"Adamantine" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Alike divine, and heaven their native place; But Jove the greater; first-born of the skies, And more than men, or gods, supremely wise. For this, of Jove's superior might afraid, Neptune in human form conceal'd his aid. These powers enfold the Greek and Trojan train In war and discord's adamantine chain, Indissolubly strong: the fatal tie Is stretch'd on both, and close compell'd ...
— The Iliad of Homer • Homer
... And hell's abyss, hide nothing from your sight (We, wretched mortals! lost in doubts below, But guess by rumour, and but boast we know), Oh! say what heroes, fired by thirst of fame, Or urged by wrongs, to Troy's destruction came! To count them all demands a thousand tongues, A throat of brass and adamantine lungs. ...
— Lives of the English Poets: Prior, Congreve, Blackmore, Pope • Samuel Johnson
... the place of all other divinities, and that happiness is the unfailing consequence of virtue. But surely the quiver of Omnipotence is stored with arrows against which the shield of human virtue, however adamantine it has been boasted, is held up in vain; we do not always suffer by our crimes; we are not always protected by our innocence.' The Adventurer, No. 120. See also Rasselas, ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 1 • Boswell
... everlasting Light, a stream from the fountain of heavenly Wisdom and Love. This is the evidence which sustains the faith of thousands, who never read and cannot understand the learned books of Christian apologists, who want, perhaps, words to explain the ground of their belief, but whose faith is of adamantine firmness, who hold the gospel with a conviction more intimate and unwavering than mere arguments ...
— Orthodoxy: Its Truths And Errors • James Freeman Clarke
... of those who begin by trying to expunge the sacred memory of the fourth of July? Shall we help them to obliterate the associations that cluster around the glorious struggle for independence, or stultify the labors of the patriots who erected this magnificent political edifice upon the adamantine base of human liberty? Shall we surrender the fame of Washington and Laurens, of Gadsden and the Lees, of Jefferson and Madison, and of the myriads of heroes whose names are imperishably connected with the memory of a ...
— The World's Best Orations, Vol. 1 (of 10) • Various
... must be loved. And though you have all the knowledge of a von Humboldt, and do not love her, you will never understand her or her teachings. You will go through life with her, and yet parted from her as by an adamantine wall. ...
— The Whence and the Whither of Man • John Mason Tyler
... might of England flush'd To anticipate the scene; And her van the fleeter rush'd O'er the deadly space between. "Hearts of Oak!" our captains cried; when each gun From its adamantine lips Spread a death-shade round the ships, Like the hurricane eclipse Of ...
— Successful Recitations • Various
... it in the rock," Saint Bernard said, "Grave it on brass with adamantine pen! 'Tis God himself becomes apparent, when God's wisdom ...
— Poetical Works of Matthew Arnold • Matthew Arnold
... in the District of Columbia," said Mr. Sumner, "concerns directly some twenty thousand colored persons, whom it will lift to the adamantine platform of equal rights. If it were regarded simply in its bearings on the District it would be difficult to exaggerate its value; but when it is regarded as an example to the whole country under the sanction of Congress, its value is infinite. ...
— History of the Thirty-Ninth Congress of the United States • Wiliam H. Barnes
... these commands, the Creator remained in his own nature. And his children, receiving from him the immortal principle, borrowed from the world portions of earth, air, fire, water, hereafter to be returned, which they fastened together, not with the adamantine bonds which bound themselves, but by little invisible pegs, making each separate body out of all the elements, subject to influx and efflux, and containing the courses of the soul. These swelling and surging as in a ...
— Timaeus • Plato
... strain that never stops Is mightier than the fiercest shock; The constant fall of water drops Will groove the adamantine rock; We feel our noblest powers decay In feeble ...
— Poems with Power to Strengthen the Soul • Various
... good and bad each had, in its turn, a perfect and distinct existence? He chose to think that this was the case. Who, within his inner consciousness, does not feel that same ferine, savage man struggling against the stern, adamantine bonds of morality and decorum? Were those bonds burst asunder, as it was with this man, might not the wild beast rush forth, as it had rushed forth in him, to rend and to tear? Such were the questions that Mainwaring asked himself. And how had it all come about? By what easy ...
— Howard Pyle's Book of Pirates • Howard Pyle
... tell me you have made up your mind," cried the lady hysterically, who knew from a twelve years' experience that John Temple's made-up mind was like an adamantine wall to ...
— Hubert's Wife - A Story for You • Minnie Mary Lee
... Prometheus; And thrusts him down from heaven. He, wandering here, In mournful terms, with sad and heavy cheer, 440 Complain'd to Cupid: Cupid, for his sake, To be reveng'd on Jove did undertake; And those on whom heaven, earth, and hell relies, I mean the adamantine Destinies, He wounds with love, and forc'd them equally To dote upon deceitful Mercury. They offer'd him the deadly fatal knife That shears the slender threads[23] of human life; At his fair-feather'd feet the engines laid, Which ...
— The Works of Christopher Marlowe, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Christopher Marlowe
... respective abilities of the parties. The laurels that grow within these precincts are to be gathered with no vulgar hands; they resist the unhallowed grasp, like the golden branch with which the hero of the AEneid threw open the adamantine gates ...
— An Essay on Professional Ethics - Second Edition • George Sharswood
... youthful freshness? Fetters thee that lovely mien? That glance so full of truth and goodness, With an adamantine chain? Vain the hardy wish to tear me From those meshes that ensnare me; For the moment I would flee, Straight my path leads back ...
— The Youth of Goethe • Peter Hume Brown
... my lips on pleas Would brandle adamantine heaven with ride and jar, did Prayer go disregarded: Forward-like, but however, and like favourable ...
— Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins - Now First Published • Gerard Manley Hopkins
... you, by unassailable testimony, no alternative remains but the verdict of guilty. Mournful as is the duty, and awfully solemn the necessity that leaves the issue of life and death in your hands, remember, gentlemen, Curran's immortal words: 'A juror's oath is the adamantine chain that binds the integrity of man to the throne of ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... felt down in my soul the clear and unmistakable conviction to disobey all, and pursue my own way." He told Emerson so, whereupon they went and dined together. The independence of the poet probably impressed Emerson more than his yielding would have done, for had not he preached the adamantine doctrine of self-trust? "To believe your own thought," he says, "to believe that what is true for you in your private heart is true of ...
— Whitman - A Study • John Burroughs
... beneath the leaves in caverns adamantine we are peeping, Now along the blazing pearl and ruby corridors we glide, And amongst the tall fantastic arches slily are we creeping, There within their dark, ...
— The Minstrel - A Collection of Poems • Lennox Amott
... Let their minds be wholly devoted. Under the influence of that faith which makes humble, but also enables to do all things in the strength of Christ, let them enter on duty. Having taken up their position, as if bound by the adamantine chain of necessity, yet free as the orbs of heaven—under the influence of gravity, let them, cordially engaged to one another, occupy that ground, there to stand or fall together. Let there be taken by them the calm and noble resolution, which ...
— The Ordinance of Covenanting • John Cunningham
... His throne can no more be shaken by the puny attacks of men or devils than the everlasting mountains can be disturbed by the storm-blasts which howl around them. What more, then, is needed, than to shut up the wicked in a prison-house, through whose adamantine walls the accusing cry can never pierce, and whose doors are for ever barred by the holy decree of the Almighty? Ah! were it so, even this thought might possibly gratify pride and enmity, could a condemned, though ...
— Parish Papers • Norman Macleod
... persecute and despise those whose sexual necessities force them to break through our unnatural moral codes; we may burn alive if we please the prostitutes and the adulterers; we may break our own and our neighbor's hearts against the adamantine laws that surround us, but not one step, not one shall we advance, till we acknowledge these laws, and adopt the only possible mode in which they can be obeyed." These words were written in 1854. Recent events have accentuated their ...
— The Pivot of Civilization • Margaret Sanger
... heroes, and the stormy glories of the sixteenth century rose on awakened Europe. But Spain was the citadel of darkness,—a monastic cell, an inquisitorial dungeon, where no ray could pierce. She was the bulwark of the Church, against whose adamantine wall the waves of innovation beat in vain. [19] In every country of Europe the party of freedom and reform was the national party, the party of reaction and absolutism was the Spanish party, leaning on Spain, looking to her for help. Above all, it was so in France; and, while ...
— Pioneers Of France In The New World • Francis Parkman, Jr.
... landed on the island of Delos, which was once a floating island, till Jupiter fastened it by adamantine chains to the bottom of the sea. Apollo and Diana were born there, and the island was sacred to Apollo. Here AEneas consulted the oracle of Apollo, and received an answer, as ambiguous as usual "Seek your ancient mother; ...
— TITLE • AUTHOR
... other party involved; it would be a rare man, indeed, who could withstand such charms, to say nothing of the alluring and appealing ways that must go with them. If he only might try them—just to test his own fine power of resistance and adamantine will! He shot a quick glance of suppressed irritation at Harleston—and Madeline Spencer saw it and smiled, turning the ...
— The Cab of the Sleeping Horse • John Reed Scott
... transient succour brought: Almighty Fate on all our labours frown'd, Athwart each scheme the thread of error wound, Our efforts with an unseen chain controll'd, Perplex'd the prudent, and dismay'd the bold. Fate urges on—Her adamantine shield Protects our destined Conqueror in the field; To his own seas by War and Famine driven, Furious he mounts, nor heeds the frowns of heaven: Fresh hosts appear, unnumber'd standards rise, From town to town his gather'd vengeance flies, His banner each ambitious ...
— Gustavus Vasa - and other poems • W. S. Walker
... Nay, stay; thou shalt not fly; Philotas, stay;— You have a father too; think, were his lot Hard as Evander's; if by felon hands Chain'd to the earth, with slow-consuming pangs He felt sharp want, and with an asking eye Implor'd relief, yet cruel men deny'd it, Wouldst thou not burst thro' adamantine gates, Thro' walls and rocks, to save him? Think, Philotas, Of thy own aged sire, and pity mine. Think of the agonies a daughter feels, When thus a parent wants the common food, The bounteous hand of ...
— The Grecian Daughter • Arthur Murphy
... seen with equal tortures riven— An equal god; in adamantine chains Ever and evermore The Titan Atlas, crush'd, sustains The mighty mass of mighty Heaven, And the whirling cataracts roar, With a chime to the Titan's groans, And the depth that receives them moans; And ...
— Athens: Its Rise and Fall, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... the characters of the people and the tenor of their laws. The Ironside quality of their creed showed itself in the cruelties with which they visited the Indians; the severity of their tenets was felt by all who could not readily adapt themselves to the adamantine ethics of men of the type of Endicott and Mather. There was not wanting, too, a spirit of lawlessness in the English America, curiously in contrast with the law-abiding character of the Non-conformist colonizations. Along the seaboard wild pirates nestled, skimmers of the seas of the most ...
— A History of the Four Georges, Volume II (of 4) • Justin McCarthy
... and she would have cracked like a nutshell against those adamantine walls. But to get into the harbour it was the only way, and as the skipper said afterwards, when I remonstrated on his apparent foolhardiness, "Needs must, ...
— Labrador Days - Tales of the Sea Toilers • Wilfred Thomason Grenfell
... we can now breathe easily, for we know that no Deus ex machina meddles with those serene and mighty forces whose adamantine grasp encloses all the phenomena of nature ...
— An Ethnologist's View of History • Daniel G. Brinton
... set, Did seem to say how vain to knock At thy heart's door, for all within Was hard, as adamantine rock. ...
— Canada and Other Poems • T.F. Young
... be one with theirs through all eternity, like twin stars in one common atmosphere, for ever giving and receiving wisdom and might, beauty and bliss, and yet are barred from their bliss by some invisible adamantine wall, against which they must beat themselves to death, like butterflies against the window-pane, gazing, and longing, and unable to guess why they ...
— Yeast: A Problem • Charles Kingsley
... at one time, and now let me apply it. When a murder is in the paulo-post-futurum tense, and a rumor of it comes to our ears, by all means let us treat it morally. But suppose it over and done, and that you can say of it,[Greek: Tetelesai], or (in that adamantine molossus of Medea) [Greek: eirzasai]; suppose the poor murdered man to be out of his pain, and the rascal that did it off like a shot, nobody knows whither; suppose, lastly, that we have done our best, by putting out our legs to trip up the fellow in his flight, ...
— Miscellaneous Essays • Thomas de Quincey
... its mouth it ranges from sixty to one hundred feet. The shores are a striking feature, and on the south side range from three hundred to four hundred feet in height, while on the north the hills, in places, attain an altitude of two thousand feet; and these adamantine walls, witnesses of many a stirring event in the history of California, are clothed in green in spring-time, while in autumn they are brown, and from the distance resemble huge lions, couchant, guardians of the Gate. But who gave it its name, and why is it so called? ...
— By the Golden Gate • Joseph Carey
... off by deep subterranean channels. But when the ridges are laid bare, the water of the autumnal rains fills the minutest pores and veins and fissures and lines of separation of the rocks, then suddenly freezes, and bursts asunder huge, and apparently solid blocks of adamantine stone. [Footnote: Palissy had observed the action of frost in disintegrating rock, and he thus describes it, in his essay on the formation of ice: "I know that the stones of the mountains of Ardennes be harder than marble. Nevertheless, ...
— The Earth as Modified by Human Action • George P. Marsh
... Rakshasas together bear the strength of my arms. Behold these strong arms of mine, each like unto the trunk of an elephant. Behold also these thighs of mine like unto iron maces, and this broad and adamantine chest. O beautiful one, thou shall today behold my prowess like unto that of Indra. O thou of fair hips, hate me not, thinking that I ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 1 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... they must, and no power can hinder them; not even that once mighty Church which has always striven to bind Humanity to the past with adamantine chains of dogma. In Cardinal Newman's own words, from perhaps his greatest and most characteristic book,—"here below to live is to change, and to be perfect is to ...
— Arrows of Freethought • George W. Foote
... no further protest after that, for his point of view was evident and his determination adamantine, but told him where he would find the bag and once more set out across the moon-bright common, he pursuing a westerly direction and I ...
— The Devil Doctor • Sax Rohmer
... condition, and in saying that I might be accused or put to death or boxed on the ears with impunity. For I may repeat once more, that to strike is worse than to be stricken—to do than to suffer. What I said then is now made fast in adamantine bonds. I myself know not the true nature of these things, but I know that no one can deny my words and not be ridiculous. To do wrong is the greatest of evils, and to suffer wrong is the next greatest evil. He who would avoid the ...
— Gorgias • Plato
... shuddered at my friend. In my recollection of his dark and impressive countenance, the features grew more sternly prominent than the reality, duskier in their depth and shadow, and more lurid in their light; the frown, that had merely flitted across his brow, seemed to have contorted it with an adamantine wrinkle. On meeting him again, I was often filled with remorse, when his deep eyes beamed kindly upon me, as with the glow of a household fire that was burning in a cave. "He is a man after all," thought I; "his Maker's own truest image, a philanthropic man!—not ...
— The Blithedale Romance • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... at last to the conclusion—that I must write a Book on Cromwell; that there is no rest for me till I do it. This point fixed, another is not less fixed hitherto, That a Book on Cromwell is impossible. Literally so: you would weep for me if you saw how, between these two adamantine certainties, I am whirled and tumbled. God only knows what will become of me ...
— The Correspondence of Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1834-1872, Vol II. • Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson
... Mrs. Siddons, about whom all the world has been talking, exposed her beautiful, adamantine, soft and lovely person for the first time, at the Smock Alley Theatre, in the bewitching, tearful, and all melting character of Isabella. From the repeated panegyrics in the impartial London newspapers, we were ...
— The International Magazine, Volume 2, No. 3, February, 1851 • Various
... principal rooms of the palace three beautiful females, clothed in cerulean robes spangled with stars, and their heads adorned with golden crowns, were at work together. One held a distaff, from which the second spun; and the third wielded an enormous pair of adamantine shears, with which she perpetually severed the labours of her sisters. Tall were they in stature and beautiful in form. Very fair; an expression of haughty serenity pervaded their majestic countenances. Their three companions, however, though ...
— The Infernal Marriage • Benjamin Disraeli
... was now near enough for us to see clearly, and the moonlight still held. My own heart grew cold as ice, and I could hear the gasp of Arthur, as we recognized the features of Lucy Westenra. Lucy Westenra, but yet how changed. The sweetness was turned to adamantine, heartless cruelty, and the purity ...
— Dracula • Bram Stoker
... disrupted finances and buttress themselves against the eventual facts. Naturally, the minor speculators throughout the city—those who had expected to make a fortune out of this crash—raged and complained, but, being faced by an adamantine exchange directorate, a subservient press, and the alliance between the big bankers and the heavy quadrumvirate, there was nothing to be done. The respective bank presidents talked solemnly of "a mere temporary flurry," Hand, Schryhart, Merrill, and Arneel went still further into their pockets ...
— The Titan • Theodore Dreiser
... Professor Alexander, of Honolulu, supposes them to be from the beginning less fluid than pahoehoe, and that they advance very slowly, being full of solid points, or centres of cooling: that a- a, in fact, grains like sugar. Its hardness is indescribable. It is an aggregate of upright, rugged, adamantine points, and at a distance, a river of it looks like a dark ...
— The Hawaiian Archipelago • Isabella L. Bird
... the heavens— For each gun, From its adamantine lips, Spread a death-shade round the ships, Like a hurricane eclipse Of ...
— Drake, Nelson and Napoleon • Walter Runciman
... listended to her story with all the sympathetic horror she could wish, and she felt buoyed up in her adamantine decision, although she still harped on the intention ...
— Winding Paths • Gertrude Page
... thou genius of that ventrous but zealous musicion of Thrace, Euridice's husband, who being besotted on his wife, of whiche sin none but ... should be guiltie, went alive with his fiddle at's backe, to see if he could bail her out of that adamantine prison. The fees he was to pay for her were jigs and countrey-daunces: he paid them; the forfeits if he put on yellow stockings and lookt back upon her, was her everlasting lying there, without bayle or mayne-prize. The loving ...
— The English Novel in the Time of Shakespeare • J. J. Jusserand
... had dissected out a shade of feeling of which I had often been conscious. There is a coldness about all the luscious exuberance of Milton, like the wind that blows from, the glaciers across these flowery valleys. How serene his angels in their adamantine virtue! yet what sinning, suffering soul could find sympathy in them? The utter want of sympathy for the fallen angels, in the whole celestial circle, is shocking. Satan is ...
— Sunny Memories of Foreign Lands V2 • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... head as adamantine, as millstone or hard as one o' your cannon balls that shall not save him, if mind and body agreeably seek and desire death, and mind (pray understand, sir) is the more potent factor, thus (saving and excepting the abnormal vigour of his body) by ...
— Martin Conisby's Vengeance • Jeffery Farnol
... which it plays, and is poised so exactly that the weakest hand can turn it. It is hooped round with a hollow cylinder of adamant, four feet yards in diameter, placed horizontally, and supported by eight adamantine feet, each six yards high. In the middle of the concave side, there is a groove twelve inches deep, in which the extremities of the axle are lodged, and turned ...
— Gulliver's Travels - into several remote nations of the world • Jonathan Swift
... guard Was safe against a siege. No hand of man In ancient days built up her lofty wall, No hammer rang upon her massive stones: Not all the works of war, nor Time himself Shall undermine her. Nature's hand has raised Her adamantine rocks and hedged her in With bulwarks girded by the foamy main: And but for one short bridge of narrow earth Dyrrhachium were an island. Steep and fierce, Dreaded of sailors, are the cliffs that bear Her walls; ...
— Pharsalia; Dramatic Episodes of the Civil Wars • Lucan
... illustrious through the sable curtain of my ink, and in sublimity transcend the galaxy itself, though wafted on the pinions of a gray goose quill! But, ah! celestial enchantress! the necromancy of thy tyrannical charms hath fettered my faculties with adamantine chains, which, unless thy compassion shall melt I must eternally remain in the Tartarean gulf of dismal despair. Vouchsafe, therefore, O thou brightest luminary of this terrestrial sphere! to warm, as well as shine; and let the genial rays of thy benevolence melt the ...
— The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle, Volume I • Tobias Smollett
... his stately citie was destroyd, That monument of great antiquitie, When his poore hart, with griefe and sorrow cloyd, Fled to his wife, last hope in miserie; Pyrrhus, more hard than adamantine rockes, Held him and halde him by ...
— The Affectionate Shepherd • Richard Barnfield
... infernal spirit, bound in avenging fire by adamantine chains, lying vanquished nine times the space that measures night and day to mortal men; of the darkness visible of the eternal prisons and the burning ocean where the fallen angels float. Then, his voice, now powerful, began the address of the fallen angel. "Art thou," he ...
— Cinq Mars, Complete • Alfred de Vigny
... revulsion his heart recoiled from its purpose, As from the verge of a crag, where one step more is destruction. Strange is the heart of man, with its quick, mysterious instincts! 570 Strange is the life of man, and fatal or fated are moments, Whereupon turn, as on hinges, the gates of the wall adamantine[38] "Here I remain!" he exclaimed, as he looked at the heavens above him, Thanking the Lord whose breath had scattered the mist and the madness, Wherein, blind and lost, to death he was staggering headlong. ...
— Narrative and Lyric Poems (first series) for use in the Lower School • O. J. Stevenson
... and good and strong—a suppressed strength. He looks passion-proof; but if he ever falls in love! And what a triumph for a thief to capture an adamantine heart! But I don't want ...
— Penny of Top Hill Trail • Belle Kanaris Maniates
... hardens the brain into a state of obstinacy perhaps. Anyhow, with whitewash from the wall on my forehead, my obstinacy was adamantine. I reflected for some time, and then answered as if I had discovered a new idea, "I mean ...
— Great Expectations • Charles Dickens
... to this forlorn company; for, self-contained and stern as was his nature, he could soften, in times of extremity, to a gentleness that strongly appealed to the hearts of those around him; and though he could not impart, to minds of less adamantine temper, the audacity of hope with which he still clung to the final accomplishment of his purposes, the contagion of his courage touched, nevertheless, the drooping spirits of his followers. [Footnote: "L'egalite d'humeur du Chef rassuroit tout le monde; ...
— France and England in North America, a Series of Historical Narratives, Part Third • Francis Parkman
... mesmeric eloquence, fitfully flecking the embossed page, as one tier or set of ideas, in rhetoric orchestration, symphonizes with or eclipses another. Connection, an element of robust mesmeric cohesion with this prized author being the adamantine hyphen, the articulating link, which compacts the roll. John Henry Shorthouse, the templar, the confessor of music, was, and concurrently, the apologist of philosophic light. Engaged to a powerful mechanism of ...
— Original Letters and Biographic Epitomes • J. Atwood.Slater
... are bound by the adamantine chain of destiny is most certain, if it be proved that they are never to exercise their own reason, never to be independent, never to rise above opinion, or to feel the dignity of a rational will that only bows to God, and often forgets ...
— A Vindication of the Rights of Woman - Title: Vindication of the Rights of Women • Mary Wollstonecraft [Godwin]
... had a few, fine, adamantine rules for conduct, which he was going to steadfastly apply, and he thought no more of the girl's feelings under them than one thinks of the inanimate parcel one is cording with what one knows is ...
— Six Women • Victoria Cross
... sought to reconstitute the chief landmarks before the Mahomedan invasions, the two salient features that emerge from the twilight are the failure of the Aryan Hindus to achieve any permanent form of political unity or stability, and their success, on the other hand, in building up on adamantine foundations a complex but vital social system. The supple and subtle forces of Hinduism had already in prehistoric times welded together the discordant beliefs and customs of a vast variety of races into a comprehensive fabric sufficiently ...
— India, Old and New • Sir Valentine Chirol
... said about embodying it in a cult. It comes to us commended by glowing quotations from Mr. Swinburne and Walt Whitman and we cannot help admitting that for common hearts it stands in need of the commendation. The transfer of affection from an all loving Father to an adamantine universe is a process for which we may well seek all the aid that the witchery of poetry can supply. Unluckily we are haunted by the consciousness that the poetry itself is blindly ground out by the same illimitable mill of evolution which grinds out Virtue and affection. We ...
— Lectures and Essays • Goldwin Smith
... thoughts which roll within my ravish'd breast, To me, no seer, the inspiring gods suggest; Nor skill'd nor studious, with prophetic eye To judge the winged omens of the sky. Yet hear this certain speech, nor deem it vain; Though adamantine bonds the chief restrain, The dire restraint his wisdom will defeat, And soon restore him to his regal seat. But generous youth! sincere and free declare, Are you, of manly growth, his royal heir? For sure Ulysses in your look appears, The same his features, if ...
— The Odyssey of Homer • Homer, translated by Alexander Pope
... beneath its feet, upon that green pavement which every breeze broke into new fantasies of rich tessellation; when first, at the extremity of the bright vista, the shadowy Rialto threw its colossal curve slowly forth from behind the palace of the Camerlenghi; that strange curve, so delicate, so adamantine, strong as a mountain cavern, graceful as a bow just bent; when first, before its moonlike circumference was all risen, the gondolier's cry, "Ah! Stali," [Footnote: Appendix I, "The Gondolier's Cry."] struck sharp upon the ...
— Stones of Venice [introductions] • John Ruskin
... with blood to vomit crime;[nz] And fatal have her Saturnalia been[oa] To Freedom's cause, in every age and clime; Because the deadly days which we have seen, And vile Ambition, that built up between Man and his hopes an adamantine wall, And the base pageant[477] last upon the scene, Are grown the pretext for the eternal thrall Which nips Life's tree, and ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 2 • George Gordon Byron
... Philibert, sending the blood to her cheeks. There is a magnetic touch in loving fingers which is never mistaken, though their contact be but for a second of time: it anticipates the strong grasp of love which will ere long embrace body and soul in adamantine chains of a union not to ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby
... king of terrors, Arm'd in adamantine chains, Lead me to the crystal mirrors, Watering ...
— The Poems of Jonathan Swift, D.D., Volume I (of 2) • Jonathan Swift
... it turned out, the Professor himself insisted upon testing lethodyne in his own person. All Nat's strove to dissuade him. "Your life is so precious, sir—the advancement of science!" But the Professor was adamantine. ...
— Hilda Wade - A Woman With Tenacity Of Purpose • Grant Allen
... into the Northern world; Prometheus's gift of fire brought the same curse upon the Greeks. The punishment inflicted by the gods upon the culprits is not unlike, for while Loki is bound with adamantine chains underground, and tortured by the continuous dropping of venom from the fangs of a snake fastened above his head, Prometheus is similarly fettered to Caucasus, and a ravenous vulture continually preys upon his liver. Loki's punishment has another counterpart in that of Tityus, bound ...
— Myths of the Norsemen - From the Eddas and Sagas • H. A. Guerber
... in Heaven and battle proud, With vain attempt. Him the Almighty Power Hurled headlong flaming from th' ethereal sky, With hideous ruin and combustion, down To bottomless perdition, there to dwell In adamantine chains and penal fire, Who durst defy th' Omnipotent to arms. Nine times the space that measures day and night To mortal men, he, with his horrid crew, Lay vanquished, rolling in the fiery gulf, Confounded, though immortal. But his doom Reserved him to more ...
— Paradise Lost • John Milton
... he climbed cautiously in at the window, he uncovered an ambuscade, in the person of his aunt; and when she saw the state his clothes were in her resolution to turn his Saturday holiday into captivity at hard labor became adamantine in its firmness. ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... does. Symptoms of too great interest bore one. I enjoy more the men who are impervious to me. Now there's my father. He comes nearer understanding me than anybody else, but he's quite adamantine ...
— The Vision Spendid • William MacLeod Raine
... sixteenth century rose on awakened Europe. But Spain was the citadel of darkness,—a monastic cell, an inquisitorial dungeon, where no ray could pierce. She was the bulwark of the Church, against whose adamantine front the wrath of innovation beat in vain. In every country of Europe the party of freedom and reform was the national party, the party of reaction and absolutism was the Spanish party, leaning on Spain, looking to her for help. Above all, it was so in France; and while within her bounds there ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 12, No. 73, November, 1863 • Various
... whether Dr. Cumming's interpretation accords with the meaning of the New Testament writers: we simply point to the fact that the text becomes elastic for him when he wants freer play for his prejudices, while he makes it an adamantine barrier against the admission that mercy will ultimately triumph—that God, i.e., Love, will be all in all. He assures us that he does not "delight to dwell on the misery of the lost:" and we believe him. That misery does not seem to be a question of feeling with him, either ...
— The Essays of "George Eliot" - Complete • George Eliot
... whose christening should be erected a cathedral more vast than St. Peter's, a temple rarer than that of Baalbec. But while our sensitive cousin across the water would pin us down to a credo as absurd as that of Tertullian, and hedge us in with the adamantine wall of his own lordly fiat, let us, who fondly hope we have a literature, whose principal defect—a defect to which the one infallible remedy is daily applied by the winged mower—is youth, inquire into its leading characteristics, seeing if haply we may ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I. February, 1862, No. II. - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... gird; screw up, wind up, set up; gird up one's loins, brace up one's loins; recruit, set on one's legs; vivify; refresh &c. 689; refect[obs3]; reinforce, reenforce &c. (restore) 660. Adj. strong, mighty, vigorous, forcible, hard, adamantine, stout, robust, sturdy, hardy, powerful, potent, puissant, valid. resistless, irresistible, invincible, proof against, impregnable, unconquerable, indomitable, dominating, inextinguishable, unquenchable; incontestable; ...
— Roget's Thesaurus • Peter Mark Roget
... defeated) love, of love that is frustrated of its kind design. Thou mayst perceive in these tears the steady, unalterable laws of heaven, the inflexibleness of the divine justice, that holds thee in adamantine bonds, and hath sealed thee up, if thou prove incurably obstinate and impenitent, unto perdition; so that even the Redeemer Himself, He that is mighty to save, can not at length save thee, but only ...
— The World's Great Sermons, Vol. 2 (of 10) • Grenville Kleiser
... the belief that, under the strain of war, the far-flung British Empire, with its heterogeneous elements and racial jealousies, would promptly crumble. It was a vital error. Instead of crumbling it hardened into a unity which is adamantine. Canada has already contributed half a million men to the British armies, Australia three hundred thousand. South Africa, by undertaking her own defense, released the imperial regiments stationed there. She not only suppressed the German-fomented rebellion, ...
— Italy at War and the Allies in the West • E. Alexander Powell
... undoubtedly was, had not the adamantine hardness of character which enabled his admiral to risk all on the hazards of the moment; or possibly the Grand Turk was deficient in that clearness of strategical instinct which never in any circumstances foregoes a present advantage ...
— Great Pirate Stories • Various
... the position he had assumed. She had never failed yet to work her will with men—young and old—by a pretty persistence, a steady flattery, a subtle pleading manner. But Sir John had met all her wiles with his adamantine smile. He would not openly declare himself an enemy—which she argued to herself would have been much nicer of him. He was merely a friend of her aunt's, and from that contemplative position he never stepped down. She could not quite make out what he was "driving at," as she herself put it. ...
— With Edged Tools • Henry Seton Merriman
... conversing with the doorman. That adamantine individual, unaccustomed to being addressed as a human being, was startled at first, surly and distrustful. But he mellowed under Hosey's simple and friendly advances. They became quite pals, these two—perhaps two ...
— Half Portions • Edna Ferber
... founder of the Critical Philosophy, more than any other work, at once invigorated and disciplined my understanding. The originality, the depth, and the compression of the thoughts; the novelty and subtlety, yet solidity and importance of the distinctions; the adamantine chain of the logic; and I will venture to add—(paradox as it will appear to those who have taken their notion of Immanuel Kant from Reviewers and Frenchmen)—the clearness and evidence, of the Critique of the Pure ...
— Biographia Literaria • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... streets by day and night, your hours are very long; Yet since you love the G.P.O. that thus your feet employs, We must not see you flouted by a perky pack of hoys. Swift rally round the Master who quavers not nor quakes, Our Red Knight of the Pillar-Box, the adamantine RAIKES. ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 100, March 28, 1891 • Various
... like her romance, was hard, high, and strict; but while she had as little mercy on herself as on others, and while there were some soft spots in her adamantine judgment, there was hope that these would spread, and, without lowering her tone, make her ...
— The Young Step-Mother • Charlotte M. Yonge
... the name of liberty and to protect minorities, that nullification professes to act; while in its first ordinance it sweeps away the dearest rights of a large minority of the people of Carolina, and binds the freedom of conscience in adamantine chains. It deprives American citizens of that last and hitherto sacred refuge from oppression, a trial by an impartial jury, and requires the very judges upon the bench and jurors within the box to be sworn to condemn the unhappy ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 3 No 2, February 1863 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... formal laws of mathematics, which are those of nature, and logic, which are those of mind, be fully understood, no one will seek such an argument in the former but in the latter only, for they alone, as I have shown, are purposive, and they are wholly so. The only God that nature points to is an adamantine Fate. ...
— The Religious Sentiment - Its Source and Aim: A Contribution to the Science and - Philosophy of Religion • Daniel G. Brinton
... Power Hurled headlong flaming from the ethereal sky, With hideous ruin and combustion, down To bottomless perdition; there to dwell In adamantine chains and penal ...
— The Astronomy of Milton's 'Paradise Lost' • Thomas Orchard
... inscrutable expression which the latter's countenance could assume. It had seemed interesting and even admirable to him then—but then he had not foreseen the possibility that he himself might some day confront its adamantine barrier with a sinking heart. All at once he could bear this implacable sphinx-gaze ...
— The Market-Place • Harold Frederic
... solemnity of an oath, at Columbia, in a court of justice. I was present, and shall never forget them. The testimony of Drs. Parrott and Jones was most appalling. I seem to hear the death-groans of that murdered man. His cries for mercy and protestations of innocence fell upon adamantine hearts. The facts above stated, and others in relation to this scene of cruelty came to light in the following manner. The master of the murdered man commenced legal process against the actors in this tragedy for ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society
... very imperfect, he had subsequently read a good deal, especially in French literature. He had formed his mind by Helvetius, whose system he deemed irrefutable, and in whom alone he had faith. Armed with the principles of his great master, he believed he could pass through existence in adamantine armour, and always gave you in the business of life the idea of a man who was conscious you were trying to take him in, and rather respected you for it, but the working of whose cold, unkind, eye ...
— Sybil - or the Two Nations • Benjamin Disraeli
... The adamantine steel! O shining light, O beacon, polestar, path and guide of all Who, scorning slumber and the lazy down, Adopt the toilsome life of bloodstained arms! To thee, great hero who all praise transcends, La Mancha's lustre and Iberia's star, Don Quixote, wise as brave, to thee ...
— Don Quixote • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... and shrieking wounded, when the tide of a great battle raged fiercest and strongest, his foothold bathed in the life-blood of his comrades. Such scenes ever tend to pervert the kinder tendencies of our nature, and to render the mind adamantine in its manifestations; nor were his less susceptible to these influences than others. When first he entered the ranks of the army, and joined in the death-dealing battle, he saw the daily commission of crimes which made his ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII No. 6 June 1848 • Various
... sphinx of Far End was compounded of even more adamantine substance than his feminine prototype, for he exhibited a mulish aversion to budging an inch—much less galloping—in the direction Sara ...
— The Hermit of Far End • Margaret Pedler
... this world, in the tender lightness that seemed to come into his heart. "His whole appearance, poise and bearing," says one of his observers, "had marvelously changed. He was, in fact, transfigured. That indescribable sadness which had previously seemed to be an adamantine element of his very being, had been suddenly changed for an equally indescribable expression of serene joy, as if conscious that the great purpose of his life ...
— Lincoln • Nathaniel Wright Stephenson
... of flashing light, Its vast and azure dome; And on the verge of that obscure abyss 225 Where crystal battlements o'erhang the gulf Of the dark world, ten thousand spheres diffuse Their lustre through its adamantine gates. ...
— The Daemon of the World • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... be called infinitely little, and yet its meaning for Archie was immense. "I did not know the old man had so much blood in him." He had never dreamed this sire of his, this aboriginal antique, this adamantine Adam, had even so much of a heart as to be moved in the least degree for another—and that other himself, who had insulted him! With the generosity of youth, Archie was instantly under arms upon the other side: had instantly created a new image of Lord Hermiston, ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. XIX (of 25) - The Ebb-Tide; Weir of Hermiston • Robert Louis Stevenson
... here, in silent reverence tread. Beneath those marble cenotaphs and urns Lies richer dust than ever nature hid Packed in the mountain's adamantine heart, Or slyly wrapt in unsuspected sand— The dross men toil for, and oft stain the soul. How vain and all ignoble seems that greed To him who stands in this dim claustral air With these most sacred ashes at his feet! This dust was Chaucer, Spenser, Dryden this— ...
— The Sisters' Tragedy • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... at her, felt as one does who has been reading a fairy-tale and is called to the family meal. All the things he had meant to say, that had seemed so eloquent, now seemed foolish. He awoke her hastily in case his courage should fail before that most adamantine thing—an ...
— Gone to Earth • Mary Webb
... as others did, that civil war would bring you to anarchy, and anarchy to military despotism. All historical precedents conspired to lead me to this belief. I did not know—for there was no example to teach me—the power of a really united people, the adamantine strength of institutions which were truly free. Watching the course of events with an open mind, and a deep interest, such as men at a distance can seldom be brought to feel, in the fortunes of this country, I soon revised my opinion. Yet, many times ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 86, December, 1864 • Various
... sepulchral tone, "you cannot be ignorant, as a scholar and bachelor of Oxford, of that dread sacrament by which Catiline bound the soul of his fellow-conspirators, in order that both by the daring of the deed he might have proof of their sincerity, and by the horror thereof astringe their souls by adamantine fetters, and Novem-Stygian oaths, to that wherefrom hereafter the weakness of the flesh might shrink. Wherefore, O Jack! we too have determined, following that ancient and classical example, to fill, as he did, a bowl with the lifeblood of our most heroic selves, and to pledge ...
— Westward Ho! • Charles Kingsley
... fit is scrupulous, yet no woman's figure is revealed. You are decorously shapeless. Your satin trousers even are lined with fur. Your hair is stiff and lustrous as polished ebony, bound at the neck in an adamantine knot, in which ...
— Profiles from China • Eunice Tietjens
... alternative was to run away or be killed. I took to flight, and the bull, bristling with fury, pursued me closely. The pistol was soon ready, and then looking back, I saw his head five or six yards behind my horse's tail. To fire at it would be useless, for a bullet flattens against the adamantine skull of a buffalo bull. Inclining my body to the left, I turned my horse in that direction as sharply as his speed would permit. The bull, rushing blindly on with great force and weight, did not turn so quickly. As I looked back, his neck and shoulders ...
— The Oregon Trail • Francis Parkman, Jr.
... nor herb Nor chirped a grasshopper. Above his head Phlegethon formed a fiery firmament: Part were sulphurous clouds involving, part Shining like solid ribs of molten brass; For the fierce element which else aspires Higher and higher and lessens to the sky, Below, earth's adamantine arch rebuffed. Gebir, though now such languor held his limbs, Scarce aught admired he, yet he this admired; And thus addressed him then the conscious guide. "Beyond that river lie the happy fields; From them fly gentle breezes, which when drawn ...
— Gebir • Walter Savage Landor
... was to be shown into—Mary knew not; but she was there. He stood perfectly still, massive and inflexible, to receive her. Without approaching him—or he her—to shake hands, without looking at his face or anywhere near it, she perceived the adamantine set of lips, the cold gaze, more withering than fire, which informed her that he knew all; and she sank crouching into a chair, and hid her face. But her back was against the wall now. The coward stage was past. In the most desperately false position that a girl could occupy, she made no further ...
— Sisters • Ada Cambridge
... the cruel house of Pelops: while diffidence, and the Muse who presides over the peaceful lyre, forbid me to diminish the praise of illustrious Caesar, and yours, through defect of genius. Who with sufficient dignity will describe Mars covered with adamantine coat of mail, or Meriones swarthy with Trojan dust, or the son of Tydeus by the favor of Pallas a match for the gods? We, whether free, or ourselves enamored of aught, light as our wont, sing of banquets; we, of the battles ...
— The Works of Horace • Horace
... irresistible desire to go forth in the world and by his prowess dazzle all mankind for the purpose of attracting one pair of eyes. The same occurs to the lady, and she determines to make all men fall at her feet by way of illustrating to one adamantine heart that he was a dullard to have passed over her charms. And this young lady of the rose and lily complexion, and knight of the bright-hued locks and herculean muscles, being young—sufficiently young to be downcast ...
— Some Everyday Folk and Dawn • Miles Franklin
... first discovery will be that such communication has adamantine limitations. The off-hand impression of most persons would probably be that we are able to make literal conveyance of our thought. But, in truth, one could as soon convey the life out of his veins into the veins of another as transfer from his own mind ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 84, October, 1864 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... glory and colour. Aldebaran was a spot of blood-red fire, and Sirius condensed to one point the light of innumerable sapphires. And they shone steadily: they did not scintillate, they were calmly glorious. My impressions had an adamantine hardness and brightness: there was no blurring softness, no atmosphere, nothing but infinite darkness set with the myriads of these acute and brilliant points and specks of light. Presently, when I looked again, the little earth seemed ...
— The Country of the Blind, And Other Stories • H. G. Wells
... out of myself, to expatiate on the misery peculiar to my sex. 'Are not,' I thought, 'the despots for ever stigmatized, who, in the wantonness of power, commanded even the most atrocious criminals to be chained to dead bodies? though surely those laws are much more inhuman, which forge adamantine fetters to bind minds together, that never can mingle in social communion! What indeed can equal the wretchedness of that state, in which there is no alternative, but to extinguish ...
— Posthumous Works - of the Author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman • Mary Wollstonecraft
... world-sick soul must have despaired of ever reaching so far, or of climbing its steel-blue walls. The stars were large, keen, and brilliant, but cold and steadfast. They did not dance nor twinkle in their adamantine setting. The furnace fire painted the faces of the men an Indian red, glanced on brightly colored blanket and serape, but was eventually caught and absorbed in the waiting shadows of the black mountain, scarcely twenty feet from the furnace door. The low, half-sung, half-whispered ...
— The Story of a Mine • Bret Harte
... says the adamantine youth, "what is the name of the house with a big gate, about a half ...
— Rossmoyne • Unknown
... the aspiring adamantine trunk Of a huge tree, whose root, with slaughter drunk Sends forth a scent of war, La Mancha's knight, Frantic with valor, and returned from fight, His bloody standard trembling in the air, Hangs up his glittering armor beaming far, With that fine-tempered ...
— Wit and Wisdom of Don Quixote • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... delicious morsels of other days, and are likely at such times to put hard crackers and glory on one side, the good things of home and peace on the other and owing probably to the unsubstantial quality of glory, and the adamantine quality of the crackers, arrive at conclusions not at all favorable ...
— The Citizen-Soldier - or, Memoirs of a Volunteer • John Beatty
... bed, of the last new pattern, worthy of a child's delicious sleep; and they would only have discovered that the room was three hundred years old when they had drawn aside the window curtains, and had revealed the adamantine solidity of the outer walls. Or, if they had been allowed to pursue their investigations a little further, and had found their way next into Mrs. Linley's sitting room, here again a transformation scene would have revealed more modern luxury, presented ...
— The Evil Genius • Wilkie Collins
... do in the refashioning of a world-old wild—one woman against the established creeds of an iron wilderness? Where, now, were her dreams of empire, her ideals, and her castles in Spain? Was she to return, broken on the wheel? Crushed between the adamantine millstones of things as they ought ...
— The Gun-Brand • James B. Hendryx
... mother was thin, and old, and wrinkled, but her face was stamped with a species of beauty which never fades—the beauty of a loving look. Ah! the brow of snow and the peach-bloom cheek may snare the heart of man for a time, but the loving look alone can forge that adamantine chain that time, age, ...
— The Dog Crusoe and His Master - A Story of Adventure in the Western Prairies • Robert Michael Ballantyne
... presentation of the truth. Many men who would not tell a lie, yet seem to have faith in concealment: they would rather not reveal the truth; darkness seems to offer them the cover of a friendly wing. But there is no veil like light —no adamantine armour against hurt like the truth. To Malcolm it was one of the promises of the kingdom that there is nothing covered that shall not be revealed. He was anxious, therefore, to tell his people, at the coming dinner, the main points of his story, and certain that such openness would ...
— The Marquis of Lossie • George MacDonald
... the most elegant, charming—a perfect sylph! It was now about eleven months since I had first become acquainted with the bewitching creature; and, from the very first day, I had been her vassal, her slave, bound by chains as adamantine as those of Armida. She had just left the French boarding-school at St John's. That, by the by, is one of the means by which our mushroom aristocracy pushes itself upwards. A couple of pretty daughters, brought up at a fashionable school, are sure to attract a swarm of young fops and danglers ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXLV. July, 1844. Vol. LVI. • Various
... credible witnesses that the widow cried out in her agony, "Well, sir, well; the day of reckoning will come;" and that the murderer replied, "To man I can answer for what I have done; and as for God, I will take him into mine own hand." Yet it was rumoured that even on his seared conscience and adamantine heart the dying ejaculations of his victim made an impression which was ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 1 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... about was one of rocks and treeless ridges, spewed from some vast volcanic forge of ages past. It was all a hard, gray, adamantine world, unlovely and severe—a huge old gold furnace, minus heat or fire, lying neglected in a universe of mountains that might have been a workshop in the ancient days when Titans wrought their arts ...
— The Furnace of Gold • Philip Verrill Mighels
... land compels the female prisoner to submit the question of her guilt or innocence to twelve individuals of the opposite sex; and permits the female complainant to rehearse the story of her wrongs before the same collection of colossal intellects and adamantine hearts. ...
— Courts and Criminals • Arthur Train
... dreamed, even in visions. A few comfit-makers made "Lemon Pil Candy, Angelica Candy, Candy'd Eryngo Root & Carroway Comfits;" and a few sweetmeats came to port in foreign vessels, "Sugar'd Corrinder Seeds," "Glaz'd Almonds," and strings of rock-candy. Whole jars of the latter adamantine, crystalline, saccharine delight graced the shelves of many a colonial cupboard. And I suppose favored Salem children, the happy sons and daughters of opulent epicurean Salem shipowners, had even in colonial days Black Jacks and Salem Gibraltars. The first-named dainties, though ...
— Customs and Fashions in Old New England • Alice Morse Earle
... Knew ye the cause of this my pilgrimage, Ye would lie down and join your moans with mine. Let this poor wretch but pass, who war doth wage With heaven, the elements, the powers divine! I beg for pity or for death. No more! But open, ope Hell's adamantine door! ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... a Sunday morning that Clara's letter reached Aylmer Park, and Frederic Aylmer found it on his plate as he took his place at the breakfast-table. Domestic habits at Aylmer Park had grown with the growth of years till they had become adamantine, and domestic habits required prayers every morning at a quarter before nine o'clock. At twenty minutes before nine Lady Aylmer would always be in the dining-room to make the tea and open the post-bag, and as she was always there alone, she knew ...
— The Belton Estate • Anthony Trollope
... cells with an expression of a little curiosity but more repugnance on their faces, and asked several prisoners if they were well and contented. The men looked with the shrewdness of their class into their visitors' faces and measured them; saw there, first a feeble understanding, secondly an adamantine prejudice; saw that in those eyes they were wild beasts and Hawes an angel, and answered to please Hawes, whose eye was fixed on them all this time and in whose power ...
— It Is Never Too Late to Mend • Charles Reade
... struck midnight. Then Theos, raising his eyes, saw that all further progress was impeded by a great wall of solid rock that glistened at every point with flashes of pale and dark violet light—a wall composed entirely of adamantine spar, crusted thick with the rough growth of oriental amethyst. It rose sheer up from the ground to an altitude of about a hundred feet, and apparently closed in and ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... then the descent continued in clouds of volcanic dust, winding in and out among cinder-cones, brick-red, old rose, and purplish black of colour. Above us, higher and higher, towered the crater-walls, while we journeyed on across innumerable lava-flows, turning and twisting a devious way among the adamantine billows of a petrified sea. Saw-toothed waves of lava vexed the surface of this weird ocean, while on either hand arose jagged crests and spiracles of fantastic shape. Our way led on past a bottomless pit and along and over the main stream of the ...
— The Cruise of the Snark • Jack London
... the sea-level except the mule's ears. By frantic exertions I worked myself backward, and was sliding down behind—too late. The bush broke, causing the mule to fall back forcibly against the inner bank, with myself sandwiched between the adamantine wall of the mountain and the well-shod heels of the mule. The animal, being as much scared as myself, started up the trail at a gallop. I had saved my life but lost my mule. I have no taste for overtaking runaway ...
— A Truthful Woman in Southern California • Kate Sanborn
... green-blue waters. Some of them were of gigantic proportions and strange outlines. There were hills with lofty summits, marvellous castles, turreted and towered, and majestic cathedrals, their icy pinnacles and spires reaching high above the top-masts of the ship and their polished adamantine surfaces sparkling in the brilliant sunshine and scintillating fire and colour with the wondrous iridescent ...
— The Story of Grenfell of the Labrador - A Boy's Life of Wilfred T. Grenfell • Dillon Wallace
... something wonderful in the way Parson Brush kept control of himself. Externally he was as calm as when standing in front of the adamantine blackboard, giving instruction to Nellie Dawson, while down deep in his heart, raged a tempest such as rouses into life the darkest passions that can nerve a man to wrong doing. Believing it necessary to stir the father ...
— A Waif of the Mountains • Edward S. Ellis
... walking again in this street, which had played so great a part in his life. The traffic was heavier here than in other places, and the stone paving made it more so. A peculiar adamantine self-dependence was characteristic of this district where every step was weighted ...
— Pelle the Conqueror, Complete • Martin Andersen Nexo
... regard to the marriage of young women. That the young women belonging to them should be settled,—and thus got rid of,—is no doubt the great desire; but, whether the old woman be herself married or a spinster, the desire is founded on an adamantine confidence that marriage is the most proper and the happiest thing for the young woman. The belief is so thorough that the woman would cease to be a woman, would already have become a brute, who would desire to keep any ...
— The Vicar of Bullhampton • Anthony Trollope
... of this dwindling sphere of ours, but a fact and a law supreme, holding sway beyond the uttermost star, valid in infinity and eternity, at this hour, the sovereign law of life for whatsoever or whomsoever lives and knows, the adamantine foundation upon which all law, civilisation, ...
— Morality as a Religion - An exposition of some first principles • W. R. Washington Sullivan
... abyss of despair, To sin indebted for a life of woe. Still worse, if worse can be! the thought must sting (If e'er reflection calls it from the bed Of low oblivion) that ignoble wretch, The cruel instrument of all their woe; Sure it must cut his adamantine heart More than ten thousand daggers onward plung'd, With all death's tortures quivering ...
— Poetic Sketches • Thomas Gent
... Great, while Fortune did him raise, Nowe vailes the glory of his vanting plumes And to the ground casts of his high hang'd lookes. You gentle Heauens. O execute your wrath On vile mortality, that hath scornd your powers. You night borne Sisters to whose haires are ty'd In Adamantine Chaines both Gods and Men Winde on your webbe of mischiefe and of plagues, And if, O starres you haue an influence: 30 That may confounde this high erected heape Downe powre it; Vomit out your worst of ills Let Rome, ...
— The Tragedy Of Caesar's Revenge • Anonymous
... her own visitors—nobody ever dreamed that the thing was permanent, and nobody could break down that adamantine wall of Christian virtue she suffered behind, not owning that ...
— The Forerunner, Volume 1 (1909-1910) • Charlotte Perkins Gilman
... strove to crush his adversary by sheer strength. No sooner would one attacking column waver, break, retreat—leaving a writhing and ghastly wake behind it—than a fresh host would hurl against the adamantine line that sunk and shriveled under the resistless fire, but never wavered. In all the fearful carnage of the war—whether resulting in gloom, like that of Corinth, or purchasing brilliant victory with precious blood—men never fought better than did that battle-torn, service-worn ...
— Four Years in Rebel Capitals - An Inside View of Life in the Southern Confederacy from Birth to Death • T. C. DeLeon
... feeling of love, was bound in adamantine chains to her sister. Time and fortune, that shatter all human institutions and prove human feelings, consolidated the union of their hearts and their destinies. A stranger on stronger proof of the influence of sisterly affection could not be adduced; it dragged the beautiful, blushing ...
— Alvira: the Heroine of Vesuvius • A. J. O'Reilly
... resort to physical resistance to the Fugitive Slave Law by his non-resistant doctrine, it seemed that all the energy and belligerency of the man went into the most tremendous verbal expressions. They were like adamantine projectiles flung with the savage strength of a catapult against the walls of slavery. The big sinners, like Webster and Clay, he singled out for condign punishment, were objects of his utmost severities of speech. It was thus that he essayed to breach the iron ...
— William Lloyd Garrison - The Abolitionist • Archibald H. Grimke
... of the District Attorney, Drake was to be taken "dead or alive," but according to an adamantine principle of the Force, he must be taken not only alive, but unscathed if that were humanly possible. This meant that he must not be given an opportunity to run and so render shooting necessary. If, however, he should break away, his chance ...
— Americans All - Stories of American Life of To-Day • Various
... the simple process of reducing it to a petty nuisance. For men become civilized, not in proportion to their willingness to believe, but in proportion to their readiness to doubt. The more stupid the man, the larger his stock of adamantine assurances, the heavier his load of faith. When Copernicus proved that the earth revolved around the sun, he did not simply prove that the earth revolved around the sun, he also proved that the so-called revelation ...
— The Necessity of Atheism • Dr. D.M. Brooks |
