"Thorn" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... and more torn, until there was literally not a scrap of sound skin upon them anywhere. Even the beaters, a stolid lot, had roared when old VELVETEENS the second keeper had brought up to poor COODENT a lump of flesh from his right leg, which he had found sticking on a thorn-bush in the centre of the high covert. Suddenly Sir HENRY stopped and shaded his eyes with his hand anxiously. We all imitated him, though for my part, not being a sportsman, I had no notion what was up. "What's the time of day, ...
— Punch, or The London Charivari, Vol. 100., Jan. 17, 1891 • Various
... threaten, in hopes of causing us to arrest our flight. In the same moment came the explosion and a pitiful cry from Missy; and my gentleman, making certain he had struck her, went down the road pursued by the furies, turned at the first corner, took a flying leap over the thorn hedge, and disappeared across country in the ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 20 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... afternoon, David managed to cross the Bottom at a point where a fallen thorn-tree gave him a bridge over the soft snow. He stayed but a little while at Kenmuir, yet when he started for home it ...
— Bob, Son of Battle • Alfred Ollivant
... pitched his umbrella and his easel below a ridge on the far slope of the fir plantation. A thorn bush sheltered him from the wind and made him invisible from the terrace ...
— The Return of the Prodigal • May Sinclair
... five corners of my beard!" shouted the Pharisee, who belonged to the sect called The Dashers (that little knot of saints whose manner of dashing and lacerating the feet against the pavement was long a thorn and a reproach to less zealous devotees-a stumbling-block to less gifted perambulators)—"by the five corners of that beard which, as a priest, I am forbidden to shave!-have we lived to see the day when a blaspheming and idolatrous ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 5 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... fold. That by his loyalty to the party he has earned such consideration is a truth not so fully recognised as it might be if he were less modest in putting forth a claim. If he had been a man of small mind and mean instincts, what a thorn in the flesh of Lord Salisbury, Mr. Smith, and Mr. Balfour he might have proved in the whole period following on his resignation up to the dissolution of the ...
— The Strand Magazine, Volume V, Issue 29, May 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... man and a young woman courting, walking out in the moonlight, and the nightingale singing a song of pain and love, as though the thorn touched her heart—imagine them stopping there in the moonlight and starlight and song, and saying, "Now, here, let us settle who is 'boss!'" I tell you it is an infamous word and an infamous feeling—I abhor a man who is "boss," who is going to ...
— The Ghosts - And Other Lectures • Robert G. Ingersoll
... shake, And makes through all their green recesses swell The massive myrtle and the asphodel. To the fair child it comes, and tears away On its strong wing the rose-flower from the spray. On the wild waters casts it bruised and torn, And the Infanta only holds a thorn. Frightened, perplexed, she follows with her eyes Into the basin where her ruin lies, Looks up to heaven, and questions of the breeze That had not feared her highness to displease; But all the pond is changed; anon so clear, Now back it swells, ...
— Poems • Victor Hugo
... but dusky purple. Rosemary's heart sang as she climbed, and the fragrance of the lily thrilled her soul with pure delight. The path was smooth, now, and thorns no longer hurt her feet. The hand that held the lily, however, was bleeding, from some sharp thorn or ...
— Master of the Vineyard • Myrtle Reed
... in a vanishing world. Soames was careful; he was a warm man; but he had no one to leave his money to. There it was! He didn't know! And there was that fellow Chamberlain! For James' political principles had been fixed between '70 and '85 when 'that rascally Radical' had been the chief thorn in the side of property and he distrusted him to this day in spite of his conversion; he would get the country into a mess and make money go down before he had done with it. A stormy petrel of a chap! Where was Soames? He had gone ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... but he subdued them by his force of character,—they saw in his eye that which told them that their leader was no common man, but one who would die rather than abandon his marvellous enterprise. And you remember the end? The very day after the mutiny, a branch of thorn with berries on it floats by them. They are all excitement. Then a small board appears; then a rudely-carved stick; then at night Columbus sees a light, and next day lands on the shores of his new world, after a voyage of more than two months over seas hitherto unexplored by man, and in vessels ...
— Amos Huntingdon • T.P. Wilson
... lad of seventeen—I suppose he is not much over that—should have conceived and carried out such a plan. It sounds like a piece of old knight-errantry. Clive did as much, but Clive was some years older when he first became a thorn in the side of the French. ...
— With Moore At Corunna • G. A. Henty
... their arrival at the Vaal, they set off; accompanied by the Hottentots, to the plain which they had spoken of; riding through magnificent groups of acacia or camel-thorn trees, many of which were covered with the enormous nests of the social grosbeaks. As they descended to the plain, they perceived large herds of brindled gnoos, quaggas, and antelopes, covering the whole face of the country as far as the eye could reach, moving about in masses ...
— The Mission; or Scenes in Africa • Captain Frederick Marryat
... adversary; [41] and the disappointment might tend to imbitter, perhaps to shorten, the last days of the sultan. [42] In the fulness of conquest, Mahomet the Second still felt at his bosom this domestic thorn: his lieutenants were permitted to negotiate a truce; and the Albanian prince may justly be praised as a firm and able champion of his national independence. The enthusiasm of chivalry and religion has ranked him with the names of Alexander and Pyrrhus; nor would they blush ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 6 • Edward Gibbon
... small birds assemble in flocks, and which may be used in various ways. Put the bird-lime into an earthen dish, with the addition of one ounce of fresh lard to every quarter-pound of bird-lime, and melt the whole gently over the fire. Take a quantity of wheat ears, with a foot of the straw attached to thorn, and, having warmed the lime, that it may spread the thinner, lime about six inches of the straw from the bottom of the ears. Scatter a little chaff and thrashed ears over a compass of twenty yards; stick the limed straws into the ground, with the ears inclining downwards, or even touching the ...
— Practical Taxidermy • Montagu Browne
... shores of the remote Pacific. What most of us know of these ultra-occidental regions may be summed up in a very few words. We have most of us read Washington Irving's charming narrative of 'Astoria,' sympathised with the untimely fate of Captain Thorn and his crew, and read with breathless interest the wanderings of the pilgrims to the head waters of the Columbia. After thirty years, the curtain rises again on the stormy period of the Ashburton Treaty, when the 'patriots' were bent ...
— Handbook to the new Gold-fields • R. M. Ballantyne
... came in line with the woods. Allan, after another deliberate look, stepped from behind a flowering thorn. The party drew up. "Good-afternoon, my man," said the stars and wreath in the centre in a high, piping voice. "Alone, are you?—Ain't straggling, I hope? Far too many stragglers—curse of this service—civilians turned soldiers and all that. What's that? You ...
— The Long Roll • Mary Johnston
... embodied his conviction that if Mr. Goodwood were interested in Isabel in the serious manner described by Miss Stackpole he would not care to present himself at Gardencourt on a summons from the latter lady. "On this supposition," said Ralph, "he must regard her as a thorn on the stem of his rose; as an intercessor he must find her ...
— The Portrait of a Lady - Volume 1 (of 2) • Henry James
... see the mess that things were in, and partly because they told him he would have to make a speech that night, and he had to spend two of his hardearned dollars for the hire of a dress-suit. Here, as always, the scarcity of dollars was like a thorn in his flesh. He had been obliged to leave Corydon heart-broken at home, because he had not been able to lay by enough to bring her; he had to stay at a cheap hotel—cheaper even than any of the actors; and when Miss Lewis and Mr. Tapping went out to lunch, he would have to ...
— Love's Pilgrimage • Upton Sinclair
... the Loons ran to the forest's edge and quickly returned with a long, sharp thorn. He glanced at the King, who nodded his head in assent, and then he rushed forward and stuck the thorn into the leg of the Scarecrow. The Scarecrow merely smiled and said nothing, for the thorn ...
— The Tin Woodman of Oz • L. Frank Baum
... proves the better horse. Throughout the agricultural regions, as we passed along, the men apparently all wore petticoats; at least, the petticoats were the most active and prominent in the field occupations. Then wearers were digging potatoes, pulling beets, following the harrow (in one instance a thorn-bush drawn by a cow), and stirring the wet, new-mown grass. I believe the pantaloons were doing the mowing. But I looked in vain for any Maud Mullers in the meadows, and have concluded that these can be found only in New England hay-fields! And ...
— Winter Sunshine • John Burroughs
... clung to it and it was only after a number of vigorous shakes that he succeeded in dislodging it. In his lack of experience he had planted his paw directly upon a giant rhinoceros beetle with bristling, thorn-like "antlers" one of which had penetrated the skin between the pads. The pain was intense so he held up the injured member and wailed for his mother; he was in trouble and wanted ...
— The Black Phantom • Leo Edward Miller
... love will conquer strife, And strength from conflict flows, For discord is the thorn of ...
— The Red Flower - Poems Written in War Time • Henry Van Dyke
... had discovered a trail which led towards the north, and that two white men were with the party, they were from the first certain. That this was the case was confirmed by a slip of paper which had been found fastened to a tree by a thorn. It contained but a few words, signed by Gilbert; Vaughan eagerly took it. "We are both alive, but our captors glance at us unpleasantly. We will try to escape; follow if you ...
— The Settlers - A Tale of Virginia • William H. G. Kingston
... on the Knight look'd he, And his blue eyes gleam'd wild and wide; "And, darest thou, Warrior! seek to see What heaven and hell alike would hide? My breast, in belt of iron pent, With shirt of hair and scourge of thorn; For threescore years, in penance spent. My knees those flinty stones have worn; Yet all too little to atone For knowing what should ne'er be known. Would'st thou thy every future year In ceaseless prayer and penance drie, Yet wait thy latter end with fear Then, ...
— From John O'Groats to Land's End • Robert Naylor and John Naylor
... palo verdes until my hands are like a Gila monster's back, and now look at them cows eat giant cactus! There's no use talkin', Rufe, the feller that wears the number five hat and the number forty jumper ain't worth hell-room when you're around—here, gimme that axe!" He seized it in his thorn-scarred hands and whirled into the surrounding giants like a fury; then when he had a dozen fat sahuaros laid open among the rocks he came back and sat down panting in the ...
— Hidden Water • Dane Coolidge
... marsh, and exposed his naked body to the stings of venomous flies.... His disciple, St. Eusebius, carried one hundred and fifty pounds of iron, and lived for three years in a dried-up well.... St. Besarion spent forty days and nights in the middle of thorn bushes, and for forty days and nights never lay down when he slept.... Some saints, like St. Marcian, restricted themselves to one meal a day, so small that they continually suffered the pangs of ...
— Religion & Sex - Studies in the Pathology of Religious Development • Chapman Cohen
... was a glowing ruby—he held it in his hand— His hand was thin and withered, it shook beneath the gem; He took the vivid ruby, the ransom of a land, And tied it firmly, tightly, within his garment's hem; And then he shuffled forward, but like a thorn within His soul he bore the torment of bitterness ...
— Cross Roads • Margaret E. Sangster
... intended that his words should be taken, she perceived, in a general sense. But the mind always seeks the specific: hers instinctively seized on the particular thorn that had prompted his utterance. Of Ruth Gardner's extraordinary and inexplicable behaviour she had become informed, like everyone else; it at first amazed, then shocked, and finally outraged her sense of decency. It repelled her—but, then, ...
— The Iron Furrow • George C. Shedd
... Helen Armstrong; the others her father, and sister. They are en route for the city of Natchez, the port of departure for their journey south-westward into Texas; just starting away from their old long-loved dwelling, whose gates they have left ajar, its walls desolate behind thorn. ...
— The Death Shot - A Story Retold • Mayne Reid
... Torpedo, or numbing fish, which is in shape very like the fiddle-fish, and is not to be known from it but by a brown circular spot of about the bigness of a crown-piece near the centre of its back; perhaps its figure will be better understood when I say it is a flat fish, much resembling the thorn-back. This fish is of a most singular nature, productive of the strangest effects on the human body; for whoever handles it, or happens even to set his foot upon it, is presently seized with a numbness ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 11 • Robert Kerr
... vine and rose; cypress and orange; thorn and olive—the plants in which the buried lovers of ballad romance live again and intertwine their limbs, vary with the clime and race; and just as the 'Black Douglas' of the Yarrow ballad—'Wow but he was rough!'—plucks up the brier, and 'flings it in St. Mary's Loch,' the King, in the Portuguese ...
— The Balladists - Famous Scots Series • John Geddie
... "See this thorn bush growing just beside the place. The edge of the canvas caught on the thorns and when they pulled it away it left these threads. See, here are ...
— The Keepers of the Trail - A Story of the Great Woods • Joseph A. Altsheler
... the milkman (who was a big puppy dog) came along and said he was sorry he was late, but he couldn't help it, because he had stepped on a thorn and had a lame foot and couldn't go fast, so ...
— Uncle Wiggily's Travels • Howard R. Garis
... "alcohol is classed among the stimulants, and opium and tobacco among the narcotics, whose ultimate effect upon the animal system is to produce stupor and insensibility." He says, "Most of the powerful vegetable poisons, such as hen-bane, hemlock, thorn-apple, prussic acid, deadly night-shade, fox-glove and poison sumach, have an effect on the animal system scarcely to be distinguished from that of opium and tobacco. They impair the organs of digestion, and may bring on fatuity, palsy, delirium, or apoplexy," ...
— A Disquisition on the Evils of Using Tobacco - and the Necessity of Immediate and Entire Reformation • Orin Fowler
... I say she says very improper things. What is one to do with such a thorn in the flesh?" ...
— Roderick Hudson • Henry James
... little countess in her own feudal keep, I would get up in the dawn, and gather flowers in the May dew—primroses and eglantine!—Charlie says it is affected to call sweet-briar eglantine.—Sylvia! Sylvia! that thorn has got hold of me; and there's Aunt Barbara coming down the lane in the baker's jiggeting cart.—Oh dear! was it only dreaming? I thought I was gathering dog-roses with Charlie and Sylvia in the lane; and ...
— Countess Kate • Charlotte M. Yonge
... crawl on the ground yo' has walked over, that bad do I worship yer. And if yo' cud stay and marry me and civilize me, I'd try to brush up and be a decenter man than I ever war; leastways, I'd clar ev'ry rock and thorn outer yer path.' ...
— The Wedge of Gold • C. C. Goodwin
... was wild and barren, a wilderness of rocks and thorn bushes and stunted scrub oaks. Now and then a Greek partridge, in its beautiful plumage of fawn-gray, marked with red and black about the head, clucked like a hen on the stony hillside, or whirred away in low, straight flight over the bushes. Flocks ...
— Out-of-Doors in the Holy Land - Impressions of Travel in Body and Spirit • Henry Van Dyke
... grows and covers the thorn, O'er the waste is the dragon-plant creeping. The man of my heart is away and I mourn— What home have ...
— Chinese Literature • Anonymous
... he felt his heart oppressed with a new and more bitter emotion. The company thought him happy in exclusive possession of the lovely girl's society—his side was pierced with a cruel, rankling thorn. ...
— The Youth of Jefferson - A Chronicle of College Scrapes at Williamsburg, in Virginia, A.D. 1764 • Anonymous
... remember one warm morn, when Winter Crept aged from the earth, and Spring's first breath Blew soft from the moist hills—the black-thorn boughs, So dark in the bare wood, when glistening In the sunshine were white with coming buds, Like the bright side of a sorrow—and the banks Had violets ...
— Life of Robert Browning • William Sharp
... but also rattles window-shutters and throws down tiles from the roof. It is not safe to call to it; if it reaches out to any one three times that is taken as a sign that it is a good spirit from purgatory asking for help. For protection a thorn-stick is carried, with which the vampire is thrust through. The "Alp" (the nightmare) is an evil old maid who sits on the back or breast of sleepers, holds their hands and feet, and stops their mouth so that ...
— The Shores of the Adriatic - The Austrian Side, The Kuestenlande, Istria, and Dalmatia • F. Hamilton Jackson
... we parted, swore Ere the spring he would return. Ah! what means yon violet flower, And the bud that decks the thorn! 'Twas the lark that upward sprung, 'Twas the ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole - Volume I • Horace Walpole
... mystic candelabra of visions and legends, with a hundred thousand branches bristling and overflowing with sorrowing thorns and ecstatic roses, with angels, virgins, and martyrs upon every flower and on every thorn, with infinite myriads of the triumphant Church springing from the ground pyramidically even into the azure, with its millions of blended and vibrating voices mounting upward ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Vol VIII - Italy and Greece, Part Two • Various
... hapless lovers. Its sluggish stream was fed by every ill-starred love. The trees had neither leaves nor fruit, and the ground was cumbered with briars, nettles, and rank weeds. The food, too, was such as might be expected in such a horrid clime. A few dried roots, horse-chestnuts, and thorn-apples—this was all the fare with which the Lion-Witch appeased the hunger of those ...
— Old-Time Stories • Charles Perrault
... pleasantly to them all. Other people drifted down—Marion Page who looked like a school-marm and rode like a demon; Eileen Shannon, pink and white as a thorn blossom, with the deuce to pay lurking in her grey eyes; Kathryn Tassel and Mrs. Vendenning whom he did not know, and finally his hostess Grace Ferrall with her piquant, almost boyish, freckled face and sweet frank eyes and ...
— The Fighting Chance • Robert W. Chambers
... lightsome heart I pu'd a rose Frae off its thorny tree; And my fause luver staw the rose, But left the thorn wi' me. ...
— Poems Every Child Should Know - The What-Every-Child-Should-Know-Library • Various
... other hand it should be remembered that Maynard was a man eminently qualified to sow violent animosities, and that he was a perpetual thorn in the flesh of the political barristers, whose principles he abhorred. A subtle and tricky man, he was constantly misleading judges by citing fictitious authorities, and then smiling at their professional ignorance when they had swallowed his audacious fabrications. ...
— A Book About Lawyers • John Cordy Jeaffreson
... which consists for the most part in peace of mind and contentment, would be served by nothing so much as by reducing this impulse of human nature within reasonable limits,—which would perhaps make it one fiftieth part of what it is now. By doing so, we should get rid of a thorn in the flesh which is always causing us pain. But it is a very difficult task, because the impulse in question is a natural and innate perversity of human nature. Tacitus says, The lust of fame is the last that a wise man shakes off[1] The only way of putting an end to this universal folly ...
— The Essays Of Arthur Schopenhauer: The Wisdom of Life • Arthur Schopenhauer
... it a goodly forest for the greatest king on earth. At last he came to where another road crossed the way he followed, and about the crossway was the ground clearer of trees, while beyond it the trees grew thicker, and there was some underwood of holly and thorn as the ground fell off as towards ...
— The Well at the World's End • William Morris
... youths who bear along The symbols of their Saviour's wrong, The spear, the garment torn, The flaggel, and the thorn,— ...
— Gloucester Moors and Other Poems • William Vaughn Moody
... with a resolution of the House of Representatives of the 30th of January last, calling for the papers relative to the claim of Owen Thorn and others against the British Government, I transmit a report from the Secretary of State, together with copies of the papers ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents: Ulysses S. Grant • James D. Richardson
... that it was "their joy and delight to die on the battlefield, and that nothing so tormented them as to die idly in their beds." "No wonder," says Sammes, "that they conquered many nations; distressed the Romans themselves, and were a constant thorn in the side of the Gauls" ("Antiquities of Ancient ...
— Bolougne-Sur-Mer - St. Patrick's Native Town • Reverend William Canon Fleming
... a signal, and at once all disappeared even as they had come, swiftly and silently. Warrenton and Stuteley placed themselves low down behind bushes of white thorn. Warrenton, who had given his quiver to Little John, now produced a great bag from under a bush; and took out of it a dozen or more long smocks such as shepherds wear. Hastily Robin and Stuteley attired ...
— Robin Hood • Paul Creswick
... a house sanctified by the sufferings of brave men, who had fought for a great cause and laid us all under an obligation never to be expressed in words. Newlands, with its keen, almost mountain, air, its views, its woodlands, its yews, its groves of ash, and oak, and thorn, its green paths winding through the greyer and deeper-toned gorse, heather, and bracken, is a thing to live for. If one can be grateful, as certainly one can, to things inanimate, I am grateful for the health and strength which ...
— The Adventure of Living • John St. Loe Strachey
... possess a church that should surpass all others in magnificence, and which could boast of some special unique glory— that seemed to a monk something worth living for. The holy rood at Bromholm, the holy thorn at Glastonbury, were possessions that brought world-wide renown to the monasteries in which they were found, and gave a lustre to the churches in which they were deposited; and the intense esprit de corps, the passionate loyalty, of a monk to his monastery is a sentiment which ...
— The Coming of the Friars • Augustus Jessopp
... good-humor which was not without malice. He had played his cards extremely well, but the trumps in his hand had not been quite strong enough. Well, he was young; plenty of time yet for Cabinet office. That he would be a thorn in the side of the new Ministry went without saying. Ferrier felt no particular dismay at the prospect, and amused himself with speculations on the letters which had probably passed that very day between Broadstone and the ...
— The Testing of Diana Mallory • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... said, "or you would know that here, in these parts, we are so often more wet than dry that it makes no matter. Yes, I thought so; there was a thorn in its foot. May I trouble you to hold him ...
— At Love's Cost • Charles Garvice
... really thought that documents signed in tents by gentlemen wearing shoulder-straps were deserving of more respect, even by the President, than were mere Acts of Congress. This was a mistaken notion, but Fremont never could see that he had been in error, and from this time forth he became a vengeful thorn in ...
— Abraham Lincoln, Vol. II • John T. Morse
... old brown thorn trees break in two high over Cummen Strand Under a bitter black wind that blows from the left hand; Our courage breaks like an old tree in a black wind and dies, But we have hidden in our hearts the flame out of the eyes Of Cathleen the daughter ...
— Stories of Red Hanrahan • W. B. Yeats
... sorts of debts as your wife. If her father gets her back, I shall be able to bring her to terms at North Villa; if not, I must get speech of her, wherever she happens to be hidden. She's the only thorn in our side now, and we must pull her out with gold pincers immediately. Don't you ...
— Basil • Wilkie Collins
... for blame, one cannot say. By dotting a few i's, crossing the t's, and perhaps touching up some hidden letters with the requisite reagent, one can, however, get a not unfair or unshrewd criticism of the book out of this envelope. Telemaque, if it is not, as one of Thackeray's "thorn" correspondents suggested, superior to "Lovel Parsonage and Framley the Widower," has, or with some easy suppressions and a very few additions and developments might have, much more pure romance interest than ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 1 - From the Beginning to 1800 • George Saintsbury
... moments and hours which are devoted to the celebration of eminent BOOK-COLLECTORS! Let the sand roll down the glass as it will; let "the chirping on each thorn" remind us of Aurora's saucy face peering above the horizon! in such society, and with such a subject of ...
— Bibliomania; or Book-Madness - A Bibliographical Romance • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... who had never appeared in this parlour was the captain's wife. That had been a thorn in Abramka's flesh. He had spent days and nights going over in his mind how he could rid this lady of the, in his opinion, wretched habit of ordering her clothes from Moscow. For this ball, however, as she herself had told him, she had not ordered a dress but only material from out of ...
— Best Russian Short Stories • Various
... the poem when it deals with these matters is often suggestive of a tyrant's attorney-general whose business is to find plausible excuses for an arbitrary despot. Milton had his share in creating that bad sort of fear of God which is always appearing as the thorn in the theological rose-bed of the eighteenth century, and, later on, becomes the nightmare of the Evangelical revival. None of these conceptions, the capricious despot, the remorseless creditor, the Judge whose {145} invariable sentence is hell fire, ...
— Milton • John Bailey
... struggles! and uncommonly pretty turns of thought! The picture that was found on a bramble-bush, the new sensitive-plant, or tree, which caught the swain by the upper-garment, and presented to his ravished eyes a portrait.—Fatal image!—It planted a thorn in a till then insensible heart, and sent a new kind of a knight-errant into the world. But even this was nothing to the catastrophe, and the circumstance on which it hung, the hornet settling on the sleeping lover's face. What a heart-rending accident! She planted, in imitation ...
— Mary - A Fiction • Mary Wollstonecraft
... turned them loose to feed, they sat down under a tree, and made some sort of a meal off the biltong and cooked corn which they had brought with them. By the time this was finished darkness fell, for there was little moon, so that nothing remained to do except to sleep within a circle of a few dead thorn-boughs which they had drawn about their camp. This, then, they did, and so weary were they both, that notwithstanding all the emotions through which they had passed, and their fears lest lions should attack them—for ...
— Benita, An African Romance • H. Rider Haggard
... originated the plan of the Lyrical Ballads; [Footnote: Published in 1798. It opened with the Ancient Mariner and closed with Wordsworth's lines on Tintern Abbey. Among other poems written in Wordsworth's simplest style were The Idiot Boy, The Thorn, and We are Seven.] in which it was agreed that my endeavours should be directed to persons and characters supernatural, or at least romantic; yet so as to transfer from our inward nature a human interest and a semblance of truth sufficient to procure for these shadows ...
— English literary criticism • Various
... his action at the last. He had some sense of the fitness of things. He could not find a place in the world without making other people uncomfortable, and causing trouble. If he had lived, he would always have added to the blight on his wife's career, and have been an arrow—not a thorn—in her side. Very likely he would have created a scandal for the good young girl who nursed him. He made the false step, and compelled society to reject him. It did not want to do so; it never does. It is long-suffering; it tries not to see and acknowledge things until the culprit himself ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... we cannot untie. Tasso's is no infrequent case in modern biography. A man of genius, of an ardent temperament, reckless of physical laws, self-indulgent, becomes presently unfortunate, querulous, a "discomfortable cousin," a thorn to himself and ...
— Essays • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... in one of his Cornish stories exactly this conception. Rags were offered. "Just a rag tored off a petticoat or some such thing. They hanged 'em up around about on the thorn bushes, to shaw as they'd 'a' done more for the good saint if they'd ...
— Folklore as an Historical Science • George Laurence Gomme
... we're sent to do. And the crowds crowd to listen, when it's given. This is the way the Witness did. He followed the clear Father-voice, though the road led straight across the regular roads through thorn hedges and thick underbrush. Should not the servant tread ...
— Quiet Talks on John's Gospel • S. D. Gordon
... cote should be provided with 1,000 pigeons, but this number does not appear to have been yet reached except at Thorn, Metz, ...
— Scientific American Supplement No. 819 - Volume XXXII, Number 819. Issue Date September 12, 1891 • Various
... fine wefts, has got into my head; not "bee-bonneted," but bird-bonneted, I go. Yes, this day shall be given to the king, as our country-folk say, when they go a-pleasuring. I am off with the little wool-gatherers, to see what thorn and brier and fern-stalk and willow-catkin ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 32, June, 1860 • Various
... rode unto an horn that was green, and it hung upon a thorn, and there he blew three deadly motes, and there came two damosels and armed him lightly. And then he took a great horse, and a green shield and a green spear. And then they ran together with all their mights, and brake their spears unto ...
— Le Morte D'Arthur, Volume I (of II) - King Arthur and of his Noble Knights of the Round Table • Thomas Malory
... son of Duke Bevis d'Aygremont, stolen in infancy by a female slave. As the slave rested under a white-thorn, a lion and a leopard devoured her, and then killed each other in disputing over the infant. Oriande la f['e]e, attracted to the spot by the crying of the child, exclaimed, "by the powers above, the ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook, Vol. 3 • E. Cobham Brewer
... to a place where you may be—well—what one might call the thorn in the side of their happiness. You are the 'other man', as it were, to cause quarrels and that sort of thing. And she feels that she has not done rightly by you, and, through her friendship and a desire to see peace all around, believes she can arrange ...
— The Cross-Cut • Courtney Ryley Cooper
... first object is the removal of the cause. Remove any dust, chaff, thorn, or other foreign body from the conjunctiva, purify the stable from all sources of ammoniacal or other irritant gas; keep the horse from dusty roads, and, above all, from the proximity of a leading ...
— Special Report on Diseases of the Horse • United States Department of Agriculture
... not intermeddle with the joy of authorship. Spoken praise carries off the rose and puts a thorn in its place. One of our famous novelists, whom we will call Brown, happened to catch sight in a strange city of the sign, "Autographs of distinguished authors for sale," He thought to himself he would test his own market value, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine Of Popular Literature And Science, Old Series, Vol. 36—New Series, Vol. 10, July 1885 • Various
... the gods and giants represented the opposite forces of good and evil, there was no hope of their living together in peace. The struggle continued evidently for ages, neither party gaining a decided advantage, until Boerr married the giantess Bestla, daughter of Bolthorn (the thorn of evil), who bore him three powerful sons, Odin (spirit), Vili (will), and Ve (holy). These three sons immediately joined their father in his struggle against the hostile frost-giants, and finally succeeded in slaying their deadliest foe, the great Ymir. ...
— Myths of the Norsemen - From the Eddas and Sagas • H. A. Guerber
... put into an ox-cart, to be jolted over the unequal road; saluting impartially all the stumps and stones that lay in our way, the only means of avoiding which seemed to be when the little, thick-headed Frenchman, our conductor, bethought him of suddenly guiding his cattle into a projecting tree or thorn-bush, to the great detriment not only of my straw bonnet, ...
— Wau-bun - The Early Day in the Northwest • Juliette Augusta Magill Kinzie
... "whether it would puzzle a monkey?" He had forgotten the needs of his Growing Nation, and was earnestly parting the white-thorn ...
— Actions and Reactions • Rudyard Kipling
... abrupt, and precipitous, and partially covered with copse-wood, as was the little brawling stream which ran through it, and of which the eye of the spectator could only catch occasional glimpses from among the hazel, dogberry, and white thorn, with which it was here and there covered. In the bottom, there was a small, but beautiful green carpet, nearly, if not altogether circular, about a hundred yards in diameter, in the centre of which stood one of those fairy rings that gave ...
— The Black Baronet; or, The Chronicles Of Ballytrain - The Works of William Carleton, Volume One • William Carleton
... a thorn, I say it is a dart, And yet I cannot tear thee from my heart." Antonio, Count ...
— What Katy Did At School • Susan Coolidge
... put every possible obstacle in their way. To keep these unruly youngsters in order meant a constant clashing of wills, and needed much courage and determination. Some of the new girls also were inclined to rebel and to air their own views. Sybil Vernon, in particular, was a thorn in the flesh. She had been at boarding-school before, and on the strength of her previous experience she offered advice upon any and every occasion. She was very aggrieved that she had not been eligible ...
— Monitress Merle • Angela Brazil
... a garden alley, between a row of quince-trees and a hedge of Christ's-thorn; at one end was a fountain in a great basin of porphyry, at the other a little temple, very old and built for the worship of Isis, now an oratory under the invocation of the Blessed Mary. The two young men made a singular contrast, for Basil, who was in his twenty-third year, had all ...
— Veranilda • George Gissing
... Stramonium). Stramonium, also known as Thorn-apple, in large doses is a powerful narcotic poison. In medicinal doses it acts as an ...
— The People's Common Sense Medical Adviser in Plain English • R. V. Pierce
... possible;" that is, as far as is consistent with the fulfilment of the sentence of condemnation on the whole earth. Death must be upon the hills; and the cruelty of the tempests smite them, and the briar and thorn spring up upon them: but they so smite, as to bring their rocks into the fairest forms; and so spring, as to make the very desert blossom as the rose. Even among our own hills of Scotland and Cumberland, ...
— Modern Painters, Volume IV (of V) • John Ruskin
... vain for a place wide enough to allow him to get into the opening in the rock. He was about to give up, when he seized hold of a branch of a thorn tree growing on the side of the rock. He looked closer and saw that it grew out of the cleft in the rock. He saw, too, that at this point the opening was wider and that he had only to remove the tree in order to ...
— An American Robinson Crusoe • Samuel B. Allison
... and for her sake, I don't feel quite easy about leaving them to Prince's bride. Your mother never saw them, never knew of their existence. They are very valuable, and the amount they will bring must relieve all present necessities. Tell Ellice the sight of the case disturbs me, like a thorn in the flesh, so I send them away, to rid myself of an annoyance. She must not thank me; they come from ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... to put forward the theory of the earth's motion in a way to command attention was born in 1473, at the village of Thorn, in eastern Prussia. His name was Nicholas Copernicus. There is no more famous name in the entire annals of science than this, yet posterity has never been able fully to establish the lineage of the famous expositor of the true doctrine of the solar system. The city ...
— A History of Science, Volume 2(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... made Mannering start. She was full six feet high, wore a man's greatcoat over the rest of her dress, had in her hand a goodly sloe-thorn cudgel, and in all points of equipment, except her petticoats, seemed rather masculine than feminine. Her dark elf-locks shot out like the snakes of the gorgon, between an old-fashioned bonnet called a bongrace, heightening the singular effect of her strong and weather-beaten ...
— Guy Mannering • Sir Walter Scott
... in her career when she clung passionately to the conformities, and when the fact of being able to say: "I'm here with my father and mother" was worth paying for even in the discomfort of that grim abode. Nevertheless, it was another thorn in her pride that her parents could not—for the meanest of material reasons—transfer themselves at her coming to one of the big Fifth Avenue hotels. When she had suggested it Mr. Spragg had briefly replied that, owing ...
— The Custom of the Country • Edith Wharton
... returned, and repeated this more than once. Then, turning suddenly towards me, she made four or five huge bounds, only just touching the ground, and dropped into the chalk quarry a few feet below me, and crept under the shelter of some dwarf thorn bushes. Her object was manifest. By passing more than once over her own tracks, on the hill top, she created a strong scent, which the breeze, just catching it at the brow, would carry further forward. By her leaps towards the quarry, she had left but a slight scent, and under those thorn bushes ...
— Records of Woodhall Spa and Neighbourhood - Historical, Anecdotal, Physiographical, and Archaeological, with Other Matter • J. Conway Walter
... crowds, dividing and subdividing, but never dying, make excellent mouthfuls for a small feeder. Those with the more flint in their skins were the more apt to survive and "breed." The threads of flint increase until they form a sort of thorn-thicket round a little social group, or a complete lattice round an individual body. Next, spikes or spines jut out from the lattice, partly for additional protection, partly to keep the little body afloat ...
— The Story of Evolution • Joseph McCabe
... through the bush with his rod and a few troutlings, dry-shod and immaculate in a jacket that fitted him like a uniform, and Ida went back to camp with him. She fancied, however, that her father or Weston, who sat still and filled his pipe again, would have come back with a heavy fish, or at least thorn-rent and dripping wet. ...
— The Gold Trail • Harold Bindloss
... priest. And I saw I must inform myself more thoroughly from an impartial source. There is an old rascal of a chief here, Faiaso, whom I dare say you saw to-day at the council; he has been all his life turbulent and sly, a great fomenter of rebellions, and a thorn in the side of the mission and the island. For all that he is very shrewd, and, except in politics or about his own misdemeanours, a teller of the truth. I went to his house, told him what I had heard, and besought him to be frank. I do not think I had ever a more painful interview. ...
— Island Nights' Entertainments • Robert Louis Stevenson
... CIRCUS BOYS ACROSS THE CONTINENT," it will be recalled how Phil and his companion won new laurels in the sawdust arena, and how the former ran down and captured a bad man who had been a thorn in the side of the circus itself for many weeks through his efforts to avenge a fancied wrong. By this time the boys had become full-fledged circus performers, each playing an ...
— The Circus Boys On the Mississippi • Edgar B. P. Darlington
... taken Pignerol from the duke, put it into such a state of defence as the duke could never force it out of his hands, and reduced the duke, rather by manage and conduct than by force, to make peace without it; so as annexing it to the crown of France it has ever since been a thorn in his foot that has always made the peace of Savoy lame and precarious, and France has since made Pignerol one of the strongest fortresses ...
— Memoirs of a Cavalier • Daniel Defoe
... offen de thorn tree and bile it with turpentine for de toothache. She used herbs for de ...
— Slave Narratives: a Folk History of Slavery in the United States From Interviews with Former Slaves. - Texas Narratives, Part 2 • Works Projects Administration
... "Yes," says the Lord, "go and preach the Gospel to those Jerusalem sinners." I can imagine Him saying: "Go and hunt up that man that put the cruel crown of thorns upon My brow, and preach the Gospel to him. Tell him he shall have a crown in My kingdom without a thorn ...
— Moody's Anecdotes And Illustrations - Related in his Revival Work by the Great Evangilist • Dwight L. Moody
... thorn? Then count it not a whit! Man is well done with it; Soon as he's born He should all means essay To put the plague away; And I, war-worn, Poor captured fugitive, My life most gladly give - I might have had ...
— Songs of a Savoyard • W. S. Gilbert
... boundary. Luke plunged into the heart of this defile, fighting his way downwards, in the direction of the brook. His progress was impeded by a thick undergrowth of brier, and other matted vegetation, as well as by the entanglements thrown in his way by the taller bushes of thorn and hazel, the entwined and elastic branches of which, in their recoil, galled and fretted him, by inflicting smart blows on his face and hands. This was a hardship he usually little regarded. But, upon the present occasion, it had the effect, by irritating his temper, of increasing the thirst ...
— Rookwood • William Harrison Ainsworth
... took a thorn of the Tree of Sleep and he put it into the flesh of the battle-maiden. Then, with her helmet on her head and the breast-mail of the Valkyrie upon her, he lifted Brynhild in his arms and carried her ...
— The Children of Odin - The Book of Northern Myths • Padraic Colum
... arisen the curious after-the-Paris-conference situation. Italy has been despised by France; Italy, therefore, has renounced that war-after-the-war, dear to the French heart; Italy has communed with Dr. Benes and planted another thorn in the side of the Hapsburgs; she has secretly opposed French policy in Hungary. With Germany she has made a commercial entente—not a political or military one, but a pacific laissez-faire for the purposes of trade. France envisages the complete ruin of German industry ...
— Europe—Whither Bound? - Being Letters of Travel from the Capitals of Europe in the Year 1921 • Stephen Graham
... This plant belongs to the same family as the deadly nightshade, henbane, belladonna, thorn-apple, Jerusalem cherry, potato, tomato, egg-plant, cayenne pepper, bitter-sweet, and petunia. Most of the plants of this Nightshade family have more or less poison in their leaves or fruit. Tobacco is supposed to have been named from the ...
— Object Lessons on the Human Body - A Transcript of Lessons Given in the Primary Department of School No. 49, New York City • Sarah F. Buckelew and Margaret W. Lewis
... foot-way tread, For all the bloomy flush of life is fled. All but yon widow'd, solitary thing That feebly bends beside the plashy spring; 130 She, wretched matron, forc'd in age, for bread, To strip the brook with mantling cresses spread, To pick her wintry faggot from the thorn, To seek her nightly shed, and weep till morn; She only left of all the harmless train, 135 The sad historian of ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Oliver Goldsmith • Oliver Goldsmith
... thorn in Bentley's side, from the latter having called the former, when a young student in the university, fiddling Conyers, because he played on the violin. A punning caricature represented B. about to be thrust into the brazen bull of Phalaris, ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. XIX. No. 540, Saturday, March 31, 1832 • Various
... the plains, where there is less moisture, and where vegetation therefore is scantier, we find the unwonted forms of growth more distinct, and have the full sense of being in a southern land. Here the thorn palms, the cactus hedges, the penguin fences, resembling huge pineapple plants, and various trees and shrubs, being seen more isolated, make a stronger impression of the peculiarities of tropical forms. Here too we meet in greater abundance with the cocoanut ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. IV. October, 1863, No. IV. - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various
... her memory she knew not from whence. But she shuddered at it. Polly's eyes, dazed, pleading like the lamb's, rose before her; or was it that Other Face, tender, thorn-crowned, that had been looking upon her in love all these ...
— Sowing Seeds in Danny • Nellie L. McClung
... certainly expressed to me a hope that he should visit England some time. There can be no doubt that it is well worth while thus to secure the alliance of the Montenegrians, for they would prove a bitter thorn in any collision either with Turkey or Austria. The country is divided into twelve military jurisdictions, under so many captains, and every man is bound to serve, though by what power, except inclination, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 57, No. 351, January 1845 • Various
... be not a far more faithful copy. "I have been in a many parts, far and near, and I don't know that I ever saw before a man crying by himself in the public road; a grown man I mean, that was neither sick nor hurt," etc., etc. But when I turn to the following stanza in The Thorn: ...
— Biographia Literaria • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... the legend of yore told in the state of Kentucky When in the springtime the birds call from the beeches and maples, Call from the petulant thorn, call from the acrid persimmon; When from the woods by the creek and from the pastures and meadows, When from the spring-house and lane and from the mint-bed and orchard, When from the redbud and gum and from redolent lilac, When from the dirt roads and pikes comes ...
— John Smith, U.S.A. • Eugene Field
... found great delight in shooting with the bows and arrows of the papooses or children, who, in turn, were wonderfully amused at the bad shots of the little pale-face. Now and then, to be sure, the vicious child of some chieftain would amuse itself by pricking Kitty's tender skin with a thorn, and hearing her scream in consequence; or, having seen the black-and-blue marks upon her delicate arms, caused by the rough handling of her captors, they would pinch her flesh and watch for the change of color with intense interest. One day they ...
— Po-No-Kah - An Indian Tale of Long Ago • Mary Mapes Dodge |
