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More "Labyrinth" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... that for one night the toil of travelling was intermitted. This recess from incredible fatigue was a pause that afforded our adventurer time to overtake them before they reached the metropolis, that vast labyrinth, in which Aurelia might have been for ever lost to ...
— The Adventures of Sir Launcelot Greaves • Tobias Smollett
... and dominion they have attained, than by amusing the men of business, and ignorant, with hard words, or employing the ingenious and idle in intricate disputes about unintelligible terms, and holding them perpetually entangled in that endless labyrinth. Besides, there is no such way to gain admittance, or give defence to strange and absurd doctrines, as to guard them round about with legions of obscure, doubtful, and undefined words. Which yet make these retreats ...
— An Essay Concerning Humane Understanding, Volume II. - MDCXC, Based on the 2nd Edition, Books III. and IV. (of 4) • John Locke
... become a monstrous labyrinth, a cortical lute of three thousand strings, and upon it impacted the early music at the dawn of things. In the planetary slime he heard the screaming struggles of fishy beasts; in the tanglewood of hot, aspiring forests were muffled roarings ...
— Melomaniacs • James Huneker
... signifying plenty, abundance; the zigzag, symbolic of the river Nile; the winged globe or scarabaeus, signifying protection and dominion, usually placed over doors of houses; the fret, type of the Great Labyrinth, with its three thousand chambers, which was, in its turn, symbolic of the ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 598, June 18, 1887 • Various
... chronology. The Roman poet brings Dido and AEneas together,—the historian parts them far asunder. Homer may or may not have been the contemporary of Laertes. Nothing is idler or more dangerous than to enter a labyrinth without a clew." ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 104, June, 1866 • Various
... difficulties that attend an attempt to recite all of the details of human progress, philosophers and historians have approached the subject from various sides, each seeking to make, by means of higher generalizations, a clear course of reasoning through the labyrinth of materials. By adopting certain methods of marking off periods of existence and pointing out the landmarks of civilization, they have been able to estimate more truly the development of the race. Civilization cannot be readily measured by time; indeed, ...
— History of Human Society • Frank W. Blackmar
... Walt Whitman's (1819-92) most characteristic poems. I love the swing and the stride of his great long lines. I love his rough-shod way of trampling down and kicking out of the way the conventionalities that spring up like poisonous mushrooms to make the world a vast labyrinth of petty "proprieties" until everything is nasty. I love the oxygen he pours on the world. I love his genius for brotherliness, his picture of the Negro with rolling eyes and the firelock in the corner. These excerpts are some ...
— Poems Every Child Should Know - The What-Every-Child-Should-Know-Library • Various
... nor am I, like so many of my brethren, a mere vacuum as regards scientific knowledge. I can follow a particle of musk until it reaches the olfactory nerve; I can follow the waves of sound until their tremors reach the water of the labyrinth, and set the otoliths and Corti's fibres in motion; I can also visualise the waves of aether as they cross the eye and hit the retina. Nay more, I am able to pursue to the central organ the motion thus imparted at the periphery, and to see in idea ...
— Fragments of science, V. 1-2 • John Tyndall
... butler (who, I must admit, seemed thoroughly to comprehend his duties) had entered the service of Sir Lionel during the time that the latter was pursuing his celebrated excavations upon the traditional site of the Daedalian Labyrinth in Crete. It was during this expedition that the death of a distant relative had made him master of Graywater Park; and the event seemingly had inspired the eccentric baronet to ...
— The Hand Of Fu-Manchu - Being a New Phase in the Activities of Fu-Manchu, the Devil Doctor • Sax Rohmer
... "General's" office and asked to see him. He had, he insisted, orders to deliver the letter into nobody's hands but those of the "General" himself, and on this pretext in due course found himself, after being led through a labyrinth of passages and stairs, in the presence of ...
— The Confessions of Artemas Quibble • Arthur Train
... in the afternoon when they arrived at the entrance of the village, an uninviting underground labyrinth, where the sun never penetrated and where men, women and children lived in homes cut out of the virgin rock. It was, of course, necessary to leave their camels and go through the village on foot. Abdul told the servants that he alone would go with his master; they were to meet them ...
— There was a King in Egypt • Norma Lorimer
... leaped like a greyhound. Forgotten was the rushing torrent, and his own danger. He thought only of that frantically clinging man. He reached the edge of the stream, leaped upon the nearest logs, and, with the agility of a wildcat, threaded his way through that terrible labyrinth of ...
— The Fourth Watch • H. A. Cody
... think she did so quite as much simply in order to show that she felt at home in Naples, and knew the city thoroughly. Indeed, she needed to know it very thoroughly to venture by night into that labyrinth of subterranean alleys and flights of steps. If ever any many showed absolute docility in allowing himself to be guided, that man was myself. Dante never followed the steps of Beatrice with more confidence than I felt in following ...
— The Crime of Sylvestre Bonnard • Anatole France
... moment to the most cruel perplexity. M. Galpin was utterly overcome by consternation. He sat at the little table, on which he had been writing, his head resting on his hands, thinking, apparently, how he could find a way out of this labyrinth. ...
— Within an Inch of His Life • Emile Gaboriau
... Bucolia, or 'pasturages,' and is a tract of low land, which has been converted by the inundations of the Nile into a lake, of great depth in the middle, and gradually shoaling towards the margins into a marsh. Among this labyrinth of lakes and morasses, all the robber-community of Egypt hold their commonwealth; some building huts wherever there is enough of dry land for the purpose, and others living wholly on board their boats, which serve them for a home, as well as to transport them from place ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine—Vol. 54, No. 333, July 1843 • Various
... of Egypt of which we now speak, is famous for several rarities, each of which deserves a particular examination. I shall mention only the principal, such as the obelisks, the pyramids, the labyrinth, the lake of Moeris, ...
— The Ancient History of the Egyptians, Carthaginians, Assyrians, • Charles Rollin
... abandoned to our vulgar propensities, without guide, leader, or control: that is, made to be full of a blind elevation in prosperity; to despise untried dangers; to be overpowered with unexpected reverses; to find no clew in a labyrinth of difficulties; to get out of a present inconvenience with any risk of future ruin; to follow and to bow to fortune; to admire successful, though wicked enterprise, and to imitate what we admire; to contemn the government ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. V. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... Eversleigh had recourse to the commonest form of consolation. He fled from a country in which his name had become odious, and took up his abode in Paris, where he found a miserable lodging in one of the narrowest alleys in the neighbourhood of the Luxembourg, which was then a labyrinth of narrow streets ...
— Run to Earth - A Novel • M. E. Braddon
... proved his familiarity with that labyrinth of sombre streets and alleys. Selecting a devious course, stooping low beneath the black shadows of walls and fences, he yet set so swift a gait with his confounded long legs it kept me puffing to follow. But we ...
— Prisoners of Chance - The Story of What Befell Geoffrey Benteen, Borderman, - through His Love for a Lady of France • Randall Parrish
... was over we wandered down to the little disencumbered space before the inn, through a small labyrinth of obliterated things. They took the form of narrow, precipitous streets, bordered by empty houses, with gaping windows and absent doors, through which we had glimpses of sculptured chimney-pieces and fragments of stately arch and vault. Some of the houses ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume 3 • Various
... way in which foreigners spoke of the principal residence of our sovereigns, and often said that it was a pity that the great fire had not spared the old portico of St. Paul's and the stately arcades of Gresham's Bourse, and taken in exchange that ugly old labyrinth of dingy brick and plastered timber. It might now be hoped that we should have a Louvre. Before the ashes of the old palace were cold, plans for a new palace were circulated and discussed. But William, ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 5 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... Zelee, who was in Hanavave visiting a relative. He was the very highest physical and mental type of the Paumotan, a honey-comb of good-nature, a well of laughter, and a seaman beyond compare. To be a pilot in the Isles of the Labyrinth demands many strong qualities, but to be the pilot of the only warship in this sea was the very summit of pilotry. He had an accurate knowledge of forty harbors and anchorages, and spoke English fluently, French, Paumotan, Tahitian, ...
— White Shadows in the South Seas • Frederick O'Brien
... Casino, with the miscellaneous objects of interest about them. Uncle thought he was entering the Liberal Arts building when he walked past the guard at the southeast entrance of the Casino. He wandered into a labyrinth of side-rooms, where he heard an amazing medley of excited voices in as many different languages. They were evidently quarreling over something that displeased them very much. Presently a guard caught him by ...
— The Adventures of Uncle Jeremiah and Family at the Great Fair - Their Observations and Triumphs • Charles McCellan Stevens (AKA 'Quondam')
... Reigns in Egypt. He adorned Memphis, and translated the seat of his Empire thither from Thebes. There he built the famous Labyrinth, and the northern portico of the Temple of Vulcan, and dug the great Lake called the Lake of Moeris, and upon the bottom of it built two great Pyramids of brick: and these things being not mentioned by Homer or Hesiod, were unknown to them, and done after their ...
— The Chronology of Ancient Kingdoms Amended • Isaac Newton
... by a sheer cliff wall, with storm-stunted brambles and furzes cowering along the edge, fathoms above a base-line of exuberant weed and foam. The long sea-frontage of this rock-rampart is fissured by only a few narrow clefts. On the left hand, facing oceanward, the coast is a labyrinth of mountain fiords, straits, and bays, where you may see great craggy shoulders and domed summits waver in their crystal calm at the flick of a gull's dipping wing, or add to the terror of the tempest as they start out black and ...
— Stories by English Authors: Ireland • Various
... laugh at the last price of them. But what signifies the fate of those tickets of despotism? The despotism will find despotic means of supply. They have found the short cut to the productions of nature, while others, in pursuit of them, are obliged to wind through the labyrinth of a very intricate state of society. They seize upon the fruit of the labour; they seize upon the labourer himself. Were France but half of what it is in population, in compactness, in applicability of its force, situated as it is, and being what it is, it would be too strong ...
— Political Pamphlets • George Saintsbury
... morning Topanashka left before daybreak with five picked men in the hideous garb of Indian braves. They penetrated cautiously the mountain labyrinth west of the Rito, concealing themselves during the day and travelling at night. On the morning of the fifth day they discovered a few huts of the Navajo. Whether or no their inmates had participated in the murder of the old woman ...
— The Delight Makers • Adolf Bandelier
... through the East end of the Lorette Ridge to Carency, and thence to La Targette, but on September 25th of that year, the French had driven the enemy back nearly a mile, practically to the foot of the Vimy Ridge itself. In this area were portions of the front having such well-known names as "The Labyrinth," and Souchez Sugar Refinery—reminders of the fact that some of the most savage fighting of the whole war took place there, owing to the struggle of the enemy to retain a footing on that splendid line of observation, the Lorette ...
— The Sherwood Foresters in the Great War 1914 - 1919 - History of the 1/8th Battalion • W.C.C. Weetman
... beginning of; the Place where I found my self to be, was a wide and spacious Plain, full of People that wandered up and down through several beaten Paths, whereof some few were strait, and in direct lines, but most of them winding and turning like a Labyrinth; but yet it appear'd to me afterwards, that these last all met in one Issue, so that many that seemed to steer quite contrary Courses, did at length meet and face one another, to the no little ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... obdurate, on that day at least, and with an unusually grave face he began to fold the embroidery, wrapping it at last in the inevitable piece of shabby gray linen. The party left the shop, and threaded the labyrinth of vaulted passages towards the gate. Cutter was interested in Gregorios, and asked him a great many questions, so that Chrysophrasia felt she was being neglected, and wore her most mournful expression. Paul and Hermione came behind, talking a little as they walked. They reached the bridge ...
— Paul Patoff • F. Marion Crawford
... sat in the rear seat. Two small lamps served to light the way through the Stygian labyrinth of trees and rocks. O'Dowd had an electric pocket torch with which to pick his way ...
— Green Fancy • George Barr McCutcheon
... impatient and the desultory, of con- descension and humility. I do not profess to under- stand the plan of Chambord, and I may add that I do not even desire to do so; for it is much more entertaining to think of it, as you can so easily, as an irresponsible, insoluble labyrinth. Within, it is a wilderness of empty chambers, a royal and romantic barrack. The exiled prince to whom it gives its title has not the means to keep up four hundred rooms; he contents himself with preserving the huge outside. The repairs of the prodigious roof alone must absorb a ...
— A Little Tour in France • Henry James
... you find out my poor boy?" asked Lady Oldfield, as they hurried along through a labyrinth of by-streets, each dirtier and more dismal ...
— Frank Oldfield - Lost and Found • T.P. Wilson
... at Santa Rosa runs at least five miles an hour, and we were soon picking our way—now drifting, now paddling—through a labyrinth of islands and snags. The Indians, so accustomed to brutal violence from the hands of the whites, had begged of us, before our departure, that we would not beat them. But shortly after we left, one of them, who was literally filled with chicha, ...
— The Andes and the Amazon - Across the Continent of South America • James Orton
... condition that every nine years they should send him a tribute of seven youths and seven maidens. The most tragic of the legends states these poor children when they reached Crete were thrown into the Labyrinth, and there either were devoured by the Minotaur or else perished with hunger, being unable to find the way out. The Minotaur, as ...
— Plutarch's Lives, Volume I (of 4) • Plutarch
... first glance as if the mind must be confused by these varieties, whose possible number fades into infinity; but the teacher does not open this labyrinth to his disciples without providing them with ...
— Delsarte System of Oratory • Various
... taste every sort of them: Then to the arbours walk, then to the bowers, Thence to the walks again, thence to the flowers, Then to birds, and to the clear spring thence, Now pleasing one, and then another sense. Here one walks oft, and yet anew begin'th, As if it were some hidden labyrinth; So loath to part and so content to stay, That when the gard'ner knocks for you away, It grieves you so to leave the pleasures in it, That you could wish that you had never ...
— Pastoral Poems by Nicholas Breton, - Selected Poetry by George Wither, and - Pastoral Poetry by William Browne (of Tavistock) • Nicholas Breton, George Wither, William Browne (of Tavistock)
... day I have no quite clear idea of how we went. A strange city at night—Paris of all cities—is a labyrinth. I know that after a time we came out in some meadows along the river-bank, traversed them, and plunged once more into narrow, high-walled streets. It was very late, and lights were few. We had started in clear starlight, but ...
— Helmet of Navarre • Bertha Runkle
... to learning and the learned, conveyed in the following scornful quotations: "Grammarians, go to your tailors and shoemakers, and learn from them the rational art of constructing your grammars!"—Neef's Method of Education, p. 62. "From a labyrinth without a clew, in which the most enlightened scholars of Europe have mazed themselves and misguided others, the author ventures to turn aside."—Cardell's Gram., 12mo, p. 15. Again: "The nations of unlettered men so adapted their language to philosophic ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... two centuries Russian orthodoxy has been undermined by obscure sects, unknown to foreigners, and little known to Russians themselves. Beneath the imposing pile of the official Church have been hollowed out vast underground burrows and a labyrinth of gloomy crypts, which form a retreat for the popular beliefs and superstitions. We propose to descend into these catacombs of ignorance and fanaticism. We shall attempt to map them out, to explore their remotest nooks, and to ...
— Lippincott's Magazine Of Popular Literature And Science, April 1875, Vol. XV., No. 88 • Various
... presently find ourselves somewhere at the back of Gray's Inn. The buildings of the Parcels' Post Depot marked another stage in our journey. But still the other cab did not show any sign of coming to a standstill. Leaving Mount Pleasant behind us, we entered that dingy labyrinth of streets lying on the other side of the Clerkenwell House of Detention. How much longer was the chase going to last? Then, to my delight, the other cab slackened its pace, and eventually pulled up before a small public-house. We were so close behind ...
— My Strangest Case • Guy Boothby
... We had no time for deliberation—our course must now be ahead, so we stood across the lake-like expanse I have spoken of, where as much caution as before was necessary; for it was full of reefs, and in another quarter of an hour we were again threading the labyrinth-like canals, from which we had before emerged. Every instant I hoped to come upon the chase, but still as we sailed ...
— Mark Seaworth • William H.G. Kingston
... bridge he was about to cross gave way. Thanks to his presence of mind and a lightning-like movement — some would call it luck — he managed to save himself. In this way we worked up about 200 feet, but then we came upon such a labyrinth of yawning chasms and open abysses that we could not move. There was nothing to be done but to find the least disturbed spot, and set the ...
— The South Pole, Volumes 1 and 2 • Roald Amundsen
... king was involved at Hanover in a labyrinth of negotiations, the South-Sea scheme produced a kind of national delirium in his English dominions. Blunt, the projector, had taken the hint of his plan from the famous Mississippi scheme formed by Law, which in the preceding ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.II. - From William and Mary to George II. • Tobias Smollett
... progress much, for the way grew more and more difficult, and it was once taken into consideration whether we had not better strike in away from the river; and we should have adopted this course but for the fear of losing ourselves in the labyrinth of mountains to the north and east, and not being able to strike ...
— To The West • George Manville Fenn
... we call it the glycine room. But how will you find it? There are three staircases and a labyrinth of passages. I can give you the clue and explain the way to you, but you would ...
— The Hollow Needle • Maurice Leblanc
... Compress'd like wedges, radiated like stars, Branching like sea-weed, whirl'd in dazzling rings; Subtle and variable as flickering flames, Sight could not trace their evanescent changes, Nor comprehend their motions, till minute And curious observation caught the clew To this live labyrinth,—where every one, By instinct taught, perform'd its little task; —To build its dwelling and its sepulchre, From its own essence exquisitely modell'd; There breed, and die, and leave a progeny, Still multiplied beyond the reach of numbers. To frame new cells and ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 10, No. 279, October 20, 1827 • Various
... which leads to the Bridge of Sighs: it was the old road to destruction,—the mysterious process, made familiar by novelists and poets, by which the ancient and sinister republic made more fearful the vengeance of government. As the unfortunate youth passed through a labyrinth of gloomy corridors, he recognized the haunts of the ancient Inquisition; the atmosphere was clogged with damp; moisture dripped from the stones. A dungeon, lighted only by a lamp suspended from the vault, and narrow, humid, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 25, November, 1859 • Various
... The interminable labyrinth of passages threaded, the warm, comfortable housekeeper's room, with its red curtains, oak presses and a delicious smell of spice pervading it, was a real haven of rest. To this very day, nearly sixty years afterwards, ...
— The Days Before Yesterday • Lord Frederick Hamilton
... the 29th Division arrived before dusk and at nightfall we set off, moving in column of route as far as Fig Tree Farm. From thence we passed in file up the Eastern Mule Track and through a labyrinth of trenches to a ruined cottage near Twelve Tree Copse. This was the Headquarters of the 87th Brigade, and here the Battalion was split up, "A" Company going to the trenches of the 1st Battalion Dublin Fusiliers, "B" to the 2nd Royal Fusiliers, and ...
— The Fifth Battalion Highland Light Infantry in the War 1914-1918 • F.L. Morrison
... and throwing up of hats. His Majesty had not stayed above an hour in his chamber, but hearing the multitude throng so fast into the uppermost court to see his highness, he showed himself openly out of his chamber window by the space of half an hour together; after which time he went into the labyrinth-like garden to walk, where he secreted himself in the Meander's compact of bays, rosemary, and the like overshadowing his walk, to defend him from the heat of the sun till supper time, at which was such plenty ...
— The Star-Chamber, Volume 1 - An Historical Romance • W. Harrison Ainsworth
... word "maze," signifying a labyrinth, probably comes from the Scandinavian, but its origin is somewhat uncertain. The late Professor Skeat thought that the substantive was derived from the verb, and as in old times to be mazed or amazed was to be "lost in thought," the transition to a maze in whose tortuous windings we ...
— Amusements in Mathematics • Henry Ernest Dudeney
... all her canvas. The snowy sails, swelled by the strangely soft wind, the labyrinth of cordage, and the yellow flags flying at the masthead, all stood out sharp and uncompromisingly clear against the vivid background of space, sky, and sea; there was nothing to alter the color but the shadow cast ...
— A Woman of Thirty • Honore de Balzac
... now, Thersites! What, lost in the labyrinth of thy fury? Shall the elephant Ajax carry it thus? He beats me, and I rail at him. O worthy satisfaction! Would it were otherwise: that I could beat him, whilst he rail'd at me! 'Sfoot, I'll learn to conjure and raise devils, but I'll see some issue ...
— The History of Troilus and Cressida • William Shakespeare [Craig edition]
... seemingly endless labyrinth of galleries lined with closed coffins and shelved skeletons the two passed until at last a great noise, like a far-off droning, broke the stillness. "The meeting hath begun," the guide said. As they neared the chamber they ...
— The Coming of the King • Bernie Babcock
... review on the table itself; while in the Music-room a hundred or so lorries could be parked without attracting observation too glaringly. Should the need arise, the Library could accommodate a battalion on parade, a rifle range or sufficient office room for Q branch of a division. A labyrinth of corridors and servants' bedrooms harbours the rank and file, and it is said that the number of kitchens, pantries and cellars in the north and east wings runs ...
— Punch, Volume 156, 26 March 1919 • Various
... compared to a labyrinth? A. Because the entry and coming in is easy, and the going ...
— The Works of Aristotle the Famous Philosopher • Anonymous
... human Nature, will never qualify a Man to be a Writer of Characters. He must be a Master of the Science; and be able to lead a Reader, knowingly, thro' that Labyrinth of the Passions, which fill the Heart of Man, and make him either a noble or a despicable Creature. For tho' some, who have never attempted any thing of this kind, may think it an easy Matter to write two ...
— A Critical Essay on Characteristic-Writings - From his translation of The Moral Characters of Theophrastus (1725) • Henry Gally
... Sprot through the labyrinth of his confessions and evasions, as attested by the authentic reports of his private examinations between July 5 and the day of his death. It will be observed that, while insisting on his own guilt, and on that of Logan, he produced no documentary evidence, no genuine ...
— James VI and the Gowrie Mystery • Andrew Lang
... West Indian islands as their most valued possessions, a voyage thither would be certain to draw British sails in eager pursuit. Finally, those islands dotted over a thousand miles of sea presented a labyrinth wherein it would be easy for the French to elude ...
— The Life of Napoleon I (Volumes, 1 and 2) • John Holland Rose
... friends parted, and Dion walked down the quay alone to meet the freedman, who must have found it difficult to guide his boat out of this labyrinth of vessels. The inspection of the mausoleum had detained the young father too long and, though disguised beyond recognition, he reproached himself for having recklessly incurred a danger whose consequences—he felt this to-day for the first time—would not injure himself alone. The whole fleet ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... outside shall be of treillage, which, however, I shall not commence, till I have again seen some of old Louis's old-fashioned Galanteries at Versailles. Rosamond's bower, you, and I, and Tom Hearne know, was a labyrinth:(769) but as my territory will admit of a very short clew, I lay aside all thoughts of a mazy habitation: though a bower is very different from an arbour, and must have more chambers than one. In short, I both know, and don't ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole Volume 3 • Horace Walpole
... and, remembering only her sufferings, thought of her only with tender compassion. Sometimes, however, she could not avoid musing upon the strange infatuation that had proved so fatal to her aunt, and had involved herself in a labyrinth of misfortune, from which she saw no means of escaping,—the marriage with Montoni. But, when she considered this circumstance, it was 'more in sorrow than in anger,'—more for the purpose of indulging lamentation, ...
— The Mysteries of Udolpho • Ann Radcliffe
... the Pyrenees stretched across Wellington's path, a tangle of mountains sixty miles in length; a wild table-land rough with crags, fierce with mountain torrents, shaggy with forests, a labyrinth of savage and snow-clad hills. On either flank a great fortress—San Sebastian and Pampeluna—was held by the French, and Wellington was besieging both at once, and besieging them without battering trains. The echoes of Vittoria had aroused Napoleon, then ...
— Deeds that Won the Empire - Historic Battle Scenes • W. H. Fitchett
... Like a phantom she had slipped away amid the underbrush, leaving him to flounder blindly in the labyrinth. Once she laughed outright, a clear burst of girlish merriment ringing through the silence, and he leaped desperately forward, hoping to intercept her flight. His incautious foot slipped along the steep edge of the shelving ...
— Bob Hampton of Placer • Randall Parrish
... to wait before going aboard the boat for Re. So I made a tour of the town. It is certainly a queer city, La Rochelle, with strong characteristics of its own streets tangled like a labyrinth, sidewalks running under endless arcaded galleries like those of the Rue de Rivoli, but low, mysterious, built as if to form a suitable setting for conspirators and making a striking background for those old-time wars, the savage heroic wars of religion. ...
— Maupassant Original Short Stories (180), Complete • Guy de Maupassant
... face of a hound and arms to hug like a bear—in converse with the fishmonger, saw the master at first refusing, then gradually giving reluctant assent to some demand. Next Phormio was half leading, half carrying the fugitive aboard the ship, guiding him through a labyrinth of bales, jars, and cordage, and pointing to a hatchway ladder, illumined ...
— A Victor of Salamis • William Stearns Davis
... spacious stables. The kitchens, usually situated on the ground floor, were large enough to provide meals for half a thousand retainers, if necessary; and the cellars and underground prisons were a vast labyrinth of vaulted chambers, which not unfrequently communicated with the Tiber by secret passages. In restoring the palace of the Santacroce, a few years ago, a number of skeletons were discovered, some still wearing armour, and ...
— Ave Roma Immortalis, Vol. 1 - Studies from the Chronicles of Rome • Francis Marion Crawford
... fields around, traversed, in these days, with a tired step, but still vigilantly explored, I find nothing so often as the Labyrinth Spider (Agelena labyrinthica, CLERCK.). Not a hedge but shelters a few at its foot, amidst grass, in quiet, sunny nooks. In the open country and especially in hilly places laid bare by the wood-man's ...
— The Life of the Spider • J. Henri Fabre
... labyrinth of columns and mirrors, and through 'em and round 'em and up overhead wuz splendor on splendor ...
— Samantha at the World's Fair • Marietta Holley
... sandstone quarries on the hill. It is a mass of streets placed close above each other, and linked together with arms and arches of solid masonry, as a protection from the earthquakes, which are frequent at San Remo. The walls are tall, and form a labyrinth of gloomy passages and treacherous blind alleys, where the Moors of old might meet with a ferocious welcome. Indeed, San Remo is a fortress as well as a dwelling-place. Over its gateways may still be traced the pipes for molten lead, ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece • John Addington Symonds
... This charming labyrinth is attached to Le Petit Trianon at Versailles. The palace and its gardens were formed under the reign of Louis XV., who was there when he was attacked by the contagious disease of which he died. Louis XVI. gave it to his queen, who took great delight in the spot, and had the gardens laid out ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 13, - Issue 377, June 27, 1829 • Various
... sciences, but there is every reason to expect the development of a body of classified facts that will be of inestimable value in attacking social problems, and of principles that will serve as a guide through the labyrinth of social life. The value of any science is not in the perfection of its system, but in the practical application which can be made of it to ...
— Society - Its Origin and Development • Henry Kalloch Rowe
... no virtue in Rome but gold will buy it, and, as thou knowest, in that I am not wanting. Any slave like Curio, or he of the Flavian, may be had for a basket-full of oboli. With these two clues, thou canst thread the labyrinth.' ...
— Aurelian - or, Rome in the Third Century • William Ware
... minute,—Mr. Linden stood by the low mantelpiece resting his face on his hand. The farmer, busy with the feelings which the prayer had raised, sat with downcast eyes. And Faith was motionless with a deep and manifold sense of happiness, the labyrinth of which herself could not soon have threaded out. The silence and stillness of his two companions drew the farmer's eyes up; he read first, with an eager eye that nobody saw, the sweet gravity on one half hidden face, and the deep pure joy written ...
— Say and Seal, Volume II • Susan Warner
... ladies met their gallants in the green labyrinth of which Agnes had spoken, and falling into pairs, for the walk was too narrow to allow them all four to walk abreast, they strolled in ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol. XXXII No. 2. February 1848 • Various
... ever a face was dyed in all the world before. She looked after him with a sort of gasp in her eyes, forgetting the man opposite her, the crowd around her, everybody, everything, except that one tall figure which with the passing of each instant was disappearing more and more among the labyrinth of tables and people. She saw him pause at last and seem to hesitate, and her heart throbbed wildly in her throat as she felt, with that strange instinctive intuition which continues to follow one train of thought while our very life ...
— A Woman's Will • Anne Warner
... murmuring stream, and its turrets rose from out a sea of green foliage that almost hid them from sight. Led by curiosity, or rather by his destiny, he approached the building by a winding walk, that seemed almost a labyrinth, now bringing him near, and anon carrying him to a distance, until tired at last, he stopped, and rested himself under the shade of a stately beech, that spread its broad arms afar, and afforded a delightful canopy. Here, gazing around in listless ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII No. 1 January 1848 • Various
... heart." The blaze of the Scarlet Letter compels us by a strange magnetic power to follow Hester Prynne wherever she goes, but her suffering is less acute and her character less intricate than her lover's. She bears the outward badge of shame, but after "wandering without a clue in the dark labyrinth of mind," wins a dull respite from anguish as she glides "like a grey and sober shadow" over the threshold of those who are visited by sorrow. At the last, when Dimmesdale's spirit is "so shattered and subdued that it could hardly hold itself erect," Hester has still energy to plan and to act. ...
— The Tale of Terror • Edith Birkhead
... in the bearing of Gaston de Bois, by which Maurice was struck, had been wrought by a triad of agents. A man who had passed his life in indolent seclusion, who had plunged into a tangled labyrinth of abstruse books, not in search of valuable knowledge, but to lose in its mazes the recollection of valueless hours; who had allowed his days to drag on in aimless monotony; who had fallen into melancholy because he lacked a healthy stimulus to rouse his ...
— Fairy Fingers - A Novel • Anna Cora Mowatt Ritchie
... court should be commanded from thence. Whither now? Back—and whither then? Back, round endless galleries, vaulted halls, staircases, doorways, some fast, some open, up and down, trying this way and that, losing himself at whiles in that enormous silent labyrinth. And his breath failed him, his throat was parched, his face burned as with the simoom wind, his legs were trembling under him. His presence of mind, usually so perfect, failed him utterly. He was baffled, netted; there was a spell upon him. Was it ...
— Hypatia - or, New Foes with an Old Face • Charles Kingsley
... past which we call the age of fable lived the cunning craftsman Daedalus of Athens. One of his most curious inventions was a labyrinth which he constructed for Minos, the king of Crete. Having at length displeased this king he resolved to flee from the island with his son Icarus. It was impossible to escape by way of the sea without detection, but Daedalus was ...
— Van Dyck - A Collection Of Fifteen Pictures And A Portrait Of The - Painter With Introduction And Interpretation • Estelle M. Hurll
... &c (crossing) 219; rivulation^; roughness &c 256. coil, roll, curl; buckle, spiral, helix, corkscrew, worm, volute, rundle; tendril; scollop^, scallop, escalop^; kink; ammonite, snakestone^. serpent, eel, maze, labyrinth. knot. V. be convoluted &c adj.; wind, twine, turn and twist, twirl; wave, undulate, meander; inosculate^; entwine, intwine^; twist, coil, roll; wrinkle, curl, crisp, twill; frizzle; crimp, crape, indent, scollop^, scallop, wring, intort^; contort; wreathe &c (cross) 219. Adj. convoluted; winding, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... the gates of the sok-el-Abeed was thronged with a motley, jostling, noisy crowd that at every moment was being swelled by the human streams pouring to mingle in it from the debauching labyrinth of narrow, ...
— The Sea-Hawk • Raphael Sabatini
... my eyes: a sheet of swamp, sinking slowly into the sea; for there stood trees, still rooted below high-water mark, and killed by the waves; while inland huge trees stood dying, or dead, from the water at their roots. But what a scene—a labyrinth of narrow creeks, so narrow that a canoe could not pass up, haunted with alligators and boa-constrictors, parrots and white herons, amid an inextricable confusion of vegetable mud, roots of the alder-like mangroves, and tangled creepers hanging ...
— Town Geology • Charles Kingsley
... documents, but he cannot own it unless he has eyes to see, ears to hear, and a heart to feel its charm. This appreciation Mary Adams possessed by inheritance from her student father who devoured books with an insatiate hunger. Nowhere in all New York's labyrinth did she feel as perfectly at home as in this reading-room. The quiet which reigned without apparent sign or warning seemed to belong to the atmosphere of the place. It was unthinkable that any man or woman ...
— The Foolish Virgin • Thomas Dixon
... of Democratic administration, 1875-6, as to the question of comparative expense. He shows that the State tax had indeed been reduced from 9-1/4 mills to 6-1/2 mills, but this only by cutting off outright the school tax of two mills. Not to follow further the labyrinth of figures, it is interesting to note, as to the favorite term "carpet-bagger," that of the six Republican candidates for Congress in Mississippi, in 1876, only one was of Northern birth, and he had married and lived in the South since the war; ...
— The Negro and the Nation - A History of American Slavery and Enfranchisement • George S. Merriam
... desperate position suffered no halting. The storm was ready to break at any moment. In an instant he might be a wretched fugitive, with terror before him and infamy howling behind. But one way led out of this labyrinth. He had resolutely planted his feet in that way, determined to tread it to the end. He did tread it to the end, and he ...
— Bidwell's Travels, from Wall Street to London Prison - Fifteen Years in Solitude • Austin Biron Bidwell
... the political acts of our ancestors, we have a right to bring them to the standard of the political science of their age, but we have no right to bring them to the higher standard of our own. Montesquieu could give them but an imperfect clue to the labyrinth in which they found themselves involved; and yet no one had seen farther into the mysteries of social and political organization than Montesquieu. Hume had scattered brilliant rays on dark places, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 85, November, 1864 • Various
... of Comenius's works: Labirynt swieta a rag srdce, i.e. the World's Labyrinth and the Heart's Paradise, reminds us strongly of Bunyan's celebrated Pilgrim's Progress. It was first published at Prague, 1631, in 4to; and after several editions in other places, it was last printed at the same city in 1809, 12mo. His Latin works were printed at Amsterdam ...
— Historical View of the Languages and Literature of the Slavic - Nations • Therese Albertine Louise von Jacob Robinson
... loss to appreciate the knowledge or authority of an anonymous Italian, whose history (Conclavi de' Pontifici Romani, in 4to. 1667) has been continued since the reign of Alexander VII. The accidental form of the work furnishes a lesson, though not an antidote, to ambition. From a labyrinth of intrigues, we emerge to the adoration of the successful candidate; but the next page ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 6 • Edward Gibbon
... slangy and figurative excesses of his talks. Corey had listened with a miserable curiosity and compassion up to a certain moment, when a broad light of hope flashed upon him. It came from Lapham's potential ruin; and the way out of the labyrinth that had hitherto seemed so hopeless was clear enough, if another's disaster would befriend him, and give him the opportunity to prove the unselfishness of his constancy. He thought of the sum of money that was his own, ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... full of puzzles, or rather it is this life. I would one might see the way a little clearer—might have, as it were, a thread put into one's hand to guide one out of the labyrinth, like that old Grecian story which we teach the children. Some folks seem to lose their way easier than others; and some scarcely seem to behold any labyrinth at all—they walk right through those matters which are walls and hedges to ...
— In Convent Walls - The Story of the Despensers • Emily Sarah Holt
... visited the Opera-House. The President of France lent me his private box. The Opera-House was one of the first to be lighted by the incandescent lamp, and the managers took great pleasure in showing me down through the labyrinth containing the wiring, dynamos, etc. When I came into the box, the orchestra played the 'Star-Spangled Banner,' and all the people in the house arose; whereupon I was very much embarrassed. After I had been an hour at the play, the ...
— Edison, His Life and Inventions • Frank Lewis Dyer and Thomas Commerford Martin
... the bridge where the cables are anchored is a labyrinth of trails crossing and recrossing. The Chief explained that Bright Angel, the little wild burro, had made those at a time when high water had marooned him on that small area. While the bridge was being built he ...
— I Married a Ranger • Dama Margaret Smith
... AS OBJECT.—The acceptance of pleasure and pain as the ultimate motives of human action seems, at first sight, to be of inestimable assistance to us in threading our way through the labyrinth of diverse choices made by ...
— A Handbook of Ethical Theory • George Stuart Fullerton
... November hard fighting was resumed on the Artois front in the region of the Labyrinth, north of Arras, and continued day and night, conducted chiefly with hand grenades. Artillery actions raged in the Argonne forest, near Soissons, Berry-au-Bac, and on the Belgian front. German activity in the Arras-Armentieres sector ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume IV (of 8) • Francis J. (Francis Joseph) Reynolds, Allen L. (Allen Leon)
... the other side and entered a labyrinth of narrow streets, winding in and out between rows of houses, most of them showing a plain, windowless front, the only decoration being over ...
— Virgilia - or, Out of the Lion's Mouth • Felicia Buttz Clark
... would carve his way to the centre of a Christmas pie; and then the lady gave him her hand as a matter of course. Ichabod, on the contrary, had to win his way to the heart of a country coquette, beset with a labyrinth of whims and caprices, which were forever presenting new difficulties and impediments; and he had to encounter a host of fearful adversaries of real flesh and blood, the numerous rustic admirers, who beset every portal to her heart, keeping a watchful and angry eye upon each other, but ...
— The Legend of Sleepy Hollow • Washington Irving
... quiet hour when he may ponder over the capabilities its possession unfolds. She was like one who discovers the silken clue which guides to some bower of bliss, and secure of the power within his grasp, has to wait for a time before he may thread the labyrinth. ...
— Mary Barton • Elizabeth Gaskell
... own observation went, we might have been a hundred miles from the valley we had looked down on, where the French soldiers were walking peacefully up the cart-track in the sunshine. I only knew that we had come out of a black labyrinth into a gutted house among fruit-trees, where soldiers were lounging and smoking, and people whispered as they do about a death-bed. Over a break in the walls I saw another gutted farmhouse close ...
— Fighting France - From Dunkerque to Belport • Edith Wharton
... further march of three days the little army reached the foot of the huge mountain barrier, and entered upon the labyrinth of passes which were to lead them to Atahuallpa's camp. The difficulties of the way were enough to have appalled the stoutest heart. The path was in many places so steep that the men had to dismount and scramble ...
— The Red True Story Book • Various
... plants, or, indeed, with all natural objects known to the ancients, the Ivy was the subject of a myth or religious allegory, and in investigating this myth, we find ourselves in a labyrinth of strange mystery. The ordinary works on mythology, indeed, inform the reader that it was the plant sacred to Bacchus, the god of wine, because, as Loudon states, 'this wine is found at Nyssa, the reputed birthplace of Bacchus, and in no other part of India.' 'It ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 3, No. 1 January 1863 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... tongue then may explain the various fate Which reigns o'er earth? or who to mortal eyes Illustrate this perplexing labyrinth Of joy and woe, through which the feet of man Are doom'd to wander? That Eternal Mind From passions, wants, and envy far estranged, Who built the spacious universe, and deck'd Each part so richly with whate'er pertains To life, to health, to pleasure, why bade he The viper Evil, ...
— Poetical Works of Akenside - [Edited by George Gilfillan] • Mark Akenside
... Thou that dost run, the winged winds exceeding, Bolt which no flash illumes, Fish without scales, bird without shifting plumes, And brute awhile bereft Of natural instinct, why to this wild cleft, This labyrinth of naked rocks, dost sweep Unreined, uncurbed, to plunge thee down the steep? Stay in this mountain wold, And let the beasts their Phaeton behold. For I, without a guide, Save what the laws of destiny decide, Benighted, desperate, blind. Take any path ...
— Life Is A Dream • Pedro Calderon de la Barca
... principal actor, was in a secret which Mr. Larkins did not know; it appears likewise, that there was a Persian moonshee in a secret of which Cantoo Baboo was ignorant; and it appears that Mr. Palmer was in the secret of a transaction not intrusted to any of the rest. Such is the labyrinth of this practical painche, or screw, that, if, for instance, you were endeavoring to trace backwards some transaction through Major Palmer, you would be stopped there, and must go back again; for it had begun with Cantoo ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. X. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... Athens at this time, was one of their great heroes. And you must read about his slaying the Minotaur in Crete, and about the beautiful Ariadne who fell in love with him, and gave him the clue to the labyrinth where her father, Minos, kept the monster hid. These things about the classic little island have an especial ...
— The Great Round World and What Is Going On In It, Vol. 1, No. 25, April 29, 1897 - A Weekly Magazine for Boys and Girls • Various
... of drum or clang of trumpet resounding occasionally from its deep bosom, or the bright glance of arms flashing forth like vivid lightning from its columns. King Ferdinand pitched his tents in the valley beyond the green labyrinth of gardens. He sent his heralds to summon the city to surrender, promising the most favorable terms in case of immediate compliance, and avowing in the most solemn terms his resolution never to abandon the siege until he ...
— Chronicle of the Conquest of Granada • Washington Irving
... natives, who had never read Marco Polo, told him that it was an island, although no man had ever seen the end of it; but Columbus did not believe them, and sailed westward in the belief that he would presently come upon the country and city of Cathay. Soon he found himself in the wonderful labyrinth of islets and sandbanks off the south coast; and because of the wonderful colours of their flowers and climbing plants he called them Jardin de la Reina or Queen's Garden. Dangerous as the navigation through these islands was, he preferred to risk the shoals and sandbanks rather than round them ...
— Christopher Columbus, Complete • Filson Young
... who fostered a half-fancied illness, he might have been more put out than he certainly was when, upon turning into the street, he felt the keen east wind nipping his ears; but it was from a poor house lying in the midst of a very labyrinth of squalid back streets and foul courts, and yet but a mere stone's-throw from his own ...
— A Bachelor's Dream • Mrs. Hungerford
... portion of the building which occupied the extreme apex of the island; but the newcomers had scant opportunity to take in its details, for they were marched straight to a low doorway cut in the tremendously thick wall of the lower story of the building, which gave them admission to a long labyrinth of twisting passages, lighted only by the smoky flare of half a dozen torches. This network of passages they traversed for a distance which both of them estimated at fully five hundred yards, finally arriving at a small door which was ...
— The Adventures of Dick Maitland - A Tale of Unknown Africa • Harry Collingwood
... the extremity of her terror. Should she turn back? The horses might be between her and the river, but judgment told her that they had crossed. Should she brave the nervous fright of a passage through that dark, forbidding labyrinth of gloom when she knew that she should not find the ...
— The Mucker • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... Capuano Castle to the hill of St. Elmo, deep silence had succeeded the myriad sounds that go up from the noisiest city in the world. Charles of Durazzo, quickly walking away from the square of the Correggi, first casting one last look of vengeance at the Castel Nuovo, plunged into the labyrinth of dark streets that twist and turn, cross and recross one another, in this ancient city, and after a quarter of an hour's walking, that was first slow, then very rapid, arrived at his ducal palace near the church of San Giovanni al Mare. He gave certain ...
— CELEBRATED CRIMES, COMPLETE - JOAN OF NAPLES—1343-1382 • ALEXANDRE DUMAS, PERE
... crawfish is able to learn a simple form of the labyrinth method was employed. A wooden box (Fig. 1) 35 cm. long, 24 cm. wide and 15 cm. deep, with one end open, and at the other end a triangular compartment which communicated with the main portion of the box by an opening ...
— Harvard Psychological Studies, Volume 1 • Various
... famous for its winding staircases and its large banqueting hall. The cellars underneath this palace, where the wine and the grain and the olive-oil were stored, had been so vast and had so greatly impressed the first Greek visitors, that they had given rise to the story of the "labyrinth," the name which we give to a structure with so many complicated passages that it is almost impossible to find our way out, once the front door has closed upon ...
— The Story of Mankind • Hendrik van Loon
... were so discreetly drawn. Margot scanned the several rows of windows with a curious interest. To-day new silk brise-bise appeared on the second floor, and a glimpse of a branching palm. Possibly some young bride had found her new home in this dull labyrinth, and it was still beautiful in her sight! Alas, poor bird, to be condemned to build in such a nest! Those curtains to the right were shockingly dirty, showing that some over-tired housewife had retired discomfited from the struggle against London grime. Up on the sixth floor there was a ...
— Big Game - A Story for Girls • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... back to Castile now for a time, in the labyrinth of this much involved period, where the duplication of names and the multiplicity of places makes it difficult to thread one's way intelligently, it will be found that the court, during the reign of Henry IV., was chiefly distinguished by its scandalous immorality. ...
— Women of the Romance Countries • John R. Effinger
... saw the break-up of the brief, bright companionship near Nether Stowey. Coleridge went with Wordsworth and his sister to Germany, but soon parted from them and passed on alone to Gottingen, there to study German, and lose himself in the labyrinth of German metaphysics. Wordsworth and Dorothy remained at Goslar, and, making no acquaintances, spent the winter—said to have been the coldest of the century—by the German stoves, Wordsworth writing more lyrical poems in the same vein which had been opened so happily at Alfoxden. There ...
— Recollections of a Tour Made in Scotland A.D. 1803 • Dorothy Wordsworth
... project was not received with favor by the crafty bishop. He felt it to be the knell of popery, and in writing to Peder Galle he inveighed against it. "We marvel much," he wrote, "that the archbishop should enter this labyrinth without consulting the prelates and chapters of the Church. Every one knows that translations into the vernacular have already given rise to frequent heresy.... It is said the Bible is capable of four different interpretations. Therefore it would imperil many souls were a mere literal ...
— The Swedish Revolution Under Gustavus Vasa • Paul Barron Watson
... city and never cease travelling until I had reached the hotel. Let no man reproach me with forsaking my friend, the Doctor, in his extremity. I was brought up to reverence the law and to entertain a virtuous terror of policemen; and, besides, what could I have effected in that horrible labyrinth of dark rooms and multitudinous furniture? I rang up the porter, went to bed, and lay awake alt the rest of the night, listening for the return of my companions. No one came: no Doctor, no Riley, no butcher, no baker, no candlestick-maker. I was apparently ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 6, Issue 35, September, 1860 • Various
... its prime when I came thither, yet enough of its ancient power and influence remained to show the comprehensive mind of Pedro Blanco. As I entered the river, and wound along through the labyrinth of islands, I was struck, first of all, with the vigilance that made this Spaniard stud the field with look-out seats, protected from sun and rain, erected some seventy-five or hundred feet above the ground, either on poles or on isolated trees, from which the horizon was constantly ...
— Captain Canot - or, Twenty Years of an African Slaver • Brantz Mayer
... and in the possession of an honest fortune. This is all that a wise man has the right to wish for. As to myself, I live like a galley-slave, constantly occupied, and often passing the night without sleeping. I am wrapped up in a labyrinth of affairs, and worn out with care. I do not value fortune. The love of labor is my highest ambition. You perceive that your situation is a thousand times preferable ...
— Famous Americans of Recent Times • James Parton
... indeed! I wonder did mine host suspect that I did not all leave,—that a part of me, a sort of ghostly lodger, remained with him who had asked me so little for my stay? Probably in body I shall never stir him again from beside his fire, nor follow as he leads the way through the labyrinth of his house; but in spirit, at times, I still steal back, and I always find the same kind welcome awaiting me in the guest room in the ell, and the same bright smile of morning to gild the tiny garden court. The only things beyond the grasp of change are our own memories of what ...
— Noto, An Unexplored Corner of Japan • Percival Lowell
... soul, be diverted from that course itself. Thus he pursued science, across her appointed boundaries, into the land of perplexity and shadow. From the truths of astronomy he wandered into astrological fallacy; from the secrets of chemistry he passed into the spectral labyrinth of magic; and he who could be sceptical as to the power of the gods, was credulously superstitious as to ...
— The Last Days of Pompeii • Edward George Bulwer-Lytton
... asked me to believe that (in five minutes) we had dropped an island, passed eight miles of open water, and run almost high and dry upon the next. But my captain was more sorry for himself to be afloat in such a labyrinth; laid the Casco to, with the log line up and down, and sat on the stern rail and watched it till the morning. He had enough of night in ...
— In the South Seas • Robert Louis Stevenson
... towards the mouths of the Orinoco. During the season of rains large vessels go from Angostura as far as San Fernando de Apure, and by the Rio Santo Domingo as far as Torunos, the port of the town of Varinas. At that period the inundations of the rivers, which form a labyrinth of branches between the Apure, the Arauca, the Capanaparo, and the Sinaruco, cover a country of nearly four hundred square leagues. At this point, the Orinoco, turned aside from its course, not by neighbouring mountains, but by the rising of counterslopes, runs eastward ...
— Equinoctial Regions of America V2 • Alexander von Humboldt
... minutes the messenger came back. The marabout, though not well, would receive Monsieur. Stephen was led through the remembered labyrinth of covered passages, dim and cool, though outside the desert sand flamed under the afternoon sun; and as he walked he was aware of softly padding footsteps behind him. Once, he turned his head quickly, and ...
— The Golden Silence • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... my wanderings about the labyrinth of life it has been my good fortune to find awaiting me around every corner some new adventure. If these have generally lacked that vividness of action which to the eye of youth is the very test of adventure, they have been rich in a kind of experience which to a mature and reflective mind ...
— An Adventure With A Genius • Alleyne Ireland
... the rear seat. Two small lamps served to light the way through the Stygian labyrinth of trees and rocks. O'Dowd had an electric pocket torch with which to pick his way ...
— Green Fancy • George Barr McCutcheon
... a monstrous labyrinth, a cortical lute of three thousand strings, and upon it impacted the early music at the dawn of things. In the planetary slime he heard the screaming struggles of fishy beasts; in the tanglewood of hot, aspiring forests were muffled roarings of gigantic mastodons, ...
— Melomaniacs • James Huneker
... so, an insane determination equal in measure to Tenney's insane distrust, to keep the letter of her word. Then, Nan argued, Tira and the child together must go back with her. To Tenney, used only to the remote reaches of his home, the labyrinth of city life was impenetrable. He couldn't possibly find them. He wouldn't be reasonable enough, intelligent enough, to take even the first step. And Raven could stay here and fight out the battle. Tenney wouldn't do anything dramatically silly. Tira was "'way off" in fearing that. He would ...
— Old Crow • Alice Brown
... persons more formed to whet each other's faculties by discussion, as on few points of common interest between them did their opinions agree: and that this difference had its root deep in the conformation of their respective minds, needs but a glance through the rich, glittering labyrinth of Shelley's pages ...
— My Recollections of Lord Byron • Teresa Guiccioli
... could they hurt themselves, for evil was but distance from her side, the ignorance of those who had wandered furthest into the little dark labyrinth of a separated self. The "intellect" they were so ...
— The Centaur • Algernon Blackwood
... the cross-roads of her life; she was at a turning point in the labyrinth, after passing which it would be hard to come back and find the right way. Perhaps old Griggs could help her if it occurred to him; but that was unlikely, for he had reached the age when men who ...
— The Primadonna • F. Marion Crawford
... of them, but their head-quarters were at Caius, whither they were attracted by Mr. Clayton, who was at that time senior tutor, and among the sizars of St. John's. Behind the then chapel of this last-named college was a 'labyrinth' (this was the name it bore) of dingy, tumble-down rooms," and here dwelt many Simeonites, "unprepossessing in feature, gait, and manners, unkempt and ill-dressed beyond what can be easily described. Destined most of them for the Church, the ...
— Samuel Butler's Cambridge Pieces • Samuel Butler
... has remained a slave without courage, fearing to reason, and unable to extricate himself from the labyrinth, in which he has been wandering. He believes himself forced under the yoke of his gods, known to him only by the fabulous accounts given by his ministers, who, after binding each unhappy mortal in the chains of prejudice, remain ...
— Good Sense - 1772 • Paul Henri Thiry, Baron D'Holbach
... on Benares, a city which in wealth, population, dignity, and sanctity, was among the foremost of Asia. It was commonly believed that half a million of human beings was crowded into that labyrinth of lofty alleys, rich with shrines, and minarets, and balconies, and carved oriels, to which the sacred apes clung by hundreds. The traveller could scarcely make his way through the press of holy mendicants and not less holy bulls. The broad and ...
— Critical and Historical Essays, Volume III (of 3) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... house stretched the garden; and in its midst, mounted on a stone arch, stood a dismal sun-dial with hearts and spades painted between its figures; while the trees around it were trimmed into the shapes of confessionals and chess-pawns. To the right, a labyrinth of young trees, similarly clipped in the fashion of the time, led by a thousand devious turns to a mysterious valley, where one heard continually a low, sad murmur. This proceeded from a nymph in terra-cotta, from whose urn dripped, ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... his dark figure insensibly blended with the waving branches of his wild solitude, and without a cry of fear or joy, he was lost to us, perhaps for ever! We burst through the same brushwood he had recently thrown aside, and entered a labyrinth of forest trees, without finding a clue to ...
— Discoveries in Australia, Volume 2 • John Lort Stokes
... those who have thoroughly studied the comparative morphology of the vertebrata, who have sought the genetic issue from that labyrinth of intricate morphological problems at the hands of the theory of descent, can duly value the immeasurable service which Gegenbaur has done by this and other "Investigations into the Comparative Anatomy of the Vertebrata." These investigations are as ...
— Freedom in Science and Teaching. - from the German of Ernst Haeckel • Ernst Haeckel
... sort of pastime suited my hours of silence, which became less and less broken by the talkative vein. His forefinger rubbed away defects in the aspect of faces or animals with a lion-like suppleness of sweep that seemed to me to wipe out the world. We also had a delicious game of a labyrinth of lines, which it was necessary to traverse with the pencil without touching the hedges, as I called the winding marks. We wandered in and around without a murmur, and I reveled in ...
— Memories of Hawthorne • Rose Hawthorne Lathrop
... a more interesting subject for Browning. For Love then becomes full of strange turns, unexpected thoughts, impulses unknown before creating varied circumstances, and created by them; and these his intellectual spirituality delighted to cope with, and to follow, labyrinth after labyrinth. I shall give examples of these separate studies, which have always an idea beyond the love out of which the poem arises. In some of them the love is finally absorbed in the idea. In all of them their aim is beyond the love of which ...
— The Poetry Of Robert Browning • Stopford A. Brooke
... the war broke out is like threading the Cretan Labyrinth in a dense fog. The fog, curiously enough, which now seldom lifts, would seem to form an integral part of the politics. For one of the maxims of the present chief of the Consulta, Baron Sonnino, is that secrecy is the ...
— England and Germany • Emile Joseph Dillon
... trick or in imagination, and the Obelisks, whose form is sufficiently explained, without obscenity or mystery, by the fancy for monolithic monuments and the possession of large blocks of granite. The remains of the Labyrinth do not enable us to pronounce whether its twenty-seven halls were a burial-place for kings or crocodiles, or a place of assembly for the ...
— The International Magazine, Volume 2, No. 3, February, 1851 • Various
... I had been long on my way; and as I had got by that time to the top of the ascent, and was now treading a labyrinth of confined by-roads, my whole view brightened considerably in colour, for it was the distance only that was grey and cold, and the distance I could see no longer. Overhead there was a wonderful carolling of larks which seemed ...
— Essays of Travel • Robert Louis Stevenson
... From Ddalus, a famous Athenian architect, who designed the labyrinth at Crete in which ...
— Six Centuries of English Poetry - Tennyson to Chaucer • James Baldwin
... sublime confidence, there would come the inevitable backward rush of all the chilling fear, despondency, and false thought which he had just expelled in vain, and he would be left again floundering helplessly in the dismal labyrinth of ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... service of their great project, slowly elaborating their toils, much as the ant-lion excavates its funnel in the sand and lies in wait at the bottom for its victim. Suppose that no one strays, after all, into that carefully constructed labyrinth? Suppose that the ant-lion dies of hunger and thirst in her pit? Such things may be, but if any heedless creature once enters in, it never comes out. All the wires which could be pulled to induce action on the captain's part were tried; appeals were made to the secret interested ...
— Library of the World's Best Mystery and Detective Stories • Edited by Julian Hawthorne
... rustic bridge across the mill-stream, and a wooden gate opening into Arden woods. Clarissa very often stood by this gate, leaning with folded arms upon the topmost bar, and looking into the shadowy labyrinth of beech and pine with sad dreamy eyes, but she never went beyond the barrier. Honest Martha asked her more than once why she never walked in the wood, which was so much pleasanter than the dusty high-road, ...
— The Lovels of Arden • M. E. Braddon
... to follow the obscure labyrinth of legal procedure of that period, and to recite all the marches and countermarches which legal subtlety suggested to the litigants. At the end of three years, on the 9th of April 1661, the countess obtained a judgment by which ...
— CELEBRATED CRIMES, COMPLETE - THE COUNTESS DE SAINT-GERAN—1639 • ALEXANDRE DUMAS, PERE
... vast ringed plain of Maginus, a hundred miles broad and very wonderful to look upon, with its labyrinth of formations, when the sun slopes across it, and yet, like Maurolycus, invisible under a vertical illumination. "The full moon," to use Maedler's picturesque expression, "knows no Maginus." Still larger and yet more splendid is Clavius, which ...
— Pleasures of the telescope • Garrett Serviss
... hopes, Still turning false her fickle, wavering wheel! And love's fair goddess with her Circian cup Enchanteth so fond Cupid's poison'd darts, That love, the only loadstar of my life, Doth draw my thoughts into a labyrinth. But stay: What do I see? what do mine eyes behold? O happy sight! It is fair Lelia's face! Hail, heav'n's bright nymph, the period of my grief, Sole guidress of my thoughts, ...
— A Select Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. IX • Various
... waste, nor heart to speak them. She got up and went down stairs and in at the open parlour door, like a person who walks in a dream through a dreadful labyrinth of pain, made up of what used to be familiar objects of pleasure. So she went in. But so soon as her eye caught the figure standing before the fireplace, though she did not know what he had come there for, only that he was there, her heart sprang as to a pillar ...
— Hills of the Shatemuc • Susan Warner
... composed of three walks, which are lined with orange and acacia trees, and vases of roses. At the end is a tower mounted on a rock, temples, and rustic bridges; and on each side of the walks, are little labyrinth bowers. On the side next to the Boulevard, is a terrace which commands the whole scene, is lined on each side with beautiful vases of flowers, and is terminated at each end by alcoves, which are lined with mirrors. Here in the course ...
— The Stranger in France • John Carr
... all, then, let us look at the chaotic and apparently lawless side of dreaming, and see whether any clue is discoverable to the centre of this labyrinth. In the case of all the less elaborately ordered dreams, in which sights and sounds appear to succeed one another in the wildest dance (which class of dreams probably belongs to the deeper stages of sleep), the mind may with certainty ...
— Illusions - A Psychological Study • James Sully
... of the city's fame and expectant of meeting objects of beauty at every turn, almost instant disappointment. The narrow, dirty, ill-paved streets are also very crooked. One can readily be lost in a labyrinth of filthy little lanes the moment one quits the few main thoroughfares. High over head, to be sure, the red crags of the Acropolis may be towering, crowned with the red, gold, and white tinted marble of the temples, but all around seems only monotonous squalor. The houses ...
— A Day In Old Athens • William Stearns Davis
... have no clear record, or no vestige of a record. Egyptians, Phoenicians, Cretans, men of the rich island state of which we have only recently found the remains in buried palaces, Greeks of the Asiatic mainland, and their Eastern neighbours, Greeks of the islands and the Peninsula, Illyrians of the labyrinth of creek and island that fringes the Adriatic, Sicilians and Carthaginians, all had their adventures and battles on the sea, in the dim beginnings of history. Homer has his catalogue of ships set forth in stately verse, telling ...
— Famous Sea Fights - From Salamis to Tsu-Shima • John Richard Hale
... Older Children.—Older children enjoy a peanut hunt, or a spider party where they follow a twine through a labyrinth of loopings and find a small prize at the end, or a book party, where each guest represents the title of some book. Thus Ouida's "Under Two Flags" could be very easily represented. Young folks always enjoy "dressing up," and any hostess can either find directions ...
— Mother's Remedies - Over One Thousand Tried and Tested Remedies from Mothers - of the United States and Canada • T. J. Ritter
... etiquette may be seen vividly reflected." In fact, the use of tea as a beverage had very little to do with the refined amusement to which it was ultimately elevated. The term "tasting" would apply more accurately to the pastime than "drinking." But even the two combined convey no idea of the labyrinth of observances which constituted the ceremonial. The development of the cha-no-yu is mainly due to Shuko, a priest of the Zen sect of Buddhism, who seems to have conceived that tea drinking might be utilized to promote the moral conditions which ...
— A History of the Japanese People - From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era • Frank Brinkley and Dairoku Kikuchi
... human actions than the accidental combination of the kaleidoscope does this living and breathing world. We want a key, and a key has not been found. So men go stumbling on through the inextricable labyrinth, and exhaust more ingenuity in vain speculations than would suffice to bring a variety ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 428 - Volume 17, New Series, March 13, 1852 • Various
... our village. His mind acted upon other minds of a certain constitution with wonderful magnetism, and drew many men upon long pilgrimages to speak with him face to face. Young visionaries, to whom just so much of insight had been imparted as to make life all a labyrinth around them, came to seek the clue that should guide them out of their self-involved bewilderment. Gray-headed theorists, whose systems, at first air, had finally imprisoned them in an iron framework, traveled painfully to his door, not to ask deliverance, but to invite the free ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. IX (of X) - America - I • Various
... to shut his eyes when he must choose between the neglect of duty and the wounding of the woman he loves. And alas! this is a choice that comes sooner or later, in one form or another, to all who love. The woman sometimes can find an invisible thread leading through the labyrinth of the feminine conscience which may help her to follow a middle course. The man never has any such subtle resource and he knows, from first to last, that he must do what is wrong if he does not ...
— Round Anvil Rock - A Romance • Nancy Huston Banks
... be reasonable; he wouldn't stand in her way; he would let her go. For two years he had been living some other, luckier man's life; the time had come when he must drop back into his own. He no longer tried to look ahead, to grope his way through the endless labyrinth of his material difficulties; a sense of dull resignation closed in on him like ...
— The Touchstone • Edith Wharton
... with military titles. If the vessels in which they are interested are in danger, all difficulties are conquered, for there is no one who does not hasten with vote and money to fit out fleets to oppose the enemy. But if not then each proposition is a labyrinth, whence he who makes it cannot unravel himself, although Ariadne gives him a thread to guide him. Hence it follows, either that squadrons are not prepared of size sufficient to warn the aggressors, or if they are prepared, ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898 - Volume 41 of 55, 1691-1700 • Various
... standing motionless, muffled in a heavy grey cloak; and through it our cooks passed, disappearing into the darkness, under the guidance of the liaison orderly of the preceding detachment. Whilst waiting for his return from the journey through the labyrinth our Chasseurs had a short rest before beginning the most difficult part of their journey—the last stage on the way to the trenches ...
— In the Field (1914-1915) - The Impressions of an Officer of Light Cavalry • Marcel Dupont
... the association of ideas is passive, and in consequence is a kind of passion. The association of ideas is the fact that thought passes along the same path it has already traversed, and follows in its labyrinth the thread which interlinks its thoughts, and this thread is the traces which thoughts have left in the brain. In abandoning ourselves to the association of ideas, we are passive and we yield ourselves freely to a passion. ...
— Initiation into Philosophy • Emile Faguet
... Commencing their labors on a principle of sloth, they have the common fortune of slothful men. The difficulties, which they rather had eluded than escaped, meet them again in their course; they multiply and thicken on them; they are involved, through a labyrinth of confused detail, in an industry without limit and without direction; and in conclusion, the whole of their work becomes feeble, vicious, ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. III. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... ground below Notre Dame de Lorette and the fields round Souchez, the French had fought ferociously, burrowing below earth at the Labyrinth—sapping, mining, gaining a network of trenches, an isolated house, a huddle of ruins, a German sap-head, by frequent rushes and the frenzy of those who fight vith their teeth and hands, flinging themselves on the bodies of their enemy, below ground in the darkness, or above ground between ...
— Now It Can Be Told • Philip Gibbs
... was as foggy as that which preceded it, when about the hour of ten o'clock a coaster was observed gliding in towards the cliffs, and entering among a labyrinth of rocks that lay near the mouth ...
— Wood Rangers - The Trappers of Sonora • Mayne Reid
... Oh wert thou for my selfe: but Suffolke stay, Thou mayest not wander in that Labyrinth, There Minotaurs and vgly Treasons lurke, Solicite Henry with her wonderous praise. Bethinke thee on her Vertues that surmount, Mad naturall Graces that extinguish Art, Repeate their semblance often on the Seas, That when thou ...
— The First Folio [35 Plays] • William Shakespeare
... must go either inside or outside the Great Barrier. The inside passage has been called the Inner Route in consequence of its desirability for steamers, and our business has been to mark out this Inner Route safely and clearly among the labyrinth-like islands and reefs within the Barrier. And a parlous dull business it was for those who, like myself, had no necessary and constant occupation. Fancy for five mortal months shifting from patch ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 1 • Leonard Huxley
... listen. The soft breath of the sea blew on my cheeks, and with every breath the delicate vibrations of appealing harmony rose and fell—it was as if these enchanting sounds were being played or sung for me alone. In a delicious languor I drowsed, as it were, with my eyes open,—losing myself in a labyrinth of happy dreams and fancies which came to me unbidden,— till presently the music died softly away like a retreating wave and ceased altogether. I waited a few minutes—listening breathlessly lest it should begin again and I lose some note ...
— The Life Everlasting: A Reality of Romance • Marie Corelli
... to have the honor of completing the work himself, that he commenced it at once. The president, greatly displeased at learning this, quickened his march, in order to cover the work with his whole force. But, while toiling through the mountain labyrinth, tidings were brought him that a party of the enemy had demolished the small portion of the bridge already made, by cutting the cables on the opposite bank. Valdivia, accordingly, hastened forward at the head of two hundred arquebusiers, while ...
— The History Of The Conquest Of Peru • William H. Prescott
... during the journey, nor was Beale inclined for conversation. At Baker Street Station they stopped and the cab was dismissed. Together they walked in silence, turning from the main road, passing the Central Station and plunging into a labyrinth of streets which was foreign ...
— The Green Rust • Edgar Wallace
... forest which would shelter him, and above the forest, hardly a mile back, began the Grizzly Peaks. They lunged straight up to snowy summits, and all along their sides blue shadows of the afternoon drifted through a network of ravines—a promise of peace, a surety of safety if he could reach that labyrinth. ...
— The Seventh Man • Max Brand
... the Catholic League," replied the old man, making a wry face. "However, the God of Israel neither slumbers nor sleeps, and I rejoice to have chanced upon thee, were it only to be guided back to my lodgings amid this water labyrinth." ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... then pressing upon society. We will not say that Herder wrote every work just as it should have been, and that he was evangelical throughout. This he was not, but he was greatly in advance of his predecessors. Amid the labyrinth of philosophical speculations it is interesting and refreshing to meet with an author who, though endowed with the mind of a philosopher, was content to pass for a poet, or even for an essayist. His was a mind of rare versatility. What he was not ...
— History of Rationalism Embracing a Survey of the Present State of Protestant Theology • John F. Hurst
... formed to whet each other's faculties by discussion, as on few points of common interest between them did their opinions agree; and that this difference had its root deep in the conformation of their respective minds needs but a glance through the rich, glittering labyrinth of Mr. ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. III - With His Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... imperceptibly into the future Helplessly sense the fire. A serpentine nerve Impelled to lengthen itself generation after generation Pierces the labyrinth of flames To ...
— Precipitations • Evelyn Scott
... for the uninstructed mind to grasp the plan or method of this mass of architecture; yet it is unsatisfactory to give it up, with Mr. Henry James, "as an irresponsible, insoluble labyrinth." M. Viollet-le-Duc, with a sympathetic denial of any extreme and over-technical admiration, gives just that intelligible account of the chateau which is a compromise between the unmeaning adulation of its contemporary critics and the ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume 4 (of 10) • Various
... by the fall of the river Diveria, and gazed with the fascination of a mouse for a cat at a huge and diabolical fan, driving air into the tunnel. This fearful beast had a house to itself, with a passage down which you could venture like Theseus entering the labyrinth of the Minotaur; but such was the volume of breath which it drew into its mighty lungs that you must use all your strength not to be sucked in and hurled against the shafting; all your self-control not to be confused by its ...
— The Princess Passes • Alice Muriel Williamson and Charles Norris Williamson
... last words of advice given, and Cummings plunged into the labyrinth of gullies and underbrush, leaving his companions each to pursue his own way, Moriarity going west, while Haight, going east, sprang the fence, and entering a thick patch of bushes, brought out a horse, saddled and bridled. ...
— Jim Cummings • Frank Pinkerton
... climbed to the summit of glory and power. Who would suppose that this traitor prince would desert the emperor, who had so splendidly rewarded his services, and return to the rescue of those princes whom he had so basely betrayed? But who can thread the labyrinth of an intriguing and selfish heart? Who can calculate the movements of an unprincipled and restless politician? Maurice, at length, awoke to the perception of the real condition of his country. He saw its liberties being overturned ...
— A Modern History, From the Time of Luther to the Fall of Napoleon - For the Use of Schools and Colleges • John Lord
... the thickening twilight, I saw how our paths diverged, and whither each must surely tend. No doubtful way was hers, the single-hearted woman of lofty aims, of restless feminine activity, of holy impatience with sin. She might, indeed, miss the clue which guides through the labyrinth; but then her life would teach mankind even better than she designed. On the other hand,—supposing the position attained which too constantly occupied my own thoughts,—there was an admiration of men, a market-salutation from reputable ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, No. 72, October, 1863 • Various
... better be called 'Children of the Shadow'. Their souls are dark and nocturnal. If they are to be easy, they must be able to hide, to be hidden in lairs and caves of darkness. Going through these tiny chaotic backways of the village was like venturing through the labyrinth made by furtive creatures, who watched from out of another element. And I was pale, and clear, and evanescent, like the light, and they were dark, and close, ...
— Twilight in Italy • D.H. Lawrence
... public, and he acknowledged to me that he intended to restore confidence by a more mild system than that of his predecessor. I had observed formerly that Savary did not coincide in the opinion I had always entertained of Fouche, but when once the Due de Rovigo endeavoured to penetrate the labyrinth of police, counter-police, inspections and hierarchies of espionage, he found they were all bugbears which Fouche had created to alarm the Emperor, as gardeners put up scarecrows among the fruit-trees to frighten ...
— Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte, Complete • Louis Antoine Fauvelet de Bourrienne
... Hughie thought, Hughie's wife—oh, jealous thought, only to be met by prayer! But later on—joy of joys—Hughie's children! He realized it, now and then, vaguely, momentarily, but never as fully as last Sunday. He shrank from the remembrance, and his mind wandered anew in the labyrinth of broken, twisted thought, from which he could find no ...
— Red Pottage • Mary Cholmondeley
... almost every stone or quarry of glass, was the best of lionisers, and gave her much attention when he perceived how intelligent and appreciative she was. He showed her the plan of the old conventual buildings, and she began to unravel the labyrinth through which she had been hurried. The Close and Deanery were modernised, but he valued the quaint old corner where he lived for its genuine age. The old house now divided between him and Mr. Shapcote ...
— The Pillars of the House, V1 • Charlotte M. Yonge
... moment motionless, and almost petrified with astonishment. All was changed around me: the enchanted panorama had disappeared, and I found myself in a small filthy crossway, at the entrance of a labyrinth of narrow, damp, dark, muddy streets. The houses which surrounded me, built as they were of disjointed planks, had a miserable aspect; time and rain had diluted their primitive red colour into numberless nameless ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 380, June, 1847 • Various
... have a hard task following us, unless they have an Indian trailer along with them. We have been here several hours; the horses must be rested. Let's eat what we can again and then start. We must find a way out of this labyrinth while we have daylight." ...
— The Devil's Own - A Romance of the Black Hawk War • Randall Parrish
... peoples as the surface spirit that flitted over an evanescent epoch. They stood for national grandeur, territorial expansion, party interests, and even abstract ideas. Exponents of a narrow section of the old order at its lowest ebb, they were in no sense heralds of the new. Amid a labyrinth of ruins they had no clue to guide their footsteps, in which the peoples of the world were told to follow. Only true political vision, breadth of judgment, thorough mastery of the elements of the situation, an instinct for discerning central issues, genuine ...
— The Inside Story Of The Peace Conference • Emile Joseph Dillon
... uneasy in his mind just at present. But he was by no means so clear on this subject as could be desired—in fact, he spoke through his nose, put in and left out his hs in the wrong places, and involved his dialogue in a long labyrinth of parentheses whenever he expressed himself at any length. It was not until the entrance of his daughter Fanny (just arrived from London: nobody knew why or wherefore), that he grew more emphatic and intelligible. We now ...
— Rambles Beyond Railways; - or, Notes in Cornwall taken A-foot • Wilkie Collins
... those children of an older and simpler generation who do not love to seek for psychological subtleties in art; and I have ever refused to find in music anything more than melody and harmony, but I felt that in the labyrinth of sounds now issuing from that instrument there was something being hunted. Up and down the pedals chased him, while the manuals blared approval. Poor devil! whoever he was, there ...
— The King In Yellow • Robert W. Chambers
... and the Strangler at once released Jack from the chair and removed the gag from his mouth. Next Jack was led away by a couple of guards and conducted once more through a labyrinth of narrow, winding passages until they halted before a door, where the Malay unlocked and took off Jack's fetters. The door was opened, and he was thrust into the room, his ...
— Jack Haydon's Quest • John Finnemore
... this balcony and its realm of sunny silence through the proper palace of the "Apollo" and the "Laocoon" and Raphael's "Transfiguration" and "Stanze." The Vatican is a wilderness of art and association, and in the allotted three hours I could only wander through the stately labyrinth and arrange the rooms, but not their contents, in my mind, but could not escape the "Apollo," which stands alone in a small cabinet opening upon a garden and fountain. It was greater to me than ...
— Early Letters of George Wm. Curtis • G. W. Curtis, ed. George Willis Cooke
... friends, and everyone with the least aptitude for drawing started a sketchbook. Like most ancient buildings, the old hall, while preserving its principal rooms in good repair, was growing shaky in the upper stories. The labyrinth of attics that lay under the roof had been neglected till the latticed windows were almost off their hinges, and the plaster had fallen in great patches from the ceilings. Fearing lest the worm-eaten floors ...
— The Madcap of the School • Angela Brazil
... was accompanied with every token of sincerity. How had I tottered on the brink of destruction! If I had made use of this money, in what a labyrinth of misery might I not have been involved! My innocence could never have been proved. An alliance with Welbeck could not have failed to be inferred. My career would have found an ignominious close; or, if my punishment had been transmuted into slavery ...
— Arthur Mervyn - Or, Memoirs of the Year 1793 • Charles Brockden Brown
... through a very labyrinth of narrow, unpaved streets, roofed here and there with frayed and tattered palmetto-leaves that offer some protection, albeit a scanty one, against the blazing sun. At one of the corners where the beggars congregate and call for alms in the ...
— Morocco • S.L. Bensusan
... truth, a wonder and a stumbling-block. Good, simple-hearted, easy-going, logical-minded, sceptical shoemaker that he was, with his head all stuffed full of Malthus, and John Stuart Mill, and political economy, and the hard facts of life and science, how could he hope to understand the complex labyrinth of metaphysical thinking, and childlike faith, and aesthetic attraction, and historical authority, which made a sensitive man like Arthur Berkeley, in his wayward, half-serious, emotional fashion, turn back lovingly and regretfully to the fair old creed ...
— Philistia • Grant Allen
... who leads the soul from the depths of life to its sunary heights. Mozart transposed life into music, Wagner and his pupils transposed problems of life. Wagner questions and receives no answer. Mozart affirms life. His "Don Juan" liberates, "Tannhaeuser" leads into the labyrinth of bothersome renunciation. ...
— Mother Earth, Vol. 1 No. 1, March 1906 • Various
... of a hound and arms to hug like a bear—in converse with the fishmonger, saw the master at first refusing, then gradually giving reluctant assent to some demand. Next Phormio was half leading, half carrying the fugitive aboard the ship, guiding him through a labyrinth of bales, jars, and cordage, and pointing to a hatchway ladder, illumined ...
— A Victor of Salamis • William Stearns Davis
... fields. To-day, I propose to add to the difficulties of distance those of the ground to be traversed. Discontinuing all my backing- and whirling-tactics, things which I recognize as useless, I think of releasing my Chalicodomae in the thick of the Serignan Woods. How will they escape from that labyrinth, where, in the early days, I needed a compass to find my way? Moreover, I shall have an assistant with me, a pair of eyes younger than mine and better-fitted to follow my insects' first flight. That immediate start in the direction of the nest has already been repeated ...
— The Mason-bees • J. Henri Fabre
... picture. The town itself is neat, clean and dull, like all Dutch towns. The fortifications are strong and well worth inspection. The most remarkable thing in the neighbourhood of Maastricht is the Montagne de St Pierre, which from having been much excavated for the purpose of procuring stone, forms a labyrinth of a most intricate nature. I advise every traveller to visit it, and if he has a classical imagination he may fancy himself ...
— After Waterloo: Reminiscences of European Travel 1815-1819 • Major W. E Frye
... illustrious, for the ennoblement of their own lives. No book has sold more largely than the Imitation of Christ. But was it not often a blind struggle in the dark, an attempt to reach a goal never clearly seen. Wandering in a labyrinth of fanaticism, agonizing in the effort to distort nature, the biographical record of religious aspiration serves to show how nearly multitudes may approach the boundary line of insanity in their ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, August 1887 - Volume 1, Number 7 • Various
... iodine salts bromide skirts gas liqueurs bubbles 3 seconds toumbtoumb officer whiteness telemetre cross fire megaphone sight-at-thousand-metres all-men-to-left enough every-man-to-his post incline-7-degrees splendour jet pierce immensity azure deflowering onslaught alleys cries labyrinth mattress sobs ploughing desert bed precision telemetre monoplane cackling theatre applause monoplane equals balcony rose wheel drum trepan gad-fly rout arabs oxen blood-colour shambles wounds ...
— A Study of Poetry • Bliss Perry
... carve his way to the centre of a Christmas pie; and then the lady gave him her hand as a matter of course. Ichabod, on the contrary, had to win his way to the heart of a country coquette, beset with a labyrinth of whims and caprices, which were forever presenting new difficulties and impediments; and he had to encounter a host of fearful adversaries of real flesh and blood, the numerous rustic admirers, who beset ...
— Legends That Every Child Should Know • Hamilton Wright Mabie
... character of such a region will be clear. It is, in the technical language of military art, a labyrinth of defiles. Care has been expended upon the province, especially in the last two generations, and each narrow passage between the principal sheets of water carries a road, often a hard causeway. A considerable ...
— A General Sketch of the European War - The First Phase • Hilaire Belloc
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