"Fettered" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Truly was I aware that it was of holy praise, because there came to me "Arise and conquer!" as unto one who understands not, and yet bears. I was so enamoured therewith that until then had not been anything which had fettered me with such sweet bonds. Perchance my word appears too daring, in setting lower the pleasure from the beautiful eyes, gazing into which my desire has repose. But he who considers that the living seals[3] of every beauty have more effect the higher they are, and that I there had ...
— The Divine Comedy, Volume 3, Paradise [Paradiso] • Dante Alighieri
... to his chair, and sat staring straight into the embers, his hands to his hot, fevered brow. More than once he sighed—sighed heavily, as a man when fettered and compelled to act against ...
— The Doctor of Pimlico - Being the Disclosure of a Great Crime • William Le Queux
... for it of stones torn from the foundations of this ancient stronghold of tyranny; and thus Voltaire when dead triumphed over those stones which had triumphed over and confined him when living. On one of the blocks was the inscription, "Receive on this spot, where despotism once fettered thee, the honours decreed to thee ...
— History of the Girondists, Volume I - Personal Memoirs of the Patriots of the French Revolution • Alphonse de Lamartine
... Surely for one day they might be happy; long years would have to pass, and they would never meet. Oh, for one day, away on the river, in the world of clear waters, green boughs and violet banks—one day away from the world which had trammeled them and fettered them. ...
— A Mad Love • Bertha M. Clay
... responsibilities which lay before me, and the interests committed to my hands, I quailed, confessing myself unequal to him. I forgot the righteous vengeance I owed him; I cried out helplessly against the ill-fortune which had brought him across my path. I saw myself enmeshed and fettered beyond hope of escape, and by an effort only controlled the ...
— A Gentleman of France • Stanley Weyman
... had authority to subject all offenders to the same correction to which a soldier rendered himself liable by breaches of discipline. The Comitia Centuriata could therefore inflict capital punishment. Not so, however, the Comitia Curiata or Comitia Tributa. They were fettered on this point by the sacredness with which the person of a Roman citizen, inside the walls of the city, was invested by religion and law; and, with respect to the last of them, the Comitia Tributa, we know for ...
— Ancient Law - Its Connection to the History of Early Society • Sir Henry James Sumner Maine
... showing my parts in courtship, particularly my abilities at a billet-doux, which I always piqued myself upon, made me lay siege to her; and when, as I always do in my foolish gallantries, I had fettered myself into a very warm affection for her, she told me one day, in a flag of truce, that her fortress had been for some time before the rightful property of another; but, with the greatest friendship and politeness, she offered me every allegiance except actual possession. I found out afterwards ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham
... will. I wonnot love you; give me back my heart; But give it, as you had it, fierce and brave. It was not made to be a woman's slave, But, lion-like, has been in desarts bred, And, used to range, will ne'er be tamely led. Restore its freedom to my fettered will, And then I shall have power ...
— The Works Of John Dryden, Volume 4 (of 18) - Almanzor And Almahide, Marriage-a-la-Mode, The Assignation • John Dryden
... call he had never once failed to answer, some subtle force at work in Jan loosed the cord that had seemed to hold him fettered to the heavy aftermath of his greed that night. His heart swelled within him in answer to the sovereign's call, till it seemed to send new blood, hot and compelling, racing through all his veins into the ...
— Jan - A Dog and a Romance • A. J. Dawson
... a parable. Humanity—ourselves—are as people dwelling ever bound and fettered in a twilit cave, with our backs to the light. Behind us is a parapet, and beyond the parapet a fire; all that we see is the shadows thrown on the wall that faces us by figures passing along the parapet behind us; all we hear is the echo of their voices. Now, if some of us are turned round to face ...
— The World's Greatest Books—Volume 14—Philosophy and Economics • Various
... me to imply a mere drowsy fatalism, or servile acquiescence, or optimism shrinking from action. The sage no doubt must many a time forfeit some measure of the blind, the head-strong, fanatical zeal that has enabled some men, whose reason was fettered and bound, to achieve results that are nigh superhuman; but therefore none the less is it certain that no man of upright soul should go forth in search of illusion or blindness, of zeal or vigour, in a region inferior to that of his noblest hours. To do our true duty in life, ...
— Wisdom and Destiny • Maurice Maeterlinck
... soldiers, forming the base of the crescent, divided in the centre, and wheeling backwards, formed two files of dense thickness, leaving a lane between them through which the prisoner and his guards were discerned advancing to the place assigned. He was still heavily fettered, and his dress, which he had not been permitted to change, covered with dark, lurid stains, hung so loosely upon him, that his attenuated form bore witness, even as the white cheek and haggard eye, to the intense mental torture of the last fortnight. ...
— The Vale of Cedars • Grace Aguilar
... torch of blood-red flame, The man of blood descends; And the fettered captives curse his name, As through ...
— The Baron's Yule Feast: A Christmas Rhyme • Thomas Cooper
... ship"—Wansutis began to chant again—"a ship that sails for many days towards the rising sun; but I never see a ship that sails to the sunset. I see a deer from the free forests and it is fettered and its neck is hung with wampum and flowers; but the deer seeks in vain to escape to its bed of ferns in the woodland. I see a bird that is caught where the lodges are closer together than the pebbles on ...
— The Princess Pocahontas • Virginia Watson
... judges. It was that he should forthwith be taken to the place of execution and suspended above the flames until life should be extinct. But the courage of Du Bourg did not fail him. When the counsellors had fulfilled their commission and were about to retire, the fettered prisoner detained them, and uttered a speech of exquisite pathos. It was the bewitching spirit of delusion, he said, the messenger of hell, the capital enemy of truth, that had accused him before them, because he had abandoned her. To that evil spirit had they too readily listened and condemned ...
— The Rise of the Hugenots, Vol. 1 (of 2) • Henry Martyn Baird
... threw a rapid glance at their confused ranks, noticed their quiver, which was about to turn into a loud, trembling fear, noticed their pallor, their senseless smiles, the drowsy movements of their hands, which seemed as though fettered in iron at the shoulders—and a mortal sorrow began to burn in his heart, akin to the sorrow Christ had experienced before. Outstretching himself into a hundred ringing, sobbing strings, he rushed over to Jesus and ...
— The Crushed Flower and Other Stories • Leonid Andreyev
... frequently threw off the constraint which fettered all, and one even turned with the gayest ease from one person to another. This was Baron Malfalconnet, one of the Emperor's major-domos. He was permitted to do what no one else ventured, for his ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... lock'd up sun, And tyrant-turnkey on committed day, Bright eyes lye fettered in thy dungeon, And Heaven it self doth thy dark wards obey. Thou dost arise our living hell; With thee grones, terrors, furies dwell; Until LUCASTA doth awake, And with her beams ...
— Lucasta • Richard Lovelace
... up to him their prisoner, Robert Fitzstephen, the first of the invaders. Henry, affecting the same displeasure towards Fitzstephen he did for all those who had anticipated his own expedition, ordered him to be fettered and imprisoned in Reginald's tower. At Waterford he also received the friendly overtures of the lords of Desies and Ossory, and probably some form of feudal submission was undergone by those chiefs. Cormac, Prince of Desmond, followed their example, and soon afterwards Donald ...
— A Popular History of Ireland - From the earliest period to the emancipation of the Catholics • Thomas D'Arcy McGee
... depend altogether on the movements of those who walk before them. It is nearly the same with us. We imagine we are altogether free in our thoughts, original and independent, and we are not aware that our thoughts are manacled and fettered by language, and that, without knowing and without perceiving it, we have to keep pace with those who walked before us thousands and thousands of years ago. Language alone binds people together, and keeps them distinct ...
— Chips From A German Workshop. Vol. III. • F. Max Mueller
... a cool, calm, almost jocular tone, the trapper acted with a degree of rapidity and vigour which showed that he thought the crisis a momentous one. With his fettered hands he plucked the knife from the girdle of the dead Indian and gave it to Larry O'Hale, who at once seized it with his right hand, and, as directed, thrust the point against the stem of a neighbouring tree. The trapper ...
— Over the Rocky Mountains - Wandering Will in the Land of the Redskin • R.M. Ballantyne
... perhaps, have partaken to some extent in the contagion of these principles. True, there is this guarantee for caution, on the part of these new men, that as yet they are pledged to nothing; and that, seeing experimentally how fearfully many of their older brethren are now likely to be fettered by the past, they have every possible motive for reserve, in committing themselves, either by their votes or by their pens. In their situation, there is a special inducement to prudence, because there is a prospect, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 55, No. 340, February, 1844 • Various
... had a sonne called Tamerlan, whome the Mosoouites call Temirkutla, who likewise, as it is recorded in histories, attained vnto great renoume. For he caried about with him in a cage Baiazet the Turkish Emperour being fettered in golden chaines, and made him a laughing ...
— The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques, • Richard Hakluyt
... is. Yest're'en I did proclaim thee fairer than all fair ladies; to-day thou art yet fairer, thus this day thou art fairer than thyself; the which, though a paradox, is yet wittily true and truly witty, methinks. But as for me—for me, alas for me! I am forsooth the very slave of love, fettered fast by Dan Cupid, a slave grievous and woeful, yet, being thy slave, joying in my slavery and happy in my grievous woe. Thus it is I groan and moan, lady; I pine, repine and pine again most consumedly. I sleep little and eat less, I am, in fine and in ...
— The Geste of Duke Jocelyn • Jeffery Farnol
... infirm of purpose and choking with words which he could not voice. The whirl in which his confused brain had revolved for months—nay, years—had made the determination of conduct with him a matter of hours, of days, of weeks. Spontaneity of action had long since ceased within his fettered mind, where doubt had laid its detaining hand upon his judgment. Uncertainty of his steps, fear of their consequence, and dread lest he precipitate the calamity which he felt hung always just above him, had sapped the courage and strength of will which his ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... fallen by a beldam's hand in Argos or Julius Caesar not been knifed to death. They are not to be thought away. Time has branded them and fettered they are lodged in the room of the infinite possibilities they have ousted. But can those have been possible seeing that they never were? Or was that only possible which came to pass? Weave, weaver of ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce
... this epistle Is the first you have from me. Idleness has held me fettered, But at last the times are bettered And once more I wet my whistle Here, in ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 23 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... by a sense of general insecurity, by the terror of confiscation, and the dread of Negro supremacy. The Southern trade, from which the North would have derived so great a profit under a government of law, still languishes, and can never be revived until it ceases to be fettered by the arbitrary power which makes all its operations unsafe. That rich country—the richest in natural resources the world ever saw—is worse than lost if it be not soon placed under the protection of a free constitution. Instead of being, as it ought to be, a source ...
— State of the Union Addresses of Andrew Johnson • Andrew Johnson
... you stand so still under the shadow of the tree?" "My feet are languid with the burden of my heart, and I stand still in the shadow." "Ah, shame!" "Well, some march on their way and some linger, some are free and some are fettered—and my feet are languid with the burden ...
— The Gardener • Rabindranath Tagore
... nature, of her passionate, her idolatrous love. Now, then, did my spirit fully and freely burn with more than all the fires of her own. In the excitement of my opium dreams (for I was habitually fettered in the shackles of the drug), I would call aloud upon her name, during the silence of the night, or among the sheltered recesses of the glens by day, as if, through the wild eagerness, the solemn passion, the consuming ardor of my longing for the departed, I could restore her to the ...
— Famous Modern Ghost Stories • Various
... of trade, likewise, is, to a trading country, an article of such importance, that the principal source of wealth depends upon it; and it is impossible that any country can flourish, as it otherwise might do, whose commerce is engrossed, cramped and fettered by the laws and mandates of another—yet these evils, and more than I can here enumerate, the continent has suffered by being under the government of England. By an independence we clear the whole ...
— The Writings Of Thomas Paine, Complete - With Index to Volumes I - IV • Thomas Paine
... lands about the city; then draw thy scymitar and slay him, and leave him to feed the beasts and birds." So the headsman fared forth with me and when he was in the midst of the desert, he took me out of the chest (and I with both hands pinioned and both feet fettered) and was about to bandage my eyes before striking off my head. But I wept with exceeding weeping until I made him weep with me and, looking at him I began ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 1 • Richard F. Burton
... has been an eventful one. I was born a slave—was the child of slave parents—therefore I came upon the earth free in God-like thought, but fettered in action. My birthplace was Dinwiddie Court-House, in Virginia. My recollections of childhood are distinct, perhaps for the reason that many stirring incidents are associated with that period. I am now on the ...
— Behind the Scenes - or, Thirty years a slave, and Four Years in the White House • Elizabeth Keckley
... lashed the heavens. Brave princes died in throngs. At the sea's end hope of return had vanished away. War shields flashed. The wall of water, the mighty sea-stream, rushed over the heroes. The multitude was fettered fast in death, deprived of escape, cunningly bound. The ocean-sands awaited the doom ordained when the flowing billows, the ice-cold, wandering sea with its salt waves, a naked messenger of ill, a ...
— Codex Junius 11 • Unknown
... that I knew right well he would do no manner of wrong to any man, and asked the privilege of being with him all the time, to serve him when he could not serve himself because of the irons that fettered his legs. ...
— Richard of Jamestown - A Story of the Virginia Colony • James Otis
... induced by two centuries of restrictive legislation, is being gradually shaken off by the malting industry under the new law. For many years nearly all improvements in malting processes originated abroad, as numberless Acts of Parliament fettered every process and the use of every implement requisite in a malt-house in this country. The entire removal of these legislative restrictions gives an opportunity for improved processes, which promises to open up a considerable field for engineering work, and to develop ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 433, April 19, 1884 • Various
... land of charity and benevolence; than to be wretched as so many are in Europe, possessing nothing but their industry: tossed from one rough wave to another; engaged either in the most servile labours for the smallest pittance, or fettered with the links of the most irksome dependence, even ...
— Letters from an American Farmer • Hector St. John de Crevecoeur
... spare wizened-up grey man, in the threadbare brown velveteen jacket, who stood in the middle of the hall, caught Ernest's hand warmly, and held it for a moment fettered in his iron grip. There was an honesty in that grip and in those hazy blue-spectacled eyes that nobody could for a second misunderstand. If an emperor had been introduced to Max Schurz he might have felt a little abashed one minute ...
— Philistia • Grant Allen
... every dark hollow, and every shapeless rock in the mountains, offers you a hiding place from the vengeance of your enemies. But I have seen the gibbet raised, when no place of refuge offered. Twice have I been buried in dungeons, where, fettered and in chains, I have passed nights in torture, looking forward to the morning's dawn that was to light me to a death of infamy. The sweat has started from limbs that seemed already drained of their moisture; and if I ventured to the hole that admitted air through grates of iron ...
— The Spy • James Fenimore Cooper
... he thought that Bach, "immortal though many of his works are," was fettered by his ...
— War Letters of a Public-School Boy • Henry Paul Mainwaring Jones
... Cincinnati. The result of the conference: The boarding school was transferred to the immediate care of the Board, with Mr. Rockwood as Superintendent; the ladies to retain their respective positions—teacher, house-keeper and matron. From this time Miss Thayer felt greatly fettered, and the impression grew upon her that her presence was not desired at Mt. Hope; that her usefulness there was at an end. Long and prayerfully did she weigh the matter, and at last, though it nearly broke her heart, she asked to be dismissed from the field. ...
— Legends, Traditions, and Laws of the Iroquois, or Six Nations, and History of the Tuscarora Indians • Elias Johnson
... I am quite assured of; it is that the management should exercise a wise discretion in refusing unsuitable objects (chiefly of ethnology) or duplicates of common forms, and never receive a collection if fettered with the condition that "it must be kept separate." Order, method, neatness, and careful cataloguing I say nothing about, for I assume that all principals must practise these virtues to do any good whatever with the collections entrusted to ...
— Practical Taxidermy • Montagu Browne
... me, life's sweetest memories are all embittered. Slavery had cast its dark and fearful shadow over my childhood, youth, and early manhood, and I went out from the land of my birth, a fettered slave. A land which I can regard only as "the house of bondage and the grave of freedom." But God forgive me for having envied my master his fair ...
— Twenty-Two Years a Slave, and Forty Years a Freeman • Austin Steward
... of the same strong and stalwart contour as ever.... But in his countenance I saw a change: that looked desperate and brooding—that reminded me of some wronged and fettered wild beast or bird, dangerous to approach in his sullen woe. The caged eagle, whose gold-ringed eyes cruelty has extinguished, might look as looked that ...
— The Three Brontes • May Sinclair
... him, all at once, that this was a new Joanne—a Joanne who, at least for a brief spell, had broken the bondage of oppression and fear that had fettered her. In the narrow trail up the mountain he rode behind her, and in this he found a pleasure even greater than when he rode at her side. Only when her face was turned from him did he dare surrender himself at all to the emotions which had transformed ...
— The Hunted Woman • James Oliver Curwood
... freed himself from the string that fettered his wrists, and danced in glee round John Haynes, in whose discomfiture he ...
— Frank's Campaign - or the Farm and the Camp • Horatio Alger, Jr.
... light in the realms of space lay hidden, When life was yet in the womb of time, Ere flesh was fettered to fruits forbidden, And souls were wedded to care and crime, Was the course foreshaped for the future spirit— A burden of folly, a void of merit— That would fain the wisdom of stars inherit, And cannot fathom ...
— Poems • Adam Lindsay Gordon
... that the limb had been thrust through one of the openings of the fence, and he was a prisoner to some fierce chief who had suspected the design to escape, held in so strong a grip, that had he dared to struggle to free himself, it would not have been possible to drag the fettered arm away. ...
— The Adventures of Don Lavington - Nolens Volens • George Manville Fenn
... two crushed and fettered souls, bound by no iron bonds, confined by no bolts and bars, but only under the shadow of the supernatural, sat together like prisoners in a dungeon concocting schemes ...
— The Christian - A Story • Hall Caine
... we have too much regarded hostilities as a game in which there were certain rules to be observed, and that when we found ourselves matched against a foe whose object was to win by any means, fair or foul, the soldiers who were fettered by the scruples of honour were necessarily inferior to their unscrupulous foe. It has perhaps yet to be proved that in the long run the unchivalrous fighter always wins, and I doubt whether any of us would really prefer that even in war we should ...
— Cambridge Essays on Education • Various
... Von Siebold thinks that the officials threaten and knock them about; and this is possible; but I really think that the Kaitaikushi Department means well by them, and, besides removing the oppressive restrictions by which, as a conquered race, they were fettered, treats them far more humanely and equitably than the U.S. Government, for instance, treats the North American Indians. However, they are ignorant; and one of the men, who had been most grateful because I said I would get Dr. ...
— Unbeaten Tracks in Japan • Isabella L. Bird
... Shock, Clap, Slap, Time, Bar, Coin, Stamp, Kind, Sort, Manner, Way, Apoplexy, Wood-cutting, Enclosure, Field, Forest-clearing. This is its simple and EXACT meaning—that is to say, its restricted, its fettered meaning; but there are ways by which you can set it free, so that it can soar away, as on the wings of the morning, and never be at rest. You can hang any word you please to its tail, and make it mean anything you want to. You can begin with SCHLAG-ADER, which means artery, and you ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... squirm away from the gagging boxing-gloves and let out a yelp; but the heavy door of the gymnasium kept the secret mum, and there was something so surprising about the ambuscade in the dark that the Dozen soon had the half-dozen securely gagged and fettered. Then they were toted like meal-bags up the stairs of the chapel, and on up and up into the loft, and into the bell-tower. There they were laid out on the floor, and their angry eyes discovered that they ...
— The Dozen from Lakerim • Rupert Hughes
... gathered them around thee] and raisest thyself [against us], [thou hast made] Kingu thy husband [and hast bestowed on] him divine power. ... thou hast devised evil, [against the] gods, my fathers, hast thou directed thy enmity. [May] thy host be fettered, thy weapons be restrained! Stand up, and I and thou will fight together.' When Tiamat heard this, she uttered her former spells, she repeated her command. Tiamat also cried out vehemently with a loud voice. From her roots she rocked herself completely. She uttered an incantation, she cast ...
— Early Israel and the Surrounding Nations • Archibald Sayce
... resentment from those who are immediately affected by the arrangement, and the long train of their friends and powerful patrons."—My Lords, it is the constant burden of his song, that he cannot do his duty, that he is fettered in everything, that he fears a thousand mischiefs to happen to him,—not from his acting with carefulness, economy, frugality, and in obedience to the laws of his country, but from the very reverse of all this. ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. XI. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... him from the truth, and Davenport an emissary of Satan, if not the arch-deceiver himself. No adequate answers to doctrines which he was persuaded were false presented themselves to his mind, and this he ascribed to some hellish spell, which fettered his reason, and must soon be broken, or he was lost. Mentally, then, first ejaculating a prayer, he suddenly sprung to his feet, and in a loud voice bade the ...
— The Lost Hunter - A Tale of Early Times • John Turvill Adams
... can be hurriedly said aside, but in an aria, where the words must be repeated, it has a bad effect; and even were this not the case, I should prefer an uninterrupted aria. The beginning may remain if he chooses, for it is charming and quite a natural flowing strain, where, not being fettered by the words, I can write on quite easily; for we agreed to bring in an aria andantino here in concert with four wind instruments, viz. flute, hautboy, horn, and bassoon; and I beg that you will let me have the air ...
— The Letters of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, V.1. • Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
... heart. I have gained the mastery over my heart, I have gained the mastery over my two hands, I have gained the mastery over my legs, I have gained the power to do whatsoever my ka (double) pleaseth. My soul shall not be fettered to my body at the gates of the underworld; but I shall enter in peace and I shall come forth ...
— Egyptian Literature
... in spite of censure and rebuff in presenting schemes of ecclesiastical reform. And three years before Elizabeth's death it dealt boldly with matters of trade. Complaints made in 1571 of the licences and monopolies by which internal and external commerce was fettered were repressed by a royal reprimand as matters neither pertaining to the Commons nor within the compass of their understanding. When the subject was again stirred nearly twenty years afterwards, Sir Edward Hoby ...
— History of the English People, Volume V (of 8) - Puritan England, 1603-1660 • John Richard Green
... us here.... If Lana be asleep at this moment I do not know.... She tells me I have broke her heart—but yet will have none of me.... Tells me my duty lies elsewhere; that I shall make amends. How can a man make amends when his heart lies not in the deed?... Am I then to be fettered to a passing whim for all eternity? Does an instant's idle folly entail endless responsibility? Do I merit punishment everlasting for a silly amourette that lasted no longer than the July moon? Tell me, Loskiel, you who are called among ...
— The Hidden Children • Robert W. Chambers
... accustom ourselves to die. This will be enjoying a life like that of heaven even while we remain on earth; and when we are carried thither and released from these bonds, our souls will make their progress with more rapidity; for the spirit which has always been fettered by the bonds of the body, even when it is disengaged, advances more slowly, just as those do who have worn actual fetters for many years: but when we have arrived at this emancipation from the bonds of the body, then indeed we shall begin ...
— Cicero's Tusculan Disputations - Also, Treatises On The Nature Of The Gods, And On The Commonwealth • Marcus Tullius Cicero
... was their final visit. I bade them all farewell. Now every bond Forevermore is broken that bound me fast And fettered me ...
— Early Plays - Catiline, The Warrior's Barrow, Olaf Liljekrans • Henrik Ibsen
... grew fainter, I am afraid that we clung to this new form of occupation as an apology for remaining there; for the fascinations of our vagabond and unconventional life were more potent than we dreamed of. We were slowly fettered by our very freedom; there was a strange spell in this very boundlessness of our license that kept us from even the desire of change; in the wild and lawless arms of nature herself we found an embrace as clinging, as hopeless and restraining, ...
— The Heritage of Dedlow Marsh and Other Tales • Bret Harte
... not sided with Jesus, who yet so clearly betokened progress within the religion that He widened and unintentionally overthrew. The supernatural personality of Jesus did not seem credible to me. The demand made by faith, namely, that reason should be fettered, awakened a latent rebellious opposition, and this opposition was fostered by my mother's steady rationalism, her unconditional rejection of every miracle. When the time came for me to be confirmed, in accordance with the law, I had advanced so far that I looked ...
— Recollections Of My Childhood And Youth • George Brandes
... thou not in the far distance there, Standing alone, that child, so pale and fair? She seems to move so slowly, and with pain, As if her feet were fettered by a chain. I must confess, I almost seem to trace My poor good Gretchen ...
— The Faust-Legend and Goethe's 'Faust' • H. B. Cotterill
... came back and stood behind her eyes—only thing that had life in all that place—stood and looked for Conroy's soul. He too was fettered in every limb, but somewhere at an immense distance he heard his heart going about its work as the engine-room carries on through and beneath the all but overwhelming wave. His one hope, he knew, ...
— A Diversity of Creatures • Rudyard Kipling
... enrich and strengthen the language in order that it may deal easily with the new thoughts. French is now a superb instrument, while English is positively poorer than it was in the time of Shakespeare, thanks to the prudery of our illiterate middle class. Divorced from reality, with its activities all fettered in baby-linen, our literature has atrophied and dwindled into a babble of nursery rhymes, tragedies of Little Marys, tales of Babes in a Wood. The example of Shakespeare may yet teach us the value of free speech; he could say what he liked as he liked: he ...
— The Man Shakespeare • Frank Harris
... him; whoso built the first jail was a sage, seeing that a jail is the grave of the living and a joy for the foe." So the Caliph bade lay him in bilboes and write thereon, "Appointed to remain here until death and not to be loosed but on the corpse washer's bench;" and they cast him fettered into limbo. Now his mother was a frequent visitor to the house of the Emir Khalid, who was Governor and Chief of Police; and she used to go in to her son in jail and say to him, "Did I not warn thee to turn from ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 4 • Richard F. Burton
... us throughout Herculaneum, and descended into the cell, all green with damp, under the basilica, and lay down, fettered and manacled in the place of those found there beside the big bronze kettle in which the prisoners used to cook their dinners. How ghastly the thought of it was! If we had really seen this kettle and the skeletons there—as we did not—we could not have suffered more ...
— Italian Journeys • William Dean Howells
... Assyrians were fain to keep their horses fettered in the stable, they were so fierce and vicious; and that it required so much time to loose and harness them, that to avoid any disorder this tedious preparation might bring upon them in case of surprise, they ...
— The Essays of Montaigne, Complete • Michel de Montaigne
... Thou thinkest to overtake them, for all thou'rt fettered fast; while thou bearest Thy sins from thy desire Follies, which slay thee whatso do hinder ...
— The Life of Sir Richard Burton • Thomas Wright
... now rests far away, where no spotted-faced executioner can fill her heart with terror; where no unfeeling magistrate can extort the scanty pittance which she had preserved through every risk to sustain her fettered husband and famishing babe; no more exposed to lie on a bed of languishment, stung with the uncertainty what would become of her poor husband and child when she was gone. No, she has her little ones around her, I trust, and has taught them to ...
— Lives of the Three Mrs. Judsons • Arabella W. Stuart
... refused to tread it; I opened my drawing-room doors and they rushed in, in crowds." There is nothing more tragic in history than the spectacle of this man of unparalleled administrative and political genius, fettered by the past, and at length grown desperate, abandoning himself to his weird. The march into Russia is the return upon the daimonic spirit of its primitive instincts. The beneficent ruler is merged once more in the visionary of earlier times, ...
— The Origins and Destiny of Imperial Britain - Nineteenth Century Europe • J. A. Cramb
... dragged Athos into the water, compressing his throat, and winding his limbs round him like the coils of a serpent. Without uttering a word, or calling for help, Athos strove for a moment to maintain himself on the surface of the water. But his movements were fettered, the weight that clung to him was too great to bear up against, and little by little he sank. Before his friends could get to his assistance, his head was under water, and only his long hair was seen floating; then all disappeared, and a circle of foam, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, Number 361, November, 1845. • Various
... who can map its caverns? A limitless essence, an unfailing spring, an evergreen fruit-tree, a riddle unsolved, a quaint museum, a hot-bed of inventions, an over-mantling tankard, a whimsical motley, a bursting volcano, a full, independent, generous—a poor, fettered, jealous, Anomaly, such—bear witness—is an author's mind. O, theme of many topics! chaos of ill-sorted fancies! Let us come now to the jealousies, the real or imaginary wrongs of authorship: hereafter treat we this at lengthier; ...
— The Complete Prose Works of Martin Farquhar Tupper • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... God, will watch with a species of terror, and even repulsion, the aloofness, the solitariness of the mystic and the artist. It will seem to them a sort of chilly isolation, an inhuman, even a selfish thing; just as the mystic and the artist will see in the normal life of men a thing fettered and bound with sad and small chains. It is impossible to say which is the higher life—no dogmatism is possible—all depends upon the quality of the emotion; it is the intensity of the feeling rather than its nature ...
— The Silent Isle • Arthur Christopher Benson
... the bar, and rose to the height of my profession? That I entered politics—say, even, that I became Prime Minister of England? What then? Was that power? Hampered at every turn by my colleagues, fettered by the democratic system of which I should be the mere figurehead! No—the power I dreamed of was absolute! An autocrat! A dictator! And such power could only be obtained by working outside the law. To play on the weaknesses of human nature, then on the weaknesses ...
— The Secret Adversary • Agatha Christie
... show learning and taste far more distinctly than a glowing imagination. But even if an original poet can breathe some spirit into classical poems, the poor translator, with the dread of philologists and antiquarians in the back-ground, is so fettered that free movement becomes almost impossible. No one, I should venture to prophesy, will really succeed in such work unless he frankly accepts the impossibility of reproducing the original, and aims only at an equivalent for some of its aspects. ...
— Alexander Pope - English Men of Letters Series • Leslie Stephen
... life he led In chainless thought and fettered will Some glimpses reach us,—somewhat still Of the steep stairs and bitter bread,— Of the soul's quest whose stern avow For years had made him ...
— Recollections of Dante Gabriel Rossetti - 1883 • T. Hall Caine
... to his want of independence, and his better knowledge of Mrs. Ferrars's disposition and designs. The shortness of his visit, the steadiness of his purpose in leaving them, originated in the same fettered inclination, the same inevitable necessity of temporizing with his mother. The old well-established grievance of duty against will, parent against child, was the cause of all. She would have been glad to know when these difficulties were to cease, this opposition was ...
— Persuasion • Jane Austen
... Many fetters Skapti fettered When the men, the Gods of fight, From the fray fared all unwilling Where the skald scarce held his shield; Then the suttlers dragged the lawyer Stout in scolding to their booth, Laid him low amongst the riffraff, How his heart ...
— The story of Burnt Njal - From the Icelandic of the Njals Saga • Anonymous
... liberating force. It is absurd to say that you are especially advancing freedom when you only use free thought to destroy free will. The determinists come to bind, not to loose. They may well call their law the "chain" of causation. It is the worst chain that ever fettered a human being. You may use the language of liberty, if you like, about materialistic teaching, but it is obvious that this is just as inapplicable to it as a whole as the same language when applied to a man locked up ...
— Orthodoxy • G. K. Chesterton
... was, we came to Adan in search of him, and when we foregathered with him there, he told us that he was trading in stuffs with the monies and buying goods upon goods. So we believed him and he ceased not to cozen us till he cast us into jail and fettered us and tortured us with exceeding sore torments; and we are strangers in the land and have no helper save Almighty Allah and our lord the Kazi." When the judge heard this tale he asked Hubub the nurse, "Is this indeed thy ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 8 • Richard F. Burton
... of all men not fettered by provincial traditions as invested with this foresight and this faith, is become to a vast party an idol, and from his writings issue oracles. But the priests at his shrines, having waxed fat in honors, have at last so befogged his sentiments ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 09, No. 51, January, 1862 • Various
... one of the landmarks of history, was signed between France on the one hand, and England, Holland, Prussia, Portugal, and Savoy on the other. The emperor still held out, but the loss of British subsidies fettered the movements of his armies, and with the withdrawal of the sea powers the continental war might have fallen of itself; but France with her hands freed carried on during 1713 a brilliant and successful campaign in Germany. On the 7th of March, 1714, peace was ...
— The Influence of Sea Power Upon History, 1660-1783 • A. T. Mahan
... lay all my warlike trophies in a woman's lap, and change my truncheon for a distaff? No, Sabra, George of England was born in a country where true chivalry is nourished, and hath sworn to see the world, as far as the lamp of heaven can lend him light, before he is fettered in the golden chains of wedlock. Why decline the suit of King Almidor, fit consort for ...
— The Seven Champions of Christendom • W. H. G. Kingston
... would not change one word of doom Upon the dreadful scroll, That gave her body to the tomb And freed her fettered soul. ...
— Collected Poems - Volume One (of 2) • Alfred Noyes
... minded to do thee a hurt, I will bid one of the Jinn-guard snatch him up and bring him to thee.' Replied Teghmus, 'I hear and I obey,' and bade Shimwal bring him the prisoner, who came manacled and fettered and kissed earth between his hands. Then he commanded to strike off his chains and, mounting him on a lame mare, said to him, 'Verily Princess Shamsah hath interceded for thee: so begone to thy kingdom, but if thou fall again to thine old tricks, she will send one of the Marids to seize thee ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 5 • Richard F. Burton
... that rebellion stirred in me. Her coming had turned me cold, for all that my body was overheated from the exercise and I was sweating furiously. Now, at the sound of her voice, something of the injustice that oppressed me, something of the unreasoning bigotry that chained and fettered me, stood clear before my mental vision for the first time. It warmed me again with the warmth of sullen indignation. I returned her no answer beyond a curtly respectful invitation that she should speak her mind, couched—as had been ...
— The Strolling Saint • Raphael Sabatini
... in his bins, and upon his fertile lands the largest crop in all Kem (save only that of the Pharaoh) is nodding and awaiting the warm, ripening breath of the Snowless Month! Yet Hotep hath no use for iron money, for he is weighted and fettered with it already; but if thou desirest to bargain with him for as much yellow gold as thou hast bartered to the Pharaoh, he will be most pleased to treat with thee, and sendeth me with this ambling mule to fetch thee. Will it please thee to come ...
— Pharaoh's Broker - Being the Very Remarkable Experiences in Another World of Isidor Werner • Ellsworth Douglass
... peremptorily, if she cared for him at all. His career, which promised to be so brilliant, was spoiling at the outset. Rosamund thought of Renee almost with detestation, as a species of sorceress that had dug a trench in her hero's road, and unhorsed and fast fettered him. ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... faithful Jews cling to the expectation of the Messiah's coming, and associate with his day the resurrection of the dead.35 The statement in the Song of Solomon, "The king is held in the galleries," means, says a Rabbinical book, "that the Messiah is detained in Paradise, fettered by a woman's hair!" Every day, throughout the world, every consistent Israelite repeats the words of Moses Maimonides, the peerless Rabbi, of whom it is a proverb that "from Moses to Moses there arose not a Moses:" "I believe with a perfect faith that the Messiah will come, and though he ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... country promoted the growth of these hostile interests in both cases. The commercial policy pursued by England towards America was identical with that pursued towards Ireland. The industry of the Anglo-Irish traders was restricted, their commerce and even their production fettered, their prosperity checked, for the benefit of the merchants of Manchester and Bristol. Crescit Roma Albae ruinis. "The bulk of the people," said Stone, the Primate, "are not regularly either lodged, clothed, or fed; and ...
— Burke • John Morley
... Carolinian once managed his slaves. The idea that political power properly emanates from the people,—the idea of Rousseau and Jefferson,—never once occurred to him; nor even political power in the hands of aristocrats, fettered by a constitution and amenable to the nation. A constitutional monarchy existed nowhere, except perhaps in England. Unrestricted and absolute power in the hands of a king was the only government he believed in. The king might be feeble, in which ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume VIII • John Lord
... of Francisco Pizarro—who in this manner began his conquering career—he embarked in the pirate ship, but had hardly cleared the harbor before he began a fierce quarrel with the commander, Talavera, by whose orders he was seized and fettered. Even when chained to the deck, the undaunted cavalier dared Talavera and his crew to fight him, two at a time, and when they refused denounced them all ...
— Amerigo Vespucci • Frederick A. Ober
... you, you stolid and flesh-fettered ox, you monstrosity of over-weening and perennial health and joy, what do you think of ...
— The Valley of the Moon • Jack London
... of the body; the actual body can be fettered, but the mind is uncontrollable; the body will die and will become dust, or be eaten by vultures, but the ...
— The Albert N'Yanza, Great Basin of the Nile • Sir Samuel White Baker
... emperor was invested for life with a power unlimited, extravagant, and hardly conceivable; according to his fancy he disposed of persons and their property, condemned, confiscated, and executed without restraint. No institution, no law fettered his will. "The decree of the emperor has the force of law," say the jurisconsults themselves. Rome recognized then the unlimited despotism that the tyrants had exercised in the Greek cities, no longer circumscribed ...
— History Of Ancient Civilization • Charles Seignobos
... of life. With him, feminine tyrannies have free play. No one is more easily conquered and subdued. Only, beware! He must not be made to feel the yoke too heavily. If one day the invisible bonds with which he is surreptitiously fettered are drawn too tight and arrest the artistic effort, he will all at once tear them asunder, and, mistrusting his own weakness, will fly like our sculptor, over the ...
— Artists' Wives • Alphonse Daudet
... of it, there began to be awakened in his mind a strong liking for faro, which with all its simplicity is the most ominous of games; and this liking continued to increase more and more. He was no longer dissatisfied with his good-luck; gambling fettered his attention and held him fast to the table for nights and nights, so that he was perforce compelled to give credence to the peculiar attraction of the game, of which his friends had formerly spoken and which he would ...
— Weird Tales, Vol. II. • E. T. A. Hoffmann
... feelings of his nature suffer from the constant presence of those whose superiority he is forced to admire, but whose personal character he naturally detests. Such conflict of feeling cannot but be with detriment to the spirit, which, so fettered, refuses the generous offices of brotherhood, and yields the debt of civility only from policy or by constraint. How different is this man in his proper country! where the usages and language, and ideas are unmixedly those which ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCLXXVI. February, 1847. Vol. LXI. • Various
... you are worthy of the favor of our noble queen," said M. von Schiaden, solemnly, "for you are the representative hero of Germany, and Heaven has decreed, perhaps, that you should break the first link of the chain with which the usurper has fettered our country. As soon as that link is broken, it will be easy to break the rest. You, Major von Schill, are the hope of Germany—the hope of Queen Louisa. Take, then, the present which she sends you, worthy champion of the cause ...
— Napoleon and the Queen of Prussia • L. Muhlbach
... men, mounted on mules, and riding at a quick pace. They had soon overtaken the procession, and exchanged greetings with the curate and the barber. One of the travelers was a canon of Toledo, and on observing the fettered Don Quixote, with the armed officers of the Brotherhood as an escort, he took it for granted that the knight was some dangerous highwayman. Yet, scrutinizing the strange parade, he could not help asking questions. So when he inquired of one of the officers why Don Quixote was being ...
— The Story of Don Quixote • Arvid Paulson, Clayton Edwards, and Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... complete life of the Redeemer." Four days after an advertisement in the official Calcutta Gazette, announcing that the missionaries had established a press at Serampore and were printing the Bible in Bengali, roused Lord Wellesley, who had fettered the press in British India. Mr. Brown was able to inform the Governor-General that this very Serampore press had refused to print a political attack on the English Government, and that it was intended for ...
— The Life of William Carey • George Smith
... date, the principal ones, those of municipal officer, elector, and deputy, having but two years to run; at the end of this brief term their recipients are again subject to his vote, in order that, if he is displeased with them, he may replace them by others. He must not be fettered in his choice; in every well-conducted establishment the legitimate proprietor must be free easily and frequently to renew his staff of clerks. He is the only one in whom confidence can be placed, and, for greater security, all arms are given up to him. When his clerks wish to employ ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 2 (of 6) - The French Revolution, Volume 1 (of 3) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... Slavery' is as remarkable as the most important book ever written by an American. That book is 'Uncle Tom's Cabin.' Booker Washington's story is its echo and its antithesis. 'Uncle Tom's Cabin' was the wail of a fettered, hope-forsaken race. 'Up from Slavery' is the triumphant cry of the same race, led by its Moses upon a trail which leads to an intelligent use of the freedom that came to it as an almost direct result of ...
— Booker T. Washington - Builder of a Civilization • Emmett J. Scott and Lyman Beecher Stowe
... "the free queen of the air," living at her own wild will, suddenly fettered and brooding on her nest, and covering her helpless young with her tender wings—we see some faint image of the Divine tenderness. In the ceaseless toil of both the parent birds from morning till night to fill the little ...
— The Power of Womanhood, or Mothers and Sons - A Book For Parents, And Those In Loco Parentis • Ellice Hopkins
... was purchased and Slavery left in that vast territory; thus the first expansion of our borders was an extension of bondage,—out of that soil three great States, Louisiana, Missouri, Arkansas, have since been made, all despotic, with more than half a million of Americans fettered there to-day. Florida was purchased as slave soil, and in 1845 made a State with perpetual Slavery written in its Constitution. In 1845 Texas was annexed and Slavery extended over nearly four hundred thousand square miles of once free soil; in 1848 Slavery was spread over California, ...
— The Trial of Theodore Parker • Theodore Parker
... was smiling faintly. Her face bore no trace of the tragic truth she had uttered. But the tragedy was plain enough to him, even without her passionless words of revolt. The situation of this young, educated girl, aglow with youth, fettered, body and mind, to the squalor of Clinch's dump, ...
— The Flaming Jewel • Robert W. Chambers
... lifted Denman to his feet; and, as the boat still rolled heavily, he assisted him to the bridge stairs, where he could get a grip on the railing with his fettered hands. Daylight had come, and Denman could see Florrie, still seated in the deck chair, ...
— The Wreck of the Titan - or, Futility • Morgan Robertson
... school set out to show that the human mind is not necessarily fettered for all time by the prejudices and institutions in which it has clothed itself. When he had done stripping us, it was a nice question whether even our nakedness remained. He treated our prejudices and our effete institutions as though they were something external to us, which had ...
— Shelley, Godwin and Their Circle • H. N. Brailsford
... of the unceasing efforts of those who happen to be in authority to conceal this and attribute some other significance to it, authority has always meant for man the cord, the chain with which he is bound and fettered, or the knout with which he is to be flogged, or the ax with which he is to have hands, ears, nose, or head cut off, or at the very least, the threat of these terrors. So it was under Nero and Ghenghis Khan, and so it is to-day, ...
— The Kingdom of God is within you • Leo Tolstoy
... and selfishness, who ought to creep In their own reptile slime, and dart away When eyes perceiv'd their presence. Oh! could those Adventure in too perilous a path, If without other guide than the bright stars, The love of what is lofty and divine, Or the desire of gaining for mankind, Now fettered and held down to poison'd food, Its unpolluted birth-right —they dared on, Plunging at once into untravelled realms, And bringing, as the harvest of their toil, Arms which will make each potent talisman, Each charm, and spell, and ...
— Vignettes in Verse • Matilda Betham
... is not only through the sentiment of personal dignity, that the free direction and disposal of their own faculties is a source of individual happiness, and to be fettered and restricted in it, a source of unhappiness, to human beings, and not least to women. There is nothing, after disease, indigence, and guilt, so fatal to the pleasurable enjoyment of life as the want ...
— The Subjection of Women • John Stuart Mill
... the short interval which preceded their departure; being kept strictly apart. Hugh only observed that Barnaby walked with a drooping head among his guard, and, without raising his eyes, that he tried to wave his fettered hand when he passed. For himself, he buoyed up his courage as he rode along, with the assurance that the mob would force his jail wherever it might be, and set him at liberty. But when they got into London, and more especially into Fleet Market, lately the stronghold of the rioters, ...
— Barnaby Rudge • Charles Dickens
... against difficulties, eager and hot after knowledge, wasting eyesight and stinting sleep, subtle, inquisitive, active-minded and sanguine, but omnivorous, overflowing with dialectical forms, loose in premise and ostentatiously rigid in syllogism, fettered by the refinements of half-awakened taste and the mannerisms ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... beauty! May he ne'er, in gladsome gathering, stretch his hand to thee for partner! Never gird himself with girdle which for him thy hand embroidered! Let his heart, thy love forsaking, in another love be fettered; The love-tokens of another may his scutcheon flame in battle, While behind thy grated windows year by year, away thou mournest! To thy rival may he offer prisoners that his hand has taken! May the ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 4 • Charles Dudley Warner
... real history and broke with it, to be subjected all the more to the tyranny of historical ghosts. While the poets were fettered in blind worship of the unities of Aristotle as of a fundamental historical law, Houdart, without understanding a word of Greek, corrected Homer, whose poetry did not seem ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VIII • Various
... was rent, not fully raised; and as in some dream the solemn eyes appeared to search his. A strange shivering thrill shot along his nerves, and his quiet, well regulated heart so long the docile obedient motor, fettered vassal of his will, bounded, strained hard on the steel cable that held ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... and wheels, and what manner of men they must be who dig brown iron-stone out of the ground, and forge it into THAT! What assemblage of accurate and mighty faculties in them; more than fleshly power over melting crag and coiling fire, fettered, and finessed at last into the precision of watchmaking; Titanian hammer-strokes beating, out of lava, these glittering cylinders and timely-respondent valves, and fine ribbed rods, which touch each ...
— On the Old Road Vol. 1 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... the dearth of Fame, Though linked among a fettered race, To feel at least a patriot's shame, Even as I sing, suffuse my face; For what is left the poet here? For Greeks a blush—for ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 6 • Lord Byron
... and the members of his family has an abode in his palace, but they are all fettered in chains of iron, and guards are placed over each of their houses so that they may not rise against the great Caliph. For once it happened to a predecessor that his brothers rose up against him and proclaimed one of themselves ...
— The Itinerary of Benjamin of Tudela • Benjamin of Tudela
... beyond all, not an inquiry in the great truths of morals, of ethics, of religion, or of the very constitution of the mind itself, but at once, and in the most natural consequence, reveals the power and the goodness of God—brings God himself as clearly before us as he can be manifested to our fettered souls. Yet if these pleasures too were but temporary, if they were to pass from our sight with all our other earthly surroundings, the pursuit of them would but beget disgust and discontent, and they would be classed with the fragile ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol III, Issue VI, June, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... speaks. Her arms are raised; she seeks Her fettered hands to show. On both white wrists a chain!— She cries and pleads in pain: ...
— Songs of Labor and Other Poems • Morris Rosenfeld
... his readiness to denounce wrong from the pulpit, did he not publicly denounce these pretended revelations which brought new darkness instead of light across the conception of a Supreme Will? Why? The answer came with painful clearness: he was fettered inwardly by the consciousness that such revelations were not, in their basis, distinctly separable from his own visions; he was fettered outwardly by the foreseen consequence of raising a cry against himself even among members of his own party, as one who would suppress all Divine inspiration of ...
— Romola • George Eliot
... sale of the unhappy captives to speculators who ship them on, stage by stage, to Athens. Perhaps there is no war; the supply is kept up then by deliberately kidnapping on a large scale, or by piracy.[*] In any case the arrival of a chain gang of fettered wretches at the Peireus is an everyday sight. Some of these creatures are submissive and tame (perhaps they understand some craft or trade); these can be sold at once for a high price. Others are still doltish and stubborn. They are good for only ...
— A Day In Old Athens • William Stearns Davis
... not lust after the strengthening of its power abroad at the expense of other nations. Its aim is not to subjugate or humiliate any one. In the name of the higher principles of equity, the Russian people have broken the chains which fettered the Polish nation, but it will not suffer that its own country shall emerge from the great struggle humiliated or weakened ...
— Bolshevism - The Enemy of Political and Industrial Democracy • John Spargo
... were our estates laid under shameful impositions, our houses ransacked, our bodies imprisoned. Then was the steel of the hangman blunted with mangling the ears of harmless men. Then our very minds were fettered, and the iron entered into our souls. Then we were compelled to hide our hatred, our sorrow, and our scorn, to laugh with hidden faces at the mummery of Laud, to curse under our breath the tyranny of Wentworth. Of old time it was well and nobly said, by one of our kings, ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 1 (of 4) - Contibutions to Knight's Quarterly Magazine] • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... footlights, or the spheres,— The play of two short hours, or seventy years? Dream on! Though Heaven may woo our open eyes, Through their closed lids we look on fairer skies; Truth is for other worlds, and hope for this; The cheating future lends the present's bliss; Life is a running shade, with fettered hands, That chases phantoms over shifting sands; Death a still spectre on a marble seat, With ever clutching palms and shackled feet; The airy shapes that mock life's slender chain, The flying joys he strives to clasp in vain, Death only grasps; to live is to pursue,— Dream ...
— The Poetical Works of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Complete • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... thou, O river, cleaving half the earth From sunset to sunrise, From the great mountains to the Atlantic waves Thy joy's long anthem pour. Yet a few days (God make them less!) and slaves Shall shame thy pride no more. No fettered feet thy shaded margins press; But all men shall walk free Where thou, the high-priest of the wilderness, Hast wedded sea ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 117, July, 1867. • Various
... statesman, and oftentimes regretting his vanity, for instance, have quite as little thought it allowable to condemn the main political views, theories, and consequently actions, of Cicero. But why not? Why should a biographer be fettered in his choice of subjects by any imaginary duty of adopting the views held by him whose life he records? To make war upon the man, to quarrel with him in every page, that is quite as little in accordance with our notions; and we have already explained above our sense of its hatefulness. ...
— The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. 1 (2 vols) • Thomas De Quincey
... inquisitorial and as dogmatic as any Dominican of them all. He believed in force; he was as ready as all his fellows were to invoke the aid of the temporal power. The idea of the Church, as helped and sustained—which means fettered, and weakened, and paralysed—by the civic government, bewitched him as it did his fellows. We needed to wait for George Fox, and Roger Williams, and more modern names still, before we understood fully what was involved in the rejection of priesthood, and ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: The Acts • Alexander Maclaren
... such instruction he conceived it his duty to go on. The plea on which he somewhat confidently relied, and which his client, had he not unfortunately been prevented in some way from attending, would have supported by his evidence, was that such an expression as a 'free hand' could not be limited, fettered, and rendered unmeaning, by any verbiage which might follow it. He would go further and say that the correspondence showed that whatever he might have said in his evidence, Mr. Forsyte had in fact never contemplated repudiating liability on any of the work ordered or executed by his architect. ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... doubt; Deliberating ever, till the sting Of a recurrent ardor made him rush Right against reasons that himself had drilled And marshalled painfully. A spirit framed Too proudly special for obedience, Too subtly pondering for mastery: Born of a goddess with a mortal sire, Heir of flesh-fettered, weak divinity, Doom-gifted with long resonant consciousness And perilous heightening ...
— George Eliot; A Critical Study of Her Life, Writings & Philosophy • George Willis Cooke
... there," said Morris. "But mark my words, you'll propagate ideas here, and the result in time will be the birth of a nation—no doubt of that; but you must rest content to live on hope for the present. I was a fettered limb in this body too long. ...
— The Conqueror • Gertrude Franklin Atherton
... forth the shrillest, most despairing cries of the afflicted, and the sublimest strains of Christian faith; the struggle of innocent, defenceless womanhood, the subdued sorrow of chattel-babyhood, the yearnings of fettered manhood, and the piteous sobs of helpless old age,—made Mrs. Harriet Beecher Stowe's "Uncle Tom's Cabin" the magnifying wonder of enlightened Christendom! It pleaded the cause of the slave in twenty different languages; it engrossed the thought ...
— History of the Negro Race in America from 1619 to 1880. Vol. 2 (of 2) - Negroes as Slaves, as Soldiers, and as Citizens • George Washington Williams
... put matters to himself so, he despatched a message to the Governor at the Kasbah, and received, in answer, six State prisoners, fettered in pairs, under the guard of ...
— The Scapegoat • Hall Caine
... management of this jail, to all fresh arrivals for life there was a period of probation of three years, during which time they were fettered and worked in gangs upon the public roads. This was thoroughly punitive, and with no liberty whatever. They were, in point of fact, full of fears and practically without hope. After a time, they began to find that the only chance ...
— Prisoners Their Own Warders - A Record of the Convict Prison at Singapore in the Straits - Settlements Established 1825 • J. F. A. McNair
... There seemed a barrier as insurmountable as intangible between her and me. The will of one woman came between and parted us, and that will was as the magic line over which no effort of will or strength could enable the enchanted knight to make a single stride. And this consciousness of being fettered by insensible and infrangible bonds, this need of doing something with nothing tangible in the reach of the outstretched hand, so worked upon my mind, that it naturally sought relief, as often as the elemental strife arose, by mingling unconstrained with the tumult of the night.—Will ...
— Annals of a Quiet Neighbourhood • George MacDonald
... whom the mighty Brunhilde fettered on the bridal night, and the poor troubadour whom his capricious mistress had sewed in the skins of wolves to have him hunted like game. I envied the Knight Ctirad whom the daring Amazon Scharka craftily ensnared in a forest near ...
— Venus in Furs • Leopold von Sacher-Masoch
... vile in the sight of God, because God saw Himself in us. It was this God-self in us that was lost to us. Not knowing it to be the hidden root of our true life, we did not claim our dignity, nor walk as became the sons of God. A man who lost the sense of his freedom, though free, would be fettered still. A man whose sense of beauty was lost would be as in a desert in the paradise of God. A lost sense of freedom meant a slavish mind, and a lost sense of beauty meant a prosaic mind, no matter how free the man, nor how beautiful his environment. So men had lost the sense ...
— Lancashire Idylls (1898) • Marshall Mather
... crawl. The old spider watcheth us in self-hugging quiet, and, looking up to our native air, we think,—now shall we escape thee. Out on it! We rise not a hair's breadth: we have the wings, it is true, but the feet are fettered. We strive desperately again: the whole web vibrates with the effort; it will break beneath our strength. Not a jot of it! we cease; we are more entangled than ever! wings, feet, frame, the foul slime is over ...
— Devereux, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... may observe in passing, that the instant the distinct sounds of the human voice were heard by Everard, all idea of supernatural interference was at an end, and the charm by which he had been formerly fettered appeared to be broken; so much is the influence of imaginary or superstitious terror dependent (so far as respects strong judgments at least) upon what is vague or ambiguous; and so readily do distinct tones, and express ideas, bring such judgments back to the current of ordinary life. The ...
— Woodstock; or, The Cavalier • Sir Walter Scott
... and contemporaneously with himself, but could not attain to a decided result. His hesitation stood in the way of a clear, firm, view of the question. The tradition respecting certain books was still wavering, and he was unable to fix it. Authority fettered his independent judgment. That he was inconsistent and confused does not need ...
— The Canon of the Bible • Samuel Davidson
... things, two consequences result. One is, that the progress of the nation in wealth, power, and greatness, is more rapid than the world has ever before witnessed. Another is, that our people, being less cramped and fettered by their necessities, and feeling, of course, less of those moral evils which poverty and discomfort engender, their character, moral and intellectual, will be developed and matured with greater celerity, and, I incline to think, carried to a higher point of excellence ...
— A Voyage to the Moon • George Tucker
... of those who deal in deeds more than words. I cannot patter Ave Marias with a Catholic, nor sing interminable psalms like a Huguenot, but neither can I endure the ways the Catholics are taking to compel the Huguenots to submission. I take my own way, d'ye see, and am fettered by nobody. No one would molest La Croissette the needle-seller, not even a dragoon. And I have learnt to esteem you all; I admire the young ladies, and respect the old lady and gentleman. Therefore, there's my hand; you may take it or not. 'Tis not over soft; but there's no blood ...
— Jacques Bonneval • Anne Manning
... were uncomfortable; there was a draught from the window on his back; but, however wretched he was, he did not want to change his position. . . . A heavy nightmarish lethargy gradually gained possession of him and fettered his limbs. ...
— The Party and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... if her hope unloosed had The chains of grief, wherein her thoughts lay fettered, Upon her minions looked she blithe and glad, In that deceitful lore so was she lettered; Not glorious Titan, in his brightness clad, The sunshine of her face in lustre bettered: For when she list to cheer her beauties so, She smiled away the ...
— Jerusalem Delivered • Torquato Tasso
... change is the necessity of their very existence. They need a mighty law of liberty, into which shall never intrude one atom of chance. Is the one idea of creation the begetting of a free, grand, divine will in us? and shall that will, praying with the will of the Father, find itself cramped, fettered, manacled by foregone laws? Will it not rather be a new-born law itself, working new things? No man is so tied by divine law that he can nowise modify his work: shall God not modify his? Law is but mode of life-action. Is it of his ...
— Unspoken Sermons - Series I., II., and II. • George MacDonald |
