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verb
Sinew  v. t.  (past & past part. sinewed; pres. part. sinewing)  To knit together, or make strong with, or as with, sinews. "Wretches, now stuck up for long tortures... might, if properly treated, serve to sinew the state in time of danger."






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Sinew" Quotes from Famous Books



... marching is this. It goeth diuided into three parts, to wit, the foreward, the maine battell, and the rereward. In the foreward go the 8 Pilots before with a Chaus, which hath foure knaues, and ech knaue carrieth a sinew of a bul, to the end that if occasion requireth, the bastonado may be giuen to such as deserue the same. These knaues cast offendours downe, turning vp the soles of their feete made fast to a staffe, giuing them a perpetuall remembrance for them and the beholders. This Chaus is as the Captaine ...
— The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques, - and Discoveries of The English Nation, Volume 9 - Asia, Part 2 • Richard Hakluyt

... will spare me the pain of presenting, in detail, any more of these horrid cases. I write for YOUNG MEN, the strength—the bone, muscle, sinew, and nerve—of our beloved country. I write for those who,—though some of them may have erred—are glad to be advised, and if they deem the advice good, are anxious to follow it. I write, too, in vain, if it be not for young ...
— The Young Man's Guide • William A. Alcott

... Bathory. Rest, lady, rest! I feel in every sinew A young man's strength returning! Which way went they? The shriek came ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge

... ground, and with the violence of the fall were forced to breathe; in which space the Norman called to mind by all tokens, that this was he whom Saladyne had appointed him to kill; which conjecture made him stretch every limb, and try every sinew, that working his death he might recover the gold which so bountifully was promised him. On the contrary part, Rosader while he breathed was not idle, but still cast his eye upon Rosalynde, who to encourage him with a favor, lent him such an amorous look, as ...
— Rosalynde - or, Euphues' Golden Legacy • Thomas Lodge

... free from some infirmities which were found in empires far more extensive and magnificent. Its effective strength for a desperate struggle was not to be measured merely by the number of square miles or the number of people. In that spare but well-knit and well-exercised body, there was nothing but sinew, and muscle and bone. No public creditors looked for dividends. No distant colonies required defence. No Court, filled with flatterers and mistresses, devoured the pay of fifty battalions. The Prussian army, though far inferior in number to ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 2 • Thomas Babington Macaulay

... mind, so to speak, is more developed in winter; the fleshy, in summer. I should say winter had given the bone and sinew to Literature, ...
— In the Catskills • John Burroughs

... of land, the social haughtiness of the titled classes, the luxury and profligacy of the court—perhaps even at the opening of our story, poor England was hardly worse off. But then came the change. Gradually the bone and sinew of the country sought refuge in emigration. The titled classes, after mortgage upon mortgage of their valueless land, were forced to break their entails to sell their estates. And at last, when the great American Republic, in 1889, cut down the Chinese wall of protection, ...
— The King's Men - A Tale of To-morrow • Robert Grant, John Boyle O'Reilly, J. S. Dale, and John T.

... affectionately at the wiry mass of bone and sinew which went to make the police dog every inch a warrior, and doubted it. The child had finished her task, and started the stew to heating again over the fire, and now she turned, swept back the mass of curls from her heated face ...
— 'Smiles' - A Rose of the Cumberlands • Eliot H. Robinson

... he answered. "Our only chance is to keep her moving; if once the wound stiffens, there's an end. The sinew cannot have been severed, or it would have ...
— Benita, An African Romance • H. Rider Haggard

... enemy, Through Musa's fault, who makes me undergo His cold-bath treatment, spite of frost and snow. Good sooth, the town is filled with spleen, to see Its myrtle-groves attract no company; To find its sulphur-wells, which forced out pain From joint and sinew, treated with disdain By tender chests and heads, now grown so bold, They brave cold water in the depth of cold, And, finding down at Clusium what they want, Or Gabii, say, make that their winter haunt. Yes, I must change my quarters; my good horse Must pass the inns where ...
— The Satires, Epistles, and Art of Poetry • Horace

... South—the source of its production and wealth—was the colored race. Four millions and a half of these unfortunate people were there, slaves and property of the men who refused to submit to the will of the people lawfully expressed through the ballot-box. They were the bone and sinew of the Confederacy, tilling its fields and producing sustenance for its armies, while many of the best men of the North were compelled to abandon Northern fields to shoulder a musket in defense of the Union. ...
— Masterpieces of Negro Eloquence - The Best Speeches Delivered by the Negro from the days of - Slavery to the Present Time • Various

... its deep tones were stern with suppressed feeling; with menace, was it? The child, bewildered, looked from one to the other of his two companions. The Spaniard's eyes burned red in their depths, his glance seemed to pierce marrow and sinew; he sat leaning lightly forward in his chair, alert, possessing himself, ready for any sudden movement on the part of his adversary; for the old man must be his adversary; something deadly must lie between these two. Mr. ...
— Nautilus • Laura E. Richards

... despair? Is that the tribute to a father due? Blood is his due, Melanthon; yes, the blood, The vile, black blood, that fills the tyrant's veins, Would graceful look upon my dagger's point. Come, vengeance, come, shake off the feeble sex, Sinew my arm, and guide it to his heart. And thou, O filial piety, that rul'st My woman's breast, turn to vindictive rage; Assume the port of justice; show mankind Tyrannic guilt hath never dar'd in Syracuse, Beyond ...
— The Grecian Daughter • Arthur Murphy

... that he may have knowledge of the canonical and mathematical theory, and besides be able to tune ballistae, catapultae, and scorpiones to the proper key. For to the right and left in the beams are the holes in the frames through which the strings of twisted sinew are stretched by means of windlasses and bars, and these strings must not be clamped and made fast until they give the same correct note to the ear of the skilled workman. For the arms thrust through those stretched strings must, on being let go, strike their blow together at ...
— Ten Books on Architecture • Vitruvius

... as likes him best, and where he could bring up two fine boys to happier prospects than the parent land will afford them. Could and would America but take from other lands more of the talent, as well as the bone and sinew, she would be rich. ...
— At Home And Abroad - Or, Things And Thoughts In America and Europe • Margaret Fuller Ossoli

... vengeance that comes after lingering years! Ye quenched the voice of my singer?—hark, in your dying ears, The song of the conflagration! Ye left me a widow alone? —Behold, the whole of your race consumes, sinew and bone And torturing flesh together: man, mother, and maid Heaped in a common shambles; and already, borne by the trade, The smoke of your dissolution darkens the ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 14 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson

... the body is an obstacle to delight. Now contemplation causes a lesion of the body; wherefore it is stated (Gen. 32) that after Jacob had said (Gen. 32:30), "'I have seen God face to face' . . . he halted on his foot (Gen. 32:31) . . . because he touched the sinew of his thigh and it shrank" (Gen. 32:32). Therefore seemingly there is ...
— Summa Theologica, Part II-II (Secunda Secundae) • Thomas Aquinas

... to the North. These persons are not among the rich, the voluptuous, the effeminate; nor are they the despised, the indigent, the thriftless—they are men of moderate property, of intelligence, of conscience—in every way the "bone and sinew" ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society

... evil and cruel in her fury of loyalty to that house which begat her beloved Dea. Her eyes glistened as those of a cat waiting to fall upon its prey; her wrinkled hands looked like claws that were ready to tear the very flesh and sinew from the traitor's breast. Her voice, always hoarse and trembling, had risen to a savage shriek which died away as in a passionate outburst of love she threw herself down on the floor beside the couch, and taking Dea's tiny feet between her hands, she covered them with ...
— "Unto Caesar" • Baroness Emmuska Orczy

... half of the least of these. But in lieu of such great estates, we have a pleasing contrast to offer in the vast majority we possess of persons who earn or receive from $1,000 to $1,500 a year, and who are the bone and sinew of our country and the natural republicans of every clime." American newspapers lost no opportunity of ridiculing European royalty. The cost of maintaining the nobility was dwelt upon as a burden on the people. The attempt of George IV. to divorce his Queen furnished a text for many republican sermons. ...
— The United States of America Part I • Ediwn Erle Sparks

... for there is Socrates—a compendium of all the ancient virtues, consistent throughout, and who formed himself in the manner Hawthorne describes. It is true that in a search after rare and exceptional virtues we are apt to lose sight of the more homely kind which form the bone and sinew of human-life. But is not this effort a virtue in itself? Is not all progress in this world accomplished as the frog escaped from the well, by jumping up three feet and falling back two? Is not the very crown of character that which we derive ...
— Sketches from Concord and Appledore • Frank Preston Stearns

... the supernatural past;[1463] and similar explanations are given of the dances of Mexico.[1464] In many cases the restrictions of food and other things are ascribed to the experiences of the ancestors or to the commands of deities: the Hebrew usage of not eating a certain sinew is connected with the story of the struggle between Jacob and a ...
— Introduction to the History of Religions - Handbooks on the History of Religions, Volume IV • Crawford Howell Toy

... of the trumpet's voice. The skins of these were red, and their hair was raven-black. Arms they had, and horses, though rude the one and ill-caparisoned the other. Leather and wood, and flint and sinew served them for material. Ill-armed they were; but as they rode, with naked breasts and painted faces, and tall feathers nodding in their plaited hair, out of the eye of each there shone the soul of the fighting man, the warrior, beloved since ...
— The Singing Mouse Stories • Emerson Hough

... have been the man himself. A thin man, hatchet-faced, with hot, large eyes; a pale man, who looked not to have the sinew he proved ...
— The Forest Lovers • Maurice Hewlett

... religiously turned to the bellying patch of sail. It was heartbreaking toil; he began reluctantly to concede that it could not last much longer. And if he missed the brigantine he would be lost; mortal strength was not enough to stand the unending strain upon every bone, muscle and sinew, required to keep the boat upon her course; though for a time it might cope with and solve the problems presented by each new, malignant billow and each furious, howling squall, the end inevitably must be failure. To struggle on would be but to postpone the certain ...
— The Black Bag • Louis Joseph Vance

... physical part nothing shall be written. Let that be buried with other records of the great plague. Only in this case his mind triumphed for a while over the dissolution of his body. When there was little left of him save bone and sinew, still he found strength to cry out to God for mercy. Yes, and to raise himself and cast what had been arms about the ivory rood and kiss its feet with what had been lips, and in his last death struggle to drag it down and pant out ...
— Red Eve • H. Rider Haggard

... seemed incredible that any creature of man's art could long endure the barbarous mishandling of the seas, kicked as the schooner was from mountain-side to mountain-side, beaten and blown upon and wrenched in every joint and sinew, like a child upon the rack. There was not a plank of her that did not cry aloud for mercy; and as she continued to hold together, I became conscious of a growing sympathy with her endeavours, a growing admiration for her gallant ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 13 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson

... turned the tables on an abusive opponent. One of the Democratic orators was Colonel Dick Taylor, a dapper, but bombastic little man, who rode in his carriage, and dressed richly. But, politically, he boasted of belonging to the Democrats, "the bone and sinew, the hard-fisted yeomanry of the land," and sneered at those "rag barons," those Whig aristocrats, the "silk stocking gentry!" As Abe Lincoln, the leading Whig present, was dressed in Kentucky jeans, coarse boots, a checkered ...
— The Story of Young Abraham Lincoln • Wayne Whipple

... own flesh and blood the foundation of nations. For months it had been pouring steadily into the mountains—always in and never out, a laughing, shouting, singing, blaspheming Horde, every ounce of it toughened sinew and red brawn, except the Straying Angels. One of these sat opposite her, a dark-eyed girl with over-red lips and hollowed cheeks, and she heard the bearded man say something to his companions about "dizzy dolls" and "the little angel in the other seat." This same voice, gruffened ...
— The Hunted Woman • James Oliver Curwood

... the Tertium Quid's horse tried to bolt uphill, being tired with standing so long, and managed to strain a back sinew. ...
— Under the Deodars • Rudyard Kipling

... right knee was much swollen from the strain of a sinew, caused by an unexpected step down a bank taken by my horse when near Hhalhhool, on the road from Jerusalem; consequently, feeling feverish, and with a headache all night, I was not soothed by the camels groaning, ...
— Byeways in Palestine • James Finn

... mortkitelo; kasxi. sick : ("be"—), vomi. siege : siegxo, "be"-, siegxi. sift : kribri. sigh : sopiri, ekgxemi. sight : vidado, vidajxo. sign : signo, subskribi. signal : signalo. silent : silenta. silk : silko. sill : sojlo. silver : argxento. simple : simpla, naiva. since : de kiam, cxar, tial ke. sinew : tendeno. situation : situacio, sido, ofico. size : grandeco, amplekso; for mato; glueto skate : glit'i, -ilo; (fish) rajo. skeleton : skeleto. sketch : skizi. skilful : lerta. skin : hauxto, felo. skirt : jupo. skittles : keglo. skull : kranio. ...
— The Esperanto Teacher - A Simple Course for Non-Grammarians • Helen Fryer

... us be merry! The sundown is near— And Error is shivering And shrinking with fear. Power unmolested For centuries, vested In impotent sinew and imbecile brain, Altars that rested On mummeries ilested, Tatters to ruin ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 5, No. 3, March, 1852 • Various

... the foregoing communication and scores of others of the same purport, and knowing the truth of what the honest producers (who are the very blood and sinew and soul of this Republic) say of their trials and of the wrongs to which they have been mercilessly subjected for years, THE ARENA has decided to share the common lot. With the people we shall stand ...
— The Arena - Volume 18, No. 92, July, 1897 • Various

... doing but brief justice to the pedler to say, that, whatever, in fact, might have been the true character of his commodities, the very choicest of human fabrics could never have resisted the various tests of bone and sinew, tooth and nail, to which they were indiscriminately subjected. Immeasurable was the confusion that followed. All restraints were removed—all hindrances withdrawn, and the tide rushed onward with a most ...
— Guy Rivers: A Tale of Georgia • William Gilmore Simms

... a pound of the fat of smoked beef, and a pound of lean veal, free from skin, vein, or sinew, pound it finely in a mortar with chopped mushrooms, a little minced parsley, salt and pepper, and grated lemon peel, then have ready the crumb of two French rolls soaked in good gravy, press out the moisture, and add the crumb to the meat with three beaten ...
— The Jewish Manual • Judith Cohen Montefiore

... the 45th Psalm to be a prophecy of Queen Magueda's visit to Jerusalem; whither she was attended by a daughter of Hiram, king of Tyre. The Jewish prohibitions against the flesh of unclean animals, are observed by the Abyssinians. The sinew which shrank, and the eating of which was prohibited to the Israelite, is also prohibited in Shoa. The Jewish Sabbath is strictly observed. The Abyssinians are said, by Ludolf, to be the greatest fasters in the world. The Wednesdays and Fridays are fasts; the forty days before Easter ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. 341, March, 1844, Vol. 55 • Various

... is, the place where the Cassowary stood with the signal-gun or, rather, pistol. The shouts and cries became more agitated and violent; there was no doubt about it,—the Stork was ahead! It was in vain that the gallant little Crane strained every sinew; the Stork came into the stand a good three lengths ahead of his adversary. Bang! went the pistol, and the Stork had won. His adherents crowded around him cheering vociferously, and raising him aloft upon their shoulders above ...
— St. Nicholas Magazine for Boys and Girls, Vol. 5, January 1878, No. 3 • Various

... exercise, and can enjoy it at all times of the tide, without the formality of an apparatus — You and I have often plunged together into the Isis; but the sea is a much more noble bath, for health as well as pleasure. You cannot conceive what a flow of spirits it gives, and how it braces every sinew of the human frame. Were I to enumerate half the diseases which are every day cured by sea-bathing, you might justly say you had received a treatise, instead of ...
— The Expedition of Humphry Clinker • Tobias Smollett

... banks of the little stream. He was motionless, yet even in repose he seemed to be the highest type of physical life and energy, taller than the average man, despite the fact that he was yet but a boy in years, and with a frame all bone and sinew. Blue eyes flashed out of a face turned to the brown of leather by a life that knew no roof-tree, and the uncut locks of yellow hair fell down from the fur cap that sat lightly upon ...
— The Riflemen of the Ohio - A Story of the Early Days along "The Beautiful River" • Joseph A. Altsheler

... science of living as John Neal, and fewer still have acted upon them so faithfully. When we last saw him, some ten years since—when he had lived more than half a century—his eye had lost none of its original fire, not a nerve or sinew was unbraced by care, labor, or struggle. He stood before us, a noble specimen of the strong and stalwart growth of a new ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 2, No 3, September, 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various

... consciousness my father was beside me. He had sewed up the wounds with sinew, and had succeeded in stopping the flowing of the blood. How he came there seemed strange to me. He told me all about it when I was better. He had found out that the two uncles, well- armed and on good horses, had discovered my trail and had started after me. He was not long in following, and ...
— Three Boys in the Wild North Land • Egerton Ryerson Young

... flame that saves— The nimble element, the true phlogiston; I see it, and was told of it, moreover, By our discriminate friend himself, no other. Had you been one of the sad average, As he would have it,—meaning, as I take it, The sinew and the solvent of our Island, You'd not be buying beer for this Terpander's Approved and estimated friend Ben Jonson; He'd never foist it as a part of his Contingent entertainment of a townsman While he goes off rehearsing, as he must, If he shall ever be the ...
— The Man Against the Sky • Edwin Arlington Robinson

... nature, which was hardened by the pressure of the external cold and became hair. And God gave hair to the head of man to be a light covering, so that it might not interfere with his perceptions. Nails were formed by combining sinew, skin, and bone, and were made by the creators with a view to the future when, as they knew, women and other animals who would require them would ...
— Timaeus • Plato

... that the churches have not recognized so clearly as they ought the equities of this conflict. It is a grave failure. They ought never to have suffered such an alienation to occur between themselves and the people who constitute the very bone and sinew of our civilization," says a prominent ...
— The Long Day - The Story of a New York Working Girl As Told by Herself • Dorothy Richardson

... and milk. These are distinguished by circular huts with domed or conical roofs; clothing of skin or leather; occasional chipping or extraction of lower incisors; spears as the principal weapons, bows, where found, with a sinew cord, shields of hide or leather; religion, ancestor-worship with belief in the power of the magicians as rain-makers. Though this difference in culture may well be explained on the supposition that the first is the older and more representative of Africa, this theory must not ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia

... all is subservient to the church's welfare, seeing, I say, you know his purpose is such as the scripture speaks, then believe his performance shall be exact accordingly, nothing deficient, no joint, no sinew in all his work of providence, no line in all his book and volume of the creature, but it was written in that ancient book of his eternal counsel, and first fashioned in ...
— The Works of the Rev. Hugh Binning • Hugh Binning

... that it seemed written for Italians. Charles Albert made the mistake of forgetting the age in which he lived. His ancestors fought the stranger without troubling themselves about representative government—why should not he? But his ancestors represented in their own persons the nerve and sinew of the State, its most adventurous spirit, its strongest manhood, whereas Charles Albert represented only the party of reaction which was with him in his absolutism but not in his patriotism. He was accused of having changed sides, but, even allowing his complicity in the movement of ...
— Cavour • Countess Evelyn Martinengo-Cesaresco

... for man and beast, and an agreeable host." He was a shop-keeper of the city of London, of the calm, steady breed that has made successive kings either love them or fearingly hate them,—the bone and the sinew of the great town. ...
— The O'Ruddy - A Romance • Stephen Crane

... Who have given it its place in the respect and the fear of the world? Who, annually, recruit its energies, confirm its progress, and secure its triumph? Who are its characteristic children, the pith, the sinew, the bone, of its prosperity? Who found, and direct, and continue its manifold institutions of mercy and education? Who are, essentially, Americans? Indignant friend, these classes, whoever they may be, ...
— The Potiphar Papers • George William Curtis

... parts of his nature that were deeper than he, going back into the womb of Time. He was mastered by the sheer surging of life, the tidal wave of being, the perfect joy of each separate muscle, joint, and sinew in that it was everything that was not death, that it was aglow and rampant, expressing itself in movement, flying exultantly under the stars and over the face of dead matter that ...
— The Call of the Wild • Jack London

... compound, and cannot be divided into like parts, as the hand cannot be divided into hands, nor the face into faces. All the compound parts also are made up of simple parts—the hand, for example, of flesh and sinew and bone" (Cresswell, ...
— Form and Function - A Contribution to the History of Animal Morphology • E. S. (Edward Stuart) Russell

... every nerve and sinew of him, to do something before it should be too late. He bent forward to her and ...
— Old Crow • Alice Brown

... the children of the so-called middle class, the very bone and sinew of the Republic; here I was monarch of all I surveyed, and untrammeled by the cramming regulations of the public schools, I pursued the delightful avocation of a true educator. E and duco is the etymology ...
— The Gentleman from Everywhere • James Henry Foss

... a silk string; his countenance lofty, masculine, and contemplative; his eye light gray. He was dressed in the clothes of a citizen, and over these a blue surtout of the finest cloth. His weight must have been two hundred and thirty pounds, with no superfluous flesh; all was bone and sinew; and he walked like a soldier. Whoever has seen, in the patent-office at Washington, the dress he wore when resigning his commission as commander-in-chief, in December, 1783, at once perceives how large and magnificent was his ...
— Washington and the American Republic, Vol. 3. • Benson J. Lossing

... turned away, and started to draw a handkerchief from his hip pocket, the New Englander, thinking a revolver was on its way, scrambled to his feet, wildly seized the heavy spirit-bottle, and let fly at Garrison's head. There was whisky, muscle, sinew, and fear ...
— Garrison's Finish - A Romance of the Race-Course • W. B. M. Ferguson

... tangled thicket that you leave behind you. Your eye is on the dusky glistening hide and the stiff erect bristles in front; the shining tusks and foam-flecked chest are your goal, and the wild excitement culminates as you feel your keen steel go straight through muscle, bone, and sinew, and you know that another grisly monster has fallen. As you ease your girths and wipe your heated brow, you feel that few pleasures of the chase come up to the noblest, most thrilling sport of all, ...
— Sport and Work on the Nepaul Frontier - Twelve Years Sporting Reminiscences of an Indigo Planter • James Inglis

... sprang from his horse, and walked among them and round them in delight. He admired and handled their long-handled double axes; their short sea-bows of horn and deer-sinew; their red Danish jerkins; their blue sea-cloaks, fastened on the shoulder with rich brooches; and the gold and silver bracelets on their wrists. He wondered at their long shaggy beards, and still more at the blue patterns with which ...
— Hereward, The Last of the English • Charles Kingsley

... pestiferous pretenders, the Negro masses of the South are honest, well-meaning, industrious, and safe citizens. They are in sympathy with the superior race; they find protection and encouragement with the old slave-holding class; if left alone, they would furnish the bone and sinew of a secure and progressive civilization. To disfranchise this class and leave the degraded whites in possession of the ballot would, as we see the matter, be a ...
— History of Negro Soldiers in the Spanish-American War, and Other Items of Interest • Edward A. Johnson

... the three of them could do, in the rolling, high seas in which the "Restless" pitched like a chip of wood, to get that sail on top of the cabin deck-house. Bit by bit they rigged it in place, working fast, straining muscle and sinew to hold the sail against the gale that strove to carry the canvas overboard. At last, they had it in place, ready ...
— The Motor Boat Club and The Wireless - The Dot, Dash and Dare Cruise • H. Irving Hancock

... admitted by his Fellow-citizens into their ranks, too tender of age for them to bear the sight of him in arms—when this Boy, forgetful or unmindful of the restrictions which had been put upon him, rushed into the field where his Countrymen were engaged in battle, and, fighting with the sinew and courage of an unripe Hero, won a standard from the enemy, and bore his acquisition to the Church, and laid it with his own hands upon the Altar of the Virgin;—surely there was not less to be hoped for his Country from this act, than if the banner, taken from his grasp, had, ...
— The Prose Works of William Wordsworth • William Wordsworth

... How sinew'd soe'er, Seeks the refuge of shelter; The race of the antler They snort and they falter, A-cold in their lair; And the fawns they are wasting Since their ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volumes I-VI. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various

... pretty, and the colours brilliant; the workmanship of the garters was so good that an English merchant at Buenos Ayres maintained they must have been manufactured in England, till he found the tassels had been fastened by split sinew. ...
— The Voyage of the Beagle • Charles Darwin

... gems, and gratitude alone causes them to part with any of these treasures, which, like the mountaineers of Thibet, they regard with mystical reverence. The Navajos wear them as ear-drops, by boring them and attaching them to the ear by means of a deer sinew. Lesser stones are pierced, then strung on sinews and worn as neck-laces. Even the nobler Ute Indians, when stripping the ornaments of turquoise from the ears of the conquered Navajos, value them as sacred treasures, and refuse to part ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - Vol. XI, No. 27, June, 1873 • Various

... softly!" a mahout in his full prime made swift answer. "Truly it is well the young are not permitted to use that untamed strength in speech, which is best governed by the waste of sinew!" ...
— Son of Power • Will Levington Comfort and Zamin Ki Dost

... to recall the honors which have been bestowed on the testudinates from all antiquity. It was the sun-dried and sinew-strung shell of a tortoise that suggested the lyre to Mercury, as he walked by the shore of Nilus. It was on the back of a tortoise that the Indian sage placed his elephant which upheld the world. Under the testudo the Roman ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I., No. 3, January 1858 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various

... of action takes its rise which constitutes social life. The man of sinew contributes action or strength; the man of brain, genius; the man of heart, faith. But," he added sadly, "faith sees only the clouds of the sanctuary; ...
— Louis Lambert • Honore de Balzac

... is made of fine babiche, sinew, cord, or wire, and the loop is hung over a rabbit runway just high enough to catch it round the neck. In its struggles it sets off the spring or tossing-pole, thus usually ending its sufferings. When thus caught the flesh is tender and sweet; but when caught by a leg the flesh is flabby and tasteless, ...
— The Drama of the Forests - Romance and Adventure • Arthur Heming

... writhed about and succeeded in fixing her death-grip upon the victor's lean fore leg. With the last ounce of her strength, the last impulses of her courage and her hate, she clinched her jaws till her teeth met through flesh, sinew and the cracking bone itself. Then her lifeless body went limp, and with a swing of his massive neck the old wolf flung her ...
— The House in the Water - A Book of Animal Stories • Charles G. D. Roberts

... Temperance in importance, I would rank the habit of INDUSTRY. We were evidently made for active occupation. Every joint, sinew, and muscle plainly shows this. A young person who is an idler, a drone, is a pest in society. He is ready to engage in mischief, and to fall into vice, with but little resistance. It is an old saying, that "an idle brain ...
— Golden Steps to Respectability, Usefulness and Happiness • John Mather Austin

... cloud darkened on his face, the light came back on Isabel Raymond's. She took his hand—all fibre and sinew, like an oak-bough—into her slender fingers and pressed it hard. In good truth, a woman at her need could ask no better defender than he who stood by her side then, tall, strong, black-browed, and terrible ...
— Guy Livingstone; - or, 'Thorough' • George A. Lawrence

... Therefore We are not wrong, who seek to keep in mind The form and feature of the mighty dead. So back of all the giving is divined The giver, back of all things done or said The man himself in elemental speech Of flesh and bone and sinew uttered. ...
— More Songs From Vagabondia • Bliss Carman and Richard Hovey

... tiny lineaments encaged the embryo of the world-spanning mind of man. Man's nature, brimful of passions and affections, would have had an home in that little heart, whose swift pulsations hurried towards their close. His small hand's fine mechanism, now flaccid and unbent, would in the growth of sinew and muscle, have achieved works of beauty or of strength. His tender rosy feet would have trod in firm manhood the bowers and glades of earth— these reflections were now of little use: he lay, thought and strength suspended, waiting unresisting the ...
— The Last Man • Mary Shelley

... felt like going far afield just then, even after game, but they had set the snare that Nicholas told the Boy about on that first encounter in the wood. Nicholas, it seemed, had given him a noose made of twisted sinew, and showed how it worked in a running loop. He had illustrated the virtue of this noose when attached to a pole balanced in the crotch of a tree, caught over a horizontal stick by means of a small wooden pin tied to the ...
— The Magnetic North • Elizabeth Robins (C. E. Raimond)

... like pulse beats in the darkness as they met his own steel. As weapon met weapon in clanging song his spirits arose. He wanted to chant to the dainty, cruel rhythm of the tempered strokes. He knew on the instant that he should vanquish these foes. Muscle after muscle, sinew after sinew, thickened and grew lean alternately as thrust followed guard. His body, moving with his arm, seemed following some primitive dance—the orgy of the Sword, the ...
— Trusia - A Princess of Krovitch • Davis Brinton

... has lived in the cattle country knows the Yeager type. He was a brown, lithe man, all sinew, bone and muscle. His manner was easy and indifferent, but out of his hard face cool, quiet eyes judged men ...
— The Pirate of Panama - A Tale of the Fight for Buried Treasure • William MacLeod Raine

... you look back upon the dreams of the years that are past: they glide to the vision in pompous procession; they seem bloated with infancy. They are without sinew or bone. They do not bear the hard touches of ...
— Dream Life - A Fable Of The Seasons • Donald G. Mitchell

... resolv'd to die. With these were Clarus and Thymoetes join'd; Tibris and Castor, both of Lycian kind. From Acmon's hands a rolling stone there came, So large, it half deserv'd a mountain's name: Strong-sinew'd was the youth, and big of bone; His brother Mnestheus could not more have done, Or the great father of th' intrepid son. Some firebrands throw, some flights of arrows send; And some with darts, and some ...
— The Aeneid • Virgil

... used to be burnt in honor of God; and, again, because blood and fat are not nutritious, which is the cause assigned by Rabbi Moses (Doct. Perplex. iii). The reason why they were forbidden to eat the sinews is given in Gen. 32:32, where it is stated that "the children of Israel . . . eat not the sinew . . . because he touched the sinew of" Jacob's "thigh ...
— Summa Theologica, Part I-II (Pars Prima Secundae) - From the Complete American Edition • Saint Thomas Aquinas

... somewhere in the country. He felt a certain lack of dignity in his work. He wanted to deal in something more masculine than lace and ribbons. He read a sentimental article on Iron in the 'Journal of Commerce': how Iron held the world together; how it was nerve and sinew; how it was ductile and malleable and other things that sounded big; how without Iron civilization would stop, and New Zealanders hunt rats among the ruins of London; how anybody who would make two tons of Iron grow where one grew before ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 52, February, 1862 • Various

... of the typical Negro has the testimony of ages to its essential soundness and nobility. Physically, as an active labourer, he is capable of the most protracted exertion under climatic conditions the most exhausting. By the mere strain of his brawn and sinew he has converted waste tracts of earth into fertile regions of agricultural bountifulness. On the scenes of strife he has in his savage state been known to be indomitable save by the stress of irresistible forces, whether of men ...
— West Indian Fables by James Anthony Froude Explained by J. J. Thomas • J. J. (John Jacob) Thomas

... the glen,[10] so that it pierced through flesh and bone and skin [11]and came out by his knee.[11] [12]Thereat Cuchulain became frantic, and he gave a strong tug and[12] drew the spit out from its roots, [13]from sinew and bone, from flesh and from skin.[13] [14]"Go not, Ferbaeth, till thou seest the find I have made." "Throw it then," cried Ferbaeth.[14] And Cuchulain threw the holly-spit over his shoulder after Ferbaeth, ...
— The Ancient Irish Epic Tale Tain Bo Cualnge • Unknown

... and lights it, and passes it around after mine. I can smoke my own pipe in turn, but when the Indian pipe comes around, I am nonplussed. It has a large stem, which has at some time been broken, and now there is a buckskin rag wound around it and tied with sinew, so that the end of the stem is a huge mouthful, exceedingly repulsive. To gain time, I refill it, then engage in very earnest conversation, and, all unawares, I pass it to my neighbor unlighted. I tell the Indians ...
— Mormon Settlement in Arizona • James H. McClintock

... breath: There's no such thing, in nature: a mere term Invented to awe fools. What is my gold The worse, for touching, clothes for being look'd on? Why, this is no more. An old decrepit wretch, That has no sense, no sinew; takes his meat With others' fingers; only knows to gape, When you do scald his gums; a voice; a shadow; And, what ...
— Volpone; Or, The Fox • Ben Jonson

... grills In Hades lay, with many a sigh and groan, Hotly disputing, for each swore his own Were clearly keener than the other's ills. And, truly, each had much to boast of—bone And sinew, muscle, tallow, nerve and skin, Blood in the vein and marrow in the shin, Teeth, eyes and other organs (for the soul Has all of these and even a wagging chin) Blazing and coruscating like a coal! For Lower Sacramento, you remember, Has ...
— Black Beetles in Amber • Ambrose Bierce

... then, Before the king and his chief men, He shews his confident design To combat with the Philistine. Saul with wonder heard the youth, And thus address'd him: "Of a truth, No pow'r thy untried sinew hath To cope with ...
— Books for Children - The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Vol. 3 • Charles and Mary Lamb

... racks the joints; this fires the veins: That every labouring sinew strains; Those in the ...
— Venereal Diseases in New Zealand (1922) • Committee Of The Board Of Health

... from sheer weariness; he could have dropped gladly to the bottom of the boat. Brain as well as sinew has its limitations and the night had been long and trying. He had done work that called for tenseness and mental concentration every moment. He had outlasted divers and many periods when catastrophe might have overwhelmed ...
— A Man and His Money • Frederic Stewart Isham

... promised him that, when the time did come, he should ride by his side, and with that promise he was content to wait, knowing that, at present, his strength would be of but little avail, and that every week added somewhat to his weight and sinew. ...
— A Jacobite Exile - Being the Adventures of a Young Englishman in the Service of Charles the Twelfth of Sweden • G. A. Henty

... head. A boy should always protect a girl, his father had often said, so he was not going to let the beast harm his tiny sister. The panther crouched lower. The watcher in the bushes saw the powerful limbs gathering under the spotted body for the fatal spring. Every muscle and sinew was tense for the last rush and leap, as the ...
— The Jungle Girl • Gordon Casserly

... tearing nails snatching at all she saw; With gaping jaws, that by no means ymay Be satisfied from hunger of her maw, But eats herself as she that hath no law; Gnawing, alas! her carcase all in vain, Where you may count each sinew, bone, and vein. ...
— Specimens with Memoirs of the Less-known British Poets, Complete • George Gilfillan

... I would not have hurt these poor creatures by refusing. The men showed me some curious puzzles with knots on their fingers, and I did what I could in return. The little girls were very expert in a singular but dirty amusement, which consisted in drawing a piece of sinew up their nostrils and producing the end out of their mouths. The elder people were, for the most part, in chase of the tormentors, which swarmed in their head and clothes; and I saw, for the first ...
— Three Voyages for the Discovery of a Northwest Passage from the • Sir William Edward Parry

... would never have taken the trouble to shear Samson's locks. She would have defied him with all his strength untouched on his head, and she would have overcome him too. Judith and Jael were both probably large women. The work they went about demanded a certain strength of muscle and toughness of sinew; but who can say that Jezebel was not a small, freckled, auburn-haired Lady Audley of her time, full of the concentrated fire, the electric force, the passionate recklessness of her type? Regan and Goneril might have been beautiful demons of the same pattern; ...
— Modern Women and What is Said of Them - A Reprint of A Series of Articles in the Saturday Review (1868) • Anonymous

... into the ocean to frighten and drive the beluga into the nets set for that purpose. The "kalimetown" was a far more effective instrument. It was made of seven small ivory balls, each having a string of deer sinew attached, the strings being joined at the end by a feather. On being thrown into a flock of ducks on the wing, any one of the balls striking a bird would act as a pivot for the others to encircle the victim and ...
— Short Sketches from Oldest America • John Driggs

... harp, the wide end consisting of a broad piece of wood over which the string passes, being secured to a straight wooden bar at the back. At the narrow end the bar and string are fixed to an iron ring. The string is made of the sinew of some animal, and this renders the implement objectionable to Hindus, and may account for the Bahnas being Muhammadans. The club or mallet is a wooden implement shaped like a dumb-bell. The bow is suspended from the roof so as to hang just over the pile of loose cotton; and the worker ...
— The Tribes and Castes of the Central Provinces of India - Volume II • R. V. Russell

... oval within and opposite the entrance to the main campus of the great university there is the colossal statue of a master workman. The sculptor has done well. He does not merely show you the physical man—the mass, the strength, of bone and sinew and muscle; he reveals the man within—the big, courageous soul. Strangers often think this statue a personation of the force which in a few brief generations has erected from a wilderness our vast and splendid America. And it is that; but ...
— The Second Generation • David Graham Phillips

... holes, but they like them all the better o' that, for it shows they are owld and must ha' been good to ha' stood it so long. Well, annyway, there was a little boy called Jimmie Watson"—here all eyes were turned on Jimmy, who was sitting on the floor mending his moccasin with a piece of sinew. "There was a little boy called Jimmy Watson who used to carry milk to the lady's back dure, and a girl with black eyes and white teeth all smiley used to take it from him, and put it in a lovely pitcher with birds flying all over it. But one day the ...
— Sowing Seeds in Danny • Nellie L. McClung

... meanings of these words I have no need to translate: they were decidedly significant, and amused us a good deal. For sewing the hides together they used an awl of bone. The thread, which was of the sinew of some animal, was thrust through the awl-holes like a shoemaker's waxed-end, and drawn tight. When they had finished, Kit gave Wutchee (or Wunchee, for the life of me I couldn't tell which) a half-dozen pins from a round ...
— Left on Labrador - or, The cruise of the Schooner-yacht 'Curlew.' as Recorded by 'Wash.' • Charles Asbury Stephens

... her first glance the girl's eyes took in every particular and detail of him. She noted the huge frame, broad, yet lean with the gaunt leanness of health, and endurance, and physical strength. The sinew-corded, bronzed hands that clenched slowly as his glance rested for a moment upon the face of Lapierre. The weather-tanned neck that rose, columnlike, from the open shirt-throat. The well-poised head. The prominent, high-bridged ...
— The Gun-Brand • James B. Hendryx

... warps at a move and with each succeeding line of weft advances one warp giving the surface a twilled effect. It is interesting that the small blocks of design are woven separately something as a tapestry, and later the blocks are sewed together with a thread of sinew from ...
— Aboriginal American Weaving • Mary Lois Kissell

... bustling trolley cars and the ginger-ale and the peanuts and my physical self—all but my own soul—were swallowed up. I saw my Titan brother as he was made—four hundred yards of writhing, liquid sinew, strenuously idle, magnificently worthless, flinging meaningless thunders over the vast arid plain, splendidly empty under sun and stars! I saw him as La Verendrye must have seen him—busy only at the divine business of being a giant. And for a moment behind shut eyes, it seemed very ...
— The River and I • John G. Neihardt

... the perfect union of the French and English minds. Rabelaisian in fecundity, wit, and irrepressible sparkle, he is also of English blood and sinew, wedded to the sweet Sussex weald. History, politics, economics, military topography, poetry, novels, satires, nonsense rhymes—all these we may set aside as the hundred curiosities of an eager mind. (The dons, by the way, say that in his historical work he generalizes too hastily; but was ever ...
— Shandygaff • Christopher Morley

... companion's reins and secures the horse, while the rider springs to the ground with the same agility as a trained circus-rider, and with one dexterous blow of his flashing sword he divides the back sinew of the elephant's hind leg about 16 inches above the heel. The sword cuts to the bone. The elephant that was thundering forward at a headlong speed suddenly halts; the foot dislocates when the great weight of the animal presses upon it ...
— Wild Beasts and their Ways • Sir Samuel W. Baker

... designless loveliness of tree and sunlight brought to shape. Through this beauty Iprayed deepest and longest, and down to this hour. The shape—the divine idea of that shape—the swelling muscle or the dreamy limb, strong sinew or curve of bust, Aphrodite or Hercules, it is the same. That I may have the soul-life, the soul-nature, let divine beauty bring to me divine soul. Swart Nubian, white Greek, delicate Italian, massive Scandinavian, ...
— The Story of My Heart • Richard Jefferies

... trade of western America. Danger made no difference. All that was needed was a boat; and the boat was usually rough-hewn out of the green timbers of Kamchatka. If iron bolts were lacking so far from Europe as the width of two continents, the boat builders used deer sinew, or thongs of walrus hide. Tallow took the place of tar, deerskin the place of hemp, and courage the place of caution. A Siberian merchant then chanced an outfit of supplies for half what the returns might be. The commander—officer or exile—then enlisted sailors among landsmen. ...
— Vikings of the Pacific - The Adventures of the Explorers who Came from the West, Eastward • Agnes C. Laut

... wealthy—immensely wealthy; but the money is in the hands of the few. If we except the province of Servia, feudal lords, and tax collectors, the whole Turkish population consists of peasants, who till the soil on an equality of wretchedness. Yet it is to these same suffering peasants, the bone and sinew of the land, that reformers must look for support. It was the peasantry of Servia, headed by George the Black, that in 1800-1812, rose in rebellion, and whose success infused life and vigor into the more passive provinces. ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol 3 No 3, March 1863 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various

... high cheek bones; her eyes are small and sunken in her head, but the fire has not yet gone out. An old elk skin robe, tattered and torn, is thrown across her shoulders, with its few porcupine quills still hanging by the sinew threads where they were placed a century ago. The last of her race! Yes, long ago her people have become extinct, passed away leaving her to die. But alas, death does not claim her, and she wanders alone until picked up by ...
— The Sheep Eaters • William Alonzo Allen

... Pete Reeve. And, indeed, where guns were the subject of conversation it would have been hard to find a man more thoroughly equipped to pose as an expert than Pete Reeve. That fleshless hand, all speed of motion as it whipped out the gun from the nerve and sinew, became an incredible ghost with the holster and the long, heavy Colt danced and flashed at his fingertips as though it ...
— Bull Hunter • Max Brand

... stop now, it might be hours before he could go on again, and then he would be already weakened by hunger. There was nothing to be done but to keep at it, to strike and strike, with such half- frantic energy as was left in him. Every bone and sinew ached, and his breath came short, while the sweat ran down into his short beard, and fell in ...
— The Heart of Rome • Francis Marion Crawford

... more harshly treated by death and forfeiture; the rebels' heels are bored and thonged under the sinew, as Hector's feet were, and they are then fastened by the thongs to wild bulls, hunted by hounds, till they are dashed to pieces (for which there are classic parallels), or their feet are fastened with thongs to horses driven apart, so that they ...
— The Danish History, Books I-IX • Saxo Grammaticus ("Saxo the Learned")

... grasping his comrade by the throat, and shaking him with a vehemence that Houseman, though a man of great strength and sinew, impotently attempted ...
— Eugene Aram, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton

... the vale of years beneath A grisly troop are seen, The painful family of Death, More hideous than their queen: This racks the joints, this fires the veins, 85 That every labouring sinew strains, Those in the deeper vitals rage: Lo! Poverty, to fill the band, That numbs the soul with icy hand, ...
— Select Poems of Thomas Gray • Thomas Gray

... North-easter, Through the snowstorm hurled, Drives our English hearts of oak Seaward round the world. Come, as came our fathers, Heralded by thee, Conquering from the eastward, Lords by land and sea. Come; and strong within us Stir the Vikings' blood; Bracing brain and sinew; Blow, thou ...
— Lyra Heroica - A Book of Verse for Boys • Various

... Forsythe were stupidly drunk, and was much surprised when, at eight bells, Billings opened the door with his dinner, well cooked and savory. He was not quite sober, but as sober as a drunken man may become who has had every nerve, sinew, and internal organ shocked as by ...
— The Wreck of the Titan - or, Futility • Morgan Robertson

... dull pain was slowly creeping up the muscles of his neck towards his head. All these symptoms the climber knew. The buzzing in his ears would never cease until he could lie down and breathe freely with every muscle relaxed, every sinew slack. The dull ache would creep up until it reached his brain, and then nothing could save him—no strength of will could prevent his fingers from ...
— The Slave Of The Lamp • Henry Seton Merriman

... the "aching void" of her own life, adopted the disowned son of the premier, and called him, with reproachful significance, P'hra Nah Why, "the Lord endures." And her strong friend, Nature, who had already knit together, by nerve and vein and bone and sinew, the father and the child, now came to her aid, and united them by the finer but scarcely weaker ties of habit ...
— The English Governess At The Siamese Court • Anna Harriette Leonowens

... mentioned. At White Earth, however, some of the priests claim an additional shell as characteristic of this advanced degree, and insist that this should be as nearly round as possible, having a perforation through it by which it may be secured with a strand or sinew. In the absence of a rounded white shell a bead may be used as a substitute. On Pl. XI, No. 4, is presented an illustration of the bead (the second-degree m[-i]/gis) presented to me on the occasion of ...
— The Mide'wiwin or "Grand Medicine Society" of the Ojibwa • Walter James Hoffman

... years old, tall and active rather than strong, yet of that hardy conformation of limb and sinew, which promises great strength when the growth shall be complete, and the system confirmed. He was perfectly well made, and, like most men who have that advantage, possessed a grace and natural ease of manner and carriage, which prevented his height from being the distinguished part of his external ...
— The Monastery • Sir Walter Scott

... she had to be a man. She stepped to the broncho's side and mounted to the saddle. Suvy trembled in every sinew of his being. ...
— The Furnace of Gold • Philip Verrill Mighels

... veracious thing in it. Perhaps it is all true. Who can answer? Was there ever a great thing whose origin was not in some doubt? If so with the Iliad, with Platonic Dialogues, with Shakspearian Plays, how naturally so with Chess! The historic sinew of the above would seem to be, that Schatrenschar, the Oriental word for Chess, is the name of a very ancient and learned astronomer of Persia; how much mythologic fat has enveloped said sinew the reader must decide. Philological inquisition ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 32, June, 1860 • Various

... to bed betimes, wornout with hard mental labor: I had hoped for a night's repose to recruit my energies for the morrow. This sleep I craved was no luxurious indulgence of pampered inclination, but my stock in trade—my bone, my sinew, my heart's courage, my mental inspiration, the immediate ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 26, August, 1880 - of Popular Literature and Science • Various

... course as the crowd hung breathless on the even race; ten thousand shouts rang as thrice ten thousand eyes watched the closing contest, as superb a sight as the Shires ever saw; while the two ran together—the gigantic chestnut, with every massive sinew swelled and strained to tension, side by side with the marvelous grace, the shining flanks, and the Arabian-like head of the ...
— Under Two Flags • Ouida [Louise de la Ramee]

... without stint, for three times the men who were fated to live upon it. But the most of it was the kind which built up brawn and sinew, but did ...
— The Son of the Wolf • Jack London

... tendo, to stretch). The white, fibrous cord, or band, by which a muscle is attached to a bone; a sinew. ...
— A Practical Physiology • Albert F. Blaisdell

... times of new philosophies that Art, itself in essence always a discovery, must flourish. Those whose sacred suns and moons are ever in the past, tell us that our Art is going to the dogs; and it is, indeed, true that we are in confusion! The waters are broken, and every nerve and sinew of the artist is strained to discover his own safety. It is an age of stir and change, a season of new wine and old bottles. Yet, assuredly, in spite of breakages and waste, a wine worth the drinking is all the ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy

... fury of a thousand conflicts—and the exultation. For the glory of such moments it is well worth dying. One minute flying through the air—the old catapult tackle—and the next a crashing of bone and sinew. We rolled over, head on, and across the floor. Curses and execrations; the ...
— The Blind Spot • Austin Hall and Homer Eon Flint

... Nearly all the clearing, plowing, and planting was done by Free State men. All manner of irregularities constantly thinned the ranks of volunteers from the South. Kansas, according to Greeley's expressive phrase, "was steadily hardening into the bone and sinew of ...
— A History of the Nineteenth Century, Year by Year - Volume Two (of Three) • Edwin Emerson

... harvest wave, the garden bloom. Hark! loud resounds the bare-armed settler's axe, See where the stealthy panther left his tracks! As fierce, as stealthy creeps the skulking foe With stone-tipped shaft and sinew-corded bow; Soon shall he vanish from his ancient reign, Leave his last cornfield to the coming train, Quit the green margin of the wave he drinks, For haunts that hide the wild-cat and ...
— The Poetical Works of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Complete • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.

... Lightning and thunder send to take my life, I would applaud the wisdom of my fate, Which knew to value me at such a rate, As at my fall to trouble all the sky, Emptying upon me Jove's full armoury. Serve in your sharpest mischiefs; use your rack, Enlarge each joint, and make each sinew crack; Thy soul before was straitened; thank thy doom, To show her virtue she hath larger room. Yet sure if every artery were broke, Thou wouldst find strength for such another stroke. And now I leave thee unto ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. II (of 3) - Edited, With Memoir And Notes, By His Son, The Earl Of Beaconsfield • Isaac D'Israeli

... since, in an edition of 1842; this remark makes no part of the note on the line, "If but a sinew ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 213, November 26, 1853 • Various

... sufferers in other ways. This was the favourite mode of hunting out the enemy, whether in the shape of devil or disease. With the people it was a very common idea. One brave workman of Toulon, who had witnessed Cadiere's sad plight, declared that a bull's sinew was the poor sufferer's ...
— La Sorciere: The Witch of the Middle Ages • Jules Michelet

... he was hungry. It came with a great gnawing need. On the fifth day it was Otah who noticed, and more out of contempt than pity tossed him the remnants of a wild-dog he had brought: the portion was little more than stripped bones and sinew, but Gral accepted without question, crawled to his place on the ledge and ...
— The Beginning • Henry Hasse

... Bridger carried no firearms at all, but bore a short buffalo bow of the Pawnees—double-curved, sinew-backed, made of the resilient bois d'arc, beloved bow wood of all the Plains tribes. A thick sheaf of arrows, newly sharpened, swung in the beaver quiver at his back. Lean, swart, lank of hair, he had small look of the white man left about him as he rode now, guiding his horse with a jaw rope ...
— The Covered Wagon • Emerson Hough

... desperately and tenaciously out of the stuff of his dream, a hope flimsy enough, to be sure, a hope that was cracked and dissipated a dozen times a day, a hope mothered by mockery, but, nevertheless, a hope that would be brawn and sinew ...
— The Beautiful and Damned • F. Scott Fitzgerald

... founding of communities of their own, and the practical realization of their own ideas of social progress. Comparatively few years will pass after the restoration of peace before the West will be peopled by the very bone and sinew of all civilized nations. And these men will come to our shores imbued with the bitterest hatred of monarchical institutions, and an unbounded admiration and love of our own. Hence the new country will be intensely ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 2, August, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various

... of all came Captain Vane's two English-made sledges, heavily-laden with the goods and provisions of the explorers. These latter sledges, although made in England, had been constructed on the principle of the native sledge, namely, with the parts fastened by means of walrus-sinew lashings instead of nails, which last would have snapped like glass in the winter frosts of the Polar regions, besides being incapable of standing the ...
— The Giant of the North - Pokings Round the Pole • R.M. Ballantyne

... this middle class, however, were thrifty and industrious enough. Including as they did in their ranks the hunters and pioneers, the traders and merchants, all the freemen in fact who toiled and worked, they formed the mass of the white population, and furnished the bone and sinew and some of the intellectual power of Virginia. The only professional men were the clergy, for the lawyers were few, and growing to importance only as the Revolution began; while the physicians were still fewer, and as a class of no importance ...
— George Washington, Vol. I • Henry Cabot Lodge

... acorns; and even of this food had so slender a quantity that many died, and the rest wore the appearance of blackened skeletons. All this misery, however, had no effect to abate one jot of their zeal and their undying hatred to the perfidious enemy who was bending every sinew to their destruction. It is melancholy to record that such perfect heroes, from whom force the most disproportioned, nor misery the most absolute, had ever wrung the slightest concession or advantage, were at length entrapped ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey

... as he measured the pent-up power, the destructive possibilities of the whining, snapping, living sea of sinew and fang ahead of them. And they were Josephine's! They were her slaves! What need had she of his protection? What account would be the insignificant automatic at his side in the face of this wild horde that awaited only a word ...
— God's Country—And the Woman • James Oliver Curwood

... his buckskin garments, without his coat, in place of which he wore only a shirt of coarse linen-cheek, fastened at his throat by the sinew of a deer, leaving his red neck and weather-beaten face exposed and bare. It was the first time that he had ever crossed the threshold of a court of justice, and curiosity seemed to be strongly blended with ...
— The Pioneers • James Fenimore Cooper

... instincts. Then she curled up in the chair which Bill had painstakingly constructed for her especial comfort with only ax and knife for tools. She was working up a pair of moccasins after an Indian pattern, and she grew wholly absorbed in the task, drawing stitch after stitch of sinew strongly and neatly into place. The hours flicked past in unseemly haste, so completely was she engrossed. When at length the soreness of her fingers warned her that she had been at work a long time, she looked at ...
— North of Fifty-Three • Bertrand W. Sinclair

... was very pale, but very resolute too. He bade his sister make a snare, for, he informed her, that he meant to catch the sun. She said she had nothing; but after awhile she brought forward a deer's sinew which the father had left, and which she soon made into a string suitable for a noose. The moment she showed it to him he was quite wroth, and told her that would not do, and directed her to find something else. She said she had nothing—nothing ...
— The Indian Fairy Book - From the Original Legends • Cornelius Mathews

... set on her shoulders. The curate sighed deeply, Samayana uttered a strong word in Hindoostanee, and there was a feminine cry of "Shameful!" when the girl, putting down her load, folded her white arms, whose sinew and muscle an athlete might have envied, and, with teeth and smile as faultless as our Elise's, threw us down a "Gruss Gott!" If there ever beamed content and happiness from human face we saw it in that of this peasant beauty, who had no conception of our commiseration. ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, October 1885 • Various

... was physically somewhat degenerate. Athletics had not then come into fashion; Caius was less in stature than might have been expected from such parents; and now, after his years of town life, he had an appearance of being limp in sinew, nor was there the same strong will and alert shrewdness written upon his features. He was a handsome fellow, clear-eyed and intelligent, finer far, in the estimation of his parents, than themselves; but that which rounded out the lines of his figure was ...
— The Mermaid - A Love Tale • Lily Dougall

... queried. "Perhaps not, though the rich men are beginning to buy pictures and beautiful things, too; but in a new country it is the man of sinew and determination, not ...
— The Reason Why • Elinor Glyn

... helped to make the Dominion, and bravely guarded her shores in times of danger, are at least entitled to justice in the matter of receiving due recognition for their services. Emigrants have been assisted into Canada from all parts of Europe and given slices of our public domain, while the bone and sinew of our own people have been "passed by on the other side." This is not right—it is not patriotic, neither is it good public policy. Let justice prevail in all things, and our country will prosper and flourish. One by one the old Veterans of 1866 ...
— Troublous Times in Canada - A History of the Fenian Raids of 1866 and 1870 • John A. Macdonald

... sinew must have been contracted in life. The tendons are pulled down so tightly, that the ring could not be ...
— Rookwood • William Harrison Ainsworth

... the reward offered for the capture of Dragut, but the veteran admiral required no stimulus of this sort to urge him to put forth his utmost endeavours, to strain every nerve and sinew in the chase. All his life he had been fighting the corsairs, mostly with conspicuous success; but what Andrea could never forget—and what his enemies never allowed him to forget even had he been so inclined—was the fact that, at the supreme ...
— Sea-Wolves of the Mediterranean • E. Hamilton Currey

... befouled and degraded court, spread to the government, infected the provinces, sparing neither prince nor peasant, until over the whole fair land of France it crept and hung, a fetid, miasmic effluvia, till the nation, hopeless, weary, despairing, bereft of nerve and sinew, sank under it into ...
— Lorraine - A romance • Robert W. Chambers

... Jesus Christ!" It is useless to say they are merely women, and do not count; they do count. Their influence counts for a very great deal. Theoretically, women in India are nothing where religion is concerned; practically, they are the heart of the Hindu religion, as the men are its sinew and brain. There has never been a convert in that town since that young man was banished from it, ...
— Things as They Are - Mission Work in Southern India • Amy Wilson-Carmichael

... caps of hide, and gold ornaments in their ears. The men also wore a sort of skin cloak, which hung down to their knees, over a close tunic: the legs and feet were bare in both. Their sheep-skin mantles, sewed together with threads of sinew, and rendered soft and pliable by friction, sufficed for a garment by day and a blanket by night. These Bosjesmans exhibited a variety of the customs of their native country. Their whoops were sometimes so loud as to be startling, and they ...
— The Illustrated London Reading Book • Various

... obstacle to the ideas of Jesus came especially from orthodox Judaism, represented by the Pharisees. Jesus became more and more alienated from the ancient Law. Now, the Pharisees were the true Jews; the nerve and sinew of Judaism. Although this party had its centre at Jerusalem, it had adherents either established in Galilee, or who often came there.[1] They were, in general, men of a narrow mind, caring much for externals; ...
— The Life of Jesus • Ernest Renan

... Word of God abideth in you.' Those young Asiatic Christians, that John had in his eye, had learned the secret and the conditions of this strength; and not only in limb and sinew, or in springy and elastic buoyancy of youthful, mental, and spiritual vigour were they strong, but they were so because 'the Word of God abode in them.' Now, there are two significations of that great expression, both of them frequent in John's Gospel, ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ephesians; Epistles of St. Peter and St. John • Alexander Maclaren

... closed upon his late companion. "To think that I should risk my life against a poacher's on even terms! Of course, if they suffice, I shall only treat him to my knuckles; but if not—if he be a giant, or there be more than one of them—then here is a better ally than mere bone and sinew." Yorke took out of a drawer a life-preserver, made of lead and whalebone, struck with it once, to test its weight and elasticity, then slipped it into his shooting-jacket pocket. "That will enlarge their organs of locality," ...
— Bred in the Bone • James Payn



Words linked to "Sinew" :   muscularity, sinewy, muscle system, collagen, musculature, muscle, heftiness, strength, hamstring



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