"Thorny" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... of a mouse-trap now,' said he, 'or a lion's den, if you like a statelier image; the way in is easy enough, but the way out is more difficult than the steep and thorny path to heaven. Every town and village we should come to would rise against us with hue and cry, and drive us back to the city, to perish there; so cruel are men become through ...
— Andrew Golding - A Tale of the Great Plague • Anne E. Keeling
... things; he could do rapidly what the President and Blondet could only do after much thinking, and very often solved knotty points for them. In delicate conjunctures the President and Vice-President took counsel with their junior, confided thorny questions to him, and never failed to wonder at the readiness with which he brought back a task in which old Blondet found nothing to criticise. Michu was sure of the influence of the most crabbed aristocrats, and he was young and ...
— The Collection of Antiquities • Honore de Balzac
... historian are they which would win the goal: the one by precept, the other by example. But both not having both, do both halt. For the philosopher, setting down with thorny argument the bare rule, is so hard of utterance, and so misty to be conceived, that one that hath no other guide but him shall wade in him till he be old before he shall find sufficient cause to be honest; for his knowledge standeth so upon ...
— English literary criticism • Various
... north-west of King Hudibras' town, keeping carefully out of the way of open places, lest wandering hunters should find her, and sleeping in the forked branches of trees at night. Of course the necessity of thus keeping to the dense woods, and making her way through thorny thickets, rendered her journey very fatiguing; but Branwen was unusually strong and healthy, though the grace of her slender frame gave her a rather fragile appearance, and she did not find herself exhausted even at the end ...
— The Hot Swamp • R.M. Ballantyne
... and by the margin of the lake in the island of Inish-Eogan there stands this remarkable monument to this hour. The line of the Fir-Bolg camp can still be traced with wonderful accuracy. Caher-Speenan, the thorny fort, was a part of this camp, and still exists. More to the south-east, on the hill of Tongegee, are the remains of Caher-na-gree, the pleasant fort, and still further to the east are Lisheen, or little earthen fort, and Caher-Phaetre, pewter fort. Other forts also exist to give ...
— Folklore as an Historical Science • George Laurence Gomme
... hills east of Rio Paraguay; Gran Chaco region west of Rio Paraguay mostly low, marshy plain near the river, and dry forest and thorny ...
— The 2001 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... quiet slumber all over earth, and woodland and wild waters had sunk to rest; now the stars wheel midway on their gliding path, now all the country is silent, and beasts and gay birds that haunt liquid levels of lake or thorny rustic thicket lay couched asleep under the still night. But not so the distressed Phoenician, nor does she ever sink asleep or take the night upon eyes or breast; her pain redoubles, and her love swells to renewed madness, as she tosses on the strong tide of wrath. Even so she begins, and thus ...
— The Aeneid of Virgil • Virgil
... condition. Yes, I am hoping even far more. If I could only experience the marvellous change which Dr. Barstow described so eloquently last Sunday evening, might I not do right easily and almost spontaneously? It is so desperately hard to do right now! If conversion will render my steep, thorny path infinitely easier, then surely I ought to seek this change by every means in my power. Indeed, there must be a change in me, or I shall lose even the foothold I have gained. I am subjected, all day long, to insult and annoyance. At ...
— A Knight Of The Nineteenth Century • E. P. Roe
... man as can slide down a thorny locust and never get scratched!" he shouted. This was equivalent to setting his triggers; then he launched himself nimbly and with enthusiasm into the thick of the fight. It was Mr. Bunker's unfortunate privilege to sustain the onslaught ...
— The Prodigal Judge • Vaughan Kester
... public, and the benefit of an affectionate parent, a few circumstances connected with Briggs' family, with such observations and reflections of her own as would naturally suggest themselves to a refined and intelligent mind. Should this first essay of a timid girl in the thorny path of literature be favourably received by my friends and patrons, it will stimulate her to fresh exertions; and, I fondly hope, may be the means of placing her name in the same rank by those of Lady Morgan, Madame Tussaud, Mrs. Glasse, the Invisible ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 1, Complete • Various
... has not the heart to plant annuals, much less perennials, under such circumstances. Let the Parsonage Aid Society do it, if it must be done. And the Parsonage Aid Society does do it. You will see in many Methodist preachers' front yards fiercely-thorny, old-lady-faced roses—the kind that thrive without attention—planted always by the president of the Parsonage Aid Society. And it may be there will be a syringa bush in the background, not that the Parsonage Aid Society is partial ...
— A Circuit Rider's Wife • Corra Harris
... street with a lowering front, unmindful of the hints of Dr. Mather, who is aware of an unsettled dispute between the captain and the governor, relative to the authority of the latter over a king's ship on the provincial station. Into this thorny subject, Sir William plunges headlong. The captain makes answer with less deference than the dignity of the potentate requires: the affair grows hot; and the clergymen endeavor to interfere in the blessed ...
— Biographical Sketches - (From: "Fanshawe and Other Pieces") • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... way is cut off by huge thorny hedges and fences of barbed wire—man's devilish improvement on the bramble—brought down to the water's edge. The river-follower must force his way through these obstacles, in most cases greatly to the detriment of his clothes and temper; ...
— Afoot in England • W.H. Hudson
... first successful, and both from the Vatican and from Frederick William III., who put him in charge of the legation on Niebuhr's resignation, he received unqualified approbation. Owing partly to the wise statesmanship of Count Spiegel, archbishop of Cologne, an arrangement was made by which the thorny question of "mixed" marriages (i.e. between Catholic and Protestant) would have been happily solved; but the archbishop died in 1835, the arrangement was never ratified, and the Prussian king was foolish enough to appoint as Spiegel's ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various
... Except at their meals, and when he took them for their walk, and when they were sent to him to be reprimanded, his children never beheld him in the flesh. Mamma, poor lady, careful of many other things, superintended her children unremittingly, to keep them in the thorny way they should go. Hers the burden and heat of every day, hers to double the roles of Martha and Cornelia, that her husband might be left ever calmly aloof in that darkened room, the Study. There, in a high armchair, with one stout calf ...
— Yet Again • Max Beerbohm
... "shall the seas float without their silent inhabitants; the thorny hedges cease to hide the birds; the oak to spread its boughs; and Flora to ...
— Calamities and Quarrels of Authors • Isaac D'Israeli
... two of our elders went out for a stroll into the village. I could not restrain my eagerness any longer, and, slipping out unperceived, followed them for some distance. As I went along the deeply shaded lane, with its close thorny seora hedges, by the side of the tank covered with green water weeds, I rapturously took in picture after picture. I still remember the man with bare body, engaged in a belated toilet on the edge of the tank, cleaning his teeth with the chewed end of a twig. Suddenly my elders ...
— My Reminiscences • Rabindranath Tagore
... redeeming Saviour; he is my sole refuge. To our mother, my conscience acquits me either of intentional errors, or errors of omission. This is a source of the purest consolation; it clears the rough, the thorny path to the valley of death. Elizabeth, my dearest sister, listen to me before I go hence, and be no more seen. Every night recall to mind the actions of the day. Let this be the question you put to yourself: "Have I done my duty in all things?" Where you have failed, let the morning ...
— The Boarding School • Unknown
... and by whom conferred, M. Thiers went to Bordeaux in 1871, is a thorny question, into which I need not here enter. What he might have done for his country is, perhaps, uncertain. What he did we know. He founded a republic of which, in one of his characteristic phrases, he said that: 'it must be Conservative, or it could not be,' ...
— France and the Republic - A Record of Things Seen and Learned in the French Provinces - During the 'Centennial' Year 1889 • William Henry Hurlbert
... longer he thought the more sure he was that the girls were beginning to guess his position, and that his only course was a polite indifference to both. But this policy promised to lead through a thorny path, and to what? In impotent rage at himself he ground his teeth during the pauses between the stanzas that he was compelled to sing. Such was the discord in his heart that he felt like uttering notes that would make ...
— Nature's Serial Story • E. P. Roe
... primitive forms the Bengalees owed whatever influence they retained under Mahomedan rule, has given them under British rule far larger opportunities which they have turned to account with no mean measure of success. I must reserve the thorny question of education for separate treatment. All I need say for the present is that, had it grown less instead of more superficial, had it been less divorced from discipline and moral training as well as from the realities of ...
— Indian Unrest • Valentine Chirol
... on which the proprietors had hitherto let themselves be borne along by the force of circumstances suddenly split up into a number of narrow, arduous, thorny paths. Each one had to use his judgement to determine which of the paths he should adopt, and, having made his choice, he had to struggle along as he best could. I remember once asking a proprietor what effect the Emancipation had had on the class to which he belonged, and he gave ...
— Russia • Donald Mackenzie Wallace
... path with a sword. Above the bush towered the giants of the forest—great cotton trees, thirty or forty feet in circumference, and rising to the height of from two to three hundred feet. Round the tops of these many birds were flitting, but in the underbrush there was no sign or sound of life. Thorny ...
— Through Three Campaigns - A Story of Chitral, Tirah and Ashanti • G. A. Henty
... I must not be understood as pretending to settle the thorny question of a reconciliation between freedom of choice and pre-determination or prevision. All I there contend for is that no mechanical or scientific determinism, subject to special conditions in a limited region, can ...
— Life and Matter - A Criticism of Professor Haeckel's 'Riddle of the Universe' • Oliver Lodge
... fortress is the good greenwood, Our tent the cypress tree; We know the forest round us As seamen know the sea. We know its walls of thorny vines, Its glades of reedy grass, Its safe and silent islands Within the ...
— Hero Tales From American History • Henry Cabot Lodge, and Theodore Roosevelt
... But the ground was not level, being deeply scarred with watercourses, and not easy to cross at any time, much less in a storm. I managed to get entangled in a thorny shrub, and was nearly thrown on my face by the force of the wind as I ...
— Glimpses of Bengal • Sir Rabindranath Tagore
... the son of Indra, with a calm mind, and firmly adhering to his purpose, then devoted himself, without the loss of any time, to ascetic austerities. And he entered, all alone, that terrible forest abounding with thorny plants and trees and flowers and fruits of various kinds, and inhabited by winged creatures of various species, and swarming with animals of diverse kinds, and resorted to by Siddhas and Charanas. ...
— Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa Bk. 3 Pt. 1 • Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa
... not in the procession, and the teacher, riding on, found her lying face down among the briars of the desolate meeting-house yard, her small body convulsively heaving with her weeping, and her slim fingers grasping the thorny briar shoots as though she would still hold to the earth that lay in freshly broken clods over her ...
— The Call of the Cumberlands • Charles Neville Buck
... Miss Anthony were pioneers struggling for this righteous cause. I think the greatest reforms, the greatest progress ever made for any reforms in our country have been along the lines on which they worked. Miss Anthony's has been a long life. She has trod the thorny way, has walked through briars with bleeding feet, but it is through a sweet and lovely way now and the hearts of the whole country are with her. A few days ago some one said to me that every woman should stand with ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume V • Ida Husted Harper
... the wheels of state, And so 'twere well within his itching hand To place commission for those distant Isles Where mild efficiency can work no harm. 'Tis strange that Francos in the halls of state So long hath squatted, in a chair too big, But still much gold can smooth a thorny path And work discovery of hidden worth. With modest mental gifts, but gentle mien He ill is fitted for promotion here. But it were matter of but little weight With Quezox as a mentor at his side, What he shall fashion in his pigmy state, For squirt from wisdom's fount can quench each flame. ...
— 'A Comedy of Errors' in Seven Acts • Spokeshave (AKA Old Fogy)
... understand? She is a man's woman. She took a particular dislike to me, and I just had to be stubborn and thorny to get on at all. I'm awfully sorry—but I couldn't stay with her, and I'm certain you wouldn't ...
— A Great Success • Mrs Humphry Ward
... to taste very bitterly the agonies of those who break out of straight paths, never having realised till then how thorny the wrong course was, and how deep the pits and ...
— The Vast Abyss - The Story of Tom Blount, his Uncles and his Cousin Sam • George Manville Fenn
... says it's awful bitter an' cold to see Hiram settin' out along that stony, bony, thorny road, as she's learned every pin in from first to last. She says if Lucy 'd only be a little patient with him, but no, to bed he must go feelin' as bright as a button, an' in the mornin', oh my, but she says it's heartrendin' to ...
— Susan Clegg and a Man in the House • Anne Warner
... whose voice was toneless and gray as an autumn sky it seemed to her that all was wrong, that she had committed a fault that was almost a crime, that there was nothing now to be done but to confess, to go home and to expiate, as the Prodigal Son doubtless did among the thorny roses of forgiveness, those days in the far country. But always with the morning light came the remembrance that it was not her father's house to which she must go to make submission. It was her step-father's. And after all, it ...
— The Incomplete Amorist • E. Nesbit
... was easy, but where the current swept close along the ragged edge of the forest, progress was difficult and slow on account of snow-crinkled and interlaced thickets of alder and willow, reinforced with fallen trees and thorny devil's-club (Echinopanax horridum), making a jungle all but impenetrable. The mile of this extravagantly difficult growth through which I struggled, inch by inch, will not soon be forgotten. At length arriving within a few hundred yards of ...
— Travels in Alaska • John Muir
... calling, and while Andy and Spouter were doing their best to brush aside some thorny bushes which held them back, the struggle between Jack and Werner continued. The bully landed on Jack's shoulder again and then on his chest, and in return received a crack on the chin which ...
— The Rover Boys in the Land of Luck - Stirring Adventures in the Oil Fields • Edward Stratemeyer
... the Sierra have I ever made the acquaintance of mountains more rigidly inaccessible. The slopes are exceptionally steep and insecure to the foot of the explorer, however great his strength or skill may be, but thorny chaparral constitutes their chief defense. With the exception of little park and garden spots not visible in comprehensive views, the entire surface is covered with it, from the highest peaks to the plain. It swoops into every hollow and swells over every ridge, gracefully ...
— Steep Trails • John Muir
... there once, but for some reason or other it had become blocked with a rank vegetation. The old gap was chocked full with a thorny, flower-bearing bush so thick that a cat could not have passed through. Somerfield switched on one of his theories as soon as he got over his first surprise. Worshipers, he held, had brought flowers there and the seeds that had dropped ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1921 and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... and without pausing to relight the pine splinters, they rushed pell-mell towards the sound of barking, bumping into trees, stumbling over logs, scratching their faces and tearing their clothes on thorny vines. But no one minded. Bim had treed a 'coon in the shortest time on record, and now if they could only get it, the triumph would be ample ...
— Raftmates - A Story of the Great River • Kirk Munroe
... is the bustle and cumber of the world, that will call a man off from looking after the salvation of his soul. This is intimated by the parable of the thorny ground. (Luke 8:14) Worldly cumber is a devilish thing; it will hurry a man from his bed without prayer; to a sermon, and from it again, without prayer; it will choke prayer, it will choke the Word, it will choke convictions, it will choke ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... thick-set, or blossoms lightly tossed Low at my feet." Therewith, a dusk globe, crossed With golden bands, from bent boughs, stripped she. Through The gleaming sphere its nectrous juices drew, And thirsting cried—as one grown drunken: "Mine These fruits unknown, in thorny combs that shine, Or gray-green spikes that glow, dull on the sands. Fain would I pluck, out-reaching eager hands, Save that a marvel grows of ruddier rind Out-flinging fruity breath upon the wind, Beneath harsh ...
— Lilith - The Legend of the First Woman • Ada Langworthy Collier
... produced some good crops of grain, and even cotton and silk, were chiefly clothed with fruit-trees—orange and lemon, and the fig, the olive, and the vine. Sometimes the land was uncultivated, and was principally covered with myrtles, of large size, and oleanders, and arbutus, and thorny brooms. Here game abounded, while from the mountain-forests the wolf sometimes descended, and spoiled ...
— Lothair • Benjamin Disraeli
... ceremonial law was to surround the whole nation with an impenetrable hedge of peculiarities, and so to keep them separate from surrounding nations. The ceremonial law was like a shell which protected the kernel within till it was ripe. The ritual was the thorny husk, the theology and morality were the sacred included fruit. In this point of view the strangest peculiarities of the ritual find an easy explanation. The more strange they are, the better they serve their purpose. These ...
— Ten Great Religions - An Essay in Comparative Theology • James Freeman Clarke
... organism, we cannot say how far such conditions may have been modified by the action of man, and he may therefore have influenced the life of such organisms in ways, and to an extent, of which we can form no just idea.] I do not propose to enter upon the thorny question, whether the existing races of man are genealogically connected with these ancient types of humanity, and I advert to these facts only for the sake of the suggestion, that man, in his earliest ...
— The Earth as Modified by Human Action • George P. Marsh
... sweet; but they are perish'd, And life is thorny now, and dim, and flat; Yet rests their memory—deeply—fondly cherish'd; God! in thy mercy, ...
— A Yacht Voyage to Norway, Denmark, and Sweden - 2nd edition • W. A. Ross
... part of the mountains Mr. Hunt met with three different kinds of gooseberries. The common purple, on a low and very thorny bush; a yellow kind, of an excellent flavor, growing on a stock free from thorns; and a deep purple, of the size and taste of our winter grape, with a thorny stalk. There were also three kinds ...
— Astoria - Or, Anecdotes Of An Enterprise Beyond The Rocky Mountains • Washington Irving
... you on the thorny and bloody path to victory, will forsake you, and you will not be aware of it, for conquerors and tyrants are always blind. You will conquer and dominate. And you will plunge into injustice, and you will not ...
— Mother Earth, Vol. 1 No. 2, April 1906 - Monthly Magazine Devoted to Social Science and Literature • Various
... for with somebody to look at, it did not suit Miss Hazel's ideas to be looking. She could not tease Mr. Falkirk, who had gone to sleep; Mr. Kingsland was absolutely beyond reach, except of rather thorny wishes; and when at length the dilettante cigar perfumes began to assert themselves, Wych Hazel flung the rest of her patience straight out of the window, and looked after it. The coach was stopping just then ...
— Wych Hazel • Susan and Anna Warner
... aristocratic ladies; she also took great interest in art and literature, and it was even said that she patronized one of our poets in a manner which was worthy of the Medicis, and that she strewed the beautiful roses of continual female sympathy on to his thorny path. All this was evident to everybody, and had nothing strange about it, but the world would have liked to know the history of that woman, and to look into the depths of her soul, and because people ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume IV (of 8) • Guy de Maupassant
... heads in mocking scorn, And bade the Christ come down,— While from His wounds the blood-drops fell, And from the thorny crown; The spear uplifted pierced His side, And ...
— Hymns from the Morningland - Being Translations, Centos and Suggestions from the Service - Books of the Holy Eastern Church • Various
... examined their Sharps, and made ready to follow Jones. He slipped into the thorny brake and, flat on his stomach, wormed his way like a snake far into the thickly interlaced web of branches. Rude and Adams crawled after him. Words were superfluous. Quiet, breathless, with beating hearts, the hunters pressed ...
— The Last of the Plainsmen • Zane Grey
... constancy lives in realms above; And life is thorny; and youth is vain; And to be wroth with one we love Doth work like ...
— Eric, or Little by Little • Frederic W. Farrar
... composed of black sterile rocks, which are piled together in an extraordinary confusion; even to the environs of the town of Saint Croix, scarcely any thing is seen, on the greater part of these dry and burnt lands, but low plants, the higher of which are probably Euphorbia, or thorny Cereus; and those which cover the ground, the hairy lichen, Crocella tinctoria, which is employed in dying, and which this island furnishes in abundance. Seen from the sea, the town, which is in the form of an amphitheatre, appears to be ...
— Narrative of a Voyage to Senegal in 1816 • J. B. Henry Savigny and Alexander Correard
... early purpose, the terror at the cruel world, the longing for peace and shelter; the desire to smooth his sister's way, which had led him to devote himself in heart to the cloister, though never permitted openly to pledge himself. Then the discovery that the world was less thorny than he had expected; the allurement of royal favour and greatness; the charm of amusement, and activity in recovered health; the cowardly dread of scorn, leading him not merely into the secular life, but into the gradual dropping of piety and devotion; the actual share ...
— The Caged Lion • Charlotte M. Yonge
... some sacred caves in Burmah. Lighting our torches, and each man taking one, we mounted the steep, tortuous, and slippery foot-path of damp, green stones, through the thorny shrubs that beset it, to the low entrance to the outer cavern. Stooping uncomfortably, we passed into a small, vacant antechamber, having a low, dripping roof, perpendicular walls, clammy and green, and a rocky floor, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 26, December, 1859 • Various
... messengers, provoked to fury, of the grim king of the dead. Clubs with heavy hammers and mallets, sharp-pointed lances, heated jars, all fraught with severe pain, frightful forests of sword-blades, heated sands, thorny Salmalis—these and many other instruments of the most painful torture such a man has to endure in the regions of Yama, O Bharata! The ungrateful person, O chief of Bharata's race, having endured such terrible treatment in the regions of the grim king of the dead, has to come back to this world ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 4 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... more white than snow, If through the thorny brake ye go, My loving heart I'll set below To take the hurt ...
— Beltane The Smith • Jeffery Farnol
... the wolf, nesting place of buzzards, land of cloud-nourished trees and wild things that live without drink. Above all, it is the land of the creosote and the mesquite. The mesquite is God's best thought in all this desertness. It grows in the open, is thorny, stocky, close grown, and iron-rooted. Long winds move in the draughty valleys, blown sand fills and fills about the lower branches, piling pyramidal dunes, from the top of which the mesquite twigs flourish greenly. Fifteen or twenty feet under the drift, where it seems no rain ...
— The Land of Little Rain • Mary Austin
... thou art a fallen child of light, A ruined seraph in a world of care— Tortured and wrung by sorrow and despair, And longings for the beautiful and bright: Thy brow is deeply scarred, and bleeds beneath A spiked coronet, a thorny wreath; Thy rainbow wings are rent and torn with chains, Sullied and drooping in extremest wo; Thy dower, to those who love thee best below, Is tears and torture, agony and pains, Coldness and scorn and doubt which often parts;— ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol. XXXII No. 2. February 1848 • Various
... ten, a strong but not too thick tweed coat is the best for rough work. In a very thorny country, a leather coat is almost essential. A blouse, cut short so as to clear the saddle, is neat, cool, and easy, whether as a riding or walking costume. Generally speaking, the traveller will chiefly spend his life in his shirt-sleeves, and will only use ...
— The Art of Travel - Shifts and Contrivances Available in Wild Countries • Francis Galton
... patience was endless, and her good temper unflagging. What she lacked in brains she made up for in warmth of heart, and though she faithfully upheld discipline, she was apt somewhat to tone down the severity of the rules, and indeed sometimes surreptitiously to soften the thorny paths of ...
— The Leader of the Lower School - A Tale of School Life • Angela Brazil
... Colley Cibber, Dennis, Theobald, Blackmore, Smyth, and Lord Hervey are among the prominent criminals placed in Pope's pillory, and the student of the age may find an idle entertainment in tracking the poet's thorny course, while he gives an unenviable notoriety to names of which the larger number ...
— The Age of Pope - (1700-1744) • John Dennis
... carefully described[854] the case of a six-year-old white moss-rose, which sent up several suckers, one of which was thorny, and produced red flowers, destitute of moss, exactly like those of the Provence rose (R. centifolia): another shoot bore both kinds of flowers and in addition longitudinally striped flowers. ...
— The Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication, Vol. I. • Charles Darwin
... will, to make them all thy own He rent a pillar from the eternal throne! —Made in His image, thou must nobly dare The thorny crown of sovereignty to share. —Think not too meanly of thy low estate; Thou hast a choice; to choose is ...
— Atlantic Monthly Vol. 3, No. 16, February, 1859 • Various
... novelty of the task so absorbed was she in her sudden Quixotic project. Yet, as she groped among the brown leaves at the foot of her tree, her fingers came in contact with something wholly different from chestnuts or their thorny burrs. It was hard as a stone, yet it wasn't a stone. It was half-buried in the leaf-mold and moss, though the rain of the previous night had washed ...
— The Brass Bound Box • Evelyn Raymond
... and keeping with great care in the shadow, had followed him through the little door which he forgot to lock, and was now hidden among those very trees, he might have remembered a proverb to the effect that snakes hide in the greenest grass and the prettiest flowers have thorny stems. But he thought of no such thing, who was lost in happy anticipations of a moonlight interview with a lovely and cultured young lady, whose image, to speak truth, had taken so deep a hold upon ...
— Pearl-Maiden • H. Rider Haggard
... darling, you must! Daddy come out and help Molly pick daisies!" And, since one's here, and the Spring's in the garden (How many lives hence will that thought earn pardon?) Since one's a man and man's heart is insistent, And, since Nirvana is doubtful and distant, Though life's a hard road and thorny to travel— Stones in the borders and grass on the gravel, Still there's the wisdom that wise men call folly, Still one can go and ...
— The Rainbow and the Rose • E. Nesbit
... carried on thus without discovery. Each night was a repetition of the preceding one, an interminable fighting of our way through dark forests, into and out of sloppy ditches, over fields and through thorny hedges, ...
— The Escape of a Princess Pat • George Pearson
... to the low hedge, but though it was low it was very thorny, and while he was trying to find a place to get through, he looked over and spied a hare crouched in the rough grass, just under the hedge between it and the wheat. The hare was lying on the ground; she did not move, though she saw Bevis, and when he looked ...
— Wood Magic - A Fable • Richard Jefferies
... fallen, I frequently see such a central sprig, whose progress I have watched, when I thought it had forgotten its destiny, as I had, bearing its first crop of small green or yellow or rosy fruit, which the cows cannot get at over the bushy and thorny hedge which surrounds it; and I make haste to taste the new and undescribed variety. We have all heard of the numerous varieties of fruit invented by Van Mons[9] and Knight.[10] This is the system of Van Cow, and she has invented far more and more memorable ...
— Wild Apples • Henry David Thoreau
... lay. The cut was a natural stronghold, opening sidewise on the face of the shore, so as to be invisible from the open water. It was deep enough for an ocean-liner, but too narrow for a big steamer to enter with her own power. Bedient turned into the thick, thorny undergrowth, which lined the eastern wall of the Inlet, and made his way around its devious curvings, silently and slowly. The growth on the cliffs was so dense in places that he had to crawl. The heat pressed down upon the heavy moist foliage, and drained him like a steam-room. ...
— Fate Knocks at the Door - A Novel • Will Levington Comfort
... caves, I cannot help thinking that the sole aim of the ascetic builders was to tempt weak mortals into the sin of irritation by the inaccessibility of their airy abodes. Seventy-two steps, cut out in the rock, and covered with thorny weeds and moss, are the beginning of the ascent to the Bagh caves. Footmarks worn in the stone through centuries spoke of the numberless pilgrims who had come here before us. The roughness of the steps, with deep holes here ...
— From the Caves and Jungles of Hindostan • Helena Pretrovna Blavatsky
... safe and sure road to heaven. The observation of Gibbon respecting the early monks is applicable to all of them: "Each proselyte who entered the gates of a monastery was persuaded that he trod the steep and thorny ...
— A Short History of Monks and Monasteries • Alfred Wesley Wishart
... that can be said on the thorny subject of the return of the refugees, is that latterly the rate of return has been steadily increasing. Last month the military authorities allowed us to grant 400 ordinary permits (this number is over and ...
— Lord Milner's Work in South Africa - From its Commencement in 1897 to the Peace of Vereeniging in 1902 • W. Basil Worsfold
... before we reached that town, and that, from there, we would need no help. We followed his suggestion. The road was almost level. It passed through a district covered with a dense growth of brush and thorny trees, except where the land had been plowed for planting corn. In the early evening we saw many birds. Flocks of parrots rose from the trees as we passed by; at one point Manuel shot a little eagle, which fell wounded to the ground. Our guide concluded to carry it on alive. All went well for ...
— In Indian Mexico (1908) • Frederick Starr
... said the Abbe Gevresin; "yes, Rohant de Fleury says that its thorny branches were used to crown the Son's head; but this leaves us wondering, when we remember that in the Old Testament, in the ninth chapter of the Book of Judges, all the tall trees of Judaea bow down before the Royalty prophetically prefigured ...
— The Cathedral • Joris-Karl Huysmans
... touched upon politics, yet the careful reader will find that the hero of the sketch must have been a young Democrat, since he is made to appear very nimble, and has a fondness, partial to himself, of getting into rather thorny places. What led him into those dangerous places we have very little chance of knowing. "He was wondrous wise," saith the poet, and forsooth he jumps into a bramble-bush, the last place in the world where a wise man is to be found. ...
— Punchinello, Vol. II., No. 33, November 12, 1870 • Various
... ashore and tied it to a tree. Pressing forward, he had to push his way through a thicket of huge willows and poplars—overthrown in many places by repeated storms—and there the fruitful bramble forms a thorny undergrowth, and tall valerian, shooting upward from the weather-beaten soil, mixes its aromatic scent with the wholesome smell ...
— Timar's Two Worlds • Mr Jkai
... and is connected with no desert. It is like the gilded poison that undermines the human frame. It is like the hoarse murmur of the winds that announces the brewing tempest. Virtue, for such is the decree of the Most High, is evermore obliged to pass through the ordeal of temptation, and the thorny paths of adversity. If, in this day of her trial, no foul blot obscure her lustre, no irresolution and instability tarnish the clearness of her spirit, then may she rejoice in the view of her approaching reward, and receive ...
— Imogen - A Pastoral Romance • William Godwin
... effect of this good lesson keep, As watchman to my heart. But, good my brother, Do not, as some ungracious pastors do, Show me the steep and thorny way to heaven Whilst, like a puff'd and reckless libertine,[70] Himself the primrose path of dalliance treads, And ...
— Hamlet • William Shakespeare
... antithetical existence before us, but the beauty of experience can only be seen by the backward glance, 'tis when we turn our sad and tear-dimmed eyes to look over our bended shoulders at the thorny way that bears the impress of our weary feet, that we can feel what a grand and salutary prayer our lips might make by substituting the murmur and the cry of pain by a holy accent which ...
— Honor Edgeworth • Vera
... further the hills to the south became loftier; the banks drew closer in on both sides of him; the boulders in the arid bed were larger. Cactus and Spanish bayonet harassed him like malignant creatures; skeleton ocatillas and bristling yuccas imposed thorny barriers before him. The sun poured its full flood of white-hot rays upon him. He wound his way in and out among the obstacles, keeping his intent eyes upon the glaring rocks, save only when he lifted them to look for lurking savages. The ...
— When the West Was Young • Frederick R. Bechdolt
... and North—between the lifeless fetters of prescription and the living freedom of invention. The contrast between the two is very strongly marked. The soft and curling foliages of the sunny South are for a season giving way to the hard and thorny leafage of the wintry North. It would seem as if pointed architecture began with the hard and frozen winter of its existence, and if it had been the plan or design of one individual we might have ...
— Illuminated Manuscripts • John W. Bradley
... toward which side are you? Have you fallen into the soft feather-bed of agnosticism, or the thorny ...
— Muslin • George Moore
... world, so thorny, and where none Finds happiness unblighted, or if found, Without some thistly sorrow at its side, It seems the part of wisdom, and no sin Against the law of love, to measure lots With less distinguished than ourselves, that thus We may with patience ...
— A New England Girlhood • Lucy Larcom
... do so there were needed Many sturdy pulls and struggles. Ringing shouts and cries of triumph Greeted this successful fishing. From the rock came down the Baron To the fishers, and the ladies Eagerly made haste to follow. Over rocks and thorny brambles To the shore they found a pathway. Margaretta followed also, Notwithstanding her long habit. When young Werner saw her coming, Bashfully his arm he offered, And bewildered were his senses. So Sir Walter Raleigh's heart once Must have beaten, when his mantle He made use of as a carpet ...
— The Trumpeter of Saekkingen - A Song from the Upper Rhine. • Joseph Victor von Scheffel
... spring Nilajan and Mohana; follow them, Winding beneath broad-leaved mahua-trees, 'Mid thickets of the sansar and the bir, Till on the plain the shining sisters meet In Phalgu's bed, flowing by rocky banks To Gaya and the red Barabar hills. Hard by that river spreads a thorny waste, Uruwelaya named in ancient days, With sandhills broken; on its verge a wood Waves sea-green plumes and tassels 'thwart the sky, With undergrowth wherethrough a still flood steals, Dappled with lotus-blossoms, blue and white, And peopled with quick fish and tortoises. Near ...
— The Light of Asia • Sir Edwin Arnold
... Something told him he was not there now.... Vaguely, in the darkness, he put up his hand to feel if the plaster Christ were above his head. His groping old fingers found it, and he stayed, half-reared up against his pillows for an instant, while he touched the drooping head with its thorny crown, and on that familiar touch he let his hand fall, and with ...
— Secret Bread • F. Tennyson Jesse
... hills there. Travelling over casuarina sandhills and some level triodia ground, we found there was a creek with eucalypts on it, but it was quite evident that none of the late showers had fallen there. Hardly any grass was to be found, the ground being open and stony, with thorny vegetation. ...
— Australia Twice Traversed, The Romance of Exploration • Ernest Giles
... the rives hide In sinuous course like rivers glide, And line the path with deadly foes: The wood, my love, is full of woes. Scorpions, and grasshoppers, and flies Disturb the wanderer as he lies, And wake him from his troubled doze: The wood, my love, is full of woes. Trees, thorny bushes, intertwined, Their branched ends together bind, And dense with grass the thicket grows: The wood, my dear, is full of woes, With many ills the flesh is tried, When these and countless fears beside Vex ...
— The Ramayana • VALMIKI
... It is situated on a high part of the plain; and hence is a landmark visible at a great distance. As soon as a tribe of Indians come in sight of it, they offer their adorations by loud shouts. The tree itself is low, much branched, and thorny: just above the root it has a diameter of about three feet. It stands by itself without any neighbour, and was indeed the first tree we saw; afterwards we met with a few others of the same kind, but they were far from common. Being winter the tree had no leaves, but in their ...
— A Naturalist's Voyage Round the World - The Voyage Of The Beagle • Charles Darwin
... the high tide would have cut it off completely but for the friendly arm which the Watling Street extended to it from the Tot Hill, while a thicket of brambles and briers edged it like a natural prison wall. Nor had man forgotten such defences, she found when they had passed a gap in the thorny hedge; a fence of stone rose sheer before them and extended on either hand as far as eye could reach. In the fence was a great gate of black oak, which a black-robed Benedictine presently opened to ...
— The Ward of King Canute • Ottilie A. Liljencrantz
... services for each other: horses nibble, and cows lick each other, on any spot which itches: monkeys search each other for external parasites; and Brehm states that after a troop of the Cercopithecus griseo-viridis has rushed through a thorny brake, each monkey stretches itself on a branch, and another monkey sitting by, "conscientiously" examines its fur, and extracts every ...
— The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex • Charles Darwin
... the latter sweeping down to join the plains. A dust, light, dry, and feathery lay thickly on the adobe boxes on the surrounding ledge on the slopes, like a gray ash sprinkled from a giant sifter. Cactus and yucca dotted the slopes, thorny, lancelike, repellent; lava, dull, hinting of volcanic fire, filled crevices and depressions, and huge blocks of stone, detached in the progress of ...
— 'Firebrand' Trevison • Charles Alden Seltzer
... to when a matter shall be discussed in a Joint Cabinet or not, has not been the smallest of the stumbling blocks in the thorny path of the Union negotiations. In Norway, to quote Mr HAGERUP, there has been quite a "sickly" fear of having matters settled there. On the Norwegian Left Side they have defended the opinion, that only those matters which, being expressly mentioned in the Act of Union, as being distinctively ...
— The Swedish-Norwegian Union Crisis - A History with Documents • Karl Nordlund
... a roadhouse obtaining refreshments. For this trick, Pepper and some of the others got after the Pornellites and made them prisoners in a cave, from which they could escape only by going out a back way, through some water and mud, and thorny bushes. ...
— The Mystery at Putnam Hall - The School Chums' Strange Discovery • Arthur M. Winfield
... my dearest young lady, that worldly joy claims no kindred with the joys we are bid to aspire after. These latter we must be fitted for by affliction and disappointment. You are therefore in the direct road to glory, however thorny the path you are in. And I had almost said, that it depends upon yourself, by your patience, and by your resignedness to the dispensation, (God enabling you, who never fails the true penitent, and sincere invoker,) to be an heir of a ...
— Clarissa, Or The History Of A Young Lady, Volume 8 • Samuel Richardson
... marked exactly alike. They had a transparent dorsal and two pectoral fins, which were all I observed, and a long thin snout or beak; the mouth was just at the end of it, on the top: some of them were thorny on the back; we caught also some crabs; a very minute blue fish; a black and red insect resembling a flea; a species of Diphyes; a very small kind of polypus; and one or two small jellyfish. A land bird flew ...
— Journals Of Two Expeditions Of Discovery In North-West And Western Australia, Vol. 2 (of 2) • George Grey
... weakest, the weariest, the faintest—claims His attention. His loving eye follows me day by day out to the wilderness—marks out my pasture, studies my wants, and trials, and sorrows, and perplexities—every steep ascent, every brook, every winding path, every thorny thicket. "He goeth before them." It is not rough driving, but gentle guiding. He does not take them over an unknown road; He himself has trodden it before. He hath drunk of every "brook by the way;" He himself hath "suffered being tempted;" He is "able to succour them that are tempted." ...
— The Words of Jesus • John R. Macduff
... a current in the stream, and it flowed west. Following its course, he soon entered the oak forest again, and passed through to find himself before massed and jumbled ruins of cliff wall. There were tangled thickets of wild plum-trees and other thorny growths that made passage extremely laborsome. He found innumerable tracks of wildcats and foxes. Rustlings in the thick undergrowth told him of stealthy movements of these animals. At length his further advance appeared futile, ...
— Riders of the Purple Sage • Zane Grey
... crowned. No great, but guilty fame Here kindled pride, that should have kindled shame; THESE chose the better, happier part, That poured its sunlight o'er the heart; That crowned their homes with peace and health, And weighed Heaven's smile beyond earth's wealth; Far from the thorny paths of life They stood, a living lesson to their race, Rich in the charities of life, Man in his strength, and Woman in her grace; In purity and love THEIR pilgrim road they trod, And when they served their neighbor felt they ...
— An Ode Pronounced Before the Inhabitants of Boston, September the Seventeenth, 1830, • Charles Sprague
... the same time Transvaalers, mostly Heidelberg men, had gained a footing on the eastern end of the same ridge where boulders in Titanic masses, matted together by roots of mimosa trees, rise cliff-like from the plain where Klip River, emerging from thorny thickets, bends northward to loop miles of fertile meadow-land before flowing back into the narrow gorge past Intombi Spruit Camp. How the Boers got there one can only imagine, for neither the Imperial Light Horse pickets on Waggon Hill, ...
— Four Months Besieged - The Story of Ladysmith • H. H. S. Pearse
... gales, which the forest had partly made good, and there was scarcely a rod of the way that was not obstructed by half-rotted trunks. Then there were thick bushes, and an undergrowth of willows where the soil was damp, with thorny brakes and matted fern in between. In places the growth was almost like a wall, and the men, skirting the inlet, were glad to scramble forward among the rough boulders and ragged driftwood at the water's edge for some minutes at a time, until it was necessary ...
— Vane of the Timberlands • Harold Bindloss
... achievement, and told us nothing of the hard road that leads up to them! If the Lord chastises us, it is "for our profit"; if God smites, it is only to enrich; so bear with patience, endure as seeing him who is invisible. Be "patient in tribulation," drink the cup of your Gethsemane, wear your thorny crown without complaint, endure your Calvary; for unto you is given both to suffer and ...
— Heart Talks • Charles Wesley Naylor
... many a tale it hath, The auld kirk-yard, Of life's crooked thorny path To the auld kirk-yard. But mortality's thick gloom Clouds the sunny world's bloom, Veils the mystery of doom, In the ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volumes I-VI. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various |
