"Fosse" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... never been able to make up my mind whether it was by chance or by treachery on the part of our guides that this fosse was overlooked until we stumbled upon it in the dark. There are some who say that the Bussex Rhine, as it is called, is not either deep or broad, and was, therefore, unmentioned by the moorsmen, but that the recent constant rains ...
— Micah Clarke - His Statement as made to his three Grandchildren Joseph, - Gervas and Reuben During the Hard Winter of 1734 • Arthur Conan Doyle
... this quarry of the Coccosteus minor,—if I may take the liberty of extemporizing a name, until such time as some person better qualified furnishes the creature with a more characteristic one,—there are the remains, consisting of fosse and rampart, with a single cannon lying red and honeycombed amid the ruins, of one of Cromwell's forts, built to protect the town against the assaults of an enemy from the sea. In the few and stormy years during which this ablest of British governors ruled over ...
— The Cruise of the Betsey • Hugh Miller
... swept the howling wind. A step more, and I was in Spain. Glaciers slope away on each side of the wall; but all along the front of the Breche, on the French side, the glacier is scooped out into a deep fosse or cavity, by the action of the sun's rays pouring from the south through the opening. A wild world of mountains appeared to the south, those in the foreground covered with snow, and the more distant looming hazily over the plains of Saragossa. And this ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 456 - Volume 18, New Series, September 25, 1852 • Various
... ground, Shuts the horizon all around. The softened vale between Slopes smooth and fair for courser's tread; Not the most timid maid need dread To give her snow-white palfrey head On that wide stubble-ground; Nor wood, nor tree, nor bush are there, Her course to intercept or scare, Nor fosse nor fence are found, Save where, from out her shattered bowers, ...
— Some Poems by Sir Walter Scott • Sir Walter Scott
... and found the sentinel too heavy with sleep to defend himself: and the knights and the sergeants were cut to pieces crying for mercy in their beds. But Sir Ernault's companions were pitiless, and many a white sheet was dyed red with blood. And at last they tossed the watchman into the deep fosse and ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 1 - From the Beginning to 1800 • George Saintsbury
... credesse che mia risposta fosse A persona che mai tornasse al mondo, Questa fiamma staria senza piu scosse. Ma perciocche giammai di questo fondo Non torno vivo alcun, s'i'odo il vero, Senza tema d'infamia ...
— Poems • T. S. [Thomas Stearns] Eliot
... I was returning by the Place de Bastile, and was passing under the shadow of one of the huge old houses that then surrounded that scene of hereditary terror, two men, who had been loitering beside the parapet of the fosse, suddenly started forward and planted themselves in my way. I flung one of them aside, but the other grasped my arm, and, drawing a dagger, told me that my life was at his mercy. His companion giving a signal, a group of fierce-looking fellows started from their lurking-places; and of course further ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 54, No. 337, November, 1843 • Various
... voi starete bene di salute. Mi son scordato di darvi nuova, che abbiamo qui trovato quel Sign. Belardo, ballerina, che abbiamo conosciuto in Haye ed in Amsterdam, quello che attaco colla spada il ballerino, il Sign. Neri, perche credeva che lui fosse cagione che non ebbe la permission di ballar in teatro. Addio, non scordarvi di me, io sono sempre il vostro ...
— The Letters of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, V.1. • Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
... as she supposed, the range of windows which gave light as well to the two anterooms as to the mysterious chamber itself, looked down upon an ancient moat, by which they were divided from the level ground on the farther side. The defence which this fosse afforded seemed to have been long neglected, and the bottom, entirely dry, was choked in many places with bushes and low trees, which rose up against the wall of the castle, and by means of which it seemed to Rose the windows might be easily scaled, ...
— The Betrothed • Sir Walter Scott
... began, one of the chiefs of the Trinobantes was asked first to give a minute description of the Roman camp. The works were formidable. Surrounding it was a broad and deep fosse, into which a stream was turned. Beyond this there was a double vallum or wall of earth so steep as to be climbed with great difficulty. In the hollow between the two walls sharp stakes were set thickly together. The second wall was higher than the first, ...
— Beric the Briton - A Story of the Roman Invasion • G. A. Henty
... edifice, distinguished by an air of heavy grandeur, appeared successively between the branches of the trees—the broad turret, the arched gate-way that led into the courts, the drawbridge, and the dry fosse which surrounded the whole. ...
— The Mysteries of Udolpho • Ann Radcliffe
... raging in the gaols, and its ravages must be arrested. You will therefore proceed this evening to the prison of Le Bouffay in order to take over the prisoners whom you will march up to the Quay La Fosse, whence they will be ...
— The Historical Nights' Entertainment • Rafael Sabatini
... Charlemagne, Lewis the Debonair, Charles the Bald, Philip Augustus, St. Lewis, Lewis XII, Henry IV, Lewis XIII, and Lewis XIV. The first arch, distributed into twelve equal parts, presented the twelve apostles, painted in fresco by JOUVENET. The second arch, painted by LA FOSSE, represented the apotheosis of St. Lewis, offering to God his sword and crown. The pavement, which alone has not suffered, is in compartments of different marbles of ...
— Paris As It Was and As It Is • Francis W. Blagdon
... ne voudrois pas reprendre mon coeur en ceste sorte: meurs de honte, aveugle, impudent, traistre et desloyal a ton Dieu, et sembables choses; mais je voudrois le corriger par voye de compassion. Or sus, mon pauvre coeur, nous voila tombez dans la fosse, laquelle nous avions tant resolu d' eschapper. Ah! relevons-nous, et quittons-la pour jamais, reclamons la misericorde de Dieu, et esperons en elle qu'elle nous assistera pour desormais estre plus fermes; et remettons-nous ...
— North and South • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... filled to the brim with earth and with—no one knows what. It is all like the dried bed of a river, smashed, extended, slimy, that both water and men have abandoned. In one place the trench has been simply wiped out by the guns. The wide fosse is blocked, and remains no more than a field of new-turned earth, made of holes symmetrically bored side by side, in length and ...
— Under Fire - The Story of a Squad • Henri Barbusse
... highroad westward from Newcastle, by Westgate Road, as is well known, follows the course of the Wall for nearly twenty miles. But farther west we may walk along the uneven, broken surface of the mighty rampart, or climb down into the broad and deep fosse which lies closely against it along its northern side, without troubling ourselves with the arguments and uncertainties of antiquaries, who have by no means decided on what was the original function of the Wall, who was its real builder, why and when the earthen walls and fosse ...
— Northumberland Yesterday and To-day • Jean F. Terry
... the important town of Vailly and a strong bridgehead near by. On the western leg of the German salient, whose apex was at Fort Conde on the Aisne, the French struck another decisive blow which gave them the village of Nanteuil-le-Fosse, and endangered the Germans in the fort, who were now in the position ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume VI (of VIII) - History of the European War from Official Sources • Various
... said I, correcting the proposition—the Bastile is not an evil to be despised; but strip it of its towers, fill the fosse, unbarricade the doors, call it simply a confinement, and suppose it is some tyrant of a distemper, and not a man which holds you in it, the evil vanishes, and you bear the other half without complaint. I was interrupted in the heyday of this soliloquy, ...
— The Illustrated London Reading Book • Various
... two deep ditches, one dry, the other filled with water. Jeanne, whose place had always been with her standard at the immediate foot of the wall, from whence to direct and cheer on her soldiers, pressed forward to this point of peril, descending into the first fosse, and climbing up again on the second, the dos d'ane, which separated them, where she stood in the midst of a rain of arrows, fully exposed to all the enraged crowd of archers and gunners on the ramparts above, testing with ...
— Jeanne d'Arc - Her Life And Death • Mrs.(Margaret) Oliphant
... through the port of Sydney itself; but in the latter case it would be necessary to avoid disembarking troops on the right side of the entrance, on account of the arm of the sea of which I have already spoken.* (* Middle Harbour.) That indentation presents as an obstacle a great fosse, defended by a battery of ten or twelve guns, firing from eighteen to twenty-four-pound balls. The left shore of the harbour is undefended, and is at the same time more accessible. The town is dominated by its outlying portions to such an extent, that it might ...
— The Life of Captain Matthew Flinders • Ernest Scott
... most imposing; they are constructed of carefully-squared stone joined with cement of such extreme hardness that the weather has had no destructive effect. The perimeter of the fortress is about 4000 yards; the shape is nearly a parallelogram. The fosse varies in depth and width, but the minimum of the former is twenty-five feet, and of the width eighty feet, but in some places it exceeds one hundred and forty. This formidable ditch is cut out of the solid rock, which is the usual calcareous sedimentary limestone, ...
— Cyprus, as I Saw it in 1879 • Sir Samuel W. Baker
... broken through, than I threw one of my slippers beside the palisades, that it might be supposed I had lost it when climbing over them. These palisades, twelve feet in length, were situated in the front of the principal fosse, and my sentinels stood within. There was no sentry-box at the place where I had ...
— The Life and Adventures of Baron Trenck - Vol. 2 (of 2) • Baron Trenck
... the castle is very bold: it crowns the extremity of a ridge of chalk hills of considerable height, which commencing to the west of Dieppe, and terminating at this spot, have full command of the valley below. The fosse which surrounds the walls is wide and deep. The outline of the fortress is oval, but not regularly so; and it is varied by towers of uncertain shape, placed at unequal distances. The two entrance towers, and those nearest to them to the north and south, are considerably ...
— Architectural Antiquities of Normandy • John Sell Cotman
... ne forte putes, me, que facere ipse recusem, Cum recte tractant alii, laudare maligne; Ille per extentum funem mihi fosse videtur Ire Poeta, meum qui pectus inaniter angit, Irritat, mulcet, falsis terroribus implet, Ut magus; et modo me Thebis, modo ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... intrans. to dig, but with special meanings. Derived, like fosse, a ditch, and fossil, through French from Lat. fossus, perfect part. of fodere, to dig. Fossicking as pres. part., or as verbal noun, is commoner than the other parts ...
— A Dictionary of Austral English • Edward Morris
... the damozel eagerly, and then she said to me, 'This is Sir William de la Fosse, my true knight;' so the knight took my hand and seemed to have such joy of me, that all the blood came up to my face for ...
— The World of Romance - being Contributions to The Oxford and Cambridge Magazine, 1856 • William Morris
... not without war Thy living ones, and one doth gnaw the other Of those whom one wall and one fosse shut in! ...
— Dante's Purgatory • Dante
... downland through great beech-woods to my quarters for the night. In the first part I was in an infamous temper; in the second I was worried and mystified; but the cool twilight of the third stage calmed and heartened me, and I reached the gates of Fosse Manor with a mighty appetite ...
— Mr. Standfast • John Buchan
... the Seventh(1448) was so sumptuously banqueted, and imposed that villainous fine for his entertainment, is now shrunk to one vast curious tower, that stands on a spacious mount raised on a high hill with a large fosse. It commands a fine prospect, and belongs to Mr. Ashurst, a rich citizen, who has built a trumpery new house close to it. In the parish church is a fine square monument of black marble of one of the Earls; and there are three more tombs of the family at Earl's Colne, some miles from the ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole, Volume 1 • Horace Walpole
... of Gibourc grew red when she heard the porter's words, and she left the Palace and mounted the battlements, where she called across the fosse, 'Warrior, what ...
— The Book of Romance • Various
... would appear to have been in themselves protection enough, their inhabitants did not neglect other means of defence, from which we may gather that they were engaged in constant and terrible struggles. The TERREMARES were generally surrounded by a talus or rampart of earth, with an external fosse which protected the approaches to the dwellings. The rampart of Castione (Parma), which dates from the Bronze age, was even strengthened inside with large timber caissons.[223] In Switzerland, some works recently undertaken to deflect the course of the Aar, on its exit from Lake ...
— Manners and Monuments of Prehistoric Peoples • The Marquis de Nadaillac
... burial purposes, not the mere barrows for single internment, but in connection with sepulchral ceremonies and rites of the worship of the dead. Such, perhaps, is the small camp at Parracombe, which is built with a strong double fosse, but the inner fosse deeper than the outer, which does not seem to have been the case with camps built only for defence. There are two other camps at Parracombe, one on the common and one on a high ...
— Lynton and Lynmouth - A Pageant of Cliff & Moorland • John Presland
... still protected by a vallum from thirty to forty feet high, and between the sea and the entrance nearest to it, a length of about three hundred yards, by a wide exterior ditch with other out-works, as well as by an inner fosse, faint traces of which only now remain. Hence to the next and large entrance is a distance of about two thousand feet; and in this space the interior fosse is still very visible; but the great abruptness of the hill forbade an ...
— Account of a Tour in Normandy, Vol. I. (of 2) • Dawson Turner
... wood was about 1-1/2 miles long, with a maximum depth of 1,400 yards, and its undergrowth, where not cut away, was densely intertwined with alder, hazel, ash, and blackthorn, with water standing in large pools on parts of its boggy surface. In one corner was the picturesque Fosse Labarre, a wide horseshoe moat enclosing a little garden, now a machine-gun emplacement, where grew the cumfrey, teazle and yellow flag. Everywhere the dog violet and blue veronica flourished in enormous clumps, and near the Strand was a great patch of ...
— The War Service of the 1/4 Royal Berkshire Regiment (T. F.) • Charles Robert Mowbray Fraser Cruttwell
... defence without great reparation. On the land side, the fortifications consist of a triple wall, with towers at every 150 yards; the first wall being 30 feet in height; the second 20, and about 30 feet from the first; the third is twelve feet in height; beyond this is a fosse, thirty feet wide, now converted into gardens, and filled with fine grown trees, and a low counterscarp. There are five gates on this side, and several to the water. The streets, of which there ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 14, Issue 387, August 28, 1829 • Various
... the fashion; he was the successor of Verrio, and the rival of La Guerre, in the decorations of our palaces and public buildings. His demands for the painting of Greenwich Hall were contested; and though La Fosse received two thousand pounds for his works at Montague House, besides other allowances, Sir James, despite his dignity as Member of Parliament for his native town of Weymouth, could obtain but forty shillings ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 2, May, 1851 • Various
... lugubrious stone cage before. But the magic of his morning walk across the moor, the sight of the pagan tors, the songs of the last cuckoo, had unprepared him for that dreary building. He left the street, and, entering the fosse, began a circuit, scanning the walls ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... forward toward the castle. Seeing a knight approaching alone the garrison judged that he was friendly, and it was not until it was seen that instead of approaching the drawbridge he turned aside and rode to the edge of the fosse, that they suspected that he was a foe. Running to the walls they opened fire with arrows upon him, but by this time Archie had seen all that he required. Across the promontory ran a sort of fissure, ...
— In Freedom's Cause • G. A. Henty
... Over brake and under tree, Thro' the bosky tanglery, Brushwood and bramble! Follow me, follow me, Laugh and leap and scramble! Follow, follow, Hill and hollow, Fosse and burrow, Fen and furrow, Down into the bulrush beds, 'Midst the reeds and osier heads, In the rushy soaking damps, Where the vapours pitch their camps, Follow me, follow me, For a midnight ramble! O! what a mighty fog, What a merry night O ho! Follow, follow, nigher, nigher - Over bank, and ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... consideratione alla Santita Sua che havendo deputato un Legato apostolico su la morte dell' ammiraglio, et altri capi Ugonotti, ha fatti ammazzare a Parigi, saria per metterla in molto sospetto et diffidenza delli Principi Protestanti, et della Regina d' Inghilterra, ch' ella fosse d' accordo con la sede Apostolica, et Principi Cattolici per farli guerra, i quali cerca d' acquettar con accertarli tutti, che non ha fatto ammazzar l' ammiraglio et suoi seguaci per conto della Religione (Cusano to ...
— The History of Freedom • John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton
... found my fault, Fa la! Too soon I found my fault; The fairest of the fair brigade Advanced to mine assault. Alas! against an adverse maid Nor fosse can serve nor palisade— Too soon ...
— Collected Poems - In Two Volumes, Vol. II • Austin Dobson
... sounds of conflict, never reach." Suddenly my musings were broken in upon by hearing the measured tramp of cavalry, as at a walk, a long column wound their way along the zig-zag approaches, which by many a redoubt and fosse, over many a draw bridge, and beneath many a strong arch, led to the gates of Nancy. The loud, sharp call of a trumpet was soon heard, and, after a brief parley, the massive gates of the fortress were opened for the troops to enter. ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 3, August, 1850. • Various
... the townspeople at once became hurried and irregular, but the Scots picked off their men with steady aim. The leader of the Imperialists, who carried a petard, advanced boldly to the edge of the ditch. The fosse was shallow and contained but little water, and he at once dashed into it and waded across, for the drawbridge had, of course, been raised. He climbed up the bank, and was close to the gate, when Malcolm, leaning far over the wall, discharged ...
— The Lion of the North • G.A. Henty
... che suo dannaggio sogna, Che sognando disidera sognare, Si che quel ch'e, come non fosse, agogna; Tal mi fec'io non potendo parlare: Che disiava scusarmi e scusava Me tuttavia e not mi credea fare Maggior difetto men vergogna lava, Disse'l maestro, che'l tuo non e stato: Pero d'ogni tristizia ti disgrava; E fa ragion ch'io ti sempre allato, Se piu avvien che fortuna ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 118, August, 1867 • Various
... seine net. wall, hedge, hedge row; espalier; fence &c. (defense) 717; pale, paling, balustrade, rail, railing, quickset hedge, park paling, circumvallation[obs3], enceinte, ring fence. barrier, barricade; gate, gateway; bent, dingle [U.S.]; door, hatch, cordon; prison &c. 752. dike, dyke, ditch, fosse[obs3], moat. V. inclose, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... air, a deeper desire. The very light of the sun was whiter and more brilliant here. By the time I had reached the summit I had entirely forgotten the petty circumstances and the annoyances of existence. I felt myself, myself. There was an intrenchment on the summit, and going down into the fosse I walked round it slowly to recover breath. On the south-western side ...
— The Story of My Heart • Richard Jefferies
... l'ho desiderato Un damo aver che fosse sonatore! Eccolo qua che Dio me l'ha mandato Tutto coperto di rose e viole; Eccolo qua che vien pianin pianino, A capo basso, e suona ...
— Florence and Northern Tuscany with Genoa • Edward Hutton |
