"Labyrinthine" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Christomaniacs rolled into one. Foolish and fruitless as it has ever been to hunt through Shakespeare's plays and sonnets on the false scent of a fantastic trail, to put thaumaturgic trust in a dark dream of tracking his untraceable personality through labyrinthine byways of life and visionary crossroads of character, it is yet surely no blind assumption to accept the plain evidence in both so patent before us, that he too like other men had his dark seasons of outer or of inner life, and like other ...
— A Study of Shakespeare • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... has an ancient renown all over the south of France—advertises itself, I believe, as le plus vastedu midi. It seemed to me the model of a good provincial inn; a big rambling, creaking establishment, with brown, labyrinthine corridors, a queer old open-air vestibule, into which the diligence, in the bon temps, used to penetrate, and an hospitality more expressive than that of the new caravansaries. It dates from the days when Montpellier was still accounted a fine winter residence for people with weak lungs; ...
— A Little Tour in France • Henry James
... soldiers dash across the wide spaces of the school and stop at a word, or by a preconcerted, silent signal, every horse's head in line, every left hand down, saber or lance exactly poised, every foot motionless, horse and rider still as if wrought from bronze. And then he tells of the labyrinthine evolutions when the long line moving over the school floor coils and uncoils itself more swiftly than any serpent, each horse moving at speed, each one obeying as implicitly as any creature of brass and iron ...
— In the Riding-School; Chats With Esmeralda • Theo. Stephenson Browne
... the end of Barney Bill, and Paul found himself thrillingly alone in London. At first its labyrinthine vastness overwhelmed him, causing him to feel an unimportant atom, which may have been good for his soul, but was not agreeable to his vanity. By degrees, however, he learned the lay of the great thoroughfares, ...
— The Fortunate Youth • William J. Locke
... Him, down the nights and down the days; I fled Him, down the arches of the years; I fled Him down the labyrinthine ways Of my own mind; and in the midst of tears I hid from Him, and under running laughter. Up vistaed hopes, I sped; And shot, precipitated, Adown Titanic glooms of chasmed fears, From those strong ...
— Quiet Talks on John's Gospel • S. D. Gordon
... in the early ages of Christianity, the Christians took refuge in the vast catacombs which stretched for miles in every direction under the city of Rome, and are supposed to have been of Etruscan origin. There, amid labyrinthine windings, deep caverns, hidden chambers, chapels, and tombs, the persecuted fugitives found refuge, and there they performed ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike
... making a light, and so groped our way slowly into the ever-increasing darkness, Tars Tarkas keeping in touch with one wall while I felt along the other, while, to prevent our wandering into diverging branches and becoming separated or lost in some intricate and labyrinthine maze, we ...
— The Gods of Mars • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... of the things around him he beheld some analogy to his own inner life. The landscape became to him a symbol, an emblem, a sign to guide him through the labyrinthine passes of his own soul. He discovered secret affinities between the visible life around him and the intimate life of his desires and memories. 'To me, high mountains are a feeling'—and as the mountains were to Byron, so the sea ...
— The Child of Pleasure • Gabriele D'Annunzio
... varying hare about his business when he had no idea that I was one of the party, but the sophisticated Massachusetts rabbit has always been too clever for me. But it is not so difficult to follow the tracks, confusing as they sometimes are in their labyrinthine route, to their end for the forenoon. This is usually a snuggery under some brush or in a tangle of dried grasses and ferns. Here I fancy the rabbit backing in and crowding out a sitting room and then sitting in it. He will stay in this "form" until ...
— Old Plymouth Trails • Winthrop Packard
... began the return from a Canadian foray, bearing with them plate, candlesticks, and a silver statue that they had rifled from the Church of St. Francis. An Indian who had undertaken to guide the party through the Notch proved faithless, and led them among labyrinthine gorges to the head of Israel's River, where he disappeared, after poisoning one of the troopers with a rattlesnake's fang. Losing all reckoning, the Rangers tramped hither and thither among the snowy hills and sank down, one ...
— Myths And Legends Of Our Own Land, Complete • Charles M. Skinner
... life-clouding Rodondo had its full counterpart in the finny hosts which peopled the waters at its base. Below the water-line, the rock seemed one honey-comb of grottoes, affording labyrinthine lurking-places for swarms of fairy fish. All were strange; many exceedingly beautiful; and would have well graced the costliest glass globes in which gold-fish are kept for a show. Nothing was more striking than the complete novelty of many individuals of this multitude. ...
— The Piazza Tales • Herman Melville
... then did our horses wheel. Like rivers in horned floods wheeling in pomp of unfathomable waters round headlands; like hurricanes that ride into the secrets of forests, faster than ever light travels through the wilderness of darkness, we shot the angles, we fled round the curves of the labyrinthine city. With the storm of our horses' feet, and of our burning wheels, did we carry earthly passions, kindle warrior instincts amongst the silent dust around us, dust of our noble fathers that had slept ...
— The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. 1 (2 vols) • Thomas De Quincey
... this he dreamed not. He would sit him down Thinking to work his problems as of old, And find the star he thought so plain a blur, The columned figures labyrinthine wilds Without my comment, blind and senseless scrawls That vexed him with their riddles; he would strive And struggle for a while, and then his eye Would lose its light, and over all his mind The cold gray mist would settle; ...
— The Poet at the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... a truce between Nesta and Nataly. He had a medical hint from Dr. Themison, and he counselled his girl to humour her mother as far as could be: particularly in relation to Dudley, whom Nataly now, womanlike, after opposing, strongly favoured. How are we ever to get a clue to the labyrinthine convolutions and changeful motives of the sex! Dartrey's theories were absurd. Did Nataly think them dangerous for a young woman? The guess hinted at a clue of some sort to the ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... several flights of a rickety staircase, and down some labyrinthine passages to a large room where some forty or fifty men were busy setting up type. At the far end of this room, at a small table, crowded with "proofs," sat a red-faced individual whom the ...
— Reginald Cruden - A Tale of City Life • Talbot Baines Reed
... thou! Thou of the chorded shell and golden plectrum! thou Of the dark eyes and pale pacific brow! Music, who by the plangent waves, Or in the echoing night of labyrinthine caves, Or on God's mountains, lonely as the stars, Touchest reverberant bars Of immemorial sorrow and amaze;— Keeping regret and memory awake, And all the immortal ache Of love that leans upon the past's sweet days In retrospection!—now, oh, now, Interpreter and heart-physician, thou, Who gazest ...
— Myth and Romance - Being a Book of Verses • Madison Cawein
... borne me.—I am, I think, rather delicately than copiously provided with those conduits; and I feel no disposition to envy the mule for his plenty, or the mole for her exactness, in those ingenious labyrinthine inlets—those ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Volume 2 • Charles Lamb
... tones of Phoebe's soprano set the echoes ringing all over the great workroom. In and out among the aisles and labyrinthine passages that wind through towering piles of boxes, from the thundering machinery far over on the other side of the "loft" to the dusky recess of the uttermost table, the musical ...
— The Long Day - The Story of a New York Working Girl As Told by Herself • Dorothy Richardson
... 5. ddal. Labyrinthine, wonderful. From Ddalus, a famous Athenian architect, who designed the labyrinth at Crete in which the Minotaur ...
— Six Centuries of English Poetry - Tennyson to Chaucer • James Baldwin
... since: Tedious land for a social Prince; Halting, he scanned the outs and ins, Endless, labyrinthine, grim, Of the solitude that made him wince, ...
— Goblin Market, The Prince's Progress, and Other Poems • Christina Rossetti
... strong sensory-stimulus of glowing color, of dazzling light; in the more complex motory-stimulus of intricate, abrupt and plastic form.... He delighted in the angular, indented, intertwining, labyrinthine varieties of line and surface which call for the most delicate, and at the same time most agile, adjustments of the eye. He caught at the edges of things.... Spikes and wedges and swords run riot ...
— A Study of Poetry • Bliss Perry
... Mother's bosom rests the daughter— Grief the ripple, love the water; And thy brain like wind-harp lies Breathed upon from distant skies, Till, soft-gathering, visions new Grow like vapours in the blue: White forms, flushing hyacinthine, Move in motions labyrinthine; With an airy wishful gait On the counter-motion wait; Sweet restraint and action free Show the law of liberty; Master of the revel still The obedient, perfect will; Hating smallest thing awry, Breathing, breeding harmony; While the god-like graceful feet, For such mazy marvelling ...
— Poetical Works of George MacDonald, Vol. 2 • George MacDonald
... retrieve the error of his first forgetfulness, here, after a moment's struggle for the necessary remembrance, drew the papers from the labyrinthine receptacle which concealed them; and Henry uttered an exclamation of joy as, after cutting the silk, his eye glanced over ...
— The Last Of The Barons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... gradations, by labyrinthine delays, to the final beatification of Adonis. Picture is interwoven with picture, each in turn contributing to the panorama of sensual Paradise. Yet while straining all the resources of his art, with intense sympathy, to ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volumes 1 and 2 - The Catholic Reaction • John Addington Symonds
... Terrell, Major with his two brigades under Baylor and Bagby, and the twenty-four guns of McMahon, Moseley, West, and Nettles. The position was too strong and too difficult of approach to be taken by a direct attack save at a great cost. Through the labyrinthine morass that lay between the ferry and the river's mouth Bailey and E. J. Davis searched in vain for a practicable ford. Nothing remained but to try ...
— History of the Nineteenth Army Corps • Richard Biddle Irwin
... to go again to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre," said the Lady in a voice of dutiful reminder, "we have not half seen it." So we went down to the heart of Jerusalem and entered the labyrinthine shrine. ...
— Out-of-Doors in the Holy Land - Impressions of Travel in Body and Spirit • Henry Van Dyke
... how I might make reparation. I made up my mind that I should do this at the next halt. We were approaching another range of mountains at the time, and when we reached them, instead of winding across them through some high-flung pass we entered a mighty natural tunnel—a series of labyrinthine ...
— At the Earth's Core • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... garden; she who traced the lines of the flower-beds with the ivory tip of her parasol; she who planned the quaint stone gateways and arbours and hedge seats; she who devised the interminable stretches of paths, the labyrinthine walks, the mazes, and the hidden flower-plots. You walk on and on between high hedges, until, if you have not missed your way, you presently find a little pansy or rose or lily garden. It is quite the most unexpected and piquant method of laying out ...
— Penelope's Irish Experiences • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... surrounding was a thicket, and was about to make his way into its labyrinthine density, step by step; for the way was difficult, when there was a tramping of horses' hoofs upon the rain-soaked road that appeared to be in ...
— Mistress Penwick • Dutton Payne
... the girl whose name imaged to everyone little more than a pencil, notebook, and typewriting machine. The vividest personality was Frederick Norman. In the list of names upon the outer doors of the firm's vast labyrinthine suite, on the seventeenth floor of the Syndicate Building, his name came last—and, in the newest lettering, suggesting recentness of partnership. In age he was the youngest of the partners. Lockyer was archaic, Sanders an antique; Benchley, actually only about fifty-five, had the air of one born ...
— The Grain Of Dust - A Novel • David Graham Phillips
... Church which you, my king, have established; and of which the lofty and peculiar structure is to many so new and unusual that they ask themselves in doubt whether that is a Church of God or a palace of the king, and that they lose themselves in its labyrinthine passages, and wander about without being able ...
— Henry VIII And His Court • Louise Muhlbach
... Italy for numbering her children too carefully, and slain this little one. Black and white she lay, all breathless, in a sufficiently pictorial manner: the gardens of the Villa Regina gleamed beyond, graceful with laurel-grove and labyrinthine terrace; and folds of purple mountain were drawn afar, for curtains round ...
— On the Old Road Vol. 1 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... civilised world is not exhausted, and will not be till He is throned as Saviour and Ruler of the whole earth. There is only one religion in the world that is obviously growing. The gods of Greece and Rome are only subjects for studies in Comparative Mythology, the labyrinthine pantheon of India makes no conquests, Buddhism is moribund. All other religions than Christianity are shut up within definite and comparatively narrow geographical and chronological limits. But in spite of premature jubilations of enemies and much hasty talk about the need for a re- statement ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: St. John Chaps. XV to XXI • Alexander Maclaren
... that followed! Oh, most august revelation! Mile-long were the halls that appeared, and open spaces enormous; Areas fit to hold armies on the day of muster for battle; Hosts upon either side, for amplest castrametation. Depth behind depth, and dim labyrinthine apartments. Golden galleries above running high into darkening vistas, Staircases soaring and climbing, till sight grew dizzy with effort Of chasing the corridors up to their whispering gloomy recesses. Nations were ranged in the halls, nations ranged at a banquet, Even then lightly proceeding ...
— The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. II (2 vols) • Thomas De Quincey
... we inevitably exclaim as we watch Victorien Sardou, in whom French ingenuity culminated and caricatured itself, laying the foundations of one of his labyrinthine intrigues. The absurdities of "preparation" in this sense could scarcely be better satirized than in the following page from Francisque Sarcey's criticism of Nos Intimes (known in English as Peril)—a page which is intended, not as ...
— Play-Making - A Manual of Craftsmanship • William Archer
... dugouts, of grotesquely carved prows and gaudy paint common among Pacific tribes, escorted Vancouver's boats northward the second week in June through the labyrinthine passageways of cypress-grown islets to Burrard Inlet. To Peter Puget was assigned the work of coasting the mainland side and tracing every inlet to its head waters. Johnstone went ahead in a small boat to reconnoitre the way out of the Pacific. On both sides the shores now rose in beetling precipice ...
— Vikings of the Pacific - The Adventures of the Explorers who Came from the West, Eastward • Agnes C. Laut
... of Unas, dilapidated without, secretively beautiful within. We went from tomb to tomb, lingering long in the labyrinthine Mansion of Mereruka who, ruddy and large as life, stepped hospitably down in statue-form from his stela recess, to welcome us in the name of himself and wife. Almost he seemed to wave his hands and say, "Look at these nice pictures ...
— It Happened in Egypt • C. N. Williamson & A. M. Williamson
... reality the clue to what seemed to the outside world a labyrinthine maze of tangled interests and passions was firmly held in the hand of Barneveld, it was not to him nor to My Lords the States-General that the various parties to the impending conflict ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... poverty, dodging creditors through the labyrinthine gloom of the town. Chronic embarrassment was caused by Shelley's extravagant credulity. His love of the astonishing, his readiness to believe merely because a thing was impossible, made him the prey of every impostor. ...
— Shelley • Sydney Waterlow
... both these embryo historians had to draw their first information about history from the Jewish German paraphrase of "Yosippon," an historical compilation, is counterbalanced by careful instruction in Rabbinical literature, whose labyrinthine ways soon became ...
— Jewish Literature and Other Essays • Gustav Karpeles
... upon the pavement. The rays made the unctuous dampness of the stone flags glisten, and Sor Tommaso shivered in his broadcloth cloak. Then, as before, he was conducted in silence through arched ways, and up many steps, and along labyrinthine corridors, his strong shoes rousing sharp, metallic echoes, while the nuns' slippers slapped and shuffled as one walked on each side of him, the one on the left carrying the lamp, according to the ancient rules of politeness. At last they reached ...
— Casa Braccio, Volumes 1 and 2 (of 2) • F. Marion Crawford
... Than the isle of Delos. Echo hence shall stir No sighs but sigh-warm kisses, or light noise Of thy combing hand, the while it travelling cloys And trembles through my labyrinthine hair." ...
— Adonais • Shelley
... enthusiasm as shall conduct us indifferent and unmoved" over the bridge by which you enter Sandwich, and pay a toll if you do it in a carriage. "That man is little to be envied (Doctor Johnson again) who can lose himself in our labyrinthine streets, and not feel that he has reached the welcome limits of progress, and found a haven of rest ...
— Little Novels • Wilkie Collins
... the church music. A boy could skate to church in New York more readily than in Moscow, where such a thing was never seen, and where they are not educated up to roller skates. Lastly, as the church specified, St. Vasily, consists of a nest of small churches connected by narrow, labyrinthine corridors, and is approached from the street up two flights of low-ceiled stairs, it is an impossibility that the boy should have viewed the "aisle" and assembled congregation from his skates at the door. That is a fair specimen of the distortions ...
— Russian Rambles • Isabel F. Hapgood
... in as curious a structure. Built of old boughs of trees blown down in the groves, and covered over with unruly thatching, it seemed, without, some ostrich nest. But within, so intricate, and grotesque, its brown alleys and cells, that the interior of no walnut was more labyrinthine. ...
— Mardi: and A Voyage Thither, Vol. II (of 2) • Herman Melville
... Trocara, which flows over a stony bed, and, about a mile above its mouth, falls over a ledge of rocks, thus forming a very pretty cascade. In the neighbourhood, we found a number of specimens of a curious land-shell, a large flat Helix, with a labyrinthine mouth (Anastoma). We learned afterwards that it was a species which had been discovered a few years previously by Dr. Gardner, the botanist, on the ...
— The Naturalist on the River Amazons • Henry Walter Bates
... to be whisked away apparently through a labyrinthine maze of cars and streets, where pedestrians had to run and jump for their lives. A congestion of traffic at Fifth Avenue and Forty-second Street halted their taxi for a few moments, and here in the thick of it Carley ...
— The Call of the Canyon • Zane Grey
... vessels in particular places. The word branch is also metaphorically used for river divergents, but its application to affluents is improper. Any branch or ramification, as in estuaries, where they traverse, river-like, miles of territory, in labyrinthine mazes. ...
— The Sailor's Word-Book • William Henry Smyth
... down the nights and down the days; I fled Him, down the arches of the years; I fled Him, down the labyrinthine ways Of my own mind; and in the mist of tears I hid from Him, and under running laughter. Up vistaed hopes, I sped; And shot, precipitated Adown Titanic glooms of chasmed fears, From those strong Feet that followed, followed after. But with unhurrying chase, And unperturbed ...
— Poems • Francis Thompson
... receive more ample treatment at the hands of some future historian, Mr. Miller has performed a most useful service in affording a guide by the aid of which the historical student can find his way through the labyrinthine maze of Balkan politics. He begins his story about the time when Napoleon had appeared like a comet in the political firmament, and by his erratic movements had caused all the statesmen of Europe to diverge temporarily from their normal ...
— Political and Literary essays, 1908-1913 • Evelyn Baring
... am haunted by the heavens and the earth; ... I am besieged by things that I have seen: Followed and watched by rivers; snared and held In labyrinthine woods and tangled meads; Hemmed in by mountains; waylaid by the sun; Environed and beset by moon and stars; Whispered by winds and summoned by ...
— Platform Monologues • T. G. Tucker
... shall be found wanting," and at the voice he quailed, feeling his weakness. Then it was that Rome claimed him, showing him her unique position among the Churches. Never allowing or fostering modern doubt, immune against innovation, with myriad and labyrinthine channels of work for the different temperaments that entered within her gates, she presented at that time the spectacle of the only Church not divided against herself, and Ringfield suddenly yearned towards the cloister, the cross, the strange, hooded, cloaked men, ...
— Ringfield - A Novel • Susie Frances Harrison
... round the chimney you go, and if you arrive at all, it is just where you started, and so you begin again, and again get nowhere. Indeed—though I say it not in the way of faultfinding at all—never was there so labyrinthine an abode. Guests will tarry with me several weeks and every now and then, be anew astonished at ...
— I and My Chimney • Herman Melville
... the scene of the round-up. He followed the trail toward Jackson's Pocket, but diverged after he had gone a few miles and turned into one of the hundred blind gulches that ran out from the valley to the impassable mountain wall behind. It was known as Jack Rabbit Run, because its labyrinthine trails offered a retreat into which hunted men might always dive for safety. Nobody knew its recesses better than Jed Briscoe, who was acknowledged to be the leader of that faction in the valley which had brought it the ...
— A Texas Ranger • William MacLeod Raine
... before the Klondike day; and she lived a not over-lively village life on the strength of the mines on Douglas Island, across the narrow straits. There were sea-birds skimming the water as we threaded the labyrinthine channels that surround Juneau. We were evidently not very far from the coast-line; for the gulls were only occasional visitors on the Alaskan cruise, though the eagles we had always with us. They soared aloft among the pines that crowned the mountain ...
— Over the Rocky Mountains to Alaska • Charles Warren Stoddard
... uneven walls of the more tortuous ancient vaults which give access to these labyrinthine corridors are thousands of casks of wine—some in single rows, others in triple tiers—forming the reserve stock of the establishment. As may be supposed, a powerful vinous odour permeates these vaults, in which the fumes of wine have been accumulating for ...
— Facts About Champagne and Other Sparkling Wines • Henry Vizetelly
... proceeded to release it from the meshes; but these, on account of the desperate struggles which the fish had made, were warped and twisted around its gills and fins, and worked into such a labyrinthine puzzle, that Ossaroo found it no joke to get them clear. He was full ten minutes in accomplishing this feat, but he at length succeeded, and, holding the huge fish triumphantly in his hands above the surface of the water, he ...
— The Plant Hunters - Adventures Among the Himalaya Mountains • Mayne Reid
... fly on paper wings! From "Greek Heroes" to the Iliad was no day's journey, nor was it altogether pleasant. One could have traveled round the word many times while I trudged my weary way through the labyrinthine mazes of grammars and dictionaries, or fell into those dreadful pitfalls called examinations, set by schools and colleges for the confusion of those who seek after knowledge. I suppose this sort of Pilgrim's Progress was justified ...
— Story of My Life • Helen Keller
... uncommonly ill-contrived geese; and I record the matter here for the sake of the moral,—that we should never pass judgment on the merits of any person or thing, unless we behold it in the sphere and circumstances to which it is specially adapted. In still another part of the Garden there is a labyrinthine maze, formed of an intricacy of hedge-bordered walks, involving himself in which, a man might wander for hours inextricably within a circuit of only a few yards,—a sad emblem, it seemed to me, of the mental and moral perplexities in which we sometimes ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 10, Number 60, October 1862 • Various
... most judicious of landscape-gardeners, would scarcely have desired to alter arrangements which have quite enough of the varied and the picturesque to satisfy those who do not contend for eternal labyrinthine mazes and perpetually waving lines. There is one straight avenue in front, but the principal carriage-road has just the kind of curve most desirable, sweeping round some fine trees which group themselves for the purpose of affording ...
— Notes of an Overland Journey Through France and Egypt to Bombay • Miss Emma Roberts
... spring tides, the coral reef is uncovered, small rock-cod, slim eels, parrot-fish, perch, soles, the lovely blue-spotted sting-ray, catfish, flathead, etc., are poked out unceremoniously with spears or sharp-pointed sticks from labyrinthine mazes, or from the concealment afforded by the flabby folds and fringes of the skeleton-less coral (ALCYONARIA), or from among the weeds and stones—a kind of additional sense leading the black to the discovery of fish in places that a ...
— Tropic Days • E. J. Banfield
... large and able, without being a great poem. It has the incurable and indefensible defect of dulness. 'The line labours, and the words move slow.' The story is interesting of itself, but is lost in the labyrinthine details. It has many lines, and some highly and successfully wrought passages; but as a whole we may say of it as Porson said of certain better productions, 'It will be read when the works of Homer and Virgil are forgotten—but not ...
— Specimens with Memoirs of the Less-known British Poets, Complete • George Gilfillan
... of sunsets emblazoned in gold and crimson upon cloud and water; of violet domes and bell-towers etched against the orange of a western sky; of moonlight silvering breeze-rippled breadths of liquid blue; of distant islands shimmering in sunlitten haze; of music and black gliding boats; of labyrinthine darkness made for mysteries of love and crime; of statue-fretted palace fronts; of brazen clangour and a moving crowd; of pictures by earth's proudest painters, cased in gold on walls of council chambers where Venice sat enthroned a queen, where nobles swept the floors with robes of Tyrian ...
— New Italian sketches • John Addington Symonds
... save the crumbling walls of the fortress, of this by far the largest portion of the old town has entirely disappeared, and picnics are now made under the shade of beautiful avenues of trees which replace the labyrinthine ...
— Lippincott's Magazine Of Popular Literature And Science, April 1875, Vol. XV., No. 88 • Various
... large palatal teeth, slightly labyrinthine in character, adjacent to each internal naris. The scapulocoracoid, as shown by Peabody (1958), is Anthracosaurian in structure, as are the long-stemmed clavicles. The limbs have digits rather than fin-lobes, although the digital ...
— A New Order of Fishlike Amphibia From the Pennsylvanian of Kansas • Theodore H. Eaton
... curious labyrinthine discussion it was, winding from recriminations and flat admissions that our marriage was a failure and our love was dead, to the most poignant memories of our engagement days. But its central point was Max's detached insistence that we ...
— How To Write Special Feature Articles • Willard Grosvenor Bleyer
... novels, as opposed to the action, is used as a sort of attestation of the action; and it surely fulfils its mission very strikingly in the best of his work—the best from this point of view—Bleak House, Dombey and Son, Our Mutual Friend. His incurable love of labyrinthine mystification, when it really ran away with him, certainly defeated all precautions; not even old Dorrit's Marshalsea, not even Flora and Mr. F.'s Aunt, can do anything to carry off the story of the Clennams. But so long as he was ...
— The Craft of Fiction • Percy Lubbock
... soon, however, as the young bonito appear, both eels and rock-cod change their normal habits, and entering the lagoons through the passages thereto, they take up their quarters in the deeper parts—places which are fringed by a labyrinthine border of coral forest, and are at most ten fathoms deep. Here, when the atuli are covering the surface above, the eels and rock-cod actually rise to the surface and play havoc among them, especially during moonlight nights, and in the ...
— By Rock and Pool on an Austral Shore, and Other Stories • Louis Becke
... disobedience, self-willed departure from God. That disobedience may be as virulently active in a trifle as in a deed that men call great. Self-will is the tap root of all sin, however labyrinthine the outgrowth from it. ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... murmur of blanch'd noon Behind the sultry blind, now full now flat, Drinking anew of every odorous breath, Supremely happy in her ignorance Of Time that hastens hourly and of Death Who need not haste. Scatter your fumes, O lime, Loose from each hispid star of citron bloom, Tangled beneath the labyrinthine boughs, Cloud on such stinging cloud of exhalations As reek of youth, fierce life and summer's prime, Though hardly now shall he in that dusk room Savour your sweetness, since the very sprig, Profuse of blossom and of essences, He smells not, who in a paltering hand Clasps it laid ...
— Georgian Poetry 1918-19 • Various
... had to be killed, the pretty Presidente of Sylvecane abducted, or the cries of little girls brought thither by Lebel smothered, such places were convenient for the purpose. They were labyrinthine chambers, impracticable to a stranger; scenes of abductions; unknown depths, receptacles of mysterious disappearances. In those elegant caverns princes and lords stored their plunder. In such a place the Count ...
— The Man Who Laughs • Victor Hugo
... sympathies of that audience. In Savonarola's preaching there were strains that appealed to the very finest susceptibilities of men's natures, and there were elements that gratified low egoism, tickled gossiping curiosity, and fascinated timorous superstition. His need of personal predominance, his labyrinthine allegorical interpretations of the Scriptures, his enigmatic visions, and his false certitude about the Divine intentions, never ceased, in his own large soul, to be ennobled by that fervid piety, that passionate sense of the infinite, that active ...
— Romola • George Eliot
... men then walked on arm and arm for some distance. They seemed to be walking more for the sake of a little conversation than for any thing else, for they went slowly, and after winding about among the labyrinthine streets for ten or twenty minutes, took their way ...
— Lizzy Glenn - or, The Trials of a Seamstress • T. S. Arthur
... Jewish simply filthy. I often had to gallop through the last-named holding my handkerchief to my mouth, and the kawwasses running as though they had been pursued by devils. Everywhere in Damascus, but especially in this quarter, the labyrinthine streets are piled with heaps of offal, wild dogs are gorged with carrion, and dead dogs are lying about. One must never judge Damascus, however by externals: every house has a mean aspect in the way of entrance and approach. This is done purposely ...
— The Romance of Isabel Lady Burton Volume II • Isabel Lady Burton & W. H. Wilkins
... German prose, usually so heavy, so clumsy, so dull, becomes, like clay in the hands of the chemist, compact, metallic, brilliant; it is German in an allotropic condition. No dreary, labyrinthine sentences in which you find "no end in wandering mazes lost;" no chains of adjectives in linked harshness long drawn out; no digressions thrown in as parentheses; but crystalline definiteness and clearness, fine and varied rhythm, and all that delicate precision, ...
— George Eliot; A Critical Study of Her Life, Writings & Philosophy • George Willis Cooke
... where Peter's train would come. The struggle was spared him, however, by the recognition of a newspaper reporter who took it for granted that the ambassador to Forsland had come to meet the funeral cortege of the marine and who led him through a labyrinthine passage that brought him past the gates and under the glass dome ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1915 - And the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... only one force that would tame her; but there was that force, and Diane knew that she had submitted to its domination. From weeks of tortuous self-examination she emerged into this knowledge, as one comes out of a labyrinthine cavern into sunshine. Even here in the open, however, was a problem still to solve. Could she marry the man who had never told her that he loved her, even though she herself loved him? Had she the power to give herself without stint, ...
— The Inner Shrine • Basil King
... attics. There were no ceilings in the house; the cross-beams were simply white-washed and the spaces plastered over. Both rooms on the first floor and the dining-room below were wainscoted and adorned with the labyrinthine designs which taxed the patience of the eighteenth century joiner; but the carving had been painted a dingy ...
— The Collection of Antiquities • Honore de Balzac
... houses had not crept as far as Oxford Street; but it was, as now, the familiar thoroughfare of relief from the narrower and noisier Fleet Street and Strand, and the part of it which Milton had chosen was the most convenient. The actual house which he took may be still extant, wedged somewhere in the labyrinthine block between Great Turnstile and Little Turnstile; but one could judge but poorly from present appearances how pleasant may have been its old outlook to the rear. The fine open area of Lincoln's-Inn Fields ...
— The Life of John Milton Vol. 3 1643-1649 • David Masson
... them takes possession of the mind, while remaining merely as a curious spectator within them. The narrow steps leading to them are reached through a decorated doorway, and the passage below receives light through a series of gratings. You shortly reach the labyrinthine ways, totally excluded from external light and air, and enter one after another confined dungeons, little more than six feet square, cased with oak to deaden sounds, and to increase the difficulty of attempted escape. To make these narrow places even ...
— Rambles of an Archaeologist Among Old Books and in Old Places • Frederick William Fairholt
... him, he went rapidly along the silent and deserted street. It wound its tortuous way at first on the crest of the hill, skirting the majestic temple of Magna Mater with its elevated portico and noble steps that lost themselves in the shadows of labyrinthine colonnades. ...
— "Unto Caesar" • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... that he should devour more than three, provided he pays for the whole fourteen. 'Shortly before the hand on the dial over the doorway points to five, crowds of gentlemen may be seen hurrying through the labyrinthine paths that intersect the Temple in all directions, and concentrating at the yard before the hall, for dinner there waits for no man, and, better still, no man waits for dinner. Gowns are provided for the student in the robing-room, ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 461 - Volume 18, New Series, October 30, 1852 • Various
... through a labyrinthine avenue made up of Palms, which on that side of the City seem to be plentiful, and over these palms in extraordinary profusion the vines of the red flowered honeysuckle. You cannot see beyond the wall of green on either side in this winding way, and only as you gaze upward does the eye escape the ...
— The Certainty of a Future Life in Mars • L. P. Gratacap
... there Suffices to upturn to the warm air Half-germinating spices, mere decay Produces richer life, and day by day New pollen on the lily-petal grows, And still more labyrinthine buds the rose." ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... her gazing after him curiously and strode down the path towards the wharf. And as he entered the last narrow track in the labyrinthine bush, one of his native crew broke through the ...
— Gold Out of Celebes • Aylward Edward Dingle
... for WHAT did my soul hunger by night and in labyrinthine paths? And climbed I mountains, WHOM did I ever seek, if not thee, ...
— Thus Spake Zarathustra - A Book for All and None • Friedrich Nietzsche
... sooth, most fair, most mellific damsel, your unworthy servitor was erring enchanted in the paradise of your divine idea when that the horrific alarum did wend its fear-begetting course through the labyrinthine ...
— The Panchronicon • Harold Steele Mackaye
... long, gently rising slope separated the fugitives from that labyrinthine network of wildly carved rock. But it was the clear air that made the distance seem short. Mile after mile the mustangs climbed, and when they were perhaps half-way across that last slope to the rocks the first horse of the pursuers ...
— The Rainbow Trail • Zane Grey
... firmly fixed in his memory by the necessity of practicing them—albeit behind the back of Moses—while he had them still fresh in his mind; for he would naturally resort to every human and inhuman device to wile away the dragging decades consumed in tracing the labyrinthine sinuosities of his course in the wilderness. When a man has assurance that he will not be permitted to arrive at the point for which he set out, perceiving that every step forward is a step wasted, he will pretty certainly use his feet to a better purpose than walking. Clearly, at a time ...
— The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce, Volume 8 - Epigrams, On With the Dance, Negligible Tales • Ambrose Bierce
... vanquisht of body, 110 Vainly tossing its horns and goring the wind to no purpose. Thence with abounding praise returned he, guiding his footsteps, Whiles did a fine drawn thread check steps in wander abounding, Lest when issuing forth of the winding maze labyrinthine Baffled become his track by inobservable error. 115 But for what cause should I, from early subject digressing, Tell of the daughter who the face of her sire unseeing, Eke her sister's embrace nor less her mother's endearments, Who in despair bewept her ...
— The Carmina of Caius Valerius Catullus • Caius Valerius Catullus
... the quaintest [Greek: poikilia]. Then, from the tomb of your own Edward the Confessor, to the farthest shrine of the opposite Arabian and Indian world, I must show you how the glittering and iridescent dominion of Daedalus prevails; and his ingenuity in division, interposition, and labyrinthine sequence, more widely still. Only this last summer I found the dark red masses of the rough sandstone of Furness Abbey had been fitted by him, with no less pleasure than he had in carving them, into wedged hexagons—reminiscences of the honeycomb of Venus Erycina. ...
— Aratra Pentelici, Seven Lectures on the Elements of Sculpture - Given before the University of Oxford in Michaelmas Term, 1870 • John Ruskin
... adventure—he who had never thought himself cut out for them, and it fairly helped him that he was able at moments to say to himself that he mustn't fall below it. At his hotel, alone, by night, or in the course of the few late strolls he was finding time to take through dusky labyrinthine alleys and empty campi, overhung with mouldering palaces, where he paused in disgust at his want of ease and where the sound of a rare footstep on the enclosed pavement was like that of a retarded dancer ...
— The Wings of the Dove, Volume II • Henry James
... Government of the United States would send out expert commissioners, who would go over the line and pass judgment upon the finished work. No two groups of commissioners seemed to agree. These experts, who had their part to play in the bewildering and labyrinthine maze of men's contrary plans and plots, reported that certain sections would have to ...
— The U.P. Trail • Zane Grey
... prompted those habits of seclusion, and that apparently capricious abstraction of himself from the society not only of his friends, but of his own family, in which he from time to time persisted. He confessed to occasional accesses of an almost irresistible impulse to flee to the labyrinthine shelter of some great city like London or Paris,—there to dwell solitary amid a multitude, buried by day in the cloister-like recesses of mighty libraries, and stealing away by night to some obscure lodging. Long indulgence in seclusion, and in habits of study the most lawless possible ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 8, Slice 2 - "Demijohn" to "Destructor" • Various
... the map on the kitchen table, and at once proceeded, with the help of the chambermaid, to trace out the roads that were open to Ralph and Sim to take. It was a labyrinthine web, that map, and it taxed the utmost ingenuity of both Robbie and his little acquaintance to make head ...
— The Shadow of a Crime - A Cumbrian Romance • Hall Caine
... The labyrinthine approach adds greatly to the delight of a climb to La Californie. If you go by carriage, unless you have a map, you are tempted to feel that the cocher is taking a roundabout route to justify the high price he asked you. But if you go afoot—and without a map—you may ...
— Riviera Towns • Herbert Adams Gibbons
... nautical art—when man had obtained a faithful guide in his most devious and trackless wanderings—when he was apparently set free from the unsteady dominion of the seas and of the fickle winds—and amid his labyrinthine course could ever and at once turn his face towards his happy and expectant home;—it was not till this period that science began to lend her most useful and most extensive aids, and that her value in the ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - April 1843 • Various
... moss, at the roots of a wide-spreading oak. She was leaning back, so that she could look up, up, through vistas of changing greens,—black-green to gold-green,—through a thousand labyrinthine avenues and counter-avenues of leaves and branches, with broken shafts of sunlight caught in them here and there, to the glimpses of blue sky visible beyond. The tree gave you a sense of great spaces, and depths, and differences, like a world; and it was full of life, ...
— The Lady Paramount • Henry Harland
... Spheres of Heaven, Man's first, last home: and thou with ravish'd sense Listenest the lordly music flowing from Th'illimitable years. I am the Spirit, The permeating life which courseth through All th' intricate and labyrinthine veins Of the great vine of Fable, which, outspread With growth of shadowing leaf and clusters rare, Reacheth to every corner under Heaven, Deep-rooted in the living soil of truth: So that men's hopes and fears take refuge in The ...
— The Early Poems of Alfred Lord Tennyson • Tennyson
... learnt to peer and pore On tortured puzzles from our youth, We know all labyrinthine lore, We are the three wise mert of yore, And we know all things ...
— Poems • G.K. Chesterton
... Saint-Honore; in the University from the Porte Saint-Victor to the Porte Saint-Germain. These two great thoroughfares intersected by the two first, formed the canvas upon which reposed, knotted and crowded together on every hand, the labyrinthine network of the streets of Paris. In the incomprehensible plan of these streets, one distinguished likewise, on looking attentively, two clusters of great streets, like magnified sheaves of grain, one in the University, the other in the Town, which spread out gradually ...
— Notre-Dame de Paris - The Hunchback of Notre Dame • Victor Hugo
... in silence, and in a moment the water widened between them as Landless bent to his oars and the crazy little bark shot out into the middle of the stream. At the entrance of the first labyrinthine winding he turned and looked back to see Godwyn standing upon the bank, the moonlight silvering his thin hair and high serene brow. In the mystic white light, against the expanse of solemn heaven, he looked a vision, a seer or prophet risen from beneath the sighing grass. He waved ...
— Prisoners of Hope - A Tale of Colonial Virginia • Mary Johnston
... even thus shadowy, for hoping—I cannot say believing—that his father might be in London, he could not return to Aberdeen. Moray, who had no heart to hunt for his mother, left the next day by the steamer. Falconer took to wandering about the labyrinthine city, and in a couple of months knew more about the metropolis—the west end excepted—than most people who had lived their lives in it. The west end is no doubt a considerable exception to make, but Falconer sought only his father, and the west end was the place where he was least likely to find ...
— Robert Falconer • George MacDonald
... behind several of the small windows in the facade of the huge labyrinthine building. Without any hesitation de Batz turned down the Rue du Temple, and soon found himself in front of the main gates which gave on the courtyard beyond. The sentinel challenged him, but he had the pass-word, and explained that he desired ...
— El Dorado • Baroness Orczy
... then bid a long farewell to "John's," Its stately courts, its wisdom-wooing Dons, Its antique towers, its labyrinthine maze, Its nights of study, and its pleasant days? O learned Synod, whose decree I wait, Whose just decision makes, or mars my fate; If in your gardens I have loved to roam, And found within your courts ...
— Sagittulae, Random Verses • E. W. Bowling
... her influence over him. It was embarrassing; it declared so much, assumed so much, that had never been declared or assumed in any other way. But her stripped and beaten young Samaritan was no labyrinthine courtier, bescented and bedraped and bedyed with worldliness and conventions: he came ever in her presence naked of soul. It was this that empowered her to take the measure of his feeling for her: ...
— The Reign of Law - A Tale of the Kentucky Hemp Fields • James Lane Allen
... back, made protest. "Go!" said his master, whereupon Robin went indeed—not to the awaiting boat, but with a defiant cry end a rush across the sloping sand into the thick wood. The green depths which received him were so labyrinthine, so filled with secret places wherein to hide, that an hour's search might not dislodge him. The sometime Captain of the Cygnet let pass his wilfulness, signed to the boats to push off, awaited in silence the fulfilment of all his commands; then turning, rounded the eastern ...
— Sir Mortimer • Mary Johnston
... through gloomy and labyrinthine passages, which conducted to a different range of cellars from those entered by the unfortunate Favart, Gawtrey emerged at the foot of a flight of stairs, which, dark, narrow, and in many places broken, had been probably appropriated to servants ...
— Night and Morning, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... lovelier than Cordova; its Alhambra more enchanting than had been the palaces in the "City of the Fairest." This citadel, which is fortress and palace in one, still stands like the Acropolis, looking out upon the plain from its lofty elevation. Volumes have been written about its labyrinthine halls and corridors and courts, and the amazing richness of decoration, which still survives—an inexhaustible mine for artists and a shrine for lovers of the beautiful. But Granada cultivated other things besides the art of beauty. Nowhere in Europe was there ...
— A Short History of Spain • Mary Platt Parmele
... robust eloquence, touched not unfrequently with flashes of fancy, and kindled at times into heat of imagination. The main fault of his style is one more commonly found in the prose than in the verse of his time—a quaint and florid obscurity, rigid with elaborate rhetoric and tortuous with labyrinthine illustration; not dark only to the rapid reader through closeness and subtlety of thought, like Donne, whose miscalled obscurity is so often "all glorious within," but thick and slab as a witch's gruel with forced ...
— The Age of Shakespeare • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... puzzled as to whether there was some diabolical agency at work, or whether he was the victim of some conspiracy, he emigrated to America; for several months he had no attacks. A new paroxysm occurring he consulted Gray, who found indubitable evidence of labyrinthine disease. The paroxysms of this disease are usually accompanied by nausea and vomiting, and on account of the paleness of the face, and the cold, clammy perspiration, attacks have frequently been mistaken for apoplexy. In disease of the middle ear ...
— Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine • George M. Gould
... has been too often mentioned in these pages to warrant long description of it here, even if any man who has not lived for years among its labyrinthine passages could describe it accurately. The great descending corridor leads in a wide spiral downwards to the central spot where Hadrian lay, and in the vast thickness of the surrounding foundations there is but stone, again stone and more stone. From the ...
— Ave Roma Immortalis, Vol. 2 - Studies from the Chronicles of Rome • Francis Marion Crawford
... great procession, which was led by two mounted students in the garb of Wallenstein's soldiers. Five abreast the torch-bearers approached the Emperor's palace, and before his windows the Ziethen Hussars wheeled in and out in mystic evolutions. A labyrinthine series of movements, marked in the darkness only by the flaming torches, was executed in perfect silence; then a simple hymn of the Middle Ages was sung with singular effect by these thousands of young and manly voices; and from the ...
— In and Around Berlin • Minerva Brace Norton
... man's capacity for apprehending the bent of his mind at certain moments and laying it to heart, but my inclination for abstract thought developed my consciousness in such a way that often when I began to consider even the simplest matter, I would lose myself in a labyrinthine analysis of my own thoughts concerning the matter in question. That is to say, I no longer thought of the matter itself, but only of what I was thinking about it. If I had then asked myself, "Of what am I thinking?" the true answer would have ...
— Boyhood • Leo Tolstoy
... question to herself: How is it that a man to whom music is life and the paradise of his heart can allow himself to be so enveloped in sorrow, so beclouded by gloom? She understood the smarting pains in which he composed; she had a vague idea of the labyrinthine complications of his inner fate; these she grasped. But her own soul was filled with joyless compassion; she wished with all her power to plant greater faith and more happiness in ...
— The Goose Man • Jacob Wassermann
... review of GEORGE MEREDITH's work in the Quarterly for October—masterly, too, quoth the Baron, as striking a balance between effect and defect, and finding so much to be duly said in high praise of the diffuse and picturesquely-circumnavigating Novelist through whose labyrinthine pages the simple Baron finds it hard to thread his way, and yet keep the clue. When the unskippingly conscientious peruser of GEORGE M.'s novels is most desirous that the author shall go ahead, GEORGE, like an Irish cardriver, will stop to "discoorse us," and at such length, ...
— Punch, or The London Charivari, Volume 101, October 31, 1891 • Various
... worth while to add, for the benefit of those only who care to be provided with a clue (not to be found in the judgment) through the somewhat labyrinthine details of the question under discussion, a summary of its history. The Russian rules as to contraband are contained in several documents—viz. the "Regulations as to Naval Prize" of 1895, Arts. 11-14; ...
— Letters To "The Times" Upon War And Neutrality (1881-1920) • Thomas Erskine Holland
... privileges, and forthwith the opportunity would be accorded me. I was looking for paper, when there came the order for all of us to move out into the courtyard. With a line of soldiers on either side, we were marched through labyrinthine passages and up three flights of stairs. Here we were divided into two gangs, my gang being led off into a room already nearly filled. We were told that it was our temporary abode, and we were to make the best of it. It was an administrative ...
— In the Claws of the German Eagle • Albert Rhys Williams
... between the basilica and the imperial apartments, to which its encircling colonnade served as a corridor of communication, indicated that the lady was not a favourite of low degree, to be hidden away in some Rosalind's bower of the immense labyrinthine palace, while the most valuable statues in the entire villa, such as the replica of the Cnidian Venus by Praxiteles, the Eros bending the bow, by the same master, made this temple of love and Venus a fitting pavilion for an empress. Such it may well have been, for here was found the sculptured portrait ...
— Romance of Roman Villas - (The Renaissance) • Elizabeth W. (Elizbeth Williams) Champney
... generation of literary Jews. "A fancy which in its luxurious revelling in blood, splendor, and magnificence seems to us as Oriental as his meditative dreaminess and the subtle satisfaction with which he traces the subterranean, labyrinthine paths of the life of the soul"—these are the salient features which Wolzogen finds in the ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries - Masterpieces of German Literature Vol. 19 • Various
... There had been no frost nor rain to disturb the original rock-piling. Only the agencies of sand and wind had disarranged the distribution on which the builders of the earliest dynasty had looked. And this was weird, mysterious and labyrinthine. ...
— The Yoke - A Romance of the Days when the Lord Redeemed the Children - of Israel from the Bondage of Egypt • Elizabeth Miller
... region they were now to pass through had been penetrated by scarcely any but hunters, fur traders, soldiers, and missionaries. It was to the peaceful settler who was seeking a home, a terra incognita, an unknown land. Those mountain peaks were veiled in clouds, those devious labyrinthine valleys were the abode of darkness. The awful majesty of nature's works, the Titanic wonder-shapes which God hath wrought, are calculated to burden the imagination and subdue the aspiring soul of man by their vastness. ...
— Woman on the American Frontier • William Worthington Fowler
... into labyrinthine shops; he stood with Marie before long counters, while she inspected fine fabrics and, drawing off her glove, felt them critically with her fine hand. He watched her eagerly and devotedly, as if he read the concentration of her thoughts, ...
— Married Life - The True Romance • May Edginton
... the "Waring," having run clear of the labyrinthine reefs, steamed up and was out of ...
— In the Footprints of the Padres • Charles Warren Stoddard
... gone, and I clung to the belfry-blinds while I surveyed the cold waters of Lake Erie on the north, the rise of Little Mountain on the south, and, between them the broad tract of rolling country divided by the Chagrin River. I descended through labyrinthine passages, and came again to the ground and to the outer air with a sense of relief after my two hours' sojourn within ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 26, August, 1880 - of Popular Literature and Science • Various
... the smallest detail is essentially characteristic of Edison, not only in economy of manufacture, but in all his work, no matter of what kind, whether it be experimenting, investigating, testing, or engineering. To follow him through the labyrinthine paths of investigation contained in the great array of laboratory note-books is to become involved in a mass of minutely detailed searches which seek to penetrate the inmost recesses of nature by an ...
— Edison, His Life and Inventions • Frank Lewis Dyer and Thomas Commerford Martin
... through the streets of Rome. Being deep in talk, it so happened that they found themselves near the majestic, pillared portico, and huge, black rotundity of the Pantheon. It stands almost at the central point of the labyrinthine intricacies of the modern city, and often presents itself before the bewildered stranger, when he is in search of other objects. Hilda, looking up, ...
— The Marble Faun, Volume II. - The Romance of Monte Beni • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... your train attending, And visions fair of many a blissful day; First-love and friendship their fond accents blending, Like to some ancient, half-expiring lay; Sorrow revives, her wail of anguish sending Back o'er life's devious labyrinthine way, And names the dear ones, they whom Fate bereaving Of life's fair hours, left ...
— Faust Part 1 • Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
... lose one's way in, among the dense undergrowth, but it is a still grander book for the reader to lose himself in. In the dingle, best of all, he can "forget his own troublesome personality as completely as if he were in the depths of the ancient forest along with Gurth and Wamba." Labyrinthine, however, as the autobiography may at first sight appear, the true lover of Borrow will soon have little difficulty in finding the patteran or gypsy trail (for indeed the Romany element runs persistently as a ...
— Isopel Berners - The History of certain doings in a Staffordshire Dingle, July, 1825 • George Borrow
... lifted, we lightened the canoe by two men's avoir-dupois, that it might dance, and not blunder heavily, might seek the safe shallows, away from the dangerous bursts of mid-current, and choose passages where Cancut, with the setting-pole, could let it gently down. So Iglesias and I plunged through the labyrinthine woods, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 61, November, 1862 • Various
... red and starry fire; the danger above and the danger below; the dark mysterious caverns of the sea, rich with coral grots and grove and abounding marine life; the impenetrable gloom of the ship's hold, whose unimaginable darkness and labyrinthine intricacy of machinery set obstacles at every turn and move and step; the darkness; the fury; the hues and shape, all that art can make or Nature fashion, gild or color wrought into one grand tablature ...
— Lippincott's Magazine Of Popular Literature And Science, No. 23, February, 1873, Vol. XI. • Various
... house and labyrinthine grove, With tangled maze, too intricate to tread, But that, in pity for the queen's great love, Its secret Daedalus revealed, and led Her lover's blinded footsteps with a thread. There, too, had sorrow not the wish denied, Thy name and fame, poor Icarus, were read. Twice in the gold ...
— The Aeneid of Virgil - Translated into English Verse by E. Fairfax Taylor • Virgil
... humour; they meant to make the day remembered. Life seemed bright again and much worth while. They even grudgingly agreed that there was a curious kind of attractiveness about all this flat country, and the still waters, and the very tall trees, and labyrinthine vivid green undergrowth. Intermittent fevers had begun to appear, but, one and all, the invalids declared that this was their good day. "Shucks! What's a little ague? Anyhow, it'll go away when we get back to the Valley. ...
— The Long Roll • Mary Johnston
... to these chanted commands, the four who were executing the figure went through labyrinthine manoeuvers, forward and back, dividing and reuniting. The old clergyman held out his hand to Mrs. Crittenden, laughing as he swung her briskly about. 'Gene bent his great bulk solemnly to swing his own little daughter. Then with neat exactitude, on the stroke of the beat, they ...
— The Brimming Cup • Dorothy Canfield Fisher
... the contrary. It is no unusual thing to see such a vagrant, in all the vanity of conscious sanctimony, standing in the middle of the attentive peasants, like the nave and felloes of a cart-wheel—if I may be permitted the loan of an apt similitude—repeating some piece of unfathomable and labyrinthine devotion, or perhaps warbling, from Stentorian lungs, some melodia sacra, in an untranslatable tongue; or, it may be, exhibiting the mysterious power of an amber bade fastened as a Decade to his paudareens* lifting a chaff or light bit of straw by ...
— The Ned M'Keown Stories - Traits And Stories Of The Irish Peasantry, The Works of - William Carleton, Volume Three • William Carleton
... hair. Vast and boundless as the woods upon the Himalaya's brow, Nor ever may the struggling floods rush headlong to the earth below. Opening, egress was not there, amid those winding, long meanders. Within that labyrinthine hair, for many ...
— Nala and Damayanti and Other Poems • Henry Hart Milman
... Spirit of the Hazel, hearken now, Though shining suns and silver moons burn on the bough, And though the fruit of stars by many myriads gleam, Yet in the undergrowth below, still in thy dream, Lighting the labyrinthine maze and monstrous gloom Are many gem-winged flowers with gay and delicate bloom; And in the shade, hearken, O Dreamer of the Tree, One wild rose blossom of thy spirit breathed on me With lovely and still light, a little sister flower To those ...
— By Still Waters - Lyrical Poems Old and New • George William Russell
... Naga, one of the many savage tribes who inhabit the deep rugged labyrinthine glens which wind into the mountains from the rich valley of Brahmapootra, it used to be a common custom to chop off the heads, hands, and feet of people they met with, and then to stick up the severed extremities in their fields to ensure a good crop of grain. ...
— The Golden Bough - A study of magic and religion • Sir James George Frazer
... All hands were forthwith set to work to make our key and rancho conform to this calling, and, in a few days, the canvas roof of our hut was replaced by a thatch of leaves, while every dangerous article or implement was concealed in the thicket of a labyrinthine creek. In fact, our piscatory character could not be doubted. In our persons and occupation, we looked as innocent and rustic as a pic-nic party on a summer bivouac for fresh air and salt bathing. Nor was the transformation less real ...
— Captain Canot - or, Twenty Years of an African Slaver • Brantz Mayer
... sent, By miracle within her bower was hung again: And how on her own couch the Incarnate Son In likeness of a leprous serf, she laid: And many a wondrous tale till now unheard; Which, from her handmaid's oath and attestation, Siegfried of Maintz to far Perugia sent, And sainted Umbria's labyrinthine hills, Even to the holy Council, where the Patriarchs Of Antioch and Jerusalem, and with them A host of prelates, magnates, knights, and nobles, Decreed and ...
— The Saint's Tragedy • Charles Kingsley
... when Slone climbed to a cedared plateau that rose for a whole day's travel, and then split into a labyrinthine maze of canyons. There were trees, grass, water. It was a high country, cool and wild, like the uplands he had left. For days he camped on Wildfire's trail, always relentlessly driving him, always watching ...
— Wildfire • Zane Grey
... my eyes from time to time, and evoke the dear old haunts from their ruins; to descend once more the perilous steeps of the Rue St. Jacques, and to thread the labyrinthine by-streets that surround the Ecole de Medecine. I see them all so plainly! I look in at the familiar print-shops—I meet many a long-forgotten face—I hear many a long-forgotten voice—I am twenty years of age ...
— In the Days of My Youth • Amelia Ann Blandford Edwards
... and extraordinary thing in the world had happened, yet Betty Dalrymple asked no questions. Had she done so, it is probable that Mr. Heatherbloom would have been physically unequal to the labyrinthine explanation the occasion demanded. For a brief spell the girl had continued to regard him and she had seemed about to speak further. Then the blue light of her gaze had slowly turned and her lips remained mute. He was glad of this; ...
— A Man and His Money • Frederic Stewart Isham
... romancers have imagined again and again. And that fact realised, he had been prepared. His mind had, as it were, seated itself for a spectacle. And no spectacle unfolded itself, but a great vague danger, unsympathetic shadows and veils of darkness. Somewhere through the labyrinthine obscurity his death sought him. Would he, after all, be killed before he saw? It might be that even at the next corner his destruction ambushed. A great desire to see, a great longing to ...
— The Sleeper Awakes - A Revised Edition of When the Sleeper Wakes • H.G. Wells
... these from impious lips Fall lightly, I must rise here to refute Their poisonous message. Three days since, I stood With this man in the sacred halls of God, And witnessed in his heart the glory grow Of God's bright hope. Then suddenly from Hell, Or from his own deep, labyrinthine heart, Sprang fiends to snatch him back from heaven's clear gate And God's deliverance. And his bitter lips, By thirst so nearly quenched made bitterer yet, Cried blasphemies against the powers of heaven And all bright starry hopes that light ...
— Mr. Faust • Arthur Davison Ficke
... sometimes that minds of the highest order have entered into enmity with the Christian faith, have arraigned it as a curse to man, and have fought against it even upon Christian impulses, (impulses of benignity that could not have had a birth except in Christianity.) All comes from the labyrinthine intricacy in which the social action of Christianity involves itself to the eye of a contemporary. Simplicity the most absolute is reconcilable with intricacy the most elaborate. The weather—how simple would appear the laws of its oscillations, if we stood at their centre! and ...
— Theological Essays and Other Papers v1 • Thomas de Quincey
... rooms, he tells us, "The apartments that have been brought to light comprise a number of chambers, big and little, placed at different heights. We shall have no clear idea of the relation of these different chambers to one another, or of the mode of access to them through the labyrinthine passages and the numerous stairways, until the whole edifice has ...
— The Prehistoric World - Vanished Races • E. A. Allen
... act without reason, but there is always a motivation somewhere in their complex brains, if one can only find it, either in the seat of reason, or in the labyrinthine inhibitions from their childhood. I knew this, because I had studied them, and now there were certain notions that came into my brain which, even if I could not prove them, were ...
— B-12's Moon Glow • Charles A. Stearns
... in particular, which passed through the Carton hospital—and his graphic talk illumined for her. Then in the night arose the train of visions; the trenches—always the trenches; those hideous broken woods of the Somme front, where the blasted soil has sucked the best life-blood of England; those labyrinthine diggings and delvings in a tortured earth, made for the Huntings of Death—'Death that lays man at his length'—for panting pursuit, and breathless flight, and the last crashing horror of the bomb, in some hell-darkness at ...
— Missing • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... was now in Exhibition Road. It shone, pale amber, blue-grey and tenderly spacious and fine under clear autumnal skies, a London of hugely handsome buildings and vistas and distances, a London of gardens and labyrinthine tall museums, of old trees and remote palaces and artificial waters. I lodged near by in West Brompton at a house in a ...
— Tono Bungay • H. G. Wells
... Pass, and thereby in some unaccountable manner, missed the canyon with the trails. There was nothing else for him to think. Rustlers could not fly, nor cattle jump down thousand-foot precipices. He was only proving what the sage-riders had long said of this labyrinthine system of deceitful canyons and valleys—trails led down into Deception Pass, but no rider had ever ...
— Riders of the Purple Sage • Zane Grey |
