"Gnarled" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... harrying shapes, to drown forever in its turbid depths the thronging spectres, to wash away in its yellow flood all stains and color of the past. And now he was leaping from boulder to boulder, from blackened stump to stump, from gnarled bush to bush, caught for a moment and withheld by clinging vines, or plunging downward into dusty hollows, until, rolling, dropping, sliding, and stumbling, he reached the river-bank, whereon he fell, ...
— Mrs. Skaggs's Husbands and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... sad world of the cold north, with all its coarsenesses and its crimes, toward a realm of perpetual holiness, amid a perpetual summer of beauty and of light; as one who—for he was true to nature, even in that—from between the black jaws of a narrow glen, or from beneath the black shade of gnarled trees, catches a glimpse of far lands gay with gardens and cottages, and purple mountain ranges, and the far off sea, and the hazy horizon melting into the hazy sky; and finds his heart carried out into an infinite at once of freedom and ...
— Health and Education • Charles Kingsley
... gnarled hand and tried to show that he wished he could help, but the only thing he could do was to show the love and sympathy that filled his loyal heart. That night when the light was out and everything was quiet, Jan lay wide awake ...
— Prince Jan, St. Bernard • Forrestine C. Hooker
... the extravagantly crooked path that joins the Allpach road, just before you leave the last high-lying houses of the town, is a charming spot. On the serpentine windings of the path as it goes up the hill the sun always lies warm. The place is sheltered from every wind. A few gnarled old fruit-trees give not indeed fruit but a little shade, and the border of the road, a green strip of smooth surf, entices you in the friendliest way by its soft curves to sit down or to stretch yourself at full length. ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries - Masterpieces of German Literature Vol. 19 • Various
... village I see, just beyond, the torii leading to a great Shinto temple, a particularly odd small shrine, and feel impelled by curiosity to examine it. Leaning against its closed doors are many short gnarled sticks in a row, miniature clubs. Irreverently removing these, and opening the little doors, Akira bids me look within. I see only a mask—the mask of a goblin, a Tengu, grotesque beyond description, with an enormous nose—so grotesque that ...
— Glimpses of an Unfamiliar Japan - First Series • Lafcadio Hearn
... Jimmie. Bring the line, Matt!" and then he would go below himself, if below it was, and there would be joy and peace until some obstacle to progress interfered. I might say in passing that Matt and Jimmie, his faithful henchmen, were each between forty and fifty, if they were a day—poor, gnarled, dusty, storm-tossed Italians who had come from heaven knows where, had endured God knows what, and were now rounding out a work-a-day existence under the sheltering wing of this same Rourke, a great and ...
— Twelve Men • Theodore Dreiser
... grief, had let a half-broken horse break his neck. The young woman, aged by her grief, had sold the great house to the next of kin and moved down into an old brick cottage that sat "beside the road" in a gnarled old apple orchard, and had become the "friend to man." Through the orchard and past the door of the Little House ran the path that led from the Settlement to the Town, and through her heart and hands flowed most of the love and charity that bound the rich and poor, brother to brother. ...
— The Heart's Kingdom • Maria Thompson Daviess
... blighted bud, the gnarled oak, the ferocious beast, - like the discords of disease, sin, 78:3 and death, - are unnatural. They are the fal- sities of sense, the changing deflections of mor- tal mind; they are not the ...
— Science and Health With Key to the Scriptures • Mary Baker Eddy
... Scotch firs stretched for a long way beyond this pleasant garden, and struck a stern northern note befitting the gnarled battlements; while, nearer the house, gray beech stems towered out of the brown dead leaves below up to the brown live buds a hundred ...
— The Prodigal Father • J. Storer Clouston
... to these a little longer. How should a system so local, so accidental, and so unstable as Kant's be prescribed as a sort of catechism for all humanity? The tree of knowledge has many branches, and all its fruits are not condemned to hang for ever from that one gnarled and contorted bough. M. Bergson himself "lags behind" Kant on those points on which his better insight requires it, as, for instance, on the reality of time; but with regard to his own philosophy I am afraid he thinks that all ...
— Winds Of Doctrine - Studies in Contemporary Opinion • George Santayana
... time when the April sun smiles upon the meadow grass till it is very green and long enough to wave in the wind, and all amongst it the blue scilla flowers are like dewdrops reflecting the blue that hangs above the gnarled arms of the still leafless walnut trees. The cottage where Celeste lived was out from the village, among the meadows, and to the most hidden side of it young Fernand came on the eve of the day on which ...
— A Dozen Ways Of Love • Lily Dougall
... vineyards had come wild rocks, set with crumbling forts, and towers, and chateaux; then the mild interest of fruit blossom spraying pink and white among primly pollarded olives; then grape country again, with squat, low-growing vines like gnomes kicking up gnarled legs as they turned somersaults; then a break into wonderful mountain country, with Orgon's ruins towering skyward, dark as despair, a wild romance in stone. But before we reached the great suspension bridge, the Pont de Bonpas, the landscape appeared ...
— The Motor Maid • Alice Muriel Williamson and Charles Norris Williamson
... through a gap in this green barrier that he had found his way a few hours before, as his torn clothes still testified. At one side ran the low wall of the Alcalde's casa, a mere line of dark shadow in that strange diaphanous mist that seemed to suffuse all objects. The gnarled and twisted branches of pear-trees, gouty with old age, bent so low as to impede any progress under their formal avenues; out of a tangled labyrinth of figtrees, here and there a single plume of feathery palm swam in a drowsy upper radiance. The shrubbery around him, of some unknown variety, exhaled ...
— The Crusade of the Excelsior • Bret Harte
... disappeared, she knew not in what direction. Upon explaining the circumstances of the robbery, however, the officer caused his men to light a number of torches, and advance into the wood. But the ground was so impracticable in most places, from tangled roots and gnarled stumps of trees, that it was with difficulty they could keep their footing. They were also embarrassed by the crossing shadows From the innumerable boughs above them; and a situation of greater perplexity for effective pursuit it was scarcely possible to imagine. Everywhere they saw ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey
... a lane as this that the coarse, animal shape of a peasant was walking toward us. His legs and body were horribly twisted; the dangling arms and crooked limbs appeared as if caricaturing the gnarled and tortured boughs and trunks of the apple-trees. The peasant's blouse was filthy; his sabots were reeking with dirty straw; his feet and ankles, bare, were blacker than the earth over which he was painfully crawling; and on his face there was the vacuous, sensuous deformity of the ...
— In and Out of Three Normady Inns • Anna Bowman Dodd
... his dreams, and the complaint of the dry wind, which, instead of diminishing with night, had perhaps increased its intensity, and the rattle of the long French windows through which I could see the gnarled old wistaria vine clinging desperately to the iron balcony, its leaves tossing about as if ...
— The Blue Wall - A Story of Strangeness and Struggle • Richard Washburn Child
... mountain stream, like the arrows of Diana, shoot down the slopes. And now a vague mist is among the trees, and when it clears away they seem shrunken, as under a spell, to half their size. They grow smaller and smaller still, oak and chestnut and beech, but dwarfed and gnarled like some old orchard. And suddenly they cease, and the vast grassy dome uprises against the sky, in which the moon is paling into a dull similitude of itself; no longer wondrous, transcendent, but ...
— The Riddle Of The Rocks - 1895 • Charles Egbert Craddock (AKA Mary Noailles Murfree)
... in-door life of a family; but the cottage had somewhat grown with their growth, and thrown out a couple of small bed-chambers, like buds of incipient shanties, from the main trunk. A curiosity of wood-craft it looked, so mossy, gnarled, and weather-beaten, that one could easily have believed it had sprung from the ground without the intervention of hands, a specimen of ...
— Cedar Creek - From the Shanty to the Settlement • Elizabeth Hely Walshe
... gnarled stretch, what depth of shade, is his! There needs no crown to mark the forest's king; How in his leaves outshines full summer's bliss! Sun, storm, rain, dew, to him their tribute bring, Which he with such benignant royalty 5 Accepts, as overpayeth what is lent; All nature ...
— The Vision of Sir Launfal - And Other Poems • James Russell Lowell
... but vanished, the cave shone silvery gray, with a faint moony sparkle, and out came the lovely carving of the rodent waves. All about, its sides were fretted in exquisite curves, and fantastic yet ever graceful knots and twists; as if a mass of gnarled and contorted roots, first washed of every roughness by some ethereal solvent, leaving only the soft lines of yet grotesque volutions, had been transformed into mingled silver and stone. Like a soldier ...
— Malcolm • George MacDonald
... like metal in the furnace of a vehement imagination, making it the vehicle of fantastic passion and enthusiastic philosophy. From their crucible the Sonnet and the Ode emerged with no resemblance to academical standards. Grotesque, angular, gnarled, contorted, Gothic even, these antiquated forms beneath their wayward touch were scarcely recognizable. They had become the receptacles of burning, scalding, trenchant realities. Salvator Rosa, next below the best, forced indignation to lend him wings, and scaled ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volumes 1 and 2 - The Catholic Reaction • John Addington Symonds
... a beautiful variegated appearance when they get it smoothed. So that the more knotted and gnarled a log of mahogany is, the better. It makes the more beautiful wood. But in pine, it is not beauty, but facility of working, which is the great object. So they always want to get pine as smooth and straight-grained as possible. So that one of these trees that grow detached, in the fields, ...
— Forests of Maine - Marco Paul's Adventures in Pursuit of Knowledge • Jacob S. Abbott
... there any sign of beast or bird of any kind. No sound disturbed the stillness of the forest, no tracks were visible. As well as the hunters could make out, no foot had ever trodden the region before. Even nature seemed at rest. The trees were all old, their trunks gnarled into fantastic shapes, their leaves yellow and sere as if ...
— Jewish Fairy Tales and Legends • Gertrude Landa
... They would not be found like the lean and tough birds in the old settlements, that lingered around the clearings and stumps of the trees, in the topmost of whose branches the fear of man compelled them to rest, but young and full fed. The trees in this new land were of no stinted or gnarled growth, but shot up tall, straight, and taper. The yellow poplar here threw up into the air a column of an hundred feet shaft in a contest with the sycamore for the pre-eminence of the woods. Their wives and children would remain safe in their ...
— The First White Man of the West • Timothy Flint
... across the road, on the other side of a wooden paling, the park-like meadow was intensely green; old horse-chestnuts dotted about it made refreshing intervals of shade; in the hedgerows the tall elms stood out clear against the sky, and the gnarled oaks cast fantastic shadows on the grass; while beyond it, at the farther side of the meadow by the brook, the row of Canadian poplars which bordered it kept up a continuous whispering, as was their wont, even on the stillest days. When Beth first heard them, they spoke a ...
— The Beth Book - Being a Study of the Life of Elizabeth Caldwell Maclure, a Woman of Genius • Sarah Grand
... men thunder As Jove himself does, Jove would ne'er be quiet, For every pelting petty officer Would use his heaven for thunder: nothing but thunder.— Merciful Heaven! Thou rather, with thy sharp and sulphurous bolt, Splits the unwedgeable and gnarled oak Than the soft myrtle; but man, proud man! Dress'd in a little brief authority,— Most ignorant of what he's most assured, His glassy essence,—like an angry ape, Plays such fantastic tricks before high heaven As makes the angels weep; who, ...
— Measure for Measure • William Shakespeare [Collins edition]
... for he never hesitated. He swung us on, panting as we were, along the clearer parts, till we came to a part where our way seemed stopped by gorse-bushes. They rose up, thick and dark, right in front of us. Our guide stopped and told us to look down. Among the gnarled gorse-stems there seemed to be a passage or "run" made by some beast, fox or badger, going to ...
— Jim Davis • John Masefield
... and many must come and go before I forget it. Dark as the wood might be by day, the moonlight seemed to fill every glade of it, showing us the gnarled trunks and the flowering bushes, the silent pools and the grassy dells. And in the midst of this sylvan rest, remote from men, a lonely thicket of the great Pacific Ocean, was this figure of civilization, ...
— The House Under the Sea - A Romance • Sir Max Pemberton
... scar some 200 or 300 feet below, when there is a split in the mist. The sides and bottom are made of, and strewn with, white, moss-grown masses of volcanic cinder rock, and sparsely shrubbed with gnarled trees which have evidently been under fire—one of my boys tells me from the burning of this face of the mountain by "the Major from Calabar" during the ...
— Travels in West Africa • Mary H. Kingsley
... the summit, he glanced down to see the sun steeping the valley in a lake of gold. Near the canyon, enormous rocks loomed protrudent, like fantastic Negro skulls. The pitaya trees rose tenuous, tall, like the tapering, gnarled fingers of a giant; other trees of all sorts bowed their crests toward the pit of the abyss. Amid the stark rocks and dry branches, roses bloomed like a white offering to the sun as smoothly, suavely, it unraveled its golden threads, one by one, ...
— The Underdogs • Mariano Azuela
... scourge, which prey upon the hopes of the fruit-grower, and which, if undisturbed, would bring his care to naught. Some warblers flit incessantly in the terminal foliage of the tallest trees; others hug close to the scored trunks and gnarled boughs of the forest kings; some peep from the thicket, coppice, the impenetrable mantle of shrubbery that decks tiny water-courses, playing at hide-and-seek with all comers; others more humble still, descend ...
— A Book of Natural History - Young Folks' Library Volume XIV. • Various
... road; on either hand some half-dozen cottages with roofs of thatch or red tile, backed by trees gnarled and ancient, among which rises the red conical roof of some oast-house. Such, in ...
— The Broad Highway • Jeffery Farnol
... not going to browbeat me as you did poor papa when you had him on the stand?" said Miss Wayne, exploring the gnarled ...
— Little Miss Grouch - A Narrative Based on the Log of Alexander Forsyth Smith's - Maiden Transatlantic Voyage • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... to see these sticks, often crooked and gnarled, with a piece of the root left on, you would think they would make very shabby sticks for umbrellas. But they are sent to a factory where they are steamed and straitened, and then to a carver, who cuts the gnarled ...
— Illustrated Science for Boys and Girls • Anonymous
... nimble finger, his gnarled grip! Leagues, leagues of seamanship Slumber in these forsaken Bones, this sinew, and ...
— Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins - Now First Published • Gerard Manley Hopkins
... he slept on and ... and he was asleep for ever, gone for ever: he would never see her again! This last cut into her soul; a shrill scream came from her throat, she flung her lean brown hands together high above her head, wrung the crooked, gnarled fingers convulsively and then, with her fists clenched in her lap, sank impotently to her knees, with her ...
— The Path of Life • Stijn Streuvels
... woman, having a complexion like a shrivelled pippin, and the general appearance of a Zingari, for she wore huge ear-rings and possessed shrewd eyes of Oriental shape and colour. There was a bluish tinge about her lips, and she had a trick of pressing one labour-gnarled hand to her breast. ...
— The Orchard of Tears • Sax Rohmer
... were grouped around the devoted almond-tree: a gnarled old personage, of a great age and girth, having that pathetic look of sorrowful dignity which I find always in superannuated trees—and now and then in humans of gentle natures who are conscious that their days of usefulness are gone. Esperit, who was beside me, felt called upon to explain ...
— The Christmas Kalends of Provence - And Some Other Provencal Festivals • Thomas A. Janvier
... Lightnings now are gleaming; Thunders rolling dread, Shake the mountain's head; Nature's war Echoes far, O'er ether borne, That flash The ash Has scath'd and torn! Now it rages; Oaks of ages, Writhing in the furious blast, Wide their leafy honours cast; Their gnarled arms do force to force oppose Deep rooted in the crevic'd rock, The sturdy trunk sustains the shock, Like dauntless hero firm ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... ripe summer smell, flowed down to the shore of the bay. The olive trees were of immense size, and I can well believe, as Fra Carlo informed us, that they were probably planted by the Roman colonists, established there by Titus. The gnarled, veteran boles still send forth vigorous and blossoming boughs. There were all manner of lovely lights and shades chequered over the turf and the winding path we rode. At last we reached the foot of an ...
— The Lands of the Saracen - Pictures of Palestine, Asia Minor, Sicily, and Spain • Bayard Taylor
... weather; the country and the sea seem to sleep in the sun. In front of the farm are half-a-dozen pines that look as if they had stepped out of another land, but all round the back is orchard as lush, and gnarled, and orthodox as any one could wish. The house, a long, white building with three levels of roof, and splashes of brown all over it, looks as if it might be growing down into the earth. It was freshly thatched two ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... tulip-tree, or Liriodendron tulipifera, the most magnificent of American foresters, has a trunk peculiarly smooth, and often rises to a great height without lateral branches; but, in its riper age, the bark becomes gnarled and uneven, while many short limbs make their appearance on the stem. Thus the difficulty of ascension, in the present case, lay more in semblance than in reality. Embracing the huge cylinder as closely as possible with his arms and knees, seizing with his hands some projections, and resting ...
— Short-Stories • Various
... shall spend my time here!" she said to herself. "They may send me here, keep me here for years, if they will; but they cannot make me associate with these people." And she recalled with a shudder the gnarled, horny hand which she had touched in jumping from the cart,—she had never felt anything like it; the homely speech, and the nasal twang with which it was delivered; the uncouth garb (good stout butternut homespun!) and unkempt hair and beard ...
— Queen Hildegarde • Laura Elizabeth Howe Richards
... haunted by things unknown. I have sometimes thought whether the spirits that love solitary places, may not delight in appropriating, for embodiment momentary and partial, such a present shape as may happen to fit one of their passing moods; whether it is always the mere gnarled, crone-like hawthorn, or misshapen rock, that, between the wanderer and the pale sky, suddenly appals him with the sense of another. The hawthorn, the rock, the dead pine, is indeed there, but is it ...
— The Flight of the Shadow • George MacDonald
... gum wagged impishly back and forth. His face, sunburned and frosted like the hardened rind of some winter fruit, revealed the prominent bones of the skull under the sunken flesh. One of his gnarled old hands, trembling and red, clutched the clay bowl of his pipe; the other, with the callous skin of the palm showing under the bent fingers, rested half open on the leather patch that covered the knee of his overalls. A picture ...
— The Miller Of Old Church • Ellen Glasgow
... hoofs on the broken and rugged track through which the creature had been driven at full speed by his furious master, might easily see, that in more than a dozen of places the horse and rider had been within a few inches of destruction. One bough of a gnarled and stunted oak-tree, which stretched across the road, seemed in particular to have opposed an almost fatal barrier to the horseman's career. In striking his head against this impediment, the force of the blow ...
— St. Ronan's Well • Sir Walter Scott
... subtle change was taking place in the air. Faint breezes, the sighing heralds of advancing evening, were now beginning to steal slowly out from the picturesque, seamed rocks of the ravine and from behind each gnarled or stately ...
— 'Smiles' - A Rose of the Cumberlands • Eliot H. Robinson
... bare ground. He was searching for a spot where he might dismount and tether his horse, when again the animal started; this time, however, it was not at a flash of lightning. James looked round, when, about a dozen yards from him, he saw, as if endeavouring to conceal himself behind the gnarled stem of an aged gum tree of gigantic proportions, the very figure Johnstone had described to him the previous evening. At first he thought that his imagination must have deceived him; the light was uncertain, and his eyes had been dazzled ...
— The Gilpins and their Fortunes - A Story of Early Days in Australia • William H. G. Kingston
... firs. I delight in their forms, from James the First's gnarled giants up in Bramshill Park—the only place in England where a painter can learn what Scotch firs are—down to the little green pyramids which stand up out of the heather, triumphant over tyranny, and the strange woes of an untoward youth. Seven years on an average have most of them ...
— Prose Idylls • Charles Kingsley
... of a school life are connected with a large, rambling Elizabethan house, in a misty-looking village of England, where were a vast number of gigantic and gnarled trees, and where all the houses were excessively ancient. In truth, it was a dream-like and spirit-soothing place, that venerable old town. At this moment, in fancy, I feel the refreshing chilliness of its deeply-shadowed avenues, inhale the fragrance ...
— International Miscellany of Literature, Art and Science, Vol. 1, - No. 3, Oct. 1, 1850 • Various
... Friedrich Wilhelm's regulations on this subject, from his own hand, has come down to us. Most dull, embroiled, heavy Document; intricate, gnarled, and, in fine, rough and stiff as natural bull-headedness helped by Prussian pipe-clay can make it;—contains some excellent hints, too; and will show us something of Fritzchen and of Friedrich Wilhelm ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Volume IV. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—Friedrich's Apprenticeship, First Stage—1713-1728 • Thomas Carlyle
... horse over a strange trail, Rosalind Benham came to a thicket of gnarled fir-balsam and scrub oak that barred her way completely. She had ridden hard and her horse breathed heavily during the short time she spent looking about her. Her own breath was coming sharply, sobbing in her throat, but it was more from excitement than from the hazard ...
— 'Firebrand' Trevison • Charles Alden Seltzer
... like a lamb led to slaughter, but with innocence feigned, keeping her vain secrets to the last. The oak resists, as he resists the axe, having spent all his energy in building a stout and perfect body, proud of his twisted arms and gnarled hands. The pine rebels, and noisily to the swift end, saying: "I do not believe in cremation. I believe in breaking down alone and apart, as I lived. I am clean without the fire. You should let me alone, and now I shall not let you think nor talk of real things until I am gone...." Each with ...
— Child and Country - A Book of the Younger Generation • Will Levington Comfort
... sunken eyes, all their keen humour gone, and spoke as though each word were dug from his heart. "Say no more, Father Halen." Then he reached out, caught the priest's hand in his gnarled fingers, and ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... the rocky buttresses of a gentle slope that was utterly deserted by all save a few wild goats browsing near the summit. There were clumps of broom, thick with golden flower, about the base of the hill. Higher, a few gnarled and aged olive trees reared their grey heads from which the rays of the westering sun struck a ...
— The Sea-Hawk • Raphael Sabatini
... an iris, Dark purple, pale rose, Under the gnarled boughs That shatter their stars of bloom. She waves delicately With the ...
— Japanese Prints • John Gould Fletcher
... possess. The small boys of the neighbourhood declared that he could see in the dark like a cat. He now moved a step nearer to "Cobbler" Horn, and stood revealed, an elderly, and rather undersized, grizzled, gnarled, and knotted man, dressed in shabby and ...
— The Golden Shoemaker - or 'Cobbler' Horn • J. W. Keyworth
... lady, "I suppose I must obey orders. But my, how beautiful it is, too beautiful for the likes of me!" And Celestina stroked the lovely cloth with her gnarled and withered fingers. "How very good the dear Lord is! And now if you don't mind, let us pray together here to thank Him for all His mercies." Celestina who could not kneel, placed her hands on our bowed heads, and after a heartfelt prayer of thanks asked the ...
— Paula the Waldensian • Eva Lecomte
... scrambled out of the boat—taking Cupid with us to search out the way and carry a small coil of light line in case it should be wanted—and proceeded cautiously to claw our way like so many parrots, over and among the gnarled and twisted roots of the mangrove trees, the Krooboy leading the way, leaping and swinging himself with marvellous agility from tree to tree, while we followed slowly in his wake, as often as not being obliged to make a slip-rope ...
— A Middy of the Slave Squadron - A West African Story • Harry Collingwood
... scorn— be a bridegroom! Heaven, was I not cursed More than enough, when thou didst fashion me To be a type of ugliness,—a thing By whose comparison all Rimini Holds itself beautiful? Lo! here I stand, A gnarled, blighted trunk! There's not a knave So spindle-shanked, so wry-faced, so infirm, Who looks at me, and smiles not on himself. And I have friends to pity me—great Heaven! One has a favourite leg that he bewails,— Another sees my hip with doleful plaints,— ...
— Representative Plays by American Dramatists: 1856-1911: Francesca da Rimini • George Henry Boker
... century old former slave lifted a bony knee with one gnarled hand and crossed his legs, then smoothed his thick white beard. His rocking chair creaked, the flies droned, and through the open, unscreened door came the bawling of a calf from the building of ...
— Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States From Interviews with Former Slaves: The Ohio Narratives • Works Projects Administration
... woods!" she exclaimed. "How sweet they are! See the way the sunshine touches the old, gnarled trunks, and what a lovely light filters through the leaves. One never sees it anywhere except in an olive grove. I should like ...
— The Castle Of The Shadows • Alice Muriel Williamson
... be the chief disciple or pupil of Morgan Todd, dismounted, and followed the man that had spoken, who was old and thin and gnarled, with beady black eyes. When he had examined Sir Lancelot's wound, the old man ...
— King Arthur's Knights - The Tales Re-told for Boys & Girls • Henry Gilbert
... possesses one original, and, almost, supernatural faculty; the faculty of developing a subject by a single glance of his mind, and detecting at once, the very point on which every controversy depends. No matter what the question; though ten times more knotty than the gnarled oak, the lightning of heaven is not more rapid nor more resistless, than his astonishing penetration. Nor does the exercise of it seem to cost him an effort. On the contrary, it is as easy as vision. I am persuaded that his eyes do not fly over a landscape and take ...
— John Marshall and the Constitution - A Chronicle of the Supreme Court, Volume 16 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Edward S. Corwin
... point of terror. Swiftly we made our way, ever slightly climbing, along the rugged hillside, and soon broke into country very wild and dismal. The pastoral character of the scene lessened and altogether disappeared. The trees grew matted and grotesquely gnarled, huddling together in menacing battalions—save where some plunging rock had burst like a shell, forcing a clearing and strewing the black moss with a jagged wreck of splinters. Here no flowers crept for warmth, no sentinel marmot turned his little scut with a whistle of alarm to vanish like a ...
— At a Winter's Fire • Bernard Edward J. Capes
... is certain that the brothers Rennie entered the thicket immediately after, despite the almost angry remonstrances of the more knowing men, advanced to within about fifteen paces of the spot where the lion lay crouched among the gnarled roots of an evergreen bush with a small space of open ground on one ...
— The Settler and the Savage • R.M. Ballantyne
... as steel spears, made a barrier against cattle, ostriches, and human beings that was impassable except by the appointed gaps. No doubt it had a beauty all its own, but beneath its fantastic, isolated blooms and leaves of Madonna blue, the gnarled roots sheltered a hundred varieties of poisonous reptiles and insects. That is why, in Africa, no one likes blue ...
— Blue Aloes - Stories of South Africa • Cynthia Stockley
... pictures exhibit a scowl. In some the scowl is very pronounced, and in one he looks not unlike a professional prize-fighter. They betray a mind jaundiced, but defiant. A restless, fiery soul, his temper, never of the best, had grown daily more gnarled and perverse. Woe betide the imprudent human who crossed him! What chance had anybody against a man who had the command of all the forcible words in twenty-eight languages! His peremptory voice everywhere ensured obedience. To all save his dearest friends he was proud and haughty. ...
— The Life of Sir Richard Burton • Thomas Wright
... doing for so many months in forest and meadow, on the broad hill-side and in the valley. The old ice-king has had a merry time of it, playing with the long branches of the graceful maiden-like elm, and wrestling with the gnarled and haughty oak. You might have heard him roaring in the depths of the woods, had you been here, venerable DEIDRICH, day and night for a sevennight, apparently just for the sake of making a noise, and compelling the obeisance of the forest. Like any other demagogue, ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, May 1844 - Volume 23, Number 5 • Various
... along a sidehill, barren and devoid of all vegetation. Here and there, far off across the country, vivid patches on the slopes indicated thickets of willows and birch growing below spring seeps. A few scattered cedars sprouted from the rocky ledges of the more broken country and a clump of gnarled, wind-twisted cottonwoods marked a distant water hole. A whitish glare was reflected from an alkali flat in the bottom of a shallow basin. Twenty miles to the north the first rims of the hills rose out of the low country and ...
— The Settling of the Sage • Hal G. Evarts
... black, dense fir plantations. Emerging from these, you come to an open space, frozen blasted meadows, the rocks of snow clad peak, the newly fallen snow, close above you; and in the midst, on a knoll, with a gnarled larch on either side, the ducal villa of Sant' Elmo, a big black stone box with a stone escutcheon, grated windows, and a double flight of steps in front. It is now let out to the proprietor of the neighboring woods, who uses it for the storage of chestnuts, faggots, and charcoal ...
— Hauntings • Vernon Lee
... Indians, according to the custom of their tribe, had been buried. It was a goodly sized elm that had grown straight out of the ground to a height of twenty five feet, at which point the trunk forked into a dozen gnarled and twisted limbs, the peculiar black bark of which, gave them an unnatural appearance. Everywhere among the yellow leaves were perched heaps of decaying garments and bones. In some places, storms ...
— The Story of Paul Boyton - Voyages on All the Great Rivers of the World • Paul Boyton
... seemed to me so entirely typical of the inclemency and at the same time of the whimsicality of an incomplete and sickly creation that I could not deny it a place in my souvenirs de voyage, and so I drew it carefully." This bit of fungus was to him a symbol of his own gnarled existence. ...
— Promenades of an Impressionist • James Huneker
... men of differing temperaments less likely to yield to the stress of even the most trying circumstance than Grant and Bates, yet, during some agonized moments the one, of tried courage and fine mettle, was equally horrified and shaken as the other, a gnarled and hard-grained rustic. It was he from whom speech might least be expected who first found his tongue. Bates, who had stooped, straightened ...
— The Postmaster's Daughter • Louis Tracy
... to be looked at in winter and at night. This garden was oblong in shape, with an alley of large poplars at the further end, tolerably tall forest trees in the corners, and an unshaded space in the centre, where could be seen a very large, solitary tree, then several fruit-trees, gnarled and bristling like bushes, beds of vegetables, a melon patch, whose glass frames sparkled in the moonlight, and an old well. Here and there stood stone benches which seemed black with moss. The alleys were bordered with gloomy and very erect little ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... rational honourable courage—are the best medicine for young men, and for old men, too; for all men against sad thoughts." [172] Next to music, if not before it, Luther loved children and flowers. The great gnarled man had a heart as tender ...
— Character • Samuel Smiles
... overwhelming regard for the old stone crosses, which came to her afterward, had not grown into a live passion. Her present pilgrimages were short, her shrines those of Nature's building. Much she loved the arm of an ancient apple-tree hid in the very heart of the orchard. A great gnarled limb bent abruptly out, grew long and low, and was propped at a distance of three yards from the parent tree. Midway between the stem and support, a crooked elbow of the bough made a pleasant seat for Joan; and here, when life ...
— Lying Prophets • Eden Phillpotts
... a gigantic wheel, in the midst of the circle stood a cluster of leafless trees, mighty patriarchs, gnarled and twisted, with great overhanging limbs as stout and rugged as only hoary ...
— The Watchers of the Plains - A Tale of the Western Prairies • Ridgewell Cullum
... the dearest little picnic place, with soft green grass for a carpet, and gnarled roots of great trees ...
— Marjorie's Vacation • Carolyn Wells
... the roses; its rooms and passages filled with pictures, books, and old carved oak furniture. In a country where the flat pasture lands of Cheshire rise suddenly to the rocky ridge of Alderley Edge, with the Holy Well under an overhanging cliff; its gnarled pine-trees, its storm-beaten beacon tower ready to give notice of an invasion, and looking far over the green plain to the smoke which indicates in the horizon the presence of the ...
— Before and after Waterloo - Letters from Edward Stanley, sometime Bishop of Norwich (1802;1814;1814) • Edward Stanley
... his to a gnarled old willow, growing by the pond. Indeed, with the wryness of its branches, the grey-green of its leaves, you might almost have mistaken it for an olive-tree. A rose-vine had clambered up to the topmost top of it, and spread ...
— The Lady Paramount • Henry Harland
... though their guard has not been relieved for centuries. All around, wild myrtle, and heath, and eglantine curl and creep up the stems of the olives, trying, from the contact of their fresh youth, to infuse new life and sap into the gray, gnarled old trees, even as a fair Jewish maiden once strove to cherish her war-worn, decrepit king. There are other flowers too left, though December has begun, enough to give a faint fragrance to the air and gay colors to the ground. Just below their feet is a ...
— Sword and Gown - A Novel • George A. Lawrence
... tableland of many acres thickly covered with trees. The grass, in the open spaces between, was sparse, and there was much moss and lichen and drifts of withered leaves, dried by the sun of more than one summer; and here and there in the northern shadow of some gnarled trunk and in dipping hollows the leaves were packed close in a damp and moulding compress. Great streamers of wild grape-vine hung precariously from weary limbs and swayed to and fro gently in the wind that came mounting up the slope from the west and went dipping ...
— Stubble • George Looms
... few miles from the river exhibits the same features as on its southern bank, the soil blackish, soft, and yielding; the trees principally myall, and a species of myall, called by the squatters rosewood, interspersed with the small and gnarled forest oak. About ten miles from the river, and nearly parallel to it, is the Waramble, a sort of swamp, boggy, and difficult to cross after wet weather, directly after which water remains in the holes along its course. From thirty to forty miles beyond this is ...
— The History of Australian Exploration from 1788 to 1888 • Ernest Favenc
... days the ground they trod had been a pleasance the width of the house, bordered, doubtless, by the forest. Trees grew out of the flower beds now, and underbrush choked the paths. The box itself, that once primly lined the alleys, was gnarled and shapeless. Labyrinth had replaced order, nature had reaped her vengeance. At length, in the deepening shade, they came, at what had been the edge of the old terrace, to the daintiest of summer-houses, crumbling too, ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... these venerable oaks, Wrinkled and brown and gnarled like them with age, A brother of the monastery sits, Lost in his meditations. What may be The questions that perplex, the hopes that cheer ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... spot. Of course I did not expect to meet Lord Mortimer! Miss Fitzallen never had any such expectations. I was simply going out to read and admire the beauties of nature. When I had seated myself, in proper attitude, on the gnarled root of an old tree, overhanging a lovely ravine, I proceeded to the reading part of the play, and must of course be too much absorbed to hear the approaching footsteps, to which I listened with bated breath. ...
— Half a Century • Jane Grey Cannon Swisshelm
... with his head sunk sideways between his shoulders and the breath issuing in visible smoke from his mouth as if he were on fire within. His throat, chin, and eyebrows were so frosted with white hairs and so gnarled with veins and puckered skin that he looked from his breast upward like some old root in a fall ...
— Bleak House • Charles Dickens
... I was following—even though I stopped in a low spot to admire a mass of thrifty blue flags, now beginning to bloom—and came thus to the pines I was seeking. They are not great trees, nor noble, but gnarled and angular and stunted, for the soil in that place is poor and thin, and the winds in winter keen; but the brown blanket of needles they spread and the shade they offer the traveller are not less hospitable; nor the fragrance they give off less enchanting. ...
— Great Possessions • David Grayson
... I don't care about it to-day." Winfield rose and walked to the other end of the porch. The apple trees were in bloom, and every wandering wind was laden with sweetness. Even the gnarled old tree in Miss Hathaway's yard, that had been out of bearing for many a year, had put forth a bough of fragrant blossoms. He saw it from where he stood; a mass of pink and white against the turquoise sky, and thought that Miss Thorne would make a charming picture if she stood beneath ...
— Lavender and Old Lace • Myrtle Reed
... he at once raced, with Nellie and Rover at his heels; and, diving beneath a jungle of blackberry-bushes at the bottom, matted together with ropes of ivy that had fallen from a withered oak, whose dry and sapless gnarled old trunk still stood proudly erect in the midst of the mass of luxuriant vegetation with which it was surrounded, Nellie heard him after a bit call out from the leafy enclosure in which he had quickly found himself—"Oh, I say, I ...
— Bob Strong's Holidays - Adrift in the Channel • John Conroy Hutcheson
... me arms, Vigour of soul and body, and a race Subject by law, and dutiful by choice, Whose hand is never to be holden fast Within the closing cleft of gnarled creeds; No easy prey for these vile mitred Moors. I, who received thy homage, may retort Thy threats, vain ...
— Count Julian • Walter Savage Landor
... speeding body the gnarled, bomb-torn terrain of Nevada hurtled by. A rather sad frown creased Lance's prematurely old brow as he glimpsed it. Thousands of lives had been thrown into that ground; the hot, tumbled waste was doused with freely-sacrificed blood, the blood of whole regiments of America's ...
— Astounding Stories, February, 1931 • Various
... pine-trees (there should be NAMES for trees, as there are for rocks or ancient strongholds). Mr. Edgeworth showed us the oak from Jerusalem, the grove of cypress and sycamore where the beautiful depths of ground ivy are floating upon the DEBRIS, and soften the gnarled roots, while they flood the rising ...
— Castle Rackrent • Maria Edgeworth
... woman shook her head. She felt tired, she said, with the heat. So Mrs. Furnese drove, and Joanna sat silently beside her, watching her thick brown hand on the reins, with the wedding ring embedded deep in the gnarled finger. ...
— Joanna Godden • Sheila Kaye-Smith
... they travelled through the endless, boundless white, over wind-swept rocky hills so inhospitably barren that even the snow could not find a lodgment on them, or over wide plains where the few trees that grew had been stunted and gnarled into mere shrubs by winter blasts. On every hand the mountains began to raise their ragged austere heads like grim giant sentinels placed there to guard the way. Finally they turned into a pass, which brought them, on the other side of the ridge it led through, to a comparatively well-wooded ...
— Ungava Bob - A Winter's Tale • Dillon Wallace
... in 1881, fifteen cents. The proprietor hopes next year to consume 100,000 bushels. These institutions are important to the farmer in that they use much fruit not otherwise valuable and very perishable. Fruit so crabbed and gnarled as to have no market value, and even frozen apples, if delivered while yet solid, can be used. (Such apples are placed in the water while frozen, the water draws the frost sufficiently to be grated, and passing through the press and evaporator before there is time ...
— Scientific American Supplement No. 360, November 25, 1882 • Various
... projecting buttress, on which they might find a foothold. They had good hope of success, for they had seen many such since starting from the shore. Had rest been necessary, they might have obtained it more than once by grasping a branch above, or clinging to one of the great trunks, whose gnarled and knotted sides ...
— The Castaways • Captain Mayne Reid
... the lowest window, a knotted wild cherry, storm-beaten and crooked,—and then, suddenly, something of uncertain shape, huddled together and falling from the balcony down the precipice,—a woman's figure, caught in the gnarled boughs of the cherry-tree, hanging and swinging over the abyss, while shriek on shriek echoed down to the swollen torrent and up to the turrets of the old inn in an agonized reverberation ...
— Paul Patoff • F. Marion Crawford
... breathless over the table while her mother drew the outlines of the picture upon the linen—the witch-woman in her forest home, the straight, sturdy figure of small George standing before her. On two sides and the bottom of the panel were drawn gnarled and twisted tree- trunks and roots, ferns and flowers. Across the top a narrow conventional border was outlined, the cross of Saint George alternating with a five- petaled rose, ...
— Masters of the Guild • L. Lamprey
... Ben Weatherstaff put his gnarled hand up and passed it over his eyes and over his forehead and then he did answer in ...
— The Secret Garden • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... earth; a darkening of the shadow, blacker than the blackest night in the thickest wood—a pause—then, a sound as of the heavy air being cleft asunder; and then, an apparition of two figures coming on out of the shadow—two monsters stretching forth their gnarled yellow talons to grasp at us; leaving on their track a green decay, oozing and shining with a sickly light. Beyond and around me, as I stood in the midst of them, the phantom troop dropped into formless masses, while ...
— Basil • Wilkie Collins
... the Lebanon is held sacred by the Greek Church on account of a prevailing notion that the trees were standing at a time when the temple of Jerusalem was built. They occupy three or four acres on the mountain’s side, and many of them are gnarled in a way that implies great age, but except these signs I saw nothing in their appearance or conduct that tended to prove them contemporaries of the cedars employed in Solomon’s Temple. The final cause to which these aged survivors owed their preservation was explained ...
— Eothen • A. W. Kinglake
... an apple-tree near by, where a ten-year-old girl sat perched among its gnarled branches. She had a dog-eared book of fairy tales on her knee, and was poring over it in such blissful absorption that she had forgotten there were such things in all the world as chickens ...
— Mildred's Inheritance - Just Her Way; Ann's Own Way • Annie Fellows Johnston
... thorn it grows The rose is not less fair; Though wine from gnarled branches flows, ...
— Jewish Literature and Other Essays • Gustav Karpeles
... centre of the lane a row of elm-trees displayed their gnarled, knotted roots. Human beings were seated there, whose matted hair clung round their tired faces. Their gaunt limbs were clothed in rags; each had a stick, and some sort of dirty bundle tied to it. They were asleep. On a bench beyond, two toothless old women sat, moving their eyes from side to ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... was in the villa. Two days before, Frau von Buelow, the last of the Humboldts, had been carried forth, to rest beside her husband and children, her father William, and her uncle Alexander von Humboldt. The gnarled and twisted stem of a venerable ivy clasps with two arms one of the most majestic of the tall trees before the house, one branch bearing large leaves of a tender green, the other small and beautifully outlined leaves of dark maroon ...
— In and Around Berlin • Minerva Brace Norton
... travelers. But there was still light enough for Gale to see the constricted passage open into a wide, deep space where the dull color was relieved by the gray of gnarled and dwarfed mesquite. Blanco Sol, keenest of scent, whistled his welcome herald of water. The other horses answered, quickened their gait. Gale smelled it, too, sweet, cool, damp on ...
— Desert Gold • Zane Grey
... days later Doctor Geddes sent us Schmetz, the gardener, a gnarled little man with a peppery temper, a torrential flow of Alsatian French, and a tireless energy. I don't know why nor how Schmetz had come to Hyndsville, except that somehow he had acquired a small farm near by and ...
— A Woman Named Smith • Marie Conway Oemler
... companies, squads, and single riders. Bullets whistled and comrades fell, but the command spurred on to increased speed—shouted, yelled and still dashed on. Over fences and gullies, and then a wide ravine; through brush and dense timber, whose gnarled and low-hanging branches literally tore men from their saddles; across a great marsh where horses almost swamped—onward the resistless force rushes and strikes the enemy fully and fairly. Sabers flash in the air, pistols and carbines belch forth sulphur smoke. The unexpected movement, the ...
— Bugle Blasts - Read before the Ohio Commandery of the Military Order of - the Loyal Legion of the United States • William E. Crane
... throw away lay a large square moat, full of water, all fringed with ancient gnarled trees; the island which it enclosed was overgrown with tiny thickets of dishevelled box-trees, and huge sprawling laurels; we walked softly round it, and there was our goal: a small church of a whitish stone, in the middle of a little ...
— The Thread of Gold • Arthur Christopher Benson
... up the stream, he came to a bridge over it, closed at the farther end by iron gates between pillars, each surmounted by a wolf's head in stone. Over the gate on each side leaned a rowan-tree, with trunk and branches aged and gnarled amidst their fresh foliage. He crossed the burn to look through the gate, and pressed his face between the bars to get a better sight of a tame rabbit that had got out of its hutch. It sat, like a Druid white with age, in ...
— Sir Gibbie • George MacDonald
... and went out to where she was. As I approached what looked like a mere bundle of linen thrown against the gnarled trunk of the tree, I recognized the large, dark eyes, the tattooed stars, and the long, regular features of that semi-wild girl who had so captivated my senses. As I advanced towards her, I felt inclined to strike her, to make her suffer pain, and to have my revenge, and so I called out to ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume IV (of 8) • Guy de Maupassant
... gnarled trunk makes even the young trees seem old. The olive is like an old man with skimpy legs. It seems to me a pathetic tree. One does not like to say it is ugly; it is not ugly, but it would be puzzling to say wherein lies its charm, for it throws no shade, and is so grey—nothing ...
— Memoirs of My Dead Life • George Moore
... Frenchman had quite as great a sense of noblesse oblige as his bride. He bowed to the black woman as though she was the highest lady in the land and accepted the parcel, tied clumsily with baby ribbon by the gnarled fingers ...
— Ruth Fielding on the St. Lawrence - The Queer Old Man of the Thousand Islands • Alice B. Emerson
... unmerited Happiness; for well did I know the disparity in Age that existed between us—how Rough and Weather-beaten was I; and she, how Tender, Delicate, and Good! "But does not the Ivy twine round the Oak?" quoth the Physician, as he smote me cheerfully on the Shoulder. And behold, now, gnarled and battered old Jack Dangerous, with this delicious little Parasite creeping ...
— The Strange Adventures of Captain Dangerous, Vol. 3 of 3 • George Augustus Sala
... branches, looking about as happy as a lone wayfarer treed by a pack of wolves. Then, they commanded him to bark at the moon, and threatened him with all sorts of penalties if he disobeyed. So he yelped and gnarled and bow-wowed till there was nothing left of his voice but ...
— The Dozen from Lakerim • Rupert Hughes
... rejoiced your geologists. How long it remained in that condition cannot be said; but "the whirligig of time brought its revenges" in those days as in these. That dry land, with the bones and teeth of generations of long-lived elephants, hidden away among the gnarled roots and dry leaves of its ancient trees, sank gradually to the bottom of the icy sea, which covered it with huge masses of drift and boulder clay. Sea-beasts, such as the walrus, now restricted to the extreme north, paddled ...
— Discourses - Biological and Geological Essays • Thomas H. Huxley
... by, and no sign of life came from the badgers' home. Then the familiar white and black striped head, framed in the darkness beneath the gnarled tree-root, suddenly appeared, and as suddenly vanished. Another half-hour went by, and yet another, but no further sign was given. My companion, unused to such a long vigil, shifted uneasily, and protested that he was tingling with cramp and longing for sleep; presently, unable to endure ...
— Creatures of the Night - A Book of Wild Life in Western Britain • Alfred W. Rees
... native dust, in the arid sands of Florida; for, as we rode on, we saw gigantic pine, cedar, and hiccory trees, torn up by the roots, and scattered over the surrounding country, by by-gone hurricanes, many of them hundreds of yards from the spot that nurtured their roots—while the gnarled branches lying across our track, scorched black-with the lightning, or from long exposure to a burning sun, impeded our advance, and made ...
— An Englishman's Travels in America - His Observations Of Life And Manners In The Free And Slave States • John Benwell
... rose a great tree of huge girth, whose gnarled branches spread far and wide, a veryforest of leaves, beneath whose shade were many of the outlaws grouped about one who crouched miserably on his knees, his arms fast bound and a halter about his neck; and, ...
— The Geste of Duke Jocelyn • Jeffery Farnol
... approved a tall, deeply browned man of thirty, all sinewy angles, who, from the shoulders up, suggested nothing so much as a club with a gnarled knob on the end of it, a tough, reliable, hardwood club, capable of dealing a stiff blow in an honest cause. "If he deals in conversation, he must SELL it. I don't notice him giving ...
— The Unspeakable Perk • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... the cliffs of Glorm, but the crags were shining above us like gnarled moons, and almost lit the gloom. Louder and louder came the Irillion's song, and the sound of her dancing down from the fields of snow. And soon we saw her white and full of mists, and wreathed with rainbows delicate and small that she ...
— A Dreamer's Tales • Lord Dunsany [Edward J. M. D. Plunkett]
... children's laughter. He sat up suddenly and looked about, but no one was in sight. Again he heard an unmistakable peal of shrill, childish merriment, seemingly close at hand. He lay flat and looked over the ledge, holding on to a root of a gnarled pine that grew far out at ...
— The Lighted Match • Charles Neville Buck
... God. It is a charter and a promise. It is a stringent reminder of duty and a lofty ideal. A true Christian is an 'Israel.' His office is to wrestle with God. Nor can we forget how this mysterious scene was repeated in yet more solemn fashion, beneath the gnarled olives of Gethsemane, glistening in the light of the paschal full moon, when the true Israel prayed with such sore crying and tears that His body partook of the struggle, and 'His sweat was as it were great drops of blood falling down to the ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus and Numbers • Alexander Maclaren
... became violently atheistic, and at the same time decidedly religious: things that seem paradoxical, but are not. They adopted a vegetable diet and for two years they eschewed meat. They worshiped in the woods, feeling that the groves were God's first temples; and sitting at the gnarled roots of some great oak, they would read aloud, by turn, from ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 5 (of 14) • Elbert Hubbard
... Sally-Lou strode briskly along the hot, dusty road toward Drake's. Every now and then a low giggle would escape her lips, and she would put her thin, gnarled fingers to her mouth as if to hide her smile from some observer. "John Webb wasn't tuck in by it, I'll bet," she mused. "He ain't nobody's fool. John's got a long, cool head on 'im, he has. He kin see through a mill-rock without lookin' ...
— The Desired Woman • Will N. Harben
... we have indicated a pause, follows a description, long, rich, and luscious—Of the three naked goddesses? Fye for shame—no—of the 'lily flower violet-eyed,' and the 'singing pine,' and the 'overwandering ivy and vine,' and 'festoons,' and 'gnarled boughs,' and 'tree tops,' and 'berries,' and 'flowers,' and all the inanimate beauties of the scene. It would be unjust to the ingenuus pudor of the author not to observe the art with which he has veiled this ticklish ...
— Early Reviews of English Poets • John Louis Haney
... It seemed he could almost see through it. He was amazed at the delicacy of her colouring, at the blue of her eyes, at the dazzle of the sun-touched golden hair. And he was astounded by her fragility. It came to him that she was easily broken. His eye went quickly from his huge, gnarled paw to her tiny hand in which it seemed to him he could almost see the blood circulate. He knew the power in his muscles, and he knew the tricks and turns by which men use their bodies to ill-treat men. In fact, he knew little else, and his mind for the ...
— The Turtles of Tasman • Jack London
... in the rainy season, innumerable torrents pour into the Settite; some of these gorges were ornamented with the dark foliage of large tamarind trees, while upon rocks that did not appear to offer any sustenance, the unsightly yet mighty baobab* grasped with its gnarled roots the blocks of granite, and formed a peculiar object in ...
— The Nile Tributaries of Abyssinia • Samuel W. Baker
... awe at the white froth of flowers on the pear-trees, the tinted almond blossom, and the pink-tipped apple. She had never dreamed of such heavenly loveliness. But enthusiasm succeeded to awe at last, and, in a wild burst of delight, she suddenly threw her arms around a gnarled tree-trunk and ...
— The Beth Book - Being a Study of the Life of Elizabeth Caldwell Maclure, a Woman of Genius • Sarah Grand
... animals of the Pamirian fauna appeared wolves and foxes, and flocks of those large wild sheep with gnarled and gracefully curved horns, which are known to the natives as arkars. High in the sky flew the vultures, bearded and unbearded, and amid the clouds of white vapor we left behind us were many crows and pigeons ...
— The Adventures of a Special Correspondent • Jules Verne
... washing the breakfast dishes and put a stick of wood into the broken old cook-stove that had served him and Frank for fifteen years and was feeling its age. Lorraine's breakfast was in the oven, keeping warm. Brit looked in, tested the heat with his gnarled hand to make sure that the sour-dough biscuits would not be dried to crusts, and closed the door upon them and the bacon and fried potatoes. Frank Johnson had the horses saddled and it was time to go, yet Brit lingered, uneasily conscious that his habitation ...
— Sawtooth Ranch • B. M. Bower
... ceased but they run for ever. They burnt St. Crag, so the stories say, And his ashes cast on the winds away, But the well survives, and the block of wood Stands—nay, stood where it always stood, And still was the village's pride and glory On the day of which I shall tell my story. Gnarled and knotty and weather-stained, Battered and cracked, it still remained; And thither came, Footsore and lame, On an autumn evening a year ago The wandering pedlar, Gipsy Joe. Beside the block he stood and set His table out on the well-stones wet. "Who'll buy? Who'll buy?" was the call ...
— The Vagabond and Other Poems from Punch • R. C. Lehmann
... surprise and good-natured chiding which would mark her old aunt's reception. She gazed upward at the tall forest trees swaying to and fro in the light evening breeze, and far into its dim, mazy depths, where gray rocks lay clad in soft, green moss, and gnarled, uprooted trunks overgrown with clinging vines, and pale, delicate flowers springing beautiful from their decay. She listened to the murmuring of the brook in its rocky bed, and a thousand memories of other years rushed on her soul. The strange, fast-coming ...
— Eventide - A Series of Tales and Poems • Effie Afton
... followed Gwenny; who led me along very rapidly, with her short broad form gliding down the hollow, from which she had first appeared. Here at the bottom, she entered a thicket of gray ash stubs and black holly, with rocks around it gnarled with roots, and hung with masks of ivy. Here in a dark and lonely corner, with a pixie ring before it, she came to a narrow door, very brown and solid, looking like a trunk of wood at a little distance. This she opened, without a key, by stooping down and pressing it, where the threshold ...
— Lorna Doone - A Romance of Exmoor • R. D. Blackmore
... had been in his wildness and his weakness, and now she walked silently across the room and sat down. The firelight shone out fiercely as she savagely poked the logs, and with a motion ordered young Jock, who stood near, to throw more wood to the flames. It shone on gnarled hands gripping gnarled sticks, on rugged, ruddy faces, on white and sandy hair, on bright blue eyes, old and young. And then the door opened sharply and Andrew Lashcairn stood ...
— Captivity • M. Leonora Eyles
... paces or so from the cell a tall cross is planted in the ground; and, at the other end of the platform, a gnarled old palm-tree leans over the abyss, for the side of the mountain is scarped; and at the bottom of the cliff the Nile swells, as it were, into ...
— The Temptation of St. Antony - or A Revelation of the Soul • Gustave Flaubert
... can see us here," said Ellen, trembling at the truth of her own observation, when they stood beneath a gnarled, low-branched pine, which Dr. Melmoth's ideas of beauty had caused him to retain in his garden. "Speak quickly; for I dare follow you ...
— Fanshawe • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... everywhere, into the heart and innermost recesses of the wood; beginning with the likeness of an aisle, a cloister, or a ruin open to the sky; then tangling off into a deep green rustling mystery, through which gnarled trunks, and twisted boughs, and ivy-covered stems, and trembling leaves, and bark-stripped bodies of old trees stretched out at length, were faintly seen in ...
— Life And Adventures Of Martin Chuzzlewit • Charles Dickens
... bonnet, took off her apron, tied a new boot-lace round her umbrella, and after listening for a long time at door and window, opened the door and sallied out into a perilous world. The umbrella was under her arm and she clutched the bundle with two gnarled and resolute hands. It was her best Sunday bonnet, and the two poppies that reared their heads amidst its splendours of band and bead seemed instinct with the same tremulous courage that ...
— The Food of the Gods and How It Came to Earth • H.G. Wells
... the river. The banks slope down and make a trough for the stream a good deal below the level of the plain, and in this hollow, hidden till you are close to it, congregates all the verdure there is for miles, especially a quantity of willow trees, with gnarled black trunks leaning down to the stream, sometimes bending over and burying themselves in the ground and then shooting up again, making arches and long vistas, with green grass below and silvery foliage waving ...
— With Rimington • L. March Phillipps
... Athabasca they journeyed. The prairie was almost done with, only patches of it now like fields; poplar and willow and birch growing everywhere; and beyond the Sturgeon River, tiny forests of gnarled, stunted jack-pine, creeping wearily from a soft carpet of silver and emerald moss which lay thick upon the white sand hills. Little red berries, like blood stars, peeped at them from the setting of silk lace moss—wintergreen berries, and grouse berries, and lowbush cranberries, ...
— The Outcasts • W. A. Fraser
... stone-cast from the wall A sluice with blackened waters slept, And o'er it many, round and small, The clustered marish-mosses crept. Hard by a poplar shook alway, All silver-green with gnarled bark: For leagues no other tree did mark The level waste, the rounding gray. She only said, "My life is dreary, He cometh not," she said; She said, "I am aweary, aweary, I would that ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 2 (of 4) • Various |
