"Inextricable" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... women are rightly secret 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 ...
— Ariadne Florentina - Six Lectures on Wood and Metal Engraving • John Ruskin
... 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 ...
— CELEBRATED CRIMES, COMPLETE - JOAN OF NAPLES—1343-1382 • ALEXANDRE DUMAS, PERE
... 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 ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb IV - Poems and Plays • Charles and Mary Lamb
... broken trunks, or squeeze ourselves between others, at the next we sank knee-deep among endless parasitical plants. I began almost to despair of ever effecting a passage, and, even up to the present day, am at a loss to understand how we succeeded in escaping from this inextricable mass. ...
— A Woman's Journey Round the World • Ida Pfeiffer
... properly called law English, were submitted to his critical acumen; his thousand doubts, suggestions, hints, and queries, which would start from his mind like a flash, and for a moment seem to throw into inextricable confusion what had been laboriously, and perhaps profoundly studied, at last would most generally be adopted ...
— Memoirs of Aaron Burr, Complete • Matthew L. Davis
... could remember 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 last resource of the needy gentleman, the family repeater, chain, and ...
— Blackwoods Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 365, March, 1846 • Various
... 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
... faults and failings. The old woman now can look back and mark out a better course of conduct for the girl. But the girl is gone—the past is past, the life is lived. I was full of the humours and delusions of nineteen years, and I saw the glory and delight of my youth wrecked. Existence was merely inextricable confusion in the dark. I never dreamt of a path appearing, of a return of sunshine, of a story like ...
— The Late Miss Hollingford • Rosa Mulholland
... the conviction that I have done all the hard 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 to the ribbon, melancholy hackles, sadly ruffled Royal Coachmen, and here and there the ...
— Tenting To-night - A Chronicle of Sport and Adventure in Glacier Park and the - Cascade Mountains • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... would seem to transmute Socrates into a mythus, considering the broad daylight which then rested upon Athenian history, and the inextricable way in which Socrates is entangled in that history (although we have all seen many a Scriptural personage so transmuted under far less colourable pretenses or advantages), still it is evident that the mediaeval ...
— The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. 1 (2 vols) • Thomas De Quincey
... troops fall into the same state of indigence and mutiny 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
... 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 ...
— Historic Tales, vol 10 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris
... action: thus we talk of an intellectual beauty, of a beautiful action, of a moral beauty. Many philosophers, especially aestheticians, have lost their heads in their pursuit of these most varied uses: they have entered an inextricable and impervious verbal labyrinth. For this reason it has hitherto seemed convenient studiously to avoid the use of the word beautiful to indicate successful expression. But after all the explanations that have been given, and all danger of misunderstanding ...
— Aesthetic as Science of Expression and General Linguistic • Benedetto Croce
... view of these three towns, the City, the University, and the Ville, exhibited to the eye an inextricable knot of streets strangely jumbled together. It was apparent, however, at first sight that these three fragments of a city formed but a single body. The spectator perceived immediately two long parallel streets, without break or interruption, crossing ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. VII (of X)—Continental Europe I • Various
... first added that 'papa might be well,' 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
... interested me greatly; but how inextricable are the subjects which we are discussing! I do not think I said that I thought the productions of Asia were HIGHER (70/1. On the use of the terms "higher" and "lower" see Letters 35 and 36.) than those of Australia. ...
— More Letters of Charles Darwin - Volume I (of II) • Charles Darwin
... themselves in a tiny scented garden of their own, and try to drown the insistent noises without; or, on the other hand, if they are of the nobler sort, lose heart and hope, and even forfeit their own delight in things that are sweet and generous and pleasant and pure. A mournful and inextricable dilemma! ...
— At Large • Arthur Christopher Benson
... 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 when shot it became ...
— The Malay Archipelago - Volume I. (of II.) • Alfred Russel Wallace
... moments later the two friends had disappeared in the copse. It was a dense thicket, in which rose huge cypresses, sycamores, tulip-trees, olives, tamarinds, oaks, and magnolias. These different trees had interwoven their branches into an inextricable maze, through which the eye could not penetrate. Michel Ardan and Maston walked side by side in silence through the tall grass, cutting themselves a path through the strong creepers, casting curious glances on the bushes, and momentarily expecting to hear the ...
— Jules Verne's Classic Books • Jules Verne
... story-teller, and whose stories are of the kind that rouse suspense and satisfy it, can be read more than once, and never be quite without novelty. There is often, in his books, too much story, as in The Mayor of Casterbridge, where the plot extends into almost inextricable entanglements; and yet that is precisely one of the books that can be re-read. Is it on account of that concealed poetry, never absent though often unseen, which gives to these fantastic or real histories a meaning beyond the meaning of the facts, beneath ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... religious ideal he set up and his own attainment. And the tolerance which he extended to those who attacked him or who had (as he thought) behaved ill in public life was largely due to this pervading sense of the frailty of human character, and of the inextricable mixture in conduct of good and bad motives. "It is always best to take the charitable view," he once observed in passing through the division lobby, when a friend had quoted to him the saying of Dean Church that Mark Pattison had painted himself too black in his autobiography—"always ...
— William Ewart Gladstone • James Bryce
... breast, Whence o'er the elements his sway, But from the harmony that, gushing from his soul, Draws back into his heart the wondrous whole? With careless hand when round her spindle, Nature Winds the interminable thread of life; When 'mid the clash of Being every creature Mingles in harsh inextricable strife; Who deals their course unvaried till it falleth, In rhythmic flow to music's measur'd tone? Each solitary note whose genius calleth, To swell the mighty choir in unison? Who in the raging storm sees passion low'ring? Or flush of earnest thought in evening's glow? Who every ...
— Faust Part 1 • Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
... 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 in order, ...
— The Danish History, Books I-IX • Saxo Grammaticus ("Saxo the Learned")
... idea of this overturn, invariable in all countries where taxation exists, so singular a phenomenon would not have failed to draw their attention; they would have sought its causes, and would have ended by discovering that what they took for an accident of civilization, an effect of the inextricable difficulties of human government, was the product of the contradiction inherent in ...
— The Philosophy of Misery • Joseph-Pierre Proudhon
... herd it seemed to me—plunging up the incline—cows, heifers, calves, bulls, and oxen, all mixed together in one inextricable mass, and every one of them snorting, bellowing, or making some other kind of sound. The din was fearful, the sight bewildering, for the beasts were of all colours, and their long horns flashed like ivory in the moonlight. Indeed, the only thing in the least ...
— Child of Storm • H. Rider Haggard
... Drake's well, that made the oil available, was the discovery, which was made by Samuel Van Syckel, that a two-inch pipe, starting at the well, could convey the oil for several miles to the nearest railway station. In a few years the whole oil region of Venango County was an inextricable tangle of these primitive pipelines. Thus, before the Civil war had ended, the western Pennsylvania wilderness had been transformed into the busy headquarters of a new industry. Companies had been formed, many ...
— The Age of Big Business - Volume 39 in The Chronicles of America Series • Burton J. Hendrick
... say that I have given some year or two of more or less profane contemplation to this question, and have now engaged a large corps of men, under the direction of Mr. Frank Lyon as attorney for the Commission, to seek a way out of the inextricable maze of express company figures. Whether we will be able to find the light before the Infinite Hand that controls our destinies cuts short the cord, is a question to which no certain answer can be given. Would ...
— The Letters of Franklin K. Lane • Franklin K. Lane
... 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! ...
— Leaves of Grass • Walt Whitman
... 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 ...
— Egypt (La Mort De Philae) • Pierre Loti
... Messianic, and David in it called Messiah '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
... collecting tithes, leaving the clergy to be supported by the crown. A new tithe bill was, however, introduced, by which the clergy should accept something short of what they were entitled to by law. Not only was the tithing system an apparently inextricable tangle, but there was trouble about the renewal of the Coercion Act. Lord Grey, wearied with political life, resigned the premiership, and Lord Melbourne succeeded him,—a statesman who cared next to nothing for reform; ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume X • John Lord
... mizzen-staysail and foresail, besides the remnants of her mainsail, that was split into fluttering rags. All the rest of her canvas so recently set being carried away, and floating alongside in a tangled wreck of spars and sails and ropes and rigging, matted together in an inextricable mass, Captain Blowser now gave orders to have cut away, without further delay, as the men could ...
— Picked up at Sea - The Gold Miners of Minturne Creek • J.C. Hutcheson
... Casati. They had passed through 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 ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 6 of 8 • Various
... into 1,238 pieces. In some places furrows served to divide the lands instead of turf balks, which were of course always being altered. Another difficulty arose from there being no check to high winds, which would sometimes sweep the whole of the crops belonging to different farmers in an inextricable heap against the ...
— A Short History of English Agriculture • W. H. R. Curtler
... that has puzzled us whether it ought to be understood in jest or earnest. The irony of a single word he must be a churl who would condemn; but the continuance of this figure in serious composition, throws truth and falsehood, right and wrong into inextricable perplexity. ...
— Four Early Pamphlets • William Godwin
... further into the interior. Crossing a small waterfall, she struck right into the depths of the virgin forest, pursuing a narrow path which ran along the bank of a little stream. Palms, with their lordly crests, soared high above the other trees, which, intertwined by inextricable boughs, formed the loveliest fairy-bowers imaginable; every stem, every branch was luxuriously festooned with fantastic orchids; while creepers and ferns glided up the tall, smooth trunks, mingling with the boughs, and hanging in every direction waving curtains of flowers, of the sweetest ...
— The Story of Ida Pfeiffer - and Her Travels in Many Lands • Anonymous
... speaks of his "transgressions" and of his "sin." Looked at in one way, he sees the separate acts of which he had been guilty—lust, fraud, treachery, murder: looked at in another, he sees them all knotted together, in one inextricable tangle of forked, hissing tongues, like the serpent locks that coil and twist round a Gorgon head. No sin dwells alone; the separate acts have a common root, and the whole is matted together like the green growth on a stagnant pond, so that, by whatever filament it is grasped, the whole mass ...
— The Life of David - As Reflected in His Psalms • Alexander Maclaren
... they did with great zeal, and continued the operation until the notes were not worth sixpence to the dollar. As might have been expected, this institution exploded after a few months, involving Smith and his brethren in inextricable difficulties. The consequence was, that he and most of the members of the church set off, in the spring of 1838, for Missouri, pursued by their ...
— Travels and Adventures of Monsieur Violet • Captain Marryat
... 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 ...
— Fire Island - Being the Adventures of Uncertain Naturalists in an Unknown Track • G. Manville Fenn
... received. I have called the Secretary of the Navy, Secretary of War, and General-in-Chief together, and submitted it to them, who promise to do their very best in the case. I cannot take it into my own hands without producing inextricable confusion. ...
— The Papers And Writings Of Abraham Lincoln, Complete - Constitutional Edition • Abraham Lincoln
... daughter of the object of his hate. Mr. Snozzle, having previously made his bow, overhears him, and being the acting manager of "Punch," and having a variety of plots for rescuing injured lovers from inextricable difficulties on hand, offers one of them to the lover, considerably over cost price; namely, for the puppet-detaining eight-and-ninepence, and a glass of brandy-and-water. The bargain being struck, the ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 1, Complete • Various
... hotel-keeper told me that some one of A's 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 ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 5 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... the tunes are new, there will be no temptation to the people. They will not keep humming along, hoping they will find some bars down where they can break into the clover pasture. They will take the tune as an inextricable conundrum, and give it up. Besides that, Pisgah, Ortonville and Brattle Street are old fashioned. They did very well in their day. Our fathers were simple-minded people, and the tunes fitted them. But our fathers are gone, and they ought to have taken their baggage with them. It is ...
— Around The Tea-Table • T. De Witt Talmage
... has never failed to evoke the astonishment of the beholder. However familiar we may be with the lunar surface, we can never gaze on these extraordinary formations, whether massed together apparently in inextricable confusion, or standing in isolated grandeur, like Copernicus, on the grey surface of the plains, without experiencing, in a scarcely diminished degree, the same sensation of wonder and admiration with which they were beheld for the first time. Although the attempt to bring all these bizarre ...
— The Moon - A Full Description and Map of its Principal Physical Features • Thomas Gwyn Elger
... find, or that she had purposely enveloped her movements in mystery. When she ceased to write he had simply concluded that, like himself, she felt the mockery of trying to keep up a sort of distant, semi-fraternal relation, marked by the occasional interchange of inexpressive letters. The inextricable mingling of thought and sensation which made the peculiar closeness of their union could never, to such direct and passionate natures, be replaced by the pretense of a temperate friendship. Feeling thus himself, ...
— The Fruit of the Tree • Edith Wharton
... Charles Reade with the clever writers of the day, sandwiching him between Anthony Trollope and Wilkie Collins,—for no other reason, apparently, than that he never, with Chinese accuracy, gives us gossiping drivel that reduces life to the dregs of the commonplace, or snarls us in any inextricable tangle ...
— Atlantic Monthly,Volume 14, No. 82, August, 1864 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... individuality of its 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 blue ...
— The Beauties of Nature - and the Wonders of the World We Live In • Sir John Lubbock
... this power pursues its work in silence, and before you have begun to know your own self, you are tied and bound, you know not how. When you reach a certain age, you wake up and would like to move. But it is impossible; your hands and arms are caught in inextricable folds. It is God Himself who holds you fast, and remorseless opinion is looking on, ready to laugh if you signify that you are tired of the toys which amused you as a child. It would be nothing if there was only public opinion to brave. But the pity is that all the softest ...
— Recollections of My Youth • Ernest Renan
... seem shut up to one or other of two alternatives—regarding him as an apostle and martyr, or as a charlatan. And even more careful examination leaves in his character and life anomalies so extraordinary, contradictions so inextricable, that most historians have fallen back on the hypothesis of partial insanity—the insanity born of an honest and upright but extravagant fanaticism—as the only one adequate to explain the mystery. Whether George Eliot has in this work produced a more satisfactory solution, we do ...
— The Ethics of George Eliot's Works • John Crombie Brown
... vulgar eye, but hurl into the 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, ...
— A Phyllis of the Sierras • Bret Harte
... assure you; sometimes Barrow Strait was closed to one of them, and the next year another found it open; sometimes the vessel was irresistibly drawn towards Regent's Passage, so that we have ended by becoming acquainted with these inextricable seas." ...
— The English at the North Pole - Part I of the Adventures of Captain Hatteras • Jules Verne
... line was more 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 ...
— Tacitus: The Histories, Volumes I and II • Caius Cornelius Tacitus
... not mourn for him, and as this lamentable disaster had made her interesting, and as she was assisted and supported by unexpected acts of kindness, and had a good adviser in one of those old Parisian lawyers who would get anybody out of the most inextricable difficulties, she managed to save something from the wreck, and to keep a small income. Then reassured and emboldened, and resting her ultimate illusions and her chimerical hopes on her daughter's radiant beauty, and ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume III (of 8) • Guy de Maupassant
... ought, logically, to have adopted the former course, but (as the interests of Slavery were not involved) he elected to pursue the latter; and he has pursued it with an impotence which has cost the nation already many millions of dollars, and which has involved the "army of Utah" in inextricable embarrassments, allowing them to be shut up in the snows of the mountains before they could strike a blow or reach the first object of their expedition. Not very well appointed in the beginning, this little force was despatched ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 6, April, 1858 • Various
... to acknowledge her fault, to blush before her own child, to weep while taking from him the right to console her, was more than she could do. No, there was nothing for her but death. To die as soon as possible, to escape shame by a complete disappearance, to unravel in this way an inextricable situation. But where to die! How? There are so many ways of departure! And she called them all up mentally while she walked. Life flowed around her, its luxury at this time of the year in full flower, round the Madeleine and its market, in a space marked off by the perfume of carnations and ...
— The Nabob • Alphonse Daudet
... sovereign who has never been made the slave of passion, even for a moment. She has never been obliged to regain her self-mastery, for she never has lost it. She is the only woman who has been able to disassociate those two inextricable things, love ...
— Atlantida • Pierre Benoit
... to present to us with striking brevity the contrast between the visible and the invisible presences that may stand about a man's last hour; for he may feel with the desolate Oedipus that "all I am has perished"—he may sink like Dion through inextricable sadness to a disastrous death, and then in a moment the transitory shall disappear and the essential shall be made plain, and from Dioa's upright spirit the perplexities shall vanish away, and Oedipus, in the welcome of that ...
— Wordsworth • F. W. H. Myers
... an agricultural show such as this should contrive to visit the yard early in the morning of the opening day, some few hours before the public are admitted. The bustle, the crash of excited exhibitors, the cries of men in charge of cattle, the apparently inextricable confusion, as if everything had been put off to the last moment—the whole scene is intensely agricultural. Every one is calling for the secretary. A drover wants to know where to put his fat cattle; a carter wants to ask where a great cart-horse ...
— Hodge and His Masters • Richard Jefferies
... when the latter, erect and haughty, had imperiously laid his hand 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
... was weary of the childish quarrels and bickerings of the monks, of their puerility, of their selfishness and self-indulgence, of their hopeless vulgarity of mind, and utterly discouraged with their inextricable labyrinths of deception. A melancholy deep as the grave seized on him, and he redoubled his austerities, in the hope that by making life painful he ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 7, No. 44, June, 1861 • Various
... capitals, bristling with a fantastic vegetation of pinnacles, canopies, 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 equal distances apart, one ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Vol VIII - Italy and Greece, Part Two • Various
... scholar, the desponding looks of the puzzled porter; the one stopping at leisure, the other hurrying on with his burthen; the innocent though rather abrupt tendency of the first member of the question, with the utter and inextricable irrelevancy of the second; the place—a public street, not favourable to frivolous investigations; the affrontive quality of the primitive inquiry (the common question) invidiously transferred to the derivative (the new turn given to it) in the implied satire; namely, that few of ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Volume 2 • Charles Lamb
... king," replied Boabdil, bitterly, "and headed by a traitor and a foe. I am meshed in the nets of an inextricable fate!" ...
— Leila, Complete - The Siege of Granada • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... to keep up with the giant Thalcave. The road lay through a beautiful fertile region, abounding in rich pasturages; where a hundred thousand cattle might have fed comfortably. Large ponds, connected by an inextricable labyrinth of RIOS, amply watered these plains and produced their greenness. Swans with black heads were disporting in the water, disputing possession with the numerous intruders which gamboled over the LLANOS. The feathered tribes were ...
— In Search of the Castaways • Jules Verne
... harmonious in all its parts—beautiful and sublime in all its truths—instructive in all its lessons—inspiring the brightest, broadest hopes the mind can conceive. But lay reason aside, in its perusal, and it will be involved in inextricable confusion, and impenetrable darkness. ...
— Golden Steps to Respectability, Usefulness and Happiness • John Mather Austin
... interfered, and I even began to think that the more nicely the subject was investigated, the more perplexed it would appear, and was on the point of forming a resolution to go to heaven in my own way, without meddling or involving myself in the inextricable labyrinth of controversial dispute, when I received and perused this excellent treatise, which finally cleared up the mists which my ignorance had conjured around me, and clearly pointed ...
— The Poetical Works of Henry Kirke White - With a Memoir by Sir Harris Nicolas • Henry Kirke White
... channels, and thus made to wash 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 ...
— The Rangers - [Subtitle: The Tory's Daughter] • D. P. Thompson
... A stands out boldly on the highest crest of the mesilla. Below it northwards, a small hill of stones, from which timbers occasionally protrude, forms a tumbled and confused slope of inextricable ruin; and beyond this slope there extend the foundations of walls on the level mesilla up to 10 m.—33 ft.—from the northern transverse part of the general circumvallation, which there is 45 m.—148 ft.—from a A, and 30 m.—100 ...
— Historical Introduction to Studies Among the Sedentary Indians of New Mexico; Report on the Ruins of the Pueblo of Pecos • Adolphus Bandelier
... these well-remembered bird-notes, this sky with its fitful brightness, these furrowed 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 the grass in the far-off years, ...
— George Eliot; A Critical Study of Her Life, Writings & Philosophy • George Willis Cooke
... fellowship in a 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
... horror. She saw things which she felt certain Cecilia could never have written; yet truth and falsehood were so mixed up in every paragraph, circumstances which she herself had witnessed so misrepresented, that it was all to her inextricable confusion. The passages which were to be marked could not now depend upon her opinion, her belief; they must rest upon Cecilia s integrity—and could she depend upon it? The impatience which she had felt for Lady Cecilia's return now faded away, and merged in the more painful thought ...
— Helen • Maria Edgeworth
... the 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 not know ...
— Rollo's Experiments • Jacob Abbott
... fall on the Chinese, some of whom he could not have failed of killing; but the officer, perceiving what he was about, immediately ordered him to desist, thinking it more prudent to submit to the present violence, than to embroil his commodore in an inextricable squabble with the Chinese government by the death of their subjects; which calmness in this gentleman was the more meritorious, as he was known to be a person of an uncommon spirit, and of a somewhat hasty ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 11 • Robert Kerr
... conclusions none the less real discoveries, subtracted nothing from the aggregate of his real merit. The vast obstacles which lay in the path of these discoveries can never be fully appreciated, until we apprehend, to some extent, the apparently hopeless and inextricable confusion with which the whole subject was at that time invested: out of the blackness of darkness, out of the very heart of chaos and anarchy rose two mighty luminaries, that have been polar beacons to all subsequent explorers. De Quincey's writings on political economy are partially fragmentary; ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol. 5, No. 6, June, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... entitled to his arrears of disembodied allowance at the present moment, he will be entitled to them at no future period, and I was to the last degree surprised at the receipt of an answer which tends to involve the office in an inextricable dilemma, for it is in fact a full acknowledgment of the justice of Lieutenant Borrow's claims, and a refusal to satisfy them until a certain time, which instantly brings on the question, 'By what authority does the War Office seek to detain the disembodied allowance of an ...
— George Borrow and His Circle - Wherein May Be Found Many Hitherto Unpublished Letters Of - Borrow And His Friends • Clement King Shorter
... service. Sort me this heap of seed, the one kind from the others, grain by grain; and get thy task done before the evening." And Psyche, stunned by the cruelty of her bidding, was silent, and moved not her hand to the inextricable heap. And there came [84] forth a little ant, which had understanding of the difficulty of her task, and took pity upon the consort of the god of Love; and he ran deftly hither and thither, and called together the whole army of his fellows. "Have pity," he cried, "nimble scholars of the Earth, ...
— Marius the Epicurean, Volume One • Walter Horatio Pater
... atomic theory of chemistry. Distort them by inapposite metaphors, view them in perplexing attitudes, and you may make them more abstruse than the hardest proposition of the "Principia". What is far worse, by involving a simple fact in inextricable contradictions, they have led people gravely to recognise self-contradiction as the natural and the proper condition of a certain class of questions. Consistency is very well so far, and for the humbler matters of every-day life, but there is a higher ...
— Practical Essays • Alexander Bain
... across the room, wheeling round in circles that ever descended, borne down under the weight that clung to him. The bird dropped at last quite suddenly, and Eustace saw fingers and feathers rolled into an inextricable mass on the floor. The struggle abruptly ceased as finger and thumb squeezed the neck; the bird's eyes rolled up to show the whites, and there was a faint, half-choked gurgle. But before the fingers had time to loose their hold, Eustace had them ...
— Famous Modern Ghost Stories • Various
... chosen for such work, sound 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
... square of Poperinghe the scene was brilliant in the extreme. Uniforms of every conceivable cut and colour rubbed shoulder to shoulder; ambulance waggons, guns, ammunition trains, and picketed horses all seemed to be mixed in inextricable confusion; while a squadron of French cavalry in their bright blue and silver uniforms was drawn up on one side of the square, waiting patiently for the orders which would permit them to go to the help of their hard-pressed comrades. It seemed impossible that we could find shelter ...
— A Surgeon in Belgium • Henry Sessions Souttar
... utmost capacity to merely suggest. The creek was, as usual in the Congo, lined with an almost unbroken, impassable belt of mangroves, their multitudinous roots, gnarled and twisted, springing from the thick, mud-stained water, and presenting a confused, inextricable tangle to the eye, from the deep shadows of which flitted kingfishers of many species and brilliant plumage; while above swayed and rustled in the gentle breeze the delicate grey-green foliage of the trees themselves, ...
— The Pirate Slaver - A Story of the West African Coast • Harry Collingwood
... As George Meredith nobly wrote, during the tragic and fatal illness of his wife, "Here I am in the very pits of tragic life.... Happily for me, I have learnt to live much in the spirit, and see brightness on the other side of life, otherwise this running of my poor doe with the inextricable arrow in her flanks would pull me down too." The spirit, the brightness of the other side, that is the secret which beauty can communicate, and the message which she ...
— Joyous Gard • Arthur Christopher Benson
... 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; that he gave himself up to the imitation of Shakespeare, who often was extravagant, but that ...
— Biographia Literaria • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... of the nation were now in an inextricable labyrinth of confusion. Henry IV. was still sustained by the Protestants, though they were ever complaining that he favored too much the Catholics. He was also sustained by a portion of the moderate Catholics. They were, however, quite lukewarm ...
— Henry IV, Makers of History • John S. C. Abbott
... caravan safely, but the others getting mixed up with the camels and asses, composing the train of the caravan, who straggled in all directions, being frightened by the noise of the pursuers, a scene of inextricable confusion ...
— Tales of the Caliph • H. N. Crellin
... greatest divines and philosophers of leading a great part of mankind into inextricable labyrinths of reasoning and speculation. Natural theology and religion, he held, had become corrupt. In view of these results of mental infirmities, he applied himself to correct all errors. He proposed "to distinguish genuine and pure theism from the profane mixtures ...
— History of Rationalism Embracing a Survey of the Present State of Protestant Theology • John F. Hurst
... elegantly attired aides-de-camp galloping like mad and endeavoring to avoid mud puddles, batteries thundering along, as if eager to unlimber and fire at some enemy—in short, it was fifty acres, more or less, of uniforms, horses, flags, and bayonets, in apparently inextricable confusion. Yet one man ran the machine. A few words from him reduced confusion to order, and the apparent snarl of humanity and horses began to be unraveled in a single, unbroken line, when General Meade gave the single ...
— Perley's Reminiscences, Vol. 1-2 - of Sixty Years in the National Metropolis • Benjamin Perley Poore
... friendship, but, on the contrary, constant rancour—had material in him to render valuable services at this particular epoch. Everything depended on patience, tact, watchfulness in threading the distracting, almost inextricable, maze which had been created by personal rivalries, ambitions, and jealousies in the state he represented and the one to which he was accredited. "I ascribe it all to God," he said, in his testament to his children, "the impenetrable workman who in His goodness has enabled me to make ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... of entire liberty must be relegated to the world to come. He may be valuable as a monitor, but in the executive uses of this mighty modern world henceforth he can never share. Could the immortal soul find itself in a more inextricable, a ...
— The Opium Habit • Horace B. Day
... with propriety do so to Lady Emily; but what at a distance appeared to be a matter of easy accomplishment, now, upon a nearer approach, and when the immediate impulse which had prompted the act had subsided, appeared so full of difficulty and almost inextricable embarrassments, that he involuntarily shrunk from ...
— The Purcell Papers - Volume II. (of III.) • Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu
... 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 bird had passed. Far aloft, around the ...
— The Blithedale Romance • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... 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 ...
— Hero Tales From American History • Henry Cabot Lodge, and Theodore Roosevelt
... miles a second in all calculations of sidereal distances. Humboldt tries to reconcile these differences by the suggestion, that no one will deny, that lights of different magnetic or electric processes may have different velocities; a fact which throws all sidereal astronomy into inextricable confusion, and sets aside all existing time tables on ...
— Fables of Infidelity and Facts of Faith - Being an Examination of the Evidences of Infidelity • Robert Patterson
... I ask all these questions so immediately it is to save my son disagreeables which he might not foresee. Sometimes there are debts, embarrassing liabilities, what not! And a legatee finds himself in an inextricable thorn bush. After all, I am not the heir—but I think ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume VIII. • Guy de Maupassant
... untoward concatenation of circumstances, 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 ...
— Honore de Balzac, His Life and Writings • Mary F. Sandars
... 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
... there a more melancholy example than Sheridan exhibited, at this moment, of the last, hard struggle of pride and delicacy against the most deadly foe of both, pecuniary involvement,—which thus gathers round its victims, fold after fold, till they are at length crushed in its inextricable clasp. ...
— Memoirs of the Life of Rt. Hon. Richard Brinsley Sheridan Vol 2 • Thomas Moore
... thermometer. Contrasting this mood with the cold malignancy and resolve of his temper in the soldiers' room at Sessions's, I saw, to my delight, that our secret was forever imprisoned in his breast, gagged and chained down by the iron of his own inextricable infamy. At dawn he awakened me that he might persuade me to reject the evidences brought against his character by his doings and endurings of the night, and that he might rebuild the old house of words in which habitually he found shelter, too abysmally self-conceited ever ...
— The Cavalier • George Washington Cable
... strange that Addison should, in the first line of his travels, have misdated his departure from Marseilles by a whole year, and still more strange that this slip of the pen which throws the whole narrative into inextricable confusion, should have been repeated in a succession of editions, and never detected ...
— Critical and Historical Essays, Volume III (of 3) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... 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 center, ...
— Records of a Girlhood • Frances Anne Kemble
... an extent which 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 delight. ...
— The Letters of Charles Dickens - Vol. 3 (of 3), 1836-1870 • Charles Dickens
... the grating we found no trace of the figures that doubtless once covered the floor of the chapel. All that remained was a huge pendant of angels, cherubs, and saints, swarming as it were to the ceiling in an inextricable knot of arms, legs, wings, faces, and flowing drapery; two circles of saints, bishops, and others, who might be fitly placed in Paradise, rising one above the other high up the walls of the chapel—the lower circle full-length figures, and the other half-length; and above this a higher and richly ...
— Ex Voto • Samuel Butler
... Wilkins also gave way soon after and it was now impossible to exercise any further control. The road became crowded and jammed with troops; the wagons and artillery sinking into the deep mud became inextricable and added to the general confusion which now prevailed. No power could now check or control the panic-stricken mass as it swept toward the rear, led off by Colonel Winslow at the head of his brigade of cavalry, and who never halted until he had reached Stubbs', ten miles in rear. This ...
— The Black Phalanx - African American soldiers in the War of Independence, the - War of 1812, and the Civil War • Joseph T. Wilson
... diffusion from individual centres of the life that is in Jesus Christ is the chiefest reason—or at all events, is one chief reason—for the strange and inextricable intertwining in modern society, of saint and sinner, of Christian and non-Christian. The seed is sown among the thorns; the wheat springs up amongst the tares. Their roots are so matted together that no hand can separate them. In families, ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ezekiel, Daniel, and the Minor Prophets. St Matthew Chapters I to VIII • Alexander Maclaren
... labyrinths. In their remoter recesses, I am told, strange creatures lurk, some of them terrible and dangerous creatures that all the science of the moon has been unable to exterminate. There is particularly the Rapha, an inextricable mass of clutching tentacles that one hacks to pieces only to multiply; and the Tzee, a darting creature that is never seen, so subtly and ...
— The First Men In The Moon • H. G. Wells
... 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 ...
— A Hero and Some Other Folks • William A. Quayle
... of this war should progress as they are foreshadowed in the proclamation of September 22, then the application of this proclamation may create inextricable complications. Not only in one and the same State, but in one and the same district, nay, even in the same township, after January 1st, 1863, may be found Africo-Americans, portions of whom are emancipated, the others in bondage. But the stern logic of events will save the illogical, ...
— Diary from March 4, 1861, to November 12, 1862 • Adam Gurowski
... than a hundred yards across, lay a mass of ragged bowlders piled together in inextricable confusion; beyond these a chasm with steam rising from it, whose bottom I could not see—a crack as though the ground had suddenly cooled and split apart. Across the entire surface of this little cliff-bound circular valley it was the same, as though ...
— The Fire People • Ray Cummings
... when even the natural 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 Lee Sing was visited by two persons, bearing between ...
— The Wallet of Kai Lung • Ernest Bramah
... was easy compared with the combing. The boy's mop was such a tangled web, that the comb at first refused to pass through it; and when, encouraged by the Captain, the urchin did at last succeed in rending its masses apart various inextricable bunches came away bodily, and sundry teeth of the comb were left behind. At last, however, it was reduced to something like order, to the immense satisfaction of ...
— Rivers of Ice • R.M. Ballantyne
... bill. Then we borrowed each other's arms and legs in an inextricable tangle and sang "Auld Lang Syne." Then we ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward
... broken up every article of furniture, and with wanton destruction had thrown everything portable out of the windows. Each street was filled with a mass of debris consisting of household effects of every kind, all lying in inextricable confusion one on top of the other, forming barricades—from end to end of a street—many feet high. We entered several of the large houses belonging to the wealthier class of natives, and found every one in the same condition, turned inside ...
— A Narrative Of The Siege Of Delhi - With An Account Of The Mutiny At Ferozepore In 1857 • Charles John Griffiths
... 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 ...
— The History of the Rise, Progress and Accomplishment of the - Abolition of the African Slave-Trade, by the British Parliament (1839) • Thomas Clarkson
... "persons about to marry". Accordingly, putting a strong force upon my inclinations, and by a desperate effort screwing my virtue to the sticking point, I made a pretty speech, clenching, and thanking her for her promise of applying to me to help her out of the first hopelessly inextricable dilemma in which she might find herself involved, and rose with the full intention of leaving ...
— Frank Fairlegh - Scenes From The Life Of A Private Pupil • Frank E. Smedley
... Rock it was; the baulks had gathered about it in an inextricable mass. The shores were dark ...
— The Song Of The Blood-Red Flower • Johannes Linnankoski
... navigable. It is a back-bone thickly set with spines of unequal length, some of them running out at regular distances parallel to each other, but others twisted so strangely that they often run for a long way parallel to the back-bone, or main ridge, and interlace with one another in a maze almost inextricable. And, as if to complete the disorder, in those spots where the spines of the Apennines, being twisted round, run parallel to the sea and to their own central chain, and thus leave an interval of plain between their bases and the Mediterranean, volcanic ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXVIII. February, 1843. Vol. LIII. • Various
... life in Switzerland with the constitutional guarantee that he shall be independent in all things excepting wherein he has inextricable common interests ...
— Direct Legislation by the Citizenship through the Initiative and Referendum • James W. Sullivan
... complicated paths, she could better appreciate the condition of a country which when she saw it from an elevation had seemed to her so charming, but into which it was necessary to penetrate before the dangers and inextricable difficulties of it could be understood. Round each field, and from time immemorial, the peasants have piled mud walls, about six feet high, and prismatic in shape; on the top of which grow chestnuts, oaks and beeches. The walls thus planted are called hedges (Norman ...
— The Chouans • Honore de Balzac
... agreed to all these proceedings. But in fact the Spanish ambassador had opposed them most strenuously at Ratisbon in the name of his king, as well as in that of the Infanta Isabella.[426] He prophesied with accurate foresight new and inextricable embarrassments as the consequence. The Papal Nuncio complained that the resistance of the ambassador weakened the Catholics and emboldened the Protestants. But his remonstrance had no effect on the ...
— A History of England Principally in the Seventeenth Century, Volume I (of 6) • Leopold von Ranke
... said the master, "let it be here then." Observing that his companion seemed to be struggling with an inarticulate gratitude and an apparently inextricable buckskin purse in his pocket, he added quietly, "I'll set you a few copies to commence with," and began to lay out a few unfinished examples of Master Johnny ...
— Cressy • Bret Harte
... our route, and I speedily lost all thought for other wonders in the 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 ...
— Barn and the Pyrenees - A Legendary Tour to the Country of Henri Quatre • Louisa Stuart Costello
... the Atlantic is so broad and deep, ought we not rather to esteem it a beneficent miracle that messages can arrive at all; that a little slip of paper will skim over all these weltering floods, and other inextricable confusions, and come at last, in the hand of the Twopenny Postman, safe to your lurking-place, like green leaf in the bill of Noah's Dove? Let us be grateful for mercies; let us use them while they are granted us. Time was when "they that feared the Lord spake often one to another." ...
— The Correspondence of Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson, - 1834-1872, Vol. I • Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson
... inextricable dilemma was ever an unfortunate man involved!" Such was the tenor of his reflections.—"If we now fall to pieces by disunion, there can be little doubt that the government will take my life as the prime agitator of the insurrection. Or, grant I could stoop to save myself by a hasty submission, ...
— The Black Dwarf • Sir Walter Scott
... animal's chest, the girl's cloak, and the garments of the men, who, on account of the inextricable knotting of the leads which bound the animals one to another, and the three sets of teeth which were snapping and tearing at everything within their reach, found themselves helpless to ...
— Desert Love • Joan Conquest
... which indeed, through the law which makes the material objects about them so large an element in children's lives, it had actually become a part; inward and outward being woven through and through each other into one inextricable texture—half, tint and trace and accident of homely colour and form, from the wood and the bricks; half, mere soul-stuff, floated thither from who knows how far. In the house and garden of his dream he saw a ...
— Miscellaneous Studies: A Series of Essays • Walter Horatio Pater
... which must have weighed hundreds of tons—Krupp guns and gun mountings, twisted almost out of all recognition, masses of machinery ruined beyond redemption, and engines, wagons, rails, and sleepers piled high in inextricable confusion. Many hours, if not days, of unremitting toil would be needed before the line could be reopened for traffic. Thus the main lines of communication of the Germans were severed and a heavy blow struck for the ...
— Two Daring Young Patriots - or, Outwitting the Huns • W. P. Shervill
... the carrying-out of the sentence, the policeman returned to his duties; none too soon; for a furniture van and a butcher's cart, locked in an inextricable embrace, the subject of a sulphurous duet between their respective proprietors, ...
— The Right Stuff - Some Episodes in the Career of a North Briton • Ian Hay
... accordingly in the train of the viceroy Blasco Nunez, and found himself, through the passions of his imprudent leader, entangled, soon after his arrival, in the inextricable meshes of civil discord. In the struggle which ensued, he remained with the Royal Audience; and we find him in Lima, on the approach of Gonzalo Pizarro to that capital, when Zarate was deputed by the judges to wait on the insurgent chief, and require him to disband his troops ...
— History Of The Conquest Of Peru • William Hickling Prescott
... monarchs are curtained with tangled creepers and roped together with serpent-like lianas, stag-horn ferns, and green veils of filmy moss fluttering from every bough. A swampy path through rank grass and rough boulders pierces the dense thickets, matted together with inextricable confusion, teak and tamarind, acacia and bread-fruit, palm and tree-fern losing their own characteristics and merging themselves into concrete form. The appalling stillness and solemnity of the dense jungle appears emphasised by a solitary brown figure, with pipe and betel-box, beneath a thatched ...
— Through the Malay Archipelago • Emily Richings
... cries of itinerant salesmen,—a shriek in their beginning, and dying away into a kind of brazen ringing, all the worse for its confinement between the high houses of the passage along which we have to make our way. Over head an inextricable confusion of rugged shutters, and iron balconies and chimney flues pushed out on brackets to save room, and arched windows with projecting sills of Istrian stone, and gleams of green leaves here and there where a fig-tree branch escapes over a lower wall from some inner cortile, leading ...
— Stones of Venice [introductions] • John Ruskin
... an essential part, carries 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 of deviation, not ...
— The Origin of Species - From 'The Westminster Review', April 1860 • Thomas H. Huxley
... 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
... through with these labors, he turned his attention to the documents placed in his hands by the notary, endeavoring to find out by himself the nature of his revenues. He thought this would be a very easy matter, but he soon found that it was encumbered with inextricable difficulties. ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... the forks where the Sonora road comes in, he reached Tucson a man divided against himself. Divided beyond his will into two selves—one of faith besieged, and one of besieging inimical reason—the inextricable error! ...
— Red Men and White • Owen Wister
... washing ourselves. The Sixth Division is ready, but its help is insufficient. The situation is no clearer than before; we can learn nothing of what is going on. Again we are setting off for wet trenches. Our regiment is mixed up with other regiments in an inextricable fashion. No battalion, no company, knows anything about where the other units of the regiment are to be found. Everything is jumbled under this terrible fire which enfilades from ...
— Kings, Queens And Pawns - An American Woman at the Front • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... of the Psalms, certain portions of Job and of the prophets, there seemed to Hugh to be little in the Old Testament that did not merely hamper and encumber the religion of Christ. What endless and inextricable difficulties arose from trying to harmonise the conception of the Father as preached by Christ, with the conception of the vindictive, wrathful, national, local Deity of the Old Testament. How little countenance did Christ ...
— Beside Still Waters • Arthur Christopher Benson
... 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 understand ...
— Weighed and Wanting • George MacDonald
... court. And charitable persons with the most benevolent tendencies, being consulted on this difficulty, confessed themselves at a loss to suggest a remedy in the case, and declared that it was dangerous to interfere between parents and children; that in so doing one is liable to become involved in inextricable difficulties, since the heads of the family are the best guardians of their children. However, the sorrowful appeal of the dying woman echoed continually in the ears of her whose charitable aid had been implored. She resolved upon a supreme effort to rescue this ...
— The Bay State Monthly, Volume II. No. 2, November, 1884 • Various
... embassies and in times of danger, always carrying with us, however, that love of books which many waters could not quench. For this like a delicious draught sweetened the bitterness of our journeyings and after the perplexing intricacies and troublesome difficulties of causes, and the all but inextricable labyrinths of public affairs afforded us a little breathing space to enjoy a ...
— The Philobiblon of Richard de Bury • Richard de Bury
... 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 ...
— The Downfall • Emile Zola
... despair, he threw himself upon his bed, and passed the remainder of the night in thinking over what he should say to Marie-Anne on the morrow, and in seeking some issue from this inextricable labyrinth. ...
— The Honor of the Name • Emile Gaboriau
... rearing chargers struck each other's breasts, and these bit and tore at each other's manes, while their riders reeled down dead. Frank and Arab were blent in one inextricable mass as the charging squadrons encountered. The outer wings of the tribes were spared the shock, and swept on to meet the bayonets of Zouaves and Turcos as, at their swift foot-gallop, the Enfants Perdus of France threw themselves forward from the darkness. ...
— Under Two Flags • Ouida [Louise de la Ramee]
... asked again and again, in reference to these two solutions, can a man overstep the limits of himself—of his own consciousness? If he can, then says the querist, the reality of the external world is indeed guaranteed; but what an insoluble, inextricable contradiction is here: that a man should overstep the limits of the very nature which is his, just because he cannot overstep it! And if he cannot, then says the same querist, then is the external universe an empty name—a mere unmeaning ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 54, No. 337, November, 1843 • Various
... escape on either side, owing to the height of the banks and the denseness of the undergrowth, they jumped in among the guns and caissons and floundered about until the whole battery was involved in an almost inextricable tangle, which blocked the road for more than an hour. I tried to get around the jam of mules, horses, and cannon by climbing the bank and forcing my way through the jungle; but I was so torn by thorns and pricked by the sharp spines of the Spanish bayonet that I soon gave ...
— Campaigning in Cuba • George Kennan
... was executed with promptitude and success, preserved the Spanish army from total destruction. This line or division of the Araucanians being broken and routed, fell back tumultuously upon the other two divisions, then nearly victorious, and threw them into such inextricable confusion, that being utterly unable to restore his troops to order, after repeated ineffectual efforts, Caupolican was reluctantly constrained to sound a retreat, and yielded the victory to his enemies which he had fondly imagined was already ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 5 • Robert Kerr
... and herein I have avoided that malicious propensity of our numerous tellers of stories, whose only pleasure, as it appears to me, lies in the plunging the heroes and heroines of their tales into inextricable troubles and difficulties, and in continuing them in a state of perplexity beyond the power of human sufferance; and who slur over their unexpected, and generally ill-contrived escape, as a matter of small importance; and ...
— Blackwoods Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 366, April, 1846 • Various
... growth of a few stunted trees; but inland the traveller meets with fields clothed with a rich vegetation, vast pasturages in which here and there rise a few tall shrubs, and forests where giant trees entwined with an inextricable growth of underwood, defy all attempts to ...
— Celebrated Travels and Travellers - Part III. The Great Explorers of the Nineteenth Century • Jules Verne
... were, in the main, true. Was it impossible to prove that they were true, to cross the wise policy of William, to bring disgrace at once on some of the most eminent men of both parties, to throw the whole political world into inextricable confusion? ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 4 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... by his publishers in all his contracts, because his method of work raised this 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 ...
— Honor de Balzac • Albert Keim and Louis Lumet
... 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, through the diamond-paned lattice. And O, what torturing ...
— Charlotte's Inheritance • M. E. Braddon
... Lucianic biography, the very nature of this species of satire throws into doubt; yet they still seem shadowed out from some truths; but the truths who can unravel from the fictions? And thus a narrative is consigned to posterity which involves illustrious characters in an inextricable network of calumny ...
— Calamities and Quarrels of Authors • Isaac D'Israeli
... agape. 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, ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... favourably. For he looked sour, yellow, and discontented as we tramped over the wet stones along by towering warehouses, stacks of chests, and huge buttresses of barrels on one side, and with the great basins of water choked with shipping, all apparently in the most inextricable confusion, till we reached a great loftily masted ship and passed up the sloping gangway ...
— Sail Ho! - A Boy at Sea • George Manville Fenn
... grows tired, 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 in the way ...
— Artist and Public - And Other Essays On Art Subjects • Kenyon Cox
... entire 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 ...
— The Huntress • Hulbert Footner |
