"Labyrinthine" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... The dimmest personality in those offices was the girl whose name imaged to everyone little more than a pencil, notebook, and typewriting machine. The vividest personality was Frederick Norman. In the list of names upon the outer doors of the firm's vast labyrinthine suite, on the seventeenth floor of the Syndicate Building, his name came last—and, in the newest lettering, suggesting recentness of partnership. In age he was the youngest of the partners. Lockyer was archaic, Sanders an antique; Benchley, actually only about fifty-five, had the air of ...
— The Grain Of Dust - A Novel • David Graham Phillips
... German prose, usually so heavy, so clumsy, so dull, becomes, like clay in the hands of the chemist, compact, metallic, brilliant; it is German in an allotropic condition. No dreary, labyrinthine sentences in which you find "no end in wandering mazes lost;" no chains of adjectives in linked harshness long drawn out; no digressions thrown in as parentheses; but crystalline definiteness and clearness, fine and varied ...
— George Eliot; A Critical Study of Her Life, Writings & Philosophy • George Willis Cooke
... of Phoebe's soprano set the echoes ringing all over the great workroom. In and out among the aisles and labyrinthine passages that wind through towering piles of boxes, from the thundering machinery far over on the other side of the "loft" to the dusky recess of the uttermost ...
— The Long Day - The Story of a New York Working Girl As Told by Herself • Dorothy Richardson
... pleasant interviews with Lady de Burgho, whose territory embraces some sixty thousand acres, and who, during a widowed life of twenty-two years, has borne the stress and strain of Irish estate administration, with its eternal and wearisome chopping and changing of law, its labyrinthine complications, its killing responsibilities. Lady de Burgho is, after all, very far from dead, exhibiting in fact a marvellous vitality, and discoursing of the ins and outs of the various harassing Land Acts, and the astute diplomacy needful to save something from the ...
— Ireland as It Is - And as It Would be Under Home Rule • Robert John Buckley (AKA R.J.B.)
... about to reply, he heard the joyous voice of young Maximilian; it sounded very near. The royal party was approaching. The Baronet expressed her earnest desire to avoid it; and as to advance or to retreat, in these labyrinthine walks, was almost equally hazardous, they retired into one of those green recesses which we have before mentioned; indeed it was the very evergreen grove in the centre of which the Nymph of the Fountain watched for her loved Carian youth. A shower of moonlight fell on the marble statue, and ...
— Vivian Grey • The Earl of Beaconsfield
... judgment neither very surprising nor particularly mortifying, if we think what history in the established conception of it means. How are we to expect workmen to make their way through constitutional antiquities, through the labyrinthine shifts of party intrigue at home, and through the entanglements of intricate diplomacy abroad—'shallow village tales,' as Emerson calls them? These studies are fit enough for professed students of ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 3 of 3) - Essay 1: On Popular Culture • John Morley
... fly on paper wings! From "Greek Heroes" to the Iliad was no day's journey, nor was it altogether pleasant. One could have traveled round the word many times while I trudged my weary way through the labyrinthine mazes of grammars and dictionaries, or fell into those dreadful pitfalls called examinations, set by schools and colleges for the confusion of those who seek after knowledge. I suppose this sort of Pilgrim's Progress was justified ...
— Story of My Life • Helen Keller
... often mentioned in these pages to warrant long description of it here, even if any man who has not lived for years among its labyrinthine passages could describe it accurately. The great descending corridor leads in a wide spiral downwards to the central spot where Hadrian lay, and in the vast thickness of the surrounding foundations there is but stone, again stone and more stone. From the main entrance upwards the ...
— Ave Roma Immortalis, Vol. 2 - Studies from the Chronicles of Rome • Francis Marion Crawford
... up several flights of a rickety staircase, and down some labyrinthine passages to a large room where some forty or fifty men were busy setting up type. At the far end of this room, at a small table, crowded with "proofs," sat a red-faced individual whom the boy pointed out ...
— Reginald Cruden - A Tale of City Life • Talbot Baines Reed
... the gooseberries and currants, was the wilderness of our garden: you came on it by a sudden labyrinthine twist at the end of a narrow alley of yew, and a sudden door in the high wall. My uncle said he liked well to see roses in the kitchen-garden, but not gooseberries in the flower-garden, especially a wild flower-garden. Wherein lies ...
— The Flight of the Shadow • George MacDonald
... of the moral,—that we should never pass judgment on the merits of any person or thing, unless we behold it in the sphere and circumstances to which it is specially adapted. In still another part of the Garden there is a labyrinthine maze, formed of an intricacy of hedge-bordered walks, involving himself in which, a man might wander for hours inextricably within a circuit of only a few yards,—a sad emblem, it seemed to me, of the mental and moral ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 10, Number 60, October 1862 • Various
... quarter is clean, the Christian quarter dirty, and the Jewish simply filthy. I often had to gallop through the last-named holding my handkerchief to my mouth, and the kawwasses running as though they had been pursued by devils. Everywhere in Damascus, but especially in this quarter, the labyrinthine streets are piled with heaps of offal, wild dogs are gorged with carrion, and dead dogs are lying about. One must never judge Damascus, however by externals: every house has a mean aspect in the way of entrance and approach. ...
— The Romance of Isabel Lady Burton Volume II • Isabel Lady Burton & W. H. Wilkins
... great, swaying, four-foot weapon marked the course of a fifteen-foot sawfish. There was water to float the power boat in the channels between the banks, and families of porpoises or dolphins were always ready to serve as pilots and point the path through these labyrinthine waterways. A school of porpoises, rolling in the water and leaping in the air, passed the motor boat as if they had been telephoned for in the greatest haste. Two minutes later, a quarter of a mile away, a great splashing could be seen and huge bodies hurled in ...
— Dick in the Everglades • A. W. Dimock
... life-clouding Rodondo had its full counterpart in the finny hosts which peopled the waters at its base. Below the water-line, the rock seemed one honey-comb of grottoes, affording labyrinthine lurking-places for swarms of fairy fish. All were strange; many exceedingly beautiful; and would have well graced the costliest glass globes in which gold-fish are kept for a show. Nothing was more striking than the complete novelty of many ...
— The Piazza Tales • Herman Melville
... scheme, however magnificent, would have had but small attraction for her or for the schoolroom; but "diamond mines" sounded so like the Arabian Nights that no one could be indifferent. Sara thought them enchanting, and painted pictures, for Ermengarde and Lottie, of labyrinthine passages in the bowels of the earth, where sparkling stones studded the walls and roofs and ceilings, and strange, dark men dug them out with heavy picks. Ermengarde delighted in the story, and Lottie insisted on its being retold to her every evening. Lavinia was very ...
— A Little Princess • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... upon these genial fellow-workers. A woman as straightforward and direct as she has what is known as a single-track mind in such matters. It is your soft and silken mollusc type of woman whose mind pursues a slimy and labyrinthine trail. But it is useless to say that she did not feel something of the intense personal attraction of the man. Often it used to puzzle and annoy her to find that as they sat arguing in the brisk, everyday atmosphere of office or merchandise ...
— Fanny Herself • Edna Ferber
... long dugouts, of grotesquely carved prows and gaudy paint common among Pacific tribes, escorted Vancouver's boats northward the second week in June through the labyrinthine passageways of cypress-grown islets to Burrard Inlet. To Peter Puget was assigned the work of coasting the mainland side and tracing every inlet to its head waters. Johnstone went ahead in a small boat to reconnoitre ...
— Vikings of the Pacific - The Adventures of the Explorers who Came from the West, Eastward • Agnes C. Laut
... mystery yet, and my friend Miss Cormorant, who devours her dozen novels a week for steady diet, and perhaps makes it a baker's dozen at this season of the year, and who loves nothing so well as to be mystified by labyrinthine plots and counterplots—Miss Cormorant is about to part company with me at this point. She doesn't like this plain sailing. Now, I will be honest with you, Miss Cormorant, all the more that I don't care if you do quit. I will tell you plainly ...
— The Mystery of Metropolisville • Edward Eggleston
... she loved this man, and how it all had come about, was a mystery that puzzled her sorely; but she had no labyrinthine heart in which to play hide and seek with her own consciousness. And so vividly conscious was she now of this new and absorbing passion, that she hastily turned her face from her companions toward the cloudy sky, that looked as dark to her as it had to Jennie Burton, ...
— A Face Illumined • E. P. Roe
... of the people, the time-honored stalking-grounds of tale-writers and students of character generally, swell into more imposing proportions. The sea dwindles and the land broadens. Transportation and travel become difficult and hazardous. Merchant and customer, running alike a labyrinthine gauntlet of taxes, tolls and arbitrary exactions by the wolves of schloss and chateau, found it safest to make fewer trips and concentrate their transactions. The great nations, with many secondary trade-tournaments, as they may be termed, had each a principal one. From the great ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. XVII, No. 99, March, 1876 • Various
... then bid a long farewell to "John's," Its stately courts, its wisdom-wooing Dons, Its antique towers, its labyrinthine maze, Its nights of study, and its pleasant days? O learned Synod, whose decree I wait, Whose just decision makes, or mars my fate; If in your gardens I have loved to roam, And found within your courts a second home; If I have loved the elm trees' quivering ...
— Sagittulae, Random Verses • E. W. Bowling
... may be produced by causes which alter the tension of the labyrinthine fluid, such, for example, as the pressure of wax upon the tympanic membrane, or exudation into the middle ear or into the labyrinth. Giddiness occurring in the course of chronic middle-ear suppuration may be significant of labyrinthine ...
— Manual of Surgery Volume Second: Extremities—Head—Neck. Sixth Edition. • Alexander Miles
... secreter Than the isle of Delos. Echo hence shall stir No sighs but sigh-warm kisses, or light noise Of thy combing hand, the while it travelling cloys And trembles through my labyrinthine hair."'—p. 48. ...
— Early Reviews of English Poets • John Louis Haney
... the labyrinthine enchantments of that enchanted land were closing about me—a slender web, grey, almost impalpable, finer than fairy silk, was winding itself about my feet. My eyes were opening to things I had not ...
— The Ninth Vibration And Other Stories • L. Adams Beck
... a dusky passage of the labyrinthine store, a narrow lane running between two barricades ...
— The Rise of David Levinsky • Abraham Cahan
... us spellbound. The giant and dragon warders, indeed, offered no violent resistance, they simply turned into open portals which appeared to yield us egress, but proved entrances to interminable labyrinthine mazes. At last we escaped by resolutely, following the exact opposite track to that which we observed to be taken by a poet, who was chasing a phantom of Fame with a scroll of unintelligible ...
— The Twilight of the Gods, and Other Tales • Richard Garnett
... stream. He was in hopes that on reaching the bank, and following along the water's edge, he might find the continuation of the road at some point where the stream was fordable. After making his way with much labour and loss of time through the labyrinthine tangle of the thicket, he arrived at the bottom of the cascade, just at the moment when Costal and Clara were about entering upon the ceremony of invoking ...
— The Tiger Hunter • Mayne Reid
... passed away. Like the fabulous creations we have read of in the tales of childhood, palaces, temples, boulevards, and theatres have sprung up on the site of the antiquated and labyrinthine city. Under the dynasty of the Napoleons the capital was rebuilt with lavish magnificence. Accustomed to gaze on the splendor of the sun, we seldom advert to its real magnificence in our universe; but ...
— Alvira: the Heroine of Vesuvius • A. J. O'Reilly
... instead of burning their dead; and this is confirmed by the discovery of these sarcophagi. I found the mausoleum to consist of a series of chambers and approaches to them, excavated in the solid tufa rock, not unlike the labyrinthine recesses of the catacombs. The darkness was feebly dispelled by the light of wax tapers carried by the guide and myself; and the aspect of the narrow, low-browed passages and chambers was gloomy in the extreme. ...
— Roman Mosaics - Or, Studies in Rome and Its Neighbourhood • Hugh Macmillan
... was several miles beyond Grindstone Island and was winding its way through a labyrinthine group to the north of Grandview. The scenery here was so enchanting that Cub and his father speedily agreed that the first convenient, unclaimed natural harbor that they discovered ought to be adopted as theirs for ...
— The Radio Boys in the Thousand Islands • J. W. Duffield
... my eyes from time to time, and evoke the dear old haunts from their ruins; to descend once more the perilous steeps of the Rue St. Jacques, and to thread the labyrinthine by-streets that surround the Ecole de Medecine. I see them all so plainly! I look in at the familiar print-shops—I meet many a long-forgotten face—I hear many a long-forgotten voice—I am twenty years of age ...
— In the Days of My Youth • Amelia Ann Blandford Edwards
... fullness; I have fill'd thy lips with power. I have rais'd thee nigher to the Spheres of Heaven, Man's first, last home: and thou with ravish'd sense Listenest the lordly music flowing from Th'illimitable years. I am the Spirit, The permeating life which courseth through All th' intricate and labyrinthine veins Of the great vine of Fable, which, outspread With growth of shadowing leaf and clusters rare, Reacheth to every corner under Heaven, Deep-rooted in the living soil of truth: So that men's hopes and fears take refuge in The fragrance of its complicated ...
— The Early Poems of Alfred Lord Tennyson • Tennyson
... smallest detail is essentially characteristic of Edison, not only in economy of manufacture, but in all his work, no matter of what kind, whether it be experimenting, investigating, testing, or engineering. To follow him through the labyrinthine paths of investigation contained in the great array of laboratory note-books is to become involved in a mass of minutely detailed searches which seek to penetrate the inmost recesses of nature by an ultimate analysis of an infinite variety of parts. As the reader will obtain a fuller ...
— Edison, His Life and Inventions • Frank Lewis Dyer and Thomas Commerford Martin
... losing one's self in the woods; round and round the chimney you go, and if you arrive at all, it is just where you started, and so you begin again, and again get nowhere. Indeed—though I say it not in the way of faultfinding at all—never was there so labyrinthine an abode. Guests will tarry with me several weeks and every now and then, be anew astonished at ...
— I and My Chimney • Herman Melville
... rooms, he tells us, "The apartments that have been brought to light comprise a number of chambers, big and little, placed at different heights. We shall have no clear idea of the relation of these different chambers to one another, or of the mode of access to them through the labyrinthine passages and the numerous stairways, until the whole edifice has ...
— The Prehistoric World - Vanished Races • E. A. Allen
... covered with limestone masses. There had been no frost nor rain to disturb the original rock-piling. Only the agencies of sand and wind had disarranged the distribution on which the builders of the earliest dynasty had looked. And this was weird, mysterious and labyrinthine. ...
— The Yoke - A Romance of the Days when the Lord Redeemed the Children - of Israel from the Bondage of Egypt • Elizabeth Miller
... among the dense undergrowth, but it is a still grander book for the reader to lose himself in. In the dingle, best of all, he can "forget his own troublesome personality as completely as if he were in the depths of the ancient forest along with Gurth and Wamba." Labyrinthine, however, as the autobiography may at first sight appear, the true lover of Borrow will soon have little difficulty in finding the patteran or gypsy trail (for indeed the Romany element runs persistently as ...
— Isopel Berners - The History of certain doings in a Staffordshire Dingle, July, 1825 • George Borrow
... dreamed of Pan or Vevay; Ne'er should into blossom burst At the ball or at the levee; Never come, in fact, MY FIRST: Nor illumine cards by dozens With some labyrinthine text, Nor work smoking-caps for cousins Who ...
— Verses and Translations • C. S. C.
... herself: How is it that a man to whom music is life and the paradise of his heart can allow himself to be so enveloped in sorrow, so beclouded by gloom? She understood the smarting pains in which he composed; she had a vague idea of the labyrinthine complications of his inner fate; these she grasped. But her own soul was filled with joyless compassion; she wished with all her power to plant greater faith and more ...
— The Goose Man • Jacob Wassermann
... from the Porte Saint-Victor to the Porte Saint-Germain. These two great thoroughfares intersected by the two first, formed the canvas upon which reposed, knotted and crowded together on every hand, the labyrinthine network of the streets of Paris. In the incomprehensible plan of these streets, one distinguished likewise, on looking attentively, two clusters of great streets, like magnified sheaves of grain, one in the University, the other in the ...
— Notre-Dame de Paris - The Hunchback of Notre Dame • Victor Hugo
... not. He would sit him down Thinking to work his problems as of old, And find the star he thought so plain a blur, The columned figures labyrinthine wilds Without my comment, blind and senseless scrawls That vexed him with their riddles; he would strive And struggle for a while, and then his eye Would lose its light, and over all his mind The cold gray mist would settle; and erelong ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... think, has rightly been pronounced his greatest poem, for whilst in its wealth of melody, its magnificence of imagery, and its pathos, it is unsurpassed, it reveals also the finest depths of his thought as he takes us "down the labyrinthine ways" of his mind's flight. But next to that I would put The Making of Viola, a poem which no other, except Rossetti or his sister Christina, could ...
— Personality in Literature • Rolfe Arnold Scott-James
... 29, the island of Ceylon disappeared below the horizon, and at a speed of twenty miles per hour, the Nautilus glided into the labyrinthine channels that separate the Maldive and Laccadive Islands. It likewise hugged Kiltan Island, a shore of madreporic origin discovered by Vasco da Gama in 1499 and one of nineteen chief islands in the island group of the Laccadives, located between latitude 10 ...
— 20000 Leagues Under the Seas • Jules Verne
... doubt, eventually receive more ample treatment at the hands of some future historian, Mr. Miller has performed a most useful service in affording a guide by the aid of which the historical student can find his way through the labyrinthine maze of Balkan politics. He begins his story about the time when Napoleon had appeared like a comet in the political firmament, and by his erratic movements had caused all the statesmen of Europe to diverge ...
— Political and Literary essays, 1908-1913 • Evelyn Baring
... the boat, our silent boatman, like a spectral gondolier, rowed us silently along the labyrinthine canals of this dim and ghostly Venice. Vathek Beckford would have made them waterways to the ...
— France and the Republic - A Record of Things Seen and Learned in the French Provinces - During the 'Centennial' Year 1889 • William Henry Hurlbert
... seclusion, and that apparently capricious abstraction of himself from the society not only of his friends, but of his own family, in which he from time to time persisted. He confessed to occasional accesses of an almost irresistible impulse to flee to the labyrinthine shelter of some great city like London or Paris,—there to dwell solitary amid a multitude, buried by day in the cloister-like recesses of mighty libraries, and stealing away by night to some obscure lodging. Long indulgence in seclusion, and in habits of study the most lawless possible ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 8, Slice 2 - "Demijohn" to "Destructor" • Various
... plans and decoration. The arrangement of Aegean palaces is of two main types. First (and perhaps earliest in time), the chambers are grouped round a central court, being engaged one with the other in a labyrinthine complexity, and the greater oblongs are entered from a long side and divided longitudinally by pillars. Second, the main chamber is of what is known as the megaron type, i.e. it stands free, isolated from the rest of the plan by corridors, is entered ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... sea waves, and that ring under the hammer like a brazen bell,—that is her preparation for first stories. She does rusticate sometimes: crumbly sand-stones, with their ripple-marks filled with red mud; dusty lime-stones, which the rains wash into labyrinthine cavities; spongy lavas, which the volcano blast drags hither and thither into ropy coils and bubbling hollows;—these she rusticates, indeed, when she wants to make oyster-shells and magnesia of them; but not when she ...
— The Stones of Venice, Volume I (of 3) • John Ruskin
... not crept as far as Oxford Street; but it was, as now, the familiar thoroughfare of relief from the narrower and noisier Fleet Street and Strand, and the part of it which Milton had chosen was the most convenient. The actual house which he took may be still extant, wedged somewhere in the labyrinthine block between Great Turnstile and Little Turnstile; but one could judge but poorly from present appearances how pleasant may have been its old outlook to the rear. The fine open area of Lincoln's-Inn Fields was then only partly built round, and was ...
— The Life of John Milton Vol. 3 1643-1649 • David Masson
... dissertations, tell you that they have not said just what they would like to say; there is always a subtle, lurking something still unexpressed, which something is the real essence of the matter, and which your penetration is expected to divine. In their writings they are eccentric, vague, labyrinthine, pretentious, transcendental,[35] and frequently ungrammatical. These men, if write they must, should confine themselves to the descriptive; for when they enter the essayist's domain, which they are very prone to do, they write what I will venture ...
— The Verbalist • Thomas Embly Osmun, (AKA Alfred Ayres)
... intricate and pervious tracery resembled delicate sea-weed; the deer were turning up the snow in search of the hidden grass; the white was made intensely dazzling by the sun, and trunks of the trees, rendered more conspicuous by the loss of preponderating foliage, gathered around like the labyrinthine columns of a vast temple; it was impossible not to receive pleasure from the sight of these things. Our children, freed from the bondage of winter, bounded before us; pursuing the deer, or rousing the pheasants and partridges from their coverts. ...
— The Last Man • Mary Shelley
... day, in a winter toward the latter part of the last century, a party of Shawnee Indians crossed from the Kentucky cane-brakes into Ohio. Penetrating its deep, labyrinthine forests, they came upon a double cabin, where dwelt two widows, with several children. These they inhumanly massacred, and burnt their dwellings to the ground. Then, laden with their plunder, they set out on their return ...
— The Riflemen of the Miami • Edward S. Ellis
... leads him to make for the open water. He dashes across the semi-circle of the fishery only to be checked by the line of stakes on its outer edge. The line like a wall he follows, looking for an opening, and may be led insensibly into the labyrinthine circle at its end from which he will hardly escape. If he heads back towards shore where he came in, he is frightened by the shallow water which he disregarded only when in pursuit of his prey. Where was shallow water indeed he may now find dry land for the tide ...
— A Canadian Manor and Its Seigneurs - The Story of a Hundred Years, 1761-1861 • George M. Wrong
... most mellific damsel, your unworthy servitor was erring enchanted in the paradise of your divine idea when that the horrific alarum did wend its fear-begetting course through the labyrinthine corridors of ...
— The Panchronicon • Harold Steele Mackaye
... especially in the fact that the most important thing in the life of woman is the struggle for men.'' This assertion is strengthened by a long series of examples and historical considerations and can serve as a guiding thread in many labyrinthine cases. First of all, it is important to know in many trials whether a woman has already taken up this struggle for men, i. e., whether she has a lover, or wishes to have a lover. If it can be shown that she has suddenly become conceited, ...
— Robin Hood • J. Walker McSpadden
... handsome volutes to the human capital. Better my mother had never borne me.—I am, I think, rather delicately than copiously provided with those conduits; and I feel no disposition to envy the mule for his plenty, or the mole for her exactness, in those ingenious labyrinthine ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Volume 2 • Charles Lamb
... I alone, for WHAT did my soul hunger by night and in labyrinthine paths? And climbed I mountains, WHOM did I ever seek, if not thee, ...
— Thus Spake Zarathustra - A Book for All and None • Friedrich Nietzsche
... stimulated by emulation, I would call for paper and pen, and sacrifice to Apollo hours which it was much more to my taste to employ in worshipping another god whom his cold nature knew only by name. We drank coffee, I paid the bill, and we went about rambling through the labyrinthine alleys ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... approached through a labyrinthine avenue made up of Palms, which on that side of the City seem to be plentiful, and over these palms in extraordinary profusion the vines of the red flowered honeysuckle. You cannot see beyond the wall of green on either side in this winding way, and only as you gaze upward ...
— The Certainty of a Future Life in Mars • L. P. Gratacap
... which flows over a stony bed, and, about a mile above its mouth, falls over a ledge of rocks, thus forming a very pretty cascade. In the neighbourhood, we found a number of specimens of a curious land-shell, a large flat Helix, with a labyrinthine mouth (Anastoma). We learned afterwards that it was a species which had been discovered a few years previously by Dr. Gardner, the botanist, on the upper part ...
— The Naturalist on the River Amazons • Henry Walter Bates
... bare, with their round pebbles sticking out from the partially decomposed surface, like the piled-up skulls in the great underground cemetery of the Parisians. Massy trees, with their green fantastic roots rising high over the scanty soil, and forming many a labyrinthine recess for the frog, the toad, and the newt, stretch forth their gnarled arms athwart the stream. In front of the opening, with but a black deep pool between, there lies a midway bank of huge stones. Of these, not ...
— The Cruise of the Betsey • Hugh Miller
... uneven walls of the more tortuous ancient vaults which give access to these labyrinthine corridors are thousands of casks of wine—some in single rows, others in triple tiers—forming the reserve stock of the establishment. As may be supposed, a powerful vinous odour permeates these vaults, in which the fumes of wine have been accumulating for the best part of a century. After passing ...
— Facts About Champagne and Other Sparkling Wines • Henry Vizetelly
... struggle was spared him, however, by the recognition of a newspaper reporter who took it for granted that the ambassador to Forsland had come to meet the funeral cortege of the marine and who led him through a labyrinthine passage that brought him past the gates and under the ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1915 - And the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... quiet,—quite soundless save for the beating of our hearts. On every side opened red and yellow ways, sunny glades, labyrinthine paths, long aisles, all dim with the blue haze like the cloudy incense in stone cathedrals, but nothing moved in them save the creatures of the forest. Without the hollow there was no sign. The leaves looked undisturbed, or others, drifting down, had hidden any marks there might have been; ...
— To Have and To Hold • Mary Johnston
... standing on an automatic machine, and getting the railway porter to translate from stones into pounds how much she weighed after her visit to Europe. A couple of Oriental servants seemed to have lost themselves in the labyrinthine station, and were wandering round with Oriental indifference. Porters, with hands and faces and uniforms toned down to the universal greyness of things, trundled their hand-lorries to the monotonous calling of "B' your leave, b' your leave"; and variegated specimens of humanity were looking ...
— Impressions of a War Correspondent • George Lynch
... highest order have entered into enmity with the Christian faith, have arraigned it as a curse to man, and have fought against it even upon Christian impulses, (impulses of benignity that could not have had a birth except in Christianity.) All comes from the labyrinthine intricacy in which the social action of Christianity involves itself to the eye of a contemporary. Simplicity the most absolute is reconcilable with intricacy the most elaborate. The weather—how simple would ...
— Theological Essays and Other Papers v1 • Thomas de Quincey
... part of his home to another without a guide. It was so vast and so labyrinthine that he feared he might become lost forever. The dungeon below the chateau, and the moat with its bridges, were the especial delight of these lonely, romantic old chaps. One of the builders of this rare pile was now sleeping peacefully in the sarcophagus beneath ...
— The Man From Brodney's • George Barr McCutcheon
... not miss the way, our driver said, and woe betide us if we did! We seem already to have found the city of rocks, the famous Cite du Diable; so labyrinthine these streets, alleys, and impasses of natural stone, so bewildering the chaos around us. For my own part, I could not discern the vestige of a path, but my more keen-eyed companion assured me that we were on the right track, and her assertion proved to ...
— The Roof of France • Matilda Betham-Edwards
... Ripple like on water's breast: Mother's bosom rests the daughter— Grief the ripple, love the water; And thy brain like wind-harp lies Breathed upon from distant skies, Till, soft-gathering, visions new Grow like vapours in the blue: White forms, flushing hyacinthine, Move in motions labyrinthine; With an airy wishful gait On the counter-motion wait; Sweet restraint and action free Show the law of liberty; Master of the revel still The obedient, perfect will; Hating smallest thing awry, Breathing, breeding harmony; While the ...
— Poetical Works of George MacDonald, Vol. 2 • George MacDonald
... making a light, and so groped our way slowly into the ever-increasing darkness, Tars Tarkas keeping in touch with one wall while I felt along the other, while, to prevent our wandering into diverging branches and becoming separated or lost in some intricate and labyrinthine ...
— The Gods of Mars • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... for them, and it fairly helped him that he was able at moments to say to himself that he mustn't fall below it. At his hotel, alone, by night, or in the course of the few late strolls he was finding time to take through dusky labyrinthine alleys and empty campi, overhung with mouldering palaces, where he paused in disgust at his want of ease and where the sound of a rare footstep on the enclosed pavement was like that of a retarded dancer in a banquet-hall deserted—during these interludes he entertained cold views, ...
— The Wings of the Dove, Volume II • Henry James
... 5. ddal. Labyrinthine, wonderful. From Ddalus, a famous Athenian architect, who designed the labyrinth at Crete in which the ...
— Six Centuries of English Poetry - Tennyson to Chaucer • James Baldwin
... equal height exhibit less grandeur in their upper regions. The most imposing features of Norwegian scenery are its deep valleys, its tremendous gorges with their cataracts, flung like banners from steeps which seem to lean against the very sky, and, most of all, its winding, labyrinthine fjords—valleys of the sea, in which the phenomena of the valleys of the land are repeated. I found no scenery in the Bergenstift of so original and impressive a character as ...
— Northern Travel - Summer and Winter Pictures of Sweden, Denmark and Lapland • Bayard Taylor
... walls fence an abyss of a mile in circumference, and a depth of 450 feet. Here and there in that cold region they perceived patches of perennial snow and along the black walls, the dark entrance to labyrinthine caves fringed with long stalactites of ice. In some of these hollows flames were seen creeping along the cliff as they issued from piles of fir wood to soften the hard rock, while on every part of ...
— The Mines and its Wonders • W.H.G. Kingston
... and its centre was now in Exhibition Road. It shone, pale amber, blue-grey and tenderly spacious and fine under clear autumnal skies, a London of hugely handsome buildings and vistas and distances, a London of gardens and labyrinthine tall museums, of old trees and remote palaces and artificial waters. I lodged near by in West Brompton at a house ...
— Tono Bungay • H. G. Wells
... Robin-a-dale hung back, made protest. "Go!" said his master, whereupon Robin went indeed—not to the awaiting boat, but with a defiant cry end a rush across the sloping sand into the thick wood. The green depths which received him were so labyrinthine, so filled with secret places wherein to hide, that an hour's search might not dislodge him. The sometime Captain of the Cygnet let pass his wilfulness, signed to the boats to push off, awaited in silence the fulfilment of all his commands; then turning, rounded the eastern point of the tiny bay, ...
— Sir Mortimer • Mary Johnston
... your own Edward the Confessor, to the farthest shrine of the opposite Arabian and Indian world, I must show you how the glittering and iridescent dominion of Daedalus prevails; and his ingenuity in division, interposition, and labyrinthine sequence, more widely still. Only this last summer I found the dark red masses of the rough sandstone of Furness Abbey had been fitted by him, with no less pleasure than he had in carving them, into wedged hexagons—reminiscences of the honeycomb ...
— Aratra Pentelici, Seven Lectures on the Elements of Sculpture - Given before the University of Oxford in Michaelmas Term, 1870 • John Ruskin
... footfall there Suffices to upturn to the warm air Half-germinating spices, mere decay Produces richer life, and day by day New pollen on the lily-petal grows, And still more labyrinthine ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... of antiquity, considered as a ruin, is the Thermae of Caracalla. These consist of six enormous chambers, above 200 feet in height, and each enclosing a vast space like that of a field. There are in addition a number of towers and labyrinthine recesses, hidden and woven over by the wild growth of clinging ivy. Never was any desolation more sublime and lovely. The perpendicular wall of ruin is cloven into steep ravines, filled up with flowering shrubs, whose thick twisted roots are knotted in ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Vol. V (of X) - Great Britain and Ireland III • Various
... turn, after we left our basket at the Lodge, we knew not. Labyrinthine walks met us in every direction, leading to bowers and ...
— Harper's Young People, June 1, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... death of the late Earl of Glengyle. That mysterious person was the last representative of a race whose valour, insanity, and violent cunning had made them terrible even among the sinister nobility of their nation in the sixteenth century. None were deeper in that labyrinthine ambition, in chamber within chamber of that palace of lies that was built up ...
— The Innocence of Father Brown • G. K. Chesterton
... Judges is Constructive Crime, a crime which the revengeful, or the purchased judge distils out of an honest or a doubtful deed, in the alembic he has made out of the law broken up and recast by him for that purpose, twisted, drawn out, and coiled up in serpentine and labyrinthine folds. For as the sweet juices of the grape, the peach, the apple, pear, or plumb may be fermented, and then distilled into the most deadly intoxicating draught to madden man and infuriate woman, so by the sophistry of a State's Attorney and a Court Judge, well trained for this work, ...
— The Trial of Theodore Parker • Theodore Parker
... flat, Drinking anew of every odorous breath, Supremely happy in her ignorance Of Time that hastens hourly and of Death Who need not haste. Scatter your fumes, O lime, Loose from each hispid star of citron bloom, Tangled beneath the labyrinthine boughs, Cloud on such stinging cloud of exhalations As reek of youth, fierce life and summer's prime, Though hardly now shall he in that dusk room Savour your sweetness, since the very sprig, Profuse of blossom and of essences, He smells not, who in ...
— Georgian Poetry 1918-19 • Various
... surrounding soil to such a height that the obelisks, the colossi, and the entrance pylon were buried to a depth of 40 feet, while inside the building the level of the native village was 50 feet above the original pavement. Seven months ago the first court contained not only the local mosque, but a labyrinthine maze of mud structures, numbering some thirty dwellings, and eighty strawsheds, besides yards, stables, and pigeon-towers, the whole being intersected by innumerable lanes and passages. Two large mansions—real mansions, spacious and, in Arab ...
— Letters from Egypt • Lucie Duff Gordon
... the dead king's young mate as she cast admiring glances at her lord's successor the call of blood would not be denied. With a farewell glance toward his beloved Korak he turned and followed the she ape into the labyrinthine mazes of the wood. ...
— The Son of Tarzan • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... of Guise had to be killed, the pretty Presidente of Sylvecane abducted, or the cries of little girls brought thither by Lebel smothered, such places were convenient for the purpose. They were labyrinthine chambers, impracticable to a stranger; scenes of abductions; unknown depths, receptacles of mysterious disappearances. In those elegant caverns princes and lords stored their plunder. In such a place the Count de Charolais hid Madame Courchamp, the wife of ...
— The Man Who Laughs • Victor Hugo
... Matthison writes in his "Vaterlndische Besuche,"[16] and in a letter to the Hofrath von Kpken in Magdeburg,[17] dated October 17, 1785. After a sympathetic description of the secluded park, he tells how labyrinthine paths lead to an eminence "where the unprepared stranger is surprised by the sight of a cemetery. On the crosses there one reads beloved names from Yorick's Journey and Tristram Shandy. Father Lorenzo, Eliza, Maria of Moulines, Corporal Trim, Uncle Toby and Yorick ...
— Laurence Sterne in Germany • Harvey Waterman Thayer
... interest, but who loves it with an indescribable awe, which too often withdraws the genial sap of his activity from the columnar trunk, the sheltering leaves, the bright and fragrant flower, and the foodful or medicinal fruitage, to the deep root, ramifying in obscurity and labyrinthine ...
— Confessions of an Inquiring Spirit etc. • by Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... Psychologically to explain this universal capacity for the fine arts in the nation at this epoch, is perhaps impossible. Yet the fact remains, that he who would comprehend the Italians of the Renaissance must study their art, and cling fast to that Ariadne-thread throughout the labyrinthine windings of national character. He must learn to recognise that herein lay the sources of their intellectual strength as well as the secret of their ...
— Renaissance in Italy Vol. 3 - The Fine Arts • John Addington Symonds
... brain in fishes—a fact which seems to indicate great importance for the sense of smell in those forms. Even in the mammals (the hairy, warm-blooded, young-suckling beasts) the size of the olfactory lobes of the brain and of the olfactory nerves, and the labyrinthine chambers of the nose on which the nerves are spread, is very large, as one may see by looking at a mammal's skull divided into right and left halves. And it seems immoderately large to us—to man—because, after all, so far as our conscious lives are ...
— More Science From an Easy Chair • Sir E. Ray (Edwin Ray) Lankester
... Naga, one of the many savage tribes who inhabit the deep rugged labyrinthine glens which wind into the mountains from the rich valley of Brahmapootra, it used to be a common custom to chop off the heads, hands, and feet of people they met with, and then to stick up the severed ...
— The Golden Bough - A study of magic and religion • Sir James George Frazer
... these chanted commands, the four who were executing the figure went through labyrinthine manoeuvers, forward and back, dividing and reuniting. The old clergyman held out his hand to Mrs. Crittenden, laughing as he swung her briskly about. 'Gene bent his great bulk solemnly to swing his own little daughter. Then with neat exactitude, on the stroke of the beat, they were ...
— The Brimming Cup • Dorothy Canfield Fisher
... leaned, looking out into the warm, dead air, over the towers of the city, at the soft-hued, historic hills, at the stately shabby gardens of the palace, or at some sunny, empty, grass-grown court, lost in the heart of the labyrinthine pile. They went sometimes into the chambers painted by Raphael, and of course paid their respects to the Sistine Chapel; but Mary's evident preference was to linger among the statues. Once, when they were standing ...
— Roderick Hudson • Henry James
... blocks how vast the bound To that huge, labyrinthine mass Through which the secret pathways wound, Where emperors, if alarmed, could pass; Yet even there could find, alas! The poignard ...
— Poems • John L. Stoddard
... walked on arm and arm for some distance. They seemed to be walking more for the sake of a little conversation than for any thing else, for they went slowly, and after winding about among the labyrinthine streets for ten or twenty minutes, took their way ...
— Lizzy Glenn - or, The Trials of a Seamstress • T. S. Arthur
... moor, and quaking fen, Or depth of labyrinthine glen; Or into trackless forest set With trees, whose lofty umbrage met; World-wearied Men withdrew of yore; (Penance their trust, and prayer their store;) And in the wilderness were bound To such apartments ...
— Recollections of a Tour Made in Scotland A.D. 1803 • Dorothy Wordsworth
... vanquisht of body, 110 Vainly tossing its horns and goring the wind to no purpose. Thence with abounding praise returned he, guiding his footsteps, Whiles did a fine drawn thread check steps in wander abounding, Lest when issuing forth of the winding maze labyrinthine Baffled become his track by inobservable error. 115 But for what cause should I, from early subject digressing, Tell of the daughter who the face of her sire unseeing, Eke her sister's embrace nor less her mother's endearments, Who in ...
— The Carmina of Caius Valerius Catullus • Caius Valerius Catullus
... never dared explore their obscure and mysterious recesses. They may have ended in the cour des miracles for all we knew—it was nearly fifty years ago—and they may be quite virtuous abodes of poverty to-day; but they seemed to us then strange, labyrinthine abysses of crime and secret dens of infamy, where dreadful deeds were done in the dead of long winter nights. Evidently, to us in those days, whoever should lose himself there would never see daylight again; so we loved to visit them after dark, with our hearts in our mouths, before going ...
— The Martian • George Du Maurier
... snake-like, serpentine; serpent, anguill^, vermiform; vermicular; mazy, tortuous, sinuous, flexuous, anfractuous^, reclivate^, rivulose^, scolecoid^; sigmoid, sigmoidal [Geom.]; spiriferous^, spiroid^; involved, intricate, complicated, perplexed; labyrinth, labyrinthic^, labyrinthian^, labyrinthine; peristaltic; daedalian^; kinky, knotted. wreathy^, frizzly, crepe, buckled; raveled &c (in disorder) 59. spiral, coiled, helical; cochleate, cochleous; screw-shaped; turbinated, turbiniform^. Adv. in and out, round and round; a can of ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... fixed in his memory by the necessity of practicing them—albeit behind the back of Moses—while he had them still fresh in his mind; for he would naturally resort to every human and inhuman device to wile away the dragging decades consumed in tracing the labyrinthine sinuosities of his course in the wilderness. When a man has assurance that he will not be permitted to arrive at the point for which he set out, perceiving that every step forward is a step wasted, he will pretty certainly ...
— The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce, Volume 8 - Epigrams, On With the Dance, Negligible Tales • Ambrose Bierce
... the formality from being carried beyond its just limit. Price, the most judicious of landscape-gardeners, would scarcely have desired to alter arrangements which have quite enough of the varied and the picturesque to satisfy those who do not contend for eternal labyrinthine mazes and perpetually waving lines. There is one straight avenue in front, but the principal carriage-road has just the kind of curve most desirable, sweeping round some fine trees which group themselves for the purpose ...
— Notes of an Overland Journey Through France and Egypt to Bombay • Miss Emma Roberts
... within my privileges, and forthwith the opportunity would be accorded me. I was looking for paper, when there came the order for all of us to move out into the courtyard. With a line of soldiers on either side, we were marched through labyrinthine passages and up three flights of stairs. Here we were divided into two gangs, my gang being led off into a room already nearly filled. We were told that it was our temporary abode, and we were to make the best of it. It was an administrative office of the Belgian Government now ...
— In the Claws of the German Eagle • Albert Rhys Williams
... of the mind, while remaining merely as a curious spectator within them. The narrow steps leading to them are reached through a decorated doorway, and the passage below receives light through a series of gratings. You shortly reach the labyrinthine ways, totally excluded from external light and air, and enter one after another confined dungeons, little more than six feet square, cased with oak to deaden sounds, and to increase the difficulty of attempted escape. To make these narrow places ...
— Rambles of an Archaeologist Among Old Books and in Old Places • Frederick William Fairholt
... time had looked deep into the ungauged reservoir of Mr. Casaubon's mind, seeing reflected there in vague labyrinthine extension every quality she herself brought; had opened much of her own experience to him, and had understood from him the scope of his great work, also of attractively labyrinthine extent. For he had been as instructive as Milton's "affable archangel;" and with something ...
— Middlemarch • George Eliot
... in poverty, dodging creditors through the labyrinthine gloom of the town. Chronic embarrassment was caused by Shelley's extravagant credulity. His love of the astonishing, his readiness to believe merely because a thing was impossible, made him the prey of every impostor. ...
— Shelley • Sydney Waterlow |
