"Web" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... the gorgeousness of the Greenock's saloons and cabins, and the height of her masts, and the multitude of ropes about running in every conceivable direction, crossing and recrossing each other with the bewildering ingenuity of a spider's web; but Uncle Jack took all these wonders as a matter of course, and ...
— Teddy - The Story of a Little Pickle • J. C. Hutcheson
... that fate wove me and my doings into the web of some very strange events; terrible, tragic and complete indeed as those of a Greek play, as it has often done both before and ...
— Child of Storm • H. Rider Haggard
... word to be suspicious of as sounding affected, a word to be scoffed at. But of this relationship he had a vague understanding. He thought of it as a criss-cross of threads binding one person to the other, or as a web which might be light and easily broken, or which might have the strength of steel cables and which might work into knots here and there and become a tangle that could crush those ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1915 - And the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... laid down her new feather fan on the ledge of the box. It was possibly the loveliest thing that existed in the world at that moment. No artist had ever dreamed of so wonderful a scheme of color—such miracles of color—combinations in every feather from the quill to the spider-web-like fluffs at the tips, each of which shone not like gold but like glass. It was well worth all the nudging that ...
— Phyllis of Philistia • Frank Frankfort Moore
... days of my depression seemed at once to correct themselves. Untruth became Truth. A large part of what was once my old world was again mine. To me, at last my mind seemed to have found itself, for the gigantic web of false beliefs in which it had been all but hopelessly enmeshed I now immediately recognized as a snare of delusions. That the Gordian knot of mental torture should be cut and swept away by the mere glance of a willing eye is like a miracle. Not a few ...
— A Mind That Found Itself - An Autobiography • Clifford Whittingham Beers
... thy husband,' he answered, clasping her hand. 'Thou art mine henceforth. I will soon cut our way out of the web thy ...
— The Chaplet of Pearls • Charlotte M. Yonge
... maintaining silently and firmly, without shouting, without speech, that the men who had made this hour were indeed not devils, were no more devils than Mr. Britling was a devil, but sinful men of like nature with himself, hard, stupid, caught in the same web of circumstance. "Kill them in your passion if you will," said reason, "but understand. This thing was done neither by devils nor fools, but by a conspiracy of foolish motives, by the weak acquiescences of the clever, ...
— Mr. Britling Sees It Through • H. G. Wells
... he assured her, "but, you see, all over Germany there is spread like a spider's web the lay religion of the citizen—devotion to the Government, blind obedience to the Kaiser. Independent thought has made Germany great in science, in political economy, in economics. But independent thought is never turned towards her political destinies. Those are shaped for her. For good ...
— The Zeppelin's Passenger • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... line over the wreck. But the swell is heavier than ever, the timbers nearer to parting. At last a flash of lurid light from the dim shore-line,—a great boom of sound, and a line goes spinning out like a spider's web up into the gray, bleak sky. Too far! too short! and the line tumbles, plashing into the water. A new and fearful lift of the sea shatters the wreck, the fore part of the ship still holding fast to the sands; but all abaft the mainmast lifts, surges, reels, topples over; with the wreck, and ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 104, June, 1866 • Various
... Bishop, in spite of the gentleness and purity of his spirit, was possessed of guile. He apprehended clearly his danger. He saw himself caught in the web, and he tried to escape from it. Denied help from his friends, such as father and Ernest and I could have given, he was left to battle for himself alone. And in the enforced solitude of the sanitarium he recovered. ...
— The Iron Heel • Jack London
... noted, and then another, is sounded, bringing to the bearer's mind all the crucial moments of Bluebeard's strange, perverted, wife-pursuing life, as well as all the aspirations and disappointments of Fatima's ambitious but checkered career. All the while that this complicated web of motives is being woven out of unresolved dissonances, the thirty first violins keep on playing the same three notes in ever-precipitated rhythms. This is radical, audacious, and effective. The notes are G flat, ...
— Bluebeard • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... which theology, history, science, so abundantly furnishes the believer in the Christian revelation; and never before did I see and feel the lofty superiority of the foundation on which natural and revealed truth is established, over the cob-web and ill-shaped edifice ...
— The Story of My Life - Being Reminiscences of Sixty Years' Public Service in Canada • Egerton Ryerson
... entered the saloon. The Spider crept from the middle of his web and made plain his immediate desire. "Strangers are welcome in Showdown, riding single," he told Pete. "We aren't hooked up to entertain a crowd. If you got friends coming—friends that are suffering to see you—why, you ain't ...
— The Ridin' Kid from Powder River • Henry Herbert Knibbs
... down with Alexander, Quelling unknown lands beneath the sun; Watched where Buddha in the Bo tree shadows Saw this life's web woven and undone; ...
— Behind the Arras - A Book of the Unseen • Bliss Carman
... the Frenchman, the Irishman and the Swede, each with his peculiar prejudices and local attachments, and all the complicated and interwoven tissue of sentiments, feelings and thoughts, that country, kindred and home, indelibly combined with the web of youthful existence, settled down beside each other. The merchant, mechanic and farmer found themselves placed by necessity in the same society. Men must cleave to their kind and must be dependent upon each other. Pride ...
— Sustained honor - The Age of Liberty Established • John R. Musick,
... for him, its buffets too abrupt, its burden too heavy, and he gave up the fight before the battle had really begun. This lack of courage and extreme sensitiveness are seen in the son. But so peculiar, complex and wonderful is this web of life, that our very blunders, weaknesses and mistakes are woven in and make the fabric stronger. If Swift had possessed only his mother's merits, without his father's faults, he would never have shaken the world with laughter, and we should never ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 1 of 14 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Good Men and Great • Elbert Hubbard
... of the council what this device is. The lady Penelope set up a great loom in her house and began to weave a wide web of cloth. To each of us she sent a message saying that when the web she was working at was woven, she would choose a husband from amongst us. "Laertes, the father of Odysseus, is alone with none to care for him ...
— The Adventures of Odysseus and The Tales of Troy • Padriac Colum
... remarkable illustrations might be quoted; as for instance the web of the Spider, the pit of the Ant Lion, the mephitic odour of ...
— The Beauties of Nature - and the Wonders of the World We Live In • Sir John Lubbock
... not here discourse of Republiques, because I have other where treated of them at large: I will apply my self only to a Principality, and proceed, while I weave this web, by arguing thereupon, how these Principallities can be governed and maintained. I say then that in States of inheritance, and accustomed to the blood of their Princes, there are far fewer difficulties to keep them, than in the new: for it suffices ...
— Machiavelli, Volume I - The Art of War; and The Prince • Niccolo Machiavelli
... Squirrel left the deserted house where he had spent the winter with Stripe the Chipmunk and Web the Flying Squirrel, not to mention White Foot the Deer Mouse, he was in a very serious mood, and his first thought was to go right to work to build a home for himself in some friendly tree, and stock it early with ...
— Bumper, The White Rabbit • George Ethelbert Walsh
... walked to a private museum; a good collection of birds, shells, etc., also some fine works on natural history with beautiful coloured plates; an immense collection of specimens of plants bequeathed to the institution. A skeleton riding on horseback made ludicrous by a spider's web resembling a bridle. Thence we visited Mr. Pierpoint's garden. Took tea at Mr. Scholfield's but did not see Mr. Wood. Then set off to an election meeting and heard some good speaking; a little monkey not 8 years old ...
— A Journey to America in 1834 • Robert Heywood
... time moulds us, lacking wherewithal To shape out nobler fortunes or contend Against all-patient Fates, who may not mend The allotted pattern of things temporal Or alter it a jot or e'er let fall A single stitch thereof, until at last The web and its drear weavers be overcast ...
— The Rivet in Grandfather's Neck - A Comedy of Limitations • James Branch Cabell
... the right he threw another, and to the left another. The silver wire seemed to whirl until it became a tangle of wire all over the house. The big black cat made an attempt to escape, but it was caught in the wire as a fly is caught in a spider's web, and it ...
— Little Mr. Thimblefinger and His Queer Country • Joel Chandler Harris
... reposed and safe, To void the stuffing of my travel-scrip And share with thee whatever Jewry yields. A viscid choler is observable In tertians, I was nearly bold to say; And falling-sickness hath a happier cure Than our school wots of: there's a spider here Weaves no web, watches on the ledge of tombs, Sprinkled with mottles on an ash-gray back; Take five and drop them,.. but who knows his mind, The Syrian runagate I trust this to? His service payeth me a sublimate Blown up his nose to help the ailing eye. ...
— Robert Browning: How To Know Him • William Lyon Phelps
... that a brain of the first order, united with many rare qualities of character, had arisen. Never was there a more comprehensive mind. Nothing was too small and nothing too great for its alert observation. One page is occupied in the analysis of some peculiarity in the web of a minute spider, while the next deals with the evidence for the subsidence of a continent and the extinction of a myriad animals. And his sweep of knowledge was so great—botany, geology, zoology, each lending its corroborative aid to the other. How a youth of Darwin's age—he ...
— Through the Magic Door • Arthur Conan Doyle
... off in horror, for there flashed past him, as silent as the wind and swifter, a dark, bent figure, with flying cloak, under which, as the moonlight struck him, there whirled a web of glittering tissue whereon he seemed to ride. That uncanny tinkling floated back from this strange vision, confirming to the ear what otherwise might have appeared a mere trick of ...
— The Panchronicon • Harold Steele Mackaye
... the one actually dangerous thing in Christian Science—the fallacy that one mind can weave a web that will work the undoing of another. This is the basis of a belief in witchcraft, and justifies the hangings at Salem. On page one hundred three I find this: "As used in Christian Science, animal magnetism or hypnotism is ...
— Little Journeys To The Homes Of Great Teachers • Elbert Hubbard
... shawl—how, besides the clothes, she would buy the books that he longed for, and pay his half-year's schooling; and how she would buy a cloak for her father instead of that old great-coat which he wore. She was not mistaken as to the value of the Major's gift. It was a very fine and beautiful web, and the merchant made a very good bargain when he gave her twenty guineas ...
— Vanity Fair • William Makepeace Thackeray
... English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Georges, and Louises, doubloons and double guineas and moidores and sequins, the pictures of all the kings of Europe for the last hundred years, strange Oriental pieces stamped with what looked like wisps of string or bits of spider's web, round pieces and square pieces, and pieces bored through the middle, as if to wear them round your neck—nearly every variety of money in the world must, I think, have found a place in that collection; and for number, I am sure they were like autumn leaves, so that ...
— Treasure Island • Robert Louis Stevenson
... sometimes as the tale went on he would take the harp which was ever by his side, and touching it with skilful fingers, would weave a gay little song or a tender strain of music into his story, like a jeweled thread in a golden web. ...
— The Story-teller • Maud Lindsay
... up for all past privations by a substantial meal in the kitchen. But Mrs. Kelland had gone to Avoncester to purchase thread, and only her daughter Susan had come up, the girl who was supposed to be a sort of spider, with no capacities beyond her web. Nor did Rachel think Lovedy capable of walking down to Mackarel Lane, nor well enough for the comfortless chairs and the third part of a bed. No, Mr. Grey's words that Rachel was accountable for the children's sufferings had gone to her heart. Pity was there ...
— The Clever Woman of the Family • Charlotte M. Yonge
... had woven their many colored web of events, since Mrs. Montgomery had dropped down suddenly among us like a being from cloudland. The friendly relation established between us in the beginning, had continued, growing more and more intimate. My good Constance found ...
— The Allen House - or Twenty Years Ago and Now • T. S. Arthur
... Martie spreading her glittering web of hair to dry, as she sat in the sand by the other woman's chair; John stretched in the hot sand for a nap; Teddy staggering to and fro with a dripping pail. They liked to keep a little away from the crowd; a hundred feet away the footmarked ...
— Martie the Unconquered • Kathleen Norris
... visibly sobbing now; he knew what "being taken care of" meant. He was afraid, yes, and bewildered at being caught in this cruel web of circumstance. But most of all he was incensed and shamed by this indignity. He could not trust himself to speak, he would break down. Something was wrong, everything was wrong, fate was against him, he could not grapple ...
— Pee-wee Harris on the Trail • Percy Keese Fitzhugh
... of fate, are seen in the dim light before dawn, busily weaving the web of destiny on the rocky hillside where the Walkyries formerly held their tryst. As they twist their rope, which is stretched from north to south, they sing of the age of gold. Then they sat beneath the great world-ash, near the limpid well, where ...
— Stories of the Wagner Opera • H. A. Guerber
... no Harriet, no plausible physician to keep them away from her. Rose had a smile of tender pity for the memory of the girl who had struggled so ineffectually and yet with such heart-breaking earnestness to break the filaments of the web ...
— The Real Adventure • Henry Kitchell Webster
... they were still. The loom in the garret always had its web ready, the great wheel by the other window sung its busy song year in and year out. Dolly was her mother's right hand now; and the twins, Ralph and Reuben, could fire the musket and chop wood. Sylvy, the fourth child, was the odd one. All the rest were sturdy, rosy, laughing ...
— Good Cheer Stories Every Child Should Know • Various
... was alone this time. How like herself she looked, handsome and stately, in characteristic elegance of attire and manner both. Her white morning dress floated off in soft edges of lace from her white arms; a shawl of precious texture was gathered loosely about them; on her head a gossamer web of some fancy manufacture fell off on either side, a mock covering for it. She came up to Daisy and kissed her, and then examined into her various arrangements, to see that she was in all respects well and properly cared ...
— Melbourne House, Volume 1 • Susan Warner
... Grammaticus: Gesta Danorum" (DNA, Copenhagen, 1996). Web-based Latin edition of Saxo, substantiallly based on the above edition; currently ...
— The Danish History, Books I-IX • Saxo Grammaticus ("Saxo the Learned")
... well cooked and served a meal as any under Rupert's rule, which is saying a good deal, and if the young ladies failed to appreciate the "floating island," the "golden nests," and "silver web," so thoughtfully provided for them, Tanty did ample ...
— The Light of Scarthey • Egerton Castle
... I should like to know whether you have the same feeling as I have about the rhetoricians? To me there seem to be a great many holes in their web. ...
— Phaedrus • Plato
... often heard my poor old uncle say that no man knows what he can do till he tries; and the enemy gave us plenty of opportunities of displaying our ingenuity, industry, watchfulness, and abstinence. When poor Penelope wove her web, ...
— Frank Mildmay • Captain Frederick Marryat
... animal or vegetable form that brought expressions of wonder and astonishment from the enraptured Americans. At times, too, there were grim tragedies being enacted before them. In one spot a huge, hairy spider, whose delicate, lace-like web hung to the water's edge, was viciously wrapping its silken thread about a tiny bird that had become entangled. Again, a shriek from beyond the river's margin told of some careless monkey or small animal that had fallen prey to a hungry jaguar. Above the travelers ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... with a beating heart. It was clear that his departure from Pianura was as strongly opposed by some one in high authority as it was favoured by the Duchess; and why opposed and by whom he could not so much as hazard a guess. In the web of court intrigues it was difficult for the wariest to grope his way; and Odo was still new to such entanglements. His first sensation was one of release, of a future suddenly enlarged and cleared. The door was open again ...
— The Valley of Decision • Edith Wharton
... knife in order to get at the tree. The lines of those webs were as thick as coarse threads, and pretty strong, as I had reason to know; for when walking back to camp the same evening, meditating deeply on our unfortunate detention, I ran my head into the middle of a spider's web, and was completely enveloped in it, so much so that it was with considerable difficulty I succeeded in clearing it away. I was as regularly netted as if a gauze veil ...
— The Gorilla Hunters • R.M. Ballantyne
... its six legs slowly in the air. We all crowded about him peering at it. Rolled around the middle section of its right foreleg was something that looked like a thin dried leaf. It was bound on very neatly with strong spider-web. ...
— The Voyages of Doctor Dolittle • Hugh Lofting
... shifting web of ambition and intrigue the royal Edward moved with a careless grace: simple himself, because his object was won, and pleasure had supplanted ambition. His indolent, joyous temper served to deaden ...
— The Last Of The Barons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... expand The lyric wing; or in elegiac strains Lament the fair; or lash the stubborn age, With laughing satire; or in rural scenes With shepherds sport; or rack his hard-bound brains For the unexpected turn. Arachne so, In dusty kitchen corner, from her bowels 140 Spins the fine web, but spins with better fate, Than the poor bard: she! caitiff! spreads her snares, And with their aid enjoys luxurious life, Bloated with fat of insects, flesh'd in blood: He! hard, hard lot! for all his toil and care, And painful ...
— Poetical Works of Akenside - [Edited by George Gilfillan] • Mark Akenside
... behavior. Therefore, they ought not to be tolerated by any government, Protestant, Mohammedan, or Pagan. You say, 'Nay, but they take an oath of allegiance.' True, five hundred oaths; but the maxim, 'No faith is to be kept with heretics,' sweeps them all away as a spider's web. So that still no governors that are not Roman Catholics can have any security of ...
— Americanism Contrasted with Foreignism, Romanism, and Bogus Democracy in the Light of Reason, History, and Scripture; • William Gannaway Brownlow
... extensively used for crossing the broad rivers of India, and are especially designed with a view to their easy transport and erection. The Trellis or Warren girder is a modification of the same plan, consisting of a top and bottom flange, with a connecting web of diagonal flat bars, forming a complete system of triangulation—hence the name of "Triangular girder," by which it is generally known. The merit of this form consists in its comparative rigidity, ...
— Lives of the Engineers - The Locomotive. George and Robert Stephenson • Samuel Smiles
... joy is volatile: The flesh is faithful to her memories. This living silk, this inarticulate Remembrance of the nerves enwinds us fast: Delicate cells, obscure and obstinate, Secrete the bitter essence of the Past. Ah! Was the fading web of rose and white All macerated by the kisses of old As rare French queens with perfume? (So, by night, They lived like lilies mid their cloth-of-gold.) Within the sense, howe'er the soul abjure, Like flavours and fumes these ...
— The Hours of Fiammetta - A Sonnet Sequence • Rachel Annand Taylor
... troubled at the claim of one of differing religion and nation, and who had so uncertain and perilous a lot in which to place her child. There was also the sense that all her dearest, including her eldest son, were involved in the web of intrigue with persons far mightier and more unscrupulous than themselves; and that, however they might strive to preserve their integrity, it would be very hard to avoid ...
— Unknown to History - A Story of the Captivity of Mary of Scotland • Charlotte M. Yonge
... platypus, and a host of others, not related, just as, among birds, there are water ousels, moorhens, ducks, divers, etc., which have permanently made the water their home and seek their living in it. All these have attained to web-footedness in ...
— Concerning Animals and Other Matters • E.H. Aitken, (AKA Edward Hamilton)
... suffering: Posadowsky's Horse (among whom is Rothenburg, once vanguard), strengthened by remnants who have rallied here, are at last prospering, after reverses. And the Prussian fire of small arms, at such rate, has lasted now for five hours. The Austrian Army, becoming instead of a web a mere series of flying tatters, forming into stripes or lanes in the way we see, appears ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XII. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... pipes, one after the other, in a vain attempt to draw out some definite sequence of facts from the tangled web of happenings into which I seemed to have strayed. I came to the conclusion that Fate, which had bestowed on me a physique of more than ordinary size, a sound constitution, and muscles which had filled my study with various kinds of trophies, had not been ...
— The Lost Ambassador - The Search For The Missing Delora • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... there it wove the name Of many a town he loved, for one dear sake, Into its web of music; thus he came His ...
— Peter Ibbetson • George du Marier et al
... weavers come bringing the web they were spinning, A cloth for the curd, of the stoutest of linen. The ten men attack it, And tumble and pack it Within the vast vat in its dripping gray jacket; And the press is set going with clatter and racket. The great screw descends, ...
— St. Nicholas Magazine for Boys and Girls, Vol. V, August, 1878, No 10. - Scribner's Illustrated • Various
... Then a little wind awakes in the distance, and ruffles the surface, yard by yard, covering it with a myriad tiny wrinkles, till half the lake is milky emerald, while the rest still sleeps. And, at length, the whole is astir, and the sun catches it, and Lake Louise is a web of laughter, the opal distillation of all the buds of all the spring. On either side go up the dark processional pines, mounting to the sacred peaks, devout, kneeling, motionless, in an ecstasy of homely adoration, like the donors and their families in a Flemish picture. Among these you may wander ...
— Letters from America • Rupert Brooke
... the starlight, he saw the keyboard and the bewildering maze of wires running up and branching like a huge web toward the ...
— Barbarians • Robert W. Chambers
... esteem, for their great and universal knowledge, easier a great deal to be pretended to than really acquired, found this a good expedient to cover their ignorance, with a curious and inexplicable web of perplexed words, and procure to themselves the admiration of others, by unintelligible terms, the apter to produce wonder because they could not be understood; whilst it appears in all history, that these profound doctors were no wiser nor more useful ...
— An Essay Concerning Humane Understanding, Volume II. - MDCXC, Based on the 2nd Edition, Books III. and IV. (of 4) • John Locke
... was beset with doubts and uneasiness. Suppose she called up my office and found that the client I had named was not in town? It is undoubtedly true that a tangled web we weave when first we practise to deceive, for on my return to the office I was at once quite certain that Mrs. Johnson would ...
— Sight Unseen • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... didn't see how we could return it and I didn't want the Polydore web woven any tighter. To think of Silvia's receiving from them what it had been my longing to give her! But as I was to learn later, she was to acquire much more than a piano from ...
— Our Next-Door Neighbors • Belle Kanaris Maniates
... throat. The other Eskimos had not worn snowshoes. That in itself had not surprised him, for the snow was hard and easily traveled in moccasins. The fact that amazed him now was that the trail under his eyes had not been made by Eskimo usamuks. The tracks were long and narrow. The web imprint in the snow was not that of the broad narwhal strip, but the finer mesh of babiche. It was possible that an Eskimo was wearing them, but they ...
— The Golden Snare • James Oliver Curwood
... future foes exiles my present joy, And wit me warns to shun such snares as threaten mine annoy. For falsehood now doth flow, and subjects' faith doth ebb; Which would not be if Reason ruled, or Wisdom weaved the web. But clouds of toys untried do cloak aspiring minds, Which turn to rain of late repent by course of changed winds. The top of hope supposed the root of ruth will be; And fruitless all their graffed guiles, as shortly ye shall see. Those dazzled eves with pride, which great ambition ...
— Memoirs of the Court of Queen Elizabeth • Lucy Aikin
... she had drawn near some invisible web, of which every now and then a single filament brushed against her—almost impalpable, yet touching her with the fleetest ...
— The Splendid Folly • Margaret Pedler
... and scissars, pasting and rolling-press" work—the arduous task was at length accomplished: and Mary Collet, one of Mr. Ferrar's nieces, put the grand finishing stroke to the whole, by "doing a deed"—which has snapt asunder the threads of Penelope's web for envy:—"She bound the book entirely, ALL WROUGHT IN GOLD, in a new and most elegant fashion." The fame of this book, or concordance, as it was called, reached the ears of Charles I., who "intreated" (such was ...
— Bibliomania; or Book-Madness - A Bibliographical Romance • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... country on the inspections of his duty, managed to see to the very marrow of the prelates of a cathedral, to the inner histories of the duke's castle and the squire's home, into the secret musings of the rector's daughter, and into the tangled web of parliamentary intrigue. He did all this with a perfectly sure and subtle touch, which was often, it is true, somewhat tame, and is never perhaps of any very great brilliance, but which was almost faultlessly true, never extravagant, ...
— Studies in Early Victorian Literature • Frederic Harrison
... rushed beneath it, over a boulder-encumbered bed. I took in the situation at a glance, and then and there I would have changed that bridge for any swamp I have ever seen, yea, even for a certain bush-rope bridge in which I once wound myself up like a buzzing fly in a spider's web. I was fearfully tired, and my legs shivered under me after the falls and emotions of the previous part of the day, and my boots were ...
— Travels in West Africa • Mary H. Kingsley
... porter in an evening coat, and gentlemen with gloves as large as Doolan's, but of the famous Berlin web, were on the passage of Mr. Bungay's house to receive the guests' hats and coats, and bawl their names up the stair. Some of the latter had arrived when the three new visitors made their appearance; ...
— The History of Pendennis • William Makepeace Thackeray
... looked at the hard-faced youth a moment in silence, and turned without a word and left the room. Barclay floated away on his "Evening Star" and spun out his dream as a spider spins his web, and when Hendricks came into the office for a mislaid paper half an hour later, Barclay still was figuring up profits, and making his web stronger. As Hendricks, having finished his errand, was about to go, ...
— A Certain Rich Man • William Allen White
... beautiful when it was done, but beautiful also in the doing. To watch her, as she took the wool in its rude state and formed it into rolls, or separated it with her fingers and carded it till it looked as light and soft as a cloud, or twirled the spindle with skilful touch, or wove the web, or, after it was woven, adorned it with her needle, one would have said that Minerva herself had taught her. But this she denied, and could not bear to be thought a pupil even of a goddess. "Let Minerva try her skill with mine," said she; "if beaten I will pay the penalty." Minerva heard this ...
— Bulfinch's Mythology • Thomas Bulfinch
... give him the job because he has earned it. He gave me some very valuable information about the wretched condition of her electric-light plant and a crack, cunningly concealed, in the after web of her crank shaft—" ...
— Cappy Ricks Retires • Peter B. Kyne
... lecturing at the new London University, and Dugald Stewart in the University of Edinburgh. Captain Ross was exploring the Northern Seas, and Lander the wilds of Africa. Lancaster was founding a new system of education; Bentham and Ricardo were unravelling the tangled web of political economy; Hallam, Lingard, Mitford, Mills, were writing history; Macaulay, Carlyle, Smith, Lockhart, Jeffrey, Hazlitt, were giving a new stimulus to periodical literature; while Miss Edgeworth, Jane Porter, Mrs. Hemans, ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume IX • John Lord
... blue-bottle flies out, instead of killing them. I shouldn't wonder if it was that great spider whose life you spared who told her. You remember your cousin Dick wanted to kill it; and I noticed she guided the bee with threads from a spider's web." ...
— The Cockatoo's Story • Mrs. George Cupples
... venture. Lawrence is acquainted with Ashton, as they used to meet at old Tom's when on their drinking bouts. I will sound him, and, if I find he is all serene on the matter, Ashton must have become a more wary fly than he used to be if I do not induce him to enter my spider's web." ...
— From Wealth to Poverty • Austin Potter
... for thee the earth of its treasures; thou hast sacrificed them to thy infamous pleasures, without once thinking of these wretches. Feel now thy folly; thou hast spun the web of their destiny, and thy hungry, beggarly, miserable brood will transmit to their remotest posterity the misery of which thou art the cause. Thou didst beget children—wherefore hast thou not been a father to them? Wherefore hast thou sought happiness where mortal ...
— Faustus - his Life, Death, and Doom • Friedrich Maximilian von Klinger
... Bavarians, and Wurtembergers were moving from their respective countries. The corps were thus separated by great distances, and the Austrians, who had been long concentrated, might easily break through this spider's web or brush away its threads. Napoleon was justly uneasy, and ordered Berthier to assemble the army at Ratisbon if the war had not actually begun on his arrival, but, if it had, to concentrate it in a more retired ...
— The Art of War • Baron Henri de Jomini
... oak and cypress tree; and from Clement of Alexandria and other of the Fathers we glean a little more—for instance, that the larva was covered with thick-set hairs, and that the cocoon was of a loose material something like a spider's web. All this agrees in every particular with a certain large moth (Lasiocampa otus), which spins a rough cocoon not unlike that of our Emperor moth, and lives in south-eastern Europe, feeding on the cypress and the oak. Many other silkworms besides the true ...
— The Legacy of Greece • Various
... they exploited on land and sea were fantastic and the funny part is, they believed thoroughly all they said. It is strange to hear serious people fabricate such yarns as they did, with as much dexterity as a spider spins its web. ...
— Lige on the Line of March - An American Girl's Experiences When the Germans Came Through Belgium • Glenna Lindsley Bigelow
... said Wulf in English, "that we are flies in a web, and that the spider is called the widow Masouda, though of what use we are to her I know not. Now, brother, what is to be done? Make friends ...
— The Brethren • H. Rider Haggard
... with his arms. But the art in which they most delighted was the wonderful feather-work. With the gorgeous plumage of the tropical birds they could produce all the effect of a beautiful mosaic. The feathers, pasted upon a fine cotton web, were wrought into dresses for the wealthy, hangings for their palaces, ...
— The True Story Book • Andrew Lang
... digs the ore from our mines, he rolls the iron; he rivets the plates, he boils the water; he draws the train. He not only grows the cotton, but he spins the fiber and weaves the web. There is not a hammer raised, a wheel turned, or a shuttle thrown, that is not raised, and turned, and ...
— McGuffey's Sixth Eclectic Reader • William Holmes McGuffey
... give a few examples, the woodpecker and the humming-bird have got their peculiarly long tongues from the habit of extracting their food with their tongues from deep and narrow folds or canals; the frog has developed the web between his toes by his own swimming; the giraffe has lengthened his neck by stretching up to the higher branches of trees, and so on. It is quite certain that this use or disuse of organs is a most important factor in organic development, but it is not ...
— The Evolution of Man, V.1. • Ernst Haeckel
... and walked up the avenue, slipping on the fir needles which lay two inches thick on the ground. It was still, dark, and only here and there in the tops of the trees shimmered a bright gold light casting the colours of the rainbow on a spider's web. The smell of the firs was almost suffocating. Then I turned into an avenue of limes. And here too were desolation and decay; the dead leaves rustled mournfully beneath my feet, and there were lurking ...
— The House with the Mezzanine and Other Stories • Anton Tchekoff
... palace till the tide flooded them, and perhaps filled it with wonderful creatures and beautiful things, and floated out the dank, dripping fucus into a veil of lace above our heads; as our mother used to float out little dirty lumps of seaweed into beautiful web-like pictures when she was preserving them ...
— Brothers of Pity and Other Tales of Beasts and Men • Juliana Horatia Gatty Ewing
... innocent of petticoats, caught in the esoteric web, pumping water for Pollie Lumm—Pollie ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 11 (of 14) - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Businessmen • Elbert Hubbard
... of the process, like a man to whom the post has brought too many letters; but there was one—the last I opened—the living active contents of which served to remind me that some insects are unable to make a cylinder for themselves, having neither gum nor web to fasten it with, and yet they will always find one made by others to shelter themselves in. Here were no fewer than six unbeautiful creatures, brothers and sisters, hatched from eggs on which their parent earwig sat incubating just like an eagle or dove or swallow, or, ...
— Birds in Town and Village • W. H. Hudson
... you were born under my star! Tremble! for where that is the case with mortals, the threads of their destinies are difficult to disentangle; knottings and catchings occur—sudden breaks leave damage in the web. But these 'impressions,' as you say, with English caution. I, too, ...
— Villette • Charlotte Bronte
... flaw in some great transparent jewel. Still they wind away in their gladness, when hurriedly Beltran reaches his hand for the heedless Vivia's, and hurriedly she sees terrifying grooves spreading round them, a great web-work of cracks,—the awful ice lifts itself, sinks, and out of a monstrous fissure chill death rises to meet them and ingulf them. In an instant, Ray, who might have escaped, has hurled himself upon them, and then, as they all struggle for one drowning breath in ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 75, January, 1864 • Various
... when she saw him chasing bees and pulling down spider-webs. Hours and hours he worked, and though his fingers were big, they were nimble, like his name; so, by and by, with a needle made of a bee's sting and thread drawn from a spider-web, he sewed up the rip in her fairy ...
— St. Nicholas Magazine for Boys and Girls, Vol. 5, Nov 1877-Nov 1878 - No 1, Nov 1877 • Various
... I calls a Canterbury poke, dear boys," he cried. "Let 'em have it, my lads. The beggars look like so many flies in a spider's web; and ...
— Fitz the Filibuster • George Manville Fenn
... hushed, windless world, as full of glittering rime-runes as the frozen fields of Jotunheim. Each tree and shrub seemed a springing fountain, suddenly crystallized in mid-air, and not all the mediaeval marvels of Murano equalled the fairy fragile tracery of fine spun, glassy web, and film, and fringe that stretched along fences, hung from eaves, and belaced the ivy leaves that lay helpless on the walls. A blanched waning moon, a mere silver crescent, shivered upon the edge of the western horizon, fleeing before the scarlet and orange lances that already bristled along ...
— Infelice • Augusta Jane Evans Wilson
... speaking a full minute, the drowsy farmers seeing merely that notes were being shifted and rearranged on the table. Then he began again, the dictatorial key transposed into melody. His covert message was to the new maid in the congregation. She might struggle like a fly in a web. He wrapped her around and around with beautiful sentences. As Speaker of the State Legislature he had learned well how to handle men in the mass, but nature had doubly endowed him for entrancing women. The spiritual part of James Strang, King and Prophet of a peculiar sect, appealed to the ...
— The King Of Beaver, and Beaver Lights - From "Mackinac And Lake Stories", 1899 • Mary Hartwell Catherwood
... thought that he had lost his chance; he had set himself to frighten and quell La Cibot till she was completely in his power, bound hand and foot. She had walked into his study as a fly walks into a spider's web; there she was doomed to remain, entangled in the toils of the little lawyer who meant to feed upon her. Out of this bit of business, indeed, Fraisier meant to gain the living of old days; comfort, competence, and consideration. He and ...
— Poor Relations • Honore de Balzac
... to the floor of the crater, which is, for the most part, nearly flat. It is much rent by fissures, which during the night are seen to glow with a ruddy glare, emanating from the hot materials beneath, and giving to the floor the appearance of being overspread with a fiery tissue, like a spider's web. From the bottom there usually rise one or two small craters of eruption, whence continually issue sulphurous fumes, and which, at pretty regular intervals, discharge showers of ...
— Wonders of Creation • Anonymous
... to me, Malliver," said lady Ann, and rising, went down the stair. But the moment she entered the library, and saw Richard's hand tied up in his handkerchief, she bethought herself of the happy chance of satisfaction as to whether or not he was web-fingered: the absence of the peculiarity would indeed prove nothing, but the presence of it would be a warning of the worst danger: he might have had it removed, but could not have contrived to put ...
— There & Back • George MacDonald
... white swan or goose feathers; have them plucked off the fowl with care not to break the web; free them from down, except a small quantity on the shaft of the feather. Get also a little fine wire, different sizes; a few skeins of fine floss silks, some good cotton wool or wadding, a reel of No. 4 Moravian cotton, ...
— Enquire Within Upon Everything - The Great Victorian Domestic Standby • Anonymous
... far end the big Uranian seemed to be standing on his side, with his sixteen huge jointed legs supporting him, half of them on the floor and half on the ceiling. His purple, hairy body was supported in the middle almost as from a web. His two semi-globular eyes, seemingly opaque, were surrounded by six smaller ones. Grant knew the smaller ones could detect infra-red, and now he felt his face growing warm and knew they had on infra ...
— The Wealth of Echindul • Noel Miller Loomis
... word context (Latin, contextus) signifies literally a weaving together; and is appropriately used, therefore, to denote the web of a writer's discourse. The scope is the end which a writer proposes to accomplish: the context gives the form and manner of its accomplishment. With reference to a given passage, the context has been loosely defined to be that which immediately ...
— Companion to the Bible • E. P. Barrows
... Nimrod, standing confounded at the foot of Babel; and Niobe, with her despairing eyes, turned into stone amidst her children; and Saul, dead on his own sword in Gilboa; and Arachne, now half spider, at fault on her own broken web; and Rehoboam, for all his insolence, flying in terror in his chariot; and Alcmaeon, who made his mother pay with her life for the ornament she received to betray his father; and Sennacherib, left dead by his son in the temple; and the head of Cyrus, thrown by the motherless woman into ...
— Stories from the Italian Poets: With Lives of the Writers, Volume 1 • Leigh Hunt
... a vast web, working in gold and scarlet the sorrows that for her sake befell mankind, when they called her to the walls to see Paris fight Menelaus, in the last year of the war. There she stands, in raiment of silvery white, her heart yearning for her old love and her own city. Already ...
— Adventures among Books • Andrew Lang
... of her mouth, ere all three had leapt off their horses, and the Golden Knight came up to her, and laid his hand upon her side, and spake eagerly and said: Where is she, whence thou gattest this gown of good web? And thou, said she, art thou Baudoin the Golden Knight? But he set his hand to the collar on her neck, and touched her skin withal, and said: This, was she alive when thou camest by it? She said: If thou be Baudoin the Golden Knight, I have an errand to thee. I am he, said the knight; ...
— The Water of the Wondrous Isles • William Morris
... political career was complex where Macdonald's was simple. John A. was as great a Canadian as Laurier; but in the simpler times in which he lived he had less cause to be puzzled by the web of fate and of political cross-currents at home and abroad, even though he was immensely more baffled by politicians ...
— The Masques of Ottawa • Domino
... their objectives without effective opposition. First, the junction to the north of Bapaume, then the web of sidings at Achiet smoked and flamed under the heavy bombardment. Quick splashes of light where the bombs exploded, great columns of gray smoke mushrooming up to the sky, then feeble licks of flame ...
— Tam O' The Scoots • Edgar Wallace
... municipality provides them freely with concerts and picture galleries, golf courses and swimming ponds; and in old age, finally, if duly qualified, they receive a State pension. Now all these measures are socialistic, and Socialism is nothing more or less than a complicated web of such measures; the socialistic State, as some have put it, is simply a great national co-operative association of which the Government is the ...
— The Task of Social Hygiene • Havelock Ellis
... passage in vol. v.c. 1, which even that seasoned detective Dr. Ferriar is startled into pronouncing "singular." Burton had complained that writers were like apothecaries, who "make new mixtures every day," by "pouring out of one vessel into another." "We weave," he said, "the same web still, twist the same rope again and again." And Sterne incolumi gravitate asks: "Shall we forever make new books as apothecaries make new mixtures, by pouring only out of one vessel into another? ...
— Sterne • H.D. Traill
... at his loom: think how it should be if he sit no longer before the web and cast the shuttle and draw home the sley, but if the shed open of itself and the shuttle of itself speed through it as swift as the eye can follow, and the sley come home of itself; and the weaver standing ...
— A Dream of John Ball, A King's Lesson • William Morris
... walls of its prison, which were quite hard and smooth on the inside, probably owing to the movements of the larva, and the consequent pressing of the sticky particles to the walls. In a short time the opening made was closed over by a very thin silken web. The cells, measured on the inside of the hard walls, were .35 of an inch in length, and .15 in diameter. The natural attitude of the larva is somewhat curved in its cell, but if straightened, it just equals the inside length of the cell. On the 31st of July, two female ...
— Our Common Insects - A Popular Account of the Insects of Our Fields, Forests, - Gardens and Houses • Alpheus Spring Packard
... place to pass toll-free throughout all England, which grant was confirmed by Elizabeth. But the manufacturing celebrity of Lavenham has dwindled to spinning woollen yarn, and making calimancoes and hempen cloth; the opulent clothiers have shuffled off their mortal coil, and proved that "the web of our life is of a mingled ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 335 - Vol. 12, No. 335, October 11, 1828 • Various
... lips. I inquired his name, and was informed that it was Charles C. Burleigh. Nature has been profuse in showering her gifts upon Mr. Burleigh, but all has been bestowed upon his head and heart. There is a kind of eloquence which weaves its thread around the hearer, and gradually draws him into its web, fascinating him with its gaze, entangling him as the spider does the fly, until he is fast: such is the eloquence of C.C. Burleigh. As a debater he is unquestionably the first on the Anti-slavery platform. If he did not speak so fast, he would equal Wendell Phillips; if he did not reason his subject ...
— Three Years in Europe - Places I Have Seen and People I Have Met • William Wells Brown
... closed desperately upon his. Her heart shook her, and Fear was in her eyes. Her voice vibrated and shuddered at her white lips as a caught moth vibrates and shudders in a spider-web. ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves
... darlin' young lady,' says he. 'And it's there he threw her down into the deep, cowld, dark lake,' says he. 'Would you like to go up and lie down in his bed?' says he. 'Is it me,' says I, 'to do it? Why my brain is like a spider's web wid lookin' at it,' says I. But a young man that was used to crawling in them unchristian places—them mines—went up; and I thought I could jump through a key-hole, I felt so, to see him do it; and says I, when he came down, 'Young man, I pray, when you settle in life, ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXIII No. 5 November 1848 • Various
... the engine for some time and then crept slowly along a steel bridge that looked like a spider's web, from which she could look into the furnace-room, with its roaring fires, scorching heat and constantly clanging iron doors. For some minutes she gazed silently, then turning quickly, hurried across the bridge, up the greasy stairs and on to the main ...
— Dick in the Everglades • A. W. Dimock
... who thought that already the web of commerce and finance had been woven strong enough to save nations from the calamity of war. Their miscalculation arose from underestimating the power over the mind and the passions of that false image of trade. But because the modern internationalism of commerce ...
— Morals of Economic Internationalism • John A. Hobson
... his eyes grey and well-opened, but somewhat fierce withal. Yet was he in nowise evil-looking; he seemed some thirty summers old. He was clad in a short scarlet kirtle, a goodly garment, with a hood of like web pulled off his head on to his shoulders: he bore a great gold ring on his left arm, and a collar of gold came down on to his breast from under ...
— The Roots of the Mountains • William Morris
... dollar, which had opened, and I do not know which of the two coffers would turn out to be best lined. Enormously rich were both these mortal enemies! After the first sensation, which was rapidly suppressed, renewed silence fell on the assembly. You could have heard a spider weaving his web. ...
— Godfrey Morgan - A Californian Mystery • Jules Verne
... the index and middle fingers connected by a web, as in the case of H. syndactylus (a Sumatran species very distinct in other respects). The very closely allied H. agilis has also this peculiarity in occasional specimens. This Gibbon was called "agilis" by Cuvier from its extreme rapidity in springing from branch to branch. ...
— Natural History of the Mammalia of India and Ceylon • Robert A. Sterndale
... whose smile kindles the universe, That beauty in which all things work and move, That benediction which the eclipsing curse Of birth can quench not, that sustaining love, Which through the web of being, blindly wove, By man and beast and earth and air and sea, Burns bright or dim, as each are mirrors of The fire for which all thirst—now beams on me, Consuming the last clouds of ...
— Human Traits and their Social Significance • Irwin Edman
... also eaten. I once saw a number of men industriously robbing the large white "eggs" from an ant nest in a tree. The nest was built of leaves attached by a web. Into the bottom of this closed pocket the men poked a hole with a long stick, letting a pint or more of the white pupae run out on a winnowing tray on the earth. From this tray the furious ants were at length driven, and the eggs ...
— The Bontoc Igorot • Albert Ernest Jenks
... themselves, Leicester was working privately upon the queen, who was but too willing to listen to him, feeding her through the ladies of the bedchamber with stories that Anjou was infected with a loathsome disease, and assisting his Penelope to unravel at night the web which she had woven under Cecil's direction ...
— History of the Rise of the Huguenots - Volume 2 • Henry Baird
... then disguis'd in death, and smear'd all o'er With filth obscene, and dropping putrid gore. Soon hasty fame thro' the sad city bears The mournful message to the mother's ears. An icy cold benumbs her limbs; she shakes; Her cheeks the blood, her hand the web forsakes. She runs the rampires round amidst the war, Nor fears the flying darts; she rends her hair, And fills with loud laments the liquid air. "Thus, then, my lov'd Euryalus appears! Thus looks the prop my declining years! Was't on ...
— The Aeneid • Virgil
... actual fact he almost effaced himself, but to her excited fancy he was omnipresent, overpowering. She thought of him now not so much as a python as in the form of a huge bloated spider in the middle of an invisible web, spinning, watching, closing in. She was ready to believe he was always watching her, spying on her movements, reading her secret thoughts. There were moments when she had a wild desire to scream aloud, so tense had her nerves become with the strain ...
— Juggernaut • Alice Campbell
... sway over the subject of Dress. In this they did well; but, in my humble opinion, erred in putting the shears into the hands of sectarianism to cut every man's Dress by exactly the same pattern, and to choose it all from the same grand web of drab. It is sectarianism, and not religion, which would Dress every man alike. That is making Dress the badge of the order. Any thing put on outwardly to tell the world to what sect you belong is an evidence of sectarianism, and not of religion. The Quaker wears the sign ...
— Aims and Aids for Girls and Young Women • George Sumner Weaver
... all. First, Sahwah discovered that she was sitting next to a convention hall of gigantic red ants and a number of the delegates had gone on sight-seeing excursions up her sleeves and into her low shoes, which naturally caused some commotion. Then a spider let himself down on a web directly in front of Margery's face and threw her into hysterics. And then the mosquitoes descended, the way the Latin book says the Roman soldiers did, "as many thousands as ever came down from old Mycaenae", and after that there was no peace. ...
— The Campfire Girls Go Motoring • Hildegard G. Frey
... its spider-web-like network of grounding cables and with a large pulley at its end, extended two hundred feet straight out from the side of the ship. A twenty-five-mile coil of Graham wire was mounted on the remote-controlled Hotchkiss reel. The end of the wire was run out over the pulley; ...
— Subspace Survivors • E. E. Smith
... is given, showing the many small needle-like teeth and the broad red tongue, which curls outward to a surprising length. Then comes the most curious process of all. Drawing up one leg, the little creature deliberately wraps one hand with its clinging web around the leg and under the arms, and then draws the other wing straight across the body, holds it there a moment, while it takes a last look in all directions. Then lifting its fingers slightly, it bends its ...
— The Log of the Sun - A Chronicle of Nature's Year • William Beebe
... weak in character, and far from sensible, full of self-importance, and puffed up with her inheritance, had been easily blinded and involved in the web that the artful Lisette had managed to draw round her. She had been totally alienated from her old friends, and by force of reiteration had been brought to think them guilty of defrauding her. In truth, she was kept in a whirl of gaiety and amusement, with little ...
— Magnum Bonum • Charlotte M. Yonge
... romanticistic. Their whole lives deal with realities, the every-other-day as well as the every-day realities. But the lives of those others who make all life costly by refusing their share of its work dwell in a web of threadbare fictions which never had any color of truth in this country. They are trying to imitate poor imitations, to copy those vulgar copies of the European ideal which form the society-page's contribution to the history of our ...
— Imaginary Interviews • W. D. Howells
... were a Samson, the laws of hydrostatics would set at naught their strength. The shock with which they touch the mill will recoil on the skiff; if they grapple it they will be dragged away by it. It is as if a spider would catch a cockchafer in its web. ...
— Timar's Two Worlds • Mr Jkai
... the scene of conflict, and the strongest or most daring sometimes succeeds in carrying away the fly from its rightful captor. Where, however, a large colony have been long in undisturbed possession of a ceiling, when one has caught a fly he rapidly throws a covering of web over it, cuts it away, and drops it down to hang suspended by a line at a distance of two or three feet from the ceiling. The other spiders arrive on the scene, but not finding the cause of the disturbance retire to their own webs again. When the coast is thus clear, our spider proceeds to draw ...
— The Industries of Animals • Frederic Houssay
... lawn, that the light was still shining in Bellingham's window, and as he passed up the staircase the door opened, and the man himself looked out at him. With his fat, evil face he was like some bloated spider fresh from the weaving of his poisonous web. ...
— Round the Red Lamp - Being Facts and Fancies of Medical Life • Arthur Conan Doyle
... a quick motion to mat the fibers together. The patient striving toward something better which has marked all the centuries since man first learned to carve his rude records, finds its consummation in the process of making paper in a continuous web. This result is accomplished by a machine first invented by Louis Robert, a workman in a mill at Enonnes, France, who obtained a French patent, with a bounty of eight thousand francs for its development. This he later sold to M. ...
— A Book of Exposition • Homer Heath Nugent
... muttered. "May his ghost wander in to sniff it! These oly-koeks are not bad. I suppose this man, Ten Breecheses, or whatever he is called, is at once cook and housekeeper. Although I don't think much of his housekeeping," ruminated Mauville, as he observed a herculean spider weaving a web from an old volume of Giraldus Cambrensis, antiquary, to the classical works of one Joseph of Exeter. There is a strong sympathy between wine and cobwebs, and Mauville watched with increasing interest the uses to which these ...
— The Strollers • Frederic S. Isham
... pulling out the threads of what was to Betty only a web of very confused pattern; she did not try to unravel it. Her consciousness of just two things was clear: the pleasant stimulus of the task set before her, and a little sharp premonition of its danger. She dismissed that. She could perform the task ...
— A Red Wallflower • Susan Warner
... him round about, And went into his den, For well he knew the silly fly Would soon be back again; So he wove a subtle web In a little corner sly, And set his table ready ...
— Required Poems for Reading and Memorizing - Third and Fourth Grades, Prescribed by State Courses of Study • Anonymous
... Thou art my only hope, my only dower, And I will make thee worthy of a Queen. Proud noble, I will weave thee such a web,— I will so spoil and trample on thy pride, That thou shalt wish the woman's distaff were Ten thousand lances rather than itself. Ha! waiting still, sir Priest! Well as them seest Our venture hath been somewhat baulk'd,—'tis not Each arrow readies swift and true the ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 19. Issue 539 - 24 Mar 1832 • Various
... vain flourish of my fortune! Why strew'st thou Sugar on that bottled spider, Whose deadly web ensnareth thee about? ...
— The plant-lore & garden-craft of Shakespeare • Henry Nicholson Ellacombe
... herself altogether, and even when at home she spent no small share of the time in flitting about among the branches of the tree. On such occasions, I often saw her hover against the bole or a patch of leaves, or before a piece of caterpillar or spider web, making quick thrusts with her bill, evidently after bits of something to eat. On quitting the nest, she commonly perched upon one or another of a certain set of dead twigs in different parts of the tree, and at once shook out her feathers and spread ...
— The Foot-path Way • Bradford Torrey
... stained glass. It was only when I had reached a neighborhood where the houses were few and the gardens many, a neighborhood where the closely-knitted town began to fringe out into country, that I came to the end of my dream. And what was the dream? The slightest of tissues, madam; a gossamer, a web of shadows, a thing woven out of starlight. Looking at it by day, I find that its colors are pallid, and its threaded diamonds—they were merely the perishable dews of that June night—have evaporated in the sunshine; but such as it is you ...
— A Midnight Fantasy • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... here I expect the reader to doubt, even as I did when first I heard it, no matter how desperate their straits-these gormandisers of unmentionable filth, these starvelings, in their dire extremity will turn away in disgust from duck or any other web-footed water-fowl. ...
— The Arctic Prairies • Ernest Thompson Seton
... her shorn head the wonderful mass of gold he held in his palm. Over her shoulders the gold fell, fine, soft, and shining as her own hair. And the AEsir and the Asyniur, the Gods and the Goddesses, and the Van and Vana, when they saw Sif's head covered again with the shining web, laughed and clapped their hands in gladness. And the shining web held to Sif's head as if indeed it had roots and was ...
— The Children of Odin - The Book of Northern Myths • Padraic Colum
... of the most exalted sentiments on both sides, they parted. She followed him, however, from place to place; and without intruding herself upon his notice, found some consolation in remaining near him. Now she arrived at Naples; and at Naples she died. The web of Shelley's life was a wide one, and included more destinies than his own. Godwin, as we have reason to believe, attributed the suicide of Fanny Imlay to her hopeless love for Shelley; and the tale of Harriet has already been told. Therefore there is nothing absolutely improbable in Medwin's ...
— Percy Bysshe Shelley • John Addington Symonds
... Joseph Sedley, of the East India Company's service, was actually seated tete-a-tete with a young lady, looking at her with a most killing expression; his arms stretched out before her in an imploring attitude, and his hands bound in a web of green ...
— Vanity Fair • William Makepeace Thackeray
... him to his home in Brighton, but there he found Sylvia Custance. She weaved her web to enslave Denis, interesting herself in his career, asking him fairly intelligent questions, and doing her utmost to persuade him that he was the most important person in the world to her. Denis watched her as a scientist observes a ...
— Grey Town - An Australian Story • Gerald Baldwin
... life' cause us the greatest sorrow. Death, acute disease, sudden and great losses—these are sometimes easily borne compared with those intricate difficulties which, without name and without appearance, work themselves into the web of our daily life, and, if not rightly met, corrode and ...
— What Necessity Knows • Lily Dougall
... I can fear, The power of petty creatures here, Who trick dark deeds in gay disguise, And weave their web of brooded lies, With so few threads made smooth and fair, All seems plain sense and reason there; And yet I would not learn their art, Nor have their paltry spells by heart, Their rankling blood within my veins, For all ...
— Vignettes in Verse • Matilda Betham
... already overcrowded. But their most engaging quality is the picture of the writer; with his indomitable self-confidence and courage, his readiness in every pinch of circumstance or change of plan, and his ever fresh enjoyment of the whole web of human experience, nature, adventure, science, toil and rest, society and solitude. It should be borne in mind that the writer of these buoyant pages was, even while he wrote, harassed by responsibility, stinted in sleep and often struggling with the prostration of sea-sickness. To this last ...
— Memoir of Fleeming Jenkin • Robert Louis Stevenson
... are alike distinguished for their partialities to the human race, and their prophetic powers in disclosing the events of futurity. The Naiads differ only in name from the Nixen of Germany and Scandinavia (Nisser), or the water-elves of our countrymen. AElfric and the Nornae, who wove the web of life, and sang the fortunes of the illustrious Helga, are but the same companions who attended Ilithyia at the births of Iamos and Hercules," the venerable ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 1 (of 2) • John Roby
... their names on doors or rock-heads, But leave the task to scribblers and to blockheads; Pert, trifling folks, who, bent on being witty, Scrawl on each post some fag-end of a ditty, Spinning, with spider's web, their shallow brains, O'er wainscots, ...
— Personal Memoirs Of A Residence Of Thirty Years With The Indian Tribes On The American Frontiers • Henry Rowe Schoolcraft
... therefore ask, "What is truth? Can I not make true whatever I will?" Does not the world do so? Anybody can do it by reasoning. Take an utter falsity and bid a clever man confirm it, and he will. Tell him, for instance, to show that man is a beast, or that the soul is like a small spider in its web and governs the body as that does by threads, or tell him that religion is nothing but a restraining bond, and he will prove any one of these propositions until it appears to be truth. What is more easily done? For he does not know what appearance is or what falsity is which in blind ...
— Angelic Wisdom about Divine Providence • Emanuel Swedenborg
... It matters not how sacred the field in which they tread, nor how hallowed the associations which they invade, they press into every spot where it is possible, by spinning another thread, to strengthen their web ...
— Modern Spiritualism • Uriah Smith
... bare fields with its red mantle up to the edge of the wood. There, on a gently sloping ridge, stood some ancient, half ruined stone cairns; and however closely the heather tried to creep to these, there were always rents in its web, through which were visible great, flat rocks, folds in the mountain's own rough skin. Under the biggest of these piles rested an old king, Atle by name. Under the others slumbered those of his warriors who had fallen when the great battle raged on the moor. They had lain there now so long that ...
— Invisible Links • Selma Lagerlof
... texture, The work pulls through, or tears an ugly rent, Or gathers up our woof in meshy tangles. This is a world of worn and fretted ends, Knit in a maze of fearful intricacy, Wherein we see no meaning. Nor can we know The hidden shuttles of Eternity, That weave the endless web of living, loving, And begetting, whereby a filament Of earth takes on the likeness of an angel. The primal burden of our race-existence, Mankind's perpetual perpetuation, Weighs on weak womanhood; we bear the race And all ...
— The Scarlet Stigma - A Drama in Four Acts • James Edgar Smith
... fly who is lured within the spider's web! 'Tis easy fluttering in, but there is no ...
— Tom Tufton's Travels • Evelyn Everett-Green
... price of all that is valuable. All the great strides in the world's achievements were made possible only by forced activity and prolonged effort. Spontaneity is a foreign element in the process of healthy and rugged development. The spider spins its web and the morning bespangles it with dew, creating a thing of beauty, but valueless. It would require the entire existence of several hundred silkworms to produce an equal amount of silk fabric. The mushroom grows up in a night, and dies in the glare of the ...
— A Fleece of Gold - Five Lessons from the Fable of Jason and the Golden Fleece • Charles Stewart Given
... ladies to walk upon a public highway. Any surprise must be natural,—the result of causes at work in the story, or of circumstances which are always occurring and by themselves no surprises. If the story be a tangled web of incidents culminating in some horror, as the death of the beautiful young wife in Hawthorne's "Birthmark," all the events must be told that are necessary to carry the reader from the first time he beholds her beauty until he sees her again, her life ebbing away as the fairy hand ...
— English: Composition and Literature • W. F. (William Franklin) Webster
... porpoises, &c., of course, and by and by large schools of Portuguese men-of-war were added to the regular list of sea wonders. Some of them were white and some of a brilliant carmine color. The nautilus is nothing but a transparent web of jelly that spreads itself to catch the wind, and has fleshy-looking strings a foot or two long dangling from it to keep it steady in the water. It is an accomplished sailor and has good sailor judgment. It reefs its sail when a storm threatens or the wind blows pretty ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain |
