"Grappling" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... cried as soon as he was within earshot, "the pirates are bested, and we can make a safe escape if you will give an order to set loose the grappling irons and lines and bid our men raise sail!" He looked eagerly at Captain Blizzard. "The pirates look pretty tired now, but the Vulture might pursue us if I didn't know a way ...
— Mr. Wicker's Window • Carley Dawson
... for repairs, caused Elizabeth, with her usual parsimony, to order four great vessels to be dismantled; Howard retained them instead, at his own charges. On July 19, 1588, the Armada was sighted off the Lizard, and for eighteen days the naval heroes were grappling with that "invincible" fleet. Elizabeth herself visited the camp at Tilbury, rode through the lines, wearing a corselet and a farthingale of amazing dimensions, while a page bore her helmet, and addressed her soldiers in ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol X • Various
... lawful in all the States. These are not pressing us just now. They are not quite ready yet. The authors of these measures know that we are too strong for them; but they will be upon us in due time, and we will be grappling with them hand to hand, if they are not now headed off. They are not now the chief danger to the purpose of the Republican organization; but the most imminent danger that now threatens that purpose is that insidious Douglas popular sovereignty. This is the miner and ...
— The Papers And Writings Of Abraham Lincoln, Complete - Constitutional Edition • Abraham Lincoln
... the body. The mind remains inactive, in a sort of indolent revery, wandering here and there, without focusing anywhere. Such reading takes the spring and snap out of the mental faculties, weakens the intellect, and makes the brain torpid and incapable of grappling with great principles and ...
— Pushing to the Front • Orison Swett Marden
... much mental discomfort was indicated by the phrase, so she sat looking at him distressfully. Being unused to grappling with grave questions of right and wrong, she found the process difficult. It was like wandering through morasses in which she could neither sink nor swim, till she found herself emerging on solid, familiar ...
— The Side Of The Angels - A Novel • Basil King
... and 'Stoneborough' was the cry. Hastily springing out, shuffling the tickets into the porter's hand, and grappling Leonard's arm as if he feared an escape, Dr. May hurried him into the empty streets, and ...
— The Trial - or, More Links of the Daisy Chain • Charlotte M. Yonge
... I heard a shrill and sudden cry, And, looking up, I saw the antic Puck Grappling with Time, who clutch'd him like a fly, Victim of his own sport,—the jester's luck! He, whilst his fellows grieved, poor wight, had stuck His freakish gauds upon the Ancient's brow, And now his ear, and now his beard, would pluck; Whereas the angry churl ...
— The Poetical Works of Thomas Hood • Thomas Hood
... vivid illustration than his pages afford. The style of Hawthorne is the pure colorless medium of his thought; the plain current of his language is always equable, full and unvarying, whether in the company of playful children, among the ancestral associations of family or history, or in grappling with the mysteries and terrors of the supernatural world. "The Scarlet Letter" is a psychological romance, a study of character in which the human heart is anatomized with striking poetic and dramatic power. "The House of the Seven Gables" is a tale of retribution ...
— Handbook of Universal Literature - From The Best and Latest Authorities • Anne C. Lynch Botta
... his weapon had dropped from his hand, and he reached out blindly, grappling with the air, for Will had turned upon him with the spring of a wild beast and sent the hammer ...
— The Deliverance; A Romance of the Virginia Tobacco Fields • Ellen Glasgow
... in the month, was weeping over the pitilessness of fate, more practical Northerners were grappling with the question of what was to be done about the situation. In their thoughts they anticipated a later statesman and realized that they were confronted by a condition and not by a theory. Secession was at last a reality. ...
— Abraham Lincoln and the Union - A Chronicle of the Embattled North, Volume 29 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Nathaniel W. Stephenson
... order to prevent any such misfortune he despatched the letter by special messenger early in the evening. Gorham had returned late and betook himself to the library immediately after dinner to consider the new business complications with great care before grappling with the situation on the following day. He was still meditating when he was surprised to see Eleanor enter the room, with an expression on her face which at once made him forget his ...
— The Lever - A Novel • William Dana Orcutt
... command of one of the greatest heroes that the war produced,—the intrepid and fearless Andreas Miaulis, who with fire-ships destroyed nearly the whole of the Turkish fleet. He was aided by Constantine Canaris and George Pepinis, equal to him in courage, who succeeded in grappling the ships of the enemy and setting them on fire. The Turks, with the remnant of their magnificent fleet, took refuge in the harbor of Mitylene, while the victors returned in triumph to Ipsara, and became ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume IX • John Lord
... consists of a combination of a buoy with an electric light; when the buoy is thrown into the water the light is lighted automatically. In connection with this invention the life-savers in Paris use a grappling-hook which we illustrate. This has an electric light near the end in the oval space; this light makes it possible to grapple for persons who may have gone down beneath ...
— The Great Round World and What Is Going On In It, Vol. 2, No. 5, February 3, 1898 - A Weekly Magazine for Boys and Girls • Various
... grappling with contemporary life, of rendering the most simple aspects of things and persons visible and palpable, unqualified to explain the complicated wiles of intellects indifferent to the benefits of salvation, this language was nevertheless excellent when it treated of abstract ...
— Against The Grain • Joris-Karl Huysmans
... We were in no trim for receiving broadsides, or grappling with sea-dogs, however merry the ports might be for a man in my plight. Our business was to bring the Misericorde safe into Leith Roads, and to that venture ...
— Sir Ludar - A Story of the Days of the Great Queen Bess • Talbot Baines Reed
... through the body of one of her crew. Barney had no rockets; and, as the combat at long range was telling upon his men, he at once dashed forward into the midst of the enemy. Soon the barges were engaged in desperate hand-to-hand conflicts. The sailors, grappling with their adversary's craft, fought with pistol and cutlass across the gunwales. Barney, in a small barge with twenty men, dashed about, now striking a blow in aid of some overmatched American boat, then cheering on some laggard, or applauding some deed of gallantry that occurred in his sight. ...
— The Naval History of the United States - Volume 2 (of 2) • Willis J. Abbot
... universities of Spain were the beacon of the revival of learning. The Christian teacher was still manipulating the bones of the saints when the Arab physician was practising surgery. The monachal schools and monasteries in Italy, France, and Germany were still grappling with poor scholastic knowledge when Arab scholars were well advanced in the study of Aristotle and Plato. Stimulated by their acquaintance with the works of Ptolemy and Euclid, Galenus and Hippocrates, they extended their researches into the ...
— History Of Egypt From 330 B.C. To The Present Time, Volume 12 (of 12) • S. Rappoport
... Evangeline was as silent as ever. Miss Atherley and I surveyed it after breakfast. It was still grappling with a monkey-nut, but ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 146., January 14, 1914 • Various
... with this addition, that there were great numbers of people on shore, who they were apprehensive would come off to them. The only excuse the officer could allege was, that the tide had hurried him away, and he forgot in his fright that he had a grappling in the boat, with which he might have ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume X • Robert Kerr
... could relate. He was mad with fury of the fight. A mere animal defending life with every means at hand, caring nothing for either wound or hurt so that he won out in the end. Mike was out of it, but the two grappling him fought like wild cats, rough barroom fighters, resorting to any tactics to disable their opponent. Yet it was this that saved him. Crazed as he was, madly as his brain whirled in the fierce struggle, his long training held supreme—he knew how to fight, remembered ...
— The Case and The Girl • Randall Parrish
... hands, and, with the wonderful agility that still characterizes the Oriental swordsmen, springing to their feet and regaining their arms when seemingly overcome, wresting away their enemies' shields, and grappling with them desperately hand ...
— Mosaics of Grecian History • Marcius Willson and Robert Pierpont Willson
... minutes, till both of Pizarro's pages were stretched by his side, when Rada, impatient of the delay, called out, "Why are we so long about it? Down with the tyrant!" and taking one of his companions, Narvaez, in his arms, he thrust him against the marquess. Pizarro, instantly grappling with his opponent, ran him through with his sword. But at that moment he received a wound in the throat, and reeling, he sank on the floor, while the swords of Rada and several of the conspirators were plunged into his body. "Jesu!" exclaimed the dying man, and, ...
— History Of The Conquest Of Peru • William Hickling Prescott
... be hit by (intertores ictibus) the engines. 10-12. in eas (sc. proras) iniecta on their bows was dropped ... 11. tollenone from a swing beam, supported at the centre of gravity by a strong fixed fulcrum. 12-13. cum (ferrea manus) gravique ... ad solum lit. when (the grappling-iron) swung back (recelleret) to the ground by a heavyweight of lead. 'This is incorrect; it was not the grappling-iron, but the other (inland) end of the lever which was brought down to the ground.' ...
— Helps to Latin Translation at Sight • Edmund Luce
... virile men, who have long memory for the careless or casual sharp word. To the end of his days he never suspected that to have been less the lover and more the clear-sighted outspoken friend would have been better for her and for him. He sat into the night smoking pipe after pipe, grappling with a situation which would have presented no difficulties to a coarser nature. At last he went upstairs, listened a moment at Ann's chamber door, and having smoked too much spent a thought-tormented night, out of which he won one conclusion—the ...
— Westways • S. Weir Mitchell
... may perhaps be placed in this class, though, as before remarked, the last act is almost an independent comedy. Had the play ended with the fourth act, no one would have felt that anything was lacking; so that in his fifth act, Ibsen was not so much grappling with an urgent technical problem, as amusing himself by wringing the last drop of humour out of the given situation. A more strictly apposite example may be found in Sir Arthur Pinero's play, His House in Order. Here the action undoubtedly culminates in the great ...
— Play-Making - A Manual of Craftsmanship • William Archer
... Roquemont's ship, swept round her stern, and poured in a raking broadside. While the French sailors were still in a state of confusion from the iron storm that had beaten on their deck, the English vessel rounded to and threw out grappling-irons. Over the side of the French ship leaped Kirke's pikemen and musketeers. There was a short fight on the crowded deck; but after Roquemont had been struck down with a wound in his foot and some of his sailors had been killed, he surrendered to avert further bloodshed. Meanwhile, Lewis and Thomas ...
— The Jesuit Missions: - A Chronicle of the Cross in the Wilderness • Thomas Guthrie Marquis
... remaining in Europe, which somehow I had not the strength of mind to leave for the West Indies, or elsewhere. On the other hand, my adventurous pursuit kept me in contact with the sea where I found occupation, protection, consolation, the mental relief of grappling with concrete problems, the sanity one acquires from close contact with simple mankind, a little self-confidence born from the dealings with the elemental powers of nature. I couldn't give all that up. And besides all this was related to Dona Rita. I had, as it were, received ...
— The Arrow of Gold - a story between two notes • Joseph Conrad
... fill with shouting, and there rained a ghastly dew From the nations' airy navies grappling in the central blue!" ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 4 • Lord Byron
... sufferings of the heroic inhabitants claim our sympathy, we might read with entertainment the singular devices they resorted to in grappling with a terrible foe whose insidious advances were more difficult to oppose than the open assaults of the enemy. For the famine of Sancerre boasts of a historian more copious and minute than Josephus or Livy. In reading the narrative of the famous Jean de Lery[1298]—the ...
— History of the Rise of the Huguenots - Volume 2 • Henry Baird
... but the strength of the wind and the impact of drifted sand resisted his efforts. With a new and feverish strength possessing him he forced it open wide enough to permit his egress when the wind caught him as a feather, rolled him over and over, and then, grappling him again, held him down hard and fast against the drift. Unharmed, but unable to move, he lay there, hearing the multitudinous roar of the storm, but unable to distinguish one familiar sound in the savage medley. At last he managed to crawl flat on his face to the cabin, and ...
— Drift from Two Shores • Bret Harte
... terminus by the company. Although the most anxious care was exercised in every detail, yet, when 1,186 miles had been laid, the cable parted in 11,000 feet of water, and although thrice it was grappled and brought toward the surface, thrice it slipped off the grappling hooks and escaped to the ocean floor. Mr. Field was obliged to return to England and face as best he might the men whose capital lay at the bottom of the sea—perchance as worthless as so much Atlantic ooze. With heroic persistence he argued that all difficulties would yield ...
— Little Masterpieces of Science: - Invention and Discovery • Various
... different interests, present to the members of a legislative body of a republic difficulties little understood by the people at large and requiring for their solution the highest order of ability, self-denial, and love of country. I beg you to take my testimony, coming from another land long engaged in grappling with the same kind of difficulties; I beg you to take my testimony that the troubles of your body in legislating for your country, and those which you are to encounter in the future, are not peculiar to your country, ...
— Latin America and the United States - Addresses by Elihu Root • Elihu Root
... doubt at all, however, as to the strain and stress of the general struggle to live in the valley, the sheer wear and tear of temper and spirits involved in the daily grappling with that problem. Everywhere one comes across symptoms of it—partial evidences—but the most complete exposition that I have had was given, some years ago now, by a woman who had no intention of complaining. She came to me with a message from a neighbour who was ill, but, in ...
— Change in the Village • (AKA George Bourne) George Sturt
... When you come to think of it, he must lead a pleasant kind of life. Sails through the air without the trouble of flying. Free pass everywhere that the bee goes. No fear of being dislodged; look at those six grappling-hooks. Helps himself to such juices of the bee as he likes best; the bee feeds on the choicest vegetable nectars, and he feeds on the bee. Lives either in the air or in the perfumed pavilion of ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... concerned, of this early triumph. Let us turn now from comedy to those plays which deal with the sterner side of life. Here the development in technical skill is similar, but much slower, requiring nearly a lifetime before it reaches perfection, for the poet is grappling with a problem so difficult that it taxed all the resources ...
— An Introduction to Shakespeare • H. N. MacCracken
... beams, and pierced to north and south by open windows, from whose parapets I saw the village and the valley spread beneath. The fierce wind hurried through it, charged with snow, and its narrow space was thronged with men. Men on the platform, men on the window-sills, men grappling the bells with iron arms, men brushing by to reach the stairs, crossing, recrossing, shouldering their mates, drinking red wine from gigantic beakers, exploding crackers, firing squibs, shouting and yelling in corybantic chorus. They yelled and shouted, one could see ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... capital of $3,000,000, and made a third cable. The Great Eastern sailed with this in June, 1866, and successfully accomplished the feat. To make the triumph more complete, the vessel sailed back to the very spot where the cable of 1865 had parted, and, dropping grappling-irons, caught the lost cable, brought it to the surface, and, splicing it, laid the remaining portion. The two cables were found to work admirably. A despatch has been sent across the ocean by a ...
— A Brief History of the United States • Barnes & Co.
... into the marshes with water two feet deep and dashed on the fortified lines of the enemy. The Southerners crept through the dense underbrush to the very muzzles of the guns in the redoubts, charged, cleared them, grappling hand to hand with the desperate men who ...
— The Victim - A romance of the Real Jefferson Davis • Thomas Dixon
... being drove out o' the army, v'ich vould ha' been a great vaste of good material, as ye might say, seeing as there's so much of 'im. It vas a dark night, the night I found 'im, vith vind and rain, and there vos me and 'im a-grappling on the edge of a vharf—leastvays I vere a-holding onto 'is leg, d'ye see—ah, and a mortal 'ard struggle it vere too, and in the end I didn't save 'im ...
— The Amateur Gentleman • Jeffery Farnol et al
... the trap was sprung, with the pit yawning beneath it. Struggling, striking, grappling with his assailants, Locke managed to hurl three of them to their deaths ...
— The Master Mystery • Arthur B. Reeve and John W. Grey
... elaborate inquiries and long meditation, is that the grant of the ballot to women marks the concealed but none the less real beginning of an improvement in our politics, and, in the end, in our whole theory of government. As things stand, an intelligent grappling with some of the capital problems of the commonwealth is almost impossible. A politician normally prospers under democracy, not in proportion as his principles are sound and his honour incorruptible, but in proportion a she excels in the manufacture ...
— In Defense of Women • H. L. Mencken
... awakening consciousness has become alive to its lofty possibilities, who is beginning to shake off the darkness of ignorance in which the world is enveloped, rises before the stars have ceased their vigil, and, grappling with the darkness within his soul, strives, by holy aspiration, to perceive the light of Truth while the unawakened world ...
— The Way of Peace • James Allen
... with whom he had exchanged only about a dozen words that term, much less Dunstable, whom he merely knew by sight. Yet here they were, behaving like honoured guests. It was plain that there was a misunderstanding somewhere, but he shrank from grappling with it. He did not want to hurt their feelings. It would be awkward enough if they discovered their ...
— The White Feather • P. G. Wodehouse
... the indisputable values of mortal life. He lay back on his bed, exhausted by the fight, foolishly exhausted because, he told himself, there hadn't been any real Anne. Only her mind, as he had known it, and his own mind had been grappling, like two sides of an argument. But while he tried to dull himself with this denial of the possibilities beyond our sense, he knew underneath that there had been Anne. And she had gone. ...
— Old Crow • Alice Brown
... time to have a story read to them before going to bed. They had taken the precaution to learn one lesson immediately after dinner, before going out, cutting their out-door play down by half an hour. The two elder were learning a long spelling-lesson; the third was grappling with geographical definitions of capes, promontories, and so forth; and the youngest was at work on his primer. In spite of all their efforts, bed-time came before the lessons were learned. The little ...
— Bits About Home Matters • Helen Hunt Jackson
... Just in time, she writhed around and outward, but not quite far enough, for one paw was caught and ground to a pulp. But at the next instant, thrust back from the rock by his own effort, the bear toppled outward over the brink of the shelf. Grappling madly to save himself, he caught only the bowed loins of the puma, who now sank her teeth once more into his throat, while her rending claws seemed to tear him everywhere at once. He crushed her in his grip; and in a dreadful ball ...
— Kings in Exile • Sir Charles George Douglas Roberts
... died on Undine's lips. She found herself grappling with a new social riddle, and such surprises were always stimulating. The name of the untidy-looking young woman she had been about to repel was one of the most eminent in the impregnable quarter beyond the ...
— The Custom of the Country • Edith Wharton
... the universal topics of the early sixties was the feats of the acrobat Blondin. This daring rope-walker crossed the waters by Niagara Falls on a slack wire. On one occasion he carried a man on his back, to whom he imparted the caution, "grappling as with hooks ...
— The Lincoln Story Book • Henry L. Williams
... fine virginal spontaneity of his native style, never weakened in the vigour of his thought or in the primitiveness of his expression. His contact with the East compassed the liberation of that vast fund of stored—up early experiences, acquired through grappling with life in many a ...
— Mark Twain • Archibald Henderson
... Hal, grappling with two of the enemy, was giving a good account of himself; but Chester, weak from the loss of blood, was unable to hold his own. A blow from the butt of one of the Austrian's revolvers and he ...
— The Boy Allies with the Cossacks - Or, A Wild Dash over the Carpathians • Clair W. Hayes
... Something in her figure affected him as it had that night when she stood in the doorway—some heroic endurance, some fighting courage that held it erect, and yet it was touched by a yearning as restless and unsatisfied as the desert wind. Bob knew her father was incapable of grappling alone with the problems of life. This project had all been hers; it was her will, her brain, her courage that had wrought the change on the face of this spot of desert. Yet how softly girlish as she sat there in the moonlight; ...
— The Desert Fiddler • William H. Hamby
... seen twice.' Instantly I dived to the bottom of the dock, but could not see him. I swam to and fro for some time, and at last saw him under the vessel; he seemed quite dead, but I seized him and brought him up. They were busy with the grappling irons, but as he was under the vessel, the probability is he would never have been got out of the water alive. I went home and got some dry clothes on, and when I returned and inquired how he was, I was told he rapidly recovered. ...
— The Hero of the Humber - or the History of the Late Mr. John Ellerthorpe • Henry Woodcock
... grappling at each other's throats. As if surf made sport of them on the shelving sands they rolled, one upper-most now, the other then. And they fought and rolled until Morgan felt something hard under his oppressed back, and groped for ...
— Trail's End • George W. Ogden
... he had kept his eyes and ears opened and he was convinced that trouble was unavoidable. As his father continued to set forth his plans, his admiration for him grew. He brought to bear upon the problems with which he was grappling a clear head, wide knowledge and steady courage. He was a general, planning a campaign in the face of serious odds. He recalled a saying of his old Commander-in-Chief in France: "War is a business and will be won ...
— To Him That Hath - A Novel Of The West Of Today • Ralph Connor
... street, and sent him rolling in the mud; this was followed by a quick succession of staggering facers, administered right and left on the eyes and noses of the subordinates. These, however, though bruised and bleeding, succeeded at last in grappling their man, and all came to the ground together, and there struggled furiously; every window in the street was open by this time, and at one the white hair and reverend face of Michael Penfold looked out ...
— Foul Play • Charles Reade
... committed some depredations, a French fleet of thirty-nine sail issued from Brest, under the command of Primauget, and began an engagement with the English. Fire seized the ship of Primauget; who, finding his destruction inevitable, bore down upon the vessel of the English admiral, and grappling with her, resolved to make her share his fate. Both fleets stood some time in suspense, as spectators of this dreadful engagement; and all men saw with horror the flames which consumed both vessels, and heard the cries of fury and despair which came ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part C. - From Henry VII. to Mary • David Hume
... disgusting to them; all that is said on these subjects they look upon as fabulous and incredible; they call in question the most undeniable evidence, or attribute these wonders to natural and unknown causes. The wonders which are recorded in the Life of St, Francis, afford an opportunity of grappling with these prejudices. ...
— The Life and Legends of Saint Francis of Assisi • Father Candide Chalippe
... time had been lost in repairing the injury done him. When they camped on the second night, it was certain that this would be achieved, and Gerrard went to bed in good spirits after making the round of his outposts. The next day would see, he hoped, a grave difficulty settled by prompt grappling with it, and would bring him the breezy company of Charteris, and possibly the promise of good sport. His sleep was dreamless until an overmastering impression that tidings of disaster were arriving hotfoot awoke him. The sound of distant ...
— The Path to Honour • Sydney C. Grier
... note that, at the very time when the Congress at Philadelphia was busy with its stern work, the people of Virginia were grappling with the peril of an Indian war assailing them from beyond their western mountains. There has recently been brought to light a letter written at Hanover, on the 15th of October, 1774, by the aged mother of Patrick Henry, to a friend living far out towards the exposed ...
— Patrick Henry • Moses Coit Tyler
... sometimes one way, and sometimes another; but all his exercises have a tendency in them more or less to spoil him; if he deals with them hand to hand; therefore he is rather for flying than standing; for flying to Christ, than for grappling with them in and by ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... enthusiastic student of history. Possibly he recognised an affinity between the vaguely outlined dreams of Pauline's lover and those of the historic Paracelsus; and he may well have thought that the task of grappling with definite historic material would steady the young poet's hand. We could applaud the acuteness of the suggestion with more confidence had not the Count had an unlucky afterthought, which he regarded as fatal, to the effect ...
— Robert Browning • C. H. Herford
... autumn, and may be seen for hours together gambolling and chasing each other upon the very smallest ledges of rock, where it would seem almost impossible to maintain a foothold. There are sometimes bitter fights, too, between the male chamois, terrible contests for leadership. Grappling each other with their horns, they battle until the superiority of ...
— Harper's Young People, March 23, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... albeit the most profound, of the many issues that arise from the desire to obtain some conviction of the inner and essential character of life. Though so intimately connected with practical concerns, these issues are primarily the business of thought. In grappling with them, thought is called upon for its greatest comprehensiveness, penetration, and self-consistency. By the necessity of concentration, thought is sometimes led to forget its origin and the source of its problems. But in naming itself philosophy, thought has only recognized ...
— The Approach to Philosophy • Ralph Barton Perry
... posterior to full view, stretching himself face downward on the earth, and burying his head, with the grappling pole, in the well. ...
— Vesty of the Basins • Sarah P. McLean Greene
... alter our original insistence that in our realm as preachers, unlike the scientist's realm of the theologians, thought is the handmaid, not the mistress. Our great plea, then, for doctrinal preaching is that by intellectual grappling with the final and speculative problems of religion we do not supersede but feed the emotional life and do not diminish but focus and steady it. It is that you and I may have reserves of feeling—indispensable to great preaching—sincerity and intensity of emotion, that disciplined imagination ...
— Preaching and Paganism • Albert Parker Fitch
... a few days later, while he was grappling at the treasury with a file of papers on the mysteries of superannuation, Mr. Gladstone was again summoned by the prime minister, and again (Jan. 26) he writes to ...
— The Life of William Ewart Gladstone, Vol. 1 (of 3) - 1809-1859 • John Morley
... body he was never healed; died of them gradually, with clear-eyed resignation; of his wounded pride, we knew only from his silence. He returned to that city where he had lorded it in his ambitious youth; lived there alone, seeing few; striving to retrieve the irretrievable; at times still grappling with that mortal frailty that had brought him down; still joying in his friend's successes; his laugh still ready but with kindlier music; and over all his thoughts the shadow of that unalterable law which he had disavowed and which had brought him low. ...
— Memories and Portraits • Robert Louis Stevenson
... the captain, with that puzzled expression of countenance which was wont to indicate that his mind was grappling difficulties. ...
— The Crew of the Water Wagtail • R.M. Ballantyne
... Verrier said to herself—not altogether shrewdly—that he had no nerves, or no heart; and Daphne had not yet come across the genus. Her lovers had either possessed too much heart—like Captain Boyson—or a lack of coolness, when it really came to the point of grappling with Daphne and her millions, as in the case of a dozen she could name. Whereby it had come about that Daphne's attention had been first provoked, then peremptorily seized by the Englishman; and Mrs. Verrier began now to suspect that deeper things ...
— Marriage a la mode • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... and on: big, Southern-bred steer grappling the problem of his first Northern winter; thin-flanked cow with shivering, rough-coated calf trailing at her heels; humpbacked yearling with little nubs of horns telling that he was lately in his calfhood; red cattle, spotted cattle, white cattle, black cattle; white-faced ...
— The Lure of the Dim Trails • by (AKA B. M. Sinclair) B. M. Bower
... plank-bed, the guard being instructed to visit him periodically, lest he should smother. He was scarcely half an hour there—this was in the early evening—when the most unmerciful screaming brought all hands to the lock-up, to find the erstwhile helpless man standing on the plank-bed, and grappling with a, to us, invisible foe. We took him out, and he maintained that a man had tried to choke him, and was still there when we came to his relief. The strange thing was, that he was shivering with fright, and perfectly sober, though in the ordinary course of events he would not be in that condition ...
— True Irish Ghost Stories • St John D Seymour
... into the room. He was grappling with the hardest task he had ever had to tackle. West ...
— The Swindler and Other Stories • Ethel M. Dell
... It is ungrateful to great men, I grant; but it has the irritation of its own vague sense that it is but their tool, their ladder, their grappling-iron, to excuse it. Still—I know well what you mean; the man who works for mankind works for a taskmaster who makes bitter every hour of his life only to forget him with the instant of his death; he is ever rolling the stone of human ...
— Wisdom, Wit, and Pathos of Ouida - Selected from the Works of Ouida • Ouida
... this strange encounter lasted. I felt myself grappling with the tawny monsters, and hurling them over the cliff. Now they sprang at my throat, and I threw out my arms, thrusting them fearlessly between the shining rows of teeth. Then I was free again, and, seizing ...
— The Rifle Rangers • Captain Mayne Reid
... under the larboard bow of the Serpent, and Wolf the Red had thrown out grappling hooks, holding her there. She was a longship, of twenty banks of oars, and her crew were the pick of all the warmen of Denmark. Sharp and fierce was the fight at this side, and great was the carnage. While Kolbiorn and others of Olaf's stem defenders kept up an incessant ...
— Olaf the Glorious - A Story of the Viking Age • Robert Leighton
... correct solution of which will demand all the strength and agility of his mind, be helped or hindered by their use? These are questions which are asked every day, and especially by the young, who seek in vain for an adequate reply. The student grappling with the early difficulties of science and literature, wishes to know whether he will be wiser to use or to abstain ...
— Study and Stimulants • A. Arthur Reade
... houses were built in accordance with the requirements of modern sanitary ideas, there would be but little difficulty in grappling with the problem of bedroom ventilation, for the sleeping apartment would be a well ventilated room, with all the latest contrivances, such as Tobin's ventilators, for the admission of fresh air. But as the greater number of people have to live in rented dwellings ...
— The Art of Living in Australia • Philip E. Muskett (?-1909)
... be found in the next case (90) where Hercules is strangling the Nemean lion; and another Silenus kneeling on a wine-skin. Cupid is seizing the weapons of the strong Hercules while the latter sleeps; in the next case (91), here also he is grappling with the Maenalian stag, and Pan shows his goat's legs. The 92nd, 93rd and 94th cases are filled with various mirrors from Athens; the anciently prized knuckle bones of a small animal; bronze earrings from a tomb in Cephalonia; sling bullets found at Saguntum; part of a ...
— How to See the British Museum in Four Visits • W. Blanchard Jerrold
... a little space, Stood the great preacher; then he spake as one Who, suddenly grappling with a haunting thought Which long has followed, whispering through the dark Strange terrors, drags it, shrieking, into light "What if God's will consign thee ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... up; the Dragon sings And beats upon the dark with furious wings; And, stung to rage by his own darting fires, Reaches with grappling coils from town to town; He lusts to break the loveliness of spires, And hurls their martyred music ...
— Georgian Poetry 1916-17 • Various
... has been in the past among private interests, and to centralize industry. Wehle thinks that in America, even before the war, industrial concentration was leading to political concentration and that the states were losing their relative political importance. The grappling of states individually with large industrial problems is now, he says, at an end. Dillon has expressed the view that England ought to adopt industrial compulsion. Clementel, the French minister of commerce, thinks France ought to substitute for liberty without ...
— The Psychology of Nations - A Contribution to the Philosophy of History • G.E. Partridge
... or a year may have passed between this and the continuation. Whatever the period, a clarity arrived. Mallare's mind grappling with the nightmare shadows engulfing it, distorted his reason to give them outline and was saved. The writing, however, becomes more labored in appearance as if the letters of words were now decorations ...
— Fantazius Mallare - A Mysterious Oath • Ben Hecht
... you!' he said gratefully. 'Good evening! We're stopping here for a bit' He pointed to the open door of the lodging-house, where Mrs. Weston and the boy were grappling with the luggage. ...
— Missing • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... strength, it was Luke's chief endeavor to keep his lower limbs disengaged, and to trust more to skill than force for ultimate success. To prevent this was Hugh's grand object. Guarding himself against every feint, he ultimately succeeded in firmly grappling his agile assailant. Luke's spine was almost broken by the shock, when he suddenly gave way; and, without losing his balance, drew his adversary forward, kicking his right leg from under him. With a crash like that of an uprooted oak, ...
— Rookwood • William Harrison Ainsworth
... the eastern sky gave promise of the near approach of day. The time had been selected to enable the boat to near the shore without great danger of detection in the dim light. But by the time they should succeed in grappling the cable there would be sufficient light to enable them to ...
— A Prisoner of Morro - In the Hands of the Enemy • Upton Sinclair
... of the essential facts before him, and was thus enabled to strike out a course which he could consistently pursue amid all difficulties, because it was in harmony with the actual facts and the permanent conditions of the problem he had to solve." Here we have the secret of his success in grappling with the serious and complicated questions which constantly engaged his attention in the administration ...
— Lord Elgin • John George Bourinot
... steered for those islands which we supposed were called the Prince of Wales's Islands; and about two o'clock in the morning, came to an anchor with a grappling, along side of an island, which we called Laforey's Island. As the night was very dark, and this was the last land that could afford us relief, all hands went to sleep, ...
— Voyage of H.M.S. Pandora - Despatched to Arrest the Mutineers of the 'Bounty' in the - South Seas, 1790-1791 • Edward Edwards
... gain over, by cash and promises, a sergeant and two privates, who agreed that, when on duty as sentinels on the walls over the precipice to the north, they would draw up rope-ladders, and fasten them by grappling-irons at their top to the battlements of the castle. This done, it would be easy for an armed party to scale the walls and make themselves masters of the stronghold. Arthur's plan did not end with the mere capture of the ...
— Historical Tales, Vol. 4 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris
... coming to Sicily he learned the fact that the ships of the Carthaginians were inferior to his own in stoutness and size, but excelled in the quickness of their rowing and variety of movement. Therefore he fitted out his triremes with mechanical devices,—anchors and grappling irons with long spikes and other such things,—in order that by laying hold of the hostile ships with these they might pin them fast to their own vessels; then by crossing over into them they might have a hand to hand conflict ...
— Dio's Rome, Volume 1 (of 6) • Cassius Dio
... permitting the mind to abstract itself from the sermon, or wrestle at leisure with the difficulties presented by the preacher, as General Ople often did, feeling not a little in love with his sincere attentiveness for grappling with the knotty point and partially allowing the struggle to ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... an angle of about forty-five degrees dead ahead of us, with the evident intention of combing us with grappling hooks from above as it ...
— The Gods of Mars • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... beach about six o'clock, and before we went from the boat, I made signs to the natives to retire to some distance: They immediately complied, and I then landed with the Captain of the Swallow, and several of the officers: The marines were drawn up, and the boats were brought to a grappling near the shore. I then made signs to the natives to come near, and directed them to sit down in a semicircle, which they did with great order and cheerfulness. When this was done, I distributed among them several knives, scissars, buttons, beads, combs, ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 12 • Robert Kerr
... prahus coming down stream were thus effectually disposed of; but the two coming up were now close at hand, and before another gun could be brought to bear their bows struck the sides of the steamer, grappling-irons were thrown over the bulwarks and into the chains, and yelling savagely their crews of fierce fighting men came ...
— Middy and Ensign • G. Manville Fenn
... on the next tack to windward, I bent a piece of line to a small grappling hook I had seen lying in the bail-hole. The end of the line I made fast to the ring-bolt in the bow, and with the hook out of sight I waited for the next opportunity to use it. Once more they made their leeward pull ...
— Tales of the Fish Patrol • Jack London
... Daddy Skinner lay grappling with death, Ebenezer Waldstricker sat in his handsome drawing room with an open Bible on his knee, talking ...
— The Secret of the Storm Country • Grace Miller White
... had bolder and firmer champions. Under cover of the panic of 1857, which drew men's minds away from politics, a group of them were already planning a most daring last attempt to bring Kansas into the Union as a slave State. In the grappling there, freedom had shown itself stronger than slavery. Robert J. Walker, a slaveholder, whom Buchanan and Douglas had persuaded to accept the governorship, reported that the Free-Soilers outnumbered their adversaries three to one. The legislature had provided for the ...
— Stephen Arnold Douglas • William Garrott Brown
... seemed to separate the hostile sides, but this attempt did not succeed. When about ten feet into the turmoil, I could neither advance nor retreat. Right in my front, a comparatively large normal was grappling with a middle about sixteen ...
— Botchan (Master Darling) • Mr. Kin-nosuke Natsume, trans. by Yasotaro Morri
... difficult to secure a bridge against attacks of this character unless there is time for placing a stockade above it. Boats may be anchored, provided with ropes and grappling-hooks to catch floating bodies and with ...
— The Art of War • Baron Henri de Jomini
... and the very next instant was screaming for help, flat on his back among a swarm of Indian boys. All in a second the little savage had flashed out of his blanket like lightning from a black cloud, and, grappling, had hurled McPhail junior to earth. The agent made a furious lunge to the rescue of his first-born, and the squaws and young girls scattered shrieking at his charge. Startled and excited, the horses of Cranston's ...
— Under Fire • Charles King
... iron; ratchet, detent, larigo[obs3], pawl; terret[obs3], treenail, screw, button, buckle; clasp, hasp, hinge, hank, catch, latch, bolt, latchet[obs3], tag; tooth; hook, hook and eye; lock, holdfast[obs3], padlock, rivet; anchor, grappling iron, trennel[obs3], stake, post. cement, glue, gum, paste, size, wafer, solder, lute, putty, birdlime, mortar, stucco, plaster, grout; viscum[obs3]. shackle, rein &c. (means of restraint) 752; prop &c. (support) 215. V. bridge ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... his own country with distrust. It must be some sort of a play affair. He had long despaired of witnessing a Greeklike struggle. Such would be no more, he had said. Men were better, or more timid. Secular and religious education had effaced the throat-grappling instinct, or else firm finance held ...
— The Red Badge of Courage - An Episode of the American Civil War • Stephen Crane
... He stood grappling with the new idea. In the search an old one came to the top. His face changed rapidly. The furtive, hunted look returned. In a tone, the odd quiet of which contrasted with the former heat, he spoke again. "Yer for me, now, ain't yer, Jim? If—if ...
— The Mascot of Sweet Briar Gulch • Henry Wallace Phillips
... through them swept the mighty pair, now Whitefire flashed, and now the great axe fell, and at every stroke a man lay dead or wounded. Six of the boarders turned to fly, but just then the grappling-iron broke and their ship drifted out with the tide towards the open sea, and presently no man of that ...
— Eric Brighteyes • H. Rider Haggard
... caused to germinate in this abandoned field. And the same elsewhere. Germany, with its genius, so pliant, so broad, so prompt in transformations, so fitted for the reproduction of the remotest and strangest states of human thought; England, with its matter-of-fact mind, so suited to the grappling with moral problems, to making them clear by figures, weights, and measures, by geography and statistics, by texts and common sense; France, at length, with its Parisian culture and drawing-room habits, with its unceasing analysis of characters and of works, ...
— Prefaces and Prologues to Famous Books - with Introductions, Notes and Illustrations • Charles W. Eliot
... fleet was the smaller; but as he had the weather gage he succeeded in smashing up the French rear before the rest could help it. As each English vessel ranged alongside it threw grappling irons into the enemy, who were thus held fast. The English archers hailed a storm of well aimed arrows on the French decks, which were densely crowded by the soldiers Eustace was taking over to conquer England. Then the English boarded, blinding the nearest French with lime, cutting their rigging ...
— Flag and Fleet - How the British Navy Won the Freedom of the Seas • William Wood
... from lip to lip that motor-boats were on the way down from the city, with police officers and grappling-hooks and men experienced in the gruesome business of "dragging." The boss of the railway construction gang at Hawkins, where the new bridge was being built, had started for Windomville with a quantity of dynamite to be exploded on the bottom of the river in the hope and expectation ...
— Quill's Window • George Barr McCutcheon
... the perennial youth of the vegetable world; each individual plant, so frail and perishable, while the species is eternal in the existing economy of nature. Imperceptible forests of timber scarcely tinge their inert masses of gneiss and granite, into which they anchor their roots; grappling with substances which, when struck with steel, tear up the tempered grain, and dash out the spark." This may be an enthusiastic, but is doubtless the faithful, impression of our tourist; and in descriptions of sublime nature, ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 14, - Issue 403, December 5, 1829 • Various
... the caique lost to sight among the shipping than the strange craft we had previously observed suddenly ran up to the yacht and made fast to her with grappling-irons. Before Monte-Cristo's men could recover from their surprise at this manoeuvre they were made prisoners and securely bound by twenty Turkish buccaneers, who had leaped over the bulwarks of the Alcyon, ...
— The Son of Monte Cristo • Jules Lermina
... at the coach-office utterly [Greek: analphabetos], unacquainted with the first rudiments of the given language, he had made his parting bows to his coach brethren (secretly returning thanks to them for their stupidity), in a condition for grappling with any common book in that dialect. One of the polyglot Old or New Testaments published by Bagster, would be a perfect Encyclopaedia, or Panorganon, for such a scheme of coach discipline, upon dull roads and in dull company. As respects the German language in particular, I shall give one ...
— The Uncollected Writings of Thomas de Quincey—Vol. 1 - With a Preface and Annotations by James Hogg • Thomas de Quincey
... was furnished on both sides with parapets, and had space for two men in front. When the enemy's vessel was sailing up to strike the Roman one, or was lying alongside of it after the thrust had been evaded, the bridge on deck was suddenly lowered and fastened to its opponent by means of a grappling- iron: this not only prevented the running down, but enabled the Roman marines to pass along the bridge to the enemy's deck and to carry it by assault as in a conflict on land. No distinct body of marines was formed, but land troops ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... weakest part. There were twice as many as the English; but they were for the most part nine and six pounders, and with but fifty rounds to each. The Spaniards had done their sea fighting hitherto at close range, grappling and trusting to musketry. They were to receive a lesson about this before the summer was over. But Philip himself meanwhile expected evidently that he would meet with no opposition. Of priests he had provided 180; of surgeons and surgeons' assistants eighty-five ...
— English Seamen in the Sixteenth Century - Lectures Delivered at Oxford Easter Terms 1893-4 • James Anthony Froude
... loveful households in Dublin city and urban district of scenes truly rural of happiness of the better land with Dockrell's wallpaper at one and ninepence a dozen, innocent Britishborn bairns lisping prayers to the Sacred Infant, youthful scholars grappling with their pensums or model young ladies playing on the pianoforte or anon all with fervour reciting the family rosary round the crackling Yulelog while in the boreens and green lanes the colleens with their swains strolled what times the strains ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce
... background of your mind all the time you are writing. It will be always intruding and pushing in its face, and you will be able to give only half your mind to your subject. But frankly and naturally use the I, and the remembrance of yourself vanishes. You are grappling with the subject; you are thinking of it, and of nothing else. You use the readiest and most unaffected mode of speech to set out your thoughts of it. You have written I a dozen times, but you have not thought of ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 7, No. 44, June, 1861 • Various
... is, That the Christian is a man under continual exercises, sometimes one way, and sometimes another; but all his exercises have a tendency in them more or less to spoil him; therefore he is rather for flying to Christ than for grappling with them in and ...
— The Pharisee And The Publican • John Bunyan
... with a series of pen-and-ink drawings, in which Katy was depicted as prone in her berth, refusing with horror to go to dinner, looking longingly backward toward the quarter where the United States was supposed to be, and fishing out of her port-hole with a crooked pin in hopes of grappling the submarine cable and sending a message to her family to come out at once and take her home. It ended with this short "poem," over which Katy laughed till Mrs. Ashe called feebly across the entry to ask what ...
— What Katy Did Next • Susan Coolidge
... room full of smoke; but the pistol was smoking in my poor, mad Patrick's hand; and I saw him fire the last murderous volley with my own eyes. Then he leapt on my father, who was clinging in terror to the window-sill, and, grappling, tried to strangle him with the rope, which he threw over his head, but which slipped over his struggling shoulders to his feet. Then it tightened round one leg and Patrick dragged him along like a maniac. I snatched a knife from the mat, and, rushing between them, managed ...
— The Innocence of Father Brown • G. K. Chesterton
... volumes of my own Gleanings with me,—not so much for their intrinsic merits, as because perhaps they might form a new kind of literature for native African potentates. HOMER, too, of course. At my time of life, however, I must be excused from grappling with any new Continents, dark or otherwise. I find that Ireland is quite dark enough for me just now. Excuse ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 100, May 2, 1891 • Various
... emerges into full summer. The release from any struggle leaves the mind with a new receptivity. It was not that I wanted her to get Mill or Burke, but that the mental exercise which comes from grappling with these slaves of logic, or masters, as you like, is a development of tissue, upon which the dreams, playing forth again from within, find a ...
— Child and Country - A Book of the Younger Generation • Will Levington Comfort
... as the people were again stirring below, the guide-rope was hauled into the balloon, and the grappling-iron lowered; and after sundry difficulties from the danger of getting entangled in a wood, and grievously affrighting two ladies, who stood awhile petrified with amazement at the unusual apparition, the voyagers succeeded in alighting in a grassy valley, about six miles from the town of Weilburg, ...
— Thrilling Stories Of The Ocean • Marmaduke Park
... in those where rages the lurid conflagration of Anger; feel how thy own so quiet Soul is straightway involuntarily kindled with the like, and ye blaze and reverberate on each other, till it is all one limitless confluent flame (of embracing Love, or of deadly-grappling Hate); and then say what miraculous virtue goes out of man into man. But if so, through all the thick-plied hulls of our Earthly Life; how much more when it is of the Divine Life we speak, and inmost ME is, as it were, brought into ...
— Sartor Resartus, and On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History • Thomas Carlyle
... gaining on them. Ho, ho! bend to your oars, my hearties! grappling-chains ready there! ho! ...
— The Merryweathers • Laura E. Richards
... However, I won't try you as highly as that. I will just ask you a plain, honest question. And I rely on you to answer me truthfully. . . . Do you think I should be a more attractive being; do you think I should be more capable of grappling with those great problems which—ah—surround us on all sides, if I could dissect rats—or even mice?" he added ...
— Mufti • H. C. (Herman Cyril) McNeile
... extraordinary schoolboy; but it is used with the skill and address of most able, artful, and experienced men; it is beaten out to the very thinnest leaf, and is disposed in such a way as to seem ten times larger than it is. The dexterity with which the confederates avoid grappling with those parts of the subject with which they know themselves to be incompetent to deal is quite wonderful. Now and then, indeed, they commit disgraceful blunders, for which old Busby, under whom they had studied, would have whipped them all round. ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 1 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... each with a grappling hook on the end. These caught on the yacht's rail. Three or four sailormen, one after the other, climbed the grappling lines. Two rope ladders were swiftly rigged over the side, by the Americans on the yacht's deck. Dave Darrin was ...
— Dave Darrin on Mediterranean Service - or, With Dan Dalzell on European Duty • H. Irving Hancock
... about three miles, and reached the edge of the ice, which extended far out from the promontory. Here we landed, and secured the boat by means of a small grappling-iron, which we thrust into the ice. We then walked toward the promontory for about a mile, and here we found a multitude of seals. These animals were so fearless that they made not the slightest movement as we came up, but stared at us in an indifferent way. We killed two or three, and then ...
— A Strange Manuscript Found in a Copper Cylinder • James De Mille
... Catamaran was within reach of his boat-hook, and, leaning forwards with the long shaft extended, he struck its grappling-iron into ...
— The Ocean Waifs - A Story of Adventure on Land and Sea • Mayne Reid
... a rapture. "In every way—and always—as long as you live? Do you mean it?" He had caught her hand to his breast and was grappling it tight there ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... the carrying out of the undertaking. As the Advertiser's idea is to start from some convenient Gas-Works in the Midland Counties, and keep a steady northward course by holding on, before the wind, with a line and grappling-hook to the system of telegraphic wires running alongside one of the great central railways, and as he proposes merely stopping occasionally en route to unroof the house of some local medical man when any of the party ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 93, August 13, 1887 • Various
... fiction permit themselves a license of structure which cannot but be enfeebling to the artists themselves. Few of the novelists have ever gone about a whole winter with a knot in their foreheads, such as Hawthorne carried there while he was thinking out the 'Scarlet Letter.' And only by strenuous grappling with his obstacles was he able to attain the masterly simplicity of that Puritan tragedy. A resolute wrestling with difficulty is good not only for the muscles but also for the soul; and it may be because they know this, that artists ...
— Inquiries and Opinions • Brander Matthews
... there by some student boarder. What could Livy do for a child of eight years, with no previous knowledge of Latin, and no lexicon to interpret between them? For most children, nothing. Not one in a thousand would have dreamed of seriously grappling with such a mystery. But the brave Patavinian took pity on our little one and yielded something to childish importunity. The quaint old copy was garnished, according to a fashion of the time, with rude wood-cuts, having explanatory legends underneath. The young ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II, No. 8, June 1858 • Various
... colorless statement of the Constitution that there should be one supreme court and such inferior courts as Congress should ordain and establish. On the day following its organization, while the House was grappling with the question of revenue, the Senate appointed a committee to bring in a bill to establish the federal courts. The chairman of this committee was Oliver Ellsworth, of Connecticut, who had sat on the bench of the Court of Appeals under ...
— Union and Democracy • Allen Johnson
... do. " ploughshares. do. " wheelbarrows. do. " pitchforks. do. " posts. do. " beams. do. " bolts. do. " bars. do. " hinges. do. " pokers. do. " saucepans. do. " mallets. do. " hammers. do. " saws. do. " chisels. do. " ropes. do. " chains. do. " grappling irons. together with a miscellaneous collection of articles snatched up at a moment's warning by an excited multitude, men, women, and children, headed by Frank, who wielded triumphantly an old fowling-piece, loaded ...
— Among the Brigands • James de Mille
... we are indebted for the illumination of one or two poems relinquished by the critics as hopelessly, if not intentionally, obscure. Ulalume, for example, held by some to be a mere experiment on the jingling capacity of words and the taste of readers for grappling with insoluble puzzles, is pronounced by one familiar with his most intimate feelings at the time of its composition a sublimated but distinct reflex of them and of the circumstances which ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, October, 1877, Vol. XX. No. 118 • Various
... but for my appointment to India, I should have been a luminary of the faith and a pillar of the church! grappling with the ghostly enemy in the pulpit, and giving out the psawm. Eh, sir, what a loss Scottish Divinity has had in James Binnie!" cries the little civilian with his most comical face. "But that is not the question. My opinion, Colonel, is, that ...
— The Newcomes • William Makepeace Thackeray
... leaping as usual, but one of them was a fraction of a second too late. That fraction was enough. While the first guardian was still high in air, grappling with one tiger, the other swung on a dime—the blast of air from his right wing blowing people in the crowd below thither and yon and knocking four of them flat—and took the guardian's head off his ...
— The Galaxy Primes • Edward Elmer Smith
... round his neck, did not present the usual appearance, but was much loosened, and the knot displaced and dragged extremely tight; the folds were also compressed, as if it had been used as a means of grappling the deceased, and dragging him ...
— Guy Mannering, or The Astrologer, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... on the shoulder, her eyes nearly closed. She clearly feigned to be asleep. The rat, deceived, advanced a few steps, and then sat on his haunches, looking and listening with all his might. Again he moved, again paused, then sprang into one corner of the nest, grappling an egg with his fore-paws at the same instant. The hen had never stirred all the time; but now, suddenly throwing forward her head, she seized her foe by the nape of the neck; then, without withdrawing her bill, she pressed down his head repeatedly ...
— Stories of Animal Sagacity • W.H.G. Kingston
... while the two eagles circled around and around; but at last they dashed against one another, and, grappling with their talons, tumbled over and over until they struck the ground close to the ...
— Twilight Land • Howard Pyle
... their lights, as we are. In China manufacturing is not yet extensive enough for the problem to be serious; but in both Japan and India I found the government councils thoroughly aroused to the importance of conserving child-life, and grappling with different measures for the protection of both child and women workers. My recollection is that the four thousand brown-bodied Hindu boys (there were no girls) that I found at work in a Madras cotton mill already have better ...
— Where Half The World Is Waking Up • Clarence Poe
... several yards away and slightly above him. Rip saw that the Planeteer was all right and turned his attention back to the cruiser. It was close enough to the assault boat to haul it in with grappling hooks. The hooks emerged and engaged the torn metal of the boat, then drew it into the waiting port. The massive air ...
— Rip Foster in Ride the Gray Planet • Harold Leland Goodwin
... enable the bearer of the Lochaber-axe to scale a gateway, by grappling the top of the door, and swinging himself up by the staff of ...
— The Heart of Mid-Lothian, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... forth from under the little bridge, and turned against him all their forks. But he cried out, "Be no one of you savage; ere your hook take hold of me, let one of you come forward that he may hear me, and then take counsel as to grappling me." All cried out, "Let Malacoda[1] go!" Whereon one moved, and the rest stood still; and he came toward him, saying, "What doth this avail him?" "Thinkest thou, Malacoda, to see me come here," said my Master, "safe hitherto from all your hindrances, except by Will Divine and fate propitious? ...
— The Divine Comedy, Volume 1, Hell [The Inferno] • Dante Alighieri
... intricate and tropical, exclaimed of his "dim sweet" woods: "Ye held me fast in your heart, and I held you fast in mine." Webster wielded the vital union between his nature and that of the land not only by profound sentiment, but by a vigorous physical grappling with the soil. ...
— The Old Coast Road - From Boston to Plymouth • Agnes Rothery
... to kill him. I shot them both with a right and left, for fortunately my rifle was just reloaded. He rose once more and killed a third man. Stephen came to his support and grappling with an Arab, dashed his head against the gate-post so that he fell. Old Bausi, panting like a grampus, plunged in with his remaining Mazitu and the combatants became so confused in the dark gloom of the overhanging smoke that I could scarcely tell one from the other. Yet the maddened Arabs ...
— Allan and the Holy Flower • H. Rider Haggard
... her way back to her home because her boy was gone. They spent the night in the kirk in prayer, when the minister said, "Why not ask God to restore his body?" and they did. They put out to sea and journeyed sixty miles until he told them to stop and when they let over the grappling hooks they knew by the very tug of the rope that they had his body. They bore it back again to the broken-hearted captain and his wife, who had all the time been waiting in the kirk in prayer. May God teach us ...
— And Judas Iscariot - Together with other evangelistic addresses • J. Wilbur Chapman
... as this, when the clutch of the wickedest rebellion the world ever saw is grappling the throat of the national existence, you are openly in opposition to the action of the Government, and apparently in sympathy with the rebels. Yet you claim to be loyal, and you vindicate your claim in a very remarkable ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 5, November, 1863 • Various
... increasing dread of the hallucination. The self-confidence that first supported me in my nightly encounter diminished on each occasion, and the curiosity which stimulated me to the study of the phenomenon rapidly gave way to the sentiment akin to terror when I proved myself incapable of grappling with the mystery. ...
— Shapes that Haunt the Dusk • Various
... at length courses with facility. The road to success may be steep to climb, and it puts to the proof the energies of him who would reach the summit. But by experience a man soon learns that obstacles are to be overcome by grappling with them,—that the nettle feels as soft as silk when it is boldly grasped,—and that the most effective help towards realizing the object proposed is the moral conviction that we can and will accomplish it. Thus difficulties often fall away of themselves before the determination ...
— Self Help • Samuel Smiles
... evening over the once contested land where the gentleman's forefathers had done their deeds and firmly fixed their descendants. A remainder of dull red fire prolonged the half-day above the mountain strongholds of the former owners of the soil, upon which prince and bard and priest, and grappling natives never wanting for fierceness, roared to-arms in the beacon-flames from ridge to peak: and down they poured, and back they were pushed by the inveterate coloniser—stationing at threatened points his old 'artillerymen' of those ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... captain of the "Restless" knew any fear, at such moments, he didn't permit others to see it. He neither stopped nor swerved. Ducking in under Jasper's extended right arm, Tom closed with the fellow, grappling. ...
— The Motor Boat Club and The Wireless - The Dot, Dash and Dare Cruise • H. Irving Hancock
... two or three futile attempts to find his own corpse, he had climbed up on the dock and told the officer that he had touched the body sticking in the mud. And, as a result of this fiction, the river-police dragged the river-bed around Wakeman's Slip with grappling irons for four hours, while Rags sat on the wharf and ...
— Gallegher and Other Stories • Richard Harding Davis
... away with you," I retorted, so enraged by this time I could scarcely refrain from grappling him with my hands. "I go to tell Madame ...
— Prisoners of Chance - The Story of What Befell Geoffrey Benteen, Borderman, - through His Love for a Lady of France • Randall Parrish
... first brought to its maturity within the jurisdiction where it had been born. To attain this cherished object was the chief labor of the delegates, for to the supreme court was to be intrusted the dangerous task of grappling with the representative chambers and enforcing the popular charter. Therefore they made the tenure of the judges permanent; they secured their pay; to obtain impartiality they excluded them from political office; while on the other hand ...
— The Emancipation of Massachusetts • Brooks Adams
... Sometimes from fighting squadrons of each fleet, Deceived themselves, or to preserve some friend, Two grappling AEtnas on the ocean meet, And English fires ...
— The Poetical Works of John Dryden, Vol I - With Life, Critical Dissertation, and Explanatory Notes • John Dryden
... the consideration of how far the disappearance of the boy would interfere with his obtaining payment of the various sums due by the Insurance Offices. This point was either more knotty and difficult to unravel than the previous one, or the grog began to render his intellect less capable of grappling with it. At all events it cost him an hour to determine his course of action, and required another glass of grog to enable him to put the whole matter fairly before his mental vision in one comprehensive view. This, however, accomplished, he called for a fourth glass of grog "for luck," and ...
— The Floating Light of the Goodwin Sands • R.M. Ballantyne
... Between my grappling hand he twisted and I felt the skean drive home, rip through my jacket with a tearing sound; felt the thin fine line of touch, not pain yet, as it sliced flesh. Then pain burned through my ribs and I felt hot blood, and I wanted to kill Rakhal, wanted to get my hands around his throat ...
— The Door Through Space • Marion Zimmer Bradley
... the trickling rivers, the fishermen—from this height, Liliputians grappling with Liliputian meshes—were setting their nets for the night. Across the river-beds, peasant women and fishwives, with bared legs and baskets clasped to their bending backs, appeared and disappeared—shapes that emerged ...
— In and Out of Three Normady Inns • Anna Bowman Dodd
... moves him. In this it plants all its stings; here it sinks its hot irons; cuts its deep gashes; flings its burning embers, and dashes its boiling brine and liquid fire: into this it strikes its cold flesh hooks, grappling irons, and instruments of nameless torture; and by it drags him shrieking to the end of his pilgrimage. The fact that the master inflicts pain upon the slave not merely as an end to gratify passion, but constantly as a means of extorting labor, is enough ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society
... of war! But half an hour before he and I were engaged in mortal combat, and our prisoner was all but my conqueror. Grappling with Cambaceres, whom I knocked from his horse, and was about to despatch, I felt a lunge behind, which luckily was parried by my sabretache; a herculean grasp was at the next instant at my throat—I was on the ground—my prisoner had escaped, and a gigantic warrior in the uniform of a colonel ...
— Burlesques • William Makepeace Thackeray
... soldier's death. First Lieutenant Samuel O. Peyton was severely wounded—shot in the arm and in the thigh. He was surrounded by foes who pressed him hard, after he was wounded, to capture him. He shot one assailant, and grappling with another, brought him to the ground and cut his throat with a pocket knife. Lieutenant Peyton was by birth, education, and character a thorough gentleman. Perfectly good natured and inoffensive—except when provoked or attacked—and ...
— History of Morgan's Cavalry • Basil W. Duke
... Ahmad Kamakin waited till midnight, when Canopus shone bright, and all creatures to sleep were dight whilst the Creator veiled them with the veil of night. Then he took his drawn sword in his right and his grappling hook in his left and, repairing to the Caliph's sitting-saloon planted his scaling ladder and cast his grapnel on to the side of the terrace-roof; then, raising the trap-door, let himself down into the saloon, where he found the eunuchs ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 4 • Richard F. Burton
... Warping or dragging them into shallow water had now to be commenced. Gradually the circle was drawn nearer and nearer the shore, till shallow water was reached. The seine was then moored, that is, secured by grappling hooks. It had next to be emptied. In bad weather this cannot be done, as the work requires smooth water. On the present occasion, however, the sea was calm, and several boats, supplied with smaller nets and baskets, ...
— Michael Penguyne - Fisher Life on the Cornish Coast • William H. G. Kingston
... for the Danes, for the stern-defenders of the Long Serpent and of the Short Serpent hooked anchors and grappling hooks to King Svein's ships, and as they could strike down upon the enemy with their weapons, for they had much larger and higher boarded ships, they cleared of men all the Danish ships which they had laid hold of. ...
— The Land of the Long Night • Paul du Chaillu
... dismounted Indian, or to continue the chase alone. Carson could not endure the thought of failure. His pride of character led him ever to resolve to accomplish whatever he should undertake. He seems not at all to have thought of the peril he would encounter in grappling with the savage alone. The Indian was of herculean size and strength, and of wonderful agility. He was well armed, and thoroughly understood the use of his rifle. His bravery had already given him renown, and it was certain ...
— Christopher Carson • John S. C. Abbott
... unique family characteristics, as peculiar to themselves as their choice of time for grappling with their correspondence, which Aunt Aggie was never tired of quoting. "Bellairs are always late for breakfast. It is no kind of use finding fault with Bessie about it. I was just the ...
— Prisoners - Fast Bound In Misery And Iron • Mary Cholmondeley |
