"Inextricable" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... "that is well in his wits." "But," quoth she, "there is nothing that He who is almighty cannot do." "Nothing," quoth I. "Can God do evil?" "No," quoth I, "Wherefore," quoth she, "evil is nothing, since He cannot do it who can do anything." "Dost thou mock me," quoth I, "making with thy reasons an inextricable labyrinth, because thou dost now go in where thou meanest to go out again, and after go out, where thou camest in, or dost thou frame a wonderful circle of the simplicity of God? For a little before taking thy beginning from blessedness, thou affirmedst that to be the chiefest good which thou ...
— The Theological Tractates and The Consolation of Philosophy • Anicius Manlius Severinus Boethius
... returned Hester, "as it ought to be read, until you understand it at least as well as the poet himself. To do a poem justice, the reader must so have pondered phrase and word as to reproduce meaning and music in all the inextricable play of their lights and shades. I never came near doing the kind of thing I mean with any music till I had first learned it thoroughly by heart. And that too is the only way in which I can get to ...
— Weighed and Wanting • George MacDonald
... For that is single, but this is double, The mind in pain, and the hands in trouble. The life men live is a weary coil, There is no rest from woe and toil; And if there's aught elsewhere more dear Than drawing breath as we do here, That darkness holds In black inextricable folds. ...
— Ionica • William Cory (AKA William Johnson)
... what was pleasant to take, nor dread what was awful to look upon, though they should find themselves amidst abundance of both these things. If they did, their greedy hands would suddenly be bound fast, unable to tear themselves away from the thing they touched, and knotted up with it as by inextricable bonds. Moreover, they should enter ...
— The Danish History, Books I-IX • Saxo Grammaticus ("Saxo the Learned")
... she backed, coming up into the wind so that her bows turned toward the fort. Fortunately, the rear ships were some little distance off; but Farragut, ignorant of the cause of the Brooklyn's action, saw his line of battle doubling up and threatened with an almost inextricable confusion, in the most difficult and exposed part of the passage, under a cross-fire from the fort and the enemy's vessels. Immediately upon this frightful perplexity succeeded the great disaster of the day. Craven, pursuing ...
— Admiral Farragut • A. T. Mahan
... own. In the tropics, on the contrary, they are interlaced and interwoven, so as to form one mass of vegetation; many of the trunks are almost concealed by an undergrowth of verdure, and intertwined by spiral stems of parasitic plants; from tree to tree hang an inextricable network of lianas, and it is often difficult to tell to which tree the fruits, flowers, and leaves really belong. The trunks run straight up to a great height without a branch, and then form a thick leafy canopy far overhead; a canopy so dense that even the blaze of the cloudless ...
— The Beauties of Nature - and the Wonders of the World We Live In • Sir John Lubbock
... in his masterly grasp of a situation, and his keen, incisive reasoning, which made it a pleasure to me to study his system of work, and to follow the quick, subtle methods by which he disentangled the most inextricable mysteries. So accustomed was I to his invariable success that the very possibility of his failing had ceased to enter ...
— The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes • Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
... gum; solder, weld; cake, consolidate &c. (solidify) 321; agglomerate. Adj. cohesive, adhesive, adhering, cohering &c. v.; tenacious, tough; sticky &c. 352. united, unseparated, unsessile[obs3], inseparable, inextricable, infrangible[obs3]; compact ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... many Millions of ours have begun with Flatteries, Protestations and Endearments, but ended with Reproaches, Perjury, and Perfidiousness; they would shun like Death the very first Approaches of one that might lead them into inextricable Labyrinths of Guilt and Misery. I must so far give up the Cause of the Male World, as to exhort the Female Sex in the Language of ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... period, but were quite distinct from each other: the one was grave and prosing, the other melancholy and fantastical. There are a number of good lines and good thoughts in the Cooper's Hill. And in Cowley there is an inexhaustible fund of sense and ingenuity, buried in inextricable conceits, and entangled in the cobwebs of the schools. He was a great man, not a great poet. But I shall say no more on this subject. I never wish to meddle with names that are sacred, unless when they stand in the way of things that are ...
— Lectures on the English Poets - Delivered at the Surrey Institution • William Hazlitt
... the spreading trees in the orchard, wandered Salome, anxious to escape scrutiny, and vaguely conscious that she had reached the cross-roads in her life, where haste or inadvertence might involve her in inextricable difficulties. ...
— Vashti - or, Until Death Us Do Part • Augusta J. Evans Wilson
... ladder carefully, now thoroughly recalled to the realities of life by the care necessary to prevent a fall on the uneven ground where the stones, decaying planks, and half-sawn beams were piled up in inextricable confusion. As he turned towards the house where he lived—"my old house" he called it—his ear detected the splash of paddles away in the darkness of the river. He stood still in the path, attentive and surprised at anybody being on the river at this late hour during such a heavy freshet. ...
— Almayer's Folly - A Story of an Eastern River • Joseph Conrad
... proved difficult enough, for where the trees were not close and their roots interlaced, there were openings where masses of volcanic rock were tumbled-together in inextricable confusion, and the way over them was made more difficult by the bushy, shrubby growth and creepers which bound ...
— Jack at Sea - All Work and no Play made him a Dull Boy • George Manville Fenn
... Memmleben, a Monastery on the Unstrut, not far from Schulpforte), age sixty; had reigned only seventeen years, and done so much. Lies buried in Quedlinburg Abbey:—any Tomb? I know no LIFE of him but GUNDLING'S, which is an extremely inextricable Piece, and requires mainly to be forgotten.—Hail, brave Henry: across the Nine dim Centuries, we salute thee, still visible as a valiant Son of Cosmos and Son of Heaven, beneficently sent us; as a man who did in grim earnest 'serve God' in his day, and whose works accordingly bear ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol, II. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—Of Brandenburg And The Hohenzollerns—928-1417 • Thomas Carlyle
... we imagine ourselves involved in inextricable woe, and enjoy at waking, the ecstasy of a deliverance from it. "And such a deliverance," says Dr. Beattie, "will every good man meet with at last, when he is taken away from the evils of life, and awakes in the regions of everlasting light and peace; looking ...
— Thaumaturgia • An Oxonian
... explain how these students ignored the worth of the manuscript which Father Theobaldi, keeper of the records of Assisi, mentioned to them, and of which he offered them a copy (A. SS., Oct., t. ii., p. 546f). Father Suysken was thus thrown into inextricable difficulties, and exposed to a failure to understand the lists of biographies of St. Francis arranged by the annalists of the Order; he was at the same time deprived of one of the most fruitful sources of information upon the acts and works of the Saint. Professor Mueller (Die Anfaenge, ...
— Life of St. Francis of Assisi • Paul Sabatier
... this. Pass over, also, the interminable and inextricable dispute about the precise meaning and application of the terms "mobilization," "partial mobilization," "complete mobilization," "precautionary measures," "Kriegsgefahr," an so on. That is an unfathomable morass ...
— Fighting For Peace • Henry Van Dyke
... trouble themselves not at all in ascertaining what residuum of truth, historical or critical, may remain in a book which certainly gives ten falsehoods for one truth, and welds both together in inextricable confusion. The German infidels, on the other hand, with infinite labour, and amidst infinite uncertainties, extract either truth 'as old as the creation,' and as universal as human reason,—or truth which, after being hidden from the world for eighteen hundred years in mythical obscurity, is unhappily ...
— Reason and Faith; Their Claims and Conflicts • Henry Rogers
... and unalterable powers seemed to be conspiring against the success of Lee's modest and inoffensive hopes, an event was taking place which was shortly to reverse the entire settled arrangement of persons and affairs, and involved Fow Hou in a very inextricable state of uncertainty. For, not to make a pretence of concealing a matter which has been already in part revealed, the Mandarin Chan Hung had by this time determined to act in the manner which Ming-hi had suggested; so that on a certain morning ...
— The Wallet of Kai Lung • Ernest Bramah
... merchants of every nation, adventurers of all kinds, Italians, Spaniards, Hungarians, Arabs, Jews, soldiers, Bohemians, jesters, poets, monks, courtesans, swarmed and clustered here, and hustled one another in the streets. There was confusion of tongues, customs, and costumes, an inextricable mixture of splendour and rags, riches and misery, debasement and grandeur. The austere poets of the Middle Ages stigmatised the accursed city in their writings under the name ...
— Celebrated Crimes, Complete • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... for at first everything appeared to my sight an inextricable mass of confusion and disorder. After watching for some time, I observed a man whom I concluded was the first mate, by the way he ordered the other people about and the air of authority which he assumed; so at last I mustered courage to go up ...
— Peter the Whaler • W.H.G. Kingston
... re-enunciation of this idea has been attended; it is this assumption of the allness of God which underlies and colours quite a number of modern movements, and will be seen to lead those who accept it into endless and inextricable tangles. ...
— Problems of Immanence - Studies Critical and Constructive • J. Warschauer
... significant fact that the name of Macedonia, the heart of the Balkan peninsula, has been long used by the French gastronomers to denote a dish, the principal characteristic of which is that its component parts are mixed up into quite inextricable confusion. ...
— The Balkans - A History Of Bulgaria—Serbia—Greece—Rumania—Turkey • Nevill Forbes, Arnold J. Toynbee, D. Mitrany, D.G. Hogarth
... young men to attend him, but never mentions him more; he makes Protheus, after an interview with Silvia, say he has only seen her picture;[2] and, if we may credit the old copies, he has, by mistaking places, left his scenery inextricable. The reason of all this confusion seems to be, that he took his story from a novel, which he sometimes followed, and sometimes forsook, sometimes remembered, ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson in Nine Volumes - Volume V: Miscellaneous Pieces • Samuel Johnson
... his desert. We had to descend the slope of that sandhill which looked like a cloud, and seemed as if covered with felt, in order to preserve in such a place a more complete silence. And here and there we passed a gaping black hole—an airhole, as it seemed, of the profound and inextricable kingdom of mummies, very populous still, in spite of the zeal of ...
— Egypt (La Mort De Philae) • Pierre Loti
... description, which glittered and scintillated in the most wonderful way imaginable. Upon the floor, in rough, uncovered boxes, heaps of gold bracelets and brooches, gold rings and gold chains, gold ornaments and trinkets, and bits of miscellaneous jewellery were piled high in inextricable confusion, as though they had been tossed there to be thrown on to a waste heap. Upon the ground were bars of gold, the thickness of a brick, ranged carefully in rows. At one end of the room was a small smelting furnace, not now alight, ...
— The Four Faces - A Mystery • William le Queux
... white-pine tree. A wild grapevine, of unusual size and luxuriance, had twined and twisted itself up into the tree, and, after wreathing the entanglement of its tendrils around almost every bough, had caught hold of three or four neighboring trees, and married the whole clump with a perfectly inextricable knot of polygamy. Once, while sheltering myself from a summer shower, the fancy had taken me to clamber up into this seemingly impervious mass of foliage. The branches yielded me a passage, and closed again beneath, as if only a squirrel or a ...
— The Blithedale Romance • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... and he might go home; but where home was there was no discovering, except that there had been journeys by puff puff; and Louey, and Aunt Emma, and Nurse, and sea, and North something, and 'nasty man,' were in an inextricable confusion. ...
— That Stick • Charlotte M. Yonge
... with the first. Bond is paid by bond; arrear is turned into new arrear; usury engenders new usury; mutiny, suspended in one quarter, starts up in another; until all the revenues and all the establishments are entangled into one inextricable knot of confusion, from which they are only disengaged by being entirely destroyed. In that state of confusion, in a very few months after the date of the memorial I have just read to you, things were found, when the Nabob's troops, famished ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. III. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... the fourteen unfortunate youths and maidens had to be sent from Athens to be devoured by this insatiate beast. We are not told on what food it was fed in the interval, or why Minos did not end the trouble by allowing it to starve in its inextricable den. As the story goes, the living tribute was twice sent, and the third period came duly round. The youths and maidens to be devoured were selected by lot from the people of Athens, and left their city ...
— Historic Tales, vol 10 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris
... about it, and detailed confessions unadvisable. Much talk about 'hypocrisy' in this matter is quite wrong and unjust. Then, its connection with female beauty, as a cause of love between man and woman, seems to me to be the inextricable nodus of the Fall, the here inseparable mixture of good and evil, till soul and body are parted. For the sense of seen Beauty is the awakening of Love, at whatever distance from any kind of return or sympathy—as with a rose, or what not. Sandro may be the man who has gone nearest to the right ...
— Ariadne Florentina - Six Lectures on Wood and Metal Engraving • John Ruskin
... is a perpetual blending of the natural and the supernatural, the human and divine. The Iliad is an incongruous medley of theology, physics, and history. In its gorgeous scenic representations, nature, humanity, and deity are mingled in inextricable confusion. The gods are sometimes supernatural and superhuman personages; sometimes the things and powers of nature personified; and sometimes they are deified men. And yet there are passages, even in Homer, which clearly distinguish Zeus from all the other divinities, and mark him out as the ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... commemoration, in which the venerated college does dutiful honor to a son, and the assembled alumni crown with their affection the memory of a brother, I dismissed also, upon the same persuasion, all anxious solicitudes, which otherwise would have oppressed me, lest importunate and inextricable preoccupations of time and mind should disable me from presenting as considerable, and as considerate, a survey of the eminent character and celebrated career of Mr. Chase as should comport with them, or satisfy the ...
— Eulogy on Chief-Justice Chase - Delivered by William M. Evarts before the Alumni of - Dartmouth College, at Hanover • William M. Evarts
... were both gazing upon the track of the earthquake wave, and all around them trees were lying torn-up by the roots, battered and stripped of their leafage, some piled in inextricable confusion, others half buried in mud. Some again had soft white coral sand heaped over them. Here, the surface had been swept bare to the dark rock which formed the base of the island or continent upon which they had been cast; there, mud lay in slimy waves, some of ...
— Fire Island - Being the Adventures of Uncertain Naturalists in an Unknown Track • G. Manville Fenn
... adventure, dewy with the freshness of a frontier world, and are in brief a section of the old French voyagers' days. Parkman's "Wolfe and Montcalm" is a picture, painted in smoke and blood, where heroism of Englishmen and Frenchmen mix themselves in an inextricable confusion. Pray you read Parkman, and be transported to a world where great deeds were done by men whose lives were as contradictory as an April day; but "their works do follow them" for all that, and do glorify them. Be glad for ...
— A Hero and Some Other Folks • William A. Quayle
... foreign nations. In proportion to the extension of civilization, and increase of trustworthiness in Governments, it will cease. So long as it exists, the phenomena of the cost and price of the articles used for currency are mingled with those proper to currency itself, in an almost inextricable manner: and the market worth of bullion is affected by multitudinous accidental circumstances, which have been traced, with more or less success, by writers on commercial operations: but with these variations the true political economist has no more to do than an engineer, fortifying ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin
... Clytaemnestra's bed, memorable throughout the Grecians: from whom we virgins were born, three from one mother; Chrysothemis, and Iphigenia, and myself Electra; and Orestes the male part of the family, from a most unholy mother, who slew her husband, having covered him around with an inextricable robe; the reason however it is not decorous in a virgin to tell; I leave this undeclared for men to consider as they will. But why indeed must I accuse the injustice of Phoebus? Yet persuaded he Orestes to kill that mother that brought him ...
— The Tragedies of Euripides, Volume I. • Euripides
... she do?' cried Siegmund, 'What will she do when I am gone? What will become of her? Already she has no aim in life; then she will have no object. Is it any good my going if I leave her behind? What an inextricable knot this is! But what will ...
— The Trespasser • D.H. Lawrence
... his being. At school and at college, necessarily limited in his allowance, he contracted engagements which followed him for at least ten years after his entrance into life, and then only quitted him to leave him bound to others far more tremendous and inextricable. His most frequent visitors, his most constant friends, his most familiar acquaintance, were money-lenders. He had borrowed money upon all possible and unimaginable securities, from the life of his grandmother down to that ...
— Blackwoods Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 365, March, 1846 • Various
... woke up in him feelings which were always pleasant, feelings which the sight of his father, or the writing to his father, could only awaken. Quaintly enough, the thought of Grace and of his father seemed intertwined, inextricable. If the old man had but such a nurse as she! And for a moment he felt a glow of tenderness toward her, because he thought she would be tender to his father. She had stolen his money, certainly; or if not, she ...
— Two Years Ago, Volume I • Charles Kingsley
... round their bristling ranks, no quailing look, no craven spirit was there. The Emperor himself endeavored to repair the disaster; he rode with lightening speed hither and thither, commanding, ordering, nay imploring too; but already the night was falling, the confusion became each moment more inextricable, and the effort was a fruitless one. A regiment of the Guards, and two batteries were in reserve behind Planchenoit; he threw them rapidly into position; but the overwhelming impulse of flight ...
— The Ontario Readers: The High School Reader, 1886 • Ministry of Education
... this part of Cataract Canyon would probably annihilate any human being venturing into it, though it is possible high water would make it easier. Where there was driftwood it was in tremendous piles, wedged together in inextricable confusion; hundreds of tree-trunks, large and small, battered and cut and limbless, with the ends pounded into a spongy lot of splinters. The interstices between the large logs were filled with smaller stuff, like boughs, railroad-ties, and pieces of dressed ...
— The Romance of the Colorado River • Frederick S. Dellenbaugh
... sheets, is more fully to make known the aggravated iniquity attending the practice of the Slave Trade; whereby many thousands of our fellow creatures, as free as ourselves by nature and equally with us the subjects of Christ's redeeming Grace, are yearly brought into inextricable and barbarous bondage; and many; very many, to miserable and untimely ends." Fearlessly directing this as an attack on public functionaries he remarks: "How an evil of so deep a dye, hath so long, not only passed uninterrupted by those in power, but hath even had their countenance, ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 2, 1917 • Various
... reasonable demands. Hanno, in a very energetic and powerful speech, told the senate that he had warned them not to send Hannibal into Spain. He had foreseen that such a hot and turbulent spirit as his would involve them in inextricable difficulties with the Roman power. Hannibal had, he said, plainly violated the treaty. He had invested and besieged Saguntum, which they were solemnly bound not to molest, and they had nothing to expect in return but that the Roman legions would ...
— Hannibal - Makers of History • Jacob Abbott
... it did not give the impression of a barracks, but had rather the character of a fantastic village—as though a hundred hamlets had been swept together in one inextricable heap. Originally it had been a little frame building of one story with a gabled roof. Then it had gradually become an embryo town; it budded in all directions, upward as well, kaleidoscopically increasing to a vast mass of little bits of facade, high-pitched roofs, deep ...
— Pelle the Conqueror, Complete • Martin Andersen Nexo
... open-throated peals of laughter, and then made me sit down till I had conquered my qualms and was able to walk back to Edinburgh. Before I went, she showed me a heap of her children, too many, it seemed to me, to be counted; but as they lay in an inextricable mass on the floor in an inner room, there may have seemed more arms and legs forming the radii, of which a clump of curly heads was the ...
— Records of a Girlhood • Frances Anne Kemble
... through which we had to force our way, however, was wonderfully thorny. The creepers were thorny, even the bamboos were thorny, while shrubs grew in a zig-zag and jagged fashion, forming an inextricable tangle, through which it was difficult to cut our way. Beautiful birds flitted in and out among the shrubs—grass-green doves, large black cockatoos, golden orioles, and king-crows—their varied and brilliant colours flashing brightly as they darted forth here and there in the sunlight ...
— In the Eastern Seas • W.H.G. Kingston
... Intrigue, mistrust, disunion reigned in the Council itself. It became more and more difficult to find suitable persons to execute important missions. Several of the most experienced statesmen endeavored to withdraw. The well-meaning sighed over the inextricable confusion. ...
— The Life and Times of Ulric Zwingli • Johann Hottinger
... would justify any philanthropic stranger in clapping me into a strait-waistcoat without further inquiry, endeavouring to goad H. into some dim and faint understanding of a prompter's duties, and struggling in such a vortex of noise, dirt, bustle, confusion, and inextricable entanglement of speech and action as you would grow giddy in contemplating. We perform "A Roland for an Oliver," "A Good Night's Rest," and "Deaf as a Post." This kind of voluntary hard labour used to be my great ...
— The Letters of Charles Dickens - Vol. 3 (of 3), 1836-1870 • Charles Dickens
... written to the rest of Goethe's dramas. Schiller's ROBBERS he found so extravagant, that he could not read it. I spoke of the scene of the setting sun. He did not know it. He said Schiller could not live. He thought DON CARLOS the best of his dramas; but said that the plot was inextricable.—It was evident he knew little of Schiller's works: indeed, he said, he could not read them. Buerger, he said, was a true poet, and would live; that Schiller, on the contrary, must soon be forgotten; ...
— Biographia Literaria • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... the arrival of other babes, and fathers to whom the charming idea had occurred of inviting their daughters' affianced lovers. And they were all related, they had all sprung from a common ancestry, they were all mingled in an inextricable tangle, fathers, mothers, brothers, sisters, fathers-in-law, mothers-in-law, brothers-in-law, sisters-in-law, sons, daughters, uncles, aunts, and cousins, of every possible degree, down to the fourth generation. ...
— Fruitfulness - Fecondite • Emile Zola
... very site where it had stood and knew it not, and called its ruins by a meaningless Greek name, handing down concerning it a tradition absurdly made up of true and fictitious details, jumbled into inextricable confusion. For Nineveh had been the capital of the Assyrian Empire, while the Medes were one of the nations who attacked and destroyed it. And though an eclipse of the sun—(the obscuring cloud could mean ...
— Chaldea - From the Earliest Times to the Rise of Assyria • Znade A. Ragozin
... the vessel, but after another fashion, had, in the inextricable intersection of shadows which rose up before him, no resource but the footsteps in the snow, and he held to it as the thread ...
— The Man Who Laughs • Victor Hugo
... stuff; but the moral is—do not employ citizen soldiers for offensive operations. When I returned into the town at about 5 o'clock this afternoon, the peninsula of Gennevilliers resembled the course at Epsom on a wet Derby Day. To my civilian eyes, cavalry, artillery, and infantry, seemed to be in inextricable confusion. ...
— Diary of the Besieged Resident in Paris • Henry Labouchere
... is surely transported beyond the limits of nature and history, when he affirms, "that, in those desert countries, nothing was left except the sky and the earth; that, after the destruction of the cities, and the extirpation of the human race, the land was overgrown with thick forests and inextricable brambles; and that the universal desolation, announced by the prophet Zephaniah, was accomplished, in the scarcity of the beasts, the birds, and even of the fish." These complaints were pronounced about twenty years after the death of Valens; and the Illyrian provinces, which were constantly ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 2 • Edward Gibbon
... by auction, unless it be universally accepted, will plunge you into great and inextricable difficulties. In what year of our Lord are the proportions of payments to be settled? To say nothing of the impossibility that colony agents should have general powers of taxing the colonies at their discretion, consider, I implore you, ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. II. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... whom I am under solemn and inconceivable obligations! A choice way, truly, to salute the bosom-friend of my sire, the guardian of my interests, the creator of my property, the fosterer of my orphan infancy! It is useless to conceal it; I am placed in the most disagreeable, the most inextricable situation. 'Inextricable! Am I, then, the Duke of St. James? Am I that being who, two hours ago, thought that the world was formed alone for my enjoyment, and I quiver and shrink here like a common hind? Out, out on such craven cowardice! I am no Hauteville! ...
— The Young Duke • Benjamin Disraeli
... valley a debris so monstrous and unlovely as to shame even the hideous ruins left by dynamite, hydraulic, or pick and shovel; an overflown and forgotten woodland torrent will leave in some remote hollow a disturbed and ungraceful chaos of inextricable logs, branches, rock, and soil that will rival the unsavory details of some wrecked or abandoned settlement. Of lesser magnitude and importance, there are certain natural dust-heaps, sinks, and cesspools, where the elements have collected the cast-off, broken, and frayed disjecta of wood ...
— A Phyllis of the Sierras • Bret Harte
... straggling vines, reproduced from offshoots, had crept along the ground to the foot of the trees, and, climbing up their trunks, had twined themselves about them, and encircled their highest branches with their inextricable net. You could only pass through this virgin forest by following the path made by the guardian, to go from the grating to the house, the approaches to which were a little sloped to let the water run off, and carefully paved to the width of about ten feet. ...
— The Wandering Jew, Complete • Eugene Sue
... the mattresses seemed so soft or the sheets so comfortable as they did to the tired boys. Their heads had hardly touched the pillows before they were off in dreamland—a region in which, on that night at least, fires, panthers and sharks raged in inextricable confusion. ...
— The Boy Aviators' Polar Dash - Or - Facing Death in the Antarctic • Captain Wilbur Lawton
... THE DOCTRINE OF ABSTRACT GENERAL IDEAS.—It were an endless as well as an useless thing to trace the SCHOOLMEN, those great masters of abstraction, through all the manifold inextricable labyrinths of error and dispute which their doctrine of abstract natures and notions seems to have led them into. What bickerings and controversies, and what a learned dust have been raised about those matters, and what mighty advantage has been from thence derived to mankind, are things ...
— A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge • George Berkeley
... promises' was called to do what seemed to blast all hope of their being fulfilled. What a cruel position to have God's command and God's promise apparently in diametrical opposition! But faith loosened even that seemingly inextricable tangle of contradiction, and felt that to obey was for man, and to keep His promise was for God. If we do our duty, He will see to the consequences. 'Tis mine to obey; 'tis His ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus and Numbers • Alexander Maclaren
... its condemnation within itself; but, even supposing such a definition were, in form, tenable, the physiologist who should attempt to apply it in Nature would soon find himself involved in great, if not inextricable, difficulties. As we have said, it is indubitable that offspring 'tend' to resemble the parental organism, but it is equally true that the similarity attained never amounts to identity, either in form or in structure. There is always a certain amount ...
— The Origin of Species - From 'The Westminster Review', April 1860 • Thomas H. Huxley
... from the brittle monuments lest he destroy their outlines, and obliterate their inscriptions, so it behoves the student of the history of religion to set to work carefully, lest he should miss the track, and lose himself in an inextricable maze. The relics which he handles are more precious than the ruins of Babylon; the problems he has to solve are more important than the questions of ancient chronology; and the substructions which he hopes one day to ...
— Chips From A German Workshop - Volume I - Essays on the Science of Religion • Friedrich Max Mueller
... others as well. When the brain is affected, whether by an acute or a chronic derangement, its images may become so disordered that records of mere imaginations get mixed up with records of real perceptions in inextricable confusion. You may have had occasion to notice the process in the case of a man who is becoming intoxicated and then passes on to mania or delirium tremens: he gradually proceeds to mix up brain-pictures with realities, ...
— Moral Principles and Medical Practice - The Basis of Medical Jurisprudence • Charles Coppens
... density that it was next to impossible for any one to pick his way forward or backward except by keeping within the path itself. To step aside into the jungle would immediately involve one in so inextricable a tangle that he could move only with ...
— The Jungle Fugitives • Edward S. Ellis
... witch-chant, that wove with braided sound a weird spell about me, a charm fating me for some service, I knew not what. That chant moaned, it wailed, it whispered, it sang gloriously, it bound, it drowned me, it lapped me in an inextricable stream of misty murmuring, till I was perplexed, bewildered, enchanted. I felt surprised at myself, when, at the end of the day's journey, I carried my bag to the hotel, and ate my supper there as usual,—and felt natural again only ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 30, April, 1860 • Various
... sent him word to summon her personally to compear before him a precise hundred years thereafter, to answer to some interrogatories touching certain points which were not contained in the verbal defence. Which resolution of theirs did import that it was in their opinion a so difficult and inextricable matter that they knew not what to say or judge therein. Who had decided that plea by the chance and fortune of the dice, could not have erred nor awarded amiss on which side soever he had passed his casting ...
— Gargantua and Pantagruel, Complete. • Francois Rabelais
... rained heavily on the 19th and, after a very heavy march in the dark, we reached our new quarters about ten o'clock. The groves were separated by a narrow lane, and here the entire transport of the Brigade had contrived to get itself into the most inextricable confusion. There was no room for two limbers to pass abreast, and they could be turned only by separating the two halves and turning one at ...
— The Fifth Battalion Highland Light Infantry in the War 1914-1918 • F.L. Morrison
... had begun to sink beneath the horizon; it was the hour in which the Limanian aristocracy went in its turn to the Amancaes; the richest toilets shone in the equipages which defiled to the right and left beneath the trees along the road; there was an inextricable melee of foot-passengers, carriages, horses; a confusion of cries, ...
— The Pearl of Lima - A Story of True Love • Jules Verne
... deservedly left a prey to the Prince of Darkness. As the fated and influential hour rolled on, the terrors of the hateful Presence grew more confounding to the mortal senses of the victim, and the knot of the accursed sophistry became more inextricable in appearance, at least to the prey whom its meshes surrounded. He had not power to explain the assurance of pardon which he continued to assert, or to name the victorious name in which he trusted. ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 14, No. 384, Saturday, August 8, 1829. • Various
... the country of the dwarfs, nearly perishing with hunger, and when they reached the lake, Emin's soldiers had mutinied and he was a prisoner. Emissaries from the Mahdist Dervishes had stirred up the camp of Emin and caused inextricable confusion. Emin was reluctant to leave the province, and when Stanley and his white companions determined to attempt to reach Zanzibar by an unexplored route, Emin refused to depart. Four months were spent in an effort to overcome the reluctance of Emin ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 6 of 8 • Various
... characteristic feature of the jungle was its thorniness. The shrubs were thorny; the creepers were thorny; the bamboos even were thorny. Everything grew zigzag and jagged, and in an inextricable tangle, so that to get through the bush with gun or net or even spectacles, was generally not to be done, and insect-catching in such localities was out of the question. It was in such places that the Pittas often lurked, and ...
— The Malay Archipelago - Volume I. (of II.) • Alfred Russel Wallace
... has written appear pagan enough, and have been regarded as such. The God of Christians seems to inhabit and preside over an amazing Valhalla of pagan divinities; and indeed throughout Mr. Kipling's work the heavens and the earth are mingled in a most inextricable and astonishing fashion. It is said that not long ago, during the launch of a Chinese battleship at one of our British yards, they were burning papers to the gods in a small joss-house upon the pier, while the ...
— Among Famous Books • John Kelman
... seized in the night, save that they were louder and harsher. Over and over they floundered and rolled. The mud and water flew about. Long legs, shaggy paws, wet, wriggling tail, and squawking beak, fur and feathers—all turning and squirming in inextricable confusion. It was hard telling which was having the best of the melee, when, on a sudden, the struggle stopped, as if ...
— Happy Days for Boys and Girls • Various
... mice Sure ruin. So her disembowelled web Arachne, in a hall or kitchen, spreads Obvious to vagrant flies: she secret stands Within her woven cell; the humming prey, Regardless of their fate, rush on the toils Inextricable, nor will aught avail Their arts, or arms, or shapes of lovely hue; The wasp insidious, and the buzzing drone, And butterfly, proud of expanded wings Distinct with gold, entangled in her snares, Useless resistance make: with eager strides, She towering flies to her expected spoils; ...
— Specimens with Memoirs of the Less-known British Poets, Complete • George Gilfillan
... perhaps spurious verbiage of aforesaid Poet BURNS) my line, owing to superabundant longitude, did promptly become a labyrinth of Gordian knots, and the flies (which are named Zulus) attached their barbs to my cap and adjacent bushes with well-nigh inextricable tenacity, until at length I had the bright idea to abbreviate the line, so that I could dangle my bait a foot or two above the surface of the water—where a salmon could easily obtain it by simply turning ...
— Baboo Jabberjee, B.A. • F. Anstey
... and grassy fields, each with a sort of personality given to it by the capricious hedgerows—such things as these are the mother tongue of our imagination, the language that is laden with all the subtle inextricable associations the fleeting hours of our childhood left behind them. Our delight in the sunshine on the deep-bladed grass to-day might be no more than the faint perception of wearied souls, if it were not for the sunshine and ...
— George Eliot; A Critical Study of Her Life, Writings & Philosophy • George Willis Cooke
... their king," replied Boabdil, bitterly, and headed by a traitor and a foe. I am meshed in the nets of an inextricable fate!" ...
— Leila or, The Siege of Granada, Book II. • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... James, to feel the inextricable harpoon in your blubber, and to go snoving away beneath an ice-floe with four miles of line connecting you with ...
— Heads and Tales • Various
... of the Delaware! Land of Ontario, Erie, Huron, Michigan! Land of the Old Thirteen! Massachusetts land! land of Vermont and Connecticut! Land of the ocean shores! land of sierras and peaks! Land of boatmen and sailors! fishermen's land! Inextricable lands! the clutch'd together! the passionate ones! The side by side! the elder and younger brothers! the bony-limb'd! The great women's land! the feminine! the experienced sisters and the inexperienced sisters! Far breath'd land! Arctic braced! Mexican breez'd! the diverse! the compact! ...
— Leaves of Grass • Walt Whitman
... seemed to behold a great light from Jupiter,) but in another respect he was alarmed, (because the dream appeared to him to be from Jupiter who was a king, and the fire to blaze all around him,) lest he should be unable to escape from the king's territories, but should be hemmed in on all sides by inextricable difficulties. ...
— The First Four Books of Xenophon's Anabasis • Xenophon
... the concealment of time, place, and circumstance in the accusations, created such embarrassment, that, unless the accused was possessed of unusual acuteness and presence of mind, it was sure to involve him, in his attempts to explain, in inextricable contradiction. [41] ...
— History of the Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella V1 • William H. Prescott
... should notice how far its influence tends to the production of abundance or scarcity, and not simply of cheapness or dearness of price. We must beware of trusting to absolute prices, it would lead to inextricable confusion. ...
— Sophisms of the Protectionists • Frederic Bastiat
... mischief in you, by burying the whole affair in profound secresy. It is fortunate for him that you are not here, or you would surely indulge your propensity, and with malicious invention put the whole parish, with the Curate, into inextricable confusion. It is bad enough as it is. There!—it cannot be helped—I must tell you at once the condition we are in, if I would have you read the rest of my ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 378, April, 1847 • Various
... endure it, or, if it press too hard, to exert their fierce and savage strength for a good purpose, and fling it off at once! This feeble and most sensitive of spirits could do neither, yet continually did one thing or another, which intertwined, in the same inextricable knot, the agony of heaven-defying ...
— The Scarlet Letter • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... later by a sudden uproar. The camp was in confusion. Sleepy voices tossed back and forth in inextricable babble. Hilary was on his feet in an instant, instinctively slipping his automatic into his blouse. Grim looked huge at his ...
— Slaves of Mercury • Nat Schachner
... the accusation in black and white. Richard's brain reeled as he tried to fix his thought on Lemuel Shackford's letter. That letter!—where had it been all this while, and how did it come into Taggett's possession? Only one thing was clear to Richard in his inextricable confusion,—he was not going to be able to prove his innocence; he was a doomed man, and within the hour his shame would be published to the world. Rowland Slocum and Lawyer Perkins had already condemned him, and Margaret would condemn ...
— The Stillwater Tragedy • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... scant courtesy and ingratitude meted out to him. He learned that Messrs. Barking Brothers & Barking's embarrassments did, in point of fact, skirt the edge of ruin. Their affairs were in apparently inextricable confusion, owing to Reginald Barking's reckless speculations, while, to add to the general confusion, that strenuous young man had broken down utterly from nervous verstrain, and was, at the present time, incapable ...
— The Far Horizon • Lucas Malet
... apparently far into the interior, Gregory was left once more in total darkness. He heard the sound of retreating footsteps, but not a glimmer was visible, and he feared to follow lest he might be entangled in some inextricable labyrinth. He recollected to have heard a vague sort of tradition, that a subterraneous passage once led from the hall to the Ribble bank, whereby the miners had in former days ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 1 (of 2) • John Roby
... perfect Union" was put off to a more propitious time, when a reconstruction of the government under a new federal Constitution was possible. Meanwhile Congress borrowed the money to pay the interest on money already borrowed; the confederate government floundered deeper and deeper into inextricable difficulties; the thirteen ships of state drifted farther and farther apart, with a fair ...
— James Madison • Sydney Howard Gay
... The railings were hidden both by the twining branches of the lilac and laburnum trees and by the climbing plants, ivy, honeysuckle, and clematis, which sprouted everywhere in luxuriance, and glided and intermingled in inextricable confusion, drooping down in leafy canopies, and running along the walls till they reached the elms at the far end, where the verdure was so profuse that you might have thought a tent were stretched between the trees, the elms serving as its giant props. The ...
— A Love Episode • Emile Zola
... began to get a little too strong. We had a sail or two set to steady the ship: on the second night one split with a crack like a cannon; and was tied up in an instant, cordage and strips, into inextricable knots. ...
— At Last • Charles Kingsley
... over the shingle. One or two of them had axes, and the rest, running into the shanty, brought out saws and handspikes. In the meanwhile a huge log crashed upon the one held fast, and there was no need to tell any of the men that those which followed would rapidly pile up into an inextricable confusion of interlocked timber. There was only one thing to be done, and that was to cut away the first log, which would hold them ...
— The Greater Power • Harold Bindloss
... Egyptians there was no principle of contradiction. All the heterogeneous beliefs that ever obtained in the various districts during the different periods of a very long history, were maintained concurrently and formed an inextricable confusion in ...
— The Oriental Religions in Roman Paganism • Franz Cumont
... beasts, most prodigious, to be sure, and worthy of all admiration, unless the artist had gone incomparably beyond his subject. Jugglers proclaimed aloud the miracles which they were prepared to work; and posture-makers dislocated every joint of their bodies and tied their limbs into inextricable knots, wherever they could find space to spread a little square of carpet on the ground. In the midst of the confusion, while everybody was treading on his neighbor's toes, some little boys were very solicitous to brush your boots. These lads, ...
— Our Old Home - A Series of English Sketches • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... invented the most treacherous ways of getting rid of a rival. There had been none of this internecine warfare among the Liberals; they were too far from power, too hopelessly out of favor; and Lucien, amid the inextricable tangle of ambitions, had neither the courage to draw sword and cut the knot, or the patience to unravel it. He could not be the Beaumarchais, the Aretino, the Freron of his epoch; he was not made of such stuff; he thought of nothing but his one desire, the patent of nobility; ...
— A Distinguished Provincial at Paris • Honore de Balzac
... perilous hoax played upon him by the Irish servant, Daniel Hill; or whether, as he himself surmised, the crime was instigated by an unfriendly neighbour, it is impossible to say. Strange adventures of this kind, blending fact and fancy in a now inextricable tangle, are of no unfrequent occurrence in Shelley's biography. In estimating the relative proportions of the two factors in this case, it must be borne in mind, on the one hand, that no one but Shelley, who was ...
— Percy Bysshe Shelley • John Addington Symonds
... continent, and particularly with Austria, acting officially and publicly, the other faction counteracting and opposing them. These private agents were continually going from their function to the Bastile, and from the Bastile to employment, and favour again. An inextricable cabal was formed, some of persons of rank, others of subordinates. But by this means the corps of politicians was augmented in number, and the whole formed a body of active, adventuring, ambitious, discontented people, despising the regular ministry, despising the courts ...
— Political Pamphlets • George Saintsbury
... problem that lamps of different voltages could be used. But, as we are considering systems of extended distribution employing vast numbers of lamps (as in New York City, where millions are in use), it will be seen that such a method would lead to inextricable confusion, and therefore be absolutely out of the question. Inasmuch as the percentage of drop decreases in proportion to the increased cross-section of the conductors, the only feasible plan would seem to be to increase their size to such dimensions as to eliminate the drop altogether, beginning ...
— Edison, His Life and Inventions • Frank Lewis Dyer and Thomas Commerford Martin
... hospital," he observes. "Oh, it's from that professor who was here some time since. I thought from his remarks and careless manner he was a likely man to lead his violin into danger, if not into inextricable difficulties; let us see what is the matter. Open the box, James, take the fiddle out, there is probably a letter placed with it to save postage." James dutifully proceeds with the work while his chief retires to make a short note ...
— The Repairing & Restoration of Violins - 'The Strad' Library, No. XII. • Horace Petherick
... tremendous passes which bear the name of Chaos, and of which the best description can give but a faint and imperfect idea. The huge masses of rock, looking like fallen buildings, which are strewn along the valley in inextricable confusion, defy calculation. There they lie, the consequence of some terrific deboulement, which must have shaken the mountains to their centre when the mighty ruin was effected. It is supposed that the accident may have occurred in the sixth ...
— Barn and the Pyrenees - A Legendary Tour to the Country of Henri Quatre • Louisa Stuart Costello
... that they might have a little trade in the way of furnishing our suppers. At one village, indeed, they would not show us the path at all unless we remained at least a day with them. Having refused, we took a path in the direction we ought to go, but it led us into an inextricable thicket. Returning to the village again, we tried another footpath in a similar direction, but this led us into an equally impassable and trackless forest. We were thus forced to come back and remain. In the following ...
— Missionary Travels and Researches in South Africa - Journeys and Researches in South Africa • David Livingstone
... played hide and seek among the purple and gold of the clusters of ripening grapes. They had come now to the horrible flight that succeeded the defeat; the broken, demoralized, famishing regiments flying through the fields, the highroads blocked with men, horses, wagons, guns, in inextricable confusion; all the wreck and ruin of a beaten army that pressed on, on, on, with the chill breath of panic on their backs. As they had not had wit enough to fall back while there was time and take post among the passes of the Vosges, where ten thousand men would have ...
— The Downfall • Emile Zola
... full power of annual monetary expenditure, to blindly risk her necessary expenses for life upon one whom the cost of a single imported bonnet, in the contingency of a General European War, might plunge into inextricable pecuniary embarrassment? Possibly, the General European War might not occur in an ordinary married-lifetime, as France was no longer in a condition to menace England, Russia would be wary about provoking the new Prussian giant, and Austria and Italy were not likely soon to forget their ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 2, No. 27, October 1, 1870 • Various
... them?" Honey asked idly. He did not really listen to Pete's answer. His eyes, sparkling with amusement, had gone back to Lulu, who still sat seriously practising her lesson. Red lips, little white teeth, slender pink tongue seemed to get into an inextricable tangle over ...
— Angel Island • Inez Haynes Gillmore
... species, and varieties, by which means each minute part can be examined by itself in connection with the whole; the memory and the judgment are assisted in their references and application; and order reigns through the whole subject, which otherwise would have been involved in inextricable confusion. ...
— A Practical Enquiry into the Philosophy of Education • James Gall
... of Prussia has sent His Minister at this Court a proposition for regulating the position of the Christians in Syria, which, if it were acted upon, would in Prince Metternich's opinion throw that Country into inextricable confusion. His Highness transmitted a few days back a memorandum on the subject to London which He persists in regarding as establishing the only advantageous mode of treating the question, and as ...
— Notes on the Diplomatic History of the Jewish Question • Lucien Wolf
... that the discovery has been made before it was too late. Had I listened to his deceits, and, as the perfidious man had almost persuaded me, precipitated myself into an inextricable engagement, before— ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb IV - Poems and Plays • Charles and Mary Lamb
... two wedges, and would not let Nathan have them, and Nathan held the beetle away behind him so that Rollo should not have that. Thus they seemed to be in inextricable difficulty. Rollo did ...
— Rollo's Experiments • Jacob Abbott
... come; Diane was now to entangle that great man in the inextricable meshes of a romance carefully prepared, to which he was fated to listen as the neophyte of early Christian times listened to ...
— The Secrets of the Princesse de Cadignan • Honore de Balzac
... most of them were encamped from four to eight miles away. Aides-de-camp with markers by the score were already in position on the plain when the troops arrived, so that there was almost no delay in getting into position. As our column debouched upon the field, there seemed an inextricable mass of marching columns as far as the eye could see. Could order ever be gotten out of it? Yet, presto! the right of the line fell into position, a series of blue blocks, and then on down to the far left, block after block, came upon the line with unerring order and ...
— War from the Inside • Frederick L. (Frederick Lyman) Hitchcock
... item to an unreasonable sum. For one of his short stories, Pierette, Balzac demanded no less than seventeen successive revised proofs. And his corrections, his additions and his suppressions formed such an inextricable tangle that the typesetters refused to work more than an hour at a time over ...
— Honor de Balzac • Albert Keim and Louis Lumet
... throughout, even when professing to accord with Blunt's Lunar Chart, is entirely at variance with that or any other lunar chart, and even grossly at variance with itself. The points of the compass, too, are in inextricable confusion; the writer appearing to be ignorant that, on a lunar map, these are not in accordance with terrestrial points; the east being to the ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 1 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... donacophilus. The rock composing the elevated ridge of the Parentins is the same coarse iron-cemented conglomerate which I have often spoken of as occurring near Para and in several other places. Many loose blocks were scattered about. The forest was extremely varied, and inextricable coils of woody climbers stretched from tree to tree. Throngs of cacti were spread over the rocks and tree-trunks. The variety of small, beautifully-shaped ferns, lichens, and boleti, made the place quite a museum of ...
— The Naturalist on the River Amazons • Henry Walter Bates
... there was a long pause in Balzac's contributions to La Presse. Madame Hanska had unfortunately decided for some time that she would in 1845 make one of those journeys which more than anything else threw Balzac and his affairs into inextricable confusion. Before M. de Hanski's death, however, Balzac was at any rate welcomed with effusion when, in his longing to see Madame Hanska, he left his affairs in Paris to take care of themselves. In those early days she was devotedly attached to him; besides, an adorer was a fashionable ...
— Honore de Balzac, His Life and Writings • Mary F. Sandars
... hoped for unless when a poet adjusts his inward eye to a proper focus with the outward organ. Grapevines here and there twine themselves around shrub and tree and hang their clusters over the water within reach of the boatman's hand. Oftentimes they unite two trees of alien race in an inextricable twine, marrying the hemlock and the maple against their will and enriching them with a purple offspring of which neither is the parent. One of these ambitious parasites has climbed into the upper branches of a tall white-pine, and is still ascending from bough to bough, ...
— The Old Manse (From "Mosses From An Old Manse") • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... causeway, they wheeled into the woods on their left, and escaped by heading the stream. Had they been followed by the whole party, boldly charging across the bridge, the entire force of the enemy must have laid down their arms. The British were so crowded in the lane and causeway, in such inextricable confusion, without room to display or to defend themselves, that they must have yielded by spontaneous movement to avoid being cut to pieces. The reproach lies heavily against the halting cavalry, that could leave to their fate the brave fellows ...
— The Life of Francis Marion • William Gilmore Simms
... exaggerates his mannerisms, gives a greater and greater share of the work to his pupils. The later Stanze are either pompous or confused, or both, until we reach the higgledy-piggledy of the "Burning of the Borgo" or that inextricable tangle, suggestive of nothing so much as of a dish of macaroni, the "Battle of Constantine," a picture painted after the master's death, but for which he probably left something ...
— Artist and Public - And Other Essays On Art Subjects • Kenyon Cox
... my landlord had told me, rose sheer from the water to the height of at least twenty-five feet, bristling and formidable. Back of it pressed the volume of logs packed closely in an apparently inextricable tangle as far as the eye could reach. A man near informed me that the tail was a good three miles up stream. From beneath this wonderful chevaux de frise foamed the current of the river, irresistible to any force less mighty than the statics ...
— Blazed Trail Stories - and Stories of the Wild Life • Stewart Edward White
... foliated niches and statues, are like venerable trunks crowned with delicate and pendent mosses. They spread out in great branches meeting in the vault overhead, the intervals of the arches being filled with an inextricable network of foliage, thorny sprigs and light branches, twining and intertwining, and figuring the aerial dome of a mighty forest. As in a great wood, the lateral aisles are almost equal in height to that of the center, and, on all sides, at ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Vol VIII - Italy and Greece, Part Two • Various
... innocence. Sam was aware of no feelings toward her save gratitude and friendliness. Nevertheless, it would not have been the first time it happened, if these safe and simple feelings had suddenly landed him in an inextricable coil. Men are babies in ...
— The Huntress • Hulbert Footner
... going I need to, and that this summer we shall go to the New England coast. And then—about the first of June there comes a day when I find myself going over the fishing-tackle unearthed by the spring house-cleaning and sorting out of inextricable confusion the family's supply of sweaters, old riding-breeches, puttees, rough shoes, trout-flies, quirts, ponchos, spurs, reels, and old felt hats. Some of the hats still have a few dejected flies fastened ...
— Tenting To-night - A Chronicle of Sport and Adventure in Glacier Park and the - Cascade Mountains • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... visible real vestige of a copyright obtainable here; only Chapman asserts that he has obtained one, and that he will take all contraveners into Chancery,—which has a terrible sound; and indeed the Act he founds on is of so distracted, inextricable a character, it may mean anything and all things, and no Sergeant Talfourd whom we could consult durst take upon him to say that it meant almost anything whatever. The sound of "Chancery," the stereotype character of this volume, ...
— The Correspondence of Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1834-1872, Vol II. • Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson
... ancient site; and he would be a bold man who would venture to-day to call 'illusory' the search for 'points of solid truth' in the old legends, or to assert that 'the items of matter of fact, if any such there be,' are inextricable from the mass of romantic inventions in which they are embedded. The work, of course, is by no means complete; very probably it is scarcely more than well begun; but already the dark gulf of time that lay behind the Dorian conquest is beginning to yield up the unquestionable evidences ...
— The Sea-Kings of Crete • James Baikie
... gesture, his pale face flushed with joy and excitement, while from time to time as he sat on his horse he took off his hat and, looking upward, thanked heaven for the victory it had vouchsafed him. As darkness drew near he was in the front, where friend and foe were mingled in almost inextricable confusion. He and his staff were fired at, at close range, by the Union troops, and, as they turned, were fired at again, through a mistake, by the Confederates behind them. Jackson fell, struck in several places. He was put in a litter and carried ...
— Hero Tales From American History • Henry Cabot Lodge, and Theodore Roosevelt
... 'my Lord.' How can He be both? Jesus' question is in two forms,—'If He is son, how does David call Him Lord?' or, if He is Lord, 'how then is He his son?' Take either designation, and the other lands you in inextricable difficulties. ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Matthew Chaps. IX to XXVIII • Alexander Maclaren
... familiarize names, having never been equaled by any successor. He was, in fact, the very man fitted by nature to retrieve the desperate fortunes of her beloved province, had not the Fates, those most potent and unrelenting of all ancient spinsters, destined them to inextricable confusion. ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. IX (of X) - America - I • Various
... upon that globe, which he seemed desirous of subjecting by the strength of his pride and courage. The one resembled the eagle, that hovers above his prey—the other the reptile, that envelops its victim in its inextricable folds. ...
— The Wandering Jew, Complete • Eugene Sue
... is employed in restoring the Poet's genuine Text; but in those Places only where it labours with inextricable Nonsense. In which, how much soever I may have given Scope to critical Conjecture, where the old Copies failed me, I have indulged nothing to Fancy or Imagination; but have religiously observed the severe Canons of literal Criticism; as may be seen ...
— Eighteenth Century Essays on Shakespeare • D. Nichol Smith
... administration, and bringing into order the various conflicting authorities which had been handed down from ancient times, royal courts and manor courts, church courts, shire courts, hundred courts, forest courts, and local courts in special franchises, with all their inextricable confusion of law and custom and procedure. Under Henry I. two courts, the Exchequer and the Curia Regis, had control of all the financial and judicial business of the kingdom. The Exchequer filled a far more important place in the national life than the Curia Regis, for the power of the king ...
— Henry the Second • Mrs. J. R. Green
... immediate experience will never disclose any fixed order in it; the surface of experience, when not interpreted materialistically, is an inextricable dream. Berkeley and his followers, when they look in this direction, towards nature and the rationale of experience and science, are looking away from their own system, and relying instead on the automatic propensity of human nature to routine, so that we spontaneously prepare ...
— Some Turns of Thought in Modern Philosophy - Five Essays • George Santayana
... St. Ange has described how the peduncle[19] is gorged with an inextricable mass of branching ovarian tubes, filled with granular matter and immature ova. In Conchoderma and Alepas, the ovarian tubes run up in a single plane (Pl. IX, fig. 3,) between the two folds of corium round the sack. Here the development of ...
— A Monograph on the Sub-class Cirripedia (Volume 1 of 2) - The Lepadidae; or, Pedunculated Cirripedes • Charles Darwin
... law had been an inextricable labyrinth of laws and customs, mainly Roman and Frankish in origin, hopelessly tangled by feudal customs, provincial privileges, ecclesiastical rights, and the later undergrowth of royal decrees; and no ...
— The Life of Napoleon I (Volumes, 1 and 2) • John Holland Rose
... ragged now, for, having no general to marshal them, their ranks now filled, now thinned, with each alternation of courage and fear. As soon as Antonius saw them waver, he kept thrusting at them in massed column. The line bent and then broke, and the inextricable confusion of wagons and siege-engines prevented their rallying. The victorious troops scattered along the cross-road ...
— Tacitus: The Histories, Volumes I and II • Caius Cornelius Tacitus
... vois la honte ou je suis descendue, Implacable Venus, suis—je assez confondue!" Edna felt as if her own great weakness were known to the world, and she bent her face close to her basket and tumbled the contents into inextricable confusion. ...
— St. Elmo • Augusta J. Evans
... which furnisheth encouragement to those poor ignorant people to perpetuate their savage wars, in order to supply the demands of this most unnatural traffic, by which great numbers of mankind, free by nature, are subject to inextricable bondage, and which hath often been observed to fill their possessors with haughtiness, tyranny, luxury, and barbarity, corrupting the minds and debasing the morals of their children, to the unspeakable prejudice of religion and ...
— The History of the Rise, Progress and Accomplishment of the - Abolition of the African Slave-Trade, by the British Parliament (1839) • Thomas Clarkson
... extraordinary degree, the power of rapidly transferring his undivided and undisturbed attention to every thing, great and small, which could be brought before it. A single glance of his eye penetrated the most obscure and perplexing parts of a case—a touch of his master-hand disentangled apparently inextricable complexities. He could apply, with beautiful promptitude and precision, some maxim or principle which had not occurred to those who had devoted long and anxious attention to the case, and which at ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 363, January, 1846 • Various
... Midway the vast round-raying beard A desiccated midge appeared; Whose body pricked the name of meal, Whose hair had growth in earth's unreal; Provocative of dread and wrath, Contempt and horror, in one froth, Inextricable, insensible, His poison presence there would dwell, Declaring him her dream fulfilled, A catch to compliment the skilled; And she reduced to beaky skin, Disgraceful among kith ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... existed the most complete freedom of opinion, and where the most divergent and numerous philosophic sects consequently developed, there has always been perfect unanimity regarding the doctrine of rebirth, and in that inextricable forest of metaphysical speculations two giant trees have always overtopped the rest: the tree of Karma and the tree ...
— Reincarnation - A Study in Human Evolution • Th. Pascal
... name had stayed there with another hussy (giving Miss T's stage name): "There were nice carryings on with the pair of them." I thought of Miss T's strange looks, but could not imagine what hold she had on A., for A. loved me, I knew. I seemed to be in an inextricable maze. I could settle to nothing and was thinking of applying to the police when I heard that the actor A. had mentioned had taken his company to the Gippsland lakes. I followed to Sale, found the actor and was told that A. was not there. "She slipped me at the last moment," he said, ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 5 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... Reverend Mr. Prentice was a widower. Overwrought with anxiety and strain, the clergyman, as soon as he had taken his coat, began a hurried, inconsequential narrative, broke off, tried again, fell into an inextricable confusion of words, and, dropping his head ...
— Average Jones • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... concourse of the trains of an army, in connection with any rapid movement, would give the idea of inextricable confusion. It is of course necessary to move them upon as many different roads as possible, but it will frequently happen that they must be concentrated in a small space, and move in a small number of columns. During the celebrated 'change of base' from Richmond ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol. 6, No. 1, July, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various
... equivalent in the dictionary in order to be able to recognise such a place when I saw it. In my little pocket dictionary I could not find any other word than 'Lombard.' On looking at a map of Paris I found, situated in the middle of an inextricable maze of streets, a very small lane called Rue des Lombards. Thither I wended my way, but my expedition was fruitless. Often, on reading by the light of the transparent lanterns the inscription 'Mont de Piete,' I became very curious to know its meaning, and on consulting my advisory board ...
— My Life, Volume I • Richard Wagner
... footmen and animals with their burdens. The swarthy, untidy inhabitants are among the laziest on earth, for, where nature is so lavish, the necessity for laborious toil is wanting. The avenues leading to the wharf slope gently upward, winding in and out, and mingling in seemingly inextricable confusion. ...
— Up the Forked River - Or, Adventures in South America • Edward Sylvester Ellis
... army was a moving mass of human beings and dumb brutes, at times mixed in inextricable confusion, a hundred feet wide or more. Sometimes two columns of wagons, traveling on parallel lines and near each other, would serve as a barrier to prevent loose stock from crossing; but usually there would be a confused ...
— Ox-Team Days on the Oregon Trail • Ezra Meeker
... painful. To sleep was to be the feverish fool of vague wild visions, in which Charlotte and Dr. Doddleson, the editor of the Cheapside, the officials of the British Museum reading-room, Diana Paget, and the Sheldons, figured amidst inextricable confusion of circumstances and places. Throughout these wretched dreams he had some consciousness of himself and the room in which he was lying, the July moon shining upon him, broad and bright, ...
— Charlotte's Inheritance • M. E. Braddon
... show'd a tree Hard by me, newly-scathed. I rose tumultuous: 315 My soul work'd high: I bared my head to the storm, And with loud voice and clamorous agony Kneeling I pray'd to the great Spirit that made me, Pray'd that Remorse might fasten on their hearts, And cling, with poisonous tooth, inextricable 320 ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... now as four hundred years since. Under the carver's hand it seems to cut like clay, to fold like silk, to grow like living branches, to leap like living flame. Canopy crowning canopy, pinnacle piercing pinnacle—it shoots and wreathes itself into an enchanted glade, inextricable, imperishable, fuller of leafage than any forest, and fuller of story ...
— Our Fathers Have Told Us - Part I. The Bible of Amiens • John Ruskin
... thing that can release us from the inextricable confusion of an infinite multiplicity is the realization of an underlying unity, and at the back of all things we find the presence of one Great Affirmative principle without which nothing could have existence. This, then, is ...
— The Dore Lectures on Mental Science • Thomas Troward
... out impassable gulfs. Every bridge had disappeared, and all the surrounding timber rendered useless for constructing more; while, for mile after mile, one continued mass of gnarled and crooked trees, here pitched together in seemingly inextricable tangles, and there piled mountains high, had been felled into the road, which even now had scarcely been made passable by the toiling thousands who, for weeks, had been employed upon it. In consequence of this, and the time spent in making circuits round in the woods to avoid parties ...
— The Rangers - [Subtitle: The Tory's Daughter] • D. P. Thompson |
