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More "Intricacy" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... partner, she began to spin round on her toes. Ada's only talent lay in her feet, and, conscious of her skill, she danced before the hunchback with the lightness of a feather, revolving smoothly on one spot, reversing, advancing and retreating in a straight line, displaying every intricacy of the waltz. The sight was too much for Jonah, and, dropping the mouth-organ, he ...
— Jonah • Louis Stone
... And now—a further intricacy of mood—came a whole new set of emotions due to the mere spectacle of Mr. Gilman's august back! She was intimidated by Mr. Gilman's back. She knew horribly that in the afternoon she had treated Mr. Gilman as Mr. Gilman ought never to have been treated. And, quite ...
— The Lion's Share • E. Arnold Bennett
... that you divide the science which manages pedestrian animals into two corresponding parts, and define them; for if you try to invent names for them, you will find the intricacy too great. ...
— Statesman • Plato
... a person simple in the main. The colors she had selected to wear accorded with the rest, showing little intricacy of taste. The two silks composing her dress were respectively the blue of a summer morning and the pink of a rose. From cushioned and dimpled shoulders the bodice tapered to as fine a waist as a Paris dressmaker had found possible ...
— Aurora the Magnificent • Gertrude Hall
... vessels to port for search because of the size and seaworthiness of modern carriers and the difficulty of uncovering at sea the real transaction owing to the intricacy of modern trade operations. The United States submitted that such commercial transactions were essentially no more complex and disguised than in previous wars, during which the practice of obtaining evidence in port to determine whether a vessel should be held for prize-court ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume V (of 8) • Francis J. (Francis Joseph) Reynolds, Allen L. (Allen Leon)
... found a refuge. He put all his mighty powers at the service of Minos, and for him designed an intricate labyrinth which, like the river Meander, had neither beginning nor ending, but ever returned on itself in hopeless intricacy. Soon he stood high in the favour of the king, but, ever greedy for power, he incurred, by one of his daring inventions, the wrath of Minos. The angry monarch threw him into prison, and imprisoned along with him his son, Icarus. But prison bars and ...
— A Book of Myths • Jean Lang
... would not be easy to point out a blemish. None have that completeness which constitutes one of the chief merits of Fielding's Tom Jones. There is always either an improbability, or a forced expedient, or an incongruous incident, or an unpleasant break, or too much intricacy, or a hurried conclusion. They are usually languid in the commencement, and abrupt in the close; too slowly opened, and too hastily summed up. Guy Mannering is one of those in which these two faults are least apparent. The plot of Peveril of the Peak might perhaps, on the whole, have been ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 19, Issue 550, June 2, 1832 • Various
... common and to be frequently met with among the vulgar, but the second is rarer than can be imagined, and yet abundantly more necessary for great enterprises; and is there a greater in the world than heading a party? The command of an army is without comparison of less intricacy, for there are wheels within wheels necessary for governing the State, but then they are not near so brittle and delicate. In a word, I am of opinion there are greater qualities necessary to make a good head ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... oak, or stirred the immense brands with a long pole. Within the furnace were seen the curling and riotous flames, and the burning marble, almost molten with the intensity of heat; while without, the reflection of the fire quivered on the dark intricacy of the surrounding forest, and showed in the foreground a bright and ruddy little picture of the hut, the spring beside its door, the athletic and coal-begrimed figure of the lime-burner, and the half-frightened child, shrinking into the protection of ...
— The Snow Image • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... ancient Hawaiian war-club or spear-paddle, in its full multiplicity and elaboration of carving, is as great a trophy of human perseverance as a Latin lexicon. For, with but a bit of broken sea-shell or a shark's tooth, that miraculous intricacy of wooden net-work has been achieved; and it has cost steady ...
— Moby Dick; or The Whale • Herman Melville
... note," rallied Condy, as Travis executed a banjo "piece" of no little intricacy. "That's just like ...
— Blix • Frank Norris
... I sometimes put five francs on zero en plein to protect half a stake on a simple chance," Mary explained, now thoroughly conversant with every intricacy of the game that had been so kind to her. "But zero's been up three times in half an hour, so I don't think I shall bother with it again for a while. And, anyhow, I'm not playing for a few minutes. Sometimes I feel as if I must wait ...
— The Guests Of Hercules • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... particulars may prove of some interest to an Intelligent, a Sympathetic, and a Benevolent Public. He will simply allude, in conclusion, to the performances of the Mysterious Foundling, as exhibiting perfection hitherto unparalleled in the Art of Legerdemain, with wonders of untraceable intricacy on the cards, originally the result of abstruse calculations made by that renowned Algebraist, Mohammed Engedi, extending over a period of ten years, dating from the year 1215 of the Arab Chronology. More than this Mr. Jubber will not venture to mention, for 'Seeing is Believing,' ...
— Hide and Seek • Wilkie Collins
... rebel stockades were carried with tremendous loss not only to the defenders, but also to a relieving force sent from Liyang. Five thousand prisoners were also taken. Liyang itself was the next place to be attacked; but the intricacy of the country, which was intersected by creeks and canals, added to the fact that the whole region had been desolated by famine, and that the rebels had broken all the bridges, rendered this undertaking one of great difficulty and some risk. However, Major Gordon's fortitude ...
— China • Demetrius Charles Boulger
... informed. He says: "At the opening of this century it was thought that a successful reaping machine had been invented, and a reward had been voted by Parliament to its author. The machine was employed here and abroad, but from its intricacy, fell into disuse. Another has been lately devised in one of our Colonies, which cuts off the heads of the corn, but leaves the straw standing, a fatal defect in an old settled country, where the growth of corn is forced by the application of dung. Our farmers may ...
— Obed Hussey - Who, of All Inventors, Made Bread Cheap • Various
... so well framed, the intricacy so artful, and the disentanglement so easy, the suspense so affecting, and the passionate parts so properly interposed, that I have no ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 2 • Boswell
... a statement of his affairs, placed his papers in my hands, and I found myself, on inspecting them, engaged in a controversy which was likely to give me the opportunity which I desired, of appearing soon in cases of equal intricacy and interest. Kingsley had some ten thousand dollars in land, the greater part of which was involved in questions of title and pre-emption, presenting some complex features, and likely to occasion bad blood ...
— Confession • W. Gilmore Simms
... ample roadway through the heart of a great city, the peer of which does not exist elsewhere. It is to be feared, though, that it is hardly appreciated. The London cabby appears to be fascinated with the glare and intricacy of the Strand, and mostly the drivers of brewers' drays and parcel delivery vans the same. The result is that, but for a few earnest folk who are really desirous of getting to their destination quickly, ...
— Dickens' London • Francis Miltoun
... cases of ague are cases of a certain kind. Therefore it is best in all cases to give the patient water." Philotas having propounded his argument in this way, challenged the physician to point out the fallacy of it; and while the physician sat perplexed and puzzled in his attempts to unravel the intricacy of it, the company enjoyed a temporary ...
— Cleopatra • Jacob Abbott
... deny, that, though relatively to the variety of purposes it has to perform the apparatus is very simple, it is absolutely very complex; and that its parts play into one another with great facility indeed, but with endless intricacy. ...
— The Eclipse of Faith - Or, A Visit To A Religious Sceptic • Henry Rogers
... iamb; the second, an amphibrachys; the third, a trochee; and the fourth an amphimacer; and yet our schoolboy, with no other liberty but that of inflicting pain, had triumphantly scanned it as five iambs. Perceive, now, this fresh richness of intricacy in the web; this fourth orange, hitherto unremarked, but still kept flying with the others. What had seemed to be one thing it now appears is two; and, like some puzzle in arithmetic, the verse is made at the same time to read in fives and to ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 16 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... here united to make a perfect work. Here the simplicity of the drawing of the Virgin and Child is shown in contrast with the foreshortening of the group of angels—the strongest unity of effect with the most perfect system of intricacy. The emitting the light from the body of the child, though a supernatural illusion, is eminently successful. The matchless beauty of the Virgin and Child, the group of angels overhead, the daybreak in the ...
— Sunny Memories of Foreign Lands V2 • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... distinguishing attributes of the Continental spires. We know not why it was, but in the gray old towns of Belgium and the Low Countries there existed such exuberance of imagination, such an unbounded luxuriousness of conception, as created more images of Gothic quaintness and intricacy than elsewhere can be seen. If any architecture ever expressed the average of human thought, that of these towns is especially eloquent in its indications that their inhabitants were very happy and contented. Look at a print of any old Belgian town or street, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 27, January, 1860 • Various
... and rich contrast of colors one's early idea of the Palace of Aladdin. The floors and fountains are all of marble mosaic; the arches of the liwan glitter with gold, and the walls bewilder the eye with the intricacy of their adornments. In the first house, we were received by the family in a room of precious marbles, with niches in the walls, resembling grottoes of silver stalactites. The cushions of the divan were of the richest silk, and a chandelier of Bohemian ...
— The Lands of the Saracen - Pictures of Palestine, Asia Minor, Sicily, and Spain • Bayard Taylor
... is ever thus—morn, noon and eve, And in the still midnight, undying Choirs of creation's minstrels weave Sweet symphony of incense, vying In wrapt intricacy of endless songs. Ever, oh ever thus they sing, But to our soul's dull ear belongs Seldom the trancing sense To list the universal worshiping, Thrill with the glorious ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXIII No. 4 October 1848 • Various
... behind. By noon the fifty thousand dollars had been distributed to the Indians; by one o'clock every cent of it was put up on the race in equal bets. Who was to be stake holder? How much was each stake to be held or awarded? These were problems of some intricacy in view of the fact that the Indians could not read a word or trust any white man except the Indian Agent and Father Cyprian, the Jesuit missionary, both of whom declined to have any hand or part in ...
— The Preacher of Cedar Mountain - A Tale of the Open Country • Ernest Thompson Seton
... paragraph is an incomplete one which is scored out in the MS. The comment on the intricacy of modern life is interesting. Mary wrote: "The world you have just quitted she said is one of doubt & perplexity often of pain & misery—The modes of suffering seem to me to be much multiplied there since I made one of the throng & modern feelings seem to have acquired an ...
— Mathilda • Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
... Lopez was summoned, and Clarice followed to listen to her. And when the Lopez had soared with strong practised flight through the brilliant intricacy of the Shadow Song, Clarice became aware what real applause sounded like from the stage. It shook the stage as the old favourite of two generations, wearing her set smile, waddled back to the debutante. Scores of voices hoarsely shouted 'Encore!' and 'Last Rose ...
— Tales of the Five Towns • Arnold Bennett
... English seized these insignificant vessels solely with a wish for vengeance, since it was not usual for ships of the force of the Proserpine to turn aside to molest the poor fishermen and coasters. A few execrations followed, quite as a matter of course, but the intricacy of the channel and the necessity of having all his eyes about him soon drove every other thought from the mind of the dashing privateersman but such as were connected with the care and safety of ...
— The Wing-and-Wing - Le Feu-Follet • J. Fenimore Cooper
... living, on the graves of the dead! All white save the river, that marked its course by a winding black line across the landscape; and the leafless trees, that against the leaden sky now revealed more fully the wonderful beauty and intricacy of their branches! ...
— Graded Poetry: Seventh Year • Various
... of the greater part of the fleet to pass was principally due to other circumstances than the Confederate fire. The darkness of the night, the stillness of the air, which permitted the smoke to settle undisturbed, the intricacy of the navigation, the rapidity of the current, then running at the rate of five knots, the poor speed of the ships, not over eight knots, were known beforehand, and were greater elements of danger than the simple fire of the enemy. To these is to be added the difficulty of making the turn, ...
— The Gulf and Inland Waters - The Navy in the Civil War. Volume 3. • A. T. Mahan
... transport. Every week the line grew, Railhead moved forward, and the strain upon the pack animals diminished. But the problem of feeding the field army without interfering with the railway construction was one of extraordinary intricacy and difficulty. The carrying capacity of the line was strictly limited. The worn-out engines frequently broke down. On many occasions only three were in working order, and the other five undergoing 'heavy repairs' ...
— The River War • Winston S. Churchill
... uninitiated mind it would have seemed marvelous and beautiful in its combination of simplicity and intricacy, to have noted the delicate tactics with which Bertie conducted himself between his two claimants—bending to his Countess with a reverent devotion that assuaged whatever of incensed perception of her unacknowledged rival might be silently lurking in her proud heart; wheeling up to the pony-trap ...
— Under Two Flags • Ouida [Louise de la Ramee]
... The diversity and intricacy of American mythology have been greatly fostered by the delight the more developed nations took in rhetorical figures, in metaphor and simile, and in expressions of amplification and hyperbole. Those who imagine ...
— American Hero-Myths - A Study in the Native Religions of the Western Continent • Daniel G. Brinton
... in Cheapside should have seized Ludgate Hill to the top of the steps of St. Paul's and left the body of the cathedral to its opponent. The lines securing this important salient are of immense strength and intricacy, with many great avenues of approach. The front line is double across the greater part of the crest, and behind it is a very deep, strong, trebly wired support line which is double ...
— The Old Front Line • John Masefield
... his wonderful patience of industry. An ancient Hawaiian war-club or spear-paddle, in its full multiplicity and elaboration of carving, is as great a trophy of human perseverance as a Latin lexicon. For, with but a bit of broken sea-shell or a shark's tooth, that miraculous intricacy of wooden net-work has been achieved; and it has cost steady years of steady application. As with the Hawaiian savage, so with the white sailor-savage. With the same marvellous patience, and with the same single shark's tooth, ...
— Moby-Dick • Melville
... aid in writing the conclusion of Old Mortality, assured him, as the fruit of her experience in reading through the stock of three circulating libraries that, in a novel, young people may fall in love without the countenance of their parents, "because it is essential to the necessary intricacy of the story." But apart from his characters, who are so colourless that they hardly hold our attention, Walpole bequeathed to his successors a remarkable collection of useful "properties." The background of his story is a Gothic ...
— The Tale of Terror • Edith Birkhead
... steps, and proceeded to the subway station, somewhat mystified. He had handled many curious cases in the past, many that had been notable for their intricacy, their complexity of motive and detail. But here, he felt, was a case of a very different sort, the peculiarity of which lay in its astonishing lack of clues of any sort. Usually in the past there had been motives, ...
— The Film of Fear • Arnold Fredericks
... torn out the partition between front parlor and back parlor, thrown it into a long room on which she lavished yellow and deep blue; a Japanese obi with an intricacy of gold thread on stiff ultramarine tissue, which she hung as a panel against the maize wall; a couch with pillows of sapphire velvet and gold bands; chairs which, in Gopher Prairie, seemed flippant. She hid the sacred family phonograph in the dining-room, and replaced its ...
— Main Street • Sinclair Lewis
... would be impossible to describe the variety of halls, corridors, courts, towers, ramparts, and battlements which Rollo and Minnie were led to see. They went from one to another, until they were at length completely bewildered with the intricacy, as well as dazzled by the magnificence, of the place. There were suites of most beautiful apartments, with polished floors, and painted walls, and furniture of the most curious and antique description. The chairs, the tables, ...
— Rollo on the Rhine • Jacob Abbott
... bend aside the brambles, then he crept in and took his way along a low, narrow passage. It had many windings, but was without intersections or intricacy. He heard his own steps echoed like a pursuing footfall. His labored breathing returned in sighs from the inanimate rocks. It was an uncanny place, with strange, sepulchral, solemn effects. He shivered with the cold. A draught stole in from some secret crevice known ...
— 'way Down In Lonesome Cove - 1895 • Charles Egbert Craddock (AKA Mary Noailles Murfree)
... "Why cannot I read Sordello?" we can only answer:—Admitted a leading idea, not only metaphysical but subtle and complicated to the highest degree; how work out this idea, unless through the finest intricacy of shades of mental development? Admitted a philosophic comprehensiveness of historical estimate and a minuteness of familiarity with details, with the added assumption, besides, of speaking with the very voice of the times; ...
— The Germ - Thoughts towards Nature in Poetry, Literature and Art • Various
... many divisions, and an abode full of mazes. Daedalus, a man very famed for his skill in architecture, plans the work, and confounds the marks {of distinction}, and leads the eyes into mazy wanderings, by the intricacy of its various passages. No otherwise than as the limpid Maeander sports in the Phrygian fields, and flows backwards and forwards with its varying course, and, meeting itself, beholds its waters that are to follow, and fatigues its wandering current, now ...
— The Metamorphoses of Ovid - Literally Translated into English Prose, with Copious Notes - and Explanations • Publius Ovidius Naso
... 'discovery,' in the scientific sense of the term, but there is ample room for the exercise of that mechanical ingenuity which has given us the sewing machine and so many other useful inventions. Knowing something of the intricacy of the practical problem, I should certainly prefer seeing it in Mr. Edison's hands to having it in mine. [Footnote: More than thirty years ago the radiation from incandescent platinum was admirably investigated by ...
— Fragments of science, V. 1-2 • John Tyndall
... bringing thought, feeling, action, home to the consciousness of the spectator from the artist's consciousness on which they have been impressed. Painting can tell a story better than sculpture, can represent more complicated feelings, can suggest thoughts of a subtler intricacy. Through colour, it can play, like music, directly on powerful but vague emotion. It is deficient in fulness and roundness of concrete reality. A statue stands before us, the soul incarnate in ideal form, fixed and frozen for eternity. ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... a forest, just where its intricacy had broken away into picturesque openings, leaving visible some strange old trees with knotted trunks and mysteriously twisted branches, sat a young girl sketching. She was intently engaged, but as her eyes were ever and anon raised ...
— The Fairy Godmothers and Other Tales • Mrs. Alfred Gatty
... with the most watchful jealousy. Its headwaters approached those of the Canadian river Chaudiere, the mouth of which is near Quebec; and by ascending the former stream and crossing to the headwaters of the latter, through an intricacy of forests, hills, ponds, and marshes, it was possible for a small band of hardy men, unencumbered by cannon, to reach the Canadian capital,—as was done long after by the followers of Benedict Arnold. ...
— A Half Century of Conflict - Volume I - France and England in North America • Francis Parkman
... various grotesque dances, which are originals in their kind, being extremely difficult to execute, not only for the variety of the steps, but for the intricacy and uncommonness, or ...
— A Treatise on the Art of Dancing • Giovanni-Andrea Gallini
... its glowing intricacy, and with a remarkable effort of candor exclaimed, "I think this is as pretty as anything in the Forest—as pretty as Fairfield or the manor-house at Brook;" which amused her grandfather, for the south front of the old mansion-house of Abbotsmead was one of the most grandly picturesque ...
— The Vicissitudes of Bessie Fairfax • Harriet Parr
... ways by which the contents of the safes might be reached, some simple and desperate, hanging on the razor-edge of chance to fall this way or that; others more elaborate, safer on the whole, but more liable to break down at some point of their ingenious intricacy. And setting aside complicity on the part of the manager—a condition that Carrados had satisfied himself did not exist—they all depended on a relaxation of the forms by which security was assured. Carrados continued to have several occasions to visit the safe during the week, and he "watched" ...
— Four Max Carrados Detective Stories • Ernest Bramah
... of man that took form in steel and stone and glass, yet none matched the lightness, the grace, the intricacy, the sublime simplicity of these interwoven crystalline structures where light from the noonday sun separated prismatically until it filled the air with myriads of living, darting, colored sparks of fire above him. Where the breeze that blew through the vibrating spires made blended sounds ...
— Eight Keys to Eden • Mark Irvin Clifton
... palanquins, litters with stately dames close veiled, elephants gorgeously caparisoned, idols grotesquely hewn, drums, banners, and gongs, spears, silver and gilded maces. And amid the crowd, and the clamor, and the general intricacy and confusion—amid the million of black and yellow men, turbaned and robed, and of flowing beard, there roamed a countless multitude of holy filleted bulls, while vast legions of the filthy but sacred ape clambered, ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 3 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... existence of this machine, for such a completed piece of mechanism as a man or a tree cannot be explained as a result of simple accident, as the existence of a rough piece of rock might be explained. Its intricacy of parts and their purposeful interrelation demands explanation, and therefore the fundamental problem is to explain how this machine came into existence. The second problem is simpler, for it is simply to explain ...
— The Story of the Living Machine • H. W. Conn
... cottage chimney, or cares much to preserve them. The traceries of hoar frost upon the windows of inhabited rooms are not only beautiful in the highest degree, but have been shown in several French memoirs to obey laws of transcendental geometry, and also to obey physical laws of startling intricacy. These lovely forms of almighty nature wear the grandeur of mystery, of floral beauty, and of science (immanent science) not always fathomable.[6] They are anything but capricious. Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like them; and yet, simply ...
— The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. II (2 vols) • Thomas De Quincey
... limit of ingenuity and intricacy; and it is well for the sanity of his readers that the author gives a list of solutions at the end of ...
— The Canterbury Puzzles - And Other Curious Problems • Henry Ernest Dudeney
... Analysis by this preface, which admittedly befogged even poor Hogarth himself. Suffice to say here that he seeks to divide his elusive element, which might have defied even the dialectic of Socrates, into its "principles of Fullness, Variety, Uniformity, Simplicity, Intricacy, and Quantity; all which co-operate in the production of beauty, mutually correcting, and restraining each other occasionally"; and that the essay, even if entirely inadequate as a philosophical treatment ...
— The Eighteenth Century in English Caricature • Selwyn Brinton
... complex problems of life and thought, its metaphysical speculation, it may well give pause to the reader who makes his first approach to Browning through it, and send him back,—if he begins, as is likely, with the feeling of one challenged to an intellectual task,—baffled by the intricacy of its ways and without a comprehension of what it contains or leads to. Mr. Augustine Birrell says ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 6 • Various
... entanglement, snarl, intricacy, complication; cluster, group, band, bevy, gang, company; joint, node, knag, burl, gnarl, knob, nodule, nodosity; ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming
... when I think of the numerous instances in which I have seen university-scholars unable to write English, with any tolerable degree of correctness. In this book, the principles are so clearly explained, that the disgust arising from intricacy is avoided; and it is this disgust, that is the great and mortal ...
— Advice to Young Men • William Cobbett
... her as Mrs. Rexford's sewing machine, which she had not yet been allowed to touch. Yet had she been shut up alone with the machine, as she was now shut up to revise her own conduct within herself, she would, by sheer force of determined intelligence, have mastered its intricacy to a large degree without asking aid. And so with this strong idea that she must learn how to act differently to this young man; dim, indeed, as was her idea of what was lacking, or what was to be gained, she strove with it in no fear ...
— What Necessity Knows • Lily Dougall
... affairs. Nor are the papers which relate to the home government of the Republic less copious and valuable. Each magistracy has its own series of documents, the daily record of its proceedings: in this we find the whole of that elaborate machinery of State laid bare before us in all its intricacy of detail; and we are enabled to study the construction, the origin, development, and ossification, of one of the most rigid and enduring constitutions that the world has ever seen; a constitution so strong in its component parts, so compact in its rib-work, that it sufficed ...
— The Quarterly Review, Volume 162, No. 324, April, 1886 • Various
... it. It is a heroic poem, in which the heroine, who gives her name to it, never appears: a story, of which the basis and starting-point is whimsically withheld for disclosure in the last book, which was never written. If Ariosto's jumps and transitions are more audacious, Spenser's intricacy is more puzzling. Adventures begin which have no finish. Actors in them drop from the clouds, claim an interest, and we ask in vain what has become of them. A vein of what are manifestly contemporary allusions breaks across ...
— Spenser - (English Men of Letters Series) • R. W. Church
... extremely reticent. Only an artist would have recognized beauty in those scenes, for in all Ireland it would be difficult to find a landscape with less amenity; the hill shapes are featureless, without boldness or intricacy of line. Redmond, a born artist in words, possessing strongly the sense of form, was sensitive to beauty in all kinds—yet rather to the beauty that is symmetrical, graceful and well-planned. A sailor does not love the sea for its beauty, and Redmond loved ...
— John Redmond's Last Years • Stephen Gwynn
... unspeakable advantage of being reared in close contact with Nature, in an aspect beautiful and wild. My father's house was remarkable for its pretty garden, laid out with the old-fashioned intricacy of pattern, and blazing, even into autumn, with varied colour. In the midst of it, a large and absolutely symmetrical cedar "spread its dark green layers of shade," and supplied us in summer with a kind of al fresco sitting-room. The background of the garden was formed by the towering ...
— Fifteen Chapters of Autobiography • George William Erskine Russell
... St. Martin and Chamouny, is little more than six leagues, but from the extreme inequality of the ground and the intricacy of the paths, occupied a very long space of time in passing. We still continued to follow the course of the Arve, which, according to the opinions of some writers, is believed to have, at one period, formed ...
— A tour through some parts of France, Switzerland, Savoy, Germany and Belgium • Richard Boyle Bernard
... the company of these gentlemen displayed in dress, bearing and manner alike, less emphasis and more intricacy. Some affected a classical simplicity of robing and subtlety of fold, after the fashion of the First French Empire, and flashed conquering arms and shoulders as Graham passed. Others had closely-fitting dresses without seam or ...
— The Sleeper Awakes - A Revised Edition of When the Sleeper Wakes • H.G. Wells
... tailors; here, in this deafening alley, are the blacksmiths; farther on are the shoemakers, and you are driven mad with wonder at the quantities of slippers made for a people which goes eternally barefoot. Springing out of this daedal intricacy of booths and workshops rise the slender minarets of prayer, of which the principal one belongs to a mosque said to be the most beautiful in Algeria. The interior of this chief mosque is not deprived of ornament, having its columns of pink marble, its ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 11, No. 24, March, 1873 • Various
... by others, however otherwise it may really be; but what a weak man calls morality is scarcely regarded as such even if it be the highest morality. From the importance of the issue involved, from its intricacy and subtlety, I am unable to answer with certitude the question thou hast asked. However, it is certain that as all the Kurus have become the slaves of covetousness and folly, the destruction of this our race will happen on no distant date. O blessed one, the family into which thou hast been ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 1 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... discursive reason. Of late we have in Ibsen, Shaw, Brieux, and Galsworthy the old expedient applied to the consideration of social perplexities and contradictions. The dialogue is indecisive in its outcome. It does not lend itself to dogmatic conclusions and systematic presentation, but exposes the intricacy of all important questions and the inevitable conflict of views, which may seem altogether irreconcilable. We much need to encourage and elaborate opportunities for profitable discussion to-day. We should revert to the dialectic of the Athenian agora and make it a chosen instrument ...
— The Mind in the Making - The Relation of Intelligence to Social Reform • James Harvey Robinson
... regularity, yet that regularity be so relieved from monotony and so modified in its actual effects, that however regular may be the structure of parts, what is composed of them may be infinitely various. Milton's exquisite poem, 'Comus,' is an example of perfect rhythm with ceaseless intricacy and great variety. It would indeed be a fatal mistake to suppose that proportion cannot be susceptible of great variety, since the whole meaning of the term has reference to the adjustment and ...
— The Continental Monthly, Volume V. Issue I • Various
... to-morrow in the morning!" In this preoccupation I believe he took leave of me without observing it; our things were handed out; we heard the window shut behind us; and became instantly lost in a horrid intricacy of blackness and ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 20 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... as she did so they all began to move. Each mirror moved on its own axis and she watched with fatal curiosity. For now a bright light was cast from behind her on the revolving mirrors and they formed a scintillating kaleidoscope that was bewildering in its intricacy. ...
— The Master Mystery • Arthur B. Reeve and John W. Grey
... in the proper quarter. So that henceforth there is always a hope of Peace through England; as well as contrariwise, especially till Bavaria settle itself (in April next), a hope of great assistance from the French. Here are potentialities and counter-potentialities, which make the Bavarian Intricacy very agitating to the young King, while it lasts. And indeed his world is one huge imbroglio of Potentialities and Diplomatic Intricacies, agitating to behold. Concerning which we have again to ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XV. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... said Burr, not fairly comprehending what she said. He sat down again upon the stone, and leaned his head upon his hands. In truth he felt dazed and helpless, as if he had reached suddenly the mouth of many roads and knew not which to take. The intricacy of the situation was fairly paralyzing to an order of mind like his, which was wont to grasp, though shrewdly enough, only the straight course of cause and effect. He revolved dizzily in his mind the fact that he could not tell Madelon ...
— Madelon - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... of clearest perspective: perfect horizontals at one's feet, perfect perpendiculars opposite the eye, a constant alternation of looking up and looking down, a never-failing possibility of looking beyond, an outlet everywhere for the eye, and for the breath; and endless intricacy of projecting spur and engulfed ravine, of valley above valley, and ridge beyond ridge; and all of it, whether definitely modelled by stormy lights or windy dryness, or washed to mere outline by sunshine ...
— Laurus Nobilis - Chapters on Art and Life • Vernon Lee
... in the intricacy of a deal so complicated that he was lost after the first two moves, when he opened his eyes to see Ali at the door panel. The Engineer-apprentice made an emphatic beckoning wave and Dane ...
— Plague Ship • Andre Norton
... stars. Lovers were vouchsafed her, of a kind (her small stars, as we may call them); and, at length, through perilous intricacies, the big star, Autocracy of All the Russias,—through what horrors of intricacy, that last! She had hoped always it would be by Husband Peter that she, with the deeper steady head, would be Autocrat: but the intricacies kept increasing, grew at last to the strangling pitch; and it came to be, between Peter and her, 'Either you ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XX. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... the discreet, gray reception-room, the soft, fat rugs, the intricacies of banisters and alcoves and curtained cubby-holes—all reflected his personality, all corroborated the ensemble. It was his habitat, his distinctly, from the pronounced but meaningless intricacy of the architecture to the studied but unconvincing tints, like a man who suddenly starts to speak, but checks himself, realising he has ...
— The Fighting Chance • Robert W. Chambers
... was sufficiently absurd; here within a stone's throw of his own palace, and stretching almost to the doors of the House of Legislature whereto he went in so much state every year, lay an unknown territory which he had never thought to explore. The intricacy of back streets was quite unknown to him, and he seemed at almost every corner to be stepping into yards and cul-de-sacs, from which he had perforce to turn back again. In a short time all sense of the points of ...
— King John of Jingalo - The Story of a Monarch in Difficulties • Laurence Housman
... enough for us to remark upon it. But in the lighter range of comedy, the French playwrights are unequalled and inexhaustible, as is proved by the constant transfer of their productions into both the English and German languages. They do not think it necessary to have a plot of much intricacy, or even of great interest. The point and brilliancy of the dialogue, and the perfection of the actors, render that a matter of subordinate consequence. The Two Eagles, by Bayard and Bieville (these partnerships are frequent among the dramatists of Paris), was brought out at the Theatre ...
— The International Magazine, Volume 2, No. 3, February, 1851 • Various
... intercalate a month, every second year, of twenty-two and twenty-three days alternately, and one day had also been added to make a fortunate number. This made the adaptation of the nominal year to the actual a matter of great intricacy, the duty being intrusted to the chief pontiffs. These officers were often corrupted, and managed to effect political ends from time to time by the addition or omission of the intercalary days and months. At this ...
— The Story of Rome From the Earliest Times to the End of the Republic • Arthur Gilman
... engineer digs long tunnels of great intricacy in the bands of lazy rivers, and because of its paradoxical nature and appearance has caused many strange stories to originate about its habits and methods of propagation. It has the beak of a duck and waddles not ...
— The Human Side of Animals • Royal Dixon
... uncertainty); intricacy; entanglement; cross fire; awkwardness, delicacy, ticklish card to play, knot, Gordian knot, dignus vindice nodus, net, meshes, maze; coil, ...
— Journalism for Women - A Practical Guide • E.A. Bennett
... dukedom could barely make the son of a simple esquire a match for an emperor's daughter, and the suit did not prosper. Political reasons may have interfered. Suffolk, too, is accused by the Venetian ambassador of having already had three wives.[187] This seems to be an exaggeration, but the intricacy (p. 081) of the Duke's marital relationships, and the facility with which he renounced them might well have served as a precedent to ...
— Henry VIII. • A. F. Pollard
... service was about to be performed; so I remained to hear it, and to see what I could of the cathedral. What a total and admirable contrast between this and a Gothic church! the latter so dim and mysterious, with its various aisles, its intricacy of pointed arches, its dark walls and columns and pavement, and its painted glass windows, bedimming even what daylight might otherwise get into its eternal evening. But this cathedral was full of light, and light ...
— Passages From the English Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... perchance, was gay with its company of passengers whiling away the time with books, games, or flirtations, according to their respective inclinations. And over all towered the three masts, lofty and symmetrical, with all their orderly intricacy of standing and running rigging, and their wide-spreading spaces of snow-white canvas; the whole combining to make up as stately and beautiful a picture as a sailor's eye need care to rest upon. And now look at her! There she lies, clean ...
— Dick Leslie's Luck - A Story of Shipwreck and Adventure • Harry Collingwood
... aid of much circumstance and detail, has found in the novel a far more perfect development, ought to induce us to purify the drama, and retain amongst us its most exalted type. It is in vain that it strives to compete with the novel in the intricacy of its plot, in the number of its dramatis personae, in the representation of the peculiarities, or as they used to be called, the humours of men. These have now a better scene for their exhibition than the old five-act play, or ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 57, No. 356, June, 1845 • Various
... so unlike, the tragic end of Darnell and her brother's sudden removal, sank deep into her, sounding to her in the midst of her own childish preoccupation with her own life, the intricacy, the mystery of all existence. Life was larger than a private garden hedged with personal ambitions. She was the instrument of forces outside her being. And in her ...
— Together • Robert Herrick (1868-1938)
... of Pitt's bill the ministry to which he then belonged fell. The one which followed refrained from dealing at all with the subject, except by recourse to an expedient not uncommon with party leaders, dealing with a new question of admitted intricacy. They passed a bill leaving the whole matter to the Crown for executive action. Accordingly, in July, 1783, a proclamation was issued permitting intercourse between the islands and the American continent, in a long list of specified articles, but only by British ships, ...
— Sea Power in its Relations to the War of 1812 - Volume 1 • Alfred Thayer Mahan
... a singular picture: the hovering and diving birds; the bodies of the dead discolouring the rice with blood; the scuppers vomiting breadstuff; the men, frenzied by the gold hunt, toiling, slaying, and shouting aloud: over all, the lofty intricacy of rigging and the radiant heaven of the Pacific. Every man there toiled in the immediate hope of fifty dollars; and I, of fifty thousand. Small wonder if we waded callously ...
— The Wrecker • Robert Louis Stevenson and Lloyd Osbourne
... the one hand and Russia on the other, and to involve England in embarrassing questions. The attempt of the German democracies, triumphant in 1848, to fuse the powers of Germany into a whole, a new Germanic empire, also involved questions of great intricacy, and which, however England might desire to keep aloof, tended to affect treaties in which she was concerned. The union of all Germany as one authority would introduce a new element into European relations, disturbing the balance of power. Russia and ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... Joaquin Rivers empty into the Bay of San Francisco at the same point, about sixty miles from the Pacific, and by numerous mouths or sloughs as they are here called. These sloughs wind through an immense timbered swamp, and constitute a terraqueous labyrinth of such intricacy, that unskilful and inexperienced navigators have been lost for many days in it, and some, I have been told, have perished, never finding their way out. A range of low sloping hills approach the Sacramento a short distance above its mouth, ...
— What I Saw in California • Edwin Bryant
... what its name implies. The lap is actually raked by a fine-tooth comb with needle-like teeth of steel ranging from 16 to 90 per inch. This involves breaking the lap again and the intricacy of the comber rests in the mechanism which it employs for joining the ...
— The Fabric of Civilization - A Short Survey of the Cotton Industry in the United States • Anonymous
... lamentations. But I believe that the terrors that Carlyle had to face were the terrors of a swift, clear-sighted, feverishly active, intuitive brain, prevented by mortal weakness and frailty from dealing as he desired with the dazzling immensity and intricacy of ...
— Where No Fear Was - A Book About Fear • Arthur Christopher Benson
... example may suffice to illustrate the intricacy of the legislation passed in pursuance of this policy. It describes a change of detailed policy in support ...
— The Evolution of Modern Capitalism - A Study of Machine Production • John Atkinson Hobson
... other simple purposes apart from the use of the dynamo, a ready application of this form of wind-engine with a minimum of intricacy or expense may be worked out by setting the lower bearing in a round tank of water kept in circular motion by a set of small paddles working horizontally. Into the water a vertically-working paddle-wheel dips, carrying on its shaft a crank ...
— Twentieth Century Inventions - A Forecast • George Sutherland
... labyrinth, a wonderful structure, that covered many acres of ground. The passages in this edifice met and crossed each other with such intricacy, that a stranger who had once entered the building, would have been starved to death before he could find his way out. In this labyrinth Minos shut up the Minotaur. Having conceived a deep resentment against the people of ...
— Lives of the Necromancers • William Godwin
... danger above and the danger below; the dark mysterious caverns of the sea, rich with coral grots and grove and abounding marine life; the impenetrable gloom of the ship's hold, whose unimaginable darkness and labyrinthine intricacy of machinery set obstacles at every turn and move and step; the darkness; the fury; the hues and shape, all that art can make or Nature fashion, gild or color wrought into one grand tablature of splendor and magnificence. War and peaceful industry ...
— Lippincott's Magazine Of Popular Literature And Science, No. 23, February, 1873, Vol. XI. • Various
... complexity; complexness &c. adj.; complexus[obs3]; complication, implication; intricacy, intrication[obs3]; perplexity; network, labyrinth; wilderness, jungle; involution, raveling, entanglement; coil &c. (convolution) 248; sleave[obs3], tangled skein, knot, Gordian knot, wheels within wheels; kink, gnarl, knarl[obs3]; webwork[obs3]. [complexity if a task ...
— Roget's Thesaurus • Peter Mark Roget
... predilection for law and chicanery, and a respect amounting to veneration for written documents, red tape, and sealing-wax. Master Pothier's acuteness in picking holes in the actes of a rival notary was only surpassed by the elaborate intricacy of his own, which he boasted, not without reason, would puzzle the Parliament of Paris, and confound the ingenuity of the sharpest advocates of Rouen. Master Pothier's actes were as full of embryo ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby
... and then began to work her warily into the next system of shoal marks; the same patient, heedful use of leads and engines followed, the boat slipped through without touching bottom, and entered upon the third and last intricacy of the crossing; imperceptibly she moved through the gloom, crept by inches into her marks, drifted tediously till the shoalest water was cried, and then, under a tremendous head of steam, went swinging over the reef and away into ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... it shall appear that an impartial trial cannot be had, or that the intricacy of the case requires ...
— Civil Government for Common Schools • Henry C. Northam
... some principles, some truths clearly defined; but now I know nothing distinctly, believe nothing. The more I read and study the more obscure seem the questions I am toiling to answer. Is this increasing intricacy the reward of an earnestly inquiring mind? Is this to be the end of all my glorious aspirations? Have I come to this? 'Thus far, and no farther.' I have stumbled on these boundaries many times, and now must I rest here? Oh, is this my recompense? Can this be ...
— Beulah • Augusta J. Evans
... yourself unequal to dealing satisfactorily with the increasing intricacy of our financial operations, become confused by the multiplicity of detail, suffer from pains in the head?" Sir Abel had commented, with a certain largeness of manner. "I own, my good friend, I was not wholly unprepared for ...
— The Far Horizon • Lucas Malet
... to the Cluny, the museum? There you will see Persian carpets of the most exquisite hue and of a pattern the beautiful intricacy of which delights and amazes the eye. In them you will see the mystery and the sensual beauty of the East, the roses of Hafiz and the wine-cup of Omar; but presently you will see more. You were asking just now ...
— Of Human Bondage • W. Somerset Maugham
... went on for many months, with no other obstruction than the complication and intricacy which attend all matrimonial arrangements where the interests of kingdoms, as well as the personal happiness of the wedded pair, are involved in the issue. Ambassadors were sent, and contracts and treaties were drawn up, discussed, modified, and finally signed. A formal announcement ...
— History of King Charles II of England • Jacob Abbott
... the most unwarrantable kinds or forms of detraction, is the attributing of any man's conduct to corrupt or unworthy motives. A man's real motives are known only to God and to himself; indeed, very often to God alone, as from the deceitfulness and intricacy of the human heart, a man himself is sometimes ignorant as to what his real motives actually are. Certainly it is rash and presumptuous for any other man to pretend to decide upon them, and most uncharitable and unjust to pronounce them ...
— Advice to a Young Man upon First Going to Oxford - In Ten Letters, From an Uncle to His Nephew • Edward Berens
... something to reckon by, the revelation to Lindsay still in prospect, of the single visit Captain Filbert did make, was perhaps lacking in essentials. It would be an experiment of some intricacy, it might very probably work out in shades. So much would infallibly have to be put down for surprise and so much reasonably for displeasure, without any prejudice to the green hope budding underneath; the key to Hilda's theory might very well be lost in contingencies. ...
— The Path of a Star • Mrs. Everard Cotes (AKA Sara Jeannette Duncan)
... stove. There was a carpet on the floor, originally of rich texture, but so worn and faded in these latter years that its once brilliant figure had quite vanished into one indistinguishable hue. In the way of furniture, there were two tables: one, constructed with perplexing intricacy and exhibiting as many feet as a centipede; the other, most delicately wrought, with four long and slender legs, so apparently frail that it was almost incredible what a length of time the ancient tea-table ...
— The House of the Seven Gables • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... necessary to get outside Ashdurada Bay; sometimes we are steaming bow on for Bunder Guz, apparently returning to port; at other times we are going due south, when our destination is nearly north. This, the captain explains, is due to the intricacy of the channel, which is little more than a deeper stream, so to speak, meandering crookedly through the shallows and sand-bars of the bay. Buoys and sirens mark the steamer's course to the Russian naval station of Ashdurada. Here we cross a bar so shallow that ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle Volume II. - From Teheran To Yokohama • Thomas Stevens
... to be an unfortunate turn, for the policeman saw him take it, and, knowing every intricacy of the town, he was enabled to take a cross cut by a lane, accompanied by several of his brother constables, who had joined him by this time, and by such of the ...
— Shifting Winds - A Tough Yarn • R.M. Ballantyne
... the nature of the metaphysical problems lying at the root of art in general, and Christian art in particular, the writer goes on to set the difficulty of M. Rio's task against its attractiveness, to insist on the intricacy of the investigations involved, and on the impossibility of making the two instruments on which their success depends—the imaginative and the analytical faculty—work harmoniously and effectively together. And supposing the goal achieved, supposing a man by insight and ...
— Amiel's Journal • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... this English Translation something more plain and correct than the Spanish. Some few notorious faults either of the Printer or the Interpreter, I am sure I have redressed. But the Spanish Translator complaining much of the intricacy of Stile in the Original (as flowing from a person who, as hath been said, was no Scholar) as he was pardonable, being in great haste, for not rendring his own Version so distinct and elaborate as he could desire; so must I be ...
— The Pirates of Panama • A. O. (Alexandre Olivier) Exquemelin
... into the ex-President's peculiarities of style. It was Clevelandesque to the core. All his protuberant characteristics are there: the leviathanic egotism, the profound and tenebrous ponderosity, the labored intricacy of the commonplace, the pedagogic moralizing, the oracular inconsequence. How absurdly obvious it all is now, and how inexplicable that the glamour of high place should ever have clothed such matter as his with the seeming ...
— The Arena - Volume 18, No. 92, July, 1897 • Various
... before Parliament thus enumerate and describe the five rapids of the St. Lawrence, which are impassable by steam, and occur between Montreal and Kingston, a distance, by the St. Lawrence River, of 171 miles, and by the Rideau Canal, 267 miles. The rapids vary in rapidity, intricacy, depth and width of channel, and in extent, from half a mile to nine miles. The Cedar Rapid, twenty-four miles from La Chine, is nine miles long, very intricate, running from nine to twelve miles an hour, ...
— The Conquest of Canada (Vol. 1 of 2) • George Warburton
... wars of Chaka, the Kaffirs, and Matabili. Finally, in the latter half of the nineteenth century, we see the gradual subjection of the Kaffir-Zulus and the Bechuana under the English and the final conquest of the Dutch. The resulting racial problem in South Africa is one of great intricacy. ...
— The Negro • W.E.B. Du Bois
... the years of climbing and let him have her opinions hot and strong as a simple uncultivated child of the people. The expression on Anthony Barraclough's face read plainly enough relief at his escape. He packed his valise and departed wondering greatly at the intricacy and unreasonableness of women. It did not occur to him that he was greatly to blame for having given her such a good time. Such a consideration was as remote as the thought of congratulating himself on ...
— Men of Affairs • Roland Pertwee
... and I have no right to betray confidence at whatever rate I purchased it. Usually, indeed, my feats and Singleton's were only obtaining the best information and communicating the most speedy instructions to Mr. Wentworth's vessels, which were made to move from port to port with a rapidity and intricacy of movement which none besides us two understood in the least. It was in that expedition that I travelled almost alone across the continent. I was, I think, the first white man who ever passed through the mountain path of Xamaulipas, now so ...
— If, Yes and Perhaps - Four Possibilities and Six Exaggerations with Some Bits of Fact • Edward Everett Hale
... of 1755 and onwards, is becoming frightfully stringent; and the solution, "What practically will be the wise course for me?" does not lessen in abstruse intricacy, but the reverse, as it grows more pressing. A very stormy and dubious Future, truly! Two circumstances in it will be highly determinative: one of them evident to Friedrich; the other unknown to him, and to all mortals, except two or ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XVII. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—The Seven-Years War: First Campaign—1756-1757. • Thomas Carlyle
... Mr. Gladstone's handiwork, prepared as well as brought in and advocated by him. All were highly complicated, and of one—the Land Act of 1881, which it took three months to carry through the House of Commons—it was said that so great was its intricacy that only three men understood it— Mr. Gladstone himself, his Attorney-General for Ireland, and Mr. T. M. Healy. So far from shrinking from, he seemed to revel in, the toil of mastering an infinitude of technical ...
— William Ewart Gladstone • James Bryce
... possible for a schemer to overdo himself, for one who trusts to his plots and his policy to defeat himself by the very neatness and intricacy of his combinations, and so it proved on one occasion in the dealings between these two men. The incident which we propose to relate forms the subject of "Quentin Durward," one of the best-known novels by Sir Walter Scott, and is ...
— Historical Tales, Vol. 6 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality. French. • Charles Morris
... LeBlanc. Ranking highest among these personal narratives, however, is Mildred Cram's "Stranger Things—" Besides calling up, under the name of Cecil Grimshaw, the irresistible figure of Oscar Wilde, the author has created a supernatural tale of challenging intricacy and imaginative genius. The only other stories of the supernatural to find place in the Committee's first list are Maxwell Struthers Burt's "Buchanan Hears the Wind" and Mary Heaton Vorse's "The Halfway House." In all of these, suggestion, delicately managed, is the potent ...
— O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1921 • Various
... only slow to perceive but slow to announce the perception; so the moment would go by, and the game be lost. Not even amateur conjuring does so baffle the slow turning of a child's mind as does a little intricacy of grammar. ...
— The Children • Alice Meynell
... the master; and that, being the master of various unconnected countries, he may keep them all in order by employing a military force which to each of them is foreign. This maxim, too, however formerly plausible, will not now hold water. This scheme is full of intricacy, and may cause him everywhere to lose the hearts of his people. These counsellors forget that a corrupted army was the very cause of the ruin of his brother-in-law, and that he is himself far from secure from a ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. IV. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... indifferent to all that could happen now, even smiled again, perhaps with a new sense of safety. She saw her husband settled in a place not too wet, and got about the venerable boards of the Judy, looking at the old gear with curiosity, glancing, with her head dropped back, into the dark intricacy of rigging upheld by the ponderous mainmast as it swayed back and forth. Every time the men went hurriedly trampling to some point of the running gear she watched what they were at. For hours we beat about, in a great noise of ...
— Old Junk • H. M. Tomlinson
... many parts, yet it wanted not method, it being mani mum artis celare artem.(109) His diction and language is easy and fluent, neat and fine, void of all affectation and bombast. His style is free from starch lusciousness and intricacy, every period has a kind of undesigned negligent elegance, which arrests the reader's attention, and makes what he says as apples of gold set in pictures of silver, so that, considering the time when ...
— The Works of the Rev. Hugh Binning • Hugh Binning
... mountain, gives us the idea of sublimity; with which is often confounded the terrific, and the melancholic: what is now termed picturesque includes objects, which are principally neither sublime nor beautiful, but which by their variety and intricacy joined with a due degree of regularity or uniformity convey to the mind an agreeable sentiment of novelty. Many other agreeable sentiments may be excited by visible objects, thus to the sublime and beautiful may be added ...
— The Temple of Nature; or, the Origin of Society - A Poem, with Philosophical Notes • Erasmus Darwin
... in honor of our eminent friend's visitation, and of the excellence with which you have been examine', I p'onounce the exhibition finish'—dispensing with 'Twink', twink' lil stah.' And now, in the book of the best writing scholar in the school—you, sir, deciding that intricacy—shall now be written the name of the eminent frien' of learning hereinbefo' confronting.—Claude! a ...
— Bonaventure - A Prose Pastoral of Acadian Louisiana • George Washington Cable
... peculiar talent arise, one after another, according to the circumstances of the times, and accomplish it. One gives it flexibility, that is, shows how it can be used without difficulty to express adequately a variety of thoughts and feelings in their nicety or intricacy; another makes it perspicuous or forcible; a third adds to its vocabulary; and a fourth gives it grace and harmony. The style of each of such eminent masters becomes henceforth in some sort a property of the language itself; ...
— The Idea of a University Defined and Illustrated: In Nine - Discourses Delivered to the Catholics of Dublin • John Henry Newman
... his right knee with a constant motion, and fixing his eye for hours together upon a little print of Amsterdam, which hung in a black frame against the opposite wall of the council-chamber. Nay, it has even been said, that when any deliberation of extraordinary length and intricacy was on the carpet, the renowned Wouter would shut his eyes for full two hours at a time, that he might not be disturbed by external objects; and at such times the internal commotion of his mind was evinced by certain regular guttural sounds, which his admirers declared were merely the noise ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... Saint Michael, and of bright variegated stones, such as the agates in the Saint Anne, and in a hieratic preciseness and grace, as of a sanctuary swept and [103] garnished. Amid all the cunning and intricacy of his Lombard manner this never left him. Much of it there must have been in that lost picture of Paradise, which he prepared as a cartoon for tapestry, to be woven in the looms of Flanders. It was the perfection of the older Florentine ...
— The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry • Walter Horatio Pater
... footsteps and goes downward towards the dust of those who made it famous, but by the ruined temples and columns whose rent seams were shaped anew into graceful perfection by the magical light, by the wilderness of the ruined Caesar's palace, until we looked wonderingly into the intricacy of arch and corridor and column of which was built the arch-temple of Paganism, the Coliseum. The moonlight silvered the broad spaces of scornful silence as if Fate mused mournfully upon the work it must needs do. Grass and flowers in their luxuriant ...
— Early Letters of George Wm. Curtis • G. W. Curtis, ed. George Willis Cooke
... she to tread that intricacy of streets round the Market, with stoppages for enquiries, till she found the office, where she presently sat in an inner room, veil at nose-tip, and before her at ...
— The Lord of the Sea • M. P. Shiel
... Philosophy has seen the vast machine of the universe, wheel within wheel, in countless numbers and hopeless intricacy. But it has not had the spiritual insight of Ezekiel to see that they were everyone of them full of eyes—God's own emblem ...
— Recreations in Astronomy - With Directions for Practical Experiments and Telescopic Work • Henry Warren
... Warmth worked antagonistically to light. The numerous permutations brought about by two changing variations were shown by a mechanical hand, which traced most complicated curves. In actual life the number of changing factors are very numerous, hence the intricacy involved in ...
— Sir Jagadis Chunder Bose - His Life and Speeches • Sir Jagadis Chunder Bose
... grotesque dances, which are originals in their kind, being extremely difficult to execute, not only for the variety of the steps, but for the intricacy and uncommonness, or rather ...
— A Treatise on the Art of Dancing • Giovanni-Andrea Gallini
... been to the Cluny, the museum? There you will see Persian carpets of the most exquisite hue and of a pattern the beautiful intricacy of which delights and amazes the eye. In them you will see the mystery and the sensual beauty of the East, the roses of Hafiz and the wine-cup of Omar; but presently you will see more. You were asking just now what was the meaning of life. Go and look at those Persian ...
— Of Human Bondage • W. Somerset Maugham
... Hosack, the same sheet anchor to the advocate which mercury or bark is to the physician), was ready in attack or defence, and possessed great eloquence of expression. As an advocate he showed a sagacity of perception which no intricacy of detail could blind, no suddenness of attack confuse, and which afterwards so distinguished him as a Judge. He was thrown among the leading lawyers; and undaunted as all young lawyers should be (although preserving their modesty of deportment and learning), he measured swords ...
— The International Monthly Magazine - Volume V - No II • Various
... by a sense of what he owes to his company. He must interest and entertain, he may not bore them; and so his form must be short; essay or sketch, or tale or letter. So too his style must be simple, the sentences clear and quotable, good sense ready packed for carriage. Strength of phrase, intricacy of structure, height of tone were all necessarily banished from such prose as we banish them from ordinary conversation. There was no room for pedantry, for the ostentatious display of learning, for pompousness, for affectation. The essayist had to think, as a talker should ...
— History of the English People, Volume VII (of 8) - The Revolution, 1683-1760; Modern England, 1760-1767 • John Richard Green
... an echo—it was a sound: the archaism was not affected; on the contrary, there was something which said, as plainly as though the living painter had spoken it, that his somewhat constrained treatment was due simply to his having been puzzled with the intricacy of what he saw, and giving as much as he could with a hand which was less advanced than his judgment. By some strange law it comes about that the imperfection of men who are at this stage of any art is the only true perfection; for the wisdom ...
— Alps and Sanctuaries of Piedmont and the Canton Ticino • Samuel Butler
... of this? That Nature is not more natural to my body than God is to my soul. Every animal and plant has its own Environment. And the further one inquires into the relations of the one to the other, the more one sees the marvelous intricacy and beauty of the adjustments. These wonderful adaptations of each organism to its surroundings—of the fish to the water, of the eagle to the air, of the insect to the forest bed; and of each part of every organism—the ...
— Natural Law in the Spiritual World • Henry Drummond
... aside the brambles, then he crept in and took his way along a low, narrow passage. It had many windings, but was without intersections or intricacy. He heard his own steps echoed like a pursuing footfall. His labored breathing returned in sighs from the inanimate rocks. It was an uncanny place, with strange, sepulchral, solemn effects. He shivered with the cold. A draught stole in from ...
— 'way Down In Lonesome Cove - 1895 • Charles Egbert Craddock (AKA Mary Noailles Murfree)
... and found that the afternoon service was about to be performed; so I remained to hear it, and to see what I could of the cathedral. What a total and admirable contrast between this and a Gothic church! the latter so dim and mysterious, with its various aisles, its intricacy of pointed arches, its dark walls and columns and pavement, and its painted glass windows, bedimming even what daylight might otherwise get into its eternal evening. But this cathedral was full of light, and light was proper to it. There were no painted windows, ...
— Passages From the English Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... opening of this century it was thought that a successful reaping machine had been invented, and a reward had been voted by Parliament to its author. The machine was employed here and abroad, but from its intricacy, fell into disuse. Another has been lately devised in one of our Colonies, which cuts off the heads of the corn, but leaves the straw standing, a fatal defect in an old settled country, where the growth of corn is forced by the application ...
— Obed Hussey - Who, of All Inventors, Made Bread Cheap • Various
... local administrators, penetrated with the thought of a protesting and humanitarian age. Some, like La Fayette, had played conspicuous roles, and proved revolution in the making; others, like La Rochefoucauld, had mastered every intricacy of political and philanthropic thought; and some, like Condorcet, had proved themselves among the masters of science of their time. Counts, marquises, dukes, they were prepared to lay all aside in the overwhelming demand which suffering humanity made for release from all its troubles. And ...
— The French Revolution - A Short History • R. M. Johnston
... third encore. The dance was a marvellous one, a piece of dazzling intricacy, of swift and unexpected subtleties, of almost superhuman grace. It must have proved utterly exhausting to any ordinary being; but to that creature of fire and magic it was no more than a glittering ...
— The Safety Curtain, and Other Stories • Ethel M. Dell
... 24, the day after his arrival at Washington, Halleck was sent to consult with McClellan and his generals. The record of their consultations sufficiently shows the intricacy of the problem to be decided. The question of the health of the climate in August weighed much with Halleck, but the most striking feature of their conversation was the fluctuation of McClellan's own opinion upon each important point—at one moment he even gave Halleck the impression ...
— Abraham Lincoln • Lord Charnwood
... element of romance in his character, which was strongly emotional though extremely reticent. Only an artist would have recognized beauty in those scenes, for in all Ireland it would be difficult to find a landscape with less amenity; the hill shapes are featureless, without boldness or intricacy of line. Redmond, a born artist in words, possessing strongly the sense of form, was sensitive to beauty in all kinds—yet rather to the beauty that is symmetrical, graceful and well-planned. A sailor does not love the sea for its ...
— John Redmond's Last Years • Stephen Gwynn
... that struggled and died among their feet. We made a singular picture: the hovering and diving birds; the bodies of the dead discolouring the rice with blood; the scuppers vomiting breadstuff; the men, frenzied by the gold hunt, toiling, slaying, and shouting aloud: over all, the lofty intricacy of rigging and the radiant heaven of the Pacific. Every man there toiled in the immediate hope of fifty dollars; and I, of fifty thousand. Small wonder if we waded callously in blood ...
— The Wrecker • Robert Louis Stevenson and Lloyd Osbourne
... precipitate; but on her way back, when she has gained a little time for consideration and stratagem, she describes a curious labyrinth of short turnings and windings as if to perplex the dogs by the intricacy ...
— Composition-Rhetoric • Stratton D. Brooks
... agreeable to your own heart's desire and contentment. You know how by the advice and counsel and prediction of fools, many kings, princes, states, and commonwealths have been preserved, several battles gained, and divers doubts of a most perplexed intricacy resolved. I am not so diffident of your memory as to hold it needful to refresh it with a quotation of examples, nor do I so far undervalue your judgment but that I think it will acquiesce in the reason of this my subsequent discourse. As he who narrowly takes heed ...
— Gargantua and Pantagruel, Complete. • Francois Rabelais
... would have seemed marvelous and beautiful in its combination of simplicity and intricacy, to have noted the delicate tactics with which Bertie conducted himself between his two claimants—bending to his Countess with a reverent devotion that assuaged whatever of incensed perception of her unacknowledged rival might be silently lurking ...
— Under Two Flags • Ouida [Louise de la Ramee]
... been dictated by the sagacity of their guide, in order to diminish the marks of their trail, if, haply, the Canadian savages should be lurking so far in advance of their army. For many minutes the intricacy of the route admitted of no further dialogue; after which they emerged from the broad border of underbrush which grew along the line of the highway, and entered under the high but dark arches of the forest. Here their progress was less interrupted; and the instant the guide perceived ...
— The Last of the Mohicans • James Fenimore Cooper
... imperative for every nation that would excel in agriculture, manufacture, and trade, not only because of the growing intensity of competition, but because of the decline of the apprentice system and the growing intricacy of processes, requiring only the skill needed for livelihood. Thousands of our youth of late have been diverted from secondary schools to the monotechnic or trade classes now established for horology, glass-work, brick-laying, ...
— Youth: Its Education, Regimen, and Hygiene • G. Stanley Hall
... mountains, on the meadows, on the roofs of the living, on the graves of the dead! All white save the river, that marked its course by a winding black line across the landscape; and the leafless trees, that against the leaden sky now revealed more fully the wonderful beauty and intricacy of ...
— Graded Poetry: Seventh Year • Various
... not the subtleties of the laws, nor the intricacy of pleadings. First, let me assert that I have never robbed; but I have restored unto the plundered: I have never murdered; but I have stood between the assassin's knife and his victim. For this have I been hated and reviled by my associates, and for this is my life now threatened by ...
— The Pirate and The Three Cutters • Frederick Marryat
... as though an army holding Fleet Street against an army on the Embankment and in Cheapside should have seized Ludgate Hill to the top of the steps of St. Paul's and left the body of the cathedral to its opponent. The lines securing this important salient are of immense strength and intricacy, with many great avenues of approach. The front line is double across the greater part of the crest, and behind it is a very deep, strong, trebly wired support line which is ...
— The Old Front Line • John Masefield
... of her delicate spirituality, so completely shielded from the bald fatality of facts. An increasing dread seized him at the thought of the hurt his revelation would inflict on her. The interweaving of life in life, consequence on consequence, the unbroken intricacy of the whole fabric of existence, realized anew, filled him with bitter rebellion. The blind commitment of a vanished youth, potent after years, still hung in a dark cloud over Susan Brundon. He was conscious of the past like an insuperable lead weight dragging at his attempted progress. ...
— The Three Black Pennys - A Novel • Joseph Hergesheimer
... pink-and-white drawing-room, the discreet, gray reception-room, the soft, fat rugs, the intricacies of banisters and alcoves and curtained cubby-holes—all reflected his personality, all corroborated the ensemble. It was his habitat, his distinctly, from the pronounced but meaningless intricacy of the architecture to the studied but unconvincing tints, like a man who suddenly starts to speak, but checks himself, realising he has nothing in particular ...
— The Fighting Chance • Robert W. Chambers
... find the men, we could not make the machine, which they have been perfecting for forty years and more. But it is here!—operating with perfect smoothness; a machine, which in its mere mass and intricacy, almost staggers the imagination. One cannot speak of the details of the system for fear of saying something which should not be told; but it is stupendous in its proportion, dealing as it does with the methodical handling of the men in their hundreds ...
— The War on All Fronts: England's Effort - Letters to an American Friend • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... it is not enough to have learned them, for our knowledge slips away from us unless it be kept up—I allude to geometry and astronomy, and such other sciences as are Hard to remember because of their intricacy—so the greatness of some benefits prevents their being forgotten, while others, individually less, though many more in number, and bestowed at different times, pass from our minds, because, as I have stated above, we do not constantly think about them, and ...
— L. Annaeus Seneca On Benefits • Seneca
... processes, partly material and partly metaphysical, but ever more and more subject to the inspiration and the purpose of the Brahman, alone versed in the knowledge of the gods, and alone competent to propitiate them by sacrificial rites of increasing intricacy, and by prayers of a rigid formalism that gradually assume ...
— India, Old and New • Sir Valentine Chirol
... metaphysical problems lying at the root of art in general, and Christian art in particular, the writer goes on to set the difficulty of M. Rio's task against its attractiveness, to insist on the intricacy of the investigations involved, and on the impossibility of making the two instruments on which their success depends—the imaginative and the analytical faculty—work harmoniously and effectively together. And supposing the goal achieved, supposing a man by insight and patience ...
— Amiel's Journal • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... text of some examination into the ex-President's peculiarities of style. It was Clevelandesque to the core. All his protuberant characteristics are there: the leviathanic egotism, the profound and tenebrous ponderosity, the labored intricacy of the commonplace, the pedagogic moralizing, the oracular inconsequence. How absurdly obvious it all is now, and how inexplicable that the glamour of high place should ever have clothed such matter as his with the seeming of philosophy and statesmanship! ...
— The Arena - Volume 18, No. 92, July, 1897 • Various
... husband. She is permitted to hold no opinion unaccepted by her master, denied all reason and forced to frequent churches where she is forbidden the exercise of her common-sense, and where she is told: "Men are logical; women lack this quality, but have an intricacy of thought. There are those who think that women can be taught logic; this is a mistake. They can never, by any process of education, arrive at the same mental status as that enjoyed by man; but they have a quickness of apprehension—what is usually ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume III (of III) • Various
... there a fight so snarled. The intricacy of those incidents which defy the narrator's extrication, is not illy figured in that bewildering intertanglement of all the yards and anchors of the two ships, which confounded them for the time in one ...
— Israel Potter • Herman Melville
... out of the general mass of things, from the block as it were of nature: And it is, I think, an easier thing to give a just draught of man from these Theatric forms, which I cannot help considering as originals, than by drawing from real life, amidst so much intricacy, obliquity, and disguise. If therefore, for further proofs of Falstaff's Courage, or for the sake of curious speculation, or for both, I change my position, and look to causes instead of effects, the reader must not be surprized ...
— Eighteenth Century Essays on Shakespeare • D. Nichol Smith
... assortment of paper containers. Monstrosities of hearts, cupids, and entwining fretwork were embossed on each, but save for the intricacy of design, there was little difference between them. He indicated ...
— A Son of the City - A Story of Boy Life • Herman Gastrell Seely
... of the maze; perhaps she herself was the heart of it, the very secret heart. She sat alone for him there, in the dear silent place where all the paths led. The very thickness and elaboration of the maze would make their peace. Freda's heart failed her before the intricacy of Miss Nethersole's knowledge of him, the security of her possession. Miss Nethersole was valuable to him for her own sake, it being evident ...
— The Return of the Prodigal • May Sinclair
... a labyrinth, a wonderful structure, that covered many acres of ground. The passages in this edifice met and crossed each other with such intricacy, that a stranger who had once entered the building, would have been starved to death before he could find his way out. In this labyrinth Minos shut up the Minotaur. Having conceived a deep resentment against the people of Athens, where his only ...
— Lives of the Necromancers • William Godwin
... were mixed up in her imagination with the fairies in an intricacy that would have defied the best reasonings of ...
— Bebee • Ouida
... art are here united to make a perfect work. Here the simplicity of the drawing of the Virgin and Child is shown in contrast with the foreshortening of the group of angels—the strongest unity of effect with the most perfect system of intricacy. The emitting the light from the body of the child, though a supernatural illusion, is eminently successful. The matchless beauty of the Virgin and Child, the group of angels overhead, the daybreak in ...
— Sunny Memories of Foreign Lands V2 • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... Woman's, A Chaste Maid in Cheapside, Anything for a Quiet Life, More Dissemblers besides Women. As with all the humour-comedies of the time, the incidents are not unfrequently very improbable, and the action is conducted with such intricacy and want of clearly indicated lines, that it is sometimes very difficult to follow. At the same time, Middleton has a faculty almost peculiar to himself of carrying, it might almost be said of hustling, the reader or spectator along, so that he has no time ...
— A History of English Literature - Elizabethan Literature • George Saintsbury
... commenced went on for many months, with no other obstruction than the complication and intricacy which attend all matrimonial arrangements where the interests of kingdoms, as well as the personal happiness of the wedded pair, are involved in the issue. Ambassadors were sent, and contracts and treaties were drawn up, discussed, modified, ...
— History of King Charles II of England • Jacob Abbott
... who knows all about such things, said no, it was far from right artistically, though beautiful in spite of faults. My description would briefly be: whole chapel like great carved jewel-casket for a queen; ornamentation simply dazzling in intricacy and delicate detail; extraordinary pale rose-flush in shadow on stone pillars, which have the rich cream tints of carved ivory. No two alike: Spanish spirit visible here. Reminded me of detail in Burgos Cathedral. Nice story about the Prentice's ...
— The Heather-Moon • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... other part the sea was quite open. Resuming our voyage after noon, we proceeded along the coast, which is fringed by islands; and at five P.M., entered another bay, where we were for some time involved in our late difficulties by the intricacy of the passages; but we cleared them in the afternoon, and encamped near the northern entrance of the bay, at a spot which had recently been visited by a small party of Esquimaux, as the remains of some eggs containing young, were lying beside some half-burnt ...
— Narrative of a Journey to the Shores of the Polar Sea, in the years 1819-20-21-22, Volume 2 • John Franklin
... subject, can easily believe this, and especially when I think of the numerous instances in which I have seen university-scholars unable to write English, with any tolerable degree of correctness. In this book, the principles are so clearly explained, that the disgust arising from intricacy is avoided; and it is this disgust, that is the great and ...
— Advice to Young Men • William Cobbett
... esquire a match for an emperor's daughter, and the suit did not prosper. Political reasons may have interfered. Suffolk, too, is accused by the Venetian ambassador of having already had three wives.[187] This seems to be an exaggeration, but the intricacy (p. 081) of the Duke's marital relationships, and the facility with which he renounced them might well have served as a precedent to his master in ...
— Henry VIII. • A. F. Pollard
... head a little, and her long lashes shaded her eyes for a moment. He wondered why he always looked at her hair first. It had a peculiarly pleasing effect on him. He had been observant enough to know that she had rearranged it since breakfast, and the smooth coils twisted in mysterious intricacy at the crown of her head were like softly glowing velvet. The ridiculous thought came to him that he would like to see them tumbling down about her. They must be even more beautiful when freed ...
— The Alaskan • James Oliver Curwood
... proceed with regularity, yet that regularity be so relieved from monotony and so modified in its actual effects, that however regular may be the structure of parts, what is composed of them may be infinitely various. Milton's exquisite poem, 'Comus,' is an example of perfect rhythm with ceaseless intricacy and great variety. It would indeed be a fatal mistake to suppose that proportion cannot be susceptible of great variety, since the whole meaning of the term has reference to the adjustment and proportional ...
— The Continental Monthly, Volume V. Issue I • Various
... Exquisite intricacy! Wilfrid worked through all the intervolutions, and nearly forgot his wretchedness in admiration of his sister's mental endowments. He was the more willing to magnify them, inasmuch as he thereby strengthened his hope that liberty would follow ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... twelve years old her walk to school was across quite an intricacy of electric-car tracks, and on rainy days, out of a small fund of children's car tickets laid by in Mrs. Becker's glove box for just that contingency, she would ride to and from school, changing cars with a drilled precision ...
— Star-Dust • Fannie Hurst
... face from the insufferable glare, thrust in huge logs of oak, or stirred the immense brands with a long pole. Within the furnace were seen the curling and riotous flames, and the burning marble, almost molten with the intensity of heat; while without, the reflection of the fire quivered on the dark intricacy of the surrounding forest, and showed in the foreground a bright and ruddy little picture of the hut, the spring beside its door, the athletic and coal-begrimed figure of the lime-burner, and the half-frightened child, ...
— Short-Stories • Various
... habitation of many divisions, and an abode full of mazes. Daedalus, a man very famed for his skill in architecture, plans the work, and confounds the marks {of distinction}, and leads the eyes into mazy wanderings, by the intricacy of its various passages. No otherwise than as the limpid Maeander sports in the Phrygian fields, and flows backwards and forwards with its varying course, and, meeting itself, beholds its waters that are ...
— The Metamorphoses of Ovid - Literally Translated into English Prose, with Copious Notes - and Explanations • Publius Ovidius Naso
... enter on this public exhibition of myself, it is necessary that nothing should bear the appearance of obscurity or concealment. I should be continually under the eye of the reader, he should be enabled to follow me In all the wanderings of my heart, through every intricacy of my adventures; he must find no void or chasm in my relation, nor lose sight of me an instant, lest he should find occasion to say, what was he doing at this time; and suspect me of not having dared to reveal the ...
— The Confessions of J. J. Rousseau, Complete • Jean Jacques Rousseau
... of the three brothers. 'The country would have had much. reason to deplore the death of Sir Frederick Bruce whenever it had happened; but his loss is an especial misfortune at a time when, negotiations of the utmost intricacy and delicacy are pending with a Government which is not always disposed to approach Great Britain in a spirit of generosity and forbearance. Seldom has a citizen of another country visited the United States who possessed so keen an insight into the political ...
— Letters and Journals of James, Eighth Earl of Elgin • James, Eighth Earl of Elgin
... up an intolerable time, and prevent crews from getting to sea in favourable weather, is sometimes fortified by the assertion that the people of Shetland are singularly defective in arithmetic. Even if we assume this statement to be correct, there is so little intricacy in a calculation of the price of 18 cwt. of fish at 6s. 6d. per cwt., and dividing the sum among five or six men, that a very low arithmetical faculty would not be severely taxed in checking it. There is little doubt that in stating this objection, which scarcely deserves refutation, the ...
— Second Shetland Truck System Report • William Guthrie
... that it may be drained, Mr. Sanitary Superintendent RAUCH has made a report which is extremely figurative and which quite bristles with the nine digits. Mr. PUNCHINELLO has read it until perfectly bewildered by the intricacy of the computations; but what he does understand is that if Chicago be not drained immediately, the amiable cholera may be expected to put in an early appearance. Mr. Superintendent RAUCH prints an aggravating table to show, by multiplication, addition, subtraction, division, and the ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 14, July 2, 1870 • Various
... jutted his eyebrows, and kept repeating, 'This must be seen to, indeed! this shall be barred to-morrow in the morning!' In this preoccupation, I believe he took leave of me without observing it; our things were handed out; we heard the window shut behind us; and became instantly lost in a horrid intricacy of blackness and ...
— St Ives • Robert Louis Stevenson
... us by a Gothic richness of detail,* the picturesque counterpart of its intricacy of thought, and, perhaps for this very reason, never so fully displayed in any subsequent work. Mr. Browning's genuinely modest attitude towards it could not preclude the consciousness of the many imaginative beauties which its unpopular character had served ...
— Life and Letters of Robert Browning • Mrs. Sutherland Orr
... at length the wisest of all attempts it, and even he in despair cries "vanity." Then another key is put into our hands by One who claims to have made the very lock we have found. We apply it, and its intricacies meet every corresponding intricacy; its flanges fill every chamber, and we open it with perfect facility. What is the reasonable, necessary conclusion? We say—and rightly, unavoidably say—"He who made the lock must have made the key. His claim is just: they have been made ...
— Old Groans and New Songs - Being Meditations on the Book of Ecclesiastes • F. C. Jennings
... her—if you are not satisfied with the abundant, clear, and obviously unbiassed evidence, put before you with that terseness and simplicity of diction which distinguishes our noble civil force. The case is so free from intricacy, gentlemen, that I need not call your attention to any of the details of that evidence. You must either accept it as a whole and bring in a verdict of guilty, or your verdict must be one which would be tantamount to accusing the sergeant and constables of wilful and corrupt ...
— The Tables Turned - or, Nupkins Awakened. A Socialist Interlude • William Morris
... those Instructions for his little Prince's Schoolmasters, and smoking meditative under the stars, with Magdeburg "RITTER-DIENST" and much else of his own to think of,—there is an extraneous Political Intricacy, making noise enough in the world, much in his thoughts withal, and no doubt occasionally murmured of amid the tobacco-clouds. The Business of the Heidelberg Protestants; which is just coming to a height in those Autumn months ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Volume IV. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—Friedrich's Apprenticeship, First Stage—1713-1728 • Thomas Carlyle
... all but lost in a crowd of other articles, tapestry, draperies of velvet, flowered silks, little objects of art in porcelain, more or less useless, silver and ormoulu, exquisitely decorated with a precieuse intricacy of chiselled designs. ...
— The Art of Interior Decoration • Grace Wood
... of invention in man is probably due to natural selection, combined with the inherited effects of habit, for the most able men will have succeeded best in defending and providing for themselves and for their wives and offspring. As far as the extreme intricacy of the subject permits us to judge, it appears that our male ape-like progenitors acquired their beards as an ornament to charm or excite the opposite sex, and transmitted them only to their male offspring. The females apparently first ...
— The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex • Charles Darwin
... nearly exhausted the day. The intermingling mists of the season and the heavy smoke of the town were now shrouding the streets in a dense obscurity. There were no gas lights then. Profoundly ignorant of the intricacy of the streets of the metropolis, I was completely at the mercy of the hackney-coachmen, and they made me buy it extremely dear. Merely from habit, I again repaired to the White Horse, and concluded my nineteenth natal day ...
— Rattlin the Reefer • Edward Howard
... summoned, and Clarice followed to listen to her. And when the Lopez had soared with strong practised flight through the brilliant intricacy of the Shadow Song, Clarice became aware what real applause sounded like from the stage. It shook the stage as the old favourite of two generations, wearing her set smile, waddled back to the debutante. Scores of voices hoarsely shouted 'Encore!' and 'Last Rose of Summer,' and with a proud ...
— Tales of the Five Towns • Arnold Bennett
... course of his own life, or the conduct of the world around him, unworthy his attention; yet, among the sons of learning, many seem to have thought of every thing rather than of themselves, and to have observed every thing but what passes before their eyes: many who toil through the intricacy of complicated systems, are insuperably embarrassed with the least perplexity in common affairs; many who compare the actions, and ascertain the characters of ancient heroes, let their own days glide away without examination, and suffer vicious habits to encroach ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson - Volume IV [The Rambler and The Adventurer] • Samuel Johnson
... much to preserve them. The traceries of hoar frost upon the windows of inhabited rooms are not only beautiful in the highest degree, but have been shown in several French memoirs to obey laws of transcendental geometry, and also to obey physical laws of startling intricacy. These lovely forms of almighty nature wear the grandeur of mystery, of floral beauty, and of science (immanent science) not always fathomable.[6] They are anything but capricious. Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like them; and yet, simply because the sad hand of ...
— The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. II (2 vols) • Thomas De Quincey
... to prevent the departure of new hostile expeditions from British ports. The Emperor of France has by a like proceeding promptly vindicated the neutrality which he proclaimed at the beginning of the contest. Questions of great intricacy and importance have arisen out of the blockade and other belligerent operations between the Government and several of the maritime powers, but they have been discussed and, as far as was possible, accommodated in a spirit of frankness, ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents: Lincoln - Section 1 (of 2) of Volume 6: Abraham Lincoln • Compiled by James D. Richardson
... Much intricacy and difficulty attends the subject of ancient punctuation; nor could any satisfactory account of the rules and exceptions that have been gathered from existing MSS. be given, which should subserve the intention ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 10, - Issue 269, August 18, 1827 • Various
... jungle. He didn't take a book with him—on purpose; indeed he wouldn't have needed to—he knows every page, as I do, by heart. They all worked in him together, and some day somewhere, when he wasn't thinking, they fell, in all their superb intricacy, into the one right combination. The figure in the carpet came out. That's the way he knew it would come and the real reason—you didn't in the least understand, but I suppose I may tell you now—why he went ...
— Embarrassments • Henry James
... wren who favored me with what I thought the most bewitching bit of vocalism to which I had ever listened. He was in the bushes close at my side, in the Franconia Notch, and delivered his whole song, with all its customary length, intricacy, and speed, in a tone—a whisper, I may almost say—that ran along the very edge of silence. The unexpected proximity of a stranger may have had something to do with his conduct, as it often appears to have with the thrasher's; but, however that ...
— A Florida Sketch-Book • Bradford Torrey
... till last night how difficult it was for a Queen to indulge in a bit of flirtation! A most elaborate intrigue is, it seems, necessary to procure for her a tender interview with her innamorato. A plan was invented, whose intricacy would have bothered the inventor of spinning-jennies, whereby Henrico was to be closeted with her most Christian Majesty,—its grand accomplishment to take place when the Queen called for a glass of ice (the original Scribe wrote "water," but the Adelphi ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 1, October 30, 1841 • Various
... against her, because she had become possessor of his property: her patrons stand[29] and boldly plead the cause of the guiltless woman. The judges then besought the Emperor Augustus that he would aid them in the discharge of their oath, as the intricacy of the case had embarrassed them. After he had dispelled the clouds raised by calumny, and had discovered a sure source of truth[30]: "Let the Freedman," said he, "the cause of the mischief, suffer punishment; but as for her, at the ...
— The Fables of Phdrus - Literally translated into English prose with notes • Phaedrus
... training of the schools, and the reward of assiduity. So that, as he goes on with his translation from canvas to paper, the work becomes his own. He finds poetry where he would feel it were he himself transcribing the event, invention in the intricacy of the mise en scene, and noble philosophy in some detail of philanthropy, courage, modesty, or virtue, suggested to him by ...
— The Gentle Art of Making Enemies • James McNeill Whistler
... ends now where its prettiest windings once began; being cut off by a cross-road leading out of Dulwich to a minor railway station: and on the other side of this road, what was of old the daintiest intricacy of its solitude is changed into a straight, and evenly macadamized carriage drive between new houses of extreme respectability, with good attached gardens and offices—most of these tenements being larger—all more pretentious, and many, I imagine, held at greatly higher ...
— On the Old Road, Vol. 2 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... little aquatic engineer digs long tunnels of great intricacy in the bands of lazy rivers, and because of its paradoxical nature and appearance has caused many strange stories to originate about its habits and methods of propagation. It has the beak of a duck and waddles not unlike this bird, but, like other mammals, it gives birth ...
— The Human Side of Animals • Royal Dixon
... these very lapses is that they remain purely exceptional. They do not affect either the tone of his writing or the value and intricacy of his argument. They may be compared to those undignified and valueless chips of conversational English that pop up in the best rhetoric if it be the rhetoric of an enthusiastic and ...
— Froude's Essays in Literature and History - With Introduction by Hilaire Belloc • James Froude
... suppose that any army under competent leadership could be committed to them. The same might surely be said of the route by the Nuksan Pass into the valley of Chitral and the Kunar, which joins the Khyber route not far from Jelalabad. Its length and intricacy alone, independently of the intractable nature of the tribes which border it on either side, and of the fact that the Nuksan Pass is only open for half the year, would surely place it beyond the consideration of any general who aspired to ...
— Afghanistan and the Anglo-Russian Dispute • Theo. F. Rodenbough
... of herself, to tell him the story of her childhood, and how she and her father formed this great friendship. Evelyn's story of her mother's death would have interested him if he had been able to bestow sufficient attention upon it, but the intricacy of the intrigue he was entering upon engrossed his thoughts. There were her love of her father, her duty towards him, and her piety to be overcome. Against these three considerable influences there were her personal ambition and her love of him. A very evenly matched ...
— Evelyn Innes • George Moore
... time and exposure, are the colours chiefly employed. The decoration consists, as a rule, of stiff, conventional foliage, Arabic inscriptions, and geometrical patterns wrought into arabesques of almost incredible intricacy and ingenuity. Painted tiles are largely used as panelling for ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... purpose. At every juncture Marco must be consulted, and acquainted with every step of progress; and no doubt the Biondina has some lively Moretta for her friend, to whom she confides her part of the love-affair in all its intricacy. ...
— Venetian Life • W. D. Howells
... hang all round the girdle of Saint Michael, and of bright variegated stones, such as the agates in the Saint Anne, and in a hieratic preciseness and grace, as of a sanctuary swept and garnished. Amid all the cunning and intricacy of his Lombard manner this never left him. Much of it there must have been in that lost picture of Paradise, which he prepared as a cartoon for tapestry, to be woven in the looms of Flanders. It was the perfection of the older Florentine style ...
— The Renaissance - Studies in Art and Poetry • Walter Pater
... occupied in clandestine amours, and in buying and selling women as if they were dogs and parrots. No wonder that "to live like the Greeks" became a by-word and reproach. Beyond this, the authors throw the whole force of their genius into the construction of the plot, upon the strength and intricacy of which their success depends; and the management of the various threads of the story so as to meet together in the conclusion, shows a great improvement in art since the days of Aristophanes. Advancing time seems ...
— History of English Humour, Vol. 1 (of 2) - With an Introduction upon Ancient Humour • Alfred Guy Kingan L'Estrange
... childhood's captivity; but long ere that he will have other bonds thrown around him, some of which he can never break. He will weave with his own hands the silken cord of love, coil it about him, knot it with Gordian intricacy, net it with Vulcan strength, and then, with blind simplicity, place it in Beauty's hand to lead him captive to her capricious will. My dear Madam, did not Tommy's father do the same foolish thing? And is he not grateful to the lovely Mrs. Asmodeus for the gentleness with which ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 104, June, 1866 • Various
... previously, Mazarin had seen clearly that, cost what it might, he must cut his way through the knotted intricacy of the situation, and that the moment had arrived for forcing Anne of Austria to choose her part. The occasion was decisive. If the peril which he had just undergone, and which was only suspended over his head, did ...
— Political Women (Vol. 1 of 2) • Sutherland Menzies
... their feet. We made a singular picture—the hovering and diving birds; the bodies of the dead discolouring the rice with blood; the scuppers vomiting breadstuff; the men, frenzied by the gold hunt, toiling, slaying, and shouting aloud; over all the lofty intricacy of rigging and the radiant heaven of the Pacific. Every man there toiled in the immediate hope of fifty dollars, and I of fifty thousand. Small wonder if we waded callously in ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 13 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... for Foreign Tongues on March 15, 1649. He removed from High Holborn to Spring Gardens to be near the scene of his labours, and was soon afterwards provided with an official residence in Whitehall Palace, a huge intricacy of passages and chambers, of which but a fragment now remains. His first performance was in some measure a false start; for the epistle offering amity to the Senate of Hamburg, clothed in his best Latin, was so unamiably regarded ...
— Life of John Milton • Richard Garnett
... sister Miriam appears in a genealogy of Caleb (1 Chron. iv. 17) with Jether (cp. JETHRO) and Heber (cp. KENITES). In view of the confusion of the traditions and the difficulty of interpreting the details sketched above, the recovery of the historical Aaron is a work of peculiar intricacy. He may well have been the traditional head of the priesthood, and R. H. Kennett has argued in favour of the view that he was the founder of the cult at Bethel (Journ. of Theol. Stud., 1905, pp. 161 sqq.), corresponding to the Mosaite founder of Dan (q.v.). ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... The intricacy of the interlacing decoration is so minute that it is impossible to describe it. Each line may be followed to its conclusion, with the aid of a strong magnifying glass, but cannot be clearly traced with the naked eye. Westwood reports ...
— Arts and Crafts in the Middle Ages • Julia De Wolf Addison
... watchful jealousy. Its headwaters approached those of the Canadian river Chaudiere, the mouth of which is near Quebec; and by ascending the former stream and crossing to the headwaters of the latter, through an intricacy of forests, hills, ponds, and marshes, it was possible for a small band of hardy men, unencumbered by cannon, to reach the Canadian capital,—as was done long after by the followers of Benedict Arnold. Hence it was thought a matter of the ...
— A Half Century of Conflict - Volume I - France and England in North America • Francis Parkman
... that many thousands of those who annually leave London on voyages, short and long—of profit and pleasure—have very little idea of the intricacy of the channels through which they pass, and the number of obstructions which, in the shape of sandbanks, intersect the mouth of the Thames at its junction with the ocean. Without pilots, and an elaborate well-considered system of lights, buoys, and beacons, a vessel would be about as ...
— The Floating Light of the Goodwin Sands • R.M. Ballantyne
... controversy has arisen. At present then I only desire to say, that in spite of the great labour which I have bestowed on this translation, I am sensible of its shortcomings, and in a work of such length, such intricacy, and such a wide range of subject, it will not be surprising if some slips are discovered. Any errors which may be pointed out to me, however, shall be rectified in subsequent editions. I have given, I think, the whole essence of M. Zola's text; but he himself has admitted ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... ancient shrine (as already has been hinted), and might do as he liked, even on the Sabbath-day. And as one of the first things he always liked to do was to enter into everybody's business, he got into an intricacy of little knowledge too manifold even for his many-fibred brain. But some of this ran into and strengthened his main clew, leading into the story he was laboring to explore, and laying before him, as bright as a diamond, ...
— Mary Anerley • R. D. Blackmore
... of the earth with much attention; the way in which they fortify their villages appears almost scientific. The town in which I lived was surrounded by several deep moats, or ditches, one within the other, arranged with so much intricacy, that it was at first difficult to find my way out of it; then there were several walls, and in the centre a sort of citadel on a hill surmounted by a rock. On the summit of the rock stood a flagstaff, on which was hoisted, in war-time, the ...
— Old Jack • W.H.G. Kingston
... those times. He was a gift of Heaven. At any other epoch he would have been as great, perhaps greater. What he received from his surroundings and from the "civilization" with which he was blessed, he has handed down to us in the uncouth form, the intricacy of plot and adventures, which would have rendered barbarous a poet less naturally gifted. And, although the question has never been definitely settled, it is probable that he was born and lived a Catholic; and it is strange how Elizabeth, who, tradition tells us, was ...
— Irish Race in the Past and the Present • Aug. J. Thebaud
... of it not because its lack of simplicity makes it intricate and elaborate, for "reality" is intricate and elaborate; but because its inability to find expression for its intricacy in any concrete symbol is a proof that it is too simple. For the remote conclusions of a purely logical and rationalistic philosophy are made to appear much less simple than they really are by reason of their use of remote ...
— The Complex Vision • John Cowper Powys
... inspiration, e. g. of the blind Oedipus, in the second play bearing his name, by which he is enabled, [Greek: athiktos hegeteros] ['without a guide'], to lead the way to his place of death, in our judgement, produces more poetical effect than all the skilful intricacy of the plot of the Tyrannus. The latter excites an interest which scarcely lasts beyond the first ...
— English Critical Essays - Nineteenth Century • Various
... other reasons besides those just described, by which outsiders are hindered from arriving at such a right view of the matter. Not only does the intricacy of Catholicism described, blind them to the simplicity of Catholicism experienced, but they confuse with the points of faith, not only the scientific accounts the theologians give of them, but mere rules of discipline, and pious opinions also. It is supposed popularly, for instance, to be ...
— Is Life Worth Living? • William Hurrell Mallock
... argument, faultlessly cast in logical moulds. Too faultlessly methought, for looking at the mere heaps of architectural rubbish, let alone the earth, the various vegetations which have accumulated upon it, I had a sense of the infinite intricacy of all reality, and of the partiality and insufficiency of the paths which our reason (or our fancy in the garb of reason) cuts into it. Rituals and laws whose meaning had become mere shibboleths two thousand years ago, races whose very mien ...
— The Spirit of Rome • Vernon Lee
... patches of ice still lingering round to some of them, but in every other part the sea was quite open. Resuming our voyage after noon we proceeded along the coast which is fringed by islands, and at five P.M. entered another bay where we were for some time involved in our late difficulties by the intricacy of the passages, but we cleared them in the afternoon and encamped near the northern entrance of the bay at a spot which had recently been visited by a small party of Esquimaux, as the remains of some eggs ...
— The Journey to the Polar Sea • John Franklin
... on the Lynd, unable to move forward for want of water, and that their provision was exhausted, and finally the wet season had set in. To facilitate their endeavours in finding the Settlement (a work of more than ordinary difficulty, arising from the intricacy of the rivers and scrubby nature of the country, at the apex of the Cape York peninsula,) Mr. Jardine had cut a marked tree line for 30 miles in a south-westerly direction, meeting a similarly marked ...
— The Overland Expedition of The Messrs. Jardine • Frank Jardine and Alexander Jardine
... however, that America was destined to play her greatest role on the economic field. Capable men therefore ceased to go into politics and instead turned their energies into the whirl of business, where they received a training that made them capable of handling affairs of the greatest intricacy ...
— The American Empire • Scott Nearing
... "The size and intricacy which we have to deal with," says Walter Lippmann, "have done more than anything else, I imagine, to wreck the simple generalizations ...
— A Librarian's Open Shelf • Arthur E. Bostwick
... consult the two great Benedictine works, the Diplomatica of Mabillon, and the Palaeographia of Montfaucon. I studied the theory without attaining the practice of the art: nor should I complain of the intricacy of Greek abbreviations and Gothic alphabets, since every day, in a familiar language, I am at a loss to decipher the hieroglyphics of a female note. In a tranquil scene, which revived the memory of my first studies, idleness would have been less pardonable: the public libraries ...
— Memoirs of My Life and Writings • Edward Gibbon
... von Vecsey, Hubay's pupil, whom I heard abroad, and Heifetz, with his cameo-like perfection of technic. These I would call masters of the violin, as an instrument, since they have mastered every intricacy of the instrument. But I could name several others who are greater musicians, and whose playing and interpretation, to say nothing of tone, ...
— Violin Mastery - Talks with Master Violinists and Teachers • Frederick H. Martens
... noble art of music almost sacred in its intensity, these great composers penetrated far, far into its depths, finding their greatest enjoyment in so doing. Starting with the simpler forms of the art left by their predecessors, they deepened, they broadened and varied those forms; while, with every intricacy created, they experienced the sweetest of pleasure. And one of the most fitting tributes that can be paid to these and others of the noble masters of harmony is beautifully embodied in ...
— Music and Some Highly Musical People • James M. Trotter
... crossed over to him, and stood in silence surveying the knot; his mind, by a not uncongenial transition, passing from its own entanglements to those of the hemp. For intricacy, such a knot he had never seen in an American ship, nor indeed any other. The old man looked like an Egyptian priest, making Gordian knots for the temple of Ammon. The knot seemed a combination of double-bowline-knot, ...
— The Piazza Tales • Herman Melville
... Treasury might be permitted to make his report in person in order to answer such inquiries as the members might be disposed to make, for it was a justifiable surmise that gentlemen would not be able clearly to comprehend so intricate a subject without oral illustration." The allusion to the intricacy of the subject had the effect of turning against the plan of oral communication some who had favored giving the Secretary the same direct access to Congress that the Superintendent of Finance had formerly enjoyed. Ames, for instance, now desired that the Secretary's communications should be ...
— Washington and His Colleagues • Henry Jones Ford
... who is shocked by 'slabby-bellies,' 'mucus,' 'Priapulids'; the reader who is awed by the paraded learning of 'Splendour by Numbers,' by the deliberate intricacy of 'Beauty,' or the delicate fatigue of 'The Death of Lully' in Limbo—these are no audience for an artist. It tickles the author's fancy, stretches his wits, flatters his deviltry to provoke and witness such consternation and such respect. But the process ...
— When Winter Comes to Main Street • Grant Martin Overton
... Gauvon lay somewhere at the foot of that mountain. For some time his aged companion kept up her speed: but, on reaching a part of the moor which was intersected with turf pits, she was compelled to suit her pace to the intricacy of the ground; though even here she selected her path from the labyrinth before her with a promptitude and decision which showed that she was well acquainted with the ground she was traversing. On emerging again into smoother roads, she resumed at intervals her rapid motions: and again, ...
— Walladmor: - And Now Freely Translated from the German into English. - In Two Volumes. Vol. II. • Thomas De Quincey
... consideration. Apart from all that I have said, is it not in itself a strikingly suggestive fact that consciousness only, yet always, appears upon the scene when the adjustive actions of any animal body rise above the certain level of intricacy to which I have alluded? Surely this large and general fact points with irresistible force to the conclusion, that in the performance of these more complex adjustments, consciousness—or the power of feeling and the power of willing—is of some use. Assuredly on the ...
— Mind and Motion and Monism • George John Romanes
... evolved several ways by which the contents of the safes might be reached, some simple and desperate, hanging on the razor-edge of chance to fall this way or that; others more elaborate, safer on the whole, but more liable to break down at some point of their ingenious intricacy. And setting aside complicity on the part of the manager—a condition that Carrados had satisfied himself did not exist—they all depended on a relaxation of the forms by which security was assured. ...
— Four Max Carrados Detective Stories • Ernest Bramah
... scanned the eastward shore, rising jagged, rocky, and forbidding from the willows of the stream bed. If only, indeed! Not only all this row of which Byrne had seen so much, but all this other row, this row within a row, this intricacy of mishaps and misery that involved the social universe of Camp Sandy, of which as yet the colonel, presumably, knew so very little; of which, as post commander, Plume had yet to tell him! An orderly came running ...
— An Apache Princess - A Tale of the Indian Frontier • Charles King
... Athenian assembly has over that of the English senate. It is this—the public business of Athens was as yet simple and unencumbered by details; the dignity of the occasion was scenically sustained. But, in England, the vast intricacy and complex interweaving of property, of commerce, of commercial interests, of details infinite in number, and infinite in littleness, break down and fritter away into fractions and petty minutiae, the whole huge labyrinth of our ...
— The Uncollected Writings of Thomas de Quincey—Vol. 1 - With a Preface and Annotations by James Hogg • Thomas de Quincey
... man that took form in steel and stone and glass, yet none matched the lightness, the grace, the intricacy, the sublime simplicity of these interwoven crystalline structures where light from the noonday sun separated prismatically until it filled the air with myriads of living, darting, colored sparks of fire above him. Where the breeze that blew through the vibrating ...
— Eight Keys to Eden • Mark Irvin Clifton
... the Bay of San Francisco at the same point, about sixty miles from the Pacific, and by numerous mouths or sloughs as they are here called. These sloughs wind through an immense timbered swamp, and constitute a terraqueous labyrinth of such intricacy, that unskilful and inexperienced navigators have been lost for many days in it, and some, I have been told, have perished, never finding their way out. A range of low sloping hills approach the Sacramento a short distance above its mouth, on the left-hand side as you ascend, and run parallel with ...
— What I Saw in California • Edwin Bryant
... that the writer was contemporary with the events he describes, and although his perfect ingenuousness ceaselessly connects his narrative with history, in no case has he been proved to be in error. The intricacy of the connexions between this record and the Pauline Letters will be best estimated from a study of Paley's Horae Paulinae. We know nothing definite as to the place where the Acts was written, nor the sources whence the information for the earlier portion of the narrative was obtained. But ...
— Weymouth New Testament in Modern Speech, Preface and Introductions - Third Edition 1913 • R F Weymouth
... engine-room in the cellars, and furnishing meals to the employees, attest the energy and enterprise of the firm. The most delicate of the linen fabrics sold here are made, I was informed, all over the north country. The looms, three or four of which are kept going here in a great room to show the intricacy and perfection of the processes, are supplied by the firm to the hand-workers on a system which enables them, while earning good wages from week to week, to acquire the eventual ownership of the machines. The building is crowned by a sort of observatory, from which we enjoyed a noble ...
— Ireland Under Coercion (2nd ed.) (2 of 2) (1888) • William Henry Hurlbert
... together upon a little print of Amsterdam, which hung in a black frame against the opposite wall of the council chamber. Nay, it has even been said, that when any deliberation of extraordinary length and intricacy was on the carpet, the renowned Wouter would shut his eyes for full two hours at a time, that he might not be disturbed by external objects—and at such times the internal commotion of his mind was evinced by certain regular guttural ...
— Knickerbocker's History of New York, Complete • Washington Irving
... evil connected with Roman jurisprudence was the intricacy and perplexity and uncertainty of the laws, together with the expense involved in litigation. The class of lawyers was large, and their gains were extortionate. Justice was not always to be found ...
— The Old Roman World • John Lord
... has found in the novel a far more perfect development, ought to induce us to purify the drama, and retain amongst us its most exalted type. It is in vain that it strives to compete with the novel in the intricacy of its plot, in the number of its dramatis personae, in the representation of the peculiarities, or as they used to be called, the humours of men. These have now a better scene for their exhibition ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 57, No. 356, June, 1845 • Various
... for us to remark upon it. But in the lighter range of comedy, the French playwrights are unequalled and inexhaustible, as is proved by the constant transfer of their productions into both the English and German languages. They do not think it necessary to have a plot of much intricacy, or even of great interest. The point and brilliancy of the dialogue, and the perfection of the actors, render that a matter of subordinate consequence. The Two Eagles, by Bayard and Bieville (these partnerships are frequent among the dramatists of Paris), was brought out ...
— The International Magazine, Volume 2, No. 3, February, 1851 • Various
... studied intricacy of the enemy's defences, consisting not only of the breastwork connecting their batteries, but of successive lines of entrenchments for a hundred yards in the rear, covering the batteries and enfilading each other, ...
— The Medallic History of the United States of America 1776-1876 • J. F. Loubat
... Kurprinz Georg Ludwig" (Electoral Prince and Heir-Apparent), who became George I. of England; he, always a taciturn, saturnine, somewhat grim-visaged man, not without thoughts of his own but mostly inarticulate thoughts, was, just at this time, in a deep domestic intricacy. Uncle George the Kurprinz was painfully detecting, in these very months, that his august Spouse and cousin, a brilliant not uninjured lady, had become an indignant injuring one; that she had gone, and was going, far astray in her walk of life! Thus all is not radiance at Hanover either, ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. I. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—Birth And Parentage.—1712. • Thomas Carlyle
... suggestion—for it was scarcely more—of the sound of breaking water. But if it were indeed an actual sound, and not an illusion of the senses, what did it mean? Had we already become embayed or entangled among an intricacy of reefs and shoals during the night, or had we in some marvellous fashion blundered past or through them in the darkness, and were already leaving them behind us? As I stood on the poop, asking myself these questions, and sending my glances ...
— Overdue - The Story of a Missing Ship • Harry Collingwood
... each vessel, that the failure of the greater part of the fleet to pass was principally due to other circumstances than the Confederate fire. The darkness of the night, the stillness of the air, which permitted the smoke to settle undisturbed, the intricacy of the navigation, the rapidity of the current, then running at the rate of five knots, the poor speed of the ships, not over eight knots, were known beforehand, and were greater elements of danger ...
— The Gulf and Inland Waters - The Navy in the Civil War. Volume 3. • A. T. Mahan
... were spared in making the most of its special qualities, while for long and long no force was put upon the material to make it imitate the qualities of brush-painting, either in power of colour, in delicacy of gradation, or intricacy of treating a subject; and, moreover, easy as it would have been to minimise the jointing of the tesserae, no ...
— Hopes and Fears for Art • William Morris
... exactly what its name implies. The lap is actually raked by a fine-tooth comb with needle-like teeth of steel ranging from 16 to 90 per inch. This involves breaking the lap again and the intricacy of the comber rests in the mechanism which it employs for joining the ...
— The Fabric of Civilization - A Short Survey of the Cotton Industry in the United States • Anonymous
... all, the English party and the people themselves, the two lines of mounted men helped to keep back the rush of the crowd who pressed forward to see the great man of whose deeds they had just heard, and the length, the intricacy, and narrowness of the streets played their part in lessening the gathering; but it was a weary journey—one which grew slower and slower, till the city was completely traversed, and the mounted men rode off to one side, leaving ...
— In the Mahdi's Grasp • George Manville Fenn
... court, rivalling in profusion of ornament and rich contrast of colors one's early idea of the Palace of Aladdin. The floors and fountains are all of marble mosaic; the arches of the liwan glitter with gold, and the walls bewilder the eye with the intricacy of their adornments. In the first house, we were received by the family in a room of precious marbles, with niches in the walls, resembling grottoes of silver stalactites. The cushions of the divan were of the richest silk, and a chandelier of Bohemian crystal hung from the ceiling. ...
— The Lands of the Saracen - Pictures of Palestine, Asia Minor, Sicily, and Spain • Bayard Taylor
... fear that with many of us the recommendation of our own favorite pursuits is rooted more in conceit of ourselves, than affection towards others, so that sometimes in our very pointing of the way, we had rather that the intricacy of it should be admired than unfolded, whence a natural distrust of such recommendation may well have place in the minds of those who have not yet perceived any value in the thing praised, and because also, men ...
— Modern Painters Volume II (of V) • John Ruskin
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