"Thorny" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... readers are disturbed by this thorny question, I beg leave to recommend, to them Letter 69 of Montesquieu's Lettres Persanes; and the late Mr. John Palmer of Islington's Answer to Dr. Priestley's mechanical arguments for what he absurdly calls 'Philosophical Necessity.' ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 3 • Boswell, Edited by Birkbeck Hill
... upon a thorny waste; Hot noontide lies on all the way, And with its scorching breath makes haste Each freshening dawn to burn and slay, Yet patiently I bide and stay: Knowing the secret of my fate, The hour of bloom, dear Lord, ...
— Verses • Susan Coolidge
... childhood again—bright and tender childhood, which dowers our after life with so many tender, mournful, happy memorials;—whose breezes fan our weary brows so often as we go on over the thorny path, once a path of flowers. They were once more children, and they wandered thus through the beautiful forest, collecting their memories, laughing here, sighing there—and giving an association or a word to every feature of ...
— The Last of the Foresters • John Esten Cooke
... returning to civilisation through a safe road; as it was, Gabriel, Roche, and I resumed our journey alone. During two or three days we followed the edge of the wood, every attempt to penetrate into the interior proving quite useless, so thick were the bushes and thorny briars. Twice or thrice we perceived on some hills, at a great distance, smoke and fires, but we could not tell what Indians ...
— Travels and Adventures of Monsieur Violet • Captain Marryat
... little harebells o'er the lee; Ye stately foxgloves fair to see; Ye woodbines hanging bonnilie, In scented bow'rs; Ye roses on your thorny tree. ...
— Language of Flowers • Kate Greenaway
... amused." He presented a top-like triangular appearance for one staggering second. The Tinleys did not go 'so' at all, and consequently they lost the satirical man, and were called 'the ballet-dancers' by Adela which thorny scoff her sisters permitted to pass about for a single day, and no more. The Tinleys were their match at epithets, and any low contention of this kind obscured for them the social summit they hoped to attain; the dream whereof ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... gold, of the songs of bliss; and then her eyes glistened; she said, "Yes, I shall be there soon; I shall meet them by-and-by;" and then she seemed so glad! Ah! believer, you may always cheer yourself with that thought. Thy head may be crowned with thorny troubles now, but it shall wear a starry crown directly; thy hand may be filled with cares—it shall grasp a harp soon, a harp full of music. Thy garments may be soiled with dust now; they shall be white by-and-by. Wait a little ...
— The world's great sermons, Volume 8 - Talmage to Knox Little • Grenville Kleiser
... see such a central sprig, whose progress I have watched, when I thought it had forgotten its destiny, as I had, bearing its first crop of small green or yellow or rosy fruit, which the cows cannot get at over the bushy and thorny hedge which surrounds it, and I make haste to taste the new and undescribed variety. We have all heard of the numerous varieties of fruit invented by Van Mons and Knight. This is the system of Van Cow, and ...
— Excursions • Henry D. Thoreau
... flush of dawn has left the sky, a man makes his way along the steep deserted bank like a tiny speck: the ancient, mast-like pines rise up in terraces on both sides of the torrent, gaze sternly at the free man and murmur menacingly; rocks, huge stones, and thorny bushes bar his way, but he is strong in body and bold in spirit, and has no fear of the pine-trees, nor stones, nor of his solitude, nor of the reverberating echo which repeats the sound of every footstep that ...
— The Witch and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... softly as a cat, and keeping with great care in the shadow, had followed him through the little door which he forgot to lock, and was now hidden among those very trees, he might have remembered a proverb to the effect that snakes hide in the greenest grass and the prettiest flowers have thorny stems. But he thought of no such thing, who was lost in happy anticipations of a moonlight interview with a lovely and cultured young lady, whose image, to speak truth, had taken so deep a hold upon his fancy, ...
— Pearl-Maiden • H. Rider Haggard
... pallid ghost of mortal love, That fills with banned and mournful loveliness, Unblest, the haunted chambers of my soul. My misery will atone,—my misery, - Dear God, will surely atone! for not the sting Of lacerating thongs, nor the slow horror Of crowns of thorny iron maddening the brows, Nor all that else pale hermits have devised To scourge the rebel senses in their shade Of caverned desolation, have the power To smart and goad and lash and mortify Like the great love that binds my ruined heart Relentless, as the insidious ivy binds The ...
— Pike County Ballads and Other Poems • John Hay
... it were, but poorer were the love. Lord, I would have me love thee from the deeps— Of troubled thought, of pain, of weariness. Through seething wastes below, billows above, My soul should rise in eager, hungering leaps; Through thorny thicks, through sands unstable press— Out of my dream to him who ...
— A Book of Strife in the Form of The Diary of an Old Soul • George MacDonald
... peeps into the dining-room, and see the curly brown head between the two gay ones, as the three sat round the table. He could not help hearing a word now and then, as the windows were open, and these bits of conversation filled him with curiosity for the names "Thorny," "Celia," and "George" were often repeated, and an occasional merry laugh from the young lady sounded like music in ...
— Under the Lilacs • Louisa May Alcott
... employment, and have supported thy wife and children; and thy family, which is now sunk into the refuse of humanity, would have been blooming and prosperous; lamented by them, thou wouldst have died calmly on thy bed, and thy example would have guided thy posterity along the thorny ...
— Faustus - his Life, Death, and Doom • Friedrich Maximilian von Klinger
... formation had given place to basaltic rocks. They passed from groups of mhowa trees and left behind a wide shallow stream, its bed dotted with pools fringed by great kowa trees, and its banks lined by a thick green cover of jamun and karonda. Thorny babul thrust their spiked branches out over the roadway, white with tufts of cotton torn by its thorns from bales, loose pressed, on their way to market in buffalo carts; "Babul the thief," the natives called this ...
— Caste • W. A. Fraser
... in the dreamy and forgotten little town, I hold acquittal for all who have strayed and gone to ruin in Cupid's flowery and thorny labyrinth. For assuredly it is ...
— The Bride of Dreams • Frederik van Eeden
... wilt answer? He will smile on thee, One smile of His shall be enough to heal The wound of man's neglect; and He will sigh, Pitying the trouble which that sigh shall cure; And He will speak—speak in the desolate nigh In the dark night: 'For me a thorny crown Men wove, and nails were driven in my hands And feet: there was an earthquake, and I died I died, and ...
— Poems by Jean Ingelow, In Two Volumes, Volume I. • Jean Ingelow
... place of call on the mainland called Pangu; they were steaming straight out of a bay. To the east a massive headland closed the view, with the tilted edges of the rocky strata showing through its ragged clothing of rank bushes and thorny creepers. The wind had begun to sing in the rigging; the sea along the coast, green and as if swollen a little above the line of the horizon, seemed to pour itself over, time after time, with a slow and thundering fall, into the shadow of the leeward cape; and across ...
— End of the Tether • Joseph Conrad
... of the river called Shigogo and Shipanga are bordered by a low level expanse of marshy country, with occasional clumps of palm-trees and a few thorny acacias. The river itself spreads out to a width of from three to four miles, with many islands, among which it is difficult to navigate, except when the river is in flood. In front, a range of high hills from ...
— A Popular Account of Dr. Livingstone's Expedition to the Zambesi and Its Tributaries • David Livingstone
... man's nose is a great organ, and we will not cast it in his teeth more than nature has done. I said so to my diplomatist, who was amused. If you are sparklingly vulgar with the English, you are aristocratic. Oh! what principle we women require in the thorny walk of life. I can show you a letter when we meet that will astonish humdrum. Not so diplomatic as the writer thought! Mrs. Melville (sweet woman!) must continue to practise civility; for a woman who is a wife, my dear, ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... parable tells us nothing about the comparative acreage of the path and the rocky and thorny soils on the one hand, and of the fertile soil on the other. It is not meant to teach the proportion of success to failure, but to exhibit the fact that the reception of the word depends on men's dispositions. The good soil has none of the faults of the rest of the field. ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Matthew Chaps. IX to XXVIII • Alexander Maclaren
... one vintem's worth of pins in his pocket threw the pins at her. Immediately a high, thorny hedge sprang out of the ground between the little old ...
— Fairy Tales from Brazil - How and Why Tales from Brazilian Folk-Lore • Elsie Spicer Eells
... Colonia Dublan, is made in the shape of a horned toad, the lizard so familiar to anyone who has visited the Southwest of the United States. The head with its spikes, and the tail as well, are well rendered; the thorny prominences of the body are represented by the indentations around ...
— Unknown Mexico, Volume 1 (of 2) • Carl Lumholtz
... eminent for Wisdom and Vertue, and Men acted by a noble Principle of Conscience: Had not Conscience (of Duty to God) prevailed above other Considerations with them, they would not for all they are worth in the World have medled in this Thorny business. Have there been any disputed Methods used in discovering the Works of Darkness? It may be none but what have had great Presedents in other parts of the World; which may, though not altogether justifie, ...
— The Wonders of the Invisible World • Cotton Mather
... on the step he saw the ragged cluster of children troop down the road from twenty years agone, almost as if he actually beheld them, himself at the head. He could still feel their plump palms clinging to his hand at the first suggestion of danger. He had led them a right thorny path, each to a successful goal. And now could he turn against "Fambly"? Should he denounce the treachery of one of the little group that he could see huddling together for warmth on the meagre hearthstone, while outside the snows of a ...
— The Mystery of Witch-Face Mountain and Other Stories • Charles Egbert Craddock
... cannot be put in motion in any other; and whose muscular power is so exclusively exercised that the nervous power which produces intelligence is thereby greatly reduced. People of this kind must absolutely have something that they can take hold of on the slippery and thorny path of their life, some sort of beautiful fable by means of which things can be presented to them which their crude intelligence could most certainly only understand in picture and parable. It is impossible to approach them with subtle ...
— Essays of Schopenhauer • Arthur Schopenhauer
... be," I objected, "when the pea is a weak, clinging, straggling herb, and the locust a big, thorny hardwood tree?" ...
— The Story of My Boyhood and Youth • John Muir
... berry to berry, gathering them with a deft skilfulness her companions could not emulate. Diana knew how they were getting on, without using her eyes to find out; for all their experience was proclaimed aloud. How the ground was rough and the bushes thorny, how the berries blacked their lips and the prickles lacerated their fingers, and the stains of blackberry juice were spoiling gloves and dresses and all ...
— Diana • Susan Warner
... a flat wooden cover over it now, with an iron bar to keep it in place, lest some one be careless and fall in, though now the wild blackberry vines have nearly hidden it from sight. Even now when only young leaves are on the brambles, the thorny stems make a network over the cover. The old Paxton House was gone before my time," Mrs. Derby said, "but a part of its fine wall remains. It was upon that wall ...
— Dorothy Dainty at Glenmore • Amy Brooks
... were frequently relieved. It was rather serious work for the bearers—to say nothing of my feelings—for they had never carried a chair before, and the way lay through thick jungle, constantly interspersed by morasses and swamps, and obstructed by fallen trees, overhanging branches, thorny creepers, and marshy streams. At first I had many misgivings, but soon gained confidence when I saw how careful the men were, and how anxious to avoid an accident. Two coolies went on in front, and with their sharp parongs cut down or hacked away the more ...
— The Last Voyage - to India and Australia, in the 'Sunbeam' • Lady (Annie Allnutt) Brassey
... of the differences of opinion between the two seniors of the house of Fujinami, which became more frequent as the clouds of disaster gathered over the home in Akasaka. A far more thorny problem was ...
— Kimono • John Paris
... rock-walled well, Where the silver-scaled sea-farers, and the crook-lipped bull-trout dwell. But most when their hearts were merry 'twas the joy of carle and quean To ride in the deeps of the oak-wood, and the thorny thicket green: Forth go their hearts before them to the blast of the strenuous horn, Where the level sun comes dancing down the oaks in the early morn: There they strain and strive for the quarry, when the wind hath fallen dead In the odorous dusk of the ...
— The Story of Sigurd the Volsung and the Fall of the Niblungs • William Morris
... Chris held his breath, the dampened leaves and petals of the bush he had planted sent their green fragrance lifting and turning on the night air. As if that had been the signal it had long waited for, a dust-colored bird flew down to perch on a thorny stem. ...
— Mr. Wicker's Window • Carley Dawson
... the town of Shumla, is nearly surrounded by a rampart of Mount Haemus, or the Balkan, which descends on both sides in the form of a horse-shoe. The steep slopes of this great fence are covered with detached rocks and close thorny bushes. The nature of the ground makes it a most advantageous position for the Turkish soldier, who when sheltered by these inequalities, rapid steeps and a few intrenchments, displays all the address ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 14, Issue 390, September 19, 1829 • Various
... heap Toil and unvanquishable penury On those who build their palaces, and bring Their daily bread? From vice, black, loathsome vice, From rapine, madness, treachery and wrong; From all that genders misery, and makes Of earth this thorny wilderness; from ...
— Percy Bysshe Shelley as a Philosopher and Reformer • Charles Sotheran
... disbelieve it, you think yourself deceived; but no: Caroline lacks intellect, she is dull, she can neither joke nor reason, sometimes she has little tact. You are frightened. You find yourself forever obliged to lead this darling through the thorny paths, where you must perforce ...
— Petty Troubles of Married Life, Part First • Honore de Balzac
... had been friends in youth; But whispering tongues can poison truth; And constancy lives in realms above; And life is thorny; and youth is vain; And to be wroth with one we love, Doth work like madness in the brain. And thus it chanced, as I divine, With Roland and Sir Leoline. Each spake words of high disdain And insult to his heart's best brother They parted—ne'er to meet again! But never either found another To free ...
— Appreciations, with an Essay on Style • Walter Horatio Pater
... fell fast and faster Yet you would not call me back Nay be glad her feet no longer Tread life's rough and thorny track ...
— Preliminary Report of the Commission Appointed by the University • The Seybert Commission
... volcanic convulsion far down in the depths of the ocean. Masses of coral worn by time lay scattered about, amid which grew shrubs and tangled creepers, with here and there a few taller trees; but as the shrubs were not of a thorny species we pushed through them or leaped over them, Dick and Nat coming down on their noses more than once in our progress. Seeing a knoll, or rather a mass of coral, thrown up higher than the rest ahead I made ...
— The Cruise of the Dainty - Rovings in the Pacific • William H. G. Kingston
... collurio, an allied bird, uses this method still more frequently. He even prepares a small larder before feasting. One may thus see on a thorny branch spitted side by side Coleoptera, crickets, grasshoppers, frogs, and even young birds, which he has seized when they ...
— The Industries of Animals • Frederic Houssay
... searching in the underbrush, for it was evident it could not be far off. The bloody track could be followed for some distance; in fact, in one place the thorny roots of the remarkable pachiuba palm-tree, the roots that the women here use for kitchen graters, had torn off a bunch of long, beautiful hair from the sides of the jaguar, which very likely was weak and was dragging itself to some cluster of trees where ...
— In The Amazon Jungle - Adventures In Remote Parts Of The Upper Amazon River, Including A - Sojourn Among Cannibal Indians • Algot Lange
... been a chance of returning to civilization through a safe road; as it was, Gabriel, Roche, and I resumed our journey alone. During two or three days we followed the edge of the wood, every attempt to penetrate into the interior proving quite useless, so thick were the bushes and thorny briers. Twice or thrice we perceived on some hills, at a great distance, smoke and fires, but we could not tell what ...
— Monsieur Violet • Frederick Marryat
... and spattering him with mud, Herrick's face was very tired and worn, but in his eyes there lurked a little faint light of happiness that he had helped another weary soul a few steps forward on its pilgrimage over a thorny road. ...
— The Making of a Soul • Kathlyn Rhodes
... slender, bending pines to the bushes of dogwood and sassafras, and the rotting, ancient stumps and fallen logs, by the uncontrollable, all-spreading vine. It was such a fantastic thicket as one might look to find in fairyland, thorny and impenetrable: here as tall as a ten years' pine, there sunken away to the height of the wild honeysuckles; everywhere backed by blue sky, heavy with odors, filled, with the flash of wings and the songs of birds. To the east the thicket fell ...
— Audrey • Mary Johnston
... the arts of peace and he cultivated none but those of war; he was by choice a warrior and a sailor, a wanderer to other lands, a plougher of the desolate places of the "vasty deep," yet withal a lover of home, who trod at times, with bitter longing for his native land, the thorny paths of exile. To him physical cowardice was the unforgivable sin, next to treachery to his lord; for the loyalty of thane to his chieftain was a very deep and abiding reality to the Anglo-Saxon warrior, and in the early poems of our English race, love for ...
— Hero-Myths & Legends of the British Race • Maud Isabel Ebbutt
... with them, and the banks which were thus formed caused the waters to accumulate in lagoons extending behind the dunes. For miles the road led through thickets, interrupted here and there by marshy places and clumps of thorny shrubs. Bands of Shausu were accustomed to make this route dangerous, and even the bravest heroes shrank from venturing alone along this route. Towards Aluna the way began to ascend Mount Carmel by a narrow and giddy track cut in the ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 4 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... another prefatory remark which it seems desirable I should make. It is that I think it proper to confine myself to the work done, without saying anything about the doers of it. Meddling with questions of merit and priority is a thorny business at the best of times, and unless in case of necessity, altogether undesirable when one is dealing with contemporaries. No such necessity lies upon me, and I shall, therefore, mention no names of living men, lest, perchance, ...
— The Advance of Science in the Last Half-Century • T.H. (Thomas Henry) Huxley
... Goya, who from the first plucked success from its thorny setting, was soon forgotten, and until Gautier in 1840 recorded his impressions in his brilliant Voyage en Espagne, critical literature did not much concern itself with the versatile Spaniard. And Gautier's sketch of a few pages ...
— Promenades of an Impressionist • James Huneker
... Parana) has not been determined Climate: varies from temperate in east to semiarid in far west Terrain: grassy plains and wooded hills east of Rio Paraguay; Gran Chaco region west of Rio Paraguay mostly low, marshy plain near the river, and dry forest and thorny scrub elsewhere Natural resources: iron ore, manganese, limestone, hydropower, timber Land use: arable land 20%; permanent crops 1%; meadows and pastures 39%; forest and woodland 35%; other 5%; includes irrigated NEGL% Environment: local flooding in southeast (early September ...
— The 1992 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... the Black Watch in single file through the bush, and desired Lieutenant-Colonel Ewart to guide the remainder of the brigade round the obstruction. The three battalions in rear, easily avoiding the small patch of thorny shrubs, rejoined more quickly than had been expected, and soon fell into their proper places. When the brigade-major reported their arrival, Major-General Wauchope issued instructions for deployment on the Black Watch, but not in the same order ...
— History of the War in South Africa 1899-1902 v. 1 (of 4) - Compiled by Direction of His Majesty's Government • Frederick Maurice
... world, the longing for peace and shelter; the desire to smooth his sister's way, which had led him to devote himself in heart to the cloister, though never permitted openly to pledge himself. Then the discovery that the world was less thorny than he had expected; the allurement of royal favour and greatness; the charm of amusement, and activity in recovered health; the cowardly dread of scorn, leading him not merely into the secular life, ...
— The Caged Lion • Charlotte M. Yonge
... was toneless and gray as an autumn sky it seemed to her that all was wrong, that she had committed a fault that was almost a crime, that there was nothing now to be done but to confess, to go home and to expiate, as the Prodigal Son doubtless did among the thorny roses of forgiveness, those days in the far country. But always with the morning light came the remembrance that it was not her father's house to which she must go to make submission. It was her step-father's. And after all, it was her own life—she had ...
— The Incomplete Amorist • E. Nesbit
... has any heart, would not grieve! The golden ore may still by stamping be broken up, how much more the feelings choked with sorrow! the prince has grown up in a palace, with every care bestowed upon his tender person, and now he gives his body to the rough and thorny forest; how will he be able to bear a life of privation? When first you ordered me to equip your steed, my mind was indeed sorely troubled, but the heavenly powers urged me on, causing me to hasten the preparation of the horse, but what is the intention that urges the prince, to resolve thus ...
— Sacred Books of the East • Various
... holds the reason in perceptive thought. More pitiable, like rivers lacking rains, Kissing cold stones, the women shrink for drought. Those faceless discords, out of nature strayed, Rank of the putrefaction ere decayed, In impious singles bear the thorny wreaths: Their lives are where harmonious Pleasure breathes For couples crowned with flowers that burn in dew. Comes there a tremor of night's forest horn Across her garden from the insaner crew, She darkens ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... a gateway there once, but for some reason or other it had become blocked with a rank vegetation. The old gap was chocked full with a thorny, flower-bearing bush so thick that a cat could not have passed through. Somerfield switched on one of his theories as soon as he got over his first surprise. Worshipers, he held, had brought flowers there and the seeds that had dropped had sprouted. ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1921 and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... two about this friend. At Vernet he was usually called M. le Capitaine, though in fact he had never reached that rank. He had been in the army, and having been wounded in the leg while still a sous-lieutenant, had been pensioned, and had thus been interdicted from treading any further the thorny path that leads to glory. For the last fifteen years he had resided under the roof of Madame Bauche, at first as a casual visitor, going and coming, but now for many years as constant there as she ...
— La Mere Bauche from Tales of All Countries • Anthony Trollope
... Camoens were frequently in his mouth, and in bitterest moments, in the times of profoundest defection, he could always find relief in the pages of him whom he reverently calls "my master." Later in life he could see a parallel between the thorny and chequered career of Camoens and his own. Each spent his early manhood on the West Coast of India [74], each did his country an incalculable service: Camoens by enriching Portugal with The Lusiads, Burton by his travels and by presenting to England vast stores of ...
— The Life of Sir Richard Burton • Thomas Wright
... would be the best general direction. Toward the east, they knew, lay the railroad and the more cultivated part of the province. Westward were nothing but sterile, arid plains, without water or inhabitants, supporting no vegetation but thorny bushes and the ...
— The Border Boys Across the Frontier • Fremont B. Deering
... brook, and with much fatigue, and after walking three miles, ascended the first spur of the mountains. The whole lower country he found covered with almost impenetrable thickets of small pine, with which is mixed a species of plant resembling arrow-wood, twelve or fifteen feet high, with thorny stems, almost interwoven with each other, and scattered among the fern and fallen timber: there is also a red berry, somewhat like the Solomon's seal, which is called by the natives solme, and used as an article ...
— Little Masterpieces of Science: Explorers • Various
... said Ezekiel. He walked towards the cactus; there was nothing to be seen but its thorny spikes. He was confronted, however, by the sudden apparition of Joan from behind the manzanita at its side. She looked up and glanced from Ezekiel to Dona Rosita ...
— The Argonauts of North Liberty • Bret Harte
... writers are God's elect. I will not contradict you. Shtcheglov calls me the Potyomkin of literature, and so it is not for me to speak of the thorny path, of disappointments, and so on. I do not know whether I have ever suffered more than shoemakers, mathematicians, or railway guards do; I do not know who speaks through my lips—God or someone worse. I will allow myself to mention only one little drawback which I ...
— Letters of Anton Chekhov • Anton Chekhov
... reverence, Above a fold where wrapped in swaddling clothes A new-born infant in a manger lay; In humble contrast to the throne of light, He left to tread the thorny paths of earth; In undefiled and stainless innocence, Which earth with all her foul iniquities Might never tarnish ...
— Mountain idylls, and Other Poems • Alfred Castner King
... free from under-wood. Along the left-hand fence ran a thick belt of underwood, sumac and birch, with a few young oak trees interspersed; but in the middle of the swampy level, covering at most some five or six acres, was a dense circular thicket composed of every sort of thorny bush and shrub, matted with cat-briers and wild vines, and overshadowed by a clump of tall and leafy ashes, which had not as yet lost one atom of their foliage, although the underwood beneath them was quite sere ...
— Warwick Woodlands - Things as they Were There Twenty Years Ago • Henry William Herbert (AKA Frank Forester)
... Jose stripped, retaining only a pair of sandals. These were as noiseless as his bare feet, and would be needed, as in the dark he might tread upon a thorny creeper, or strike ...
— The Treasure of the Incas • G. A. Henty
... saints in a single night, in the way that Jack's beanstalk grew from earth to sky. Sainthood comes slowly, like the blossom on a century plant; there must be a hundred years of thorny stem-life first. ...
— Ole Mammy's Torment • Annie Fellows Johnston
... about 4 P.M., and they invariably, retire to the thickest and most thorny jungle in the neighbourhood of their feeding-place by 7 A.M. In these impenetrable haunts they ...
— The Rifle and The Hound in Ceylon • Samuel White Baker
... For a mile or so the route lay through fertile gardens and fields. Then suddenly the cultivation ended abruptly on the edge of a sandy desert that, seamed with nullahs, or deep, steep-sided ravines, and dotted with tall clumps of thorny cactus, stretched away to the horizon. The road became a barely discernible track; but the two sowars cantered on, confidently heading for the spot where the fresh ...
— The Jungle Girl • Gordon Casserly
... lion should be mine. The section we were in was the usual 'lion country' of East Africa, wide stretches of dry, level plain with occasional low rolling hills, thinly timbered everywhere with the thorny mimosa, most of it low bush, some grown to small trees twenty or ...
— The Red-Blooded Heroes of the Frontier • Edgar Beecher Bronson
... of feeling, mingled with the terrible sense, periodically alive in him, of physical doom, seems to have stripped from the thorny soul its outer defences of mental habit. He sees once more the hideous spectacle of his father's death, his own black half-remembered moments of warning, the teasing horror of his sister's increasing weakness of brain. Life has been on the ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... sonny," said the president promptly. "We'll hang on to this until we hear where that thorny old chump of yours has fetched up and is actin' her conundrums, and mebbe we ...
— Openings in the Old Trail • Bret Harte
... and one that I shall never forget—the white-faced, distracted woman, tramping in her flimsy house-shoes over the rough ground, bursting through the bushes, regardless of the thorny branches that dragged at skin and hair and dainty clothing, and sending forth from time to time a tremulous cry, so dreadfully pathetic in its mingling of terror and coaxing softness, that a lump rose in my throat, and I could barely keep ...
— John Thorndyke's Cases • R. Austin Freeman
... an eye on the technicians. They were working on a bush of some kind that had little thorny-looking nuts on it, clipping bits off here and there. He wasn't at all sure what they did with all those little pieces and bits, but that was none of his business, anyway. Let the brains take care of that stuff; his job ...
— Cum Grano Salis • Gordon Randall Garrett
... table-lands and across the tops of mountains, it was no longer necessary as it had been in the hot lands. Never did I see anything more dreary than these immense lengths of desolate plains covered with aloes and other thorny and succulent shrubs of fantastic aspect, which alone could live on the sandy and waterless soil. This is a strange land, that can boast three separate climates within its borders, and is able to ...
— Montezuma's Daughter • H. Rider Haggard
... Many brave and gallant Princes tried to force their way through the magic hedge, in order to solve the mystery and to see for themselves the beautiful maiden who lay in an enchanted sleep behind that thorny barrier. But the thorns caught them, and held them from going forward or back, and the gallant youths perished miserably in ...
— Favorite Fairy Tales • Logan Marshall
... water, absence of trees, a failure of stones, an almost luxuriant abundance of thistles during the rainy season, thistles which became almost shrubby with the warm season, and then formed impenetrable thickets; then, also, dwarf trees, thorny shrubs, the whole giving to these plains a rather arid and ...
— Dick Sand - A Captain at Fifteen • Jules Verne
... and looked across the sea, and he knew that she was thinking of those beloved coasts—of the Ionian waters, of the blossoming almond-trees among the olives and the rocks, of the scarlet geraniums glowing among the thorny cactus, of the giant watercourses leading up into the mountains. A hunger was awake in her, now that she had a home so near the ...
— A Spirit in Prison • Robert Hichens
... enveloped its base, on the outside of which the light and graceful Acacia pendula also grew on the grassy plain. I found the red rock to be the common one of the country, in a state of decomposition. It was hollowed out by some burrowing animal, whose tracks had opened ways through the thick thorny scrub, enabling us to lead our horses to near the top. From the apex, I obtained an extensive view of the country then before us, in many parts clear of wood to the verge of the horizon, and finely studded with isolated hills ...
— Journal of an Expedition into the Interior of Tropical Australia • Thomas Mitchell
... through which we had to force our way, however, was wonderfully thorny. The creepers were thorny, even the bamboos were thorny, while shrubs grew in a zig-zag and jagged fashion, forming an inextricable tangle, through which it was difficult to cut our way. Beautiful birds flitted in and out ...
— In the Eastern Seas • W.H.G. Kingston
... Boeotia they dress up the bride with a chaplet of asparagus, for as the asparagus gives most excellent fruit from a thorny stalk, so the bride, by not being too reluctant and coy in the first approaches, will make the married state more agreeable and pleasant. But those husbands who cannot put up with the early peevishness of their brides, are not a whit wiser than ...
— Plutarch's Morals • Plutarch
... her fond husband, was by his tender care kept from every inclemency of the air, and preserved from every inconvenience that it was possible for human nature to suffer. What then must be her condition now, when through bypaths and thorny ways, she was obliged to fly with all possible speed, to escape the fury of her cruel pursuers: for she too well knew the merciless temper of her enemies, to hope that they would not pursue her with the utmost diligence, especially as she ...
— The Governess - The Little Female Academy • Sarah Fielding
... most circumstances, even more readily deceived; but, in the matter of dress, they have walked the thorny paths of experience. They know the cruel cost of everything they wear,—a cost which in this country is artificially maintained by a high protective tariff,—and they are not to be cajoled by that delusive word "simplicity," being too well ...
— Americans and Others • Agnes Repplier
... You spotted Snakes with double tongue, Thorny Hedgehogges be not seene, Newts and blinde wormes do no wrong, Come not neere our Fairy Queene. Philomele with melodie, Sing in your sweet Lullaby. Lulla, lulla, lullaby, lulla, lulla, lullaby, Neuer harme, nor spell, nor charme, Come our louely Lady nye, ...
— The First Folio [35 Plays] • William Shakespeare
... May Comes no more with golden weather; Fields, and woods, and sunshine gay, Purple skies, and purple heather. We have had our holyday, And I sit with folded hands, In the twilight looking back Over life's uneven track— Thorny wilds, ...
— The Coming of the Princess and Other Poems • Kate Seymour Maclean
... heart a strange wish for exploring The thorny and briery place, And, lo, a path through the deepest thicket Opened ...
— On the Tree Top • Clara Doty Bates
... to be tied to any thorny bush than to be with a cross man. He to know the seventy-two languages he couldn't be more crabbed ...
— Three Wonder Plays • Lady I. A. Gregory
... protect from the hot sun the globe-shaped nuts that hang in grape-like clusters beneath. I see the abanico, with its enormous fan-shaped leaves; the wax-palm distilling its resinous gum; and the acrocomia, with its thorny trunk and enormous racemes of golden fruits. By the side of the stream I guide my horse among the columnar stems of the noble coeva, which has been enthusiastically but appropriately termed the "bread of life" ...
— The Rifle Rangers • Captain Mayne Reid
... buzzards, land of cloud-nourished trees and wild things that live without drink. Above all, it is the land of the creosote and the mesquite. The mesquite is God's best thought in all this desertness. It grows in the open, is thorny, stocky, close grown, and iron-rooted. Long winds move in the draughty valleys, blown sand fills and fills about the lower branches, piling pyramidal dunes, from the top of which the mesquite twigs flourish greenly. Fifteen or twenty feet under the ...
— The Land of Little Rain • Mary Austin
... clothing upon himself from within but collects it from various distant and haphazard sources is not any reason to call this necessity an instinct for decency. These, you will admit, are weighty reflections and worthy of consideration before we proceed to the wide and thorny subject of moral and immoral action. Now, what is virtue?" Pan, who had listened with great courtesy to these remarks, here ...
— The Crock of Gold • James Stephens
... girl as Cuckoo could not be capable of the real love, the love ascetic, not the love Bacchanalian. Love among the roses is easy, but not many can welcome love among the nettles; and, moreover, Julian, despite his knowledge of the thorny paths along which Cuckoo walked habitually, along which all her poor sisterhood walked incessantly, had not entirely disabused himself of the fallacy that a life such as hers was, in some vague, undefined and indefinable way, a life of pleasure. Even when we know a thing to ...
— Flames • Robert Smythe Hichens
... the wall at the rear of the gardens; had clambered over it, dropping to his feet in the midst of a climbing rose which clutched at him with its thorny branches; had run across an acre of kitchen garden and leaped the low-growing hedge which divided it from the sunken flower garden he had made for Lydia. Here were more rosebushes and an interminable space broken ...
— An Alabaster Box • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman and Florence Morse Kingsley
... as if there was going to be trouble between the two boys, for Thorny was naturally masterful, and illness had left him weak and nervous, so he was often both domineering and petulant. Ben had been taught instant obedience to those older than himself, and if Thorny had been a man Ben would have made ...
— St. Nicholas Magazine for Boys and Girls, Vol. 5, May, 1878, No. 7. - Scribner's Illustrated • Various
... in the wisdom with which this delicate task would be executed, to find that it was entrusted to a family party, one of which was a mere boy; and the mistrust must have been increased when, somewhat later in the course of the year, the thorny questions which immediately encompassed the task of distribution led to the introduction by Tiberius of another law, which gave judicial power to the triumvirs, for the purpose of determining what was public ...
— A History of Rome, Vol 1 - During the late Republic and early Principate • A H.J. Greenidge
... least; but toward which side are you? Have you fallen into the soft feather-bed of agnosticism, or the thorny ditch of belief?' ...
— Muslin • George Moore
... sometimes the drovers taking their lunch of tortillas and wine, while their animals munched their midday meal hard by. The scenery was often fine. On the third day the fertile soil, watered by many rivers, was exchanged for a sandy plain, broken by a thorny mimosa scattered over the surface. This plain lay between the Cordillera of the Andes and the Coast Range. As the road advanced farther inland, the panorama of the Cordilleras became more and more striking. In the glow of the sunset, the peaks of the ...
— Louis Agassiz: His Life and Correspondence • Louis Agassiz
... a sprawling, hateful thing, Thorny and twisted like a snake, Writhing to work a mischief, in the brake It stands at menace, in its cling Is danger and a venomed sting. It grows on green and slimy slopes, It is a thing of shades and slums, For passing feet it wildly gropes, And loops to catch all feet that run Seeking ...
— The Trail of the Goldseekers - A Record of Travel in Prose and Verse • Hamlin Garland
... of our elders went out for a stroll into the village. I could not restrain my eagerness any longer, and, slipping out unperceived, followed them for some distance. As I went along the deeply shaded lane, with its close thorny seora hedges, by the side of the tank covered with green water weeds, I rapturously took in picture after picture. I still remember the man with bare body, engaged in a belated toilet on the edge of the tank, cleaning his teeth with the chewed end of a twig. Suddenly ...
— My Reminiscences • Rabindranath Tagore
... I was an hour descending that tree, but I could not have been more than three minutes if my skinned legs could be relied upon as evidence of speed. I found Holman in a thorny tangle, and as I dragged him into the open he groaned loudly and endeavoured ...
— The White Waterfall • James Francis Dwyer
... express. We could not satiate our eyes with gazing on the beauties of this place, verdure being so enchanting to the sight, especially after having travelled through the Desert. Before reaching the river we had to descend a little hill covered with thorny bushes. My ass stumbling threw me into the midst of one, and I tore myself in several places, but was easily consoled when I at length found myself on the banks of a river of fresh water. Every one having quenched ...
— Thrilling Narratives of Mutiny, Murder and Piracy • Anonymous
... suits The gouty limb, 'tis true; but gouty limb, Though on a Sofa, may I never feel: For I have loved the rural walk through lanes Of grassy swarth, close cropped by nibbling sheep, And skirted thick with intertexture firm Of thorny boughs: have loved the rural walk O'er hills, through valleys, and by river's brink, E'er since a truant boy I passed my bounds To enjoy a ramble on the banks of Thames. And still remember, nor without regret Of hours that sorrow since has much endeared, How ...
— The Task and Other Poems • William Cowper
... axe, the forest yields Its thorny maze to fertile fields; This goodly breadth of well-till'd land, Well-purchased by his own right hand, With conscience clear, he can bequeath His children, when he sleeps ...
— Roughing it in the Bush • Susanna Moodie
... thorny pink Close wall of blossom'd may, I gazed thro' one green chink And saw no more than thousands may,— Saw sweetness, tender and gay,— Saw full rose lips as rounded as the cherry, Saw braided locks more dark than bay, And flashing eyes ...
— Book of English Verse • Bulchevy
... time Dinah had undressed and put on her night-gown, this feeling about Hetty had gathered a painful intensity; her imagination had created a thorny thicket of sin and sorrow, in which she saw the poor thing struggling torn and bleeding, looking with tears for rescue and finding none. It was in this way that Dinah's imagination and sympathy acted and reacted habitually, each heightening the other. She ...
— Adam Bede • George Eliot
... fish have the air of bantam cocks, and, with their sharp, prickly fins and spines and scaly sides, must be ugly customers in a hand-to-hand encounter with other finny warriors. To a hungry man they look about as unpromising as hemlock slivers, so thorny and thin are they; yet there is sweet meat in them, as we found ...
— A Year in the Fields • John Burroughs
... point on some high down, and sitting on her horse survey the prospect before her—the sea of rounded hills, hills beyond hills, stretching away to the dim horizon, and over it all the vast blue dome of heaven. Sky and earth, with thorny brakes and grass and flowers and wild creatures, with birds that flew low and others soaring up into heaven—what was the secret meaning it had for her? She was like one groping for a key in a dark place. Not a human figure visible, not a ...
— Dead Man's Plack and an Old Thorn • William Henry Hudson
... to my thoughts at that time was, to get up into a thick bushy tree like a fir, but thorny, which grew near me, and where I resolved to sit all night, and consider the next day what death I should die, for as yet I saw no prospect of life. I walked about a furlong from the shore, to see if I could find any fresh water ...
— The Children's Hour, v 5. Stories From Seven Old Favorites • Eva March Tappan
... a good bath and teaching him to smile. Finally, I assigned him Comedy as his yokefellow, thus gaining him the confidence of his hearers, who until then would as soon have thought of picking up a hedgehog as of venturing into the thorny presence ...
— Works, V3 • Lucian of Samosata
... loved the shade. Prim, right-angled paths neatly bordered with clamshells, intersected it like moist red ribbons and in the beds between old-fashioned flowers ran riot. There were rosy bleeding-hearts and great splendid crimson peonies; white, fragrant narcissi and thorny, sweet Scotch roses; pink and blue and white columbines and lilac-tinted Bouncing Bets; clumps of southernwood and ribbon grass and mint; purple Adam-and-Eve, daffodils, and masses of sweet clover white with its delicate, fragrant, feathery sprays; scarlet ...
— Anne Of Green Gables • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... his father was by no means in the habit of telling him everything, making indeed a thin cloud of wilful mystery about some of his doings. It had always been so; and Angelot had grown up with a certain amount of blind trust in the hand which had guided his mother and himself through the thorny years ...
— Angelot - A Story of the First Empire • Eleanor Price
... Love! thou art a fallen child of light, A ruined seraph in a world of care— Tortured and wrung by sorrow and despair, And longings for the beautiful and bright: Thy brow is deeply scarred, and bleeds beneath A spiked coronet, a thorny wreath; Thy rainbow wings are rent and torn with chains, Sullied and drooping in extremest wo; Thy dower, to those who love thee best below, Is tears and torture, agony and pains, Coldness and scorn and doubt which often parts;— "The course of true love never does run smooth," ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol. XXXII No. 2. February 1848 • Various
... were both cautious in the extreme, going out on all fours, and then crawling in and out between the blocks of granite—a pleasant enough task so long as the growth between was whortleberry, heath or ferns, but as for the most part it was the long thorny strands of the blackberry, the travelling became more and more painful. At last, after progressing in this way some three hundred yards, a horribly thorny strand hooked Vince in the leg of his trousers and skin as well, with ...
— Cormorant Crag - A Tale of the Smuggling Days • George Manville Fenn
... again during our troubled journey through life we reach little oases of almost perfect happiness, set jewel-like here and there in the thorny wilderness of time. Sometimes these are hours of mere animal content. In others they are made beautiful by waters blowing from our spiritual springs of being, as in those rare instances when the material veil of life seems to be rent by a mighty hand, and we feel the presence ...
— Marie - An Episode in The Life of the late Allan Quatermain • H. Rider Haggard
... Father—you who alone of all the world can understand—forgive and pity your son who has found the cross too heavy—the crown too thorny—to bear! I go to join my unhappy mother across the river that men call death—and there together we shall await the coming of the husband and father we could neither of us claim in this miserable, ...
— One Day - A sequel to 'Three Weeks' • Anonymous
... some sacred caves in Burmah. Lighting our torches, and each man taking one, we mounted the steep, tortuous, and slippery foot-path of damp, green stones, through the thorny shrubs that beset it, to the low entrance to the outer cavern. Stooping uncomfortably, we passed into a small, vacant antechamber, having a low, dripping roof, perpendicular walls, clammy and green, and a rocky floor, sloping inward through a narrow arch to a long, double, transverse ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 26, December, 1859 • Various
... 237: Lehua makanoe. The lehua trees that grow on the top of Wai-aleale, the mountain mass of Kauai, are of peculiar form, low, stunted, and so furzy as to be almost thorny, kuku, as mentioned ...
— Unwritten Literature of Hawaii - The Sacred Songs of the Hula • Nathaniel Bright Emerson
... he revolved in his mind the question of attempting this or that career, he may have thought of entering the alluring but thorny path of office-seeking and "practical" politics. It cannot be said that his desire for public emolument lasted very long. He deliberately decided against a political career. Even if the exigencies of the moment had not tended to forbid the flight of his ...
— Charles Carleton Coffin - War Correspondent, Traveller, Author, and Statesman • William Elliot Griffis
... of the acacia-trees stood up like the blackened pillars of a burning city, and behind them the glow of a conflagration blazed high up to the heavens. Beams of violet and gold slipped and sparkled between the boughs, and danced among the thorny twigs, the white racemes of flowers, and the tufts of leaves with their feathery leaflets; the clouds above were fired with tints more pure and tender than those of the roses with which Cleopatra had ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... personally supervised the examination of many thousands of graves and has forwarded the bulk of his collections to the United States. His explorations have occupied a number of years, during which time he has undergone much privation and displayed great enthusiasm in pursuing the rather thorny pathways of scientific research. In the preparation of this paper his notes have been used as freely as their rather disconnected character warranted, and since Mr. McNiel's return to the United States, in July, 1886, I have been favored with a series of interviews with him, and by this means ...
— Ancient art of the province of Chiriqui, Colombia • William Henry Holmes
... why you have not reached the soft exuberance of Livy, after you have thoroughly regretted imitating the calm solemnity of Sallust, and been satisfied with only the few flowers you have plucked with a discriminative hand out of the gardens of Quintus Curtius more frequently than the thorny thickets of Cornelius Tacitus": "Non reposcent a te rationem, cur lacteam Livii ubertatem non sis assecutus; postquam et te omnino piguerit Sallustii sobrietatem imitari, et satis tibi fuerit pauculos tantum flores ex Quinti Curtii pratis, soepius quam ex ...
— Tacitus and Bracciolini - The Annals Forged in the XVth Century • John Wilson Ross
... unclasping from my brow The thorny crown of lost delight, The solemn grandeur of the night Flashed on me from ...
— The Poets and Poetry of Cecil County, Maryland • Various
... let me go out for walks in the afternoon. And this afternoon I walked a new way, and a little brook led me into a new country, but I tore my frock getting through some of the difficult places, as the way was through many bushes, and beneath the low branches of trees, and up thorny thickets on the hills, and by dark woods full of creeping thorns. And it was a long, long way. It seemed as if I was going on for ever and ever, and I had to creep by a place like a tunnel where a brook must have been, but all the water ...
— The House of Souls • Arthur Machen
... woman should have any tincture of aught ignoble in it, and one is caused thereby to decry one's state of mortality, which seems as inseparable from selfish ends as the red wings of a rose from the thorny stem which binds it to earth. Truly the longer I live the more am I aware of the speck which mars the completeness of all in this world, and ever the desire for a better, and that longing which will not be appeased groweth in my soul, until ...
— The Heart's Highway - A Romance of Virginia in the Seventeeth Century • Mary E. Wilkins
... The thorny question of etiquette was the next matter to receive Washington's attention. Personally he favored the easy hospitality to which he was accustomed in Virginia, but he knew quite well that his own taste ought not to be decisive. The forms that he might adopt would ...
— Washington and His Colleagues • Henry Jones Ford
... not the case with all aristocratic ladies; she also took great interest in art and literature, and it was even said that she patronized one of our poets in a manner which was worthy of the Medicis, and that she strewed the beautiful roses of continual female sympathy on to his thorny path. All this was evident to everybody, and had nothing strange about it, but the world would have liked to know the history of that woman, and to look into the depths of her soul, and because people could not do this in Princess ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume IV (of 8) • Guy de Maupassant
... William bristles up at sight of him, and crosses the street with a lowering front, unmindful of the hints of Dr. Mather, who is aware of an unsettled dispute between the captain and the governor, relative to the authority of the latter over a king's ship on the provincial station. Into this thorny subject, Sir William plunges headlong. The captain makes answer with less deference than the dignity of the potentate requires: the affair grows hot; and the clergymen endeavor to interfere in the blessed capacity of peacemakers. The governor lifts his cane; and ...
— Biographical Sketches - (From: "Fanshawe and Other Pieces") • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... caught a thousand times in as many feet last night," Scotty commented. "It's easy by day, but don't try it by night." He led the way through clear spaces between the thorny patches, ...
— The Blue Ghost Mystery • Harold Leland Goodwin
... novelty of the task so absorbed was she in her sudden Quixotic project. Yet, as she groped among the brown leaves at the foot of her tree, her fingers came in contact with something wholly different from chestnuts or their thorny burrs. It was hard as a stone, yet it wasn't a stone. It was half-buried in the leaf-mold and moss, though the rain of the previous night had washed it free in ...
— The Brass Bound Box • Evelyn Raymond
... now—that the common bed is strewn or sown with the cast shells of Radiolaria. However that may be, the Sponges soon begin to absorb the silica or lime of the sea-water, and deposit it in needles or fragments in their bed. The deposit goes on until at last an elaborate framework of thorny, or limy, or flinty material is constructed by the one-celled citizens. In the higher types a system of pores or canals lets the food-bearing water pass through, as the animals draw it in with their lashes; in the highest types the animals ...
— The Story of Evolution • Joseph McCabe
... it to be seen, not even the flag upon the roof. But the story of the beautiful sleeping "Briar-rose," for so the princess was named, went about the country, so that from time to time kings' sons came and tried to get through the thorny hedge ...
— Household Tales by Brothers Grimm • Grimm Brothers |
