"Weft" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Lamarck, into the comparison between nature and a tree. Buffon says that the chain of nature is not a single long chain, but is comparable rather to something woven, "which at certain intervals throws out a branch sideways that unites it with the strands of some other weft."[135] On the following page there is a passage which has been quoted as an example of Buffon's contempt for the men of science of his time. The writer maintains that the most lucid arrangement of birds, would ...
— Evolution, Old & New - Or, the Theories of Buffon, Dr. Erasmus Darwin and Lamarck, - as compared with that of Charles Darwin • Samuel Butler
... doctor should be sent for. One man held the bed rail, looking at his dead daughter; the other sat by the window. That one was John Norton. His brain was empty, everything was far away. He saw things moving, moving, but they were all so far away. He could not re-knit himself with the weft of life; the thread that had made him part of it had been snapped, and he was left struggling in space. He knew that Kitty had thrown herself out of the window and was dead. The word shocked him a little, but there was no sense of realisation to meet it. She had walked with him ...
— A Mere Accident • George Moore
... was I? And when our Kate got the news at the Hanyards, the smile would die out of her eyes for ever, for Jack, dear, splendid Jack, was the weft that had been woven into the warp ...
— The Yeoman Adventurer • George W. Gough
... mother's thin, stubborn mouth must find expression somewhere in her daughter. But where? Evelyn's mouth was thin and it drooped at the ends.... But she was only twenty; at five-and-twenty, at thirty, she might be possessed by new ideas, new passions.... The moment we look into life and examine the weft a little, what a mystery it becomes, how occult the design, and out of what impenetrable darkness the shuttle passes, weaving a strange pattern, harmonious in a way, and yet deducible to none of our ...
— Evelyn Innes • George Moore
... carefully woven that if held up against the light it will show no flaws nor knots. Many a professing Christian life has a veneer of godliness nailed thinly over a solid bulk of selfishness. There are many goods in the market finely dressed so as to hide that the warp is cotton and only the weft silk. No Christian man who has memory and self-knowledge can for a moment claim to have reached the height of his ideal; the best of us, at the best, are like Nebuchadnezzar's image, whose feet were ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... and butter, however, the play was growing scene by scene. In the lone hours of the night he spun upon the loom of his fancy a brilliant weft of swift desire—heavy, perfumed, Oriental—interwoven with bits of gruesome tenderness. The thread of his own life intertwined with the thread of the story. All genuine art is autobiography. It is not, however, necessarily a revelation of the artist's actual self, but ...
— The House of the Vampire • George Sylvester Viereck
... machine to a cylindrical beam. This being taken to the dressing machine, the warp is sized, dressed, and wound upon the weaving beam. The weaving beam is then placed in the power loom, by which machine, the shuttle being provided with cops with weft, the cloth ...
— Rides on Railways • Samuel Sidney
... spores, purplish to olivaceous. The stem usually tapers downward, is firm, stuffed, smooth, or with remnants of the veil giving it a floccose scaly appearance, usually ascending because of the crowded growth. The veil is thin and only manifested in the young stage of the plant as a loose weft of threads. As the cap expands the veil is torn and adheres to the ...
— Studies of American Fungi. Mushrooms, Edible, Poisonous, etc. • George Francis Atkinson
... the crust of dogma and the froth of traditional beliefs; nor does it seem to have occurred to him that, while he stripped the rags and patches that conceal the nakedness of ordinary human nature, he might drag away the weft and woof of nobler thought. In his poet-philosopher's imagination there bloomed a wealth of truth and love and beauty so abounding, that behind the mirage he destroyed, he saw no blank, but a new Eternal City of the Spirit. He never doubted whether his fellow-creatures ...
— Percy Bysshe Shelley • John Addington Symonds
... brine— We'll make no sport in an English court till we come as a ship o' the Line: Till we come as a ship o' the Line, my lads, of thirty foot in the sheer, Lifting again from the outer main with news of a privateer; Flying his pluck at our mizzen-truck for weft of Admiralty, Heaving his head for our dipsey-lead in sign that we ...
— Departmental Ditties and Barrack Room Ballads • Rudyard Kipling
... so fine. However, there would be more threads than one in the split, and by adopting this we can make cloth in our day having between 400 and 500 in the inch. However, the ancient cloths are much finer in the warp than woof, probably from want of appliance for driving the threads of the weft close enough, as they do not appear to have lays as we have for this purpose. Pliny refers to the remains of a linen corselet, presented by Amasis, king of Egypt, to the Rhodians, each thread of which was composed of 365 fibres: "Herodotus mentions this corselet, ...
— Museum of Antiquity - A Description of Ancient Life • L. W. Yaggy
... that night, with its perfume and glory!— The scent of the locusts—the light of the moon; And the violin weaving the waltzers a story, Enmeshing their feet in the weft of the tune, Till their shadows uncertain, Reeled round on the curtain, While under the trellis ...
— Nye and Riley's Wit and Humor (Poems and Yarns) • Bill Nye
... I but a minstrel, deft At weaving, with the trembling strings Of my glad harp, the warp and weft Of rondels such as rapture sings,— I'd loop my lyre across my breast, Nor stay me till my knee found rest In midnight banks of bud and flower Beneath my ...
— Riley Love-Lyrics • James Whitcomb Riley
... woven fragments (139554). None was found in connection with the finished articles of the collection, so that their use is purely conjectural. The warp is generally 2-ply, Z-twist, medium- to hard-twist cordage; the weft is the same, but generally lighter in weight than ...
— A Burial Cave in Baja California - The Palmer Collection, 1887 • William C. Massey
... of a trumpet. There is no such reinforcement as faith in God, and that faith is impossible till we have squared our policy and conduct with our highest instincts. In the loom of time, though the woof be divinely foreordained, yet man supplies the weft, and the figures of the endless web are shaped and colored by our own wisdom or folly. Let no nation think itself safe in being merely right, unless its captains are inspired and sustained ...
— The Writings of James Russell Lowell in Prose and Poetry, Volume V - Political Essays • James Russell Lowell
... of rhyme, save in a couple or so of chance instances. Parts of them, indeed, may be regarded as a warp of prose amid the weft of poetry, such as Shakespeare furnishes the precedent for in drama. Still there is a very powerful and majestic ...
— Poems By Walt Whitman • Walt Whitman
... glimmered from the long slope of a wave like the glint of spangles on a dress. But it was a garment of far-flung amplitude, woven on the shadowy loom of night and the sea, and from such mysterious warp and weft is often produced the sable robe of tragedy and death. It was so now, within an ace. At one instance, the restless plain of the ocean seemed to bear no other argosy than the Andromeda; in the next, Hozier's quick-moving glance had caught ...
— The Stowaway Girl • Louis Tracy
... lighter, my limbs more supple, As I walked on, glad to have slipt the fetter. My mind was full of the scene I had left, That placid flock, that pastor vociferant, —How this outside was pure and different! The sermon, now—what a mingled weft Of good and ill! Were either less, Its fellow had colored the whole distinctly; But alas for the excellent earnestness, And the truths, quite true if stated succinctly, But as surely false, in their quaint presentment, However to pastor and flock's contentment! ...
— Browning's England - A Study in English Influences in Browning • Helen Archibald Clarke
... counts himself fortunate if he can earn six or seven shillings a week, while to reach this sum he must sit at his loom fourteen to eighteen hours a day. Most woven goods require moreover a damp weaving-room, to keep the weft from snapping, and in part, for this reason, in part because of their poverty, which prevents them from paying for better dwellings, the workrooms of these weavers are usually without wooden or paved floors. I have been ...
— The Condition of the Working-Class in England in 1844 - with a Preface written in 1892 • Frederick Engels
... some weft of opalescent mist, the sweet mirage melted in the noonday. What I then saw I will leave to be told hereafter; but it was not what I ...
— The Silent Isle • Arthur Christopher Benson
... possessor? A new Mdlle. de Maupin, with royal lily and aureole, cloud-capped mountains, great gulfs of sea-water flowing up and reflecting as in a mirror the steep cliff's side; the straight white feet are set thereon, the obscuring weft of flesh is torn, and the pure, strange soul continues its mystical exhortations. Then the radiant vision, a white glory, the last outburst and manifestation, the trumpets of the apocalypse, the colour of heaven, the closing of this stupendous ...
— Confessions of a Young Man • George Moore
... connected together. As soon as this radiating framework or scaffolding was finished, like the woof on a loom, the industrious craftswoman started at the middle, and began the task of putting in the cross-pieces or weft which were to complete and bind together the circular pattern. These she wove round and round in a continuous spiral, setting out at the centre, and keeping on in ever-widening circlets, till she arrived at last at the exterior or foundation threads. How she fastened these cross-pieces ...
— Science in Arcady • Grant Allen
... Jacob Bright, out of a capital lent to him by two members of the Society of Friends. Here he received bales of new cotton by canal or from carriers, span it in his mill, and gave out the warp and weft thus manufactured to handloom weavers, whom he paid by the piece to weave it in the weaving chamber at the top of their own houses. He then sold the fully manufactured article in Manchester or elsewhere. In such surroundings, many a clever boy has developed into a hard-headed prosperous ...
— Victorian Worthies - Sixteen Biographies • George Henry Blore
... plate of a door, not far from the gothic portal of the Swedenborgian church. Near this door stood a misty figure, whose sad, spectral eyes floated on vacancy, and whose long, shadowy white hair, lifted like an airy weft in the streaming wind. That was the ghost! It stood near the door a long time, without any other than a shuddering motion, as though it felt the searching blast, which swept furiously from the north up the ...
— The Ghost • William. D. O'Connor
... his limbs, that he could not raise himself without assistance. He heard with some pleasure that they were now running right for the Wampool river, and that he would be put on shore in a very short time. The vessel accordingly lay to, and presently showed a weft in her ensign, which was hastily answered by signals from on shore. Men and horses were seen to come down the broken path which leads to the shore; the latter all properly tackled for carrying their loading. Twenty fishing barks were pushed afloat at once, and crowded round the ...
— Redgauntlet • Sir Walter Scott
... the weaving, the shed is opened by raising one of the heddle sticks, and a heavy knife-shaped batten of wood is slipped into the opening. This is turned sideways to enlarge the shed, and a shuttle bearing the weft thread is shot through. By raising and lowering the heddle rods the position of the warp is changed as desired, while from time to time the weft threads are forced up against the fabric by means of the reed board, ...
— The Tinguian - Social, Religious, and Economic Life of a Philippine Tribe • Fay-Cooper Cole
... goddess, train'd the maid To twirl the spindle by the twisting thread, To fix the loom, instruct the reeds to part, Cross the long weft, and close the web with art: An useful gift; but what profuse expense, What world of fashions, took ...
— Poetical Works of Johnson, Parnell, Gray, and Smollett - With Memoirs, Critical Dissertations, and Explanatory Notes • Samuel Johnson, Thomas Parnell, Thomas Gray, and Tobias Smollett
... I left, 'Midst dames and maids who stood to aid; They wrapped me first in silken weft, And next ...
— The Verner Raven; The Count of Vendel's Daughter - and other Ballads • Anonymous
... and Rowley by a publisher of the next generation has been carefully and delicately analyzed by a critic of our own time, who naturally finds it easy to distinguish the finer from the homelier part of the compound weft, and to assign what is rough and crude to the inferior, what is interesting and graceful to the superior poet. The authority of the rogue Kirkman may be likened to the outline or profile of Mr. Mantalini's early loves: it is either no authority at all, or ...
— The Age of Shakespeare • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... East India cotton, in small quantities; the seeds were picked out one by one, by hand; it was carded on wool-cards, and spun into a rather intractable yarn which was used as warp for linsey-woolsey and rag carpets. Even in England no cotton weft, no all-cotton fabrics, were made till after 1760, till Hargreave's time. Sometimes a twisted yarn was made of one thread of cotton and one of wool which was knit into durable stockings. Cotton sewing-thread was unknown in ...
— Home Life in Colonial Days • Alice Morse Earle
... "Al-Sufuf," either ranks of fighting-men or the rows of thread on a loom. Here the allusion is to a weaver who levels and corrects his threads with the wooden spate and shuttle governing warp and weft and who makes them stand straight (behave aright). The "stirrup" (rikab) is the loop of cord in ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 1 • Richard F. Burton
... grew pensive and weary. Sometimes, the sunlight broke over my toil, and I sang to the wheel as it was rolling; but sometimes again there were shadows, and the wheel was then heavy and slower. Sometimes, the threads grew so tangled, that I sighed with impatience and worry, the weft bears the marks in the weaving—they are plain, in unwinding the pirns—and still, 'twas a labor of love, this patchwork of sunlight and shadow, this discord of sorrow ...
— The Doctor's Daughter • "Vera"
... cellular tissue, which constitute the medullary rays, and the cells of which have a horizontal direction, are but the basis of the vegetable fabric. The stem of an exogenous plant has been compared to a piece of linen, of which the weft is composed of cellular tissue, and the warp of fibrous and vascular tissue—crossing each other. Now, after the portion is once formed, which is woven every year by the wondrous machinery set to work for this purpose, it receives no ...
— The Church of England Magazine - Volume 10, No. 263, January 9, 1841 • Various
... Catherine, now that she would let her fellows help her, I was even anxious that she should feel something of that love about her which she had so long driven from her door. I felt towards her somewhat as towards a new-born child, for whom this life of mingled weft must be made as soft as its material will admit of; or rather, as if she had been my own sister, as indeed she was, returned from wandering in weary and miry ways, to taste once more the tenderness of home. I wanted her to read the love of ...
— Annals of a Quiet Neighbourhood • George MacDonald
... it is that forms the weft of this Fair tapestry of armies marshalled here! Likewise of Russia's drawing steadily nigh. But they may see what these see, by ...
— The Dynasts - An Epic-Drama Of The War With Napoleon, In Three Parts, - Nineteen Acts, And One Hundred And Thirty Scenes • Thomas Hardy
... the hint we give Our Sovereign Lady Queen, To dress herself and lady maids In bonnie tartan sheen. Then treadles, shuttles, warp, and weft— (For trade would not be bad)— Would rattle as in days of yore, When ...
— Revised Edition of Poems • William Wright
... restlessly over a heaving ocean of change, but to light on firm, solid certainty, and fold its wearied wings there. Forecasting is ever close by foreboding. Hope is interwoven with fear, the golden threads of the weft crossing the dark ones of the warp, and the whole texture gleaming bright or glooming black according to the angle at which it is seen. So is it always until we turn our hope away from earth to God, and fill the future with the light of His presence ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Isaiah and Jeremiah • Alexander Maclaren
... always be the show, like ocean's scum; enough, if waters deep and clear make up the rest. Enough, that while the piled embroider'd shoddy gaud and fraud spreads to the superficial eye, the hidden warp and weft are genuine, and will wear forever. Enough, in short, that the race, the land which could raise such as the late rebellion, could also put it down. The average man of a land at last only is important. He, in these States, remains immortal owner and boss, deriving good uses, ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman
... a poet! On my heart The thought flashed sudden, burning through the weft Of life, and with too much I sank bereft. Up to my eyes the tears, with sudden start, Thronged blinding: then the veil would rend and part! The husk of vision would in twain be cleft! Thy hidden soul in naked beauty left, I should behold thee, Nature, as thou art! ...
— The Poetical Works of George MacDonald in Two Volumes, Volume I • George MacDonald
... the part of the pedestrian. There were currents and counter-currents, eddies and backwaters, and at the corner of Vine a veritable maelstrom through which two lines of electric cars pushed their way, east and weft, north and south, with incessant clanging of bells; followed by automobiles with resounding horns, trucks and delivery wagons with wheels reverberating on the granite. A giant Irish policeman, who seemed ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... the tall, pillar-like clouds sweeping along over the level sand like so many parts of a vast machine preparing warp and weft for spinning a garment to clothe the earth, and there were moments when the pillars were so regular in distance and motion that it seemed impossible not to believe that ...
— In the Mahdi's Grasp • George Manville Fenn
... is remarkable what a degree of friendship and companionship grew up between the two. In the course of time the weaving process became so familiar to Angel that whenever George would throw the bobbin, containing the weft, through the opening of the woof threads, the animal stood ready to pull the heddles forward, so as to force the last weft thread up against the ...
— The Wonder Island Boys: The Mysteries of the Caverns • Roger Thompson Finlay
... met with in dyeing such light fabrics as Italians, cashmeres, serges and similar thin textiles lightly woven from cotton warp and woollen weft. When deep shades (blacks, dark blues, browns and greens) are being dyed it is not advisable to make up the dye-bath with the whole of the dyes at once. It is much better to add these in quantities of about one-fourth ...
— The Dyeing of Woollen Fabrics • Franklin Beech
... conciliate the king and to escape the peril hanging over his own head. But as he lay awake all the night long, there came to his remembrance the man with the crushed foot; so he had him brought before him, and said, "I remember thy saying that thou weft an healer of injured speech." "Yea," quoth he, "and if thou wilt I will give thee proof of my skill." The senator answered and told him of his aforetime friendship with the king, and of the confidence which he had enjoyed, and of the snare laid for ...
— Barlaam and Ioasaph • St. John of Damascus
... again, a chance career ended, with option of picking up the severed threads—his inheritance at the loom—and of retying them, warp and weft, and continuing the pattern according to the designs of the tufted, tinted pile-yarn, knotted in by his ...
— The Younger Set • Robert W. Chambers
... mine eyes, To my soul her soul replies. But when breaks the common dawn, And the city wakes—behold! My shy phantom is withdrawn, And I shiver lone and cold. And I know when she has left, She is stronger far than I, And more subtly spun her weft, Than my human wizardry. Though I force her to my will, By the red flame in my blood, By my nerves' electric thrill, By the passion of my mood, Yet all day a ghost am I. Nerves unstrung, spent will, dull brain. I achieve, attain, but die, And she ...
— The Poems of Emma Lazarus - Vol. I (of II.), Narrative, Lyric, and Dramatic • Emma Lazarus
... somewhat more advanced looms. They serve throughout to keep the warp threads in place, and they serve to separate the odd threads from the even (1, 3, 5, 7 from 2, 4, 6, 8, &c.), and in so doing take the place of the fingers in making the "shed," i.e., the opening through which the "weft (or woof)" is passed, a function which in turn is usurped by the "heald (or heddle)." The heddle therefore becomes a very important factor, and Dr. H. G. Harrison by no means overstates the case when he says that the development of the heddle is the most important step in the evolution of the ...
— Ancient Egyptian and Greek Looms • H. Ling Roth
... the many-colored light from this Gothic window—for she insisted upon the pointed arch—Miss Dabstreak had made her own especial corner of the drawing-room. There one might see strange pots and plates, and withered rushes, and fantastic greenish draperies of Eastern weft, which, however, would not fetch five piastres a yard in the bazaar of Stamboul, curious water-colors said to represent "impressions," though one would be shy of meeting, beyond the bounds of an insane asylum, the individual whose impressions ...
— Paul Patoff • F. Marion Crawford
... of bamboo and rattan, though other materials, such as pandanus are sometimes brought into service. Three weaves or their variants are employed. The first is the common diagonal or twilled weave, in which each element of the weft passes over two or more of the warp elements. In this way most of the rice winnowers, transportation baskets, knife sheaths, and the like are made. In the second weave (Fig. 22), the foundation of the basket is made up of parallel horizontal rods, or strips of bamboo. These ...
— The Wild Tribes of Davao District, Mindanao - The R. F. Cummings Philippine Expedition • Fay-Cooper Cole
... the yarn in spinning and winding incident to the use of a fixed ring. With the non-revolving ring the strain upon the yarn varies greatly, owing to the difference in diameter of the full and empty bobbin. At the base of the cone, especially in spinning weft, or filling, the diameter of the cop is five or six times that of the quill at the tip. As the yarn is wound upon the cone, the line of draught upon the traveler varies continually, the pull being almost direct ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 362, December 9, 1882 • Various |
