"Cobweb" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Women Middleton plays on the word:— "Fab. When she was invited to an early wedding, She'd dress her head o'ernight, sponge up herself, And give her neck three lathers. Gaar. Ne'er a halter.") Laugh and lye downe Launcepresado Law, the spider's cobweb Legerity Letters of mart Leveret Limbo Line of life Linstock Long haire, treatise against (An allusion to William Prynne's tract The Unlovelinesse of Love-Lockes.) Loves Changelings Changed, MS. play founded on Sidney's Arcadia ...
— A Collection Of Old English Plays, Vol. IV. • Editor: A.H. Bullen
... the Duchessa lightly. "A rather pretty soap-bubble burst and turned into an unpleasant cobweb, that's all. So—well, I've just been brushing my mind clear of both the cobweb and the memory of ...
— Antony Gray,—Gardener • Leslie Moore
... The ancient firm of Smith, Brown, Jones, Robinson, and Co., which had been for some years past expanding from a solid golden organism into a cobweb-tissue and huge balloon of threadbare paper, had at last worn through and collapsed, dropping its car and human contents miserably into the Thames mud. Why detail the pitiable post-mortem examination resulting? Lancelot sickened over it for many a long day; not, ...
— Yeast: A Problem • Charles Kingsley
... back to him, 'I'll giye up the succession;' says I, 'and what is more, I'll grant that you have been called by the Lord, and that I have not; but the Lord that called you,' says I, 'was Lord Foxhunter.' Man, you'd tie his Lordship wid a cobweb, he ...
— The Poor Scholar - Traits And Stories Of The Irish Peasantry, The Works of - William Carleton, Volume Three • William Carleton
... I'm entirely reconciled to staying here," returned Kit. "Poppycheek, you are a wonderful dancer! You're like a butterfly skimming over a cobweb!" ...
— Patty's Suitors • Carolyn Wells
... difficulties, and had mastered the alphabet, which was an Egyptian Temple in itself, there then appeared a procession of new horrors, called arbitrary characters; the most despotic characters I have ever known; who insisted, for instance, that a thing like the beginning of a cobweb, meant expectation, and that a pen-and-ink sky-rocket, stood for disadvantageous. When I had fixed these wretches in my mind, I found that they had driven everything else out of it; then, beginning again, I forgot them; while I was picking them up, I dropped the ...
— David Copperfield • Charles Dickens
... habits of a lifetime? Do you think that, left to yourself, you would ever have any inclination to break them? Certainly, left to yourselves, you will never have the power. These long indulged appetites of ours grow with indulgence; and that which first was light as a cobweb, and soft as a silken bracelet, becomes heavier and solider until it is an iron fetter upon the limb, which no man can break. There is nothing more awful in life than the influence of habit, so unthinkingly acquired, so inexorably ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Isaiah and Jeremiah • Alexander Maclaren
... me; I'll give the fairies to attend on thee; And they shall fetch thee jewels from the deep, —Peas-blossom! cobweb! moth! and ...
— Oak Openings • James Fenimore Cooper
... was gone, Janet caught up her broom again, and went spying about over the roof—ceiling there was none—after long tangles of agglomerated cobweb ...
— Sir Gibbie • George MacDonald
... a tall, beautiful woman clothed in a splendid trailing gown, trimmed with exquisite lace as fine as cobweb. This was the important Sorceress known as Glinda the Good, who had been of great assistance to both Ozma and Dorothy. There was no humbug about her magic, you may be sure, and Glinda was as kind as she was powerful. ...
— The Road to Oz • L. Frank Baum
... tilled his garden with a pickle-fork and grew vegetables for pickling, Mrs. Vinegar, who was a sharp, bustling, tidy woman, swept, brushed, and dusted, brushed and dusted and swept to keep the house clean as a new pin. Now one day she lost her temper with a cobweb and swept so hard after it that bang! bang! the broom-handle went right through the glass, and crash! crash! clitter! clatter! there was the pickle-jar house about her ears all in splinters ...
— English Fairy Tales • Flora Annie Steel
... said Quilp, making towards the door on tiptoe. 'Not a sound, not so much as a creaking board, or a stumble against a cobweb. ...
— The Old Curiosity Shop • Charles Dickens
... of their webs? (Trapping prey, supporting egg cases, protection, and means of moving, as in the case of cobweb spiders.) ...
— Ontario Teachers' Manuals: Nature Study • Ontario Ministry of Education
... own, and the leader of the House of Commons in a necktie you do not envy. That is the kind of thing you want to take the nonsense out of you. If you are not decanted off from yourself every few days or weeks, you will think it sacrilege to brush a cobweb from your cork by and by. O little fool, that has published a little book full of little poems or other sputtering tokens of an uneasy condition, how I love you for the one soft nerve of special ...
— The Poet at the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... military station too, for once I led my party into Pixley's camp, And he paroled me. I defended, too, The State of Oregon against the sharp And bloody tooth of the Australian sheep. But I've an aptitude exceeding neat For bloodless battles of diplomacy. My cobweb treaty of Exclusion once, Through which a hundred thousand coolies sailed, Was much admired, but most by Colonel Bee. Though born a tinker I'm a diplomat From old Missouri, and ...
— Black Beetles in Amber • Ambrose Bierce
... died at forty, As white and worn as an old table-cloth, Darned, washed, and ironed to a shred of cobweb, Past mending; while your father was sixty-nine Before he could finish himself, soak as ...
— Krindlesyke • Wilfrid Wilson Gibson
... aside as if she had been a cobweb in his path, and with a wild cry of joy and vengeance he burst through the half-open door. Offitt turned at the noise, and saw Sam coming, and knew that the end of his life was there. His heart was like water within him. He made a feeble effort at defence; but the carpenter, without a word, ...
— The Bread-winners - A Social Study • John Hay
... barbarousness; I never heard the old song of Percy and Douglas, that I found not my heart moved more than with a trumpet; {55} and yet it is sung but by some blind crowder, with no rougher voice than rude style; which being so evil apparelled in the dust and cobweb of that uncivil age, what would it work, trimmed in the gorgeous eloquence of Pindar? In Hungary I have seen it the manner at all feasts, and all other such-like meetings, to have songs of their ancestors' valour, which ...
— A Defence of Poesie and Poems • Philip Sidney
... ordinary commonplace courtiers; the lovers, men and women in the condition of all conditions in which fairy-powers might get a hold of them; the quarrelling king and queen of Fairyland, with their courtiers, Blossom, Cobweb, and the rest, and the court-jester, Puck; the ignorant, clownish artisans, rehearsing their play,—fairies and clowns, lovers and courtiers, are all mingled in one exquisite harmony, clothed with a night of early summer, ...
— The Seaboard Parish Vol. 3 • George MacDonald
... at breakfast the postman came, and there were letters and packages for everybody. Lloyd sent a present to each of us. Mine was a darling little lace fan all spangled, like a cobweb with dew-drops caught in its meshes. We opened everything then and there, as we had already had part of our presents. Jack's to me was this holiday trip, and Mamma's was the shirt-waist that I ...
— The Little Colonel's Chum: Mary Ware • Annie Fellows Johnston
... be," he said, after a moment's silence, "one of those frivolous fears, those hazy suspicions which women dwell on more than they do on the great things of life. You all have a way of tipping the world sideways with a straw, a cobweb—" ...
— A Daughter of Eve • Honore de Balzac
... "Mounsieur Cobweb; good mounsieur, get you your weapons in your hand, and kill me a red-hipp'd humble-bee on the top of a thistle, and, good ...
— The Writings of John Burroughs • John Burroughs
... angrier feeling that found vent in an emphatic "Set her up!" Her frock was of straw-coloured jaconet muslin, cut low at the bosom and short at the ankle, so as to display her DEMI- BROQUINS of Regency violet, crossing with many straps upon a yellow cobweb stocking. According to the pretty fashion in which our grandmothers did not hesitate to appear, and our great-aunts went forth armed for the pursuit and capture of our great-uncles, the dress was drawn up so as to mould the contour of both breasts, and ...
— Weir of Hermiston • Robert Louis Stevenson
... Cobweb, good mounsieur, get you your weapons ready in your hand, and kill me a red-hipped humble bee on the top of a Thistle; and, good ...
— The plant-lore & garden-craft of Shakespeare • Henry Nicholson Ellacombe
... sciolistic assumptions caught up in his youth from Auguste Comte and other one-eyed seers of modern France; his generalization, multitudinous and imposing, is often of the card-castle description, and tumbles at the touch of an inquisitive finger; and his cobweb logic, spun chiefly out of his wishes rather than his understanding, is indeed facile and ingenious, but of a strength to hold only flies. Such, at any rate, is the judgment passed upon him in the present paper; ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 11, No. 63, January, 1863 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... more. This time, however, he had a black eye, just a friendly slap he had run up against in a playful moment. His curly hair, already streaked with grey, must have dusted a corner in some low wineshop, for a cobweb was hanging to one of his locks over the back of his neck. He was still as attractive as ever, though his features were rather drawn and aged, and his under jaw projected more; but he was always lively, as he would sometimes say, with ...
— L'Assommoir • Emile Zola
... croaking of the frogs, dominating all the other noises of the night, and uniting in one mighty chorus in the marshes along the river. An owl was hooting from a distant tree, and the hum of innumerable insects sounded on every side. Here and there a glittering, dew-spangled cobweb stretched across our path, a barrier of silver, and required more than ordinary resolution to be brushed aside. As we turned nearer to the river, the ground grew softer and the underbrush more thick, and I knew that we ...
— A Soldier of Virginia • Burton Egbert Stevenson
... become a shelter for a young generation. The pine and fir woods, left entirely to Nature, display an endless variety; and the paths in the woods are not entangled with fallen leaves, which are only interesting whilst they are fluttering between life and death. The grey cobweb-like appearance of the aged pines is a much finer image of decay; the fibres whitening as they lose their moisture, imprisoned life seems to be stealing away. I cannot tell why, but death, under every form, appears to me like something getting free to expand ...
— Letters written during a short residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark • Mary Wollstonecraft
... were gambolling around her like so many kittens. They did not seem to heed Henson in the joy of her presence. He came on again, he made a grab for her dress, but the rotten fabric parted like a cobweb in his hand. A warning grunt came from one of the dogs, ...
— The Crimson Blind • Fred M. White
... bardache Thallus! more than Coney's robe Soft, or goose-marrow or ear's lowmost lobe, Or Age's languid yard and cobweb'd part, Same Thallus greedier than the gale thou art, When the Kite-goddess shows thee Gulls agape, 5 Return my muffler thou hast dared to rape, Saetaban napkins, tablets of Thynos, all Which (Fool!) ...
— The Carmina of Caius Valerius Catullus • Caius Valerius Catullus
... calmly out their dangerous dream, Till wakened by the morning beam; When, dazzled by the eastern glow, Such startler cast his glance below, And saw unmeasured depth around, 700 And heard unintermitted sound, And thought the battled fence so frail, It waved like cobweb in the gale; Amid his senses' giddy wheel, Did he not desperate impulse feel, 705 Headlong to plunge himself below, And meet the worst his fears foreshow? Thus, Ellen, dizzy and astound, As sudden ruin yawned around, By crossing ...
— Lady of the Lake • Sir Walter Scott
... countless canals, to a quarter quite unknown to us, where at work in a small room, we came upon our glass blower and the coveted copy of that lovely table-garden. This man had made four, and one was still in his possession. We brought it back to America, a gleaming jewelled cobweb, and what happened was that the very ethereal quality of its beauty made the average taste ignore it! However, a few years have made a vast difference in table, as well as all other decorations, and to-day the same Venetian gardens ...
— The Art of Interior Decoration • Grace Wood
... Friday Unlucky Dean't o' Friday buy your ring An Omen Blest is t' bride at t' sun shines on A Charm Tak twea at's red an' yan at's blake A gift o' my finger Sunday clipt, Sunday shorn A Monday's bairn 'll grow up fair A cobweb i' t' kitchen, Snaw, snaw, coom faster Julius Caesar made a law A weddin', a woo, a clog an' a shoe Chimley-sweeper, blackymoor The Lady-bird Cow-lady, cow-lady, hie thy way wum, The Magpie I cross'd pynot,(1) an' t' pynot cross'd me Tell-pie-tit The Bat Black-black-bearaway ...
— Yorkshire Dialect Poems • F.W. Moorman
... Simple, Quickly, Overdone, Elbow, Froth, Dogberry, Puck, Peablossom, Taurus, Bottom, Bushy, Hotspur, Scroop, Wall, Flute, Snout, Starveling, Moonshine, Mouldy, Shallow, Wart, Bullcalf, Feeble, Quince, Snag, Dull, Mustardseed, Fang, Snare, Rumor, Tearsheet, Cobweb, Costard and Moth; but in names as well as in plot "the father of Pickwick" has distanced the Master. In fact, to give all the odd and whimsical names invented by Dickens would be to publish a book, for he compiled an indexed volume of names from ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 1 of 14 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Good Men and Great • Elbert Hubbard
... is sweet when one has smelled of graves, Down in unholy heathen gloom; farewell." She pointed to a gateway, strong and high, Reared of hewn stones; but, look! in lieu of gate, There was a glittering cobweb drawn across, And on the lintel there were writ these words: "Ho, every one that cometh, I divide What hath been from what might be, and the line Hangeth before thee as a spider's web; Yet, wouldst thou enter thou must break the ...
— Poems by Jean Ingelow, In Two Volumes, Volume I. • Jean Ingelow
... first began to notice the white lisle socks marked E.G. She picked them from among the great heap at her work table because of the exquisite fineness of the darning that adorned them. It wasn't merely darning. It was embroidery. It was weaving. It was cobweb tapestry. It blended in with the original fabric so intimately that it required an expert eye to mark where darning finished and cloth began. Martha regarded it with appreciation unmarred by envy, as the artisan eye regards the work of ...
— Defenders of Democracy • The Militia of Mercy
... Great Beyond. They saw before them not the Sea of China, as speculators had dreamed, not kingdoms for conquest, which the princes of Europe coveted; not a short road to Asia, of which savants had spun a cobweb of theories. They saw what every Westerner sees to-day,—illimitable reaches of prairie and ravine, forested hills sloping to mighty rivers, and open meadow-lands watered by streams looped like a ribbon. They saw a land waiting for its ...
— Pathfinders of the West • A. C. Laut
... it's like a cobweb—perhaps if I marry a rich man, I can have things like this! What an angel you look in yours! Austin will certainly think he's struck heaven when he sees you like that! I never could understand what a little thing like you wanted this huge bed for, ...
— The Old Gray Homestead • Frances Parkinson Keyes
... room to corridor, from hall to gallery, and through passages; examining secret exits and closets. They traversed the long banquet-hall and were upon the threshold of a carved and lofty doorway, when Janet espied upon the parquetry a cobweb bit of lace protruding from beneath the tapestry of a chair. Lord Cedric's keen eyes marked her movement as she essayed to reach it without his notice. He turned quickly and fierce upon her, knocking his sword with a loud ...
— Mistress Penwick • Dutton Payne
... cruelty, made man, young Hermes, who, as all Olympus knew, was for ever at some piece of mischief, insisted on meddling with his father's work, and got leave to fashion the human ear out of a shell that he chanced to have by him, across which he stretched a fine cobweb that he stole from Arachne. But he hollowed and twisted the shell in such a fashion that it would turn back all sounds except very loud blasts that Falsehood should blow on a brazen horn, whilst the impenetrable web would keep out all such whispers ...
— Wisdom, Wit, and Pathos of Ouida - Selected from the Works of Ouida • Ouida
... as long as they abide in it, there is no Room for Satan to enter. But let this Morning's Work, Deb, be a Warning to you, not thus to transgress again. As long as we are in peaceful Communion among ourselves, there is a fine, invisible Cobweb, too clear for mortal Sight, spun from Mind to Mind, which the least Breath of Discord rudely breaks. You owe to your Mother a Daughter's Reverence; and if you behave like a Child, you must look to be punisht ...
— Mary Powell & Deborah's Diary • Anne Manning
... angels, still showing signs of devotion like mutilated martyrs—while over all, the grand pointed roof, untouched by reforming wash, showed its lines and colors mysteriously through veiling shadow and cobweb, and a hoof now and then striking against the boards seemed to fill the vault with thunder, while outside there was the answering bay ...
— Daniel Deronda • George Eliot
... finished reading he folded the paper and looked dreamily at the cobweb in the corner. He wished to be understood as having no opinion whatever to express. Cranston sat in silence with lips compressed under his heavy moustache. Davies never moved. His blue eyes were fixed unflinchingly on the swarthy face of the veteran adjutant until the latter ...
— Under Fire • Charles King
... vivid pages of history in which he explains and defends the French Revolution which Burke had attacked and misunderstood, are only an illustration to his main argument. He expounds the right of revolution, and blows away the cobweb argument of legality by which his antagonist had sought to confine posterity within the settlement of 1688. Every age and generation must be free to act for itself. Man has no property in man, and the claim of one generation to govern beyond the grave is of all tyrannies the most insolent. ...
— Shelley, Godwin and Their Circle • H. N. Brailsford
... Delineation, in these ages, were it never so Epic, 'speaking itself and not singing itself,' must either found on Belief and provable Fact, or have no foundation at all (nor except as floating cobweb any existence at all),—the Reader will perhaps prefer to take a glance with the very eyes of eye-witnesses; and see, in that way, for himself, how it was. Brave Jourgniac, innocent Abbe Sicard, judicious Advocate Maton, these, greatly compressing themselves, shall speak, ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle
... the teacher, lifting his broad shoulders and smiting them with his hands. "God has been house cleaning. The dome of the sky is all swept and dusted. There isn't a cobweb anywhere. Santa Claus come?" ...
— Darrel of the Blessed Isles • Irving Bacheller
... Meadow-Lark again, and told her of his nice warm cozy little nest beneath the mushroom. "It is always nice and dry there," he said, "for the rain runs right off the mushroom and does not touch my little cobweb home!" ...
— Friendly Fairies • Johnny Gruelle
... reeled in the filament after it had done its work. "It doesn't need to be nearly as tough and heavy to cut through soft stuff like ... er ... say, a beefsteak, as it does to cut through steel. It's as fine as cobweb almost invisible. Won't the World Welfare State have fun when that stuff gets into the hands ...
— Thin Edge • Gordon Randall Garrett
... fools of men. The white light was not for the heirs of that age, nor yet the golden mean. Wonders happened, that they knew, and so like children they looked for strange chances. There was no miracle at which their faith would balk, no illusion whose cobweb tissue they cared to tear away. Give but a grain whereon to build, a phenomenon before which started back, amazed and daunted, the knowledge of the age, and forthwith a mighty imagination leaped ...
— Sir Mortimer • Mary Johnston
... meet her any day, or never meet her at all, but any direct approach we must give up. The more I think of it, the graver it appears. If it be a police affair, no letter reaches her unopened. Rest assured of that. She is like a fly in a cobweb. Chance may help us, but so far the luck ...
— A Diplomatic Adventure • S. Weir Mitchell
... recurred to his memory. It was most unwelcome. Brandon could see that he looked more than disturbed; he was also angry; and yet after awhile, both these feelings melted away, he was like a man who had walked up to a cobweb, that stretched itself before his face, but when he had put up his hand and cleared it off, where ...
— Fated to Be Free • Jean Ingelow
... indeed, was filled with crazy lumber, mostly dating from the times of the surgeon who was Jekyll's predecessor; but even as they opened the door they were advertised of the uselessness of further search, by the fall of a perfect mat of cobweb which had for years sealed up the entrance. Nowhere was there any trace of Henry Jekyll, dead ...
— Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde • ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON
... grandees of his court, came to the weavers; and the rogues raised their arms, as if in the act of holding something up, saying, "Here are your Majesty's trousers! here is the scarf! here is the mantle! The whole suit is as light as a cobweb; one might fancy one has nothing at all on, when drest in it; that, however, is the great virtue ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. VIII (of X) - Continental Europe II. • Various
... lie thus long unmolested. Those were rough and rugged days, through which equally rough and rugged men served and suffered to find foundations whereon to lay those two threads of steel that now cling like a cobweb to the walls of the wonderful "gap" known as ...
— The Moccasin Maker • E. Pauline Johnson
... dart at and so dimple it again. It is like molten glass cooled but not congealed, and the few motes in it are pure and beautiful like the imperfections in glass. You may often detect a yet smoother and darker water, separated from the rest as if by an invisible cobweb, boom of the water nymphs, resting on it. From a hilltop you can see a fish leap in almost any part; for not a pickerel or shiner picks an insect from this smooth surface but it manifestly disturbs the ...
— Walden, and On The Duty Of Civil Disobedience • Henry David Thoreau
... paper slips down from the walls and crumples to a heap on the floor. The paint and varnish drop from the woodwork like so much sand. Every cobweb and speck of dust rolls off and falls in a little black ...
— Common Science • Carleton W. Washburne
... all this folk, flown guests and masters of the still-abiding palace-chambers, haunt us as we hurry through. They are but filmy shadows. We cannot grasp them, localise them, people surrounding emptiness with more than withering cobweb forms. ...
— New Italian sketches • John Addington Symonds
... joiner makes tables, chairs, and other wooden objects. I use no sort of alcoholics. His old mother carried on the management of the house. "An evil appearance he had," answered the Jew. She thought over the doings of the past day. It is as light as a cobweb. The train of the dress was long. They ...
— The Esperanto Teacher - A Simple Course for Non-Grammarians • Helen Fryer
... in and out among the great, tall, pillar-like trunks whose tops shut out the light of day, all but where at intervals what seemed to us like rays of golden dust, or there were silvery-looking lines of finest cobweb stretching from far on high, but which proved to be only delicate threads of sunshine which had pierced the great canopy ...
— Mass' George - A Boy's Adventures in the Old Savannah • George Manville Fenn
... had succeeded in restoring the candle to consciousness, the light fell upon a tall, shy-looking man of about thirty-five, with long, hay-colored beard and mustache, upon which the rain-drops stood in clusters, like the night-dew on patches of cobweb in a meadow. It was an honest face, with unworldly sort of blue eyes, that looked out from under the broad visor of the infantry cap. With a deferential glance towards us, the new-comer unstrapped his knapsack, spread his blanket over it, and sat ...
— Modern Prose And Poetry; For Secondary Schools - Edited With Notes, Study Helps, And Reading Lists • Various
... Sayyid, Shaykh Furayj, and the ex-Wakl, Mohammed Shahdah, who is trusted by the Bedawin, and who brought with him a guide of the Faw'idah-Juhaynah, one Rjih ibn Ayid. This fellow was by no means a fair specimen of his race: the cynocephalous countenance, the cobweb beard, and the shifting, treacherous eyes were exceptional; the bellowing voice and the greed of gain were not. He had a free passage for himself, his child, and eight sacks of rice, with the promise of a napoleon by way of "bakhshsh;" yet he complained ...
— The Land of Midian, Vol. 2 • Richard Burton
... thee; And they shall fetch thee Iewels from the deepe, And sing, while thou on pressed flowers dost sleepe: And I will purge thy mortall grossenesse so, That thou shalt like an airie spirit go. Enter Pease-blossome, Cobweb, ...
— The First Folio [35 Plays] • William Shakespeare
... Dan thought, and the result of his cogitations was that on the Monday he stole a sheaf of Nicholas's most complicated cobweb-like diagrams from their hiding-place in the wall, and brought them with him when he went by appointment to meet his patron off beyond Knockfinny. And when Mr. Willett said to him: "Well, Dan, what about the States and the doctoring?" he replied inconsequently ...
— Strangers at Lisconnel • Barlow Jane
... during his trip was which had impressed him the most; and he said at once the St. Louis bridge. But his companion said, Are you not astonished at the Capitol of Washington? "Yes," he said, "but my people can pile stones on top of each other; but they cannot make a cobweb of steel hang ...
— Our Unitarian Gospel • Minot Savage
... Prince, clapping his hands. "Come here and let me decorate you, my friend." And as John bowed before him the Prince placed upon his bosom a beautiful star of diamonds that gleamed and sparkled like a cobweb full ...
— John of the Woods • Abbie Farwell Brown
... of barking," answered Temperance, laying smooth a piece of cobweb lawn. "I think I'll bite, one of these days. Deary me, but there are widows of divers sorts! If ever there were what Paul calls 'a widow indeed,' it is my Lady Lettice; and she doesn't make a screen of it, as Faith does, against all the east winds that blow. Well, well! Give me that pin-case, Lettice, ...
— It Might Have Been - The Story of the Gunpowder Plot • Emily Sarah Holt
... something like a cobweb on the sky between the central pier and the opposite bank. There was a black spot that resembled a spider moving slowly along the ...
— Six Months at the Cape • R.M. Ballantyne
... viscid, and which adheres in the excretory ducts of the glands of the skin; as described in Class I. 2. 2. 9. and which may be pressed out by the fingers, and resembles little worms. Similar to this would seem the fabrication of silk, and of cobweb by the silk worm and spider; which is a secreted matter pressed through holes, which are the excretory ducts of glands. And it is probable, that the production of hair on many parts of the body, and at different periods of life, ...
— Zoonomia, Vol. II - Or, the Laws of Organic Life • Erasmus Darwin
... corridor on which it opened was cut off from the other boxes by hangings of tapestry. One of the most beautiful effects of all was made by the ceiling, where the chandeliers shone through a network of strings of smilax and white and green electric lights radiating from the center like the strands of a cobweb. As may be guessed, the brilliancy of the audience was in harmony with that of the audience-room. The price of tickets for the stalls on the main floor was thirty dollars, and the chairs in the other parts of the room cost proportionately. Persons who could pay such ...
— Chapters of Opera • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... country places I could tell you of. When one walks on those grey roads at evening by the scented elder-bushes of the white cottages, watching the faint mountains gathering the clouds upon their heads, one all too readily discovers, beyond the thin cobweb veil of the senses, those creatures, the goblins, hurrying from the white square stone door to the north, or from the Heart Lake ...
— The Celtic Twilight • W. B. Yeats
... the Hammer, Pepin Bow-legged, where now is their eye of menace, their voice of command? Rollo and his shaggy Northmen cover not the Seine with ships; but have sailed off on a longer voyage. The hair of Towhead (Tete d'etoupes) now needs no combing; Iron-cutter (Taillefer) cannot cut a cobweb; shrill Fredegonda, shrill Brunhilda have had out their hot life-scold, and lie silent, their hot life-frenzy cooled. Neither from that black Tower de Nesle descends now darkling the doomed gallant, in his sack, to the Seine ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle
... break down the obstruction. Until some altogether new means of transport are provided, the attempt to restrict the number of passengers which a car or trolley may carry is, I think, antisocial, and must prove futile. The force of public convenience would break the red-tape barrier like a cobweb. The trains and trolleys follow each other at the very briefest intervals; it does not seem possible that a greater number should be run on the existing lines; and, that being so, there is no alternative between overcrowding ...
— America To-day, Observations and Reflections • William Archer
... be wary, and pull in your sails, And yield unto the weather of the tempest. You think your power's infinite as your malice, And would do all your anger prompts you to; But you must wait occasions, and obey them: Sail in an egg-shell, make a straw your mast, A cobweb all your cloth, and pass unseen, Till you have 'scaped the rocks ...
— English Literature For Boys And Girls • H.E. Marshall
... Eliot, in 'Middlemarch,' 'ever pinched into its pilulous smallness the cobweb of pre-matrimonial acquaintance?' And, to press the metaphor, the cobweb, as far as Mark and Mabel were concerned, brilliantly as it shone in all its silken iridescence, would have rolled up into a particularly small pill. Mark was anxious ...
— The Giant's Robe • F. Anstey
... he made the strange announcement that all the rebels, as they were called, would be freely pardoned, and invited the leading Protestant nobles to appear before him at Prague. They walked into the trap like flies into a cobweb. If the nobles had only cared to do so, they might all have escaped after the battle of the White Hill; for Tilly, the victorious general, had purposely given them time to do so. But for some reason ...
— History of the Moravian Church • J. E. Hutton
... conviction was entirely due to a misguided enthusiasm on the part of the prosecutor, the present writer, whom he characterized as a "novelist" and dreamer. The whole case, he alleged, was constructed out of the latter's fanciful imagination, a cobweb of suspicion, accusation and falsehood. Some day his friend Hubert would come out of the West, into which he had so unfortunately disappeared, and release an innocent man, sentenced, practically to death, because the case had fallen into the hands of ...
— True Stories of Crime From the District Attorney's Office • Arthur Train
... not; and further saw a quiet purpose in his face. She was sure he had fixed upon the time, if not the day. She felt those cobweb bands all around her. Here she was, almost in bridal attire, at his side already. ...
— The Old Helmet, Volume I • Susan Warner
... everlastingly patching up the leaks and defects in the construction of the Villas. The next morning we had reveille at six, and turned out promptly to feed the wretched horses; the poor, woe-begone looking creatures, hardly one of which was properly picketed, were standing expectantly amid a perfect cobweb of muddy, tangled picketing ropes in the quagmire, which represented their lines. One of the fellows, who had passed the night under our ox waggon, on lifting his rain-sodden blanket, found to his surprise and disgust a fine iguana, ...
— A Yeoman's Letters - Third Edition • P. T. Ross
... wish he'd given us some facts; they would have been serviceable. But the letters reveal nothing except that he knew Doris. He writes in one of them: 'Doris is learning to embroider. It's like a fairy weaving a cobweb!' Doris isn't a very common name. She must be the same little girl to whom Miss Challoner wrote from time ...
— Initials Only • Anna Katharine Green
... place, my soul had for its daily food the bread of spiritual dryness. Then, too, dear Mother, Our Lord allowed you, unconsciously, to treat me very severely. You found fault with me whenever you met me. I remember once I had left a cobweb in the cloister, and you said to me before the whole community: "It is easy to see that our cloisters are swept by a child of fifteen. It is disgraceful! Go and sweep away that cobweb, and be more ...
— The Story of a Soul (L'Histoire d'une Ame): The Autobiography of St. Therese of Lisieux • Therese Martin (of Lisieux)
... to break loose from the critical cobweb of an age of periwigs and patches, that accounted itself 'understanding,' and the grand epoch of our Elizabethan literature, 'barbarous.' Rymer, one of ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... implicated. The intrigue, 'a dark kind of treason,' as Rushworth calls it, 'a sham plot' as it is styled by Sir John Hawles, belongs to our story only so far as the cross machinations involved Ralegh. His slender relation to it is as hard to fix as a cobweb or a nightmare. Even in his own age his part in it was, as obsolete Echard says, 'all riddle and mystery.' Cobham had an old acquaintance with the Count of Arenberg, Minister to the Archduke Albert and the Infanta Isabel, joint sovereigns of ...
— Sir Walter Ralegh - A Biography • William Stebbing
... diction, your perspicuity which leaves no cobweb of misty doubt wherewith to drape my shivering moral deformity! To 'see ourselves as others see us' is as disappointing as the result of plunging one's hand into the 'grab-bag', but at least it brings the stimulating tingle of a ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... that the fan-bearers and the other attendants, women and men, are in their places.—Here are the pearl and diamond necklaces for your throat and bosom. Take care of the robe. The transparent bombyx is as delicate as a cobweb, and if you tear it No, you must not refuse. We all know how it pleases him to see his goddess in divine majesty and beauty." Cleopatra, with glowing cheeks and throbbing heart, made no further objection to donning the superb festal robe, strewn with glimmering pearls and glittering gems. It ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... members of my family fortune scratching and clucking about my feet that I prolonged the process of the feeding by scattering only a few grains at a time until great shafts of golden morning sun were thrusting themselves in through the dim dusk and cobweb-veiled windows. ...
— The Golden Bird • Maria Thompson Daviess
... do very nicely," said Avrillia. "Now a thimble—a really good one, please, that is thoroughly finger-broken, and has a tractable disposition and some sense. The one this little girl has now is simply abominable, and wouldn't push a needle through cobweb—not to mention the heavy textiles they are obliged to use in her country. Now, some knotless thread, please," she continued, having decided upon a thimble after much careful thought. "Oh, no—not that! I don't mean the kind that ...
— The Garden of the Plynck • Karle Wilson Baker
... grave music of the Syro-Chaldaic tongue he put the mutterings of thunder. Where he had preached, he upbraided; in place of exquisite parables came sonorous threats. He blessed but rarely, sometimes he cursed. That mosaic, the Law, he treated like a cobweb; and to the arrogant clergy a rumor filtered that this vagabond, who had not where to lay his head, declared his ability to destroy the Temple, and to rebuild ...
— Mary Magdalen • Edgar Saltus
... got the key of the house from Paul, explored it thoroughly, and was satisfied that no improper visitor had recently entered the drawing-room at least, as the windows were strongly bolted on the inside, and a large cobweb, heavy with dust, hung across the doorway. This did no great credit to Paul's stewardship, but was, perhaps, a slight relief to me. Nor could I see a trace of anything uncanny outside the house. When Severance went with me, next day, the coast was equally clear, and I was glad to ...
— Oldport Days • Thomas Wentworth Higginson
... as if man's actions were the most natural, they so gently accord with her. The small seines of flax stretched across the shallow and transparent parts of our river, are no more intrusion than the cobweb in the sun. I stay my boat in midcurrent, and look down in the sunny water to see the civil meshes of his nets, and wonder how the blustering people of the town could have done this elvish work. The twine looks like a new river weed, and ...
— Excursions • Henry D. Thoreau
... underlying systems of ways contrived for water and steam and fire. On either hand tower facades pierced by scores of tiers of windows,—cliffs of architecture shutting out the sun. Above, the pale blue streak of sky is cut by a maze of spidery lines,—an infinite cobweb of electric wires. In that block on the right there dwell nine thousand souls; the tenants of the edifice facing it pay the annual rent of a million dollars. Seven millions scarcely covered the cost of those bulks overshadowing the square beyond,—and ...
— Kokoro - Japanese Inner Life Hints • Lafcadio Hearn
... then she let drop another word or two on the subject of her fright; her poor disconnected brain seemed unable to grasp anything as a whole; something would float across it and be lost. Marie had grown apt at gathering together these cobweb strands, and disentangling them, but now even her ingenuity was at fault, and the number was the only point which stood out clearly from wavering words about a man and a box. She gathered at last that somewhere or other this number with the light shining on it ...
— Tales from Many Sources - Vol. V • Various
... earth, if left alone, What sort of life wouldst thou have led? How oft, by methods all my own, I've chased the cobweb fancies from thy head! And but for me, to parts unknown Thou from this earth hadst long since fled. What dost thou here through cave and crevice groping? Why like a horned owl sit moping? And why from dripping stone, damp moss, and rotten ...
— Faust • Goethe
... most distinguished courtiers, came in person, and the rogues lifted their arms up in the air, just as if they held something, and said, "See! here are the trousers, here is the coat, here is the cloak," and so forth. "It is as light as a cobweb; one might imagine one had nothing on, but that is just the ...
— Tell Me Another Story - The Book of Story Programs • Carolyn Sherwin Bailey
... skilful right hand was {then} holding, quitted him {on the instant}. Immediately, he files out some slender chains of brass, and nets, and meshes, which can escape the eye. The finest threads cannot surpass that work, nor yet the cobweb that hangs from the top of the beam. He makes it so, too, as to yield to a slight touch, and a gentle movement, and skilfully arranges it drawn around the bed. When the wife and the gallant come into the same bed, being ...
— The Metamorphoses of Ovid - Vol. I, Books I-VII • Publius Ovidius Naso
... and the quiet of the hour, tempted me to an early stroll; for it is pleasant to enjoy such old-time places alone, when one may indulge poetical reveries, and spin cobweb fancies, without interruption. Dressing myself, therefore, with all speed, I descended a small flight of steps from the state apartment into the long corridor over the cloisters, along which I passed to a door at the farther end. Here I emerged into the open air, ...
— Abbotsford and Newstead Abbey • Washington Irving
... of moonbeams and rays of sunshine and rainbow-gleams—this dream—woven by fairy fingers into so fragile a cobweb that it seemed absurd to think it could stand the winds and torrents of Grown-Up Land; but Opal, in spite of her eighteen years, was still awaiting the coming of her ideal knight, though the stage setting ...
— One Day - A sequel to 'Three Weeks' • Anonymous
... off and put his hand over his eyes. Mary feigned not to notice his profound emotion, and, taking up a paper parcel on the table, opened it, and unrolled a long piece of wonderful old lace, yellow with age, and fine as a cobweb. ...
— The Treasure of Heaven - A Romance of Riches • Marie Corelli
... snowy avenues of the Walpole tract sounded the rick-tack of busy axes, the yawk of saws, and the crash of falling timber. The twitch roads, narrow trails which converged to centers like the strands of a cobweb, led to the yards where the logs were piled for the sleds; and from the yards, after the snows were deep and had been iced by watering tanks on sleds, huge loads were eased down the slopes to the landings ...
— Joan of Arc of the North Woods • Holman Day
... light-touched edges threw off a sea-green reflet; with no ornaments but the chtelaine at her side, with no adornment but her own silky hair in its own wayward arrangement. To all this there was just one addition. Hazel had taken the lace veil,exquisite in pattern, cobweb-like in texture, and laid it across her head like a Spanish mantilla, from whence it came down about her on all sides to the floor, leaving only the face and the front of the dress clear. One little ungloved hand held the lace lightly together; ...
— The Gold of Chickaree • Susan Warner
... opening before it. Orde, returning to Lansing after a trip devoted to the carrying out of Newmark's directions as to finances, was dismayed at the tangle of strategy and cross-strategy, innuendo, vague and formless cobweb forces by which he was surrounded. He could make nothing of them. They brushed his face, he felt their influence, yet he could place his finger on no tangible and comprehensible solidity. Among these delicate and complicated cross-currents ...
— The Riverman • Stewart Edward White
... Thallus, inly softer you than any furry rabbit, Or glossy goose's oily plumes, or velvet earlap yielding, Or feeble age's heavy thighs, or flimsy filthy cobweb; ...
— The Poems and Fragments of Catullus • Catullus
... Chester. 'Dear me! I hope the aged soul has not caught her foot in some unlucky cobweb by the way. She is there at last! ...
— Barnaby Rudge • Charles Dickens
... come again, this time like a messenger bearing a command, to call him back to a duty which he believed he had relinquished and put down forever. And solely because it would be treasonable to that duty which still clung to him like a tenacious cobweb, he was riding into the smoke ...
— Trail's End • George W. Ogden
... above the clattering of the hammers and the confusion of tongues. Had they been lovers, they would have found each other before, no matter what stood in the way; but friendships, even the warmest, have little of the fierce energy of love, and a very cobweb mesh of circumstances or business engagements can bind the sentiment, while there is no cord spun in the long rope-walk of life, strong enough to fetter the free limbs of the passion. That Walter Harding ...
— Shoulder-Straps - A Novel of New York and the Army, 1862 • Henry Morford
... consequences of enmity, ye have at last to play your last card as protectors of truth upon earth—as though "the Truth" were such an innocent and incompetent creature as to require protectors! and you of all people, ye knights of the sorrowful countenance, Messrs Loafers and Cobweb-spinners of the spirit! Finally, ye know sufficiently well that it cannot be of any consequence if YE just carry your point; ye know that hitherto no philosopher has carried his point, and that there might be a more laudable truthfulness in every little interrogative mark which you place after ...
— Beyond Good and Evil • Friedrich Nietzsche
... the inmost. All that he likes, all that he sees,—all that he can do,—his imagination, his affections, his perseverance, his impatience, his clumsiness, cleverness, everything is there. If the work is a cobweb, you know it was made by a spider; if a honeycomb, by a bee; a worm-cast is thrown up by a worm, and a nest wreathed by a bird; and a house built by a man, worthily, if he is worthy, and ignobly, if ...
— Selections From the Works of John Ruskin • John Ruskin
... devils who come and eat up London, first this part, and then that, then disgorge a little, choking it all up only to snap at it and swallow it down all bewildered a quarter of an hour after. This was a cobweb fog spun, as it might be, by some malignant central spider hidden darkly in his lair. The vapouring-like filmy threads twisted and twined their way all over London, and for four days and nights the town was a city of ghosts. Buildings loomed dimly behind their masks of silver tissue, ...
— The Captives • Hugh Walpole
... Gossamer, and as his account is very interesting, I quote it. He says that on the 21st of September, 1741, intent upon field diversions, he rose before daybreak, but on going out he found the whole face of the country covered with a thick coat of cobweb drenched with dew, as if two or three setting-nets had been drawn one over the other. When his dogs attempted to hunt, their eyes were blinded and hoodwinked, so much that they were obliged to lie down and scrape themselves. This appearance was followed ...
— Essays in Natural History and Agriculture • Thomas Garnett
... will never commit an error in this mental calculation, exceeding the tenth of a second, or six hundredth of a minute. When the star has been thus watched over the seven cobweb lines (or wires), the observer jots down the hour and minute, in addition to the second, and the task is done. Stars, not very near the sun, may be seen in broad daylight, but, at night, it is requisite to direct a ray of ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 2, July, 1850. • Various
... your bill—a very arduous, formidable undertaking. The bill is of prodigious dimensions, about the size of a sheet of foolscap paper, lined and cross-lined for a multitude of entries. When the account finally reaches you, it closely resembles a design for a cobweb factory. Any attempt to decipher the various hieroglyphics is useless—it can't be done. The only thing that can be done is to read the total at the foot of the page and ...
— Composition-Rhetoric • Stratton D. Brooks
... first attempt to draw on his new trousers, to the astonishment of all his messmates, who had now gathered round him, found them separated in the middle of each of his legs. He might as well have attempted to clothe himself with cobweb continuations; they came to pieces almost with a shake. The waistcoat and coat were in the same predicament; they had not the principle of continuity in them. Everybody was lost in amazement, except Mr Pigtop, whose amazement, quite as great as ...
— Rattlin the Reefer • Edward Howard
... vault, the yellow bills hanging from a cobweb of strings; why should they terrify her; what did they threaten? Dully, and from a distance, Monica heard the voice ...
— The Lost Road • Richard Harding Davis
... time in trivialities, Fenton," he rejoined gently. He brushed a fleck of cobweb from his coat. "By this time you ought to know that you cannot deal with me in any ...
— The Blind Spot • Austin Hall and Homer Eon Flint
... river runs perfectly straight for a mile or more to Carlisle Bridge, which consists of twenty wooden piers, and when we looked back over it, its surface was reduced to a line's breadth, and appeared like a cobweb gleaming in the sun. Here and there might be seen a pole sticking up, to mark the place where some fisherman had enjoyed unusual luck, and in return had consecrated his rod to the deities who preside ...
— A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers • Henry David Thoreau
... how John Dolittle with his fat heavy fingers undid that cobweb cord and unrolled the leaf, whole, without tearing it or hurting the precious beetle. The Jabizri he put back into the box. Then he spread the leaf out flat ...
— The Voyages of Doctor Dolittle • Hugh Lofting
... freely pervaded with pronounced white threads this is no sign that the spawn is bad. Bricks dried as hard as a board may be perfectly good; so, too, may be those that are comparatively soft. Mushroom spawn should have a decided smell of mushrooms, and whatever cobweb-like mold may be apparent should be of a fresh bluish white color, and the fine threads clear white. Prominent yellowish threads or veins are a sign that the mycelium had started to grow and been killed. ...
— Mushrooms: how to grow them - a practical treatise on mushroom culture for profit and pleasure • William Falconer
... the note gently across the edge of the keen knife, and the paper parted like a cobweb. He took it to the window and ...
— Put Yourself in His Place • Charles Reade
... will drive me to despair, so determined does she seem to thwart all my plans. I tell her to call me Madame; she persists in calling me Mademoiselle. I told her to bring simple dresses and country shoes; she has brought nothing but embroidered muslins, cobweb handkerchiefs and gray silk boots. I entreated her to put on a simple dress, when she came with me. This made her desperate, and through vengeance and maliciously exaggerated zeal she bundled herself up like an old witch. I tried to ...
— The Cross of Berny • Emile de Girardin
... Young Islay had worn to a thin gossamer, and he was as ardent a lover as any one could be with what still was no more than a young lady of the imagination. And diligently he sought a meeting. It used to be the wonder of Mr. Spencer of the Inns, beholding this cobweb-headed youth continually coming through the Arches and hanging expectant about the town-head, often the only figure there in these hot silent days to give life to the empty scene. There is a stone at Old Islay's corner that yet one may ...
— Gilian The Dreamer - His Fancy, His Love and Adventure • Neil Munro
... graceful appearance of these exquisite creatures is increased by two long, fringed tentacles streaming behind, drifting at full length or contracting into numerous coils. The fringe on these streamers is a series of living hairs—an aquatic cobweb, each active with life, and doing its share in ensnaring minute atoms of food for its owner. When dozens of these ctenophores (or comb-bearers) as they are called, glide slowly to and fro through a pool, the sight is not soon forgotten. To try to photograph them is like attempting ...
— The Log of the Sun - A Chronicle of Nature's Year • William Beebe
... Crown-Princess there is some pleasant shadow traced as on cobweb, to this effect. But of the Crown-Prince there is no forming the least conception from what he says:—this is mere cobweb with Nothing elaborately painted on it. Nor do the portraits of the others attract by their verisimilitude. Here ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. X. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—At Reinsberg—1736-1740 • Thomas Carlyle
... the advancing troops to preserve some kind of alignment. At this the wary prick up their ears. Surprise stares on every face. Immediately follows a crash of musketry as Rodes sweeps away our skirmish line as it were a cobweb. Then comes the long and heavy roll of veteran infantry fire, as he falls upon ...
— The Campaign of Chancellorsville • Theodore A. Dodge
... reason to regard with such contempt the transcendental mode of argument, and to look down upon it, with the conceit of clear-sighted observers of nature, as the brain-cobweb of obscure speculatists. For, if they reflect upon and examine their own arguments, they will find that, after following for some time the path of nature and experience, and discovering themselves no nearer their object, they suddenly leave this path and pass into the region of ...
— The Critique of Pure Reason • Immanuel Kant
... moonlit stillness of the forest had altered indefinably. Its depth and shadows jarred. Fair as it was, it had harbored things sinister and evil. And who might say—there was peace of course in the moon-silver rug of pine among the trees, in the gossamer cobweb there among the bushes jeweled lightly in dew, in the faint, sweet chirp of a drowsy bird above his head—but the moon-ray which lingered in the heart of the wild geranium would presently cascade through the trees to light ...
— Diane of the Green Van • Leona Dalrymple
... first poured down over the Alps and beheld the jewels and marbles and round, smooth, soft women of Italy's ancient civilization. But at the same time he had the unmistakable, the terrifying feeling of dare-devil sacrilege. What were his coarse hands doing, dabbling in silks and cobweb laces and embroideries? Silk fascinated him; but, while he did not like calico so well, he felt at home with it. Yes, he had seized her, had crushed her madly in the embrace of his plowman arms. But that seemed now a freak of courage, a drunken man's deed, ...
— The Fashionable Adventures of Joshua Craig • David Graham Phillips
... wool that are suitable to each other in size. The work of the best knitter in the world would appear ill done if the needles were too fine or too coarse. In the former case, the work would be close and thick; in the latter it would be too much like a cobweb. ...
— Enquire Within Upon Everything - The Great Victorian Domestic Standby • Anonymous
... They know that without hands or feet, without horses, without steam, so far as they can see, they are transported from place to place, and that there is nothing to account for it except the witch-broomstick and the iron or copper cobweb which they see stretched above them. What do they know or care about this last revelation of the omnipresent spirit of the material universe? We ought to go down on our knees when one of these mighty caravans, car after car, spins by us, under the mystic impulse which seems to know not whether ...
— Over the Teacups • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... had the day been from the dawn, All chequer'd was the sky, Thin clouds like scarfs of cobweb lawn Veil'd heaven's most glorious eye. The wind had no more strength than this, That leisurely it blew, To make one leaf the next to kiss That ...
— The Children's Garland from the Best Poets • Various
... hill the Cumberland, clear as when it descended from its mountains five hundred miles away, flowed between its high, straight walls of limestone, spanned by cobweb-like bridges, and bore on its untroubled breast a great fleet of high-chimneyed, white-sided transports, and black, sullen gunboats. Miles away to her left she saw the trains rushing into Nashville, unrolling as they came along black and ...
— The Red Acorn • John McElroy
... nothing. Here his resolution will be tested. Remember there is no element of human character so potential for weal or woe as firmness. To the merchant and the man of business it is all-important. Before its irresistible energy the most formidable obstacles become as cobweb barriers in its path. Difficulties, the terror of which causes the timid and pampered sons of luxury to shrink back with dismay, provoke from the man a lofty determination only a smile. The whole history of our race—all nature, indeed—teems with examples to show ...
— How to Get on in the World - A Ladder to Practical Success • Major A.R. Calhoon
... Cobweb[46], out of which great flyes breake and in which the little are hangd: the Tarriers snaphance[47], limetwiggs, weavers shuttle & blankets in which fooles & wrangling coxcombes are tossd. Doe I ...
— A Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. II • Various
... is a relation eternally disparate from the relation of propinquity or derivation between existences. Yet when sounds were attached to an event or emotion, the sounds became symbols for that disparate fact. The net of vocal relations caught that natural object as a cobweb might catch a fly, without destroying or changing it. The object's quality passed to the word at the same time that the word's relations enveloped the object; and thus a new weight and significance was added to sound, previously nothing but a dull music. A conflict at once established ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... roof is like a sheet of silk Spun like a cobweb. My apple-trees are bare as the oaks in the forest; When the moon shines I ...
— Poems By a Little Girl • Hilda Conkling
... occupied. Soon she returned with flowers in her hand, and without looking at me, seated herself once more upon the marble. She was as delicate as a shade. An oval face with severe profile, surrounded by nut-brown hair; I could not see her eyes. Her drapery was of cobweb-colored gauze, the clasp of her girdle a simple buckle of soft, shaded vermilion. Face and hands were bloodlessly pale; her figure tall, slight, and fine. Thus she sat there; delicately, and yet with color and warmth, ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries - Masterpieces of German Literature Vol. 19 • Various
... And shades with cypress the young poet's bays: Pale and dejected, mark, how genius strives With poverty, and mark, how well it thrives; The shabby cov'ring of the gentle bard, Regard it well, 'tis worthy thy regard, The friendly cobweb, serving for a screen, The chair, a part of what it once had been; The bed, whereon th' unhappy victim slept And oft unseen, in silent anguish, wept, Or spent in dear delusive dreams, the night, To wake, next morning, but to curse the light, Too deep distress the artist's hand reveals; ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 13, - Issue 350, January 3, 1829 • Various
... which he had deposited himself, his hands folded on his breast, his legs stretched straight out before him and resting upon the heels, his eyes cast up to the ceiling as if he had meant to count every mesh of every cobweb with which the arched roof was canopied, wearing at the same time a face of as solemn and imperturbable gravity, as if his existence had depended on ...
— The Monastery • Sir Walter Scott
... well what he meant when he wrote it all. Taking a stump of cedar pencil from his pocket, one end of it much gnawn, he added a few scrawls to the inscriptions, and then stood on the seat to look out of the round window, which was darkened by an old cobweb. ...
— Wood Magic - A Fable • Richard Jefferies
... suddenly her heart sank with a miserable sense of impotence and dismay. Yes, this was the place beyond question. Through the picket fence she could make out the looming shadows of many buildings, and spidery iron structures that seemed to cobweb the darkness, and—and—Her face mirrored her misery. She had thought of a single building. Where, inside there, amongst all those rambling structures, with little time, perhaps none at all, to search, was ...
— The White Moll • Frank L. Packard
... stairway turns in the dark A hooded figure, shriveled under a flowing cloak! Not yellow eyes in the room at night, Staring out from a surface of cobweb gray! And not the flap of a condor wing When the roar of life in your ears begins As a sound heard never before! But on a sunny afternoon, By a country road, Where purple rag-weeds bloom along a straggling fence And the ...
— Spoon River Anthology • Edgar Lee Masters
... sought to entangle Le Gardeur's thoughts in an elaborate cobweb of occupations rivalling that of Arachne, which she had woven to catch every leisure hour of his, so as to leave him no time to brood over the pleasures of the Palace of the Intendant or the charms ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby
... the desolate cavern of the store; the ghostly remnant of cotton goods fluttered in a draft like a torn and grimy cobweb; the ...
— Wild Oranges • Joseph Hergesheimer
... at the web of all the human future; even your naught is a cobweb, and a spider that liveth on the blood ...
— Thus Spake Zarathustra - A Book for All and None • Friedrich Nietzsche
... towards the sun, which was also in the direction of Wildeve's. The mist had now so far collapsed that the tips of the trees and bushes around his house could just be discerned, as if boring upwards through a vast white cobweb which cloaked them from the day. There was no doubt that her mind was inclined thitherward; indefinitely, fancifully—twining and untwining about him as the single object within her horizon on which dreams ...
— The Return of the Native • Thomas Hardy
... plan, Maggie thought she had no time to lose in making her confession. Frank would be here before her mother got up again to tea. But she dreaded speaking about her happiness; it seemed as yet so cobweb-like, as if a ...
— The Moorland Cottage • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... arm and exclaimed: "Look there!" I looked up into the northern sky. There was not a cloud visible in all that wide expanse, but something more filmy than a cloud floated like a banner among the stars. It might almost have been a cobweb stretched from star to star—each strand woven from a star beam,—but it was ever changing in form and color. Now it was scarf-like, fluttering and waving in a gentle breeze; and now it hung motionless—a deep fringe of lace gathered in ample folds. Anon ...
— Over the Rocky Mountains to Alaska • Charles Warren Stoddard
... "how splendid it would be to have M. St. Armand for one's father! I have never cared for any girl's father, but M. St. Armand would be gentle and kind. I think, too, he could smooth away all the sort of cobweb things that haunt one's brain and the thoughts you cannot make take any shape but go floating like drifts in the sky, until you are lost in ...
— A Little Girl in Old Detroit • Amanda Minnie Douglas
... low whistle, looking wide awake all in a minute as he said with a gesture, as if he brushed a cobweb off his face: "Now, see here, Cousin, I'm not good at mysteries and shall only blunder if you put me blindfold into any nice maneuver. Just tell me straight out what you want and I'll do it if I can. Play I'm Uncle and free ...
— Rose in Bloom - A Sequel to "Eight Cousins" • Louisa May Alcott
... And thrill our tuneful frames; The garden walks are passional To bachelors and dames. The hedge is gemmed with diamonds, The air with Cupids full, The cobweb clues of Rosamond Guide lovers to the pool. Each dimple in the water, Each leaf that shades the rock Can cozen, pique and flatter, Can parley and provoke. Goodfellow, Puck and goblins, Know more than any book. Down with your doleful problems, And court ...
— Poems - Household Edition • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... wonderful activity of fancy. Shakspeare's delicate creations are touched again without crumbling at the touch, clad in new down, fed on a fresh supply of "honey-dew," and sent out on minor but aerial errands—although, after all, we prefer Puck and Ariel—not to speak of those delectable personages, Cobweb, Peaseblossom, and Mustardseed. Ariel's "oak," in our poet's hands, becomes a "vial"—"knotty entrails" are exchanged for a "bodkin's eye"—the fine dew of the "still vexed Bermoothes" is degraded into an "essence;" pomatum takes the place of poetry; the enchanted lock, of an ...
— Poetical Works of Pope, Vol. II • Alexander Pope
... had imposed upon her soul fell away at that like bonds of cobweb. She laid her hand upon his wrists, tears stood in her ...
— Mistress Wilding • Rafael Sabatini
... like the semicircles and stairways of an amphitheater. Nearly in the heart of the place rose the audacious and exquisitely embroidered tower of the town-house, three hundred and sixty-six feet in height; a miracle of needlework in stone, rivaling in its intricate carving the cobweb tracery of that lace which has for centuries been synonymous with the city, and rearing itself above a facade of profusely decorated and brocaded architecture. The crest of the elevation was crowned by the towers of the old ducal palace of Brabant, with its extensive and thickly wooded ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. X (of X) - America - II, Index • Various
... any display, if you wish to please me,' she said; and with a wave of her cobweb handkerchief she signified that the conference ...
— Tracy Park • Mary Jane Holmes |
