"Web" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... image, the theory may liken man to a spider in its web, watching for chance prey. Forces of nature dance like flies before the net, and the spider pounces on them when it can; but it makes many fatal mistakes, though its theory of force is sound. The spider-mind acquires a faculty of memory, and, with it, a singular skill of analysis ...
— The Education of Henry Adams • Henry Adams
... won acceptance slowly and grudgingly, because the facts that prove it lie other-where than on the surface, it is easy to understand that the interdependence which is international, resulting as it does from the meeting, and crossing, and twining in the web of national life of innumerable fine threads drawn from the utmost corners of the civilized world, has scarcely yet come within the consideration of the ordinary man as an influence from which he cannot escape, and with which, ...
— The Unity of Civilization • Various
... and moil, like children in their gardens, And spoil with dabbled hands, our flowers i' the planting. And yet a saint is made! Alas, those children! Was there no gentler way? I know not any: I plucked the gay moth from the spider's web; What if my hasty hand have smirched its feathers? Sure, if the whole be good, each several part May for its private blots forgiveness gain, As in man's tabernacle, vile elements Unite to one fair stature. Who'll gainsay it? The whole is good; another saint in heaven; Another ...
— The Saint's Tragedy • Charles Kingsley
... itself like a Gordian knot; disappears and reappears, almost on the same spot, but higher up on the mountain, and then glides rapidly on along the brinks of fearful abysses, over long iron bridges looking like some fanciful filigree work, some giant spider's web, extending across great valleys, chasms, and precipices, over which great mountain rivers splash down, roaring and foaming in gigantic falls. What giant power has cleft the way for these waters—Vulcan or Neptune? ...
— Dr. Dumany's Wife • Mr Jkai
... caught up and draped with bands of green ribbon. And on the thrones were seated two of the sweetest and fairest little maidens that mortal man had ever beheld. Their lovely hair was fine as a spider's web; their eyes were kind and smiling, their cheeks soft and dimpled, their mouths shapely as a cupid's bow and tinted like the petals of a rose. Upon their heads were set two crowns of fine spun gold, worked into fantastic shapes and set with glittering ...
— The Enchanted Island of Yew • L. Frank Baum
... trains slid into the darkness of the tunnel at Cleveland Street, and, as they emerged into daylight on the other side, paused for a moment like intelligent animals before the spider's web of shining rails that curved into the terminus, as if to choose the pair that would carry them in safety to the platform. It was in this pause that the passengers on the left looked out with an upward jerk of the head, and saw that the sun had found ...
— Jonah • Louis Stone
... you, and little is made of much, on your side, and much is spun out of little, on theirn. They are more cunning than foxes, and bloodthirstier than panters, and they no more git tired than the spiders, that spin and piece a web as fast as you break it. Three nights ago, I got down on my knees, and I kissed a little pink morocco slipper what your Ma wore the day when she took her first step from my arm to her own mother's knees, and I swore a solemn oath, if I could help free Miss ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... at every turn in every natural instinct of play or society. They mustn't go here or they mustn't go there; they mustn't talk to this one or to that one; they mustn't do this, or that, or the other; their whole life is bound round, I'm told, by a closely woven web of restrictions and restraints, which have no other object or end in view than the interests of a purely hypothetical husband. The Chinese cramp their women's feet to make them small and useless: you cramp your women's brains for the self-same purpose. Even light's excluded; for they mustn't ...
— The British Barbarians • Grant Allen
... little khan I stop at is, of course, besieged by the usual crowd, but they are a happy-hearted, contented people, bent on lionizing me the best they know how; for have they not witnessed my marvellous performance of riding an araba, a beautiful web-like araba, more beautiful than any makina they ever saw before, and in a manner that upsets all their previous ideas of equilibrium. Have I not proved how much I esteem them by riding over and over ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle V1 • Thomas Stevens
... sufficiently so to carry the balza under this branch before they could push it out into the stream. Once the cable was let go, they must inevitably pass under the limb of the zamang; and if that caught the toldo, it would sweep off the frail roof like so much spider's-web. This would be a serious damage; and one ...
— Popular Adventure Tales • Mayne Reid
... betrayed her annoyance over some remark by Errol. The dancing by Edith Gaines had given a flash of the jealous nature of the woman. Had it been interest in Errol that had led her to visit the laboratory? Kennedy was weaving a web about some one, I knew. ...
— The Treasure-Train • Arthur B. Reeve
... summer night was deliciously soothing and restful. Our captain and one or two of the sailors were about on duty, and I sat in the stern of the vessel looking up into the glorious heavens. The tapering bow-sprit of the 'Diana' pointed aloft as it were into a woven web of stars, and I lost myself in imaginary flight among those glittering unknown worlds, oblivious of my material surroundings, and forgetting that despite the splendid evidences of a governing Intelligence in the beauty and order of the Universe spread about them every day, ...
— The Life Everlasting: A Reality of Romance • Marie Corelli
... midnight hours when Jennie's gentle little face haunted him and his conscience attacked him, Peter looked back upon the tangled web of events, and saw quite clearly how inevitable this tragedy had been, how naturally it had grown out of circumstances beyond his control. The fearful labor struggle in American City was surely not Peter's fault; nor was it his fault that he had been drawn into it, ...
— 100%: The Story of a Patriot • Upton Sinclair
... the web of lying as she might, the pressure on the English Queen became greater every day. What had given Elizabeth security was the adhesion of the Scotch Protestants and the growing strength of the Huguenots in France. But the firm government of Murray and her own steady abstinence from any ...
— History of the English People - Volume 4 (of 8) • John Richard Green
... yard by yard, covering it with a myriad tiny wrinkles, till half the lake is milky emerald, while the rest still sleeps. And, at length, the whole is astir, and the sun catches it, and Lake Louise is a web of laughter, the opal distillation of all the buds of all the spring. On either side go up the dark processional pines, mounting to the sacred peaks, devout, kneeling, motionless, in an ecstasy of homely adoration, like the donors and their families in a Flemish picture. Among these ...
— Letters from America • Rupert Brooke
... affords no scope for such a theme; and besides, painful as it is to pass to common topics, they claim their dues. Life, ay, common life, must go on as it ever did, and nothing shall tear that infinite web of mystery in which it walks enveloped. Ours, however, in these days, is rather a shaded life. Absence from home, a strange land, a land, too, that sits in mourning over the great relics of the past,—all this tends to make ...
— Autobiography and Letters of Orville Dewey, D.D. - Edited by his Daughter • Orville Dewey
... the same ideological agenda and reinforcing each other's efforts to cultivate a favorable international image for their "cause." By capitalizing on the very technological advances that we use within our country, terrorist organizations learn and share information garnered from our web sites, exploit vulnerabilities within our critical infrastructure, and communicate across the same internet paths we use each day. The interconnected nature of terrorist organizations necessitates that we ...
— National Strategy for Combating Terrorism - February 2003 • United States
... sitting in her shop-door at the corner of the street of San Simone, like an evil spider in its web, could ...
— The Italians • Frances Elliot
... all the heath, Clouds of carnage blot the sun, Sisters, weave the web of death; Sisters, ...
— The Influence of Old Norse Literature on English Literature • Conrad Hjalmar Nordby
... that I should take the field against the common enemy, leaving this tangled web of mystery and misery behind. In sheerest decency I owed it first to Jennifer to make a swift and frank confession of the ill-concluded tale of happenings. That done, I owed it equally to him and Margery to find some way to set aside ...
— The Master of Appleby • Francis Lynde
... if it were made of a million dewdrops turned to diamonds and sprinkled over a lacy spider-web; the web swathing the tall and wandlike figure of Miss Billie Brookton in a way to show that she had all the delicate perfections of a ...
— A Soldier of the Legion • C. N. Williamson
... smiling lips seemed constantly suggesting, with mute eloquence, that they were made for kissing, while the expressive hands picked at the knots till the Professor felt like a very resigned fly in the web of a ...
— On Picket Duty and Other Tales • Louisa May Alcott
... strides in the world's achievements were made possible only by forced activity and prolonged effort. Spontaneity is a foreign element in the process of healthy and rugged development. The spider spins its web and the morning bespangles it with dew, creating a thing of beauty, but valueless. It would require the entire existence of several hundred silkworms to produce an equal amount of silk fabric. The mushroom grows up in a night, ...
— A Fleece of Gold - Five Lessons from the Fable of Jason and the Golden Fleece • Charles Stewart Given
... impossible for me to use. If I were to attempt to unravel the strand of truth from the web of falsehood, it would end in your condemning me the more. The canons of conduct in France are so different from those in America that what is permissible in one country is heinous in the other. In the same way that your ...
— The Inner Shrine • Basil King
... for having written an Essay on Shakspeare, being mentioned. REYNOLDS. 'I think that essay does her honour.' JOHNSON, 'Yes, Sir; it does her honour, but it would do nobody else honour. I have, indeed, not read it all. But when I take up the end of a web, and find it packthread, I do not expect, by looking further, to find embroidery. Sir, I will venture to say, there is not one sentence of true criticism in her book.' GARRICK. 'But, Sir, surely it ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 2 • Boswell
... within the gripe of the priests of the superstition, a blood-thirsty race, as cruel and remorseless as the being whom they represented as the family God of Abraham, of Isaac, and of Jacob, and the local God of Israel. They were constantly laying snares, too, to entangle him in the web of the law. He was justifiable, therefore, in avoiding these by evasions, by sophisms, by misconstructions, and misapplications of scraps of the prophets, and in defending himself with these their own weapons, as sufficient, ad homines, at least. That Jesus did not mean to impose himself on mankind ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson
... certain lights; and the wings are of a dark purple-brown. The tail is composed of feathers of different tints—the two central of a rich, shining green; the next, green, marked with bronze; and the outer, dark brown, with triangular white spots on the inner web. ...
— The Western World - Picturesque Sketches of Nature and Natural History in North - and South America • W.H.G. Kingston
... hand. Only there were some too feeble to exclaim, or to run, and who dragged themselves forward, groaning, upon their hands and knees. There was in the midst of all, a child clothed, not in anything that could be called a shirt, but a kind of spider's web, with a thousand holes, who had no wooden bowl, and who wept with hunger. It stretched out its poor little meagre hands, and joined them together, to supply as well as it could, by this natural receptacle, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Vol. 53, No. 331, May, 1843 • Various
... in their absence. John Trueman, who lived "down the road," was lounging along behind. They had called him as they passed, and bade him come to "tend the horse." Amelia rose and shook herself free from the web of her dream. She hurried forward and at the horse-block offered old ...
— Country Neighbors • Alice Brown
... but blame thy mother, who indeed is crafty above all women. For now this is the fourth year that we have come suing for her hand, and she has cheated us with hopes. Hear now this that she did. She set up a great web for weaving, and said to us: 'Listen, ye that are my suitors. Hasten not my marriage till I finish this web to be a burial cloth for Laertes [Footnote: La-er'-tes.], the father of Ulysses, for indeed ...
— The Story Of The Odyssey • The Rev. Alfred J. Church
... and the sidewinder, the tarantula and the scorpion multiply, and where sickness is unknown and fivescore years no uncommon span of life. A land of strange contradictions! A peninsula which to the Spanish conquistadores was an island glistening in the azure web of romance; a land for which the padres gave their lives in fanatic devotion to the Cross; a land rich in history, when the timbers of the Mayflower were yet trees in the forest. Lower California, ...
— The California Birthday Book • Various
... by means of which the eyes of the physicians were opened to the fact that they must search deeper for the cause of death than the bruises she had received. Thus it is that Justice opens loop-holes in the finest web a criminal can weave." ...
— That Affair Next Door • Anna Katharine Green
... that there are a great variety of dogs. The Newfoundland dog not only drags carts and sledges, but has a sort of web foot that makes him a particularly good swimmer. He often saves the lives ...
— True Stories about Cats and Dogs • Eliza Lee Follen
... model, with the choruses and dialogue complete. The subject proposed was from the story of Ulysses, which afforded him an opportunity of bringing in the whole sonorous nomenclature of the Heathen Mythology,—which, says Forsyth, enters in the web of every improvvisatore, and assists the poet both with rhymes and ideas. Most of the celebrated improvvisatori have been Florentines: Sgricci is, I believe, a Neapolitan, and ...
— The Diary of an Ennuyee • Anna Brownell Jameson
... with little ponds are intelligent seals and families of otters, with their elegant fur coats always clean and in order; and down by the shore of the stream and the large lake a loud chattering is made by the numerous web-footed creatures and long-legged waders. Here are ducks from Barbary and the American tropics, wild-geese from every clime, and swimming gracefully and silently in the clear water are swans—black, gray, and white—that glide up to the summer-houses on the bank, and eat bread and ...
— Harper's Young People, September 28, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... Father of his People, the Restorer of would be forgotten, or would be remembered only as implicated in the confusion that had ceased; and in a short time there would be parties, factions, divisions, and the beginnings of a new spider-web of Court-government and Absolutism. "Have you not found him at this play all along? And do not all men acknowledge him most exquisite at it?" So the Remonstrance proceeds, page after page, in long, complex, wave-like ...
— The Life of John Milton Vol. 3 1643-1649 • David Masson
... skulls grinning from between the forked tops of high poles, and there was a well-grown bear ready for his doom and apotheosis. In nearly all the houses a woman was weaving bark-cloth, with the hook which holds the web fixed into the ground several feet outside the house. At a deep river called the Nopkobets, which emerges from the mountains close to the sea, we were ferried by an Aino completely covered with hair, which on his shoulders was wavy like that of a retriever, and rendered clothing quite needless ...
— Unbeaten Tracks in Japan • Isabella L. Bird
... their names on doors or rock-heads, But leave the task to scribblers and to blockheads; Pert, trifling folks, who, bent on being witty, Scrawl on each post some fag-end of a ditty, Spinning, with spider's web, their shallow brains, O'er wainscots, borrowed books, or ...
— Personal Memoirs Of A Residence Of Thirty Years With The Indian Tribes On The American Frontiers • Henry Rowe Schoolcraft
... trades. The passion for money took entire hold of him. Finally he came to Paris which became the centre of his operations, and established himself on rue des Gres. There Gobseck, like a spider in his web, crushed the pride of Maxime de Trailles and brought tears to the eyes of Mme. de Restaud and Jean-Joachim Goriot—1819. About this same time Ferdinand du Tillet sought out the money-lender to make some deals with him, and spoke of him as "Gobseck the Great, master of ...
— Repertory Of The Comedie Humaine, Complete, A — Z • Anatole Cerfberr and Jules Franois Christophe
... the web was with incredible diligence completed; nor could I avoid thinking that the insect seemed to exult in its new abode. It frequently traversed it round, examined the strength of every part of it, retired into its hole, and came out very frequently. The first enemy, ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. IV (of X)—Great Britain and Ireland II • Various
... darnin' needle? Gosh! I'm s'prised at ye. I seen lots of 'em right on this here river. He's a bug about so long"—he stuck out a finger—"and he's got jaws like a crab and a long limber tail a with reg'lar needle in the end, and inside him is a roll o' tough silk—tough as spider web. And he's death on liars. Any time a feller tells a lie he's got to look out, or all to oncet one o' them bugs'll come scootin' at him and grab him by the nose with them jaws. Then he'll curl up his tail—the bug, I ...
— The Pathless Trail • Arthur O. (Arthur Olney) Friel
... of fate, are seen in the dim light before dawn, busily weaving the web of destiny on the rocky hillside where the Walkyries formerly held their tryst. As they twist their rope, which is stretched from north to south, they sing of the age of gold. Then they sat beneath the great world-ash, near the limpid well, where Wotan had left an eye in pledge ...
— Stories of the Wagner Opera • H. A. Guerber
... Gesta Danorum" (DNA, Copenhagen, 1996). Web-based Latin edition of Saxo, substantiallly based on the above ...
— The Danish History, Books I-IX • Saxo Grammaticus ("Saxo the Learned")
... you, Bunny, but the figures must keep until I have them in black and white. I've promised to see if there really isn't a forlorn hope of getting these poor Garlands out of the spider's web. But there isn't, Bunny, I ...
— Mr. Justice Raffles • E. W. Hornung
... Domitian, so are most of us on the side of the fly against the spider. We pity the fly as (if the image is permissible) the underdog. One of the most agonising of the minor dilemmas in which a too sensitive humanitarian ever finds himself is whether he should destroy a spider's web, and so, perhaps, starve the spider to death, or whether he should leave the web, and so connive at the death of a multitude of flies. I have long been content to leave Nature to her own ways in such matters. I cannot say that I like her in all her processes, but I am content to believe ...
— The Pleasures of Ignorance • Robert Lynd
... read. "My name—here—is Art Georgopoulis. I work at present as a bartender at the Golden Web, on Thermopylae street. The high-ups in the underworld hang out there, and I pick up occasional bits of news. If you come in, introduce yourself by asking for 'a good old Kentucky mint-julep,' Practically no one ...
— Man of Many Minds • E. Everett Evans
... board. I know the tricks you will try against me; and I shall watch you like a duenna. You will never go out of this house except on my arm; and you will never leave me. As to what passes within the house, damn it, you'll find me like a spider in the middle of his web. Here is something," he continued, showing the bewildered woman a letter, "which will prove to you that I could, while you were lying ill upstairs, unable to move hand or foot, have turned you out of doors without a penny. ...
— The Celibates - Includes: Pierrette, The Vicar of Tours, and The Two Brothers • Honore de Balzac
... therefore the passage of the forest will be easy. But beyond it is the water which we have no means of crossing and beyond the water that old wizard, the Motombo, sits in the mouth of his cave watching like a spider in its web. And beyond the Motombo and his cave are Komba, the new Kalubi ...
— Allan and the Holy Flower • H. Rider Haggard
... the other. Nor is there any real conflict between the East and the West or the North and the South in the United States. The complete interlocking of economic dependence, the common striving for social and spiritual progress, our common heritage as Americans, and the infinite web of national sentiment, have created a solidarity in a great people unparalleled in all human history. These invisible bonds should not and can not be shattered by differences of opinion growing out of ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... in the newspapers an account of a philosopher in Germany who made caterpillars manufacture for him a veil of cobweb. The caterpillars were enclosed in a glass case, and, by properly-disposed conveniences and impediments, were induced to work their web up the sides of the glass case. When completed it weighed four-fifths of a grain. Herschel saw it lying on a table, looking like the film of a bubble. When it collapsed a little, and was in that state wafted up into the air, it wreathed like fine smoke. Chantrey, ...
— The Life and Letters of Maria Edgeworth, Vol. 2 • Maria Edgeworth
... thundering view halloo after her, clapt the dogs at her heels, and away they went for the bare life. Never was there seen such running as that day—the cat made for a shaking bog, the loneliest place in the whole country, and there the riders were all thrown out, barrin' the huntsman, who had a web-footed horse on purpose for soft places; and the priest, whose horse could go anywhere by reason of the priest's blessing; and, sure enough, the huntsman and his riverence stuck to the hunt like wax; and just as the cat ...
— Handy Andy, Vol. 2 - A Tale of Irish Life • Samuel Lover
... "sentiment is the life and soul of poetry and art." Perhaps this statement may help us here. Pure poetry is the perfection of prose, or prose idealized. "It is a dream drawn from the infinite, and portrayed to mortal sense." It takes a great mind, a great genius to weave into a gossamer web, complete and perfect in every part, a story, a tale, an idea, which alike charms the mind, enthralls the sense, and enchains the spirit. Poetry is the perfection of language. It is not a mere mechanical contrivance of words, ...
— The True Citizen, How To Become One • W. F. Markwick, D. D. and W. A. Smith, A. B.
... alike been produced from a similar living filament. In some this filament in its advance to maturity has acquired hands and fingers with a fine sense of touch, as in mankind. In others it has acquired claws or talons, as in tigers and eagles. In others, toes with an intervening web or membrane, as in seals and geese. In others it has acquired cloven hoofs, as in cows and swine; and whole hoofs in others, as in the horse: while in the bird kind this original living filament has put forth wings instead of arms or legs, and feathers instead of hair. ...
— Evolution, Old & New - Or, the Theories of Buffon, Dr. Erasmus Darwin and Lamarck, - as compared with that of Charles Darwin • Samuel Butler
... VERA (sometimes called the co'ri-on) is composed of minute fibres, which are collected into small bundles or strands. These are interwoven with each other so as to constitute a firm, strong, and flexible web. In the superficial part of the true skin, the web is so close as to have the appearance of felt-cloth; but more deeply, the pores become progressively larger, and, upon the lower surface, have a diameter of about a line, or one twelfth of an inch. This gives the under surface the ...
— A Treatise on Anatomy, Physiology, and Hygiene (Revised Edition) • Calvin Cutter
... had never looked so lovely as she did then, enveloped in a thin, soft, silky-looking mackintosh, with a dainty little, close-fitting hat upon her head, her beautiful hair all blown adrift and streaming, a long golden web of ringlets, in the fiery breeze, her cheeks flushed to a delicate pink with the rude buffeting of wind and sea, and her eyes fairly blazing with excitement and exhilaration at the ...
— The Cruise of the "Esmeralda" • Harry Collingwood
... that morning, when their hearts were full and their heads light with the heady wine of Spring, that before three months had sped, they would feel the strands of the mighty web of nations tighten about them; that they would see the beginning of the greatest war the world has ever known? Perhaps it was just as well that they were not gifted with prophecy, for the grim shadow of war that hung menacingly over ...
— Lucile Triumphant • Elizabeth M. Duffield
... murmur'st thou? and what are we? When empires must be wound, we bring the shroud, The time-old web of the implacable Three: Is it too coarse for him, the young and proud? Earth's mightiest deigned ...
— Poems of American Patriotism • Brander Matthews (Editor)
... of ordinary shoestrings, take both ends of one of them and force the ends through the middle of the other, leaving a loop 1-1/2 in. long, as shown in Fig. 2. In this sketch, A is the first string and B is the second, doubled and run through the web of A. Take hold of the loop and turn it as shown in Fig. 2, allowing the four ends to hang in four directions. Start with one end, the one marked A, in Fig. 1, for instance, and lay it over the one to the right. Then take B and lay it over A, and the one ...
— The Boy Mechanic: Volume 1 - 700 Things For Boys To Do • Popular Mechanics
... without war, and that the forces which hope to benefit by war are stronger than the forces which hope to benefit by peace. That is the indubitable reason why the United States must remain aloof from the European system and must avoid scrupulously any entanglements in the complicated web of European international affairs. The policy of isolation is in this respect as wise to-day as it was in the time of its enunciation by Washington and Hamilton; and nobody seriously proposes to depart from it. On the other hand, the basis for this policy is wholly independent of the domestic ...
— The Promise Of American Life • Herbert David Croly
... individuals in the Netherlands. It is curious to observe the minute reticulations of tyranny which he had begun already to spin about a whole, people, while cold, venomous, and patient he watched his victims from the centre of his web. He forwarded particular details to the Duchess and Cardinal concerning a variety of men and women, sending their names, ages, personal appearance, occupations, and residence, together with directions for their immediate ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... and the patterns prettily fancied. Their loom or apparatus for weaving (tunun) is extremely defective, and renders their progress tedious. One end of the warp being made fast to a frame, the whole is kept tight, and the web stretched out by means of a species of yoke, which is fastened behind the body, when the person weaving sits down. Every second of the longitudinal threads, or warp, passes separately through a set ...
— The History of Sumatra - Containing An Account Of The Government, Laws, Customs And - Manners Of The Native Inhabitants • William Marsden
... peaceable behavior. Therefore, they ought not to be tolerated by any government, Protestant, Mohammedan, or Pagan. You say, 'Nay, but they take an oath of allegiance.' True, five hundred oaths; but the maxim, 'No faith is to be kept with heretics,' sweeps them all away as a spider's web. So that still no governors that are not Roman Catholics can have any security ...
— Americanism Contrasted with Foreignism, Romanism, and Bogus Democracy in the Light of Reason, History, and Scripture; • William Gannaway Brownlow
... which connects Tutors' Lane with Whitmanville. "If he only has chickens, I won't mind, but if he has bats I shall hate it. I confess I'm a perfect fool about bats. They're loathsome. What they really are, are hairy rats with wings like web feet, and they have the ...
— Tutors' Lane • Wilmarth Lewis
... Snodgrass, as he glanced down at the liberated toads and lizards. "Oh, my goodness! That is too bad. I brought them with me to compare with the horned toads and web-footed lizards I hope to secure. Now they are getting away. Please, my dear young lady, help me ...
— The Motor Boys on the Pacific • Clarence Young
... tell you of the council what this device is. The lady Penelope set up a great loom in her house and began to weave a wide web of cloth. To each of us she sent a message saying that when the web she was working at was woven, she would choose a husband from amongst us. "Laertes, the father of Odysseus, is alone with none to care for him living or dead," said ...
— The Adventures of Odysseus and The Tales of Troy • Padriac Colum
... live secure from its enemies while feeding and growing. We afterwards found several of the same description. Another sort had made itself a bag of leaves open at both ends, the inside being lined with a thick web. It put us in mind of the caddis worms which we had seen ...
— On the Banks of the Amazon • W.H.G. Kingston
... the pick, and began to hack away at loose rocks, swinging the pick above shoulder as a woodsman swings an axe. Two feet below the surface, the pick caught in a web of cloth. In another minute Larry lifted out an old woollen jersey undershirt, that had been fastened up bag-wise. He snatched his knife, ripped open the sleeves, and the setting sun shot over a huge heap ...
— The Shagganappi • E. Pauline Johnson
... to Shah Bagh; cloudy weather, occasionally a very slight shower during the last few days, depending probably on the Punjab rains. To-day, observed a small green caterpillar, climbing up a fine thread, like a spider's web, which hung from the fly of the tent; its motions were precisely those of climbing, the thread over which it had passed was accumulated between its third pairs of legs; it did not ...
— Journals of Travels in Assam, Burma, Bhootan, Afghanistan and The - Neighbouring Countries • William Griffith
... that this substance was spiders' web. That was adjustment. But it's not adjustment to me; so I'm afraid I shall have some intelligence in this matter. If I ever arrive at adjustment upon this subject, then, upon this subject, I shall be able to have no thoughts, except routine-thoughts. I haven't ...
— The Book of the Damned • Charles Fort
... our blood, and Hate grows while Love is starving," Vergilius reflected, as he went along, while a hideous, unwelcome thought grew slowly, creeping over him. This golden mile-stone was the centre of a great spider-web laced by road and sea way to the far corners of the empire; and that cunning, alert man—who ...
— Vergilius - A Tale of the Coming of Christ • Irving Bacheller
... into the middle of it and interrupt the speaker. She always said exactly what she meant without reserve or ruth; and throughout her long life, as the mistress of great wealth, she had always been allowed to have her own way. She asserted her rights even over her son, though he was the centre of a web whose threads reached to the furthest circumference of the known world. The peasants who tilled the earth by the Upper and Lower Nile, the shepherds who kept their flocks in the Arabian desert, in Syria, or on the Silphium meads of Cyrenaica, the wood-cutters ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... easily; at frequent intervals she absented herself altogether, and even when at home she spent no small share of the time in flitting about among the branches of the tree. On such occasions, I often saw her hover against the bole or a patch of leaves, or before a piece of caterpillar or spider web, making quick thrusts with her bill, evidently after bits of something to eat. On quitting the nest, she commonly perched upon one or another of a certain set of dead twigs in different parts of the tree, and at once shook out her feathers and spread her tail, displaying its handsome ...
— The Foot-path Way • Bradford Torrey
... there across the narrow hole Through which Saint Felix fled, The spider spun a heavy web ...
— The Book of Saints and Friendly Beasts • Abbie Farwell Brown
... Sebastiano Venier, and Christ looks on in approval. Tintoretto also painted for the Palace a picture of this battle, but it perished in the fire of 1576. It is Veronese who painted the virtues and attributes on the ceiling, one of his most famous works being the woman with a web, who is sometimes called "Industry" and sometimes "Dialectics," so flexible is symbolism. "Fidelity" has a dog with a fine trustful head. To my weary eye the finest of the groups is that of Mars and Neptune, with flying cherubs, which is superbly drawn and coloured. Nothing but a chaise-longue ...
— A Wanderer in Venice • E.V. Lucas
... firm face. But she was a woman, and a woman's acts may be her own, but their consequences are beyond her. Oh, the misery of being a woman! She asked herself what she could do, and there was no answer. She could not break the web of circumstances. Her situation might be false, it might be dishonourable, but there was no escape from it. There was no gleam ...
— The Manxman - A Novel - 1895 • Hall Caine
... was possibly the loveliest thing that existed in the world at that moment. No artist had ever dreamed of so wonderful a scheme of color—such miracles of color—combinations in every feather from the quill to the spider-web-like fluffs at the tips, each of which shone not like gold but like glass. It was well worth all the nudging ...
— Phyllis of Philistia • Frank Frankfort Moore
... shut thine eyes? And wilt thou NOT regard? Take warning, and stop thy journey before it be too late. Wilt thou he like the silly fly, that is not quiet unless she be either entangled in the spider's web or burnt in the candle? O sinner, sinner, there are better things than HELL to be had! There is heaven, there is God, there is Christ, there is communion with an innumerable assembly of saints ...
— The Riches of Bunyan • Jeremiah Rev. Chaplin
... in Budapest, Abranyi, Mihalovich, Count Albert Apponyi, Count Geza Zichy and several others, are strongly and heartily attached to me. Archbishop Haynald only comes to Pest in the beginning of January. I was not caught in the other base spider's web. "Honesty ...
— Letters of Franz Liszt, Volume 2: "From Rome to the End" • Franz Liszt; letters collected by La Mara and translated
... clamor, the prisoners themselves were righteously indignant, and Norvin found that he had begun to lose that confidence which the public had been so quick to place in him. Nevertheless, he pursued his work systematically, and soon the mysterious agent proceeded to weave a new web around the four suspected men, while he looked on fascinated, doing as he was bid, keeping his own counsel as he had been advised, and turning over the results of his inquiries to the police as they ...
— The Net • Rex Beach
... different tone when dealing with an Allied representative, and I have a vivid remembrance of one such interview to which there seems to be no harm in referring now. Some aspects of the tangled political web of 1915, in the Near East, will be dealt with at greater length in Chapter VII. Suffice it to say here that, at the juncture under reference, Serbia, with formidable German and Austro-Hungarian hosts pouring into her territory from the north and aware that her traditional ...
— Experiences of a Dug-out, 1914-1918 • Charles Edward Callwell
... small for their number. So the newcomer was seen by all of them at once, and all the more promptly, because nothing can compare for keenness with the eye of a prisoner, who in a prison-yard feels like a spider watching in its web. And this comparison is mathematically exact; for the range of vision being limited on all sides by high dark walls, the prisoners can always see, even without looking at them, the doors through which the warders come and go, the windows of the parlor, and the ...
— Scenes from a Courtesan's Life • Honore de Balzac
... thew and sinew of its offspring. Nay, it is this single element, which, acted on by heat or acting through machinery, fetches and carries for us over the wide globe, and is fast weaving into one living web the far-scattered ...
— Lectures on Popular and Scientific Subjects • John Sutherland Sinclair, Earl of Caithness
... invited him to his home in Brighton, but there he found Sylvia Custance. She weaved her web to enslave Denis, interesting herself in his career, asking him fairly intelligent questions, and doing her utmost to persuade him that he was the most important person in the world to her. Denis watched her as a scientist observes a remarkable organism. Once, ...
— Grey Town - An Australian Story • Gerald Baldwin
... she weaves by night and day A magic web{5} with colors gay. She has heard a whisper say, A curse is on her if she stay To look down to Camelot. She knows not what the curse may be, And so she weaveth steadily, And little other care hath she, The Lady ...
— Six Centuries of English Poetry - Tennyson to Chaucer • James Baldwin
... however useless to my friends, have not failed to make me more than the usual number of enemies. I am therefore bound, in justice to myself and to those whose good opinion has hitherto protected me, not to peril myself too frequently. The naturalists tell us that if you destroy the web which the spider has just made, the insect must spend many days in inactivity till he has assembled within his person the materials necessary to weave another. Now, after writing a work of imagination one feels in nearly the same exhausted state as the spider. I ...
— Guy Mannering, or The Astrologer, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... mighty commerce which, confined To the mean channels of no selfish mart, Goes out to every shore Of this broad earth, and throngs the sea with ships That bear no thunders; hushes hungry lips In alien lands; Joins with a delicate web remotest strands; And gladdening rich and poor, Doth gild Parisian domes, Or feed the cottage-smoke of English homes, And only bounds its blessings by mankind! In offices like these, thy mission lies, My Country! and it shall not end As long as rain shall fall and Heaven bend In blue above thee; ...
— War Poetry of the South • Various
... it may easily be pushed to dangerous extremes. Pew things are more curious than to observe how rapidly during the past generation the love of individual liberty has declined; how contentedly the English race are submitting great departments of their lives to a web of regulations restricting and encircling them. Each individual case must be considered on its merits, and few persons will now deny that the right of adult men and women to regulate the conditions ...
— The Map of Life - Conduct and Character • William Edward Hartpole Lecky
... out in this manner, as ye shall hear. Ae afternoon towards the glomin' I was oblegated to tak' a stap doun to the cross, wi' a web under my arm, which I had finished for Mr. Weft, the muslin manufacturer. By way of frolic, a gayan foolish ane I allow, I brocht Nosey (the monkey's name,) alang wi' me. He had on, as for ordinar', his Heeland dress, and walkit behint me, wi' the bit stick in his hand, ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 10, - Issue 275, September 29, 1827 • Various
... Destiny, that tireless spinner, was weaving sinister red threads of hate and love into the web of his life, Lambert continued to live quietly in his woodland retreat. In a somewhat misanthropic frame of mind he had retired to this hermitage, after the failure of his love affair, since, lacking the society of Agnes, there was nothing left for him to desire. ...
— Red Money • Fergus Hume
... tall. They were obliged to thread their way in and out, until Dorothy was afraid they would get lost, and finally they were halted by a curious thing that barred their further progress. It was a huge web—as if woven by gigantic spiders—and the delicate, lacy film was fastened stoutly to the branches of the bushes and continued to the right and left in the form of a half circle. The threads of this web were of a brilliant ...
— Glinda of Oz • L. Frank Baum
... the engine for some time and then crept slowly along a steel bridge that looked like a spider's web, from which she could look into the furnace-room, with its roaring fires, scorching heat and constantly clanging iron doors. For some minutes she gazed silently, then turning quickly, hurried across the bridge, up the greasy stairs and on to the main saloon where she found her father in a big ...
— Dick in the Everglades • A. W. Dimock
... represent? but, How high can I build—how wonderfully can I hang this arch in air, or weave this tracery across the clouds? And the catastrophe was instant and irrevocable. Architecture became in France a mere web of waving lines,—in England a mere grating of perpendicular ones. Redundance was substituted for invention, and geometry for passion; tho Gothic art became a mere expression of wanton expenditure, and vulgar mathematics; and was swept away, ...
— The Two Paths • John Ruskin
... that little little less-than-little wit from them that they have! which short-arm'd ignorance itself knows is so abundant scarce, it will not in circumvention deliver a fly from a spider without drawing their massy irons and cutting the web. After this, the vengeance on the whole camp! or, rather, the Neapolitan bone-ache! for that, methinks, is the curse depending on those that war for a placket. I have said my prayers; and devil Envy say 'Amen.' What ...
— The History of Troilus and Cressida • William Shakespeare [Craig edition]
... ran in foaming and abundant streams, to the unspeakable joy of four small pale boys, who now were divided in their joy over this, and their admiration of the little, lively, black-and-white spotted calf; which admiration, however, in the mind of the youngest, was mixed with fear. The web, also, had turned out beyond expectation: Susanna helped the housewife to cut out the piece of cloth in the most advantageous manner, and her cheerful words and cordial sympathy were like the cream to the milk breakfast. It was with this glad ...
— Strife and Peace • Fredrika Bremer
... one would expect it to descend at the proper moment in the narrative, and make an end of him with its nippers; but Doctor Grimshawe dies a comparatively natural death, and the desiccated body of the spider is found still clinging to the web above him. The man and the insect were too closely akin in the modes and purposes of their lives for either to outlast the other. There is nothing abnormal in the fact of Doctor Grimshawe's possessing this dangerous pet; for all kinds of poisonous creatures have ...
— The Life and Genius of Nathaniel Hawthorne • Frank Preston Stearns
... rustler myself. Soapy and his friends voted for Bolt. He would go to them, listen to their story, prove part of it by me, and turn them loose for lack of evidence. Sam would go back to Dead Cow with them, and Stone would weave another web ...
— Crooked Trails and Straight • William MacLeod Raine
... back in the Web-Foot District, it was the Custom to have a Debate every Friday Afternoon. The much-mooted Question as to which does the greater Damage, Fire or Water, had been carefully gone over by the Squabs. Also who was the ...
— People You Know • George Ade
... web of fate was closing in on Khartum. In vain did Gordon seek to keep communications open. All that he could do was to hold stoutly to that last bulwark of civilisation. There were still some grounds for hope. The Mahdi remained in Kordofan, ...
— The Development of the European Nations, 1870-1914 (5th ed.) • John Holland Rose
... said her Ladyship. And my mistress forthwith penned me a letter, in her most fascinating and winning manner:—'Why, sir,' wrote she, 'will you pursue me? why environ me in a web of intrigue so frightful that my spirit sinks under it, seeing escape is hopeless from your frightful, your diabolical art? They say you are generous to others—be so to me. I know your bravery but too well: exercise ...
— Barry Lyndon • William Makepeace Thackeray
... took us along the causeway to Beeching, and so up the downs and round almost as far as Steadhurst, home. My moods, as we went, made a mingled web. By this time I had really grasped the fact that my uncle had, in plain English, robbed me; the little accumulations of my mother, six hundred pounds and more, that would have educated me and started me in business, ...
— Tono Bungay • H. G. Wells
... salotto, whose windows opened on the terrace looking out on old gray San Felice where she always wrote, to devote themselves to serious work. "Aurora Leigh" proceeded rapidly some mornings, and again its progress would remind her of the web of Penelope. During this summer Browning completed "In a Balcony," and wrote the "Holy Cross Day," the "Epistle of Karnish," and "Ben Karshook's Wisdom." Like his wife, Browning held poetry to be above all other earthly interests; ...
— The Brownings - Their Life and Art • Lilian Whiting
... nothing like so durable as the old threads. When we consider that lace to be known as "Old Lace" must be two hundred or three hundred years old, we can understand the strength of this fairy thread, which was like a spider's web in filminess and yet durable enough to last centuries of wear, and remain as a lasting memorial of ...
— Chats on Old Lace and Needlework • Emily Leigh Lowes
... Fraser Johnstone shudder, as he sat drinking champagne cup with his guest. "One for you, my lady!" he had laughed, grimly, as the woman whom he had tricked drove swiftly away. And the grim fates laughed too, spinning at a shortening life web. ...
— A Fascinating Traitor • Richard Henry Savage
... king no more! What words to say, what tears to pour Can tell my love for thee? The spider-web of treachery She wove and wound, thy life around, And lo! I see thee lie, And thro' a coward, impious wound Pant forth thy life and die! A death of shame—ah woe on woe! A ...
— The House of Atreus • AEschylus
... startled his contemporaries, while it did not fascinate them. The august figures which he brought before them seemed monstrous and uncouth. Neglected in life, and doomed to an early death, the history of this poet was painfully interesting; a strangely brilliant web of mingled gold and ordinary thread—a strangely blended fabric of glory and of grief. Solitary, poor, bowed down with physical and mental suffering, from his heart's wound, as out of a dark cleft in a rock, swelled the clear stream ...
— Handbook of Universal Literature - From The Best and Latest Authorities • Anne C. Lynch Botta
... beneath him the waters of the abyss, swelled by the thawing of the glaciers, those palaces of the Ice Maiden, foamed and roared in their rapid course. When Rudy began to ascend, the ladder trembled like the web of the spider, when it draws out the long, delicate threads; but as soon as he reached the fourth of the ladders, which had been bound together, he felt more confidence,—he knew that they had been fastened securely by skilful hands. The fifth ladder, that appeared to reach the nest, was supported ...
— Fairy Tales of Hans Christian Andersen • Hans Christian Andersen
... a low minor key From awful holy calm, as this from grief, I weave, a silken flower, into my web, That goes straight on, with simply crossing lines, Floating few colours ...
— A Hidden Life and Other Poems • George MacDonald
... there was also a look of pity that annoyed her. It was this that she resented. She felt that she was being enmeshed in an invisible web, and she sought for a means of escape. Seeing none she might be sure of, she dropped the figurative speech and took refuge ...
— The Title Market • Emily Post
... extraordinary black tail ribands are developed, which is very remarkable. They first appear as two ordinary feathers, rather shorter than the rest of the tail; the second stage would no doubt be that shown in a specimen of Paradisea apoda, in which the feathers are moderately lengthened, and with the web narrowed in the middle; the third stage is shown by a specimen which has part of the midrib bare, and terminated by a spatulate web; in another the bare midrib is a little dilated and semi-cylindrical, and the terminal web very small; in a fifth, the perfect black horny ...
— The Malay Archipelago - Volume II. (of II.) • Alfred Russel Wallace
... long blast; while the first of the new-comers set hand to the clasps of the fur cloak and let it fall to the ground, and lo! a woman exceeding beauteous, clad in glistering raiment of gold and fine web; her hair wreathed with bay, and in her hand a naked sword with goodly-wrought golden hilt and ...
— The Roots of the Mountains • William Morris
... left the hall door open an' in creeps the little Spider, an' away wid him acrass the hall, an' never stops till he gets to the great big parlour. Up the wall wid him then as fast as he could leg it, an' there if he doesn't go and make his web in a corner of a great big gould pictur' frame. Well, there he sat, the poor fellow, but ne'er a fly at all come next or nigh him, an' by-an'-by in walks the housemaid wid her great big broom, ...
— North, South and Over the Sea • M.E. Francis (Mrs. Francis Blundell)
... stare, a look which gave way to one of anxiety as Mrs. Tipping, stepping into the rigging, suddenly lost her nerve, and, gripping it tightly, shook it in much the same fashion as a stout bluebottle shakes the web of a spider. ...
— A Master Of Craft • W. W. Jacobs
... land, and away into the mountains, with his father's sword upon his thigh, till he came to the Spider Mountains, which hang over Epidaurus and the sea, where the glens run downward from one peak in the midst, as the rays spread in the spider's web. ...
— Types of Children's Literature • Edited by Walter Barnes
... commenced to Qubba station, where the train was boarded. Each man was bearing a heavy burden. All ranks were fitted with web equipment, carrying in their packs great coats and a few necessaries and personal belongings, and bearing a blanket, waterproof sheet, three days' rations of biscuits and preserved meat, together with an emergency ration in a sealed tin, and (for those with rifles) 200 rounds of ammunition. Officers ...
— The 28th: A Record of War Service in the Australian Imperial Force, 1915-19, Vol. I • Herbert Brayley Collett
... who disregards the deities, or quarrels with the Brahmanas, or one, who, being naturally of a dark complexion becomes pale of hue, has but six months more to live. One, who sees the lunar disc to have many holes like a spider's web, or one, who sees the solar disc to have similar holes has but one week more to live. One, who, when smelling fragrant scents in place of worship, perceives them to be as offensive as the scent of corpses, ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 3 - Books 8, 9, 10, 11 and 12 • Unknown
... sandals all, and the braid that binds their hair, And alike the meal, in their Lady's hall, the whole three hundred share. Around her, in her chair of state, they all their places hold; A hundred weave the web of silk, and a hundred spin the gold, And a hundred touch their gentle lutes to sooth that Lady's pain, As she thinks on him that's far away with the host of Charlemagne. Lulled by the sound, she sleeps, ...
— Legends of the Middle Ages - Narrated with Special Reference to Literature and Art • H.A. Guerber
... sad, And of a tender beauty: those bright curls That press thy brow, and cling about thy neck, Seem made of sunbeams, caught upon their way To earth, by some creative hand, and woven Into a fairy web, of light and life, Conscious of its high source, and proud to be A part of aught so beautiful as thou. I have seen many full, bright mortal eyes, That were a labyrinth of witching charms, In which the heart of him who looked ...
— Mazelli, and Other Poems • George W. Sands
... he, too, must be "in all points tempted like as we are," that his words may be fitted for the solace and strength of the whole world. Poets "learn in suffering what they teach in song." These quick transitions of fortune, and this wide experience, are the many-coloured threads from which the rich web of his ...
— The Life of David - As Reflected in His Psalms • Alexander Maclaren
... be made of close-grained, well-seasoned wood. The iron axle should be driven in before the beam is turned. If the beam is ill-turned and irregular in shape, no even, perfect woof can come from it. The slightest variation in its dimensions makes the warp run off unevenly, and the web never "sets" well, but has some ...
— Home Life in Colonial Days • Alice Morse Earle
... sister, the spouse of Antenor's son, even her that lord Helikaon Antenor's son had to wife, Laodike fairest favoured of Priam's daughters. And in the hall she found Helen weaving a great purple web of double fold, and embroidering thereon many battles of horse-taming Trojans and mail-clad Achaians, that they had endured for her sake at the hands of Ares. So fleet-footed Iris stood by her side and said: "Come hither, dear sister, that thou mayest see the wondrous ...
— The Iliad of Homer • Homer (Lang, Leaf, Myers trans.)
... of the world has great sensitiveness. She sits in the room like a spider, with her web fitting as closely to the whole area as the carpet; and she feels the slightest touch upon the slightest filament. So do the company: not understandingly like her, but instinctively and unconsciously, like a fly who only knows ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 459 - Volume 18, New Series, October 16, 1852 • Various
... charged with it, they probably became insane, and in their insanity they confessed their guilt. They found themselves abhorred and deserted, charged with a crime they could not disprove. Like a man in quicksand, every effort only sunk them deeper. Caught in this frightful web, at the mercy of the devotees of superstition, hope fled and nothing remained but the ...
— Lectures of Col. R. G. Ingersoll, Volume I • Robert Green Ingersoll
... real social significance of the personal offices of home life. The poets have seen it all through the centuries and have pictured the myth goddesses bringing the cup and the bread and the fruit and weaving the web of ceremonial or of simple garment in household poetry. All human need for sustenance and the nurture of our physical being has made the wife the loaf-giver and the mother a nourisher of the young, and as such ...
— The Family and it's Members • Anna Garlin Spencer
... who had been killed by bullets was found in the river, and there was a small key tag with the name "Bouthilette, Beauce, P.Q." on it. This gave the Police a clue, and it was followed with characteristic energy and skill. A web of circumstantial evidence had again to be woven. Later on another body was found and Surgeons Madore and Thompson were satisfied that another death by violence had occurred. The body corresponded with the description given of Guy Beaudien. Constable ...
— Policing the Plains - Being the Real-Life Record of the Famous North-West Mounted Police • R.G. MacBeth
... knowest them not, but I know them, and I tell thee that they make ready thy doom. Have thy way, Eddo; it was not for her that I pleaded with thee, but for the sake of the ancient People of the Ghosts, whose fate draws nigh to them. Fool, have thy way, spin thy web, and be caught in it thyself. I tell thee, Eddo, that thy death shall be redder than any thou hast ever dreamed, nor shall it fall on thee alone. Begone now, and trouble me no more till in another place all that is left of thee ...
— The Ghost Kings • H. Rider Haggard
... their full distinctness. He saw them then, heavy with the warmth of the long summer, from the topmost pine-belt to the bronzed vineyards turning their metallic clusters to the sun; and in the midst his small bewildered figure, netted in a web of association, and seeming, as he broke away, to leave a shred of himself in every corner of ...
— The Valley of Decision • Edith Wharton
... suffered many things in much patience all these weeks. Louie's clear, hard mind, her sensuous temperament, her apparent lack of all maidenly reserve, all girlish softness, made her incomprehensible to one for whom life was an iridescent web of ideal aims and obligations. The child of grace was dragged out of her own austere or delicate thoughts, and made to touch, taste, and handle what the 'world,' as the Christian understands it, might be like. Like every other daughter of the people, Dora was familiar enough with sin ...
— The History of David Grieve • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... secured her needle, and put the colourful web aside. She was, as he had been sure she would be, entirely composed, admirable. Her questioning look grew keener. "I was afraid of that," she admitted simply; "after the first. It is very unpleasant and difficult. This is not London, and your father will make ...
— The Three Black Pennys - A Novel • Joseph Hergesheimer
... embodiment of perfect circles, perfect straight lines, and perfect right angles; the actual instrument can only show approximate circles, approximate straight lines, and approximate right angles. Perhaps the spider's part of the work is on the whole the best; the stretched web gives us the nearest mechanical approach to a perfectly straight line; but we mar the spider's work by not being able to insert those beautiful threads with perfect uniformity, while our attempts to adjust two of them across ...
— The Story of the Heavens • Robert Stawell Ball
... giant fighting with the sword, do against dwarfs who have cannon? You are courageous, but they are cunning, and would conquer you. For the sake of the nineteenth century you must not be vanquished. Do not come; in your simplicity you would be caught in the spider's web of clever mediocrity, and your grand efforts to tear yourself free would only be laughed at. Great man, you would be treated like ...
— Paris under the Commune • John Leighton
... Well-furnish'd rooms, plate shining on the board, Gay liveried lads, and cellar proudly stored: Then say how comes it that such fortunes crown These sons of strife, these terrors of the town? Lo! that small Office! there th' incautious guest Goes blindfold in, and that maintains the rest; There in his web, th' observant spider lies, And peers about for fat intruding flies; Doubtful at first, he hears the distant hum, And feels them fluttering as they nearer come; They buzz and blink, and doubtfully they tread On the strong ...
— The Borough • George Crabbe
... afloat; the crowds on the opposite shore in constant movement, and in vivid agitation when the bell and the pistol announced a racing event. We parted with our friends on the barge, and found our way through the gypsy crones squatted on the grass, weaving the web of fate and selling brooms and brushes in the intervals of their mystical employ, or cosily gossiping together; and then we took for the station the harmless fly which we had forever renounced as predatory ...
— London Films • W.D. Howells
... but then he was a coachman, and the coachman is to the Ghorawalla, what cream is to skim milk. The unmitigated Ghorawalla is a sore disease, one of those forms of suffering which raise the question whether our modern civilization is anything but a great spider, spinning a web of wants and their accompanying worries over the world and entangling us all, that it may suck our life-blood out. In justice I will admit that, as a runner, the thoroughbred Mahratta Ghorawalla has no peer in the ...
— Behind the Bungalow • EHA
... the fibres of the tree; and the chains and the shackles, and the blocks and cranes, and all the rest of the things they meant to use, seemed nothing whatever, or at all to be considered, except as a spider's web upon this tree. ...
— Erema - My Father's Sin • R. D. Blackmore
... quits; that he should forgive his father for his bad management, on condition that he himself was to be forgiven with regard to his determined marriage. Not that he put it exactly in that shape, even to himself; but could he have unravelled his own thoughts, he would have found that such was the web on ...
— Doctor Thorne • Anthony Trollope
... is also provided with bar-clips, and forcibly expanded at the heels by means of a dilator. The expansion is governed by saw-cuts through the inner margin of the shoe directed towards its outer margin, and running only partially through the inner half of the web ...
— Diseases of the Horse's Foot • Harry Caulton Reeks
... looked was of fair size and circular in shape. Three windows lit it, and between us and the nearest knelt Dom Basilio, busy with a web of linen which he was tearing into bandages. His was the voice that had commanded us to enter; and passing in, I was aware that the room had two other occupants; for behind the door stood a truckle bed, and along the bed lay my father, pale as death and swathed in bandages; ...
— Sir John Constantine • Prosper Paleologus Constantine
... says. Marry them all! One would have a good lot of wives! And what need have I to marry? Am as good as married now! There's many a chap as envies me. Yet how strange it felt when I crossed myself before the icon. It was just as if some one shoved me. The whole web fell to pieces at once. They say it's frightening to swear what's not true. That's all humbug. It's all talk, that ...
— Redemption and Two Other Plays • Leo Tolstoy et al
... pleasure; but the public has no more ignorant habit than this. That is no great work which the popular taste can fully appreciate, and no thoroughly educated man can at once grasp the full calibre of a work of great power differing from his own standard. It took Penelope's nights to unweave the web of her days' weaving, and no sudden shears of untaught comprehension will serve to analyze those finer fabrics of a genius like Delacroix. Perhaps, owing to many peculiarities of his nature, showing themselves in unsympathetic forms in his pictures, he may always fall short ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, No. 74, December, 1863 • Various
... interplay of personalities as any scene in a drama. But the implied listener is hardly more than a secondary dramatic element, the chief one being that the speaker talks, as do the characters in a play, out of the demands of the immediate experience, gradually and casually disclosing all the tangled web of influence, all the clashes of will with destiny, of desire with convention, that have led to the crisis depicted. Fra Lippo Lippi gives no consecutive history of his life, only such snatches of it as partially account for his present mad freak, but the strife between his ...
— Selections from the Poems and Plays of Robert Browning • Robert Browning
... web there is under the gooseberry bush!" said the farmer's little girl, when she came to fetch the empty bowl of ...
— More Tales in the Land of Nursery Rhyme • Ada M. Marzials
... specific diversity."[2-1] And as to the religions of heathendom, the view of Saint Paul is but expressed with a more poetic turn by a distinguished living author when he calls them "not fables, but truths, though clothed in a garb woven by fancy, wherein the web is the notion of God, the ideal of reason in the soul of man, ...
— The Myths of the New World - A Treatise on the Symbolism and Mythology of the Red Race of America • Daniel G. Brinton
... web of hair over her shoulders, she began to weave it into one wide strand, which grew and grew in length till it was like a great rope of spun gold. Inch by inch, foot by foot it grew, until at last it lay ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... He grows aweary and lies down to sleep—to sleep and wake no more, deeding to us the mintage of his love. And as love does not grow old, neither does Art. Fashions change, but hope, aspiration and love are as old as Fate who sits and spins the web of life. The Artist is one who is educated in the three H's—head heart and hand. He is God's child—no less are we—and he has done for us the things we would ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great - Volume 14 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Musicians • Elbert Hubbard
... joy of the safety that he supposed his soul, by his conversion, to be in. Oh! thanks to God, says he, I am not in the state of sin, death, and damnation, as the unjust, and this Publican is. What a strange delusion, to trust to the spider's web, and to think that a few, or the most fine of the works of the flesh, would be sufficient to bear up the soul in, at, and under the judgment of God! "There is a generation that are pure in their ...
— The Pharisee And The Publican • John Bunyan
... as that could never happen to Matamore," said Herode, with his resounding laugh; "he might fall into a spider's web without ...
— Captain Fracasse • Theophile Gautier
... bed and began to unpack. As he did this, the uselessness of what he was doing, the arid futility of every bit of the web of small details which, in their sum, were his life, flowed upon his soul like stagnant water forced into movement by some horrible machinery. He was like something agitating in a vast void, something whose incessant movements produced no effect, had no sort of ...
— In the Wilderness • Robert Hichens
... as follows: First of all a large five-sided frame is formed; then long threads, which are rather like the spokes of a wheel, are added. These harden at once, and to them are attached the cross-threads, which form the delicate network of the complete web. But if the web be examined with a strong magnifying glass, there will be found, among the network, a number of threads bearing little drops of a sticky substance (fig. 2). These are made by special glands, and differ from ...
— Chatterbox, 1905. • Various
... that the webs of the little spiders in the road, when saturated with moisture, as they were from the early fog this morning, exhibit prismatic tints. Every thread of the web was strung with minute spherules of moisture, and they displayed all the tints of the rainbow. In each of them I saw one abutment of a tiny rainbow. When I stepped a pace or two to the other side, I saw the other abutment. Of course I could not see the completed bow in ...
— Under the Maples • John Burroughs
... and animation, to Lake Ontario, is a most tender sea green. We drove on about six miles, and then crossed a slight suspension bridge (the suspension bridge being a ponderous structure for the railroad trains to pass over); but the one by which we crossed looked like a spider's-web; and the view midway, whether we looked up or down, was the finest specimen of river scenery I ever beheld. We then turned up the stream, and came by the English side to a most wonderful whirlpool, formed by the river making a rapid bend, and proceeding ...
— First Impressions of the New World - On Two Travellers from the Old in the Autumn of 1858 • Isabella Strange Trotter
... the spider again—an ugly creature, but I suppose God likes it. What a mean and odious lie is that web which naturalists extol as such a marvel ...
— Alps and Sanctuaries of Piedmont and the Canton Ticino • Samuel Butler
... reason. To all gospels there are two sides; and a great teacher who, by reason of the very fire that makes him great, disdains to halt and hesitate and consider the juste milieu, seldom guards himself against misinterpretation or excess. Mazzini writes, "He weaves and unweaves his web like Penelope, preaches by turns life and nothingness, and wearies out the patience of his readers by continually carrying them from heaven to hell." Carlyle, like Ruskin, keeps himself right not by caveats but by contradictions of himself, and ...
— Thomas Carlyle - Biography • John Nichol
... fault. The definition assumes that the mind as well as the body may "act" or "be acted upon." For this cause, Dr. Mandeville, who cannot conceive that "to be loved" is in any wise "to be acted upon," pronounces it "fatally defective!" His argument is a little web of sophistry, not worth unweaving here. One of the best scholars cited in the reverend Doctor's book says, "Of mental powers we have no conception, but as certain capacities of intellectual action." And again, he asks, "Who can be conscious of judgment, ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... ong's leg. The clumsy feet could not grasp him so tightly as to prevent his movements. At last the great feet opened wide, but the Indian did not fall. In a mighty rage, the ong tried in vain to grasp him in his teeth, but the strong web between the bird's toes sheltered him. Again and again the bird tried to use his horrid teeth, and each time his huge body would fall through the air in such twistings and contortions that those who watched below stared in bewilderment. But what the watchers could not ...
— The Lake of the Sky • George Wharton James
... cells, the so-called lasso-cells, each one of which conceals a coiled-up thread. These organs serve to seize the prey, shooting out their long threads, thus entangling the victim in a net more delicate than the finest spider's web, and then carrying it to the mouth by the aid of the lower part of the tentacle. The complication of structure in these animals, a whole community of which, numbering from twenty to thirty individuals, is not more than an ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 10, Number 59, September, 1862 • Various
... them caterpillars to eat; but one of the dishes they most enjoyed was cooked "mathametlo," a large frog, which, during a period of drought, takes refuge in a hole in the root of certain bushes, and over the orifice a large variety of spider weaves its web. The scavenger-beetle, which keeps the Kuruman villages sweet and clean, rolls the dirt into a ball, and carries it, ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Volume 19 - Travel and Adventure • Various
... wistful and admiring before this great spectacle. He must settle its value in his mind. What is nature to him? There is never a beginning, there is never an end, to the inexplicable continuity of this web of God, but always circular power returning into itself.[12] Therein it resembles his own spirit, whose beginning, whose ending, he never can find,—so entire, so boundless. Far too as her splendors shine, system on system ...
— Essays • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... beautiful box of the best possible paints, the very thing of all others for which she had been longing, so that it seemed after all that it had been a good thing when the terriers Tramp and Scamp had scratched the thin web into a hole! The ceilings were black with the smoke of fire and lamps, but the silver on the oak dresser would have delighted the heart of a connoisseur, and the china in daily use would have been laid out for view in glassed-in cabinets in most ...
— Pixie O'Shaughnessy • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... sea, like a young web stretched at the foot of the hill, stole out of the darkness. On the horizon a thin line of dull yellow—wouldn't it be a fine sunrise?—the figures on the hill were gathering shape and form, and many of them now were standing, their bodies sharp ...
— Fortitude • Hugh Walpole
... glass taken, and caution and restraint are too often forgotten. He drinks with this one and that one, until his clear head is gone and appetite, like a watchful spider, throws another cord of its fatal web around him." ...
— Danger - or Wounded in the House of a Friend • T. S. Arthur
... did not know, the great solitude through which man must move alone—without loud-voiced companions to encourage him—and listen until he hears his own heart beat within it. He sits in a cell again, like the first original germ of life, alone and forsaken; and over him a spider skilfully spins its web. At first he is angry with the busy insect, and tears down the web; but the insect begins again patiently. And this suddenly becomes a consolatory lesson to him never to give up; he becomes fond of the little vigilant creature that makes its web as ...
— Pelle the Conqueror, Complete • Martin Andersen Nexo
... Bonaparte pretended that the elements of revolt existed in France to a great extent; he went to Munich to find an English envoy, Mr. Drake, whom he also contrived to deceive. A citizen of Great Britain ought to have kept clear of this web of artifice, composed of the crossed ...
— Ten Years' Exile • Anne Louise Germaine Necker, Baronne (Baroness) de Stael-Holstein
... faith that can trust at all times can trust at any time. The moment that faith heeds the dictation of circumstance it ceases to be faith and becomes calculation. All faith is transcendent. It is independent of the conditions in which it has to live. It is not snared in the strange web of the tentative and the experimental. He that has for one moment felt the power of faith has got ...
— The Threshold Grace • Percy C. Ainsworth |
