"Mazy" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... unto his shell-like ear And there was music carven in his face, His eyes half-closed, his lips just breaking open To catch the lulling, mazy, coralline roar Of numberless ...
— Georgian Poetry 1916-17 • Various
... unconfin'd Restraint! imprisoned liberty! great key To golden palaces, strange ministrelsy, Fountains grotesque, new trees, bespangled caves, Echoing grottos, full of tumbling waves And moonlight, aye, to all the mazy world Of silvery enchantment!—who, upfurl'd Beneath thy drowsy wing a triple hour But renovates ...
— Sleep-Book - Some of the Poetry of Slumber • Various
... the arms of silence,—list, O list!— The music bursteth into second life; The notes luxuriate, every stone is kiss'd By sound, or ghost of sound, in mazy strife." Eccle. Son., ...
— Shakespeare: His Life, Art, And Characters, Volume I. • H. N. Hudson
... water as a supporting medium. Swift and mobile as is the swallow's wing, how much swifter and how much more mobile must be his eye! This rapid and ever-changing course is not followed for pleasure as if it were a mazy dance. The whole time as he floats, and glides, and wheels, his eye is intent on insects so small as to be invisible to us at a very short distance. These he gathers in the air, he sees what we cannot see, his eyes ...
— Field and Hedgerow • Richard Jefferies
... rat-infested slums, from the hot shadows and the mazy back-bazaars, from temples, store-houses, shops, and from the sin-steeped underworld, there screamed and surged and swept the many-graded, many-minded polyglot rebellion-spume. A quarter of a million underdogs had turned against their ...
— Told in the East • Talbot Mundy
... about Brook Ridge, Westbury knew—an all-wide Providence could scarcely know more. He knew every family, its history and inter-relationships. His favorite diversion was to take up and pursue some genealogical thread, to follow its mazy meanderings down the generations, dropping in curious bits of unwritten history—some of it spicy enough, some of it boisterously funny, some of it somber and gruesome, but all of it alive with the very color and savor of the land that ...
— Dwellers in Arcady - The Story of an Abandoned Farm • Albert Bigelow Paine
... and the boys pranced up to the ladies, old and young; with polite invitations to "tread the mazy," as dear Dick Swiveller has it. The small lads nearly came to blows for the Princess, but she chose Dick, like a kind, little gentlewoman as she was, and let him lead her proudly to her place. Mrs. Jo was not allowed ...
— Little Men - Life at Plumfield With Jo's Boys • Louisa May Alcott
... My hopes begin to revive. I am again permitted to associate with my Eliza—invited to the same entertainment. She does not refuse to join with me in the mazy dance, and partake the scenes of festive mirth. Nay, more; she allows me to press her hand to my lips, and listens to the sighing accents of love. Love her I certainly do. Would to Heaven I could marry her! Would to Heaven I had preserved my fortune, or she had one to supply its place! I ...
— The Coquette - The History of Eliza Wharton • Hannah Webster Foster
... by the music of an excellent band under the leadership of Gilbert Gerrish, the assembled guests with the vigor and enthusiasm of youth caught the prevailing spirit of merriment, and gave themselves up to the fascinating movement of musical measures. Lost in the charm of the mazy dance, the merrymakers noted not the flight of time. The last number on the program came all too soon ...
— Solaris Farm - A Story of the Twentieth Century • Milan C. Edson
... the tangy, heady air. There had been a long, long drive and a parting with the friendly driver where Bella turned on to the trail through the woods. It had been dim and dark and terrible among the endless regiments of trees—mazy and green and altogether bewildering. And after vague hop-o'-my-thumb wanderings, he had a disconnected memory of Hugh—a wild, rugged, ragged, bearded Hugh who caught him up fiercely as though he had an ogrish hunger for the feel of little boys. It was night when they came to Hugh's hiding-place. ...
— Snow-Blind • Katharine Newlin Burt
... entirely to bar the valley, so suddenly, and in so short a curve, did it wind round their western shoulder. To the left hand, the view was closed by a thick belt of second growth, through which the sandy road and glittering stream wandered away together on their mazy path, and over which the summits of yet loftier and more ...
— Warwick Woodlands - Things as they Were There Twenty Years Ago • Henry William Herbert (AKA Frank Forester)
... at early dawn, To taste the dew-besprinkled lawn, Behind she hears the hunter's cries, And from the deep-mouth'd thunder flies; She starts, she stops, she pants for breath; She hears the near advance of death; She doubles to mislead the hound, And measures back her mazy round; 'Till, fainting in the public way, Half dead with fear she gasping lay. What transports in her bosom grew, When first the horse appear'd in view! Let me, says she, your back ascend, And owe my safety to a friend; You know my feet betray my flight, To friendship every burden's light. The ...
— A Museum for Young Gentlemen and Ladies - A Private Tutor for Little Masters and Misses • Unknown
... broken reflections inferior in beauty and suggestion. Instead of motionless repetition of given detail, there are flickering, sinuous, mazy windings and twistings of colour, light, and shadow—a capricious hurrying from surface to surface. Knowledge of optics cannot rob them of their marvel and their glamour. And if such be their effect on the modern ...
— Nature Mysticism • J. Edward Mercer
... seen some of old Louis's old-fashioned Galanteries at Versailles. Rosamond's bower, you, and I, and Tom Hearne know, was a labyrinth:(769) but as my territory will admit of a very short clew, I lay aside all thoughts of a mazy habitation: though a bower is very different from an arbour, and must have more chambers than one. In short, I both know, and don't know, what it should be. I am almost afraid I must go and read Spenser, ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole Volume 3 • Horace Walpole
... silent! to the beating of my heart I listen'd, and nought else around me heard. How stirless! even a waving gossamer— The mazy motes that rise and fall in air— Had been as signs of life; when, suddenly, As bursts the thunder-peal upon the calm, Whence I had come the clank of feet was heard— A noise remote, which near'd and near'd, and near'd— Even to the threshold of that room it came, Where, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 349, November, 1844 • Various
... Interpreting the mazy nexus of phenomena only by the facts which science has revealed, and what conclusion are we driven to accept? Clearly, looking to what has been said in the last two sections, that from the time when the process of evolution first began,—from the time ...
— A Candid Examination of Theism • George John Romanes
... artist's hand had wrought With curious workmanship, a mazy dance, Like that which Daedalus in Cnossus erst At fair-hair'd Ariadne's bidding fram'd. There, laying each on other's wrists their hand, Bright youths and many-suitor'd maidens danc'd: In fair white linen these; in tunics those, Well woven, shining soft ...
— The Iliad • Homer
... pierce the skies, and whose foundations penetrate even to the empire of the dead." Julius Caesar gazed proudly upon those turrets; and here the shouts of Roman legions, fifteen hundred years ago proclaimed Julian emperor; and Roman maidens, with throbbing hearts, trod these floors in the mazy dance. No one can enter the grand hall of the haths, without being deeply impressed with the majestic aspect of the edifice, and with the grandeur of its gigantic proportions. The decay of nearly two thousand years has left its venerable impress ...
— Napoleon Bonaparte • John S. C. Abbott
... piece of ground on which it lay had been plotted out for it a hundred years ago, and it had come to it by a million mazy paths, but not less surely than had it followed the leading ...
— The Pools of Silence • H. de Vere Stacpoole
... away into the wild, mountain scenery of the Meuse. Steep, rocky hills, covered with pine and crowned with ruined towers, hemmed in the winding and swollen river, and the wet, cloudy sky seemed to rest like a canopy on their summits. Instead of threading their mazy defiles, we plunged directly into the mountain's heart, flew over the narrow valley on lofty and light-sprung arches, and went again into the darkness. At Verviers, our baggage was weighed, examined ...
— Views a-foot • J. Bayard Taylor
... Mrs. St. Quintin's. It seems to have been an excellent establishment. Mary learnt the harp and astronomy; her taste for literature was encouraged. The young ladies, attired as shepherdesses, were also taught to skip through many mazy movements, but she never distinguished herself as a shepherdess. She had greater success in her literary efforts, and her composition 'on balloons' was much applauded. She returned to her home in 1802. 'Plain in figure and in face, she was never common-looking,' says Mr. Harness. He gives ...
— Our Village • Mary Russell Mitford
... young native men and maidens, in the windings of the mazy dance, might have been seen disporting himself, a person of stalwart form, whose attire still somewhat faintly indicated his European origin and sacred functions. A hymn-book in my hand instead of a rattle (used by the natives), I capered gaily through their midst. Often and often I led ...
— In the Wrong Paradise • Andrew Lang
... star to star, and world to world, crashing and heaping them together in ruinous and dire confusion. So that, instead of the infinitude of worlds which now exist, which flash and sparkle in the heavens, and in their intricate, elaborate, and mazy motions move through the vast infinity like stately armies on the march, there would only be one agglomeration of matter, a silent and solitary mass existing in the ...
— Aether and Gravitation • William George Hooper
... taborines are in echoing, On a curved oat the Phrygian deep pipeth a melody, With a fury toss the Maenads clad in ivies a frolic head, To a barbarous ululation the religious orgy wakes, Where fleets across the silence Cybele's holy family; 25 Thither his we, so beseems us; to a mazy measure away." ...
— The Poems and Fragments of Catullus • Catullus
... Whyte's breath away. Reg succeeded in finding two vacant seats near a Colonel's widow, who was an acquaintance of Mrs. Whyte and, having comfortably settled the old lady, offered his arm to Amy and they were soon whirling together in the mazy throng of waltzers. ...
— Australia Revenged • Boomerang
... your second labour should be the tidying up of this room—all these papers are prophecies relating to the Deliverer—but it is one of our laws that the judge must not use any public matter for his own personal benefit. So I have decided that the next labour shall be the disentangling of the Mazy Carpet. It is in the Pillared Hall of Public Amusements. I will get my hat and we will go there at once. I can tell you about ...
— The Magic City • Edith Nesbit
... exactly meet, And learn to crawl upon poetic feet. Here one poor word an hundred clenches makes, And ductile dulness new meanders takes There motley images her fancy strike, Figures ill paired, and similes unlike. She sees a mob of metaphors advance, Pleased with the madness of the mazy dance; How tragedy and comedy embrace; How farce and epic get a jumbled race; How Time himself[190] stands still at her command, Realms shift their place, and ocean turns to land. Here gay description ...
— English Satires • Various
... half-intermitted burst 20 Huge fragments vaulted like rebounding hail, Or chaffy grain beneath the thresher's flail: And 'mid these dancing rocks at once and ever It flung up momently the sacred river. Five miles meandering with a mazy motion 25 Through wood and dale the sacred river ran, Then reached the caverns measureless to man, And sank in tumult to a lifeless ocean: And 'mid this tumult Kubla heard from far Ancestral voices prophesying ...
— Coleridge's Ancient Mariner and Select Poems • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... bolder steps they ventured nigh To catch the youthful hermit's eye. Then all the damsels, blithe and gay, At various games began to play. They tossed the flying ball about With dance and song and merry shout, And moved, their scented tresses bound With wreaths, in mazy motion round. Some girls as if by love possessed, Sank to the earth in feigned unrest, Up starting quickly to pursue Their intermitted game anew. It was a lovely sight to see Those fair ones, as they played, While fragrant robes were floating free, ...
— The Ramayana • VALMIKI
... his scanty stock of English ammunition scattered over the sterile floor of his literary magazine, he could not have the effrontery, impudence, or presumption to enter the list of philosophical and scientific disputation with one who has traversed the thorny paths of literature, explored its mazy windings, and who is thoroughly and radically fortified, as being encompassed with the impenetrable shield of genuine science. This red, hot, fiery, unguarded locust, in the inanity of his mind's incomprehensibleness, has not only incurred my displeasure by his satirical ...
— The Hedge School; The Midnight Mass; The Donagh • William Carleton
... the mazy dance, Nor let your fancy trace Resemblance in a timid glance; Or distant form and face. But if you seek me, be it when No other forms are near; And while in thought we meet again, For me ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 484 - Vol. 17, No. 484, Saturday, April 9, 1831 • Various
... off in the direction taken by the blacks, hastening through the ruins in the full expectation of coming upon them at any moment, till the mazy wilderness of stones and trees closed in and ...
— Dead Man's Land - Being the Voyage to Zimbambangwe of certain and uncertain • George Manville Fenn
... still varying progress, for the woe My heart has felt, what balm had been supplied? But where great NATURE smiles, as here she smiles, 'Mid verdant vales, and gently swelling hills, And glassy lakes, and mazy, murmuring rills, And narrow wood-wild lanes, her spell beguiles Th' impatient sighs of Grief, and reconciles Poetic Minds to Life, ...
— Original sonnets on various subjects; and odes paraphrased from Horace • Anna Seward
... evenings, uttered their dismal, deep bass hoot, hoot, hoo-oo-oot, from the depths of the gloomy forest side, beyond the Little Sea; the hen-hawks that cried down chickee-ee to us, from endless mazy circles high over the farm, and occasionally decimated the poultry, or were seen sailing low across the fields with a snake dangling from their claws; the eagles that seldom, but on a few occasions paid a brief visit to the vicinity; the herons that frogged along the boggy shore of the lake and ...
— When Life Was Young - At the Old Farm in Maine • C. A. Stephens
... these bare bluffs of rock, seemingly flung by the hand of Nature in a sportive mood into the blue waves, lingers one of the most insidious of all the old Greek legends, for it was past these lonely cliffs that the cunning Ulysses sailed during his long career of mazy wanderings in search of his island home and his faithful Penelope. In those days, so the Greek bard tells us, there dwelt upon these islets strange sea-witches with the faces and forms of most beautiful maidens, although their lower limbs had the resemblance ...
— The Naples Riviera • Herbert M. Vaughan
... streams, Runs diverse, wandering many a famous realm And country, whereof here needs no account; But rather to tell how, if art could tell, How from that sapphire fount the crisped brooks, Rolling on orient pearl and sands of gold, With mazy error under pendent shades, Ran nectar, visiting each plant, and fed Flowers worthy of Paradise, which not nice art In beds and curious knots, but nature boon Pour'd forth profuse on hill, and dale, and plain, Both where the morning sun first warmly smote The open field, ...
— Flowers and Flower-Gardens • David Lester Richardson
... Even if very little of the latter was visible in the classical period, as seems possible, yet the site seems always to have been kept holy and free from later building till Roman times, and we know that the tradition of the mazy halls and corridors of the labyrinth was always clear, and was evidently based on a vivid reminiscence. Actually, one of the most prominent characteristics of the Knossian palace is its mazy and labyrinthine system of passages and chambers. The parallel between the two buildings, which ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, And Assyria In The Light Of Recent Discovery • L.W. King and H.R. Hall
... fragrant tangle A wanderer winging went, And with many a ruby spangle Were his tawny vans besprent. And he hovered one moment stilly O'er the thicket, her mazy bower, Then he sank to the heart of the lily, And they seemed ...
— Ride to the Lady • Helen Gray Cone
... though years have passed since I last sat under the Cubber Burr's sheltering boughs with a merry party of picnicking maidens, now grown to womanhood, imagination still loves to roam among its shadows, and build fairy castles within the mazy windings of the ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII. No. 30. September, 1873 • Various
... awake, And give to rapture all thy trembling strings. From Helicon's harmonious springs A thousand rills their mazy progress take: The laughing flowers that round them blow, 5 Drink life and fragrance as they flow. Now the rich stream of music winds along, Deep, majestic, smooth, and strong, Thro' verdant vales, and Ceres' golden reign: Now rolling down the steep amain, 10 Headlong, ...
— Select Poems of Thomas Gray • Thomas Gray
... within myself, then, catching up my knotted bludgeon, I set off along the stream incontinent, following a path I had trodden many a time when but a lad; a path that led on through mazy thickets, shady dells and green coppices dappled with sunlight and glad with the trilling melody of birds; but ever as I went, before my eyes was a man who twisted in my grasp and died, over and over again, and in my ears ...
— Black Bartlemy's Treasure • Jeffrey Farnol
... and lonely ways Ulf led them, through mazy thicket, o'er murmurous rill, through fragrant bracken that, sweeping to their saddle-girths, whispered as they passed; now rode they by darkling wood, now crossed they open heath; all unerring rode Ulf the Strong, now wheeling sharp and ...
— Beltane The Smith • Jeffery Farnol
... cheek against his; and the happy tears came into his eyes, and he stroked her face, and half-reluctantly let Batavius lead her away. For, at the first mention of a dance, Batavius had risen and put down his pipe; and in a few minutes he was triumphantly guiding Joanna in a kind of mazy waltzing movement, ...
— The Bow of Orange Ribbon - A Romance of New York • Amelia E. Barr
... half-possessed my waking brain. Every now and then my mother's voice would bring me back to my senses, and I would understand it all perfectly; but in a few moments I would be involved once more in a mazy search after my child. Perhaps, however, as it was by that time late, sleep had, if such a thing be possible, invaded a part of my brain, leaving another part able to receive the impressions of the external about me. I can recall some ...
— The Vicar's Daughter • George MacDonald
... all my phantasy With thy fair face and eyes divine, The form, which in my sleep I see Mid dreamland's mazy fields, is thine. Oh if thy sweet companionship I may not win, nor call thee wife— Then all my future let me sleep, And one long dream be ...
— Welsh Lyrics of the Nineteenth Century • Edmund O. Jones
... beckonings to join this group and that. At the great man's instance, however, they were placed at a table for two, whose outlook seemed to the stranger to embrace the kingdoms of the earth. Life, pulsing life, as far as the embarrassed eye could carry; life in the mazy streets below; life in the forking estuary's tide; life, eager red-blooded life, to the crest of the horizon's hills! Nerve ganglion of a continent, market-place of a world! Shelby swept the panorama again and again as his host gave ...
— The Henchman • Mark Lee Luther
... least of them beneath His kind regards. Look at bird, or butterfly, or beetle! Observe the lavish beauty that adorns His creatures, the bounty that supplies their wants, the care taken of their lives, the happiness, expressed in songs or merry gambols or mazy dances, which He has poured into their hearts. The whole earth is full of the glory of God's infinite benignity and good will. Insignificant as I—a speck on earth, and earth itself but a speck in creation—seem to myself when, standing below the starry vault, I look up into the ...
— The Angels' Song • Thomas Guthrie
... the mazy dance she glides along Still Love is near to poize each graceful step: So breathes the zephyr o'er the ...
— The Diary of an Ennuyee • Anna Brownell Jameson
... shouting rapturously to the organ music. A sort of mad vehemence prevails, indeed, throughout the delicate bewilderments of the whole series—[54] giddy dances, wild animals leaping, above all perpetual wreathings of the vine, connecting, like some mazy arabesque, the various presentations of one oft-repeated figure, translated here out of the clear-coloured glass into the sadder, somewhat opaque and earthen hues of the silken threads. The figure was that of the organ-builder himself, a flaxen and flowery ...
— Imaginary Portraits • Walter Horatio Pater
... his profession this arose. His was a singular career. He pursued the fleeting testimonial through the mazy symptoms of disease (largely imaginary) and cure (wholly mythical). To extract from the great and shining ones of political life commendations of Certina; to beguile statesmen who had never tasted that strange concoction into asseverating their faith in the ...
— The Clarion • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... had seen The mazy Forth unravelled; Had trod the banks of Clyde, and Tay, And with the Tweed had travelled; And when we came to Clovenford, 5 Then said my "winsome Marrow," "Whate'er betide, we'll turn aside, And see the ...
— The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, Vol. II. • William Wordsworth
... hair, this time it was a woman. How the morning sun glittered on the shaken timbrel; how the spotless draperies went wild in the wind; how the group of lissome maidens on the sand below wound in and out, in a mazy dance; how the multitude was swept into transports of beatification; how the men became prophets and the women, psalmists; how the vast wilderness reverberated with a great chant of exultation—all this he remembered as a ...
— The Yoke - A Romance of the Days when the Lord Redeemed the Children - of Israel from the Bondage of Egypt • Elizabeth Miller
... little before midnight, very tired but very happy. "Ah!" he sighed, "I'm glad to be in camp. The glacier almost got me this time. If it had not been for the beacon and old Tow-a-att, I might have had to spend the night on the ice. The crevasses were so many and so bewildering in their mazy, crisscross windings that I was actually going farther into the glacier when I ...
— Alaska Days with John Muir • Samual Hall Young
... was that of fear intense, Of horror and amazement! What fearful struggle to the door and thence With mazy doubles to ...
— Capitola the Madcap • Emma D. E. N. Southworth
... at this moment, it seems most necessary to tell. This is the half of the truth that the translators who use verse cannot easily tell. They MUST be adding to Homer, talking with Pope about 'tracing the mazy lev'ret o'er the lawn,' or with Mr. Worsley about the islands that are 'stars of the blue Aegaean,' or with Dr. Hawtrey about 'the earth's soft arms,' when Homer says nothing at all about the 'mazy lev'ret,' ...
— DONE INTO ENGLISH PROSE • S. H. BUTCHER, M.A.
... Elysium, by her gentle offices, in tenderly embracing every part of his body, until his ideal scenes of bliss are realised; and when fully sated with the luscious banquet, they retire to the bath, to gather fresh vigour for a renewal of similar joys. In this mazy round of chaste dissipation, the hours glide gently on, and the evening is spent in dancing to the music of Pan's pipes, the flute, and haeva drum. They then go to the bath again, and the festivity of the evening is concluded ...
— Voyage of H.M.S. Pandora - Despatched to Arrest the Mutineers of the 'Bounty' in the - South Seas, 1790-1791 • Edward Edwards
... bade her cavaliers respond. They assured me of her gratitude and delight, and bade me welcome. The warbling birds again started their liquid strains, and a mazy dance began which resembled a fluttering band of snowy butterflies tangled in a silvery web. Slipping off, I came to the side of a lake on which were boats and Indian canoes of the moccasin flower. Here I rested, watching the measures of ...
— Prince Lazybones and Other Stories • Mrs. W. J. Hays
... beside me And put yourself at ease— I'll trouble you to slide me That wine decanter, please; The path is kind o' mazy Where my fancies have to go, And my heart gets sort o' lazy ...
— Songs of Friendship • James Whitcomb Riley
... banks are fringed with many a goodly tree, And flowers the fairest that may feast the bee; Such in her chaplet infant Dian wove, And Innocence would offer to her love. These deck the shore; the waves their channel make In windings bright and mazy like the snake. All was so still, so soft in earth and air, You scarce would start to meet a spirit there; Secure that nought of evil could delight To walk in such a scene, on such a night! 170 It was a moment only for the good: ...
— The Works Of Lord Byron, Vol. 3 (of 7) • Lord Byron
... spoke; the spirits from the sails descend; Some, orb in orb, around the nymph extend; Some thrid the mazy ringlets of her hair; Some hang upon the pendants of her ear: With beating hearts the dire event they wait, Anxious and trembling, for the ...
— Playful Poems • Henry Morley
... and the Spirit Approached the overhanging battlement, 240 Below lay stretched the boundless universe! There, far as the remotest line That limits swift imagination's flight. Unending orbs mingled in mazy motion, Immutably fulfilling 245 Eternal Nature's law. Above, below, around, The circling systems formed A wilderness of harmony. Each with undeviating aim 250 In eloquent silence through the depths of space Pursued its ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley Volume I • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... whole course without a show of effort, what could it not do with the little winding canal through its center called by pilots the "channel"? The flatboatmen had laboriously acquired the art of piloting the commerce of the West through this mazy, shifting channel, but as steamboats developed in size and power the man at the wheel had to become almost a superman. He needed to be. He must know the stage of water anywhere by a glance at the river banks. He must guess correctly the amount of "fill" at the head ...
— The Paths of Inland Commerce - A Chronicle of Trail, Road, and Waterway, Volume 21 in The - Chronicles of America Series • Archer B. Hulbert
... all understand, is not going to traverse the vast field of Protestant opinions as they are distributed through our many sects; that would be endless; and he illustrates the mazy character of the wilderness over which these ...
— Theological Essays and Other Papers v1 • Thomas de Quincey
... visited her Aunt Patty at the rock-built cottage, and she pictured in her mind, as she walked on, the surprise and good-natured chiding which would mark her old aunt's reception. She gazed upward at the tall forest trees swaying to and fro in the light evening breeze, and far into its dim, mazy depths, where gray rocks lay clad in soft, green moss, and gnarled, uprooted trunks overgrown with clinging vines, and pale, delicate flowers springing beautiful from their decay. She listened to the murmuring of the brook ...
— Eventide - A Series of Tales and Poems • Effie Afton
... me: 'A time for work,' he said, 'a time for play; Unbend the bow or else the bow will break.' But when I wearied—needing sleep and rest— A single word seemed whispered in my ear— 'Beggar,' it stung me to redoubled toil. I trod the ofttimes mazy labyrinths Of legal logic—mined the mountain-mass Of precedents conflicting—found the rule, Then branched into the exceptions; split the hair Betwixt this case and that—ran parallels— Traced from a 'leading case' through many tomes Back to the first ...
— The Feast of the Virgins and Other Poems • H. L. Gordon
... beer-drinking German sheathing his cunning in good-nature, much as a cardinal in the Middle Ages kept his dagger up his sleeve. Wirth saw a husband for Isaure, and accordingly proceeded to surround Godefroid with the mazy circumlocutions of his Alsacien's geniality, that most adhesive of all ...
— The Firm of Nucingen • Honore de Balzac
... they pant, And all unlace the country shoe; Their fingers tug the garter-knots To loose the hose of varied hue. The flashing knee at last appears, The lower curves of youth and grace, Whereat the girls intently scan The mazy thickets of the place. But who's to see except the thrush Upon the wild crab-apple tree? Within his branchy haunt he sits— A very Peeping Tom is he! Now music bubbles in his throat, And now he pipes the scene ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 2 (of 4) • Various
... on the cool dawn. In his room Dickie lay across his bed. The sun blazed in at his single long window; the big flies that had risen from the dirty yard buzzed and bumped against the upper pane and made aimless, endless, mazy circles above and below one another in the stifling, odorous atmosphere. Dickie lay there like an image of Icarus, an eternal symbol of defeated youth; one could almost see about his slenderness the trailing, shattered wings. He had wept out the first shock of his anger and his shame; ...
— Hidden Creek • Katharine Newlin Burt
... North, The lustful murderess of her wedded lord! And he, connatural Mind![115:2] whom (in their songs So bards of elder time had haply feigned) Some Fury fondled in her hate to man, 175 Bidding her serpent hair in mazy surge Lick his young face, and at his mouth imbreathe Horrible sympathy! And leagued with these Each petty German princeling, nursed in gore! Soul-hardened barterers of human blood![116:1] 180 Death's prime slave-merchants! Scorpion-whips of Fate! Nor least in savagery of holy zeal, ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... there was a heaviness in the atmosphere that felt like approaching rain. The thermometer during the night had not fallen below 60 degrees; over 4 degrees higher than at our first night's camp from the pillar. To-day, again following the mazy windings of the glen, we passed the northern tributary noticed yesterday, and continued on over rocks, under precipices, crossing and re-crossing the channel, and turning to all points of the compass, so that nearly three miles had ...
— Australia Twice Traversed, The Romance of Exploration • Ernest Giles
... innumerous-colour'd scene of things. As rising from the vegetable world My theme ascends, with equal wing ascend My panting Muse! And hark! how loud the woods Invite you forth in all your gayest trim. Lend me your song, ye nightingales! oh, pour The mazy running soul of melody Into my varied verse! while I deduce From the first note the hollow cuckoo sings, The symphony of spring, and touch a theme Unknown to fame, the passion of ...
— The Illustrated London Reading Book • Various
... knowing that all our schemes would be spilt if any eye spied upon me as I lay there beside the air shaft. But my chest was like to have split with the dull, helpless anguish that was in it, as I made my way back to my chamber through the mazy alleys of ...
— The Lost Continent • C. J. Cutcliffe Hyne
... crossed our view With joyful shout was greeted as it flew, And moth and lady-bird and beetle bright In sheeny gold were each a wondrous sight. Then as we paddled barefoot, side by side, Among the sunny shallows of the Clyde, Minnows or spotted par with twinkling fin, Swimming in mazy rings the pool within, A thrill of gladness through our bosoms sent Seen in the power ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 3 • Various
... were gathered the brave knights and the fairest ladies in the kingdom. The jolly old King, surrounded by the wise men and officers of state moved about among his guests, stately and courteous, ravishing music burst forth from all sides, and down the hall moved the fair Princess in the mazy dance, on the arm of a Knight who gazed upon her face in rapt devotion and love. Who was he that dared to look thus upon the daughter of the King, sovereign prince of the kingdom, and the heiress of ...
— Rolling Stones • O. Henry
... dreaming wave Wafts me in gladness dim Through air just cool enough to lave With sense each conscious limb. But ah! the dream eludes the rhyme, As dreams break free from sleep; The dream will keep its own free time, In mazy ...
— A Hidden Life and Other Poems • George MacDonald
... to those who dance and full of enjoyment to those who do not. There are card-tables, and a disused conservatory is transformed into a luxurious smoking-room, from which the mazy winding German can be seen. There are no wall-flowers, no dissatisfied young women with scorn-tipped noses, and the promenaders, mostly married guests, are well paired. Mr. Murray, who has seen society almost everywhere, is charmed ...
— Floyd Grandon's Honor • Amanda Minnie Douglas
... how long the painful days That follow, as he treads by unknown ways A mazy wilderness, where lurk unseen All perils challenging his eye-sight keen. Yet on—with tattered shoes and blistering feet— To find the savage foe he longs to meet! At last, to wearied eyes that search in vain, The far-off meeting-place of ...
— Indian Legends of Minnesota • Various
... relaxation of the orders of the night is the illustrious savant to whose care has been entrusted the direction of the excavations in Egyptian soil; he is also the comptroller of this vast museum, and it is he himself who has kindly consented to act as my guide to-night through its mazy labyrinth. ...
— Egypt (La Mort De Philae) • Pierre Loti
... did say. I said that much as I enjoyed the pleasant give and take of friendly conversation, dearly as I loved even the irresponsible monologue or the biting repartee, yet still more was I attached to the silent worship of the valse's mazy rhythm. 'BUT,' I went on to say, 'but,' I added, with surprising originality, 'every rule has an exception. YOU are the exception. May I have two dances, and then we'll try ...
— The Holiday Round • A. A. Milne
... Some fountain gurgling from the rifted rock, Of pure translucent wave, whose margent green Is loved by gentlest nymphs, and all the train Of that chaste goddess of the silver bow; For silent, shady groves, by purling springs, Delight the train, and through the gliding hours Their nimble feet in mazy trances wind; And oft at eve, the wondering swain hath heard The Arcadian pipe and breathing minstrelsy, From joyous troops of those rude deities Whose homes are on the steep and rocky mount, Or by the silver wave in woody dell, And know the shrine, ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, April 1844 - Volume 23, Number 4 • Various
... trade, a spectral precursor, or dim prototype, as one might say, of Mrs. Pipchin and the Peruvian mines. Throughout the chief part of the dreamy, dramatic little story, the various characters, it will be remembered, are involved in a mazy entanglement of cross purposes. Mystery sometimes, pathos often, terror for one brief interval, rose from the Reading of the "Home Fairy-Tale." There was a subdued tenderness which there was no resisting in the revelation to the ...
— Charles Dickens as a Reader • Charles Kent
... the punch. After that I began to feel more charitable toward the foreign ministers. In fact, I rather think a sweeter and more benevolent feeling came over me in all respects, for a soft mistiness settled on the crowd, and the dancers were peculiarly mazy. I felt myself smiling blandly, and, in fact, glided into a state of ...
— Phemie Frost's Experiences • Ann S. Stephens
... Virtue's blissful paths away The double-tongued are sure to stray; Good is a forth-right journey still. And mazy paths ...
— Stories by Modern American Authors • Julian Hawthorne
... over him, eating his a la Newburg in the silence of greatness. To conclude, a youth with parted hair, a name that is ochre to red journals and gold on the back of a supper check. These sat at a table while the musicians played, while waiters moved in the mazy performance of their duties with their backs toward all who desired their service, and all was bizarre and merry because it was nine feet below the level of ...
— The Voice of the City • O. Henry
... the Atlantic seaboard and remained all summer without falling into the hands of the bunko artist. A cow gentleman friend of mine who bathed his plump limbs in the Atlantic last summer during the day, and mixed himself up in the mazy dance at night, told me on his return that he had enjoyed the summer immensely, but that he ...
— Remarks • Bill Nye
... painted lids a smile, Motionless, unintelligible, she twines Her fingers into mazy lines, Twining her scarves across ...
— Silhouettes • Arthur Symons
... back from Billy's place I always have to roam The mazy road, the crazy road that leads the long way home. Ma always says, "Why don't you come through Mr Donkin's land? The footbridge track will bring you back." Ma doesn't understand. I cannot go that way, you know, because of Donkin's dog; So I set forth and travel ...
— A Book for Kids • C. J. (Clarence Michael James) Dennis
... children were sleepy, and were rather in a mazy state when lifted out and set on their legs in the wainscoted hall, and she sent them at once with nurse to the cheerful room that Humfrey's little visitors had saved from becoming disused. Miss Wells's fond vigilance was a little oppressive, but ...
— Hopes and Fears - scenes from the life of a spinster • Charlotte M. Yonge
... suggested, our minds have, by God's help, been brought into something like real, living fellowship with Him, and we have attained the wisdom that pierces through the external to the Almighty will that underlies all its mazy whirl, then why should we care about shifting our place? Why should we trouble ourselves about altering these varying events, since each in its turn is a manifestation of His mind and will; each in its turn is a means of discipline for us; and through all their variety ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: Romans Corinthians (To II Corinthians, Chap. V) • Alexander Maclaren
... rouse herself, but as it was, she felt relieved and glad when their tete-a-tete was interrupted by the entrance of a merry group, just returned in the highest spirits from exploring a thick and mazy wood in the vicinity of the ...
— The Mother's Recompense, Volume I. - A Sequel to Home Influence in Two Volumes. • Grace Aguilar
... far as his future wife is concerned and will come to you like a ready-made suit returned from the cleaner's. The Kelhams always marry young, and our brides are always very young. That's why, I think, we're so strong and long-lived." He veered suddenly from the mazy subject of eugenics and ...
— The Hawk of Egypt • Joan Conquest
... resolved to be on this occasion heteroclitical. I will not insult your good sense by lamenting the exigencies of the present times, as doubtless it always dictates to you to be (whilst travelling through the mazy labyrinth of joy and sorrow) humble in the lucent days of prosperity and omnific in the tenebricous ...
— Life and Remains of John Clare - "The Northamptonshire Peasant Poet" • J. L. Cherry
... ye are eagerly bent upon it, I will not oppose your wishes, so as not to utter every thing as much as ye desire. To thee in the first place, Io, will I describe thy mazy wanderings, which do thou engrave on the recording ...
— Prometheus Bound and Seven Against Thebes • Aeschylus
... the hills of life. No more its woods, but its hills, bathed in a vast and open sunshine. Look around us—how nobly simple is every line and shape! Far below the horizon nature is elaborate, full of fancies,—mazy watercourses, delicate dingles, fantastically gloomy ravines, misshapen woods, gibbering with diablerie; but here how simple, how great, how good she is! There is not a shape subtler than a common bowl, and the colours are alphabetical—and yet, by what taking of thought could she have achieved ...
— The Worshipper of the Image • Richard Le Gallienne
... Lion-Lord, arrived at the palace hall, at Holy-Rood. In this princely abode James was feasting the chiefs of Scotland. The historic halls rang with mirth, for well the monarch loved song and banquet. By day the tourney was held, at night the mazy dance was trod by quaint maskers. The scene of this night outshone all others. The dazzling lights hanging from the galleries, displayed the grace of lords and ladies of the court. The "motley fool" retailed his jest, the juggler performed his feat, the minstrel plied ...
— The Prose Marmion - A Tale of the Scottish Border • Sara D. Jenkins
... length which I shudder to recall. I have sometimes, when an active participant in these atrocious transactions, lingered in the hope of saying something natural to my friend (feeling that he, too, was groping in the mazy labyrinths of his mind for a like expression), until I have felt that we ought to have been separated by a policeman. It is astonishing how far the most wretched joke will go in these emergencies, and how it ...
— Urban Sketches • Bret Harte
... the sward before them; paused and seemed to be trying to flutter a hold into the ground; rushed aimlessly at a tangent to their former direction; paused again; and again seemed to be holding on. Before a sudden gust they were spun helplessly upward, sported aloft in mazy arabesques, ...
— If Winter Comes • A.S.M. Hutchinson
... violence on an old, cracked violin, during which performance he threw his whole body into the strangest contortions, working his head, jaws, legs and arms in the most ludicrous manner. The 'music' thus produced was responded to, 'on the floor,' by about twenty persons, who were indulging in the 'mazy dance.' The company included old prostitutes, young thieves, negro chimney-sweeps, and many others whom it would ...
— City Crimes - or Life in New York and Boston • Greenhorn
... on the threshold, following thy voice Away, away through mazy lengths of dreams. Music—low music from the lips we love, Is the true siren that still lures the soul From cares of ...
— Poems • Walter R. Cassels
... discovered a fine well arched forehead, from under which darted glances from her beautiful dark eyes, that when purposely directed for observation, spoke volumes to the heart. Unadorned by the feathers which waved in majestic splendor over the temples of her sister as she threaded through the mazy windings of the dance, she attracted the attention of the company in a much greater degree than the dress-delighted Caroline. Her figure was neither well nor ill formed, but the open and animated expression of her countenance, together with the graces of her mind, would in the opinion ...
— Real Life In London, Volumes I. and II. • Pierce Egan
... brother David scandalized the family by marrying an actress and himself taking to the stage. But she had seen the bewitching "Miss Arnold" at the theatre in Baltimore—had, with fascinated eyes, followed her twinkling feet through the mazy dance, had listened with charmed ears to her exquisite voice, had sat spell-bound under her acting. To her childish mind, the stage had become a fairy-land and Miss Arnold its presiding genius. That brother ...
— The Dreamer - A Romantic Rendering of the Life-Story of Edgar Allan Poe • Mary Newton Stanard
... each sublimer grace Geneva's happy scene I trace; Her lake, from whose broad bosom thrown Rushes the loud impetuous Rhone, And bears his waves with mazy sweep In rapid torrents to the deep— Oh for a Muse less weak of wing, High on yon Alpine steeps to spring, And tell in verse what they disclose As well as you have told in prose; How wrapt in snows and ...
— Poems (1786), Volume I. • Helen Maria Williams
... spirits from the sails descend; Some, orb in orb, around the nymph extend; Some thread the mazy ringlets of her hair; Some hang upon the pendants of her ear; 140 With beating hearts the dire event they wait, Anxious, and trembling for the ...
— The Poetical Works Of Alexander Pope, Vol. 1 • Alexander Pope et al
... swiftness and his strength were vain; The voice of glory called him o'er the main. Till then, in every sylvan chase renowned, With Argus, Argus, rung the woods around: With him the youth pursued the goat or fawn, Or traced the mazy leveret o'er the lawn; Now left to man's ingratitude he lay, Unhoused, neglected ...
— Voices for the Speechless • Abraham Firth
... certainly very pretty. Her "light-coloured" hair was not so light as to be uncomely, and fell in luxuriant ringlets all round the sides of her pretty head; and the head moved about enough to shake the ringlets, till they threatened to form a mazy net to catch men's eyes. The prettiest mouth in the world, set with two little rows of the most kissable teeth, if that feature ever is contemplated in a kiss; and like the ringlets, the lips seemed to ...
— Hills of the Shatemuc • Susan Warner
... intense enough to see pins on its walks and flower-beds, the scenes become grand beyond description. Immense throngs of people gather around the cafes in the evening to see the youths and beauties whirl in the mazy dance, and listen to the bewitching strains of the sweet music there rendered. It is not a rare thing to see spectators go into raptures on these occasions, for I have seen few places where nature and art so harmonize and unite in producing scenes of ...
— The Youthful Wanderer - An Account of a Tour through England, France, Belgium, Holland, Germany • George H. Heffner
... the joy of sun and the gladness of birds that shrilled 'mid the mazy thickets above, a great sadness took me and I bowed my head ...
— Martin Conisby's Vengeance • Jeffery Farnol
... and through its mazy ringlets, Titania may have led her elfin rout, Or Ariel fanned it with his gauzy winglets, Or Puck danced in the bowl to ...
— Pipe and Pouch - The Smoker's Own Book of Poetry • Various
... house-spider, which glided with so much ease after its flies, through webs so numerous and mazy, had yet to amuse Madame di Negra with assurances that the fugitives sought for would sooner or later be discovered. Though Randal baffled and eluded her suspicion that he was already acquainted with the exiles ("the persons he had thought of were," he said, "quite different from her description;" ...
— My Novel, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... and gather into patches, producing at once the relative localities of astral and solar systems, and the movements which they have since observed, in themselves and with regard to each other—from the daily spinning of single bodies on their own axes, to the mazy dances of vast families of orbs, which come to periods only in ...
— The World's Greatest Books - Volume 15 - Science • Various
... hoarse whirlwinds breathe, And dark with thunder sail the clouds beneath.— 355 The steepy path her plighted swain pursues, And tracks her light step o'er th' imprinted dews, Delighted Hymen gives his torch to blaze, Winds round the craggs, and lights the mazy ways; ...
— The Botanic Garden. Part II. - Containing The Loves of the Plants. A Poem. - With Philosophical Notes. • Erasmus Darwin
... cultivates his fields, the mechanic wields his tools, the sportsman pursues his game, the orator gives utterance to his thoughts, the lady sweeps the keys of the piano, and the young are whirled in the mazy dance. As the muscles bear so intimate a relation to the pleasures and employments of man, a knowledge of the laws by which their action is governed, and the conditions upon which their health depends, should ...
— A Treatise on Anatomy, Physiology, and Hygiene (Revised Edition) • Calvin Cutter
... to seek, they came time and again close together and the propinquity of flushed cheek and mazy ringlet stirred something in the lad's heart which had never been touched by the Mistresses Thriepneuk, who lived where the new houses of the Plainstones look over the level meadows of the Borough Muir. His father had often said within himself, as he walked the Edinburgh streets to visit some ...
— The Lilac Sunbonnet • S.R. Crockett
... Nature her great master-piece designed, And fram'd her last, best work, the human mind, Her eye intent on all the mazy plan, She form'd of various parts ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham
... ceremony. Mr. Robinson was not at home, but I received them, though not without some embarrassment. I was yet a child, and wholly unacquainted with the manners of the world; yet, young as I was, I became the traveller of its mazy and perilous paths. At an age when girls are generally at school, or indeed scarcely emancipated from the nursery, I was presented in society as a wife—and very nearly ...
— Beaux and Belles of England • Mary Robinson
... still, as ever, Time's a jewel in its loss; But, possessed in plenty, never Held as ought but worthless dross. Like lost truant-boys we linger Whimpering in Life's mazy wood, Heedless of the silent finger Ever pointing for our good; Each, in plodding darkness groping, Clothes his day in dreamy night, 'Stead of boldly climbing, hoping, Up the steeps towards the light, Where, as metal plucks ...
— The Death of Saul and other Eisteddfod Prize Poems and Miscellaneous Verses • J. C. Manning
... veered irresistibly at least four feet to the left-hand side of that point. Mary Makebelieve helped her back to bed, where she lay for a time watching horizontal lines spinning violently in front of her face, and these lines after a time crossed and recrossed each other in so mazy and intricate a pattern that she became violently sick from the mere looking ...
— Mary, Mary • James Stephens
... his paper, and John slumbering over the columns of the Pink Un, and Morris revolving in his mind a dozen grudges, and suspicions, and alarms. It passed Christ Church by the sea, Herne with its pinewoods, Ringwood on its mazy river. A little behind time, but not much for the South-Western, it drew up at the platform of a station, in the midst of the New Forest, the real name of which (in case the railway company "might have the law of me") I shall veil under ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 7 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... and tapped at the door of the adjoining room, while Nellie Townshead walked to the window and looked down on the city. It stretched away before her, silent for once under its blinking lights, sidewalk and pavement lying empty far down beneath the mazy wires and towering buildings, but she saw little of it as she glanced towards the block where the Somasco Consolidated had their offices. The message had troubled her, for she recalled many kindnesses shown to her and her father by the owners of Somasco ranch. She also owed ...
— Alton of Somasco • Harold Bindloss
... streams that smoothly glide, Through mazy windings o'er the plain; I 'll in some lonely cave reside, And ever mourn my ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel , Volume I. - The Songs of Scotland of the past half century • Various
... outwards. All were turned upon the attractive circle of Terpsichoreans, that, under the brilliant light of the fires, were bounding through the mazy figures, of the dance. The waggons forming the sides of the enclosure were in echellon; and their tilts lapping on each other, it was impossible to see between them. With the two, however, that closed the end of the corral, the case ...
— The Wild Huntress - Love in the Wilderness • Mayne Reid
... to think it such, of the "city" properly so termed, the one open place or street, High Street, or Corso—Aphetais by name, lined, irregularly again, with various religious and other monuments. It radiated on all sides into a mazy coil, an ambush, of narrow crooked lanes, up and down, in which attack and defence would necessarily be a matter of hand-to-hand fighting. In the outskirts lay the citizens' houses, roomier far than those of Athens, ...
— Plato and Platonism • Walter Horatio Pater
... through heaven the night mist gray, Close beside me, prankt in pride, Sister Tamar rose, and cried, 'Sluggard, up! 'Tis holiday, In the lowlands far away. Hark! how jocund Plymouth bells, Wandering up through mazy dells, Call me down, with smiles to hail, My daring Drake's returning sail.' 'Thine alone?' I answer'd. 'Nay; Mine as well the joy to-day. Heroes train'd on Northern wave, To that Argo new I gave; ...
— Westward Ho! • Charles Kingsley
... sister, with fire in each hand, And the Nymphs that her co-mates be! My spirit soars. O sovereign of my soul! I will accept the thrilling flute's control. [They dance The ivy-crowned thyrsus, see! With Bacchic fire is kindling me, And turns my emulous tread Where'er the mazy dance may lead. Euoi! Euoi! O Paean! send us joy. See, dearest Queen, behold! Before thy gaze the event ...
— The Seven Plays in English Verse • Sophocles
... chosen partners, the sets were formed, the music floating through the room, and still Ada Irvine remained in her seat, fair, sweet, and smiling to the outward view, but with a world of angry passion surging in her heart. As she sat watching the merry boys and girls winding joyously through the mazy dance, Mrs. Blake came forward, and, sitting down by her side, proceeded to question her about her parents and their movements abroad; and Ada answered each query in a pretty, graceful manner infinitely charming. Then school ...
— Aunt Judith - The Story of a Loving Life • Grace Beaumont
... forward on the green with increased spirit and merriment, and without the slightest hinderance. More than once the mummers had wheeled their mazy rounds, with Gillian and Dick Taverner footing it merrily in the midst of them. More than once the audacious 'prentice, now become desperately enamoured of his pretty partner, had ventured to steal a ...
— The Star-Chamber, Volume 1 - An Historical Romance • W. Harrison Ainsworth
... touched by this reply, for he felt that it was from the heart. It sounded strangely to his ears from the lips of one who had just been whirling in the mazy dance. ...
— Home Scenes, and Home Influence - A Series of Tales and Sketches • T. S. Arthur
... smiling lip, I mingled with the giddy thoughtless world, Seeking from out its varied realms to wring Some recompense for that which I had lost. Wealth, fame, and power, I sought for and obtained, Yet found them only gilded mockeries. The paths of hidden knowledge I essayed, And trod their mazy windings till they led My footsteps—whither I may not disclose,— But all availed me nothing, still my heart Ached with the dreary void lost love had made, Ached ever till that void was filled by thee! ...
— Mazelli, and Other Poems • George W. Sands |
