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Flinty   Listen
adjective
Flinty  adj.  (compar. flintier; superl. flintiest)  Consisting of, composed of, abounding in, or resembling, flint; as, a flinty rock; flinty ground; a flinty heart.
Flinty rock, or Flinty state, a siliceous slate; basanite is here included. See Basanite.






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Flinty" Quotes from Famous Books



... turned his steed against the mountain and spurred him up its flinty side. Horse and foot followed his example, eager, if they could not escape, to have at least a dying blow at the enemy. As they struggled up the height a tremendous storm of darts and stones was ...
— Chronicle of the Conquest of Granada • Washington Irving

... of hire to the labourer comes far short of his necessary subsistence, and the calamity of the time is so great as to threaten actual famine? Is the poor labourer to be abandoned to the flinty heart and griping hand of base self-interest, supported by the sword of law, especially when there is reason to suppose that the very avarice of farmers themselves has concurred with the errors of government to bring famine on ...
— Selections from the Speeches and Writings of Edmund Burke. • Edmund Burke

... twelve terrible plagues on the king of Egypt and his people. He opened before the Hebrews a passage through the sea, and brought them dry-shod to the opposite shore. For forty years were they fed with manna from heaven, while water was called forth from the flinty rock. And as the waves of the Red Sea were parted before them as they left Egypt, so, in like manner, were the waters of Jordan parted as they left the plains of Moab; and thus were they settled in the land of Canaan. ...
— The Young Captives - A Story of Judah and Babylon • Erasmus W. Jones

... at Ross Valley, but people began to say that old Jabel Blake had particles of gold in the flinty composition of his life, and that his trip to Washington had made him gentler and wider in his charities. He was attentive to young children. He encouraged young lovers. He lifted many errant people to their feet, and started them on their way to a braver life of sacrifice. And fortune smiled ...
— Tales of the Chesapeake • George Alfred Townsend

... I know! I'm not saying he wasn't an awful old screw. But somehow I don't believe he meant to be so flinty-hearted. You see, he came and talked to me to-day—talked like a regular human being. You could have knocked me over. It seems—a funny thing—that kid I picked up out of the street the ...
— Carl and the Cotton Gin • Sara Ware Bassett

... to take paste, paint, and polish equally well. The sheets of paper are pasted with a brush, and are united by successive processes of cold-drying, hot-drying, and hydraulic pressure. Each sheet is large enough for forty cards. The outer surfaces of the outer sheets are prepared with a kind of flinty coating, which gives sharpness to the outline of the various coloured devices. Most packs of cards are now made with coloured backs. The ground-tint is laid on with a brush, and consists of dis-temper colour, or pigments mixed with warm melted size. The device impressed on this ground-tint ...
— The Gaming Table: Its Votaries and Victims - Volume II (of II) • Andrew Steinmetz

... I once lanc'd thy froward flinty heart And cruddled bloud had thawn with living fire And prickt thy drousie sprite with gentle smart How wouldst thou wake to kindly sweet desire, Thy soul fill'd up with overflowing pleasures Would dew thy lips ...
— Democritus Platonissans • Henry More

... during my stay in Mindanao had I been fascinated and attracted by that delightfully original tribe of heathen known as the head-hunters. Those grim, flinty, relentless little men, never seen, but chilling the warmest noonday by the subtle terror of their concealed presence, paralleling the trail of their prey through unmapped forests, across perilous mountain-tops, adown bottomless chasms, ...
— Foe-Farrell • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch

... we perceive, is a state of too great dryness, a very rare condition, in this climate at least; in fact, the only case in which it is likely to occur is in very coarse sands, where the soil, being chiefly made up of pure sand and particles of flinty matter, contains comparatively much fewer pores; and, from the large size of the individual particles, assisted by their irregularity, the canals are wider, the circulation of air freer, and, consequently, the whole is much more easily dried. When ...
— Farm drainage • Henry Flagg French

... large, and the parts then wiped repeatedly on a clean cotton or other absorbent rag. Pure benzine, if not rubbed in too hard or too long, will not injure the adjacent varnish, be it the delicate film on a thousand pound gem of Cremona or the flinty covering of a less presumptuous output from Naples. When evaporation is complete, it will be so in a few minutes, some clean water brushed in and wiped away, will leave the surfaces in a state ...
— The Repairing & Restoration of Violins - 'The Strad' Library, No. XII. • Horace Petherick

... breakfasted upon tea and toast. Such a consummation would have sounded as ridiculous as if the statue of the commander in Don Juan had not only accepted of the invitation of the libertine to supper, but had also committed a beefsteak to his flinty jaws and stomach of adamant. A little more conversation ensued of a less serious nature, and tending to show that even the passage from life to death leaves the female anxiety about person and dress somewhat alive. The ghost asked Mrs. Bargrave whether she did not think ...
— The Best Ghost Stories • Various

... any part of the world to which you may chance to go you will find Silica. You may not know it by that name, but it is that shining, flinty substance you see in sand and rock-crystal. It is found in a very great number of things besides these two, but these ...
— Round-about Rambles in Lands of Fact and Fancy • Frank Richard Stockton

... never penetrated for more than a few minutes at a time, it was always twilight. At the bottom it was almost dark, so that the stream would hardly have been visible but for its yeasty foam. At some point near the base, when the flinty stone was speeding forward like a meteor, it abraded a harder portion than before. Instantly a stream of fire shot out, such as sometimes flashes from a murky cloud in the sky, and, as if it were an echo of the impact, the splash and thunderous ...
— Two Boys in Wyoming - A Tale of Adventure (Northwest Series, No. 3) • Edward S. Ellis

... brother to his end? O that I had the Thracian Orpheus' harp, For to awake out of the infernal shade Those ugly devils of black Erebus, That might torment the damned traitor's soul! O that I had Amphion's instrument, To quicken with his vital notes and tunes The flinty joints of every stony rock, By which the Scithians might be punished! For, by the lightening of almighty Jove, The Hun shall die, had he ten thousand lives: And would to God he had ten thousand lives, That I might with the arm-strong ...
— 2. Mucedorus • William Shakespeare [Apocrypha]

... surveys the world; And mounted Sleipner, and in darkness rode To Asgard. And the stars came out in heaven, High over Asgard, to light home the King. But fiercely Odin gallop'd, moved in heart; And swift to Asgard, to the gate, he came. And terribly the hoofs of Sleipner rang Along the flinty floor of Asgard streets, And the Gods trembled on their golden beds Hearing the wrathful Father coming home— For dread, for like a whirlwind, Odin came. And to Valhalla's gate he rode, and left Sleipner; and Sleipner went to his own stall; And in Valhalla Odin laid him down. But in Breidablik, ...
— Poetical Works of Matthew Arnold • Matthew Arnold

... sound, as they were, of the stanch frigate beneath them. No noise, no confusion, but just as polite and courteous, in their honest, seamanlike way, as half a legion of French dancing-masters, they whacked off the salt pork before them with their sheath-knives, munching the flinty biscuit, and all as happy and careless of the past and future as clams at high water. Ay, there they clustered, those five hundred sailors, in their snowy duck trowsers and white, coarse linen frocks, with the blue collars laid square ...
— Captain Brand of the "Centipede" • H. A. (Henry Augustus) Wise

... Well, then, my lord, say, are you satisfied? You have my goods, my money, and my wealth, My ships, my store, and all that I enjoy'd; And, having all, you can request no more, Unless your unrelenting flinty hearts Suppress all pity in your stony breasts, And now shall move you ...
— The Jew of Malta • Christopher Marlowe

... approaches hopeless—avarice and ambition. How differently those two young people viewed the same event! Christina, knowing her power over her father, and unluckily not knowing that fathers (even though they are prime ministers, and are as courtier-like as Polonius) have flinty hearts when their interests are concerned, saw nothing in the present state of affairs to despair about; and in fact, as we have said already, was nearly committing the unpardonable crime of laughing ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXXVI. October, 1843. Vol. LIV. • Various

... of a narrow ridge, trending East-South-East 1/2 a mile east, from where the boats were lying: in this singular ridge I again noticed the dip to the south-east: it was composed of a variety of rocks, jasper, a greyish kind of flinty indifferent limestone, ...
— Discoveries in Australia, Volume 2 • John Lort Stokes

... leather. But that was where they had ridden while the land was still plastic from the rain. Farther, wind and sun had dried the ridge-turf to its normal firmness and baked the dobe flats till in places they were of their old flinty hardness. Yet Piegan crossed at a lope places where neither MacRae nor I could glimpse a sign—and when we would come again to soft ground the trail of the three would rise up to confront us, and bid us marvel at the keenness of his vision. ...
— Raw Gold - A Novel • Bertrand W. Sinclair

... uncultivated downs, unhappily in diminishing numbers. For the private collector's desire to possess British-taken birds' eggs does not diminish; I doubt if more than one clutch in ten escapes the searching eyes of the poor shepherds and labourers who are hired to supply the cabinets. One pair haunted a flinty spot at Winterbourne Bishop until a year or two ago; at other points a few miles away I watched other pairs during the summer of 1909, but in every ...
— A Shepherd's Life • W. H. Hudson

... things about Bessie did escape Fay's notice except her clothes. Bessie was not at eighteen an ingratiating person. No one had ever called her the sunbeam of the home. She had preserved throughout her solemn childhood and flinty youth a sort of resentful protest against the attitude of her family at her advent, namely, that she was not wanted. Her mother had died at her birth, and for several years afterwards her father had studiously ignored her presence in the ...
— Prisoners - Fast Bound In Misery And Iron • Mary Cholmondeley

... Yes, as rocks are, When foamy billows split themselves against Their flinty ribs; or as the moon is mov'd, When wolves, with hunger pin'd, howl at her brightness. I am of a solid temper, and like these Steer on a constant course: with mine own sword, If called into the field, I can make that right, ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor, Vol. I, No. 4, April 1810 • Various

... so. I scrambled up its flinty sides, and found an opening in the summit three feet wide. I touched the rock. It was still warm, and yet no water was discernible. No sound ...
— John L. Stoddard's Lectures, Vol. 10 (of 10) - Southern California; Grand Canon of the Colorado River; Yellowstone National Park • John L. Stoddard

... in the same hollow, small portions of quartz incrusted with an impure salt, and nodules of clay extremely compact. Near the edge of the valley there lie scattered on the sand considerable portions of flinty slate; and amid the common clay, which forms the basis of the soil, are perpendicular layers of a lamellated brown argil, assuming, as it were, the slaty structure. Dr. Clarke noticed among the pebbles near the Lake of Tiberias pieces of a porous ...
— Palestine or the Holy Land - From the Earliest Period to the Present Time • Michael Russell

... loudest threatenings with a still smile. O ye loved ones, that already sleep in the noiseless Bed of Rest, whom in life I could only weep for and never help; and ye, who wide-scattered still toil lonely in the monster-bearing Desert, dyeing the flinty ground with your blood,—yet a little while, and we shall all meet THERE, and our Mother's bosom will screen us all; and Oppression's harness, and Sorrow's fire-whip, and all the Gehenna Bailiffs that patrol and inhabit ever-vexed Time, cannot ...
— Sartor Resartus, and On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History • Thomas Carlyle

... self-love mar The notes of triumph with painful jar, And the helping angels turn aside Their sorrowing faces the shame to bide. Never on custom's oiled grooves The world to a higher level moves, But grates and grinds with friction hard On granite boulder and flinty shard. The heart must bleed before it feels, The pool be troubled before it heals; Ever by losses the right must gain, Every good have its birth of pain; The active Virtues blush to find The Vices wearing their ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier

... chances, sick of this existence, of continually going round and round, like a squirrel in a cage. A change of surroundings and scene, or a spice of adventure, was what he longed for—as eagerly and as hopelessly as some fallen wayfarer in a desert land. His mother's flinty attitude and hostile nagging had frozen a naturally affectionate disposition, and Shafto passed several years of his youth without one single ray of woman's love, until generous Mrs. Malone had come forward and installed him in her ...
— The Road to Mandalay - A Tale of Burma • B. M. Croker

... strange rumour reached their cottage of a spiritual change that had been wrought in the soul of Samuel Learoyd. It was reported that the farmer had been attending the revival services held in the little Primitive Methodist chapel about a mile away from his farm, that his flinty heart had been melted, and that he had "found the Lord." The weaver's family was slow to credit this change, though Mary prayed fervently night and morning that it might be true. Their doubts, however, ...
— More Tales of the Ridings • Frederic Moorman

... species of deep-sea Foraminifera identical with species found in the chalk. Imbedded in the chalky mud of the deep sea, in many localities, are innumerable cup- shaped sponges, provided with six-rayed silicious spicula, so disposed that the wall of the cup is formed of a lacework of flinty thread. Not less abundant, in some parts of the chalk formation, are the fossils known as Ventriculites, well described by Dr. Thomson as "elegant vases or cups, with branching root-like bases, or groups of regularly or irregularly spreading tubes delicately fretted on the surface with an impressed ...
— Discourses - Biological and Geological Essays • Thomas H. Huxley

... relation to the points of the compass, were nearest their wants and supplies, and were never out of their thoughts. In each province they had found the best springs, beds of clay, paint, soapstone, flinty rock, friable stone for sculpture and hard, tenacious stone for tools, and used ashes for salt. The vegetal kingdom was no less familiar to them. Edible plants, and those for dyes and medicines, were on their lists, as well as ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia

... appeal of Giacomo Gradenigo would not have produced much effect on the flinty nature of the Hebrew, who had all the failings of a man proscribed by opinion; but having recovered from his surprise, he began to explain to his companion his apprehensions on account of Donna Violetta, whose marriage, it ...
— The Bravo • J. Fenimore Cooper

... mould; that of the hills is different, changing as you ascend them into variously coloured earth and marl. The beds of the streams and rivers, which swell into torrents during the rainy season, consist of stones and gravel, often of a flinty nature, and often also containing particles of iron. Some basaltic appearances in one of the districts into which the island is divided, and several precipices among the mountains, evidently produced ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 13 • Robert Kerr

... the chief things of the ancient mountains, and the precious things of the lasting hills, and the precious things of the earth, and the fulness thereof," "honey out of the rock, and oil out of the flinty rock, butter of kine, and milk of sheep, with fat of lambs, and rams of the breed of Bashan, and goats, with the fat of kidneys of wheat, and the pure blood of the grape[2]." These were present real blessings. What has He given us?—nothing in possession? ...
— Parochial and Plain Sermons, Vol. VII (of 8) • John Henry Newman

... wilt thou, upon Time's flinty road, Gaze at thy far off early days, in vain; Weeping, how oft wilt thou cast down thy load, And curse and pray, ...
— Poems • Frances Anne Butler

... hard, and they called for men of flinty fibre. Those of softer, gentler mould would have failed in the midst of such surroundings. The iron men of the border had a harsh and terrible task allotted them; and though they did it roughly, they did it thoroughly and on the whole well. They may have failed ...
— The Winning of the West, Volume Two - From the Alleghanies to the Mississippi, 1777-1783 • Theodore Roosevelt

... anguish, that they forebore (out of compassion, they said, finding their visits so disagreeable to her) to see her. But their apprehension of what might be the issue was, no doubt, their principal consideration: nothing else could have softened such flinty bosoms. ...
— Clarissa, Volume 7 • Samuel Richardson

... canoes in which were loads of merchandise, and they were now engaged in eating. So soon as these men caught sight of me they uttered exclamations in an unknown tongue and seizing weapons that lay by them, bows and arrows and wooden clubs set on either side with spikes of flinty glass, they made towards me as though to kill me. Now I lifted up my hands praying for mercy, and seeing that I was unarmed and helpless the men laid down their arms and addressed me. I shook my head to show that I could not understand, ...
— Montezuma's Daughter • H. Rider Haggard

... Perhaps, the flinty hardness, the indifferent crispness, of that voice raised dim memories in the woman's mind, for her glance wavered, ...
— The Wilderness Trail • Frank Williams

... than is known; And, strange as it seems, yet he constantly deems The world standing still while he's dreaming his dreams,— Does this wonderful toad in his cheerful abode In the innermost heart of that flinty old stone, By the gray-haired moss and the ...
— The World's Best Poetry Volume IV. • Bliss Carman

... heart, wrapped in a woman's hide! How could'st thou drain the life-blood of the child To bid the father wipe his face withal, And yet be seen to bear a woman's face? Women are soft, mild, pitiful and flexible, Thou stern, obdurate, flinty, ...
— Characteristics of Women - Moral, Poetical, and Historical • Anna Jameson

... had been her triumph. Archie had promised to spare the girl, and he would keep it; but who had promised to spare Archie? What was to be the end of it? Over a maze of difficulties she glanced, and saw, at the end of every passage, the flinty countenance of Hermiston. And a kind of horror fell upon her at what she had done. She wore a tragic mask. "Erchie, the Lord peety you, dear, and peety me! I have buildit on this foundation" - laying her hand heavily on his shoulder - "and buildit hie, and pit my hairt in the ...
— Weir of Hermiston • Robert Louis Stevenson

... fools are glad of the folly That made them weep and sing, And Keats is thankful for Fanny Brawne And Drummond for his king. They know that on flinty sorrow And failure and desire The steel of their souls was hammered To bring forth ...
— Main Street and Other Poems • Alfred Joyce Kilmer

... way!' Are you a little sorry to- night that the river and the way are parting in your life? Is your soul discouraged in you because of the soreness of the way? And as you go do you still wish for some better way than the strait way? And have you just espied a stile on the left hand of your narrow and flinty path, and on looking over it is there a pleasant meadow? And does your companion point out to your satisfaction, and, almost to your good conscience, that the soft road runs right along the hard road, only over the stile and outside the fence? Then, ...
— Bunyan Characters - First Series • Alexander Whyte

... you was back there, too?" asked homesick Druse, wistfully. Druse could no more take root in the city than could a partridge-berry plant, set in the flinty earth of the back-yard. ...
— A Village Ophelia and Other Stories • Anne Reeve Aldrich

... that flinty stubborn thing, That terrors cannot move, That fears no threat'nings of his wrath, Shall be ...
— Hymns and Spiritual Songs • Isaac Watts

... charadrius oedicnemus is as follows. It lays its eggs, usually two, never more than three, on the bare ground, without any nest, in the field; so that the countryman, in stirring his fallows, often destroys them. The young run immediately from the egg like partridges, etc., and are withdrawn to some flinty field by their dam, where they skulk among the stones, which are their best security; for their feathers are so exactly of the colour of our grey spotted flints, that the most exact observer, unless he catches the eye ...
— The Natural History of Selborne • Gilbert White

... Baumser, I can't stand that young fellow Girdlestone. I'll have to chuck him up. He's such a cold-blooded, flinty-hearted, calculating sort of a chap, that—" The remainder of the major's sentence was lost in the ...
— The Firm of Girdlestone • Arthur Conan Doyle

... touch of his trident a wonder! Virtue to earth from his deity flows; From the rift of the flinty rock, cloven asunder, A dark-watered fountain ebullient rose. Inly elastic, with airiest lightness It leapt, till it cheated the eyesight; and, lo! It showed in the sun, with a various brightness, The fine-woven hues of the heavenly bow. "WATER IS BEST!" cried the ...
— Mosaics of Grecian History • Marcius Willson and Robert Pierpont Willson

... and trials, aims and purposes. There are many people who are glad Jesus died for them who know nothing about "suffering with Christ." Yet the Bible is filled with allusions to it. The Heavenly Bridegroom wants a companion who will understand Him. This cold, hard, flinty, wicked world does not. "He came unto His own and His own received Him not." He knocked at the door of His own vineyard and the husband-men said, "Come, let us kill the Son." The divine Lord hungers for some one who will not misjudge ...
— The Heart-Cry of Jesus • Byron J. Rees

... I!—and at every court, from the court of Cain in Mesopotamia to the court of Victoria in this present, flinty-hearted London; only the truth is, as I have travelled I have changed my name. Bless you, half the Proverbs given to Solomon are mine. What I have lost by keeping company with kings, not ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 1, July 24, 1841 • Various

... and all the base, unmanly crew Such food they sent to make complete our woes It looked like carrion torn from hungry crows Such vermin vile on every joint were seen, So black, corrupted, mortified, and lean, That once we tried to move our flinty chief, And thus addressed him, holding up the beef— "See, Captain, see, what rotten bones we pick, What kills the healthy cannot cure the sick, Not dogs on such by Christian men are fed, And see, good master, see, what lousy bread!" "Your meat or bread," this man of death replied, ...
— American Prisoners of the Revolution • Danske Dandridge

... sky; The gently breeze that whispers by; The fields, all white with waving corn; The lilies that the vale adorn; The reed that trembles in the wind; The tree where none its fruit can find; The sliding sand, the flinty rock, That bears unmoved the tempest's shock; The thorns that on the earth abound; The tender grass that clothes the ground; The little birds that fly in air; The sheep that need the shepherd's care; The pearls that deep in ocean ...
— Twilight And Dawn • Caroline Pridham

... to the hallowed ground of the Temple. More, I led them towards it myself. But advance was checked. Piles of cloud, whose darkness was palpable even in the midnight, covered the holy hill. I attempted to pass through it, and was swept downward by a gust that tore the rocks in a flinty shower ...
— The Worlds Greatest Books - Vol. II: Fiction • Arthur Mee, J. A. Hammerton, Eds.

... my lattice window came moaning at me from Stonehenge. There was a hanger-on at that establishment (a supernaturally preserved Druid I believe him to have been, and to be still), with long white hair, and a flinty blue eye always looking afar off; who claimed to have been a shepherd, and who seemed to be ever watching for the reappearance, on the verge of the horizon, of some ghostly flock of sheep that had been mutton for many ages. He was a man with a weird belief in him that no one could count the ...
— The Holly-Tree • Charles Dickens

... described the Babylonian influences by which I had sought to seduce him. He had gone, she said, at the call of duty to accomplish what good he might, but never in the whole course of his professional experience had his words fallen on a more flinty and barren soil. And then, as if it were not enough to flaunt in the face of my old master the extravagances most hostile to the theories of which he was the advocate, I had sought to tempt him with money to become a perpetual ...
— A Romantic Young Lady • Robert Grant

... half a mile higher when, coming to a flinty piece of road, the poor devil lost a second shoe, and from off his other forefoot. I then got out of the chaise in good earnest, and seeing a house about a quarter of a mile to the left hand, with a great deal to do I prevailed upon the ...
— The Lock and Key Library • Julian Hawthorne, Ed.

... teachers of mankind How from the least of things the mightiest grow, What marvel jealous Nature made thee blind, Lest man should learn what angels long to know? Thou in the flinty rock, the river's flow, In the thick-moted sunbeam's sifted light Hast trained thy downward-pointed tube to show Worlds within worlds unveiled to mortal sight, Even as the patient watchers of the night,— The cyclope gleaners of the fruitful skies,— Show the wide misty ...
— The Poetical Works of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Complete • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.

... anywhere. Down in these waters, as transparent as air, you see coral plants of every hue and shape imaginable:—antlers, tufts of azure, waving reeds like stalks of grain, and pale green buds and mosses. In some places, you look through prickly branches down to a snow-white floor of sand, sprouting with flinty bulbs; and crawling among these are strange shapes:—some bristling with spikes, others clad in shining coats of mail, and here and there, round ...
— Omoo: Adventures in the South Seas • Herman Melville

... oil penetrates into good dry stone probably 11/2 inches, making the stone hard and flinty, as any stone cutter will soon find out if ...
— Scientific American, Vol.22, No. 1, January 1, 1870 • Various

... huge blocks of stone, which pour down with a frightful roar, and in their swift course exhibit the most convulsive movements. If you overlook from an eminence one of these landscapes furrowed with so many ravines, it presents only images of desolation and of death. Vast deposits of flinty pebbles, many feet in thickness, which have rolled down and spread far over the plain, surround large trees, bury even their tops, and rise above them, leaving to the husbandman no longer a ray of hope. One can ...
— The Earth as Modified by Human Action • George P. Marsh

... A species of horsetail rush (Equisetum hyemale), having a rough, flinty surface. It is used ...
— Lisbeth Longfrock • Hans Aanrud

... the earth. To one standing at the mouth of the cave, especially at night, they afford a picturesque spectacle. Gathered round the forge, their bronzed and naked bodies, illuminated by the flame, appear like figures of demons; while the cave, with its flinty sides and uneven roof, blackened by the charcoal vapours which hover about it in festoons, seems to offer no inadequate representation of fabled purgatory. Working in iron was an occupation strictly forbidden to the Gitanos by the ancient laws, ...
— The Zincali - An Account of the Gypsies of Spain • George Borrow

... step I now took removed me farther and farther from a country, whose mighty mountains had, with their solemnity, first taught me to think; and the integrity and single-mindedness of whose children showed how, though fostered in the flinty lap of poverty, happiness and heroic contentment were no fable. The peasants, whom we sometimes met in the interior of the country, where their livelihood must be earned with the hardest labour, and whose necessity during the long and dismal months ...
— A Yacht Voyage to Norway, Denmark, and Sweden - 2nd edition • W. A. Ross

... in a scarcely comprehensible French patois, what I wanted. I answered, in French, that I should like something to eat and drink; whereupon he produced, from a sort of cupboard in the darkest corner of the forecastle, a bowl and a large can of soup, together with a wooden tray of flinty biscuit and an old iron spoon. Pouring a liberal quantity of the soup into the bowl, and plunging the spoon into it, he handed it to me, placed the bread barge within my reach, and again composed ...
— The Log of a Privateersman • Harry Collingwood

... cooling mountain, gave birth to glaciers that, uniting edge to edge, at length formed one grand conical glacier—a down-crawling mantle of ice upon a fountain of smouldering fire, crushing and grinding its brown, flinty lavas, and thus degrading and remodeling the entire mountain from summit to base. How much denudation and degradation has been effected we have no means of determining, the porous, crumbling rocks being ill adapted ...
— Steep Trails • John Muir

... vein, Which help'd me to sustain Love's first assault, the only arms I bore; This flinty breast say who Shall once again subdue, That I with song may soothe me as before? Some power appears to trace Within me Laura's face, Whispers her name; and straight in verse I strive To picture her again, But the fond effort's vain: Me of my ...
— The Sonnets, Triumphs, and Other Poems of Petrarch • Petrarch

... our years of association and friendship, I have never known him to do an unkind or dishonorable act. He is considerate of others, tender-hearted, sentimental. But, believe me, in "contrariwise," he is flinty obsidian when it comes to his convictions. Shams and hypocrites and parading egotists are his particular and especial abomination and when he gets on the editorial trail of one of that ilk, he turns him inside out and displays the very secrets of what should ...
— The Dead Men's Song - Being the Story of a Poem and a Reminiscent Sketch of its - Author Young Ewing Allison • Champion Ingraham Hitchcock

... mind as he paced his horse slowly through the rugged and flinty street of Tully-Veolan, interrupted only in his meditations by the occasional caprioles which his charger exhibited at the reiterated assaults of those canine Cossacks, the COLLIES before mentioned. The village was more than half a mile long, the cottages being irregularly divided ...
— Waverley • Sir Walter Scott

... youth, who in the Diet must Into respectful silence hush his voice. Yet do not, for that I am young, and want Experience, slight my counsel and my words. 'Tis not the wantonness of youthful blood That fires my spirit; but a pang so deep That e'en the flinty rocks must pity me. You, too, are fathers, heads of families, And you must wish to have a virtuous son, To reverence your gray hairs, and shield your eyes With pious and affectionate regard. Do not, I pray, ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. III • Kuno Francke (Editor-in-Chief)

... moon fulfilled the circle clear While I have dragged out life in woods and houses of the deer, And gardens of the beasts; and oft from rocky place on high Trembling I note the Cyclops huge, hear foot and voice go by. And evil meat of wood-berries, and cornel's flinty fruit 649 The bush-boughs give; on grass at whiles I browse, and plucked-up root So wandering all about, at last I see unto the shore Your ships a-coming: thitherward my steps in haste I bore: Whate'er might hap enough ...
— The AEneids of Virgil - Done into English Verse • Virgil

... said ironically as well as in earnest. Caleb augured the worst, turned a deaf ear to the trio aforesaid, and was moving doggedly on, his ancient castor pulled over his brows, and his eyes bent on the ground, as if to count the flinty pebbles with which the rude pathway was causewayed. But on a sudden he found himself surrounded in his progress, like a stately merchantman in the Gut of Gibraltar (I hope the ladies will excuse the tarpaulin phrase) by three Algerine galleys. "Gude guide us, Mr. Balderstone!" said ...
— Bride of Lammermoor • Sir Walter Scott

... speaking, it is a 'stranger rock,' not in any way related to the rocks of this mountain, nor of the mountains near here. It is a mammoth conglomerate of such an interestingly curious compound and of such flinty hardness. At the time of its formation enormous pressure, coupled with the most intense heat, must have molded this strange mass together. Coarse and fine gravel, smooth, round pebbles, from the size of a pigeon's egg to that of a two-hundred-pound boulder, are all jumbled ...
— Solaris Farm - A Story of the Twentieth Century • Milan C. Edson

... time, with occasional bloodshed. The next letter is an exultant one. There were few enough of this sort. We cannot pretend to keep track of the multiplicity of mines and shares which lure the gold-hunters, pecking away at the flinty ledges, usually in the snow. It has been necessary to abbreviate this letter, for much of it has lost all importance with the years, and is merely confusing. Hope is still high in the writer's heart, and confidence ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain

... informed weel, Ye hate as ill's the very deil The flinty heart that canna feel— Come, sir, here's to you! Hae, there's my haun', I wiss you weel, An' ...
— Poems And Songs Of Robert Burns • Robert Burns

... 989) that cannot fail to arrest and hold one's attention. Capital of the Dukes of Anjou, and the home of Margaret of Anjou, daughter of Rene, who married Henry VI. of England; likewise the cradle of the first Plantagenets; and immortalized by Shakespeare's King John, who soliloquizes anent "The flinty ribs of this contemptuous town." With all this, Angers has perhaps a supreme claim for English consideration. In spite of all this, and the added attraction of a "real castle," such as is seldom found ...
— The Cathedrals of Northern France • Francis Miltoun

... tone of voice; sounds strained and worried—something unusual for the cold, flinty gentleman from Pennsylvania. And his 'friend S.,' of course, means Stevens! Great heavens! then Stevens must now ...
— A Gentleman from Mississippi • Thomas A. Wise

... did not expect an answer, for he straightened up once more and proceeded to whittle. The pitter-patter of the trotting horse, and the clatter of the wheels upon the flinty road, broke rudely upon the familiar little noises of the quiet summer morning. One sidewise glance satisfied Orn that the men in the vehicle were from Auburn prison. He stopped whittling but a moment ...
— The Secret of the Storm Country • Grace Miller White

... rocks and dug these valleys? One would almost as soon expect the wings and feet of the birds to wear away the forests they flit through. The wings of time are feathered also, and as they brush against the granite or the flinty sandstone no visible particle is removed while you watch and wait. Come back in a thousand years, and you note no change, save in the covering of trees and verdure. Return in ten thousand, and you would probably find the hills carrying their heads ...
— Time and Change • John Burroughs

... Nor race divine, Nor Dardan sire, nor Goddess mother thine! Form'd in the flinty womb of rocks accurst, 455 Begot by Caucasus, by tygers nurst. What need I more? why doubt of what is plain? One sigh, one look, did all my tears obtain. How name his crimes? did loves extremest woe, Move that hard heart, ...
— The Fourth Book of Virgil's Aeneid and the Ninth Book of Voltaire's Henriad • Virgil and Voltaire

... save for a streak of white, dying about fifty feet away, which is the beam of our searchlight. Twenty feet below is a bare floor of flinty lava and broken shell. This is unrelieved by sea-weed of any kind, appearing like an imagined fragment ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science September 1930 • Various

... thrust his velvety nose into the Indian-corn that had been placed for his meal, and went on contentedly crunching up the flinty grain, while Bart hurried away now to see how the preparations for starting were going on; for he felt, he could not explain why, neglectful of his ...
— The Silver Canyon - A Tale of the Western Plains • George Manville Fenn

... tip of his finger in water, and cool my tongue; for I am tormented in this flame!" Dost thou not hear them say, "Send one from the dead, to prevent my father, my brother, my father's house, from coming to this place of torment!" Shall not these mournful groans pierce thy flinty heart? Wilt thou stop thine ears and shut thine eyes? And wilt thou NOT regard? Take warning, and stop thy journey before it be too late. Wilt thou he like the silly fly, that is not quiet unless she be either ...
— The Riches of Bunyan • Jeremiah Rev. Chaplin

... question. I had, however, no reason to complain of my treatment by them, for they would not allow me to do any work, but brought me the best food, and did everything for me. Yet, notwithstanding all her tenderness, the charms of the loving Oilyblubbina could not move my flinty heart; but I was obliged to hide my real sentiments, for I had no fancy, unarmed as I was, to fight the father and two brothers, not to speak of having to contend against the rage of the disappointed lady and ...
— Marmaduke Merry - A Tale of Naval Adventures in Bygone Days • William H. G. Kingston

... of that cry misunderstood it, or cruelly pretended to do so, in order to find fresh food for mockery. 'Eloi' sounded like enough to 'Elijah' to suggest to some of the flinty hearts around a travesty of the piteous appeal. They must have been Jews, for the soldiers knew nothing about the prophet; and if they were Scribes, they could scarcely fail to recognise the reference to the Twenty-second Psalm, and to understand the ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Mark • Alexander Maclaren

... dusty drive to Arras. The straight, worn roads of flinty chalk passed for many miles ARRAS through country where there was no unmilitary activity save that of the crops pushing themselves up. Everything was dedicated to the war. Only at one dirty little industrial town did we see a large crowd of men waiting after lunch to go into a factory. ...
— Over There • Arnold Bennett

... entreaties with such earnestness that a flinty heart alone could have resisted them. Hers was not a flinty heart. Oh, dear ...
— Life And Adventures Of Martin Chuzzlewit • Charles Dickens

... not speaking her real sentiments. She was neither cruel nor flinty-hearted, but was arguing and opposing, as she often did, sheerly from a spirit of contradiction, and a desire to astonish her little world; Blanche's vanity was of the Erostratus character. While she longed to be liked and admired, she would have preferred ...
— Clare Avery - A Story of the Spanish Armada • Emily Sarah Holt

... my way were flinty, thorny, Were I sure it led to Thee, Could I pass one day forlornly, Home and rest so near ...
— Opening a Chestnut Burr • Edward Payson Roe

... be very glad," was all Reuben could reply. Something in his tone touched the man's flinty heart still more; and before he half knew what he was going to say, he ...
— Saxe Holm's Stories • Helen Hunt Jackson

... into the flinty eyes that were set so deeply in the wrinkled, leathery countenance. He suspected an ulterior motive, but could not find it within him to turn ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science February 1930 • Various

... seen your father, who is stern,—after the manner of fathers. What granite equals a parent's flinty bosom! For myself, I do not prefer clandestine arrangements and rope ladders; and you, dear, have nothing of the Lydia about you. But I do like my own way, and like it especially when you are at the end of the path. It is quite out of the question that you should go back to those islands. ...
— He Knew He Was Right • Anthony Trollope

... branch through North-east Wales,—were laid down—after all this, I say, some change took place in the sea-bottom, and brought down on the reefs of coral sheets of sand, which killed the corals and buried them in grit. Does any reader wish for proof of this? Let him examine the "cherty," or flinty, beds which so often appear where the bottom of the millstone grit is passing into the top of the mountain limestone—the beds, to give an instance, which are now quarried on the top of the Halkin Mountain in Flintshire, for chert, which is sent to Staffordshire to be ground down for ...
— Town Geology • Charles Kingsley

... would be a better memento than this poor word-sketching. From the hill on which the town is planted radiate a dozen ravines, down whose sides the houses slide and scramble with an alarming indifference to the cohesion of their little rugged blocks of flinty red stone. You ramble really nowhither without emerging on some small court or terrace that throws your view across a gulf of tangled gardens or vineyards and over to a cluster of serried black dwellings which have to hollow in their backs to keep their balance on the opposite ...
— Italian Hours • Henry James

... in a woman's hide! How could'st thou drain the life-blood of the child, To bid the father wipe his eyes withal, And yet be seen to bear a woman's face? Women are soft, mild, pitiful and flexible; Thou—stern, obdurate, flinty, rough, remorseless. Third part of ...
— Walladmor: - And Now Freely Translated from the German into English. - In Two Volumes. Vol. II. • Thomas De Quincey

... Minje, and Milo. There was a small band of Italians, with one Frenchman, Barbieux,—one of the bravest of the brave and an ex-Zouave officer,—ten Russians, and a few Servians. We were in for a night, and had brought no provender, while all the food in camp was the half of an old goat and some flinty ship's biscuit. The goat was roasted before the camp-fire, laid on a timber platform, which served for bed by night and table by day, and hacked to pieces by the yataghans which had come from the battle two days before. ...
— The Autobiography of a Journalist, Volume II • William James Stillman

... practise; for he was courteous and gentle, ready and willing, and always inspired the children with a liking, which old Dr. Potts, with his blue glasses and loud voice, could never do. Dr. Walter also taught the bible-class, and won the flinty hearts of the congregation, and the susceptible ones of the young ladies. He also frequently walked home with Beatrice Dering, and had fallen into the way of occasionally stopping in the evenings, ...
— Six Girls - A Home Story • Fannie Belle Irving

... not forsaken her. He bounded along over the rugged ground on the mettlesome steed, striking fire from the flinty rocks, leaping creeks and rivulets, bursting through bush and brake, mile after mile, until he gained the open prairie, while the black coat of his charger was speckled with foam. Here he drew rein, and trotted hither and thither in search of the tracks of the Indians. He found them at last, ...
— The Wild Man of the West - A Tale of the Rocky Mountains • R.M. Ballantyne

... also. And thou art cold of eye, fierce of mouth, hooked of nose, flinty of heart, stony of soul, ...
— The Geste of Duke Jocelyn • Jeffery Farnol

... toils through the furrow, Obedient to the goad; The patient ass, up flinty paths, Plods with his weary load: With whine and bound the spaniel His master's whistle hears; And the sheep yields her patiently ...
— Lays of Ancient Rome • Thomas Babington Macaulay

... juvenile, becomes insipid, and because it is too old to prattle, jabbers. Talkers are everywhere, but where are the men that say things? Where are the people that can be listened to and quoted? Where are the flinty people whose contact strikes fire? Where are the electric people who thrill a whole circle with sudden vitality? Where are the strong people who hedge themselves around with their individuality, and will be roused by no prince's kiss, but taken only by storm, yet once ...
— Gala-days • Gail Hamilton

... some reaches of the 'pike were built on planks instead of broken stone, and gave out a hollow rumble instead of a flinty roar. The shape and firmness of the road-bed were the same, but the ends of boards sometimes cropped out along the sides. In this day, branches of the old national thoroughfare penetrate to every part of the Hoosier State. The ...
— Old Caravan Days • Mary Hartwell Catherwood

... my early gymnastics (for, as the great Hermann says, before I was demulced by the Muses, I was ferocis ingenii puer, et ad arma quam ad literas paratior), had not imbued me indelibly with some of the holy rage of Frere Jean des Entommeures, I should be, at this moment, lying on the table of some flinty- hearted anatomist, who would have sliced and disjointed me as unscrupulously as I do these remnants of the capon and chine, wherewith you consoled yourself yesterday for my absence at dinner. Phew! I have a noble thirst upon me, which I will ...
— Crotchet Castle • Thomas Love Peacock

... the humorous sally,—"With a little oatmeal for food and a little sulphur for friction, allaying cutaneous irritation with one hand and grasping his Calvinistical creed with the other, Sawney ran away to the flinty hills, sung his psalm out of tune his own way, and listened to his sermon of two hours long, amid the rough and imposing melancholy of the tallest thistles." But from the graver historian, developing the historic significance of their determined ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 90, April, 1865 • Various

... is proofe against Complaint or Prayer? Or can I thinke what my Reward shall be From that proud Beauty, which was my betrayer? What talke I of a Heart, when thou hast none? Or if thou hast, it is a flinty one. ...
— Minor Poems of Michael Drayton • Michael Drayton

... feel equal to the task of relating all that I overheard; if I could have stopped my ears, I would have done it. She tempted him, beguiled him to eat, to praise her, to be at ease, to love her. With that liquid tongue of hers, which would have melted a flinty core, she talked of his and her affairs; she was interested in his commentary upon the Pandects, she was indignant at the jealousy of Dr. This, she made light of the malice of Professor That. With flying feet from table to kitchen and back, with dexterous ...
— The Fool Errant • Maurice Hewlett

... the way to London Bridge, the character of the river in this respect changes. You have everywhere gravel or flinty chalk, with but a narrow bed of alluvial soil, upon either bank to represent the ...
— The Historic Thames • Hilaire Belloc

... chap, we all worship Joan—at a distance. She is not to be painted. Tears and prayers are useless. She has a flinty father—a fisherman, who looks upon painting as a snare of the devil and sees every artist already wriggling on the trident in his mind's eye. Joan has also a lover, who would rather behold her ...
— Lying Prophets • Eden Phillpotts

... been saying all along. But you're looking at the thing by and large, and I'm figuring on the flinty details. For example: you'll admit that we can't work to any advantage west of the mountains until we have made a standard gauge out of the Plug Mountain branch. How much time have ...
— Empire Builders • Francis Lynde

... leapt In transport from my flinty couch, to welcome The thunder as it burst upon my roof, And beckon'd to the lightning, as it flash'd ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. III - With His Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore

... few minutes, work was resumed, and for another hour all continued busy as bees, cutting and pounding at the flinty surface of ...
— The Lighthouse • Robert Ballantyne

... magician, weary of the world, In sullen humor locked his charms all up Within a diamond casket, firmly clasped, And threw the key into the sea, and died. The manikins here tried with all their might; In vain! no tool can pick the flinty lock; His magic arts still slumber, like their master. A shepherd's child, along the sea-shore playing, Watches the waves, in hurrying, idle chase. Dreaming and thoughtless, as young maidens are, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XII. September, 1863, No. LXXI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various

... possibly over a hundred miles distant. Thus freed from any restraint, we held a due northward course for several days, or until we encountered some rocky country. Water was plentiful and grass fairly good, but those flinty hills must be avoided or sorefooted beeves would be the result. I had seen trails of blood left by cattle from sandy countries on encountering rock, and now the feet of ours were a second consideration to their stomachs. But long before the herd reached this menace, Morg Tussler ...
— The Outlet • Andy Adams

... was the hold-up in Giant Gorge. This was the most dreaded spot in the whole stream, and seldom had a drive been brought through without some disaster. Much blasting had been done, and a number of obstacles blown away. But for all that there were rocks which defied the skill of man to remove. Two flinty walls reared their frowning sides for several rods along the brook. Between these an immense boulder lifted its head, around which the waters incessantly swirled. But when the stream was swollen high enough the logs would ...
— The Fourth Watch • H. A. Cody

... hearts were like the flinty rock, And cold as ocean's foam; You tore them from my clasping arms, And bore them from our home: And now my brothers ye will slay! But they are proud and high, And come with spirits brave and true, Your tortures ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, February 1844 - Volume 23, Number 2 • Various

... be harried like bumbee's byke— I'll no be handled unleddy like— I winna hae ye, ye worryin' tyke, The road ye came gae 'lang!" He loupit on wi' an awsome snort, He bang'd the fire frae the flinty court; He's aff and awa' in a snorin' sturt, As hard as ...
— Tales from Blackwood, Volume 7 • Various

... rein hanging on the neck of the mustang. Fred gently pulled it and the beast stopped. He was walking so quietly that his hoofs made scarcely any sound in falling upon the flinty surface, and the Indian, from some cause or other, failed to notice the cessation of sound until the distance between ...
— In the Pecos Country • Edward Sylvester Ellis (AKA Lieutenant R.H. Jayne)

... looking after the retreating thugs and emissaries, she saw Eva again. Zita's lips formed a cruel line and a flinty hardness came into ...
— The Master Mystery • Arthur B. Reeve and John W. Grey

... the dark film of vanity and lies, And inward turn their renovated eyes; In aspect true let each himself behold, By self deform'd in pride's portentous mould. And if thy voice, on Bethl'em's holy plain Once heard, can reach their flinty hearts again, Teach them, as fearful of a serpent's gaze, Teach them to shun the gloating eye of praise; That slightest swervings from their nature's plan Make them a lie, and poison all the man, 'Till black corruption spread the soul throughout, Whence thick and fierce, like fabled ...
— The Sylphs of the Season with Other Poems • Washington Allston

... Tom!" cried Cornelia. "After such a well-turned compliment, our hearts would be flinty indeed, if we didn't excuse you. But what ...
— Holidays at the Grange or A Week's Delight - Games and Stories for Parlor and Fireside • Emily Mayer Higgins

... packet which may be useful, and to Lockhart a critique on rather a dry topic, viz.: the ancient Scottish History. I remember E. Ainslie, commonly called the plain man, who piqued himself on his powers of conversation, striving to strike fire from some old flinty wretch whom he found in a corner of a public coach, at length addressed him: "Friend, I have tried you on politics, literary matters, religion, fashionable news, etc. etc., and all to no purpose." The dry old rogue, twisting his muzzle into an infernal grin, replied, "Can you claver ...
— The Journal of Sir Walter Scott - From the Original Manuscript at Abbotsford • Walter Scott

... the flinty path and touched his arm. "Would you mind going and looking for Sisily?" she said. "She is out on the cliffs, Thalassa says." She pointed a hand in the direction she supposed the girl ...
— The Moon Rock • Arthur J. Rees

... said the duke, "if you do not relent and become softer than a ripe fig, you finger no government. It were good indeed, that I should send my islanders a cruel flinty-hearted governor; one who relents not at the tears of afflicted damsels, nor at the entreaties of wise, awful, and ancient enchanters, and sages. In fine, Sancho, either you must whip yourself, or let others whip you, or ...
— Wit and Wisdom of Don Quixote • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra

... ear had caught a faint "click, click," in the direction of the wood; her quicker instinct and rustic training enabled her to determine that it was the ring of a horse's shoe on flinty ground; her knowledge of the locality told her it came from the spot where the trail passed over an outcrop of flint scarcely a quarter of a mile from where she sat, and within the clearing. It was no errant ...
— Stories in Light and Shadow • Bret Harte

... that we should use our children as we do our puppies—take one, lay it in the lap, feed it with every good bit, and drown five; nay, yet worse, forasmuch as the puppies are once drowned, whereas the children are left perpetually drowning. Really, my lords, it is a flinty custom! and all this for his cruel ambition, that would raise himself a pillar a golden pillar for his monument, though he has children, his own reviving flesh, and a kind of immortality. And this is that interest of a family, for which we are to think ill of a government that ...
— The Commonwealth of Oceana • James Harrington

... fire-blackened mountains, glaciers began to crawl, covering them from the summits to the sea with a mantle of ice; and then with infinite deliberation the work went on of sculpturing the range anew. These mighty agents of erosion, halting never through unnumbered centuries, crushed and ground the flinty lavas and granites beneath their crystal folds, wasting and building until in the fullness of time the Sierra was born again, brought to light nearly as we behold it today, with glaciers and snow-crushed pines at ...
— The Mountains of California • John Muir

... in South Wales; studied at Oxford, was a partisan of the royal cause; wrote four volumes of poems in the vein of George Herbert, but was much more mystical and had deeper thoughts, could he have expressed them; of his poems the first place has been assigned to "Silex Scintillans," the theme the flinty heart when smelted giving out sparks. "At times," adds Prof. Saintsbury, "there is in him genuine blood and fire; but it is not always, or even often, that the flint is kindled and melted to ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood

... river-bed. In addition to this, there were abundance of rocks, of every gradation between sandstone and slate—some sandstone almost slate, some slate almost sandstone. There was also a good deal of pudding-stone; but the bulk of the rock was this very hard, very flinty sandstone. You know I am no geologist. I will undertake, however, to say positively that we did not see one atom of granite; all the mountains that I have yet seen are either volcanic or composed of ...
— A First Year in Canterbury Settlement • Samuel Butler

... and watched the climbing of the surf up the morning sky after a heavy storm at sea, you realize the force of Homer's gift for the realities. His pictures are yankee in their indications, as a work of art could be, flinty and unyielding, resolute as is the yankee nature itself, or rather to say, the original yankee, which was pioneer then in a so rough yet resourceful country. It is the quality of Thoreau, but without the genius of Thoreau for ...
— Adventures in the Arts - Informal Chapters on Painters, Vaudeville, and Poets • Marsden Hartley

... yet not uninteresting, since many of them evidently afford vestiges of classic times and manners, transmitted through the course of ages; nor unuseful, since they tend to smooth and adorn the rugged way of life, and to strew its flinty path with flowers. ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 10, Issue 266, July 28, 1827 • Various

... result—de conviva Corybanta videbis. (Oh, for muffins and dry toast!) Never mind, we shall soon be at Messina. And now we approach a point from which the lofty Calabrian coast opposite, and the flinty wall of the formidable Scylla, first present themselves, but still as distant objects. In another half hour we are just opposite the redoubtable rock; and here we turn abruptly at right angles to our hitherto course, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXLV. July, 1844. Vol. LVI. • Various

... was a revealer of more merit, as she so well and bitterly knew. He could raise the veil—a dark and dangerous necromancer, with a flinty heart and a hand that had waited long to strike. Had it struck ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker

... still spurred and plashed his headlong way through the heavy road beneath. Emerging at length from the deep and overshadowed valley, a steep hill raised its crest in advance, but still up the stony acclivity the feet of the mettled steed rattled rapidly, and flashed fire from the flinty path. As they approached the top of the hill, the force of the storm became more apparent; and on reaching its crest, the fierce pelting of the mingled rain and hail made the horse impatient of the storm of which his rider was heedless—almost unconscious. ...
— Handy Andy, Vol. 2 - A Tale of Irish Life • Samuel Lover

... warriors followed the arrow until it was only a flickering speck, far below them; but, before that moment arrived, they saw that it was speeding wide of the mark. When at last, the sharp point struck the flinty rock, and the missile doubled over upon itself and dropped harmlessly to the bottom of the canyon, it was at such a distance from the miners, that they knew nothing of it. They never looked up, nor were they aware of the futile anger of the red men, who seeing how useless was everything ...
— A Waif of the Mountains • Edward S. Ellis

... still a rim Of sunset-tinted hills, that softly dim Shine 'gainst the day. "O world, new found," she said, "With treasures heaped and odors rare, 'mong flowers shed, For whose dear sake I came o'er flinty ways, And paths with danger fraught; 'mong brambly sprays, With bleeding feet, and shoulders thorn-pierced deep. But perils past, fade fast. And I will weep My Eden lost no more." And sweet and low As one who dreams, she said, "For now I know These mountain heights, these level plains, ...
— Lilith - The Legend of the First Woman • Ada Langworthy Collier

... he sings, on earth your Muse supplies The important loss, and heals our weeping eyes; Correctly great, she melts each flinty heart, With ...
— The Poetical Works of Addison; Gay's Fables; and Somerville's Chase • Joseph Addison, John Gay, William Sommerville



Words linked to "Flinty" :   obdurate, flint, stony, hardhearted



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