"Web" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... the Czar's, with its feeble-willed autocrat, its insubordinate grand dukes, its rival ministers pulling different ways, and its greedy officials whose country was their pocket, had been silently and steadily enfolded in the invisible web of ...
— The International Spy - Being the Secret History of the Russo-Japanese War • Allen Upward
... on form and quality, developing a web of purpose not unlike that involved in a strain of solemn music, and at the last the author's attention was directed towards eliminating minute inharmonies or to the insertion of cacophony with design to make the andante passages the more enthrallingly ...
— The Light of the Star - A Novel • Hamlin Garland
... the rainbow is his bow; his skirt sparkles with fire, his stockings are blue and his shoes crimson- coloured. The daughters of the Sun and Moon sit on the scarlet rims of the clouds and weave the rays of light into a gleaming web. Untar presides over fogs and mists, and passes them through a silver sieve before sending them to the earth. Ahto, the wave-god, lives with 'his cold and cruel-hearted spouse,' Wellamo, at the bottom of the ...
— Reviews • Oscar Wilde
... All this spying and watching, he said, had as it were spun a net about his feet so that he was trapped and powerless to escape; he felt like a fly that had blundered into the intricacies of a great web; he was caught, imprisoned, and could not get away. It was a distressing sensation. A numbness had crept over his will till it had become almost incapable of decision. The mere thought of vigorous action—action towards escape—began to terrify him. All the currents of his life ...
— Three John Silence Stories • Algernon Blackwood
... one man who would have promoted her nearly vanished scheme, and this work she trusted to offer for a vestment to be used at his burial Mass. Many a cherished plan was resigned, many an act of self-negation uttered, as she bent over the dainty web; many an entreaty breathed, that her moment's wandering of fancy might not be reckoned against her, but that she might be aided to keep the promise of her infancy, and devote herself undivided to the direct service of God and of His poor, be it in ...
— The Caged Lion • Charlotte M. Yonge
... great adventure, for the spirit of which he had so diligently been searching. "Up-along" life was an affair of measured rules and things foreseen. "Down-along" it was a game of unending surprises and a gossamer web shot with the golden light of romance. High-falutin perhaps, but to Harry, as he sat before the fire with the strange dog and those ten wild men, words and pictures came too speedily to admit of a sense of ...
— The Wooden Horse • Hugh Walpole
... were obliged to penetrate, by untrodden paths, through the woods; a task presenting difficulties of which a European can scarcely form an idea. We dismounted from our mules, and my guide threw back, on either side, the low-hanging branches, and cut through the thick web of creepers; while, one moment, we were obliged to climb over broken trunks, or squeeze ourselves between others, at the next we sank knee-deep among endless parasitical plants. I began almost to despair ...
— A Woman's Journey Round the World • Ida Pfeiffer
... legislation they have fenced them around with checks to guard against the effects of hasty action, of error, of combination, and of possible corruption. Error, selfishness, and faction have often sought to rend asunder this web of checks and subject the Government to the control of fanatic and sinister influences, but these efforts have only satisfied the people of the wisdom of the checks which they have imposed and of the necessity of preserving ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents: Polk - Section 3 (of 3) of Volume 4: James Knox Polk • Compiled by James D. Richardson
... spider, the Agelena labyrinthica, has been studied by Lecaillon ("Les Instincts et les Psychismes des Araignees," Revue Scientifique, Sept. 15, 1906.) The male enters the female's web and may be found there about the middle of July. When courtship has begun it is not interrupted by the closest observation, even under the magnifying glass. At first it is the male which seeks to couple and he pursues the female over her ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 3 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... cohabitation with the clergy was forbidden of old, from which we have always taught our nurslings to flee more than from the asp and the cockatrice; wherefore she, always jealous of the love of us, and never to be appeased, at length seeing us in some corner protected only by the web of some dead spider, with a frown abuses and reviles us with bitter words, declaring us alone of all the furniture in the house to be unnecessary, and complaining that we are useless for any household purpose, and advises that we should ...
— The Philobiblon of Richard de Bury • Richard de Bury
... of the "tinsel and splendid patchwork" of Collins, "mixed with the solid, sterling ore of his genius," he speaks of a base material not to be found there. In Collins there is no tinsel or patchwork, one of his excellencies is, that the whole of every piece is of one web; there are no joinings or meaner threads. There is no height to which Collins might not have risen, had he lived long, had his mind continued sound, and had he persevered in exercising his genius. Campbell remarks that, at the same age, Milton had written nothing ...
— The Poetical Works of William Collins - With a Memoir • William Collins
... and on the way I met a man whom I had encountered some days previously, and from whom rumours had sprung as though he wove them from his entrails, as a spider weaves his web. He was no less provided on this occasion, and it was curious to listen to his tale of English defeats on every front. He announced the invasion of England in six different quarters, the total destruction of the English fleet, and the landing ...
— The Insurrection in Dublin • James Stephens
... you by and by. But first I will tell you what it is. It is spider-web—of a particular kind. My pigeons bring it me from over the great sea. There is only one forest where the spiders live who make this particular kind—the finest and strongest of any. I have nearly finished my present job. What is on the rock now will be enough. I have a week's work ...
— The Princess and the Goblin • George MacDonald
... well-mended rents, and with stains of carnage. "Behold it!" cries the idolater. "It is absolutely faultless in perfection and beauty! There is not a blemish on its folds, there is not an imperfection in its web; every thread in warp and woof is flawless; every seam is absolutely straight; every star is geometrically accurate; every proportion is exact; the man who denies it is ...
— Who Wrote the Bible? • Washington Gladden
... haire, that with such diligence was vsde To be kemb'd vp & did like clowdes appeare; Where many spangles, star-like were infus'd, To attend the lustre of so bright a haire, Whose beames like bright Arachnes web c[o]posed Taught Pallas a new enuie, now vnlosed, hiding her face, yet making it seeme rarer, as blazing Commets ...
— Seven Minor Epics of the English Renaissance (1596-1624) • Dunstan Gale
... tell the whole world about his victory, but instead he flew straight into a spider's web. And there, he who had defeated the King of beasts came to a miserable end, the ...
— The AEsop for Children - With pictures by Milo Winter • AEsop
... see the bait than it pounced down and seized it in its mouth, when a sharp tug secured the hook in its bill, and it was rapidly drawn on board. Several stormy petrels, which the sailors call "Mother Carey's chickens," were also captured. They are among the smallest of the web-footed birds, being only about six inches in length. Most of the body is black, glossed with bluish reflections; their tails are of a sooty-brown intermingled with white. In their mode of flight, Walter remarked that they resembled swallows: rapidly ...
— The South Sea Whaler • W.H.G. Kingston
... day proved one of trial to patience and muscle. The narrow watercourses, which like a spider's web penetrate the marshes with numerous small sheets of water, made travelling a most difficult task. At times I was lost, again my canoe was lodged upon oyster-beds in the shallow ponds of water, the mud bottoms of which ...
— Voyage of The Paper Canoe • N. H. Bishop
... the embroidery of conversation, but it should not be the web. 2. It is called so, but it is improperly called so. 3. Was Cabot the discoverer of America, or was he not the discoverer of America? 4. William the Silent has been likened to Washington, and he has justly been likened to him. 5. It was his address that pleased me, and ...
— Higher Lessons in English • Alonzo Reed and Brainerd Kellogg
... that morning, when their hearts were full and their heads light with the heady wine of Spring, that before three months had sped, they would feel the strands of the mighty web of nations tighten about them; that they would see the beginning of the greatest war the world has ever known? Perhaps it was just as well that they were not gifted with prophecy, for the grim shadow of war that hung menacingly over all Europe would have darkened this ...
— Lucile Triumphant • Elizabeth M. Duffield
... to enmesh any man's fancy," he spoke as to himself, "whose golden hair is a web to draw lovers like the fleece of old; whose eyes like the sunny heavens tempt them to bask ...
— Half A Chance • Frederic S. Isham
... it, didn't he? He's got to pay the piper, hasn't he? Women don't know anything about the awful struggles and temptations of the rotten business world. He didn't do it because he wanted to, you can bet your life on that. He's just another poor victim of a vicious system. A fly in the same old web; same old fat spider in the middle!. Not capital enough. Hard times and the little man goes under, no matter if he's a darn sight better fellow than the bloated ...
— The Sisters-In-Law • Gertrude Atherton
... end! It was the end of his little personal battle with the world, the end of judging and striving, the end of revolt. He should live on, strangely enough, into many years, but not as they had tried to live in self-made isolation. He should return to that web of life from which they had striven to extricate themselves. She bade him go back to that fretwork, unsolvable world of little and great, of domineering and incompetent wills, of the powerful rich struggling blindly to dominate and the weak poor ...
— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick
... had dreamed when a child, that had haunted her girlhood, that had abided since then. It was the dream of a dream she had dreamed without daring to believe in its truth. Now, from the core of the web that is spun by the spiderous fates, out it had sprung. There, before her eyes, within her grasp was that miracle, a rainbow solidified, vapour made tangible, a dream no longer a dream but a palette ...
— The Paliser case • Edgar Saltus
... called my life was a garment about my feet, For the web of the years was rent with the throe of a yearning strong. With a sweep as of winds in heaven, with a rush as of flames that meet, The Flesh and the Spirit clasped; and I cried, ...
— Ride to the Lady • Helen Gray Cone
... little thing, It groweth for the poor, And many a peasant blesseth it Beside his cottage door. He thinketh how those slender stems That shimmer in the sun Are rich for him in web and woof And shortly shall be spun. He thinketh how those tender flowers Of seed will yield him store, And sees in thought his next year's crop Blue shining ...
— The Posy Ring - A Book of Verse for Children • Various
... pointed to the west, and Kirk saw below him an impressive array of pyramidal steel towers, from the pinnacles of which stretched a spider's web of cables. Beneath this, he had a glimpse of some great activity, but his view was quickly cut off as the motor-car rumbled into a modern ...
— The Ne'er-Do-Well • Rex Beach
... quarrel. The gnat retires with verdant laurel. Now rings his trumpet clang, As at the charge it rang. But while his triumph note he blows, Straight on our valiant conqueror goes A spider's ambuscade to meet, And make its web ...
— The Fables of La Fontaine - A New Edition, With Notes • Jean de La Fontaine
... who drank, of her scandalous brother, of Lord William Bentley her friend, member of Parliament for the division, they had their own Odyssey enacting itself, Penelope and Ulysses before them, and Circe and the swine and the endless web. ...
— The Rainbow • D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
... buttoned his coat. He was looking about the office, at the mud-tracked floor and the coated windows, and at the hanging shreds of spider web in the corners and ...
— Calumet 'K' • Samuel Merwin
... same air, she's thought him a Moses in the Wilderness, and us nothing but the sticks. Think of her believing in that jelly pulp, that steel engraving in a Family Bible! No, I mean to open her eyes, and get her out of his spider's web." ...
— Fran • John Breckenridge Ellis
... not suggest age; one did not think of her as an old woman. Her slight figure still retained its grace, and though a small woman, she suggested a tall one; and the moment she spoke there was the voice which drew you like silk and entangled you as in a soft winding web. Evelyn smiled a little as she listened, for she was thinking how the Reverend Mother as a young woman must have swayed men. Presumably at one time it had pleased her to sway men's passion, or at least it pleased Evelyn's imagination to think it had. Not that she thought the Reverend Mother ...
— Evelyn Innes • George Moore
... whose precipices are thickly planted at every foothold with olive, Indian fig, and aloe. The valley, as it spread below our gaze, appeared one huge carpet of heavy-fruited orange-trees, save where at times a rent in the web left visible the bluish blades of wheat, or the intense ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 6, No. 34, August, 1860 • Various
... the Difference of the chief Scenes, and the Variety of the several Deaths, all the natural Consequences of the several Lives, and productive of the designed noble Moral in Clarissa; and I think it may be fairly and impartially said, The Web is wove so strongly, every Part so much depending on and assisting each other, that to divide any of them, would be to ...
— Remarks on Clarissa (1749) • Sarah Fielding
... eye to the telescope, and saw the glowing surface of the disc resolved into a marvellous web of shining patches on a dimmer background, and in the midst a large blotch which reminded me of a quarry hole as delineated on the plan of ...
— A Trip to Venus • John Munro
... seemed to me as if I had then an understanding of heaven, and I burst into tears. Ah! the meaning of these I have learned since then. Many such, and many far more painful, tears of longing, have fallen upon the dark web of my life. ...
— The Home • Fredrika Bremer
... life had ever before known,—tears of shame and indignation and grief. It was true that the thought which Mrs. Simm had suggested had never crossed her mind before; yet it is no less true, that, all-unconsciously, she had been weaving a golden web, whose threads, though too fine and delicate even for herself to perceive, were yet strong enough to entangle her life in their meshes. A secret chamber, far removed from the noise and din of the world,—a chamber whose soft and rose-tinted light threw its radiance over her whole ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 30, April, 1860 • Various
... webs of the little spiders in the road, when saturated with moisture, as they were from the early fog this morning, exhibit prismatic tints. Every thread of the web was strung with minute spherules of moisture, and they displayed all the tints of the rainbow. In each of them I saw one abutment of a tiny rainbow. When I stepped a pace or two to the other side, ...
— Under the Maples • John Burroughs
... kinds of tissue—light meat on the breast and dark meat on the other parts of the body. In the second class are included those fowls which swim, such as ducks and geese. These are characterized by web feet and long thick bills, and their meat is more nearly the same color over the entire body. The third class is comprised of birds that belong to the family of doves. Pigeons, which are called squabs when used as food, are the only domesticated birds of this class. They stand between ...
— Woman's Institute Library of Cookery, Vol. 3 - Volume 3: Soup; Meat; Poultry and Game; Fish and Shell Fish • Woman's Institute of Domestic Arts and Sciences
... they get, having deeper grounds to feed in; and sometimes in the summer months, when mother could spare me off the farm, I came down here, with Annie to help (because it was so lonely), and caught well-nigh a basketful of little trout and minnows, with a hook and a bit of worm on it, or a fern-web, or a blow-fly, hung from a hazel pulse-stick. For of all the things I learned at Blundell's, only two abode with me, and one of these was the knack of fishing, and the other the art of swimming. And indeed they have a very rude manner of teaching children to swim there; for the ...
— Lorna Doone - A Romance of Exmoor • R. D. Blackmore
... better humor. He supervised with determination, and seemed to know how to calculate the exact effect of everything. Breboeuf was marvellously transformed into a little flying spider, running backwards and forwards strengthening Haviland's web. The Honorable seemed to act slowly, but really with deliberation and effect, remarking neglected points, and himself seeing that certain "weak ones" were brought to the right side of the poll. The schoolmaster ...
— The Young Seigneur - Or, Nation-Making • Wilfrid Chateauclair
... under a tree like a man in a doze. I was not dozing, however, for the flowers and the verdure about me, and the birds that piped overhead, and the booming bees, and the strong sunlight on the grass, and the glimpses of blue sky through the branches, were all busying themselves for me in weaving the web of the poem I wanted to carry home ...
— The God of Love • Justin Huntly McCarthy
... immature plumage, it may be as well to notice a distinction between the Hen Harrier and Montagu's Harrier, which has been pointed out by Mr. Howard Saunders, and which holds good in all ages and in both sexes. This distinction is, that in the Hen Harrier the outer web of the fifth primary is notched, whereas in Montagu's Harrier it is plain, or, in other words, the Hen Harrier has the exterior web of the primaries, up to and including the fifth, notched, and in Montagu's Harrier this is only the case as far as the fourth.[7] ...
— Birds of Guernsey (1879) • Cecil Smith
... "'Look at that spider's-web, where that big fly is buzzing loud enough to deafen me! Look at the sweepings scattered under the bed! Look at the dust on the window-panes, so thick that I can ...
— Honor de Balzac • Albert Keim and Louis Lumet
... "As I sate on the rocks, I have thought over that completely, And I bought four pairs of worsted socks Which fit my web-feet neatly ...
— Nonsense Drolleries - The Owl & The Pussy-Cat—The Duck & The Kangaroo. • Edward Lear
... be awfully deeply interested in nothing, a spider's web in the corner behind the barrel, and the citizen scowling after him and the old dog at his feet looking up to know who ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce
... have made a steel bow, as described in the annexed plate, which receives the head longitudinally from the forehead to the occiput; having a fork furnished with a web to sustain the chin, and another to sustain the occiput. The summit of the bow is fixed by a swivel to the board going behind the head of the bed above the pillow. The bed is to be inclined from the head to the feet about twelve or sixteen inches. Hence the patient would be constantly sliding ...
— Zoonomia, Vol. II - Or, the Laws of Organic Life • Erasmus Darwin
... spirals of silk-covered copper wire suspended separately, spider-web fashion, in wooden frames marked respectively A and B. The one marked A is so connected that reversals at any desired speed per minute from a battery of one or more cells can be passed through it. The one marked B is so connected to the galvanometer and a reverser as to show the deflection caused ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 417 • Various
... first their inconsistency, afterwards, by the skill of the writer, turns out to be their good keeping. The great masters excel in nothing so much as in this very particular. They challenge astonishment at the tangled web of some character, and then raise admiration still greater at their satisfactory unraveling of it; in this way throwing open, sometimes to the understanding even of school misses, the last complications of that spirit which is affirmed by its Creator to be fearfully ...
— The Confidence-Man • Herman Melville
... sick room Zora lay on the little white bed. The net and web of endless things had been crawling and creeping around her; she had struggled in dumb, speechless terror against some mighty grasping that strove for her life, with gnarled and creeping fingers; but now at last, weakly, she opened ...
— The Quest of the Silver Fleece - A Novel • W. E. B. Du Bois
... "Imagine," he cries, "a solid tentorium or canopy over London, what a mass of smoke would then stick to it! This fuliginous crust now comes down every night on the streets, on our houses, the waters, and is taken into our bodies. On the water it leaves a thin web or pellicle of dust dancing upon the surface of it, as those who bath in the Thames discern, and bring home on their bodies." Evelyn has detailed the gradual destruction it effects on every article of ornament ...
— Literary Character of Men of Genius - Drawn from Their Own Feelings and Confessions • Isaac D'Israeli
... of these adventures impelled by love and hate, and all other passions and purposes with which men are endowed, all woven into a complex tissue with their doings in carrying out the operations of nature, constitutes the web ...
— Sketch of the Mythology of the North American Indians • John Wesley Powell
... said to the animal presently, "it looks more like a swim than a waltz quadrille, and neither of us built web-footed." ...
— The Furnace of Gold • Philip Verrill Mighels
... overshadowed, her almost superseded companion. But Adam Verver profited indeed at this time, even with his daughter, by his so marked peculiarity of seeming on no occasion to have an attitude; and so long as they were in the room together she felt him still simply weave his web and play out his long fine cord, knew herself in presence of this tacit process very much as she had known herself at Fawns. He had a way, the dear man, wherever he was, of moving about the room, noiselessly, to see what it might contain; and his manner of now ...
— The Golden Bowl • Henry James
... when heartless hands Sweep all that hard-earned web away; Destroy its pearled and glittering bands, And leave ...
— Books and Habits from the Lectures of Lafcadio Hearn • Lafcadio Hearn
... time was when we knew you not: Yet e'en then fresh was the winter, and the summer sun was hot, And the wood-meats stayed our hunger, and the water quenched our thirst, Ere the good and the evil wedded and begat the best and the worst. And how if today I undo it, that work of your fashioning, If the web of the world run backward, and the high heavens lack a King? —Woe's me! for your ancient mastery shall help you at your need: If ye fill up the gulf of my longing and my empty heart of greed, And slake the flame ye have quickened, then may ye go your ways And get ye back to your kingship and ...
— The Story of Sigurd the Volsung and the Fall of the Niblungs • William Morris
... He was quite irresistible. Trite anecdotes were sandwiched between aphorisms of the copybook; and whether anecdote or aphorism, all was delivered with the air of a man surprised by his own profundity. If you waited long enough, you had no longer the will power to run away, you sat caught in a web of sheer dulness. Only those, however, who did not know him waited long enough; the rest of his fellow-members at his appearance ...
— The Four Feathers • A. E. W. Mason
... together. The question was not now with him, What can I represent? but, How high can I build—how wonderfully can I hang this arch in air, or weave this tracery across the clouds? And the catastrophe was instant and irrevocable. Architecture became in France a mere web of waving lines,—in England a mere grating of perpendicular ones. Redundance was substituted for invention, and geometry for passion; tho Gothic art became a mere expression of wanton expenditure, and vulgar mathematics; and was swept away, as it then deserved to be swept away, by the severer ...
— The Two Paths • John Ruskin
... the stuffy room. Miss Metoaca, who had resigned herself to the inevitable after her recent explosion, was busy knitting a talma, a round cape which, like Penelope's web, seemed to the uninitiated to have no beginning and no end. She always carried it with her in a voluminous pocket as she hated to be idle. Nancy, busy with her own thoughts, sat gazing abstractedly at the dingy wall. The tread of the ...
— The Lost Despatch • Natalie Sumner Lincoln
... minor key From awful holy calm, as this from grief, I weave, a silken flower, into my web, That goes straight on, with simply crossing lines, Floating few colours upward ...
— A Hidden Life and Other Poems • George MacDonald
... unworthily would dare to sing (Hard task!) black care's inevitable ring Settling with years upon the heart that feeds Incessantly on glory. Year by year The narrowing toil grows closer round his feet; With disenchanting touch rude-handed time The unlovely web discloses, and strange fear Leads him at last to eld's inclement seat, The bitter north of life - ...
— New Poems • Robert Louis Stevenson
... the work with admiration, and bade the little Mary, the damsel of Burgundy, look on and see how the dainty web was woven, while she signed the maker to seat herself on a step of ...
— Grisly Grisell • Charlotte M. Yonge
... ark, and took thence a book wrapped in a piece of precious web of silk and gold, and bound in cuir-bouilly wrought in strange devices. Then said he: "This book was mine heritage at Swevenham or ever I became wise, and it came from my father's grandsire: and my father bade me look on it as the dearest of possessions; ...
— The Well at the World's End • William Morris
... is humour of a positively enormous variety, and pure humour bursting and shining through the careful web of ...
— Hilaire Belloc - The Man and His Work • C. Creighton Mandell
... a name is an instrument of teaching and of distinguishing natures, as the shuttle is of distinguishing the threads of the web. ...
— Cratylus • Plato
... being offended at the new teaching, wanted to put him to death; and he fled from his home at Mecca. On his way he was so closely pursued as to be forced to hide in a cave. His enemies were just going to search the cave, when they saw a spider's web over the mouth, and fancied this was a sign that no one could have lately entered it, so they passed by and left him safely concealed. In his anger at this persecution, be declared that the duty of a true ...
— The Chosen People - A Compendium Of Sacred And Church History For School-Children • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... than when he had to climb an awkward stile in the course of a walk. As for the more unpleasant manifestations of humanity; after all they no longer concerned him. Men intent on the great purpose did not suffer the current of their thoughts to be broken by the buzzing of a fly caught in a spider's web, so why should he be perturbed by the misery of a puppy in the hands of village boys? The fly, no doubt, endured its tortures; lying helpless and bound in those slimy bands, it cried out in its thin voice when the claws of ...
— The Hill of Dreams • Arthur Machen
... tropical zone. We saw some apes leaping in pairs among the trees, and Palander succeeded in shooting a male. Alligators from one to one and a half metre in length, frightened by the noise of the propeller, throw themselves suddenly into the water. Small land lizards with web-feet jumped forward with surprising rapidity on the water near the banks. This was all we ...
— The Voyage of the Vega round Asia and Europe, Volume I and Volume II • A.E. Nordenskieold
... often wish to do so; and even then their bodies were the only things that were gone, because for a long time they stubbornly survived in memory. No: she couldn't drop out. There was no chance of it. She was caught in the web of life; not alone, but a single small thing caught in the general mix-up of actions and inter-actions. She had just to go on as she was doing, waking up each morning after the events and taking her old place in the world; and in this instance she would have, somehow, to smooth matters over when ...
— Nocturne • Frank Swinnerton
... shelled. Where the transport had been drawn up there were shattered waggons. Strewn over the road were dead horses, of all carcasses the most ludicrously pitiful, and wound in and out of them, a witches' web, crawled the wire from the splintered telegraph posts. There was not a sound in the village except the gentle thump of my engine. I was forced to pull up, that I might more clearly see my way between two horses. My engine silent, I could only hear a little whisper from the house opposite ...
— Adventures of a Despatch Rider • W. H. L. Watson
... arrived,—the woman whose rough designs on paper had been carefully followed and elaborated into actual shape;—and there was a tense state of expectation among all the workers awaiting her presence. Meanwhile the lantern-gleam in the sky broadened and the web of mist which veiled the sea began to lift and Giulio Rivardi, pacing to and fro, halted every now and then to look in the direction of a path winding downward from the mainland to the shore, in watchful expectation of seeing an elfin figure, more spiritlike than mortal, floating ...
— The Secret Power • Marie Corelli
... tangle of water-plants all in glorious blossom. There were water-lilies both golden and waxy-white, and blue spikes of pickerel-weed, and clumps of fragrant musk. And over the surface of the golden-brown water was spread a fairy web of delicate plant life, vivid green, and woven of such tiny forms that it looked like airy foam that a breath would dissolve. On its outer edge was an embroidery of dainty star-blossoms, like little green forget-me-nots scattered over the ...
— 'Lizbeth of the Dale • Marian Keith
... disclosed to him during the day, and now he sincerely admired the old justice of the peace. As he gazed at his beloved portrait, he thought, "Between the two of us—this old fox and I—we will unravel the whole web." He would not, however, show himself to be ...
— The Mystery of Orcival • Emile Gaboriau
... banks of the river Tigris, far above where it washes the lofty city of the Faithful, lived Nouri, in poverty and widowhood, whose employment it was to tend the worm who clothes the richest and the fairest with its beautiful web. Her husband, who was a guard to the caravans of the merchants, lost his life in an engagement with the wild Arabs, and left the poor woman no other means of supporting herself, or her infant daughter Urad, but by her labours among the silk-worms, which were little more ...
— Eastern Tales by Many Story Tellers • Various
... and non-resistance. The republican spirit had slumbered on the white cliffs of Albion, and in his sleep, like the man-mountain in Lilliput, had been pinned down to the earth by the threads of a spider's web for cords. On the first reaeppearance of Filmer's book, he awoke, and, like the strong man in Israel, at the cost of his own life, shook down the temple of Dagon, and buried himself and the Philistines ...
— Memoir of the Life of John Quincy Adams. • Josiah Quincy
... a very industrious spider, who had made his home in the awning, came boldly out of a fold by a seam of the canvas, and with busy legs proceeded to examine the state and tension of some threads, which it had previously stretched as the basis of a web upon a geometrical plan, expressly to ...
— Middy and Ensign • G. Manville Fenn
... Behind them an old sheep-dog, his soaking paws covered with sand, ran along with his nose to the ground, but carelessly, as if thinking of something else. And then in the rocky gateway the shepherd himself appeared. He was a lean, upright old man, in a frieze coat that was covered with a web of tiny drops, velvet trousers tied under the knee, and a wide-awake with a folded blue handkerchief round the brim. One hand was crammed into his belt, the other grasped a beautifully smooth yellow stick. And as he walked, taking his time, he kept up a very soft light whistling, an airy, far-away ...
— The Garden Party • Katherine Mansfield
... to passions, run down with the stream (of desires), as a spider runs down the web which he has made himself; when they have cut this, at last, wise people leave the world free from cares, ...
— The Dhammapada • Unknown
... my love the lamp should burn, Watching the weary spindle twist and turn, Or o'er the web hold back her tears and yearn: O winter, O white winter, wert ...
— Poems By The Way & Love Is Enough • William Morris
... and gold, the visitor hastens to get away from it as he would to escape from a confectioner's shop. It seems as if this grand, glittering box, gilded and labored from pavement to lantern, caught up and tore at every point of its finery the delicate web of poetic reverie; the slender profile of the least of the columns impresses one far more than any of this display of the art of upholsterers and parvenus. Similarly to this the facade, loaded with balustrades, and round ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume 7 - Italy, Sicily, and Greece (Part One) • Various
... was the thing he thought. Arrière pensée was with him impossible. But, it may be asked, when a man carries out-speaking to such a pass as this, is he not apt to become a somewhat troublesome and discordant thread in the complex web of modern society? No doubt any other man than Tennyson would have been so. But the honest ring in the voice—which, by-the-by, was strengthened and deepened by the old-fashioned Lincolnshire accent—softened and, to a great degree, neutralized the effect of the bluntness. Moreover, behind ...
— Old Familiar Faces • Theodore Watts-Dunton
... the use of bankers and other business men. It consists of a cylindrical case of leather or other light suitable material having an opening from end to end covered by a flap, a central revolving spool, and a web of flexible substance connected to and wound on the spool so as to be drawn out through the opening and wound up again, on which web any suitable arrangement of narrow flaps folding over from the edges and connected by elastic bands, in a way to secure papers, notes, etc., in different ...
— Scientific American, Vol.22, No. 1, January 1, 1870 • Various
... is a learned preacher, a devoted churchman, a faithful minister; and in addition to this he has an extra-parochial affection for ants and spiders. He can spend a happy day in watching the busy affairs of a formicary, and to observe the progress of a bit of spider-web architecture gives him a peculiar joy. There are some severe and sour-complexioned theologians who would call this devotion to objects so far outside of his parish an illicit passion. But to me it seems a blessing conferred by heavenly wisdom upon a good man, and I doubt not ...
— Days Off - And Other Digressions • Henry Van Dyke
... and, when completed, the loom beam with its attached warp threads, cambs and reed, would be taken bodily to the loom where the "tenter," "tackler" or "tuner" adjusts all the parts preparatory to the actual operation of weaving. The latter work is often termed "gaiting a web." ...
— The Jute Industry: From Seed to Finished Cloth • T. Woodhouse and P. Kilgour
... blocks have also grooves which communicate with the interior of the hives, and which appear to the prowling worm in search of a comfortable nest, just the very best possible place, so warm and snug and secure, in which to spin its web, and "bide its time." When the hand of the bee-master lights upon it, doubtless it has reason to feel that it has been ...
— Langstroth on the Hive and the Honey-Bee - A Bee Keeper's Manual • L. L. Langstroth
... name figures often in the newspapers, or an American editor, or the president of a great American college—this personage is charmingly received. But he is never left free to form his own opinion of things, even were he capable of so doing. Circumstances spin an invisible web around him, his hosts being keenly intent on making him a speaking-trumpet for the proclamation ...
— The Invention of a New Religion • Basil Hall Chamberlain
... the farther end of a corridor, a small door, softly opening, disclosed a circular room of stupendous proportions, domed above, the curving walls filled with myriads of books. In the centre was a circular arrangement of desks, and in the midst of these an elderly man, like a garden-spider in his web; but it was his duty to feed, not devour, the human flies who sat or walked to and fro with literary meat gathered from all over the world. It was my first vision ...
— Hawthorne and His Circle • Julian Hawthorne
... man's mark; thou fool's self-chosen snare, Fond fancy's scum, and dregs of scattered thought: Band of all evils; cradle of causeless care; Thou web of will, whose end is ...
— A Defence of Poesie and Poems • Philip Sidney
... from lack of the hydraulic press; to at once see how mutually dependent are the arts, and how all must advance that each may advance. Well, the sciences are involved with each other in just the same manner. They are, in fact, inextricably woven into the same complex web of the arts; and are only conventionally independent of it. Originally the two were one. How to fix the religious festivals; when to sow: how to weigh commodities; and in what manner to measure ground; were the purely practical ...
— Essays on Education and Kindred Subjects - Everyman's Library • Herbert Spencer
... John Graham's heart. No power could have made me believe then that he wanted to possess only me; that he was horrible enough to want me even without love; that he was a great monster of a spider, and I the fly lured into his web. And the agony of it was that in all the years since Uncle Peter died I had dreamed strange and beautiful dreams. I lived in a make-believe world of my own, and I read, read, read; and the thought grew ...
— The Alaskan • James Oliver Curwood
... I felt no curiosity then, about the mystery of my parentage? I had been looking forward to the time when I should be deemed old enough to know my mother's history of which my imagination had woven such a web of mystery and romance,—when I should hear something of that father whose memory was curtained by such an impenetrable veil. But now it mattered not. Had I known that the blood of kings was in my veins, it would not have wakened one throb of ambition, kindled one ray of joy. I cared ...
— Ernest Linwood - or, The Inner Life of the Author • Caroline Lee Hentz
... devoutness must ever appear to an outsider, even to a European as sympathetic as the author, to be no better than superstition. A Hindoo able to read English with ease has at his command all the rich stores of the knowledge of the West, but very often does not care to taste them. Enmeshed in a web of ritual and belief inseparable from himself, he remains as much as ever a Hindoo, and uses his skill in English merely as an article of professional equipment. 'Good works of history and fiction' do not interest ...
— Rambles and Recollections of an Indian Official • William Sleeman
... a poem of Tennyson's in love with Lancelot; wove a web which she must not rise from, otherwise a curse would fall on her; saw Lancelot pass one day, entered a boat and glided down to Camelot, but ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... lash the stubborn age, With laughing satire; or in rural scenes With shepherds sport; or rack his hard-bound brains For the unexpected turn. Arachne so, In dusty kitchen corner, from her bowels 140 Spins the fine web, but spins with better fate, Than the poor bard: she! caitiff! spreads her snares, And with their aid enjoys luxurious life, Bloated with fat of insects, flesh'd in blood: He! hard, hard lot! for all his toil and care, And painful watchings, scarce protracts ...
— Poetical Works of Akenside - [Edited by George Gilfillan] • Mark Akenside
... piteous thing To chain forever that strong young wing. Let the butterfly break for his own sweet sake The gossamer threads that have bound him; Let him shed in free flight his rainbow light, And gladden the world around him. Short is the struggle and slight is the strain; Such a web was made to be broken, And she that wove it may weave again Or, if no power of love to bless Can heal the wound in her bosom true, It is but a lorn heart more or less, And hearts are many and poets few, So his pardon is ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 2 (of 4) • Various
... fulling-frolic, came off one Saturday night, about a fortnight after this; and while the web of strong, coarse homespun cloth, which was to furnish Mac and his boys with their year's stock of outer clothing, was being duly lifted, rubbed, banged on a bench, and twisted by the strong hands of about thirty men and women, Jim led the roaring choruses, and manipulated his end of the cloth ...
— Adrift in the Ice-Fields • Charles W. Hall
... seated, with a cap of liberty on his head, a spear in one hand and a cornucopia in the other, with the inscription, COLONIA GEORGIA AUG.: on the other side was a represention of silk worms, some beginning and others having finished their web, with the motto, NON SIBI SED ALIIS; a very proper emblem, signifying, that the nature of the establishment was such, that neither the first trustees nor their successors could have any views of interest, it being entirely designed for the benefit ...
— An Historical Account Of The Rise And Progress Of The Colonies Of South Carolina And Georgia, Volume 2 • Alexander Hewatt
... be averted? Must they both be sacrificed? Must the faults of the erring father be visited on the innocent son, who had become the last hope of the mother's heart? Kind Heaven! may not that son, at least, be delivered from the web of toils into which he has so strangely fallen, and yet be saved? Grant, O grant that hope—that one ray of hope—in this my ...
— Gaut Gurley • D. P. Thompson
... web o' the silken claith, Anither o' the twine, And wap them into our ship's side, And letna the ...
— The Ontario High School Reader • A.E. Marty
... and less enjoyment to myself. Among my privations I must rank that of spending my days in unconnected solitude. Who will willingly share the scant portion of bare sufficiency, or interweave their destiny with the tangled web of my intricate fortunes? Would you plant a flourishing eglantine under the blasted oak? Remove it from such a neighbourhood, or the blessed rain passing through the blighted branches, will affect its verdure with pestilent ...
— The Loyalists, Vol. 1-3 - An Historical Novel • Jane West
... Shah Bagh; cloudy weather, occasionally a very slight shower during the last few days, depending probably on the Punjab rains. To-day, observed a small green caterpillar, climbing up a fine thread, like a spider's web, which hung from the fly of the tent; its motions were precisely those of climbing, the thread over which it had passed was accumulated between its third pairs of legs; it did ...
— Journals of Travels in Assam, Burma, Bhootan, Afghanistan and The - Neighbouring Countries • William Griffith
... here discourse of Republiques, because I have other where treated of them at large: I will apply my self only to a Principality, and proceed, while I weave this web, by arguing thereupon, how these Principallities can be governed and maintained. I say then that in States of inheritance, and accustomed to the blood of their Princes, there are far fewer difficulties to keep them, than in the new: for it suffices only not to transgress ...
— Machiavelli, Volume I - The Art of War; and The Prince • Niccolo Machiavelli
... I'll send down some fruit and a special vintage from our club which has bottled up in it the sunlight of a dozen years in Southern France. I hope they keep the telephone wires busy—they may tangle themselves up in their own spider-web!" ...
— The Voice on the Wire • Eustace Hale Ball
... and jostled in the Jew's vehicle, was nursing comfortable thoughts. He rubbed his hands together, with content, as he thought of the web which he had woven, and through which that ubiquitous and daring Englishman could not hope to escape. As the time went on, and the old Jew drove him leisurely but surely along the dark road, he felt more and more eager for the grand finale of this exciting ...
— The Scarlet Pimpernel • Baroness Orczy
... a little breath. It was, after all, a hard task, this, that lay before him. Last night in his mind lay far enough back now, a tangled web of disconnected episodes, linked together by a strangely sweet emotional thread of sentiment. And the girl was watching his face with every sense strained to catch his words and the meaning of them. Vaguely he felt his ...
— The Lighted Way • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... looked at the programme, she thought of the strange complications of feeling that are surely the fruit of an extreme civilisation. She saw herself caught in a spider's web of apparently frail, yet really powerful, threads spun by an invisible spider. Her world was full of gossamer playing the part of iron, of gossamer that was compelling, that made and kept prisoners. What freedom ...
— The Woman With The Fan • Robert Hichens
... to bed on the unroofed porch of a log house, but routed him out early, and when Hare lifted the blankets a shower of cotton-blossoms drifted away like snow. A grove of gray-barked trees spread green canopy overhead, and through the intricate web shone crimson walls, soaring with resistless onsweep up and up to shut out all but a blue lake ...
— The Heritage of the Desert • Zane Grey
... reputation, it were good that men did hearken unto the saying of Gonsalvo, the great and famous commander, that was wont to say a gentleman's honor should be de tela crassiore, of a good strong warp or web, that every little thing should not catch in it; when as now it seems they are but of cobweb-lawn or such light stuff, which certainly is weakness, and not true greatness of mind, but like a sick man's body, that is so tender ...
— The World's Best Orations, Vol. 1 (of 10) • Various
... know," she admitted, "whether it is music or not. But it is something alive." She fell into a muse, "Queer, what a spider-web of tenuous complication human relationships are. I never would have thought, probably, of trying anything of the sort if it hadn't been for a childhood recollection. . . . French incarnation this time," she said ...
— The Brimming Cup • Dorothy Canfield Fisher
... she stepped out on the deck. She was fresh as the dew itself, and like a rose. All color of rose was the soft skirt she wore, and the little bolero above, blue, with gold buttons, covered a soft rose-colored waist, light and subtle as a spider's web, stretched from one grass stalk to another of a dewy morning. She was round and slender, and her neck was tall and round, and in the close fashion of dress which women of late have devised, to remind man once more of ...
— The Lady and the Pirate - Being the Plain Tale of a Diligent Pirate and a Fair Captive • Emerson Hough
... solitude, among the stars. Always when I hear the music of Franck—a Fleming, also, it may well be by no accident—I seem to be in contact with a sensitive and solitary spirit, absorbed in self-communion, weaving the web of its own Heaven and achieving the fulfilment of ...
— Impressions And Comments • Havelock Ellis
... and names, the minute technical descriptions, the strict keeping up of the scenery of camp-life, as so many signs of authentic objectivity. Noldeke made an end of this critical position once for all, but Colenso is properly entitled to the credit of having first torn the web asunder. /1/ ...
— Prolegomena to the History of Israel • Julius Wellhausen
... a subtle spider which doth sit In middle of her web, which spreadeth wide; If aught do touch the utmost thread of it, She feels ...
— Familiar Quotations • John Bartlett
... the irritated man, pausing, and looking at his wife, fixedly, while there sat upon his face an expression of terrible despair; "that pledge can never be renewed! It would be like binding a giant with a spider's web. I am lost! lost! lost! The eager, inexpressible desire that now burns within me, cannot be controlled. The effort to do so would drive me mad. I must drink, or die. And you, my poor wife!—and you, my children! what will become of you? Who will give you sufficient ...
— The Lights and Shadows of Real Life • T.S. Arthur
... bag-shaped, being strung on a round looped end of cane, of which the other end is the handle, the net being about the size of a good-sized butterfly net. The other form is also framed on a looped cane; but the loop in this case is larger and more oval in shape, and the netting is made of the web of a large spider. To make it they take the already looped cane to where there are a number of such webs, and twist the looped end round and round among the webs, until there is stretched across the loop ...
— The Mafulu - Mountain People of British New Guinea • Robert W. Williamson
... flushed his cheek. He dreamed a veiled maid Sate near him, talking in low solemn tones. Her voice was like the voice of his own soul Heard in the calm of thought; its music long, Like woven sounds of streams and breezes, held 155 His inmost sense suspended in its web Of many-coloured woof and shifting hues. Knowledge and truth and virtue were her theme, And lofty hopes of divine liberty, Thoughts the most dear to him, and poesy, 160 Herself a poet. Soon the solemn ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley Volume I • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... standing there cold and lifeless. A part of the roof of the shed had ended by falling in upon it, and now the rain drenched it at every shower. A bit of the leather harness by which the crane was worked hung down, and seemed to bind the engine like a thread of some gigantic spider's web. And its metal-work, its steel and copper, was also decaying, as if rusted by lichens, covered with the vegetation of old age, whose yellowish patches made it look like a very ancient, grass-grown machine which the winters had preyed ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... Fichte's transcendental idealistic philosophy as the fine-spun web of all his observations on life. The external world is but a shadow; the universe is in us; there, or nowhere, is infinity, with all its systems, past or future; the world is but a precipitate ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. IV • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... the licking of his aunt's dry, feline tongue, that he shrunk from submitting anything he wrote to Harold Sullivan, who, a man of firmer and more world-capable stuff than he, would at least have shown him how things which the author saw and judged from the inner side of the web, must appear on the other side. There are few weavers of thought capable of turning round the web and contemplating with unprejudiced regard the side of it about to be offered to the world, so as to perceive how it will look to eyes alien ...
— Home Again • George MacDonald |
