"Web" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... put it under the gas light, and knelt down to read and pray. She opened anywhere, and read without very well understanding what she read; the thoughts of lions and tigers, and green poplin, and red cashmere, making a strange web with the lines of Bible thought, over which her eye travelled. Till her eyes came to a word so plain, so clear, and touching her so nearly, that she all at once as it were woke up out of ...
— The House in Town • Susan Warner
... have thought the place quiet to-day, Mr. Dishart, there was an ugly outbreak only two months ago, when the weavers turned on the manufacturers for reducing the price of the web, made a bonfire of some of their doors, and terrified one of them into leaving Thrums. Under the command of some Chartists, the people next paraded the streets to the music of fife and drum, and six policemen who drove up from Tilliedrum in a light cart were sent back ...
— The Little Minister • J.M. Barrie
... stars beyond stars, to the bright ghost-road of the Milky Way and on out to other galaxies and flocks of galaxies, until the light which a telescope might now register had been born before the Earth. Looking from his air-lock cave, past the radio web and the other ships, Coffin felt himself drown in enormousness, coldness, and total silence—though he knew that this vacuum burned and roared with man-destroying energies, roiled like currents of gas and dust more massive ...
— The Burning Bridge • Poul William Anderson
... steps above did not come at the right height to give me leverage; and always, though I tried again and again, till my cut hands bled, I couldn't climb up. And how silly it seemed, the whole thing! I was just like a young fly that had come buzzing and bumbling round an ugly old spider's web, too foolish to know that it was a web. And even now how lightly the fly's feet were entangled! A spring, and I ...
— The Motor Maid • Alice Muriel Williamson and Charles Norris Williamson
... smell them, but invariably rolled them up in his hand and dropped them quietly again after a few moments. There could be no doubt, however, from the monkey's actions, that they were distasteful to him. A large species of spider (Nephila) also used to drop them out of its web when I put them into it. Another spider that frequented flowers seemed to be fond of them, and I have already mentioned a wasp that caught them to store ...
— The Naturalist in Nicaragua • Thomas Belt
... Empire of the Czar's, with its feeble-willed autocrat, its insubordinate grand dukes, its rival ministers pulling different ways, and its greedy officials whose country was their pocket, had been silently and steadily enfolded in the invisible web of German statecraft. ...
— The International Spy - Being the Secret History of the Russo-Japanese War • Allen Upward
... Christmas-time came round, did he not send her the most beautiful box of the best possible paints, the very thing of all others for which she had been longing, so that it seemed after all that it had been a good thing when the terriers Tramp and Scamp had scratched the thin web into a hole! The ceilings were black with the smoke of fire and lamps, but the silver on the oak dresser would have delighted the heart of a connoisseur, and the china in daily use would have been laid ...
— Pixie O'Shaughnessy • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... of smeared charcoal. We haven't been in the trenches long enough to evolve web feet, so mine are resting on a duck board spread over a quagmire of pea soup. The Heinies are right here, soaking in another ditch beyond a barbed wire fence, about the distance of second base from the home plate. Such is ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... was once gone her brain was frantically busy. It never gave her any rest. From the one stuff of its dreams it span an endless shining thread; from the one thread it wove an endless web of visions. From nothing at all it built up drama after drama. It was all beautiful what Ally's brain did, all noble, all marvelously pure. (The Vicar would have been astonished if he had known how pure.) There was no sullen and selfish Ally in ...
— The Three Sisters • May Sinclair
... were smoking their cigars and walking along beside the masses of dahlias, upon which the large golden spider had spun its silvery web, Amedee Violette and Paul Sillery had talked of times past and the comrades of their youth. It was not a very gay conversation, for since then there had been the war, the Commune. How many were dead! How many had disappeared! ...
— A Romance of Youth, Complete • Francois Coppee
... believed and disbelieved: believed in so far as it is supported by its connexion with other opinions; disbelieved while we never take such an immediate interest in it as we do in what wears the hue of the every-day life of our own experience. The Grecian mythology was a web of national and local traditions, held in equal honour as a sequence of religion, and as an introduction to history; everywhere preserved in full vitality among the people by ceremonies and monuments, already elaborated for the requirements of art and the higher species of poetry ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel
... Adele; Martie spreading her glittering web of hair to dry, as she sat in the sand by the other woman's chair; John stretched in the hot sand for a nap; Teddy staggering to and fro with a dripping pail. They liked to keep a little away from the crowd; a hundred feet away the footmarked sand was littered ...
— Martie the Unconquered • Kathleen Norris
... hair, red as a poinsettia, parted and drawn severely back, made a sweep about the fair dead-white skin of her bored sensitive face. Bored blue-gray eyes, with pathetic crescents of faintly violet-hued wrinkles beneath them, and a scarce noticeable web of tinier wrinkles at the side. Thin long cheeks, a delicate nose, and a straight strong mouth of thin but startlingly ...
— Our Mr. Wrenn - The Romantic Adventures of a Gentle Man • Sinclair Lewis
... Sally dreaming her own small and rather selfish dreams, or a Sally self-assured and self-content were not unfamiliar figures to her world. But Sally confused and tired, hurt and bewildered, not by her own actions or any one's else, but by a web of circumstance, ...
— The Campfire Girls on the Field of Honor • Margaret Vandercook
... proceeds, and ends in a contradiction; for the moment of absolute solution would be that in which Nature would cease to be Nature, i.e. a scheme of ever-varying relations; and physiology, in the ambitious attempt to solve phenomena into absolute realities, would itself become a mere web of verbal abstractions. ...
— Hints towards the formation of a more comprehensive theory of life. • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... with Seward, I called his attention to the fact that the government is surrounded by the finest, most complicated, intense, and well-spread web of treason that ever was spun; that almost all that constitutes society and is in a daily, nay hourly, contact with the various branches of the Executive, all this, with soul, mind, and heart is devoted to the rebels. I observed to him that si ...
— Diary from March 4, 1861, to November 12, 1862 • Adam Gurowski
... another and set them whirling in a slender bright oval in the air, and added another, then another and another, and soon—no one seeing whence he got them—adding, adding, adding, the oval lengthening all the time, his hands moving so swiftly that they were just a web or a blur and not distinguishable as hands; and such as counted said there were now a hundred balls in the air. The spinning great oval reached up twenty feet in the air and was a shining and glinting and wonderful sight. Then he folded his arms and told the balls to go on spinning without ...
— The Mysterious Stranger and Other Stories • Mark Twain
... Shakspeare, being mentioned. REYNOLDS. 'I think that essay does her honour.' JOHNSON, 'Yes, Sir; it does her honour, but it would do nobody else honour. I have, indeed, not read it all. But when I take up the end of a web, and find it packthread, I do not expect, by looking further, to find embroidery. Sir, I will venture to say, there is not one sentence of true criticism in her book.' GARRICK. 'But, Sir, surely it shews how much Voltaire has mistaken Shakspeare, which nobody ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 2 • Boswell
... Thou art my only hope, my only dower, And I will make thee worthy of a Queen. Proud noble, I will weave thee such a web,— I will so spoil and trample on thy pride, That thou shalt wish the woman's distaff were Ten thousand lances rather than itself. Ha! waiting still, sir Priest! Well as them seest Our venture hath been somewhat baulk'd,—'tis not Each arrow readies swift and true the aim,— Love ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 19. Issue 539 - 24 Mar 1832 • Various
... Johnson will take a word of another kind. As you know, Tayoga, as I know, and, as all the nations of the Hodenosaunee know, Waraiyageh is their friend. He will speak to them no word that is not true. He will brush away all that web of craft, and cunning and cheating, spun by the Indian commissioners at Albany, and he will see that there is no infringement upon the rights of ...
— The Shadow of the North - A Story of Old New York and a Lost Campaign • Joseph A. Altsheler
... web she made a story of her conquest over the sea-god Poseidon. For the first king of Athens had promised to dedicate the city to that god who should bestow upon it the most useful gift. Poseidon gave the horse. But Athena gave ...
— Good Stories For Great Holidays - Arranged for Story-Telling and Reading Aloud and for the - Children's Own Reading • Frances Jenkins Olcott
... of going out missionaries together to the Polynesian Island, but that had been before Julia took Captain Cairnes for better or worse, principally worse, and before she herself undertook all she could in converting Dr. Maybury,—a perfect Penelope's web of a work; for Dr. Maybury died as he had lived, holding her fondest beliefs to be old wives' fables, but not quarreling with her fidelity to them, any more than with her finger-rings or her false bangs, her ribbons, and what she considered her folderols in general. ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume IX (of X) • Various
... dramatic; or expand The lyric wing; or in elegiac strains Lament the fair; or lash the stubborn age, With laughing satire; or in rural scenes With shepherds sport; or rack his hard-bound brains For the unexpected turn. Arachne so, In dusty kitchen corner, from her bowels 140 Spins the fine web, but spins with better fate, Than the poor bard: she! caitiff! spreads her snares, And with their aid enjoys luxurious life, Bloated with fat of insects, flesh'd in blood: He! hard, hard lot! for all his toil and care, And painful watchings, ...
— Poetical Works of Akenside - [Edited by George Gilfillan] • Mark Akenside
... ebb-tide. By that time, the other vessel had disappeared in the southern board; and Gardiner came out upon the open waters again, boldly, and certain of his course. All sail was set, and the little craft slipped away from the land with the ease of an aquatic bird, that is plying its web-feet. Studding-sails were set, and the pyramid of the Horn soon began to lower in the distance, as the schooner receded. When night closed over the rolling waters, it was no longer visible, the vessel having fairly entered the Antarctic Ocean, if anything north of the circle ...
— The Sea Lions - The Lost Sealers • James Fenimore Cooper
... not be late," said the fairy, as she flew like thistle-down through the air or tripped over the heads of the flowers; but in her haste she flew into a spider's web, which held her so fast that, although she struggled again and again, she could not ...
— Mother Stories • Maud Lindsay
... astonishment at these accumulating refinements, and in the pause that followed the narration of this last episode he inquired, with the appreciative hesitation of one who is reluctant to advance lest he destroy the dew-gemmed tracery of a fragile spider's web. ...
— The Flaw in the Sapphire • Charles M. Snyder
... travelling merchants, but whom, of late, accommodating ourselves in this as in more material particulars, to the feelings and sentiments of our more wealthy neighbours, we have learned to call packmen or pedlars. To country weavers travelling in hopes to get rid of their winter web, but more especially to tailors, who, from their sedentary profession, and the necessity, in our country, of exercising it by temporary residence in the families by whom they are employed, may be considered as possessing ...
— Old Mortality, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... pretty sure. What was the thing in the brush, then? Innocent bystander? He got stiffly to his feet, conscious now of the ache in his wrist that had taken most of the recoil of the first shot, the torn web between his right thumb and forefinger where the hammer spur had bitten in; and walked over ...
— Cat and Mouse • Ralph Williams
... liniment. On such a occasion, I felt my best black silk none too good, and at Dorothy's request I turned down the neck a little in front, mebby a half a finger or so, and wore a piece of lace she gin me over it that come down to my belt. It looked like a cob-web that had ketched in its transparent meshes some voylets and snowdrops. And at her request I did not wear the cameo pin, but a little bunch of posies she fixed for me, fine white posies with a few pale lavender ones. I spoze Dorothy, though she didn't ...
— Around the World with Josiah Allen's Wife • Marietta Holley
... dare to sing (Hard task!) black care's inevitable ring Settling with years upon the heart that feeds Incessantly on glory. Year by year The narrowing toil grows closer round his feet; With disenchanting touch rude-handed time The unlovely web discloses, and strange fear Leads him at last to eld's inclement seat, The bitter north of life - ...
— New Poems • Robert Louis Stevenson
... 2. The Web.—Literature, although it stands apart by reason of the great destiny and general use of its medium in the affairs of men, is yet an art like other arts. Of these we may distinguish two great classes: those arts, like sculpture, painting, acting, which are representative, ...
— The Art of Writing and Other Essays • Robert Louis Stevenson
... swore an oath of vengeance, which would have made Hugh Fraser Johnstone shudder, as he sat drinking champagne cup with his guest. "One for you, my lady!" he had laughed, grimly, as the woman whom he had tricked drove swiftly away. And the grim fates laughed too, spinning at a shortening life web. ...
— A Fascinating Traitor • Richard Henry Savage
... "I shan't let Miss Mills live in my heart at all if she vexes you; but oh, dear; oh, dear! Just look, do look! Do you see that monstrous spider over there, the one with the sun shining on his web?" ...
— A Young Mutineer • Mrs. L. T. Meade
... forest; splendid hotels within sound of the hunter's rifle and the lumberer's axe; while the elements of society are more chaotic than the features of the country. Every year a tide of emigration rolls westward, not from Europe only, but from the crowded eastern cities, forming a tangled web of races, manners, and religions which the hasty observer cannot attempt to disentangle. Yet there are many external features of uniformity which the traveller cannot fail to lay hold of, and which go under the general ...
— The Englishwoman in America • Isabella Lucy Bird
... chains logically bound together with certain central ideas which ever repeat themselves. Such ideas not represented in the dream itself are in this instance the antitheses selfish, unselfish, to be indebted, to work for nothing. I could draw closer the threads of the web which analysis has disclosed, and would then be able to show how they all run together into a single knot; I am debarred from making this work public by considerations of a private, not of a scientific, nature. After having cleared up many things which I do not willingly acknowledge ...
— Dream Psychology - Psychoanalysis for Beginners • Sigmund Freud
... slight silken cocoon about the walls of its prison, which were quite hard and smooth on the inside, probably owing to the movements of the larva, and the consequent pressing of the sticky particles to the walls. In a short time the opening made was closed over by a very thin silken web. The cells, measured on the inside of the hard walls, were .35 of an inch in length, and .15 in diameter. The natural attitude of the larva is somewhat curved in its cell, but if straightened, it just equals ...
— Our Common Insects - A Popular Account of the Insects of Our Fields, Forests, - Gardens and Houses • Alpheus Spring Packard
... she pleaded with me! How her tender, good face spoke reproaches to me! If I was the pride of our household, she was the angel. She it was, who, knowing the worst, said, 'Julie, this must end!' She it was who labored day and night to set me free from the wicked web that bound me. I reproached her, the poor, good Marie, in saying that she was the plainer, that she had no beauty, that she was devoured with envy. But the Blessed Virgin was working ever by her side. Whatever ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 103, May, 1866 • Various
... aworking day and night fur to hang you, and little is made of much, on your side, and much is spun out of little, on theirn. They are more cunning than foxes, and bloodthirstier than panters, and they no more git tired than the spiders, that spin and piece a web as fast as you break it. Three nights ago, I got down on my knees, and I kissed a little pink morocco slipper what your Ma wore the day when she took her first step from my arm to her own mother's knees, and I swore a solemn oath, if I could help ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... nobody. But you will not think of these matters, you will think only of your children's ailments, of baking and sewing and weaving tapestries, and of directing little household tasks. And the spider will spin her web in my helmet, which will hang as a trophy in the hall of Messire ...
— Domnei • James Branch Cabell et al
... of suitors, though he knew he might be cast off the next week. If he were like Ulysses in his folly, at least she was in so far like Penelope that she had a crowd of suitors, and undid day after day and night after night the handiwork of fascination and the web of coquetry with which she was wont to allure ...
— The History of Henry Esmond, Esq. • W. M. Thackeray
... Clerie, I should forget entirely to ask about the little shoe, or the tall gentleman of the attic. Nevertheless I did, as I went out, throw a glance up to the window of the court—alas! there were more panes broken, the placard was gone, the veil was gone—there was nothing but a flimsy web which a bold spider had stretched across one of the comers. I felt sure that the last six months had brought its changes to other houses, as well as the house ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII. No. 3. March 1848 • Various
... heard it said, So Preciuse he bad his own be clept; Twas their ensign when they to battle went, His chevaliers'; he gave that cry to them. His own broad shield he hangs upon his neck, (Round its gold boss a band of crystal went, The strap of it was a good silken web;) He grasps his spear, the which he calls Maltet;— So great its shaft as is a stout cudgel, Beneath its steel alone, a mule had bent; On his charger is Baligant mounted, Marcules, from over seas, his stirrup held. That warrior, with ...
— The Song of Roland • Anonymous
... as it had looked on her, she recalled, as if to leaven the memory of those atrocities (which were often of such a nature that they seemed to give the lie to the existence of a beneficent Deity), that there was ever interwoven with the web of life an eternal tale of love—love to inspire great deeds and noble aims; love to enchain the beast in woman and man; love, whose constant expression was the sacrifice of self upon the ...
— Sparrows - The Story of an Unprotected Girl • Horace W. C. Newte
... Helen, from the skies The various goddess of the rainbow flies: (Like fair Laodice in form and face, The loveliest nymph of Priam's royal race:) Her in the palace, at her loom she found; The golden web her own sad story crown'd, The Trojan wars she weaved (herself the prize) And the dire triumphs of her fatal eyes. To whom the goddess of the painted bow: "Approach, and view the wondrous scene below!(112) Each hardy Greek, and valiant Trojan knight, ...
— The Iliad of Homer • Homer
... made his appearance, although the golden fringes upon the clouds, which floated in broad belts in the horizon, indicated his glorious yet withering approach. The dew moistened each leaf, or hung in glittering pendant drops upon the thorn of the prickly pears which lined the roads. The web of the silver-banded spider was extended between the bushes, and, saturated with moisture, reflected the beams of the rising orb, as the animals danced in the centre, to dazzle their expected prey. The mist still hovered on the valleys, and concealed ...
— Newton Forster • Frederick Marryat
... actions are. I'll like Almanzor act; and dare to be As haughty, and as wretched too, as he. What will he think is in my message meant? I scarcely understand my own intent: But, silk-worm like, so long within have wrought, That I am lost in my own web ...
— The Works Of John Dryden, Volume 4 (of 18) - Almanzor And Almahide, Marriage-a-la-Mode, The Assignation • John Dryden
... gave her the almost morbid impression of dominating the scene. As an actual fact he almost effaced himself, but to her excited fancy he was omnipresent, overpowering. She thought of him now not so much as a python as in the form of a huge bloated spider in the middle of an invisible web, spinning, watching, closing in. She was ready to believe he was always watching her, spying on her movements, reading her secret thoughts. There were moments when she had a wild desire to scream aloud, so tense had her nerves become with ...
— Juggernaut • Alice Campbell
... chance call his attention to the fact that Cain had entered upon a new phase of his life. It was in the afternoon of one of those light days, when the sun seemed to spread its rays, like the glistening threads of a spider's web along the road, from one tract of woodland to the other. The southern wood cast a cool, clear shadow, and where this ended and the sun began to spin its golden web, the line was as sharp as if cut by a knife. Fausch, whose day's work was done, put his short pipe between his teeth, and wandered ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries - Masterpieces of German Literature Vol. 19 • Various
... legislature at Albany adjourned, without regard to our wishes; and so, like the patient spider whose web is destroyed, we set to work upon a new one. So much money must be raised, so many articles must be written, so many speeches delivered, so many people seized upon and harried and wrought to a state ...
— Sylvia's Marriage • Upton Sinclair
... better humor. He supervised with determination, and seemed to know how to calculate the exact effect of everything. Breboeuf was marvellously transformed into a little flying spider, running backwards and forwards strengthening Haviland's web. The Honorable seemed to act slowly, but really with deliberation and effect, remarking neglected points, and himself seeing that certain "weak ones" were brought to the right side of the poll. The schoolmaster was away haranguing the back parishes. For the ...
— The Young Seigneur - Or, Nation-Making • Wilfrid Chateauclair
... the same fragrance of honeysuckle—this knowledge was a fact of such tremendous importance that it dwarfed to insignificance all the proud historic past of Dinwiddie. Her imagination, seizing upon this bit of actuality, spun around it the iridescent gossamer web of her fancy. She felt that it was sufficient happiness just to stand motionless for hours and let this thought take possession of her. Nothing else mattered as long as this ...
— Virginia • Ellen Glasgow
... tireless spinner, was weaving sinister red threads of hate and love into the web of his life, Lambert continued to live quietly in his woodland retreat. In a somewhat misanthropic frame of mind he had retired to this hermitage, after the failure of his love affair, since, lacking the society of Agnes, there was nothing ...
— Red Money • Fergus Hume
... them. Another portion had claws with which they dug edible roots, and they could also use them for scratching hand and foot holes in the face of a steep cliff. Others had hoofs, and these carried the heaviest burdens; and some had balls of magic spider web, which they could use on occasion for ropes, and they could also spread the web and use it as a mantle, rendering the wearer invisible ...
— A Study of Pueblo Architecture: Tusayan and Cibola • Victor Mindeleff and Cosmos Mindeleff
... However, the haill hive was ower mony for me at last, and I got this eclipse on the crown, and then I was carried, beyond my kenning, to a sma' booth at the Temple Port, whare they sell the whirligigs and mony-go-rounds that measure out time as a man wad measure a tartan web; and then they bled me, wold I nold I, and were reasonably civil, especially an auld country-man of ...
— The Fortunes of Nigel • Sir Walter Scott
... that weaves; it is a multitude of small spiders. Here is one close to my face, out at the tip of a slender grass-stem, holding on with its fore legs and kicking out backward with its hind legs a tiny skein of web off into the air. The threads stream and sway and lengthen, gather and fill and billow, and tug at their anchorage till, caught in the dip of some wayward current, they lift the little aeronaut from his hangar and bear him away through ...
— The Hills of Hingham • Dallas Lore Sharp
... stars they blest, Knight, minstrel, abbot, squire, and guest. There lay a parchment on her breast That puzzled more than all the rest The well-fed wits of Camelot: "The web was woven curiously, The charm is broken utterly; Draw near and fear not, this is I The Lady ...
— Old Friends - Essays in Epistolary Parody • Andrew Lang
... The question was not now with him, What can I represent? but, How high can I build—how wonderfully can I hang this arch in air, or weave this tracery across the clouds? And the catastrophe was instant and irrevocable. Architecture became in France a mere web of waving lines,—in England a mere grating of perpendicular ones. Redundance was substituted for invention, and geometry for passion; tho Gothic art became a mere expression of wanton expenditure, and vulgar mathematics; and was swept away, as it then deserved ...
— The Two Paths • John Ruskin
... wonder much over this production of the past, and not alone over the heroes who career so mildly in their armor of colored crewels on the linen background. We wonder, in the first place, how a continuous web of over two hundred feet in length could have been woven. Then, we know that lengths of woven stuffs are limited only by the requirements of commerce, and that Matilda was of Flanders, and her father had learned the princely trick of loving and encouraging manufactures, and ...
— The Development of Embroidery in America • Candace Wheeler
... hurried on down Division Street, which connects Tutors' Lane with Whitmanville. "If he only has chickens, I won't mind, but if he has bats I shall hate it. I confess I'm a perfect fool about bats. They're loathsome. What they really are, are hairy rats with wings like web feet, and they have ...
— Tutors' Lane • Wilmarth Lewis
... the maimed and dead Mown down upon the globe, - Their plenteous blooms of promise shed Ere fruiting-time—His words were said, Sitting against the western web of red Wrapt ...
— Moments of Vision • Thomas Hardy
... Philistines!" He walks out as easily as he did before—not a single obstruction. She coaxes him again, and he says: "Now, if you should take these seven long plaits of hair, and by this house-loom weave them into a web, I could not get away." So the house-loom is rolled up, and the shuttle flies backward and forward and the long plaits of hair are woven into a web. Then she claps her hands, and says: "They come—the Philistines!" He walks out as easily as ...
— New Tabernacle Sermons • Thomas De Witt Talmage
... enough to conceive unaided. The swain in the poem tells of his intention to make a bonnet for his chosen nymph to wear. He will fashion it with "golden thimble, scissors, needle, thread"; taking velvet from the April sky as a groundwork, stars for trimming, moonlight for banding, and a web of dreams for lining. He will scent it with the perfume of "the reddest rose that the singing wind finds sweetest where it farthest blows," and "will take it at the twilight for his love to wear." Here we have nothing of the bizarre or the conspicuous, yet ...
— Writings in the United Amateur, 1915-1922 • Howard Phillips Lovecraft
... it did. Instead of ten eggs in the nest she seemed to see twenty, and they were of a strange, dull color, and their shape seemed all wrong. She blinked her eyes nineteen times, and even rubbed them with her web-feet, so that she might not see double, but it was all in vain. Before her dazzled eyes twenty little pointed eggs lay, and when she sat upon them they felt strange to her breast. And then she grew faint and was too weak even to call Sir Sooty, but when he came waddling along presently, ...
— Solomon Crow's Christmas Pockets and Other Tales • Ruth McEnery Stuart
... or ready way to virtue; it is not an easy point of art to disentangle ourselves from this riddle or web of sin. To perfect virtue, as to religion, there is required a panoplia, or complete armour; that whilst we lie at close ward against one vice, we lie not open to the assault of another. There go so many circumstances to piece up one good action ...
— The Worlds Greatest Books, Volume XIII. - Religion and Philosophy • Various
... carted across country, which not only took ten times longer than it would have taken to send them round by sea but also gave ten times as much trouble. At last Conflans managed to move out. But he had about as much chance of escape as a fly in a spider's web; for Hawke had cruisers watching everywhere and a battle fleet ready to pounce down anywhere. Conflans had been ordered to save his fleet by all possible means till he had joined the French fleet and army of invasion. So he is not to be blamed for what ...
— Flag and Fleet - How the British Navy Won the Freedom of the Seas • William Wood
... a plate. Watson looked inside, and saw a mass of fine spider-web threads, softer than the tips of rabbit's hair, all radiating from a central grey object about the size of a pea. Chick reached out to touch this thing with ...
— The Blind Spot • Austin Hall and Homer Eon Flint
... of us can remember how the lemons came on board. Wade says they were bought as an antidote for sea-sickness. A far more sensible article of traffic was twenty dollars' worth of iron in small bars; four dozen large jack-knives; twenty butcher-knives, and the same number of hatchets. We had also a web of red flannel at twenty dollars; in ...
— Left on Labrador - or, The cruise of the Schooner-yacht 'Curlew.' as Recorded by 'Wash.' • Charles Asbury Stephens
... neatly contrived of the cup of an acorn, through the bottom of which ran a hedgehog's prickle. Balanced on the point was the needle, a spear of dried grass, and over all was a spider's web ...
— The Flamp, The Ameliorator, and The Schoolboy's Apprentice • E. V. Lucas
... none but the spider lord; Star in circle his web waits prey, Silvering bush-mounds, blue brushing sward; Slow runs the hour, swift flits the ray. Now to his thread-shroud is he nigh, Nigh to the tangle where wings are sealed, He who frolicked the jewelled fly; All is adroop on ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... subject, from Degas' point of view, lies in this strange contrast—the man thinking of his dry-points, the woman thinking, as the phrase goes, of nothing at all. Au Cafe—that is the title of the picture. How simple, how significant! And how the picture gains in meaning when the web of false melodrama that a couple of industrious spiders have woven about ...
— Modern Painting • George Moore
... in the near-by theatre, and the near-by library will be given up to the spider and his web, and the little garden of flowers that the once half-starved women have made a delight will be unknown to the worn out bread-winner, who will be the same old slave we premised to unshackle. Better clothes surely, and his home shows what it is to be a citizen ...
— Confiscation, An Outline • William Greenwood
... Quips, cranks, puns, sneers,—with clear sweet thought profound;— And stinging jests, with honey for the wound,"— The subtlest lines of ALL fine powers, split To their last films, then marvellously spun In magic web, whose ...
— Spare Hours • John Brown
... things in the world which allow of no description, and of such things a true Roman carnival is one. You might as well seek to analyze champagne, or expound the mystery of melody, or tell why a woman pleases you. The strange web of colour, beauty, mirth, wit, and folly, is tangled so together that common hands cannot unravel it. To paint a carnival without blotching, to touch it without destroying, is an art given unto few, I almost might say ...
— Rome in 1860 • Edward Dicey
... completely given up her habits of study. She did not even read novels, except aloud; and when she was not in some way occupied in caring for her mother, she sat hour after hour by the window, with a piece of crochet, which seemed a second Penelope's web, for it never was visibly larger one day than it had been the day before. Mrs. Costello gradually grew anxious as she perceived how dull and inanimate her daughter remained. She would almost have been glad of an excuse for giving her a gentle scolding, but Lucia's ...
— A Canadian Heroine - A Novel, Volume 3 (of 3) • Mrs. Harry Coghill
... gaping aye, to gormandize, Of young ones clamouring, And stammering, With unintelligible cries. The spider, with but head and feet. And powerless to compete With wings so fleet, Soon saw herself a prey. The swallow, passing swiftly by, Bore web and all away, The ...
— The Fables of La Fontaine - A New Edition, With Notes • Jean de La Fontaine
... widening circles, till it floated above like a slow white moth. Little Rol's eyes danced, and the row of his small teeth shone in a silent laugh of delight. Another and another of the white tufts was sent whirling round like a winged thing in a spider's web, and floating clear at last. ...
— The Were-Wolf • Clemence Housman
... a sentence written by a Latin historian of the fourth century was the cause, fifteen hundred years after, of the death in our country of a wretched private soldier. Who will ever disentangle the web of ...
— Balthasar - And Other Works - 1909 • Anatole France
... to damp and moisture, and is very liable to attack from worms and boring insects. The cross-section of hickory is peculiar, the annual rings appear like fine lines instead of like the usual pores, and the medullary rays, which are also very fine but distinct, in crossing these form a peculiar web-like pattern which is one of the characteristic differences between hickory and ash. Hickory is rarely subjected to artificial treatment, but there is this curious fact in connection with the wood, that, contrary to most other woods, creosote is only with difficulty injected into the sap, although ...
— Seasoning of Wood • Joseph B. Wagner
... causing it to be in such demand that very often a pair of these ducks will bring three dollars in the markets of New York and Philadelphia. When the finest turkey can be had for less than a third of that sum, some idea may be formed of the superior estimation in which the web-footed favourites ...
— The Hunters' Feast - Conversations Around the Camp Fire • Mayne Reid
... was hard to look up from her bright eyes and rosy cheeks and see this shadow hanging above his calm and ordered life, as in a glowing room one's eye may catch an impending patch of darkness drawn like a spider's web across a corner ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... feature of this affair was, that we were friends, and almost constant companions for some years. When in the country I had to be with him as continually as possible; and when I went to the city, it was his wont to follow me. Here, then, was a web strangely woven by the fingers of a wayward fate. Feelings were brought into daily exercise which might seem the least compatible with being brought into contact and maintained in harmony. And these things, which are strictly true, if set forth in the contrivances of romance might, ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume IV. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... At night the order is given, "March!" Cheerfully the column trots out of camp; we who have no horses follow it with wistful eyes. There are girls in the town too, ah! such girls! Complexions a dream of purity, mystic, melting eyes, and hair a silken web to weave sweet ...
— With Steyn and De Wet • Philip Pienaar
... scientific and literary cultivation of advancing and civilized society, have Romanized our speech; the warp may be Anglo-Saxon, but the woof is Roman as well as the embroidery, and these foreign materials have so entered into the texture, that were they plucked out, the web would be torn ...
— English Past and Present • Richard Chenevix Trench
... eyes of Richard. Hark thee—thou art wise—he hath been over-bold among those in whose fair looks and weak judgments we trust our honour, as you of the East lodge your treasures in caskets of silver wire, as fine and as frail as the web ...
— The Talisman • Sir Walter Scott
... can analyze," says George S. Hillard, "the parts and details of this matchless panorama, or unravel that magic web of beauty into which palaces, villas, forests, gardens, vineyards, the mountains, and the sea are woven? What pen can paint the soft curves, the gentle undulations, the flowing outlines, the craggy steeps, and the far-seen ...
— Italy, the Magic Land • Lilian Whiting
... pride—hatred—revenge—anger, are unholy passions, if a mother's own conduct displays either of them. How useless is it to teach that vanity should never be indulged in, when a mother delights in display! Such instruction as this is like the web of Penelope—unpicked as fast as done. The greatest reverence is due to a child; and previously to becoming a teacher, a mother should learn this hardest of all lessons—'Know thyself.' Without this, the instruction she gives her children will at best prove very imperfect. It is quite useless ...
— Trials and Confessions of a Housekeeper • T. S. Arthur
... the shunning of those rocks, which either of those ways must unavoidably cast him upon,) he was forced to seek out an untrodden path, and to frame out of his own brain a new way, (like a spider's web wrought out of her own bowels,) hoping by that device to salve all absurdities, that could be objected; to wit, by making the glory of God (as it is indeed the chiefest, so) the only end of all other ...
— Lives of John Donne, Henry Wotton, Rich'd Hooker, George Herbert, - &C, Volume Two • Izaak Walton
... entertaining gossip about some 'rich Nassau damask,' at Haughton's in the Coombe, that had taken her fancy mightily, and how she had chosen a set of new Nankeen plates and fine oblong dishes at the Music Hall, and how Peter Raby, the watchman, was executed yesterday morning, in web worsted breeches, for the murder of Mr. Thomas Fleming, of Thomas-street, she did come at last to mention Devereux: and she said that the colonel had received a letter from General Chattesworth, 'who by-the-bye,' and then came a long parenthesis, very pleasant, ...
— The House by the Church-Yard • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... to take up the thread of life where I had dropped it near a score of years before, and complete the web which fancy had embroidered with many a flower of memory and hope and love. I had forgotten that the loom weaves steadily and persistently whether my hand be on it or not, and that I can never mend the rent in the fabric I so ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 15, - No. 87, March, 1875 • Various
... her ears and seated herself on a fragment of a fallen column that had formerly made part of the colonnade of the Temple of Venus. Here she sat for a while with her hands listlessly clasped, trying to disentangle the puzzling web of her thoughts. Her most immediate sensation was delight at the departure of Diogenes. The warm, fair day seemed to have grown old and cold with his world wisdom, a wisdom so different from all that she had ever been taught to ...
— The Proud Prince • Justin Huntly McCarthy
... that Theology, at the age of seven, is not commendable—setting aside the question of whether (at any age) Theology is a web of words, ritual, dogma, tradition, invention, shibboleth; a web originally spun by interested men to obscure God from ...
— Snake and Sword - A Novel • Percival Christopher Wren
... would be bad policy in the beaver, thus to make a door by which his enemy, the wolverene, could easily get in and destroy him. The houses were all plastered over with mud, which, by the flapping of the tails and the constant paddling of the broad web-feet, had become as smooth as if the mud had been laid on with a trowel. We knew that they were also plastered inside, so as to render them warm and commodious ...
— The Desert Home - The Adventures of a Lost Family in the Wilderness • Mayne Reid
... called eccentric. He walked barefooted, meanly clad, and withal not over cleanly, seeking public places, disputing with everybody willing to talk with him, making everybody ridiculous, especially if one assumed airs of wisdom or knowledge,—an exasperating opponent, since he wove a web around a man from which he could not be extricated, and then exposed him to ridicule in the wittiest city of the world. He attacked everybody, and yet was generally respected, since it was errors rather than ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume I • John Lord
... immediate neighborhood except some artillery officers hugging a depression and spotting the fall of shells from their guns just short of Bapaume and calling out the results by telephone, over one of the strands of the spider's web of intelligence which they had unrolled from a reel when they came. I joined them for a few minutes in their retreat below the skyline and listened to their remarks about Brother Low Visibility, who soon was to have the world for his ...
— My Second Year of the War • Frederick Palmer
... gossamore. And then a rug of carded wool, Which, sponge-like drinking in the dull Light of the moon, seemed to comply, Cloud-like, the dainty deity. Thus soft she lies: and overhead A spinner's circle is bespread With cob-web curtains, from the roof So neatly sunk as that no proof Of any tackling can declare What gives it hanging in the air. The fringe about this are those threads Broke at the loss of maidenheads: And, ...
— The Hesperides & Noble Numbers: Vol. 1 and 2 • Robert Herrick
... in the hands of some metaphysical giants, have rendered both mind and matter like abstractions, is a course of proceeding I should scarcely indorse; and the best antidote I remember just now to any such web-spinning proclivities is a persual of the three first lectures of Sidney Smith on 'Moral Philosophy.' In recapitulating the tenets of the schools, he says: 'The speculations of many of the ancients on the human ...
— Beulah • Augusta J. Evans
... splendid patchwork" of Collins, "mixed with the solid, sterling ore of his genius," he speaks of a base material not to be found there. In Collins there is no tinsel or patchwork, one of his excellencies is, that the whole of every piece is of one web; there are no joinings or meaner threads. There is no height to which Collins might not have risen, had he lived long, had his mind continued sound, and had he persevered in exercising his genius. Campbell remarks that, at the same ...
— The Poetical Works of William Collins - With a Memoir • William Collins
... terrible Dame Samuel. Mr. Throgmorton also compelled the old woman and her daughter to use expressions which put their lives in the power of these malignant children, who had carried on the farce so long that they could not well escape from their own web of deceit but by the death of these helpless creatures. For example, the prisoner, Dame Samuel, was induced to say to the supposed spirit, "As I am a witch, and a causer of Lady Cromwell's death, I charge thee to come out of the maiden." The girl lay still; and this ...
— Letters On Demonology And Witchcraft • Sir Walter Scott
... article in the orthodox systems of theology will be so small, that it may better be called gilt than gold; and if worth having at all, it will be for its show, not for its substance. For instance, the 'aranea theologica' may draw out the whole web of the Westminster Catechism from the simple creed of the beloved Disciple,—'whoever believeth with his heart, and professeth with his mouth, that Jesus is Lord and Christ,'—shall be saved. If implicit faith only be required, doubtless certain doctrines, ...
— The Literary Remains Of Samuel Taylor Coleridge • Edited By Henry Nelson Coleridge
... a thing like an old trench coat, and looked superb. She went bareheaded. Her black hair was brushed up from her forehead and down over her ears, the length of it rolled in on itself in a curving mass at the back. Over it the frost had raised a crisp web of hair that covered its solid smoothness like a net. Anne's head was the head of a hunting Diana; it might have ...
— Anne Severn and the Fieldings • May Sinclair |
