"Tendril" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... suspect that the apex was sensitive to contact, and that an effect was transmitted from it to the upper part of the radicle, which was thus excited to bend away from the touching object. As a little loop of fine thread hung on a tendril or on the petiole of a leaf-climbing plant, causes it to bend, we thought that any small hard object affixed to the tip of a radicle, freely suspended and growing in damp air, might cause it to bend, if it were sensitive, and yet would not offer any mechanical resistance to its growth. Full ...
— The Power of Movement in Plants • Charles Darwin
... her kids her milk doth fill two pails. A deep bowl of ivy-wood, too, I will give thee, rubbed with sweet bees'-wax, a twy-eared bowl newly wrought, smacking still of the knife of the graver. Round its upper edges goes the ivy winding, ivy besprent with golden flowers; and about it is a tendril twisted that joys in its saffron fruit. Within is designed a maiden, as fair a thing as the gods could fashion, arrayed in a sweeping robe, and a snood on her head. Beside her two youths with fair love- locks are ...
— Theocritus, Bion and Moschus rendered into English Prose • Andrew Lang
... opened a little—the light came in slowly, and Mrs. Philip Harris stepped at last into the loggia that led from her windows—out toward the garden. Grapevines climbed the posts and tendril shadows were on the ground beneath. They rested on the frail figure moving under ...
— Mr. Achilles • Jennette Lee
... stems, which stretch, some of them twenty or thirty feet from the parent stalk, support and arrange themselves so as to preserve a neat and ornamental appearance without my having had the least trouble in training them? If you gather one of those loose branches, you will see that it has no tendril of any kind, or other apparent means of support; but this, like all others of the clematideae or clematis tribe, possesses a power of twisting the leaf-stalk round a wire, twig, or anything else that comes in its way, so as to tie the plant ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 454 - Volume 18, New Series, September 11, 1852 • Various
... curling there, and at last, perhaps, coming out at the top, and overhanging the edge with a canopy of green leaves and pretty white flowers. A very different sort of life from yours, with a gardener always after you, trimming you in one place, fastening up a stray tendril in another, and fidgeting you all along—a sort of perpetual 'mustn't go here'—'mustn't go there.' Poor thing! I quite feel for you! Still I must say you make me smile; for you look so proud and self-conscious of beauty all the time, that one would think you did not know in what ...
— The Junior Classics Volume 8 - Animal and Nature Stories • Selected and arranged by William Patten
... very slow seemed the abnegation of his manhood. To crawl after a mere schoolgirl! Besides, she was not riding very fast. On the other hand, to thrust himself in front of her, consuming the road in his tendril-like advance, seemed an incivility—greed. He would leave her such a very little. His business training made him prone to bow and step aside. If only one could take one's hands off the handles, one might pass with a silent elevation of the hat, of ...
— The Wheels of Chance - A Bicycling Idyll • H. G. Wells
... perennial old world tendril-bearing vines (family Cucurbitaceae) having large leaves, small flowers, and red or black fruit; Dried root of a bryony (Bryonia alba or B. ...
— Mother's Remedies - Over One Thousand Tried and Tested Remedies from Mothers - of the United States and Canada • T. J. Ritter
... draw themselves to an upright position, the boys flung themselves forward into the rapidly vanishing mist. Rick felt with horror a thin, icy tendril curl around his face, and he heard a gentle bubbling sound, ...
— The Blue Ghost Mystery • Harold Leland Goodwin
... Bagar or 'hedge of thorns,' because it is surrounded on all sides by wooded hills. [64] There are Bagri Jats and Bagri Rajputs, many of whom are now highly respectable landholders. Bawaria or Baori is derived from banwar, a creeper, or the tendril of a vine, and hence a noose made originally from some fibrous plant and used for trapping animals, this being one of the primary occupations of the tribe. [65] The term Badhak signifies a hunter ...
— The Tribes and Castes of the Central Provinces of India - Volume II • R. V. Russell
... told me this, she took the handkerchief out of her pocket to let me see it: she had folded it up neatly in a couple of vine-leaves, tied around with a tendril: on opening it, I saw an S. marked ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. IV (of X)—Great Britain and Ireland II • Various
... at first for its symbolic significance, but afterward even more on account of its rare beauty of form. The play of light and shade on its vigorous foliage, the variety of its drawing in leaf, vine, and tendril, and the contrast afforded by its bunches of oval fruit, caused it to be accepted as a favorite subject for imitation in all kinds of carving. It lends itself kindly to all sorts of relief, either high or low, in almost any material. ...
— Wood-Carving - Design and Workmanship • George Jack
... faint smile she touched the bright hair above her brow, where the wind had flung a gleaming tendril ...
— The Maids of Paradise • Robert W. (Robert William) Chambers
... though the confession be humbling to a maiden's pride, yet my heart tells me 'tis the last time we meet; and it is the only acknowledgment,—I render it to your honesty and good faith." Her voice grew hesitating and tremulous. "There was a tendril twining about my heart; but it is wrung off, ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 1 (of 2) • John Roby
... her toilet was finished: the pink-silk stockings and slippers shimmering beneath the lengthened pink mull; the brocaded pink ribbon now become a huge, pink-winged butterfly; and, mother's last touch, a pink rosebud holding a tendril—a curling tendril—artfully above the left ear! Missy felt a stranger to herself as, like some gracious belle and fairy princess and airy butterfly all compounded into one, she walked—no, floated down ...
— Missy • Dana Gatlin
... immediate ordeal was the need of saying good-bye to Dorothy, and neither of them would fail to understand that it might be a last good-bye. There was no room for equivocation in this crisis, and as he gazed up into the full and peaceful shade over his head, a flood of little memories, bound tendril-like by sounds, sights, and fragrances to his heart, swept ...
— The Roof Tree • Charles Neville Buck
... has been much admired, thanks to nothing but its own habit and form; under a west wall, sheltered from the strong winds, it grows near some Lilium auratum; after outgrowing the lengths of the stems, and having set off to advantage the lily bloom, it caught by its tendril-like shoots an apricot tree on the wall, and then reached the top, being furnished with bloom its whole length. The flowers are orange and scarlet, inclining to crimson; they are produced singly on ...
— Hardy Perennials and Old Fashioned Flowers - Describing the Most Desirable Plants, for Borders, - Rockeries, and Shrubberies. • John Wood
... first peeps out from earth the modest vine, Asking but little space to live and grow, How easily some step, without design, May crush the being from a thing so low! But let the hand that doth delight to show Support to feebleness, the tendril twine Around some lattice-work, and 'twill bestow Its thanks in fragrance, and with blossoms shine. And thus, when Genius first puts forth its shoot— So timid, that it scarce dare ask to live— ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII. No. 5. May 1848 • Various
... a ragged cleft of the desert, with shelving rock and giant bowlder on every side, without a sign of leaf, or sprig of grass, or tendril of tiny creeping plant, a little party of haggard, hunted men lay in hiding and in the silence of exhaustion and despond, awaiting the inevitable. Bulging outward overhead, like the counter of some huge battleship, a great mass of ...
— An Apache Princess - A Tale of the Indian Frontier • Charles King
... towards the close of my fourth chapter, I cannot persuade myself that this holds good with respect to those due to a touch. In order that the reader may know what points have interested me most, I may call his attention to certain tendril-bearing plants; for instance, Bignonia capreolata, Cobaea, Echinocystis, and Hanburya, which display as beautiful adaptations as can be found in any part of the kingdom of nature. It is, also, an interesting fact that intermediate states between organs fitted for widely different functions, may ...
— The Movements and Habits of Climbing Plants • Charles Darwin
... this fireside. She expended much art and ingenuity in piling the wood high on the fire-dogs, grasping the heavy tongs in both hands and leaning her head slightly back to avoid the sparks. Her hands were small and very supple, with that tendril-like flexibility, so to speak, of a Daphne at the very first onset ...
— The Child of Pleasure • Gabriele D'Annunzio
... visible—her countenance careless and pensive, and musing and mirthful, and mocking and tender. Not fearing the dew, she has not covered her head; her curls are free—they veil her neck and caress her shoulder with their tendril rings. An ornament of gold gleams through the half-closed folds of the scarf she has wrapped across her bust, and a large bright gem glitters on the white hand which confines it. ...
— Shirley • Charlotte Bronte
... groping painfully and profanely through a close-growing wood, paused to unwind a clinging tendril from his bare knees. As he bent down, his face came into sudden contact with a cold, wet, prickly bramble-bush, which promptly drew a loving but excoriating finger across his ...
— The First Hundred Thousand • Ian Hay
... on a hundred follies, and that you have unnumbered faults of character at which I do not even guess. Making some allowance for a figurative expression, I will answer 'it may be so.' What then? I have never called you an angel, and never desired you to be perfect. The weaknesses which cling, tendril-like, to a fine nature, not unfrequently bind us to it by ties we do not seek to sever. I know you for a true-hearted girl, but with the bitter lessons of life still unlearned; let it be my part to shield you from their sad knowledge,—yet whatever sorrow or evil ...
— International Miscellany of Literature, Art and Science, Vol. 1, - No. 3, Oct. 1, 1850 • Various
... else in his delight over the change in her. For Rosa had changed. There was no mistake about it. She had bloomed out into maturity in those few short months of his absence. Her soft figure had rounded and developed, her bewitching curls were put up on her head, with only a stray tendril here and there to emphasize a dainty ear or call attention to a smooth, round neck; and when she raised her lovely head and lifted limpid eyes to his there was about her a demureness, a coolness and charm ...
— A Voice in the Wilderness • Grace Livingston Hill
... of life and mind among the Rhizopods, a very low form of living thing. He relates that the Difflugia ampula, a creature occupying a tiny shell formed of minute particles of sand, has a long projection of its substance, like a feeler or tendril, with which it searches on the bottom of the sea for sandy material with which to build the shell or outer covering for its offspring, which are born by division from the parent body. It grasps the particle of sand by the feeler, and passes it into its body by enclosing it. Verworn removed ...
— A Series of Lessons in Gnani Yoga • Yogi Ramacharaka
... loyalty to the dear Ploughman Poet, came to the rescue, and when we returned, Robbie's plaster head had been glued to his body. He smiled at us again from between the two scarlet geraniums, and a tendril of ivy had been gently curled about his neck to hide the ...
— Penelope's Progress - Being Such Extracts from the Commonplace Book of Penelope Hamilton As Relate to Her Experiences in Scotland • Kate Douglas Smith Wiggin
... not pleased with the daughter she bore him and, wounded by his words, she withdrew with her child to the skies. Tawhaki in his grief remembered that she had told him the road thither. He must find a certain tendril of a wild vine which, hanging down from the sky to earth, had become rooted in the ground. Therefore with his brother the hero set out on the quest, and duly found the creeper. But there were two tendrils. ...
— The Long White Cloud • William Pember Reeves
... same she always brought, When legends mentioned knights of old, The courteous, eloquent, and bold. The same dark locks his forehead grac'd, A crown by partial Nature plac'd, With the large hollows, and the swells, And short, close, tendril twine of shells. Though grave in aspect, when he smil'd, 'Twas gay and artless as a child, With him expression seem'd a law,— You only Nature's dictates saw; But they in full perfection wrought Of generous feeling, varied thought,— All that can ...
— The Lay of Marie • Matilda Betham
... few of the ship's company had also bestowed great pains upon their hair, which some of them—especially the genteel young sailor bucks of the After-guard—wore over their shoulders like the ringleted Cavaliers. Many sailors, with naturally tendril locks, prided themselves upon what they call love curls, worn at the side of the head, just before the ear—a custom peculiar to tars, and which seems to have filled the vacated place of the ...
— White Jacket - or, the World on a Man-of-War • Herman Melville
... quickened with that incommunicable thrill of the desert, and their eyes turned and sought each other in silence. The gold of the sun was on Arlee's hanging hair and the morning-blue of the sky in her eyes; her face was flushed from sleep and a tiny tendril still clung to the pink cheek on which she had been sleeping. Somehow that inconsequent small tendril roused in Billy a thrill of absurd tenderness and delight.... She was so very small and childish, sitting there in the Libyan desert with him, looking up at ...
— The Palace of Darkened Windows • Mary Hastings Bradley
... endure ne'er shall forget her I, iv. 146. By Allah, wine shall not disturb me, while this soul of mine, iv. 190. By craft and sleight I snared him when he came, ii. 44. By his cheeks' unfading damask and his smiling teeth I swear, viii. 282. By his eyelash! tendril curled, by his slender waist I swear, iii. 217. By his eyelids shedding perfume and his fine slim waist I swear, i. 168. By His life who holds my guiding rein, I swear, iv. 2. By Love's right! naught of farness thy slave can estrange, viii. 76. By means of toil man shall scale the height, ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 10 • Richard F. Burton
... the simple way in which the faith of these five men ran its tiny but tough tenacious tendril-roots down into their very vitals. A simple neighbourhood wedding occasion up near the old Nazareth home drew Jesus thither with His kinsfolk and His new-made friends. And then He meets the need of the homely occasion by helping out the shortened ...
— Quiet Talks on John's Gospel • S. D. Gordon
... impulse the vines took deep hold of the treasure in the storehouse beneath, spending it prodigally for sap to be poured into these waiting goblets of emerald and pearl. All the hoarded strength of leaf and tendril was caught up by the current, and swept blindly onward to its ...
— Master of the Vineyard • Myrtle Reed
... round glasses for all the world like the two wheels of a miniature silver chariot, and proceeded to read the letter, holding it out at the full stretch of his arm. The windows giving on the garden stood open, and a tendril of wild vine hung down on to the desk at the foot of a crucifix of old ivory, while a light breeze set the papers on it fluttering ...
— The Aspirations of Jean Servien • Anatole France
... open her eyes to wide, laughing pools, plowed through the rear-counter debris of pasteboard boxes and tissue-paper, reached for her jacket and tan, boyish hat. A blowy, corn-colored curl caught like a tendril ...
— Every Soul Hath Its Song • Fannie Hurst
... standard, wings, and keel, all oblong; the first clawed, the second oblique, and adhering to the shorter keel; 10 stamens, 1 detached from other 9. Stem: Slender, weak, climbing or trailing, downy, 2 to 4 ft. long. Leaves: Tendril bearing, divided into 18 to 24 thin, narrow, oblong leaflets. Fruit: A smooth pod 1 in. long or less, 5 to 8 seeded. Preferred Habitat - Dry soil, fields, wastelands. Flowering Season - June-August. Distribution - United States from New Jersey, Kentucky, and Iowa northward ...
— Wild Flowers, An Aid to Knowledge of Our Wild Flowers and - Their Insect Visitors - - Title: Nature's Garden • Neltje Blanchan
... there let it lie—the lovelier for that tendril of sunny brown hair upon it. How it falls and rises! Which is the ...
— Imaginary Conversations and Poems - A Selection • Walter Savage Landor
... with a hammer. To apply your proverbs to yourself would be to realise this proverb of ours. Can you not let me pet and spoil my little flower-bird at least till I have tamed her, and trust me to chastise her as soon as she shall give reason—if I can find a tendril or flower-stem light ...
— Across the Zodiac • Percy Greg
... rain, And make a patch of brightness for the street, Though raised above rough fingers—so you make A weed a flower, and others, passing, think: "Next ditch I cross, I'll lift a root from it, And dress my window" . . . and the blessing spreads. Well, so I grew, with every root and tendril Grappling the secret anchorage of his love, And so we loved each other till he died. . ...
— Artemis to Actaeon and Other Worlds • Edith Wharton
... been in my mind to make a more shapely funeral urn myself—I set to work to ornament its surface. A portion of each day was given to this artistic labour; and when the surface was covered with a pattern of thorny stems, and a trailing creeper with curving leaf and twining tendril, and pendent bud and blossom, I gave it colour. Purples and black only were used, obtained from the juices of some deeply coloured berries; and when a tint, or shade, or line failed to satisfy me I erased it, to do it again; and this so often that I never completed my work. I might, ...
— Green Mansions - A Romance of the Tropical Forest • W. H. Hudson
... showed their merit's prize, Poniard or cup, tribute ordained of tribes From age to age, Eochaid's right, on them With equal right devolving. Slow they moved In mantle now of crimson, now of blue, Clasped with huge torque of silver or of gold Just where across the snowy shirt there strayed Tendril of purple thread. With jewelled fronts Beauteous in pride 'mid light of winsome smiles, Over the rushes green with slender foot In silver slipper hid, the ladies passed, Answering with eyes not lips the whispered praise, Or loud the bride extolling—"When was seen ...
— The Legends of Saint Patrick • Aubrey de Vere
... step of man As an invisible world—unheard, unseen, And listening only to the pebbly brook 55 That murmurs with a dead, yet tinkling sound; Or to the bees, that in the neighbouring trunk Make honey-hoards. The breeze, that visits me, Was never Love's accomplice, never raised The tendril ringlets from the maiden's brow, 60 And the blue, delicate veins above her cheek; Ne'er played the wanton—never half disclosed The maiden's snowy bosom, scattering thence Eye-poisons for some love-distempered youth, Who ne'er henceforth may see an aspen-grove ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... self-same fashion spring Fat olives, orchades, and radii And bitter-berried pausians, no, nor yet Apples and the forests of Alcinous; Nor from like cuttings are Crustumian pears And Syrian, and the heavy hand-fillers. Not the same vintage from our trees hangs down, Which Lesbos from Methymna's tendril plucks. Vines Thasian are there, Mareotids white, These apt for richer soils, for lighter those: Psithian for raisin-wine more useful, thin Lageos, that one day will try the feet And tie the tongue: purples and early-ripes, And how, O Rhaetian, shall ...
— The Georgics • Virgil
... ill described if it has not been made evident that to caress, to touch her, seemed the involuntarily natural expression of any feeling toward her. Something in the bright, tendril-curling hair, the curve of her young cheek, the curve of her red lips, her light, yet round form, with its confiding, unconscious movements, made as inevitable an allure as the soft rosiness of a darling child, ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol 31, No 2, June 1908 • Various
... which has ramified among the tissues, produces an AEcidium, with its constant companion, spermogonia—distinct cysts, that is, from which a quantity of minute bodies ooze out, often in the form of a tendril, the function of which is imperfectly known at present, but which from analogy we regard as a form of fruit, though it is just possible that they may be rather of the nature of spermatozoids. The AEcidia contain, within a cellular ...
— Fungi: Their Nature and Uses • Mordecai Cubitt Cooke
... glance Of the frail Crocus through its snowy sheath, On, to the ripen'd gatherings of the Grape, And thorn-clad chestnut, all was sweet to her. She loved to plant the seed and watch the germ, And nurse the tender leaflet like a babe, And lead the tendril right. To her they seem'd Like living friends. She sedulously mark'd Their health and order, and was skill'd to prune The too luxuriant spray, or gadding vine. She taught the blushing Strawberry where to run, And stoop'd to kiss the timid Violet, Blossoming in the shade, and sometimes dream'd ...
— Man of Uz, and Other Poems • Lydia Howard Sigourney
... holding-high communion with great spirits in the vasty deep. Daniel Sands, having buried his second wife, was making eyes at a third and spinning his financial web over the town. Dr. and Mrs. Nesbit were marvelling at the mystery of a child's soul, a maiden's soul, reaching out tendril after tendril as the days made years. The Dick Bowman's were holding biennial receptions to the little angels who came to the house in the Doctor's valise—and welcomed, hilariously welcomed babies they were—welcomed with cigars and ...
— In the Heart of a Fool • William Allen White
... (tendril-bearing).—A prostrate, branching-stemmed, small-growing kind, very proliferous, with roots along the main stems; branchlets upright, five-angled, with slightly raised points, or tubercles, upon which are ten short hair-like spines, arranged in a star, and surrounding three or ...
— Cactus Culture For Amateurs • W. Watson
... and talked. He had the air of a monarch displaying his kingdom. On one side was a bit of moss worthy of the closest attention; on another, a vine that carried allurement in every tendril. Here was a flower that was like a story for interest, and there was a bush that bore a secret worth the telling. Even Simeon Holly glowed into a semblance of life when David had unerringly picked out and called by name the spruce, and fir, and pine, and larch, ...
— Just David • Eleanor H. Porter
... so close that a tendril of her hair brushed his cheek, and speaking in a voice that was almost a whisper, "I told you that I had need of a friend. It is a desperate need. I may rely upon you, may ...
— The Destroyer - A Tale of International Intrigue • Burton Egbert Stevenson
... could see her parents' home standing unprotected except for one sapling maple, the sun already pressing against the drawn shades. There was a slight breeze through this morning that turned the sapling leaves and even lifted the little twist of tendril at the nape of ...
— Star-Dust • Fannie Hurst
... do not know anything about our purpose in regard to them. They merely seek to follow the law of Nature to propagate themselves, first by seeds which, strictly speaking, are the fruit, and then by runners. These slender, tendril-like growths begin to appear early in summer, and if left unchecked will mat the ground about the parent with young plants by late autumn. If we wish plants, let them grow by all means; but if fruit is our ...
— The Home Acre • E. P. Roe
... cruel wind and driving rain half the night through. The vine-leaves clustering round Robert's window fluttered with a joyous rustling, shaking the rain-drops in diamond showers from every spray and tendril. ...
— Lady Audley's Secret • Mary Elizabeth Braddon
... together some gorgeous blossoms on a tendril of liana. Months of sun and ozone had made a considerable difference in the child. She was as brown as a gipsy and freckled, not very much taller, but twice as plump. Her eyes had lost considerably that look as though she were contemplating ...
— The Blue Lagoon - A Romance • H. de Vere Stacpoole
... luxuriant growth, greatly embellish the landscape, while we saw the vine everywhere, the rich clusters of its grapes reaching to the edge of the road. Though robbed of its grace, and its lavish display of leaf and tendril, by the method of cultivating, each plant being reduced to the size of a small currant-bush, the foliage, clothing every hill with green, gave the country an aspect most grateful to those who ...
— Notes of an Overland Journey Through France and Egypt to Bombay • Miss Emma Roberts
... symptoms of acute hip-disease showed themselves, and the lad was admitted to the big Infirmary in Piccadilly. There he had lain for some six or eight weeks now, toiling no more, fretting no more, living on his mother's and Dora's visits, and quietly loosening one life-tendril after another. During all this time Dora had thought of him, prayed for him, taught him—the wasted, ...
— The History of David Grieve • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... some tendril ties Around thee still are thrown; Oh, while this cherub group is mine, Heaven's dearest gift I can resign, And say, ...
— Heart Utterances at Various Periods of a Chequered Life. • Eliza Paul Kirkbride Gurney
... be sought in receiving into our corrupt natures the uncorrupted germs of the higher life, and it is only in the measure in which that Spirit of God moves in our spirits and, like the sap in the vine, permeates every branch and tendril, that fruit to eternal life will grow. Christian graces are the products of the indwelling divine life, and nothing else will succeed in producing them. All the preachings of moralists and all the struggles after self-improvement are reduced to impotence and vanity by the stern, curt sentence—'a ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... reason to tell, Lord King," she said, "it is because I love him." As he sat regarding her, she put out her hand and played with a tendril of wild grapevine that hung from the tree beside her, her eyes following her fingers. "I do not know why I should be ashamed of the state of my feelings. I should not be able to stand alive before you if he had not been a better lord ...
— The Ward of King Canute • Ottilie A. Liljencrantz
... led him onward, with sure and certain steps, while he blundered, not knowing where to put his feet, and all the time she turned every few seconds and looked at him, and he could just distinguish the soft mystery of her eyes, while now and then, as she walked, a tendril of her floating hair flew out and caressed his face, as once ...
— Halcyone • Elinor Glyn
... author in his use of titles is interesting. Compare the crudity of "Vagaries vs. Spiritualism," and "Deep," for example, with those he selects when he begins to publish his books. "Wake-Robin," "Winter Sunshine," "Locusts and Wild Honey," "Leaf and Tendril,"—how much they connote! Then how felicitous are the titles of most of his essays! "Birch Browsings," "The Snow-Walkers," "Mellow England," "Our Rural Divinity" (the cow), "The Flight of the Eagle" (for one of his early essays on Whitman), "A Bunch of Herbs," "A Pinch ...
— Our Friend John Burroughs • Clara Barrus
... was, that, let her depart in what freak or perversity she pleased, she seemed always to have a certainty of finding him in the same mood in which she had left him,—as some bright wayward vine of Southern forests puts out a tendril to this or that enticing point, yet, winding back, will find its first support unchanged. Shut out, as Mr. Raleigh had been, from any but the most casual female society, he found a great charm in this familiarity, and, without ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 6, No. 38, December, 1860 • Various
... tendril throbbed and quickened As I nightly climbed apace, And could scarce restrain the blossoms When, anear the destined place, Her gentle whisper thrilled me Ere I ...
— The Golden Treasury of American Songs and Lyrics • Various
... they lay hold of everything they touch. On entering the swamp to examine plants, I was caught by them, and became so much entangled before I was aware of it, that it took me nearly an hour to get clear, although I had entered but a few yards. No sooner did I cut one tendril, than two or three others clung around me at the first attempt to move, and where they once clasp they are very difficult to unloose. Abundance of the shoots, from fifteen to twenty feet long, free from leaves or tendrils, could be obtained, and would be useful ...
— Voyage Of H.M.S. Rattlesnake, Vol. 2 (of 2) • John MacGillivray
... my face in Celestino's tendril-like curls, I replied, "Yes, but I wonder whether he would have been hungry enough to eat crumbs that ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 15, - No. 86, February, 1875 • Various
... wall ran on for twenty feet or so, then turned across the front of my window and so obscured the outlook. I hated that rock wall for cutting off my view, but it was almost all I had to look at, and before I said good-bye to it I knew every tendril of every fern that grew on it, and the colours of all the veins that ran through it, and of the close-creeping lichen that clothed ...
— Carette of Sark • John Oxenham
... fire, Pull'd down fresh foliage and coverture For dainty toying. Cupid, empire-sure, Flutter'd and laugh'd, and oft-times through the throng Made a delighted way. Then dance, and song, 940 And garlanding grew wild; and pleasure reign'd. In harmless tendril they each other chain'd, And strove who should be smother'd deepest ...
— Endymion - A Poetic Romance • John Keats
... me, Quita, the most perfect marriage is not quite perfect till it becomes 'the trio perfect,' three persons and one love. That's not fantastic idealism but simple fact. Besides," she hesitated and caressed a stray tendril of Quita's hair, "doesn't it seem to you a bigger thing, on the whole, to make men and women to the best of one's power, than to make books or pictures, even ...
— The Great Amulet • Maud Diver
... due to the impulse of Michael Angelo, and, through him, to the example of Signorelli. From the celestial horseman and bounding avenging angels of Raphael's Heliodorus, to the St. Sebastian of Sodoma, with exquisite limbs and head, rich with tendril-like locks, delicate against the brown Umbrian sunset; from the Madonna of Andrea del Sarto seated, with the head and drapery of a Niobe, by the sack of flour in the Annunziata cloister, to the voluptuous goddess, with purple ...
— Euphorion - Being Studies of the Antique and the Mediaeval in the - Renaissance - Vol. I • Vernon Lee
... day in which Jesus was received. The seed-vessel is its picture. With the old nature He can have nothing to do except to deliver it to death: no improving can fit it for His purpose, any more than the leaf or tendril, however beautiful, can be the receptacle of the seed. There must be "a new creation" (R.V., margin), "the new man," to be the temple of the ...
— Parables of the Christ-life • I. Lilias Trotter
... him sat Gladys, and what she felt and thought she hardly knew herself. A certain link was to be snapped asunder, which, like some growing tendril, had spread itself over and seemed to unite two ...
— Fated to Be Free • Jean Ingelow
... graceful form and delicate plumage. The branches are, however, so strong, and the masses of stone hewn into leafage so large, that, notwithstanding the depth of the undercutting, the work remains nearly uninjured; not so at the Vine angle, where the natural delicacy of the vine-leaf and tendril having tempted the sculptor to greater effort, he has passed the proper limits of his art, and cut the upper stems so delicately that half of them have been broken away by the casualties to which the situation of the sculpture necessarily exposes it. ...
— Stones of Venice [introductions] • John Ruskin
... my dear, I 'll dearly adore thee For chasing away, away, My fancy's delusion, new loves ever choosing, And teaching no more to stray. I roam'd in the wood, many a tendril surveying, All shapely from branch to stem, My eye, as it look'd, its ambition betraying To cull the fairest from them; One branch of perfume, in blossom all over, Bent lowly down to my hand, And ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volumes I-VI. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... utter desertion of no one to love Him, no one to seek Him, and no one to fear Him—"no, not one." Then as we may best show our love to Him by loving one another, is it not well that we commence loving those around us at once? Ah! yes, and like the ambitious vine, do thou reach out all thy tendril thoughts to what is nearest, the while aspiring to the oak or the pine of the loftier trust, even the faith of Abraham that was accounted unto him for righteousness. Would I had some new phrase for love, some new figure for hope! How lonely ...
— The Jericho Road • W. Bion Adkins
... man such splendid dyes produce? Can he such colours blend? Can he the tendril graceful twine, ...
— A Little Girl to her Flowers in Verse • Anonymous
... sweet good-morning, leaped from the too fond embrace of Miss Vilda's feather-bed.... And lo, a miracle!... The woodbine clung close to the wall beneath his window. It was tipped with strong young shoots reaching out their innocent hands to cling to any support that offered; and one baby tendril that seemed to have grown in a single night, so delicate it was, had somehow been blown by the sweet night wind from its drooping place on the parent vine, and, falling on the window-sill, had curled lovingly round Gay's fairy shoe, and ...
— Timothy's Quest - A Story for Anybody, Young or Old, Who Cares to Read It • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... snow-crowned still inaccessibly frowned; Idly, for instant upon him my bright-speared chivalry sallied, Smote and far into the North swept him discomfited forth, Therefore, from root unto hole, from hole into burgeoning branches, Tendril and tassel and cup now let the ichor leap up: Therefore, with flowering drift and with fluttering bloom avalanches, Snowdrop and silver thorn laugh baffled winter to scorn; Primrose, daffodil, cowslip, shine back to my shimmering sandals, Hyacinth host, o'er the green flash ...
— A Celtic Psaltery • Alfred Perceval Graves
... sometimes the leaves do not become detached from the stem for a considerable distance, as in the so-called decurrent leaves, at other times the leaves are prolonged at their base into lobes, which are directed along the stem, and are united with it. Turpin records a tendril of a vine which was fused with the stem for some distance, and bore leaves and other tendrils. Union of the leaf or bract with the flower-stalk is not uncommon. It occurs normally in the Lime and ...
— Vegetable Teratology - An Account of the Principal Deviations from the Usual Construction of Plants • Maxwell T. Masters
... and leaned over Huldricksson. He rolled up the sailor's sleeves half-way to the shoulder. The arms were white with somewhat of that weird semitranslucence that I had seen on Throckmartin's breast where a tendril of the Dweller had touched him; and his hands were of the same whiteness—like a baroque pearl. Above the line of white, Marakinoff ...
— The Moon Pool • A. Merritt
... examine the house. The parlor was almost empty, and a gust of wind took her candle as she opened the door, flaring back the flame into her face. The wind came from a broken pane of glass in the oriel window, through which a branch of ivy, and the long tendril of a Virginia creeper had penetrated, and woven themselves in a garland along the wall. A wren had followed the creeping greenness and built her nest in the cornice, from which she flew frightened, when a ...
— The Old Countess; or, The Two Proposals • Ann S. Stephens
... not in our dances now. And evening stealing in from the wild places, from darkening azaleas upon distant hills, still found them in the garden, found Rodriguez singing in idleness undisguised, or anxiously helping in some trivial task, tying up some tendril that had gone awry, helping some magnolia that the wind had wounded. Almost unnoticed by him the sunlight would disappear, and the coloured blaze of the sunset, and then the gloaming; till the colours of all the flowers ...
— Don Rodriguez - Chronicles of Shadow Valley • Edward John Moreton Drax Plunkett, Baron, Dunsany
... go shares, then. You may have half for the free gift, and I will have half for the principle. Little tendril, you look ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume V, Number 29, March, 1860 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... bright with what is on't * Of merry maidens debonnair: Double its beauty and its grace * Those trooping damsels slender- fair: Virgins of graceful swimming gait * Ready with eye and lip to ensnare; And like the tendril'd vine they loose * The rich profusion of their hair: Shooting their shafts and arrows from * Beautiful eyes beyond compare; Overpowering and transpiercing ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 2 • Richard F. Burton
... the latter bearing the ampullae. Of this period also is some ancient stained glass in Chetwood Church, Bucks, the ground of which is covered with a kind of mosaic pattern, a usual feature in the more ancient stained glass, and the borders partake of a tendril foliage; whilst in pointed oval-shaped compartments, forming the well-known symbol vesica piscis, are single figures of saints and crowned heads, each clad in a vest and mantle of two different colours. In the fourteenth century single figures under rich canopies are common, but we begin to lose ...
— The Principles of Gothic Ecclesiastical Architecture, Elucidated by Question and Answer, 4th ed. • Matthew Holbeche Bloxam
... Narcissus pining o'er the untainted spring? In some delicious ramble, he had found A little space, with boughs all woven round; And in the midst of all, a clearer pool Than e'er reflected in its pleasant cool, The blue sky here, and there, serenely peeping Through tendril wreaths fantastically creeping. And on the bank a lonely flower he spied, A meek and forlorn flower, with naught of pride, Drooping its beauty o'er the watery clearness, To woo its own sad image into nearness: ...
— Poems 1817 • John Keats
... and awkward; their long arms and hands with grasping, tendril-like fingers were ready. McGuire waited for the sharp hissing order that would throw these things upon him, and he met the attack when it came with his own shoulders dropped to the fighter's pose, head drawn in close and both ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, November, 1930 • Various
... annual plant, with an erect, angular, branching stem a foot and a half high. The leaves are winged, with about six pairs of narrow leaflets, and terminate in a divided tendril, or clasper; the flowers are small, numerous, and generally produced in pairs; the pods are somewhat quadrangular, flattened, usually in pairs, and enclose one or two round, lens-like seeds, the size and color varying in the different varieties,—about ...
— The Field and Garden Vegetables of America • Fearing Burr
... golden portico of Aphrodite, O grape-cluster filled full of Dionysus' juice, nor ever more shall thy mother twine round thee her lovely tendril or above thine head ...
— Select Epigrams from the Greek Anthology • J. W. Mackail
... to see her lovely face Peep from the thickets; shy, She hides behind the leaves her golden buds Till, bolder grown, on high She curls a tendril, throws a spray, then flings Herself aloft in glee, And, bursting into thousand blossoms, swings In wreaths from tree ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 3 (of 4) • Various
... he was graciously permitted to take in the particulars of the girl's appearance. She was dainty. Every posture of her slight figure was of an airy grace, as light and delicate as that of a rose tendril swaying in the wind. Even when she tripped over a loose rock, she caught her balance again with a pretty little uplift of the hand. As she approached, slowly, and evidently not unwilling to allow her charms ...
— The Claim Jumpers • Stewart Edward White
... country. Daun gundi or tabung bru (Nepenthes destillatoria) can scarcely be termed a flower, but is a very extraordinary climbing plant. From the extremity of the leaf a prolongation of the mid-rib, resembling the tendril of a vine, terminates in a membrane formed like a tankard with the lid or valve half opened; and growing always nearly erect, it is commonly half full of pure water from the rain or dews. This monkey-cup (as the Malayan name implies) is about four or five inches long and an ...
— The History of Sumatra - Containing An Account Of The Government, Laws, Customs And - Manners Of The Native Inhabitants • William Marsden
... she missed her lost companion, her strong friend, and, still vine-like in her instincts, turned wholly to the new support,—to one who submitted himself gladly to the sweet inthralment, and felt all the grander for the luscious weight and tendril-like clasp. And so Love came to pretty Bessie's heart ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 4, No. 23, September, 1859 • Various
... then together over all the little island; for I did search for some bush that should have a long tendril in plenty, and supple, and so to suit for binding. But, truly, there did be no such bush in all the island; and this to put me in trouble, as you shall suppose; yet was there a sufficient plenty of small and upright trees, ...
— The Night Land • William Hope Hodgson
... quite, when I began to observe the irritability of the tendrils. I do not say it is the final cause, but the result is pretty, for the plant every one and a half or two hours sweeps a circle (according to the length of the bending shoot and the length of the tendril) of from one foot to twenty inches in diameter, and immediately that the tendril touches any object its sensitiveness causes it immediately to seize it; a clever gardener, my neighbour, who saw the plant on my table last night, said: "I believe, Sir, the tendrils can see, for ...
— The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Volume II • Francis Darwin
... eyelash tendril curled, by his slender waist I swear, By the dart his witchery feathers, fatal hurtling through the air; By the just roundness of his shape, by his glances bright and keen By the swart limping of his locks, ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 3 • Richard F. Burton
... structure in natural objects, which appear to be fortuitous in shape and outline, as there is in things whose outline is more strictly geometrical. The laws which regulate the shape of a chalk down or an ivy tendril are just as severe as the laws which regulate the monkey-puzzle tree or the talc crystal. My own belief is that the trained artistic sense is probably only in its infancy, and that it will advance upon the line of the pleased apprehension of the existence ...
— The Silent Isle • Arthur Christopher Benson
... rudest force, To bear his Ing'borg o'er its source: So thrilling, midst the wild alarm, The tendril-twining of her arm." [Footnote: From Longfellow's translation of portions of Tegner's Frithiof Saga.] *[Footnote: Viking, the name of the Norse sea-pirates who coasted the shores of Europe in the eighth, ninth and tenth centuries. ...
— Journeys Through Bookland V3 • Charles H. Sylvester
... Broadstairs. As usual the weather favours us—it is a glorious day. Passing the stations of New Brompton, Rainham, Newington, and Sittingbourne, we soon get into open country, in the midst of hop gardens with their verdant aisles of the fragrant and tonic, tendril-like plants reaching in some instances perhaps to several hundred yards, and crowned with yellowish-green fruit-masses, which have a special charm for those unaccustomed to such scenery. The odd-looking "oast-houses,"[32] or drying-houses for the ...
— A Week's Tramp in Dickens-Land • William R. Hughes
... according to your errand there. Mrs. Si was tall, and almost as broad as the door itself, with the rosiest cheeks and the bluest eyes I had ever beheld, and they crinkled with loveliness around their corners. She had white water-waves that escaped their decorous plastering into waving little tendril curls, and her mouth was as curled and red-lipped and dimpled as a girl's. In a twinkling of those blue eyes I fell out of the carriage into a pair of strong, soft, tender arms covered with stiff gray percale, and received two hearty kisses, one ...
— The Golden Bird • Maria Thompson Daviess
... — N. vinculum, link; connective, connection; junction &c. 43; bond of union, copula, hyphen, intermedium[obs3]; bracket; bridge, stepping-stone, isthmus. bond, tendon, tendril; fiber; cord, cordage; riband, ribbon, rope, guy, cable, line, halser|, hawser, painter, moorings, wire, chain; string &c. (filament) 205. fastener, fastening, tie; ligament, ligature; strap; tackle, rigging; standing rigging, running rigging; ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... larvae are very curious. That of Sphinx pampinatrix feeds on a wild vine (Vitis indivisa), having green tendrils, and in this species the curved horn on the tail is green, and closely imitates in its curve the tip of the tendril. But in another species (Sphinx cranta), which feeds on the fox-grape (Vitis vulpina), the horn is very long and red, corresponding with the long red-tipped tendrils of the plant. Both these larvae are green with oblique stripes, to harmonise with the veined ...
— Darwinism (1889) • Alfred Russel Wallace
... was the cave, as any old armorial hall hung round with banners and arras. Streaming from the cleft, vines swung in the air; or crawled along the rocks, wherever a tendril could be fixed. High up, their leaves were green; but lower down, they were shriveled; and dyed of many colors; and tattered and torn with much rustling; as old banners again; sore raveled ...
— Mardi: and A Voyage Thither, Vol. I (of 2) • Herman Melville
... half-afraid he put up one finger and touched a tendril of hair that had strayed loose on her neck. She felt shyer than before, and turned her ...
— Juggernaut • Alice Campbell
... organism; and now the home, the nesting swarm, the focus of central control, seemed like the body of this strange amorphous organism—housing the spirit of the army. One thinks of a column of foragers as a tendril with only the tip sensitive and growing and moving, while the corpuscle-like individual ants are driven in the current of blind instinct to and fro, on their chemical errands. And then this whole theory, this most vivid simile, is quite upset by the ...
— Edge of the Jungle • William Beebe
... She repeated the viands named. There was a tiny tendril of her hair that curled low upon her neck at one side, caressing the pale satin sheen of the skin. He felt an overpowering desire to lean forward and press his lips to the ...
— Sheila of Big Wreck Cove - A Story of Cape Cod • James A. Cooper
... park of incomparable beauty grew into view, where brooks whispered and fountains played, and shady pergolas appeared, formed of gold and silver trellises, over which a thousand luxuriant creepers clambered, holding by their little tendril hands. ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... While the shades conceal'd our courting, Would not be lack of sporting Or gleeful phrenesie; Like the roebuck and his mate, In their woodland haunts elate The race we would debate Around the tendril tree. ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume II. - The Songs of Scotland of the past half century • Various
... just driven away an encircling collection of sand-dwelling scavengers, and what he was on his knees studying intently was an almost clean-picked skeleton of one of his own race. But there was something odd—Dalgard brushed aside a tendril of weed which cut his line of vision and so was able ...
— Star Born • Andre Norton
... Charlie gripped Schoverling's arm and pointed ahead. A long tendril of Spanish moss at a bend in the trail was shaking slightly, and without a sound the three stepped off the trail to one side, followed by the Indians. The doctor had remained some distance behind, to sketch a ...
— The Rogue Elephant - The Boys' Big Game Series • Elliott Whitney
... affectionate, full of unexpected little ways of endearment, and clung to me when we parted, making me promise to return very soon. Yes, she was my girl, devoted to me, attached to me by every tendril of her being. Every look, every word, every act of her expressed a bright, fine, radiant love. I was satisfied, yet unsatisfied, and once again ...
— The Trail of '98 - A Northland Romance • Robert W. Service
... to suffer terribly from hunger. His stomach, less resigned than he was, rebelled, and he was obliged to fasten a tendril of wild-vine tightly about his waist. Fortunately, he could quench his thirst at any moment, and, in recalling the sufferings he had undergone in the desert, he experienced comparative relief in his exemption from that ...
— Five Weeks in a Balloon • Jules Verne
... practical for it requires a mental effort to formulate any ideal of human life; it is comparatively easy to note the bad things people do, and say, don't. The pruning of the feelings, the cutting off of every tendril which can cling to the pleasures of sense, is an essential part of that mental cultivation in which the higher Buddhism consists. But the Pitakas say clearly that what is to be eliminated is only bad mental states. Desire for pleasure and ...
— Hinduism and Buddhism, Vol I. (of 3) - An Historical Sketch • Charles Eliot
... plant (FLAGELLARIA), though innocent of the means of grappling, succeeds in overtopping tall trees and smothering them with a mass of interwoven leafage. Each of its narrow leaves ends in a spiral tendril, sensitive but tough, which entwines itself about other leaves and twigs. Feeling their respective ways, the tender tips of leaves of the one family touch and twist, and the grasp is for life. Though not of such extravagant character as the lawyer vine, the FLAGELLARIA seems to ...
— The Confessions of a Beachcomber • E J Banfield
... susceptible sixteen-year-old heart was deeply impressed by Cousin Carlos's appearance, and she would often steal into the room during Rita's absence, to peep and sigh at the delicate, high-bred face, with its flashing dark eyes, and the hair that grew low on the forehead, with just the same tendril curls that made Rita's hair so lovely. Oh! Peggy would think, if her own hair were only dark, or even brown,—anything but this disgusting, wishy-washy flaxen. She had longed for dark eyes and hair ever since she could remember. Poor ...
— Three Margarets • Laura E. Richards
... smoke rose on either side of the spur, crept tendril-like up two dark ravines, and clearing the feathery green crests of the trees, drifted lazily on upward until, high above, they melted shyly together and into the haze that veiled the drowsy face ...
— The Heart Of The Hills • John Fox, Jr.
... silent on each side of the broad stream. At the foot of big, towering trees, trunkless nipa palms rose from the mud of the bank, in bunches of leaves enormous and heavy, that hung unstirring over the brown swirl of eddies. In the stillness of the air every tree, every leaf, every bough, every tendril of creeper and every petal of minute blossoms seemed to have been bewitched into an immobility perfect and final. Nothing moved on the river but the eight paddles that rose flashing regularly, dipped together with a single splash; while the steersman ...
— Tales of Unrest • Joseph Conrad
... from realms unfurrow'd bring For her the unnam'd progeny of spring; 565 Attendant Nymphs her dulcet mandates hear, And nurse in fostering arms the tender year, Plant the young bulb, inhume the living seed, Prop the weak stem, the erring tendril lead; Or fan in glass-built fanes the stranger flowers 570 With milder gales, and steep with warmer showers. Delighted Thames through tropic umbrage glides, And flowers antarctic, bending o'er his tides; Drinks the new tints, ...
— The Botanic Garden - A Poem in Two Parts. Part 1: The Economy of Vegetation • Erasmus Darwin
... vain to explain how little I had to do with the matter. Did she love Jack? I little knew in those days how tender was this gentle heart, how it went out, tendril-like, seeking it knew not what, and was for this reason ever liable to say too much, and ...
— Hugh Wynne, Free Quaker • S. Weir Mitchell
... began to seek and ask for the tender, patient solicitude, which is to the child what the light and heat of the summer sun are to the frailest tendril, no answer came to my mute appeal. My little weaknesses and childish errors were never met with that enduring forbearance which is the distinctive outgrowth of a loving maternity. My trifling joys were rarely smiled upon, my petty sorrows never shared ...
— The Doctor's Daughter • "Vera"
... not meet her thoughtful gaze. He was apparently watching the retreating form of the horse through the tangle of flower and leaf and tendril. ...
— With Edged Tools • Henry Seton Merriman
... talk! Dad's only ten years older than you are." She leaned her cheek on her hand, she brushed back a little stray tendril of midnight hair from her dark eyes, and considered him thoughtfully. "Why, John Wesley, I've known you nearly all my life and you don't look much older now than when ...
— The Desire of the Moth; and The Come On • Eugene Manlove Rhodes
... Sweet music to the magic of the scene: The little crimson-breasted Nonpareil Was there, his tiny feet scarce bending down The silken tendril that he lighted on To pour his love notes; and in russet coat, Most homely, like true genius bursting forth In spite of adverse fortune, a full choir Within himself, the merry Mock Bird sate, Filling ...
— Poems of Henry Timrod • Henry Timrod
... overturning it and laying it across the doorway, its legs in the air. Like most Akor-Neb serving tables, it had a gravity-counteraction unit under it; he set this for double minus-gravitation and snapped it on. As it was now above the inverted table, the table did not rise, but a tendril, of sleep-gas, curling toward it, bent upward and drifted away from the doorway. Satisfied that he had made a temporary barrier against the sleep-gas, Verkan Vall secured Dalla's hunting pistol and spare magazines and lay down at the ...
— Last Enemy • Henry Beam Piper
... Presumption High Noon Thought-magnets Smiles The Undiscovered Country The Universal Route Unanswered Prayers Thanksgiving Contrasts Thy Ship Life A Marine Etching "Love Thyself Last" Christmas Fancies The River Sorry Ambition's trail Uncontrolled Will To an Astrologer The Tendril's Fate The Times The Question Sorrow's Uses If Which are you? The Creed to be Inspiration The Wish Three Friends You never can tell Here and now Unconquered All that love asks "Does it pay?" Sestina The Optimist The Pessimist An Inspiration Life's ...
— Poems of Power • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... the want of it. As we did not mention that it was so peculiarly situated, the captain saw no objection, and as they came to where it hung, his bow-man caught hold of the staff, and wrested it from its position; but this time such force was used that the tendril gave way, and the nest itself fell down into the boat, and the irritated insects poured out their whole force to revenge this second aggression. The insects after all appeared to have a knowledge of the service, for they served out their stings in the same proportion ...
— Borneo and the Indian Archipelago - with drawings of costume and scenery • Frank S. Marryat
... out roots and boughs and leaves; this is a kind of locomotion; and as Dr. Erasmus Darwin long since pointed out, they do sometimes approach nearly to what may be called travelling; a man of consistent character will never look at a bough, a root, or a tendril without regarding it as a melancholy and unprincipled compromise. On the other hand, many animals are sessile, and some singularly successful genera, as spiders, are in the main liers-in-wait. It may appear, however, on the whole, like reopening a settled question to uphold the ...
— Alps and Sanctuaries of Piedmont and the Canton Ticino • Samuel Butler
... means of which plants are enabled to reach the light. Instead of being compelled to construct a stem of sufficient strength to stand alone, they succeed in the struggle by making use of other plants as supports. He showed that the great class of tendril- and root-climbers which do not depend on twining round a pole, like a scarlet-runner, but on attaching themselves as they grow upwards, effect an economy. Thus a Phaseolus has to manufacture a stem three feet in length to reach a height of two feet above the ground, whereas a pea "which had ascended ...
— Darwin and Modern Science • A.C. Seward and Others
... tendril of the mind, and the most fascinating gift which nature can give to us. The most precious associations of the human heart cluster around the word, and we love to remember those who have sorrowed with ...
— Manners and Social Usages • Mrs. John M. E. W. Sherwood
... artisan, has certainly been well done. The structures we have been traversing are, in their way, works of art—very worthy, if not the choicest conceivable, blossoms of our century-plant. For fitness, the quality that underlies beauty throughout Nature from the plume to the tendril and the petal, they have not been surpassed in their kind. Every flange, bolt, sheet and abutment has been well thought out. Whatever the purpose, to bind or to brace, to lift or ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, April, 1876. • Various
... with tendrils. In these two latter classes the stems have generally, but not always, lost the power of twining, though they retain the power of revolving, which the tendrils likewise possess. The gradations from leaf-climbers to tendril bearers are wonderfully close, and certain plants may be differently placed in either class. But in ascending the series from simple twiners to leaf-climbers, an important quality is added, namely sensitiveness to a touch, by which means the foot-stalks of the leaves or flowers, or these ...
— On the Origin of Species - 6th Edition • Charles Darwin
... their feet. Daphne's blue gown and smooth dark hair were outlined against the deep green of her cypress tree. A grapevine that had grown about the tree threw the shadow of delicate leaf and curling tendril on her pale cheek and scarlet lips. The expression of the heathen god as he looked at her ...
— Daphne, An Autumn Pastoral • Margaret Pollock Sherwood
... to 80 small, 6-parted ones clustered in an umbel on a long peduncle. Stem: Smooth, unarmed, climbing with the help of tendril-like appendages from the base of leafstalks. Leaves: Egg-shaped, heart-shaped, or rounded, pointed tipped, parallel-nerved, petioled. ...
— Wild Flowers Worth Knowing • Neltje Blanchan et al
... thy bosom, my beloved father, like a young tendril of the sandal-tree torn from its home in the western mountains[71], how shall I be able to support life in ...
— Sakoontala or The Lost Ring - An Indian Drama • Kalidasa
... being one of the most subtle characteristics of the work of the good periods. We take, for instance, a bar of ornament between two written columns of an early fourteenth century MS., and at the first glance we suppose it to be quite monotonous all the way up, composed of a winding tendril, with alternately a blue leaf and a scarlet bud. Presently, however, we see that, in order to observe the law of principality, there is one large scarlet leaf instead of a bud, nearly half-way up, which forms a center to the whole rod; and when we begin to examine the order of the ...
— The Elements of Drawing - In Three Letters to Beginners • John Ruskin
... called Lachryma Christi. A legend relates that when the Saviour once went up Vesuvius and stood in mute astonishment at the beautiful landscape surrounding the Bay of Naples, He also wept from grief over this home of sin and vanity; and where His tears moistened the ground there grew up a tendril which has not its like ...
— From Pole to Pole - A Book for Young People • Sven Anders Hedin
... figure was slender and slightly above the middle height. A distracting dimple dented the velvet of her right cheek, and above her small mouth and perfectly formed nose a pair of hazel eyes looked frankly out upon the world. Her oval face was surmounted by a dainty toque, from under which a vagrant tendril of hair had escaped. This blew about her ears, glistening like gold in ...
— Doubloons—and the Girl • John Maxwell Forbes
... bulk was hurtling through at fantastic speed. The tiny ships had screened it, but now it outran them, boring straight toward the opening in the Kloomirian fleet. Atomic cannon began running out of enormous hatches, like the bristles jutting from a tendril brush. ...
— Victory • Lester del Rey
... Doctor's wife busy in the garden with a basket and a pair of scissors, snipping off bunch and cluster ready for filling vase and basin in the shaded rooms; the other was standing upon a chair helping climber to twine and tendril to catch hold of trellis and wire which made the front of the cottage-like ...
— Trapped by Malays - A Tale of Bayonet and Kris • George Manville Fenn
... On! on! Stem, branch, leaf, tendril, fruit—on, on it went! The melons grew—great, round, smooth, rich, ripe, juicy melons, as big as houses—at the cross-roads, on the roads, in the fields, filling barn-yards and door-yards so people and cattle couldn't pass, or go in or out, till they had eaten their way ...
— St. Nicholas Magazine for Boys and Girls, Vol. 5, Nov 1877-Nov 1878 - No 1, Nov 1877 • Various
... form, the eye requires perpetual variation and transgression of the formal law. Take the simplest possible condition of thirteenth-century scroll-work, Fig. 98. The law or cadence established is of a circling tendril, terminating in an ivy-leaf. In vulgar design, the curves of the circling tendril would have been similar to each other, and might have been drawn by a machine, or by some mathematical formula. But in good design all imitation by machinery is impossible. No curve is like ...
— Modern Painters, Volume IV (of V) • John Ruskin
... bright-tinted dresses, Turn the key on your jewels to-day, And the wealth of your tendril-like tresses Braid back in a serious way; No more delicate gloves, no more laces, No more trifling in boudoir or bower, But come with your souls in your faces To meet the stern wants of ...
— War Poetry of the South • Various
... are of such frequent occurrence with plants that they do not strike us with sufficient surprise. Supernumerary petals, stamens, and pistils, are often produced. I have seen a leaflet low down in the compound leaf of Vicia sativa converted into a tendril, and a tendril possesses many peculiar properties, such as spontaneous movement and irritability. The calyx sometimes assumes, either wholly or by stripes, the colour and texture of the corolla. Stamens ...
— The Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication, Volume II (of 2) • Charles Darwin
... brackets used in the ordinary architecture of London, he will find them of some such character as Fig. XLI.; not a bad form in itself, but exquisitely absurd in its curling lines, which give the idea of some writhing suspended tendril, instead of a stiff support, and by their careful avoidance of the wall make the bracket look pinned on, and in constant danger of sliding down. This is, also, ...
— The Stones of Venice, Volume I (of 3) • John Ruskin
... replied that their faces were always at just the same pane of glass. The fences were very high and had their tops cut in points, and over them here and there drooped the heavy bough of a fruit-tree or a long tendril of grapevine, as if there were delightful gardens inside. The sidewalks were very narrow underneath these fences, so that Betty often walked in the street to be alongside her companion. There were pretty old knockers on the front doors, and sometimes ...
— Betty Leicester - A Story For Girls • Sarah Orne Jewett
... the river-course with carted earth; Or bind with iron bands that riven stone That century on century has slept Until into its heart a tendril crept, And in the quiet majesty of birth New nature broke into her own! Or bid the sun stand still! Or fashion wings To herd the heaven's stars and make them be Subservient to will and rule and whim! Or rein the winds, and still the ocean's ...
— The Eye of Zeitoon • Talbot Mundy
... one tendril to your bays, Worn quietly where who love you sing your praise; But I may stand Among the household throng with lifted hand, Upholding for sweet honour of the land ...
— Earthwork Out Of Tuscany • Maurice Hewlett
... Cowperwood's original constancy was gone. She was no longer happy. Love was dead. That sweet illusion, with its pearly pink for heart and borders, that laughing cherub that lures with Cupid's mouth and misty eye, that young tendril of the vine of life that whispers of eternal spring-time, that calls and calls where aching, wearied feet by legion follow, was no longer ...
— The Titan • Theodore Dreiser
... neck, lay at his feet. The hum of voices brought a young woman into the porch. She was bareheaded and wore a light print gown. Her face was pale and marked with lines. She walked cautiously, stretching one hand before her with an uncertain motion, and grasping a trailing tendril of honeysuckle that swept downward from the roof. Her eyes, which were partly inclined upward and partly turned toward the procession, had a vague light in their bleached pupils. She was blind. At her side, and tugging at her other hand, was a child of a year and a half—a chubby, sunny little fellow ...
— A Son of Hagar - A Romance of Our Time • Sir Hall Caine
... summit of a tall tree, and grasping with the other an object at some distance near the earth, between which it is strained as tight and straight as if hauled over a block. In all probability the young tendril had been originally fixed in this position by the wind, and retained in it till it had gained its maturity, where it has the appearance of having been artificially arranged as if to support ...
— Ceylon; an Account of the Island Physical, Historical, and • James Emerson Tennent
... he was stretched out on the undulant moss. He felt at the patch of moss sprouting under the warmth of his palm, and watched while an exploratory tendril curled around his little finger. "Now—do you know what it is ...
— Step IV • Rosel George Brown
... commercial value, and even that is uncertain. Why strive for them or worry about them? In nature there is a noble indifference to everything save the attainment of the ideal. Flattery aids not an inch to the growth of a tendril, blame does not take one tint from the sky. In nature is the joy of living, of infinite, eternal life. Her eternity is now, today, this hour. Each of her creatures seeks the largest, fullest, best life possible under given conditions. The wild raspberries ...
— Some Summer Days in Iowa • Frederick John Lazell
... young lad produced music on a kind of lute, called baringbau; consisting of the dry shaft of the scitamina stretched in the form of a bow by means of a thin tendril instead of gut. Half a coco shell is fixed in the middle of the bow, which, when playing, is placed against the abdomen, and serves as a sounding board; and the string when struck with a short wand, gave out a pleasing humming sound, realizing ...
— The Former Philippines thru Foreign Eyes • Fedor Jagor; Tomas de Comyn; Chas. Wilkes; Rudolf Virchow.
... them still, reluctant standing by, You saw your little angel, earthward turned, Yet all unknowing, lay his halo by. Soft little threads! They held you with such strength! You knew the way each wanton ringlet fell, You knew each shining tendril's golden length, How oft they've tangled, only ...
— Ainslee's, Vol. 15, No. 6, July 1905 • Various
... a fluttering white flame in the dimness of the tree-room. A tendril flicked out from among her petals, wrapped itself about my arm. It felt cool, gentle as a woman's hand. I felt ...
— Where the World is Quiet • Henry Kuttner
... gently loosened the twisted shining threads that were so delicately knotted together, and smoothing them out to their full length, displayed what was indeed a lovely tress of hair bright as woven sunlight with a rippling wave in it that, like the tendril of a vine caught and wound about his hand as though it were a fond and ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... and bends for you; the leaves tremble that you may bid them be still under the marble snow; the thorn and the thistle, which the earth casts forth as evil, are to you the kindliest servants; no dying petal, nor drooping tendril, is so feeble as to have no more help for you; no robed pride of blossom so kingly, but it will lay aside its purple to receive at your hands the pale immortality. Is there anything in common life too mean,—in common too trivial,—to be ennobled by your touch? As ...
— The Two Paths • John Ruskin
... ever see him again, which, she added, he had half promised her. As she told me this, she took the handkerchief out of her pocket to let me see it; she had folded it up neatly in a couple of vine leaves, tied round with a tendril;—on opening it, I saw an S. marked ...
— A Sentimental Journey • Laurence Sterne
... word to Aldous he began worming his long, lean body ahead of them. An instant Joanne's face was very close to Aldous', so close that he felt her breath, and a tendril of her hair touched his lips. In that instant her eyes looked into his steadily, and he felt rush over him a sudden shame. If she was seeking and expecting, it was to him more than ever that she was now looking for protection. The haunting trouble in her eyes, their ...
— The Hunted Woman • James Oliver Curwood
... pedestal on which she stood, or rather was perched, would have appeared unsafe had any figure heavier than her own been placed there. But, however she had been transported thither, she seemed to rest on it as lightly and safely as a linnet, when it has dropped from the sky on the tendril of a rose-bud. The first beam of the rising sun, falling through a window directly opposite to the pedestal, increased the effect of this beautiful figure, which remained as motionless as if it had been ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume XIII, No. 370, Saturday, May 16, 1829. • Various
... street; Fouled, even as the highways would, With mirk and mire and bruise; The cheek more petal-fine Than rose before a shrine! Those hands like star-fish in the ooze, And fingers fain to cling To any stronger thing! And smiles, for one triumphal Gift, Should one lean down, and lift! And tendril hair;—O in such wise, With wild lights aureoled, The morning-glories twine and hold, In some ...
— The Singing Man • Josephine Preston Peabody
... which slipped from his opened coat. The officer picked it up with a strange feeling—perhaps because he was conscious himself of wearing a similar one, perhaps because it might give him some clue to the man's identity. It contained only the photograph of a pretty girl, a tendril of fair hair, and the word "Sally." In the breast-pocket was a sealed letter with the inscription, "For Miss Sally Dows. To be delivered if I fall by the mudsill's hand." A faint smile came over the officer's face; he was about ...
— Sally Dows and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... heart like the tendril accustomed to cling, Let it grow where it will cannot flourish alone, But must lean to the nearest, loveliest thing It can twine itself round, and ...
— Confessions of an Etonian • I. E. M. |
