"Gnarled" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Mediterranean that she had dreamed of in her cold, dim room at the convent. This was like the dreams and the stories told by Peter, only better; for nothing could give a true idea of the glimmering olive groves. Under the silvery branches delicate as smoke-wreaths, and among the gnarled gray trunks, it seemed that at any moment a band of nymphs or dryads might pass, streaming away in fear from the ...
— The Guests Of Hercules • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... earth! Of earthy stuff, As honest as the fruitful soil, Gnarled as the friendly trees, and rough As hillsides that had known his toil; Of earthy stuff—let it be told, For earth-born men rise and reveal A courage fair as beaten gold And the enduring ...
— The Poets' Lincoln - Tributes in Verse to the Martyred President • Various
... in this open space, alone, looking seaward, with one arm out-stretched, one hand laid lightly, almost caressingly, upon the gnarled trunk of a solitary old olive-tree, the other arm hanging at her side. She was dressed in some dark, coarse stuff, with a short skirt, and a red handkerchief tied round her head, and seemed in the pale and almost ghastly light in which night and day were drawing near to each other to be tall and ...
— The Call of the Blood • Robert Smythe Hichens
... the summit, he glanced down to see the sun steeping the valley in a lake of gold. Near the canyon, enormous rocks loomed protrudent, like fantastic Negro skulls. The pitaya trees rose tenuous, tall, like the tapering, gnarled fingers of a giant; other trees of all sorts bowed their crests toward the pit of the abyss. Amid the stark rocks and dry branches, roses bloomed like a white offering to the sun as smoothly, suavely, it unraveled its golden threads, one by ...
— The Underdogs • Mariano Azuela
... the conduct of others. —He shows in his historic writings a splendour of imagery and a power of dramatic grouping second only to Shakespeare's. In command of words he is second to no modern English writer. His style has been highly praised and also energetically blamed. It is rugged, gnarled, disjointed, full of irregular force— shot across by sudden lurid lights of imagination— full of the most striking and indeed astonishing epithets, and inspired by a certain grim Titanic force. His sentences are often clumsily built. He himself said of them: "Perhaps not more than ...
— A Brief History of the English Language and Literature, Vol. 2 (of 2) • John Miller Dow Meiklejohn
... farm-steadings, and the gray, gaunt gable-ends of what had been chateaux. Broken fences, crumbling walls, vineyards littered with stones, the shattered arches of bridges—look where you might, the signs of ruin and rapine met the eye. Here and there only, on the farthest sky-line, the gnarled turrets of a castle, or the graceful pinnacles of church or of monastery showed where the forces of the sword or of the spirit had preserved some small islet of security in this universal flood of misery. Moodily and in silence the little party rode along the narrow and irregular track, ...
— The White Company • Arthur Conan Doyle
... when the master chose, Ideal graces rose Like flowers on gnarled boughs; For he was nursed and fed At beauty's fountain head And to the goddess ...
— Michelangelo - A Collection Of Fifteen Pictures And A Portrait Of The - Master, With Introduction And Interpretation • Estelle M. Hurll
... carrying the continental divide, is a gnarled and jagged rampart of snow-splashed granite facing the eastern plains, from which its grim summits may be seen for many miles. Standing out before it like captains in front of gray ranks at parade ...
— The Book of the National Parks • Robert Sterling Yard
... stretched himself, and brought the billy and pint-pots to the head of my camp. The moon had grown misty. The plain horizon had closed in. A couple of boughs, hanging from the gnarled and blasted timber over the billabong, were the perfect shapes of two men hanging side by side. Mitchell scratched the back of his neck and looked down at the pup curled like a glob of mud on the sand in the moonlight, and an idea struck him. He got a big ...
— Over the Sliprails • Henry Lawson
... "Garden of Gethsemane," and is probably the spot to which the lowly Jesus repaired and prayed earnestly the night before his execution, when his soul was "exceeding sorrowful, even unto death." It is really a garden, filled with flowers, and olive trees whose trunks, gnarled and split, represent them as being very old, but it is not to be supposed that they are the same trees beneath which Jesus prayed just before Judas and "the band of soldiers and officers" came out to arrest him. There is a fence inside the wall, leaving a passageway ...
— A Trip Abroad • Don Carlos Janes
... being so numerous and the modifications of form and structure so varied, arising probably from the immense number of species which have served as antitypes for the existing species, and thus produced a complicated branching of the lines of affinity, as intricate as the twigs of a gnarled oak or the vascular system of the human body. Again, if we consider that we have only fragments of this vast system, the stem and main branches being represented by extinct species of which we have no knowledge, while a vast mass of limbs and ...
— Contributions to the Theory of Natural Selection - A Series of Essays • Alfred Russel Wallace
... of the rugged Pathan hills applies also to the Suliman range. Kaisargarh is a fine limestone mountain crowned by a forest of the edible chilgoza pine. But the ordinary tree growth, where found at all, is of a much humbler kind, consisting of gnarled olives and dwarf palms. ...
— The Panjab, North-West Frontier Province, and Kashmir • Sir James McCrone Douie
... rocky knoll in a hollow about half a mile away, which he knew to be a favourite haunt of Wandering Willie, as often as he came into the neighbourhood. On this knoll grew some stunted trees, gnarled and old, with very mossy stems. There was moss on the stones too, and between them grew lovely harebells, and at the foot of the knoll there were always in the season tall foxgloves, which had imparted a certain fear to the spot in my fancy. For there they ...
— Ranald Bannerman's Boyhood • George MacDonald
... tall beeches, look, from a distance, like little woods. On closer view, after lowering the worm-eaten wooden bars, you imagine yourself in an immense garden, for all the ancient apple-trees, as gnarled as the peasants themselves, are in bloom. The sweet scent of their blossoms mingles with the heavy smell of the earth and the penetrating odor of the stables. It is noon. The family is eating under the shade of a pear tree planted in front of the door; father, mother, the ...
— Maupassant Original Short Stories (180), Complete • Guy de Maupassant
... my hands on them fellers!" exclaimed the old miner. "I'd show 'em!" and a look at his rugged frame and his muscular arms and gnarled hands showed Tom and Ned that in the event of a fight they could ...
— Tom Swift in the Caves of Ice • Victor Appleton
... it, like a tree that has had to force its way up surrounded by awkward environments. Fundamentally, the man is a thinking humorist; but his mode of expression is strange. The perpetual inversions, the habitual irony, the mingled tenderness and mockery, give a kind of gnarled surface to the style, which is pleasant when you get familiar with it, but which repels the stranger, and to some people even remains permanently disagreeable. I think it was his continual irony which at last brought him to writing as ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I, No. 1, Nov. 1857 • Various
... Desborough speak some very simple and touching words to a rough audience of fishermen. The gnarled faces looked placid as the clever, broken man talked on, and Desborough's own face seemed to have grown spiritual. His eye had an expression of quiet sadness, but I liked him better as a ...
— The Romance of the Coast • James Runciman
... Bishop and his men, and, at sight of the cottage and the old woman, gave pause. The crone was hobbling along with difficulty, leaning heavily upon a gnarled stick and bearing the spindle on her other arm. She would have gone by the Bishop's company, while muttering to herself, but the Bishop ordered one of his men to question her. The soldier laid his hand ...
— Robin Hood • J. Walker McSpadden
... of half-burnt wood which lay on the hearth, he threw it violently back into the grate. Marcella looked from one to the other with surprise. Mrs. Hurd's expression was one of miserable discomfort, and she kept twisting her apron in her gnarled hands. ...
— Marcella • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... One of the three dragged branches of dead cedars and replenished the fire. Quickly it flared up, with the white flame and crackle characteristic of dry cedar. The night wind had risen, moaning through the gnarled, stunted cedars near by, and it blew the fragrant wood smoke into the faces of the two hunters, who seemed too ...
— The Boy Scouts Book of Campfire Stories • Various
... have not a forenoon to spare, nor eyesight to waste, this much of merely necessary abstract must serve you,—that from the Drachenfels and its six brother felsen, eastward, trending to the north, there runs and spreads a straggling company of gnarled and mysterious craglets, jutting and scowling above glens fringed by coppice, and fretful or musical with stream; the crags, in pious ages, mostly castled, for distantly or fancifully Christian purposes;—the glens, resonant of woodmen, or burrowed at the sides by miners, and invisibly ...
— Our Fathers Have Told Us - Part I. The Bible of Amiens • John Ruskin
... lamb led to slaughter, but with innocence feigned, keeping her vain secrets to the last. The oak resists, as he resists the axe, having spent all his energy in building a stout and perfect body, proud of his twisted arms and gnarled hands. The pine rebels, and noisily to the swift end, saying: "I do not believe in cremation. I believe in breaking down alone and apart, as I lived. I am clean without the fire. You should let me alone, and now I shall not let you think nor talk of real things until I am gone...." ...
— Child and Country - A Book of the Younger Generation • Will Levington Comfort
... with massive oaks, and no doubt at one time had been part of Sherwood Forest, and these were ancient trees that had been spared when others fell. Centuries old some of them, with vast trunks and huge gnarled, twisted branches which seemed to have suffered from terrible convulsions of nature, been put on the wrack, as it were, and come forth mutilated in a ...
— The Rider in Khaki - A Novel • Nat Gould
... near night-fall. A splendid scene burst upon our view, on rounding a precipitous rock, from the crevices of which some magnificent trees shot up—their gnarled trunks and twisted branches overhanging the canal where we were pulling, and anticipating the fast falling darkness that was creeping over the fair face of nature; and there we floated, in the deep shadow of the cliff and trees—Dragon-flies and Water-sprites, motionless ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 579 - Volume 20, No. 579, December 8, 1832 • Various
... peaceful and remote up there, half-way to a blue sky thinly veiled from them by the crinkled brown-green leaves. The peculiar dry mossy smell of an oak-tree was disturbed into the air by the least motion of their feet or hands against the bark. They could hardly see the ground, and all around, other gnarled trees barred ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... had no distinguishable banks at all, for it is the nature of the mangrove to grow in the water—using its roots as legs with which, as it were, to wade away from shore. When darkness fell suddenly on the landscape, as it is prone to do in tropical regions, the gnarled roots of those mangroves assumed the appearance of twining snakes in Nigel's eyes. Possessing a strongly imaginative mind he could with difficulty resist the belief that he saw them moving slimily about in the ...
— Blown to Bits - The Lonely Man of Rakata, the Malay Archipelago • R.M. Ballantyne
... giving Friedrich Wilhelm's regulations on this subject, from his own hand, has come down to us. Most dull, embroiled, heavy Document; intricate, gnarled, and, in fine, rough and stiff as natural bull-headedness helped by Prussian pipe-clay can make it;—contains some excellent hints, too; and will show us something of Fritzchen and of Friedrich Wilhelm both at once. That is to say, ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Volume IV. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—Friedrich's Apprenticeship, First Stage—1713-1728 • Thomas Carlyle
... and were admitted by a quaint, gnarled, dried-up person, who was the butler, Ames. The poor old fellow was white and quivering from the shock. The village sergeant, a tall, formal, melancholy man, still held his vigil in the room of Fate. ...
— The Valley of Fear • Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
... A gnarled and half-starved oak, as stubborn as my own resolve, and smitten by some storm of old, hung from the crag above me. Rising from my horse's back, although I had no stirrups, I caught a limb, and tore it (like a mere wheat-awn) from the socket. Men ...
— The Speaker, No. 5: Volume II, Issue 1 - December, 1906. • Various
... close to him, passing one arm across her shoulders, so that his gnarled hand rested firmly on the delicate fabric of her sleeve. Between these two there had always lain a sympathy, an affection, a mutuality of comprehension, more like the relation of husband and wife than that ...
— The Lieutenant-Governor • Guy Wetmore Carryl
... winter morn, The gnarled and ancient tree, If in your breast they waken scorn, Shall wake ...
— Poems • (AKA Charlotte, Emily and Anne Bronte) Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell
... purpose of enabling Miss Scatchett to locate the score of a Tschaikowsky concerto, it had been moved to the small center table, and had served to give light if not festivity to the afternoon coffee and cakes. It still burned, a gnarled and stubby fragment, in its china holder; round it the disorder of the recent refreshment, three empty cups, a half of a small cake, a crumpled napkin or two,—there were never enough to go round,—and ...
— The Street of Seven Stars • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... What gnarled stretch, what depth of shade, is his! There needs no crown to mark the forest's king; How in his leaves outshines full summer's bliss! Sun, storm, rain, dew, to him their tribute bring, Which he with such benignant royalty 5 Accepts, as overpayeth what is ...
— The Vision of Sir Launfal - And Other Poems • James Russell Lowell
... me as I looked at him that he was just the sort of man that you would expect to hear of as having been in queer places—a sort of gnarled and stubbly man, with a wealth of seams and wrinkles about his face and what could be seen of his neck, and much grizzled hair, and an eye—only one being visible—that looked as if it had been on the watch ever since he ...
— Dead Men's Money • J. S. Fletcher
... stone-cast from the wall A sluice with blacken'd waters slept, And o'er it many, round and small, The cluster'd marish-mosses crept. Hard by a poplar shook alway, All silver-green with gnarled bark: For leagues no other tree did mark The level waste, the rounding gray. She only said, 'My life is dreary, He cometh not,' she said; She said, 'I am aweary, aweary, I would that ...
— Book of English Verse • Bulchevy
... Miss Drake quietly, Heywood more quietly, while even stout, uneasy Mrs. Earle smiled as in duty bound. A squad of Chinese boys, busy with tiffin-baskets, found time to grin. To this lively actress in the white gown they formed a sylvan audience under the gnarled boughs and ...
— Dragon's blood • Henry Milner Rideout
... said the old woman, putting out a gnarled hand. Her eyes were bright and clear as a bird's, and she had a quick, darting way of glancing at one that was like a bird, too. "Emma's got the supper on," she announced. ...
— Betty Gordon in the Land of Oil - The Farm That Was Worth a Fortune • Alice B. Emerson
... finds a sport while the hounds are yet afar, and his limbs are yet strong, in the chase which marks him for his victim, but grows desperate with rage and fear as the day nears its close, and the death-dogs pant hard upon his track. But at that moment the strong features, with their gnarled muscle and iron sinews, seemed to have lost every sign both of passion and the will, and to be locked in a stolid and dull repose. At last he looked up at Morton, and said, with a smile like that of an ...
— Night and Morning, Volume 3 • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... on they went, and now the track became more distinct, and it led downwards. An owl in a tree overhead hooted as Cuthbert passed by, and something of a cold shiver ran through the young man's frame; he stumbled over the outspread root of a gnarled old oak, and fell, making more ...
— The Lost Treasure of Trevlyn - A Story of the Days of the Gunpowder Plot • Evelyn Everett-Green
... have got killed, as the cliff arches in under so that we look straight into the bottom of the scar some 200 or 300 feet below, when there is a split in the mist. The sides and bottom are made of, and strewn with, white, moss-grown masses of volcanic cinder rock, and sparsely shrubbed with gnarled trees which have evidently been under fire—one of my boys tells me from the burning of this face of the mountain by "the Major from Calabar" during the ...
— Travels in West Africa • Mary H. Kingsley
... gnarled thumb down into the bowl of his pipe, reflectively. "You ain't got a match about you, have you, ...
— Life at High Tide - Harper's Novelettes • Various
... original Quakerism a conception worthy of Lycurgus. Modern Quakerism is like one of those gigantic trees which are seen in the forests of North America,—apparently flourishing, and preserving all its greatest stretch and spread of branches; but when you cut through an enormously thick and gnarled bark, you find the whole inside hollow and rotten. Modern Quakerism, like such a tree, stands upright by help of its inveterate bark alone. Bark a Quaker, and ...
— Specimens of the Table Talk of S.T.Coleridge • Coleridge
... but something, like the child, that has grown away from him and has taken a life of its own— Strong for a sixteen-foot sweep, delicate to handle the silken snood of a line— A man that the winds and the spray have blown on, gnarled and bent to the ...
— A Poor Man's House • Stephen Sydney Reynolds
... huge old pine had fallen almost across it. Nothing was left of the tree but its crumbling trunk out of which the ferns grew thickly, making a green roof and a lacy screen for the water. A maple-tree grew beside it with a curiously gnarled and twisted trunk, creeping along the ground for a little way before shooting up into the air, and so forming a quaint seat; and September had flung a scarf of pale ...
— Rainbow Valley • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... Still higher, Clematis, Thalictrum, and an increased number of grasses are seen; with bushes of Verbenaceae and Compositae. The white ant apparently does not enter this cooler region. At 3500 feet the vegetation again changes, the trees all become gnarled and scattered; and as the dampness also increases, more mosses and ferns appear. We emerged from the forest at the foot of the great ridge of rocky peaks, stretching E. and W. three or four miles. Abundance of a species of berberry and an Osbeckia marked the change ...
— Himalayan Journals (Complete) • J. D. Hooker
... before the heavy iron gates set in a lofty archway of stone through which I could see nothing but cavernous blackness. The road I had followed ended in a broad circular sweep opposite this archway, and a few tall pines twisted and gnarled in bough and stem, as though the full force of many storm winds had battered and bent them out of their natural shapes, were the only relief to the barrenness of the ground. An iron chain with a massive ...
— The Life Everlasting: A Reality of Romance • Marie Corelli
... meadow—at Una's oak by the lower gate, at the line of ash trees that overhang Otter Pool where the mill-stream spills over when the mill does not need it, and at the gnarled old white-thorn where Three ...
— Puck of Pook's Hill • Rudyard Kipling
... Coal shares advanced in price. During the period the governor had the bill under consideration there was an active and rising market and a great volume of transactions on the Stock Exchange. Apparently the day of our peace and prosperity had dawned at last. But we were not yet out of a gnarled Fate's clutches. ...
— Frenzied Finance - Vol. 1: The Crime of Amalgamated • Thomas W. Lawson
... a great tree of huge girth, whose gnarled branches spread far and wide, a veryforest of leaves, beneath whose shade were many of the outlaws grouped about one who crouched miserably on his knees, his arms fast bound and a halter about his neck; and, as obedient to Robin's words the fierce company fell back, Jocelyn saw this torn and pallid ...
— The Geste of Duke Jocelyn • Jeffery Farnol
... a-sketching! Hauled up on the wet bank in the long grass is your boat, with the frayed end of the painter tied around some willow that offers a helping root. Within a stone's throw, under a great branching of gnarled trees, is a nook where the curious sun, peeping at you through the interlaced leaves, will stencil Japanese shadows on your white umbrella. Then the trap is unstrapped, the stool opened, the easel put up, and you set your palette. The critical eye with ...
— Modern Prose And Poetry; For Secondary Schools - Edited With Notes, Study Helps, And Reading Lists • Various
... quite fair," cried another. "The youngsters who are gone sing well; and one of them has a harp I should be glad you should see. He made it himself from a gnarled olive-root." And he turned ...
— If, Yes and Perhaps - Four Possibilities and Six Exaggerations with Some Bits of Fact • Edward Everett Hale
... see the strength that is there; A frame so robust, with a nature so sweet, So earnest, so graceful, so solid, so fleet, Is worth a descent from Olympus to meet; 'Tis as if a rough oak that for ages had stood, With his gnarled bony branches like ribs of the wood Should bloom, after cycles of struggle and scathe, With a single anemone trembly and rathe; His strength is so tender; his wildness so meek, That a suitable parallel sets one to seek— He's ...
— Selections From American Poetry • Various
... firs. I delight in their forms, from James the First's gnarled giants up in Bramshill Park—the only place in England where a painter can learn what Scotch firs are—down to the little green pyramids which stand up out of the heather, triumphant over tyranny, and the strange woes of an untoward youth. Seven ...
— Prose Idylls • Charles Kingsley
... and on they rode, following the shallow valley. Lush grass overran the pools and clogged the feeble trickle of the creek. Farther on, even the green patches disappeared and white alkali soil showed between the gnarled sage bushes. Gradually the aspect of the country changed. High, grass-covered foothills gave place to sharp pinnacles of black lava rock, the sides of the valley once more drew together, low, and broken ...
— The Texan - A Story of the Cattle Country • James B. Hendryx
... the Casa Lesca swung in, admitting Lawrence to a damp stone-flagged room. At the farther end it opened on a little cortile, where gnarled rose-bushes were in bloom. A broken Venus, presiding over a dusty fountain, made the centre of the cortile, and there a strapping girl from the campagna was busy trimming the stalks of a bunch of roses. The ...
— Literary Love-Letters and Other Stories • Robert Herrick
... village I see, just beyond, the torii leading to a great Shinto temple, a particularly odd small shrine, and feel impelled by curiosity to examine it. Leaning against its closed doors are many short gnarled sticks in a row, miniature clubs. Irreverently removing these, and opening the little doors, Akira bids me look within. I see only a mask—the mask of a goblin, a Tengu, grotesque beyond description, with an enormous ...
— Glimpses of an Unfamiliar Japan - First Series • Lafcadio Hearn
... sides of the town, the fourth being bounded by the "dark waters" of the Frome. They are lined with fine trees planted about two hundred years ago; the West Walk, with its section of Roman Wall, is perhaps the best, though the South Walk with its gnarled old trees is much admired. They all give the town an uncommon aspect, and there is nothing quite like them elsewhere in England. The contrast on turning eastwards from the quiet West Walk into bustling High West Street is striking and bears out the claim that Dorchester still keeps ...
— Wanderings in Wessex - An Exploration of the Southern Realm from Itchen to Otter • Edric Holmes
... than before. Then the sharp bark of a fox rang out from a neighboring hill. The breeze started up again and a limb of a tree that rubbed against its neighbor produced a wailing sound as of some one in distress. We could see fantastic shapes out among the gnarled tree trunks and ghostly forms appeared in the velvety shadows and vanished again among the trees. The moon rose out over the rim of the eastern hills and seemed almost to pause as if some Oriental Magic was ...
— See America First • Orville O. Hiestand
... obscure, are plunged more or less deeply in proportion to the heinousness of their crimes; for, like earthly streams, this has its deep and shallow. At the latter point they cross, on the back of Nessus the Centaur, and at once enter (Canto xiii.) a wood of gnarled and sere trees, in which the Harpies have their dwelling. These trees have sprung from the souls of suicides, and retain the power of speech and sensation. From one of these, who in life had been the famous statesman Peter de Vineis, Dante learns ...
— Dante: His Times and His Work • Arthur John Butler
... her hands resting on the edge of the table. They were large, gnarled, strong—the hands of a man. She flexed them. They were smooth ...
— Unthinkable • Roger Phillips Graham
... Ocean-nymphs and Hamadryades, Oreads and Naiads, with long weedy locks, Offered to do her bidding through the seas, Under the earth, and in the hollow rocks, 220 And far beneath the matted roots of trees, And in the gnarled heart of stubborn oaks, So they might live for ever in the light Of her sweet presence—each ...
— The Witch of Atlas • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... he knew his throw-stones were gone. Once more Obe snarled, and Gral saw those great shoulder muscles slide. His hand encountered the wall, groped desperately; then his fingers found something—a stick, a root, some gnarled thing ...
— The Beginning • Henry Hasse
... place, old as the hills that surround it, and wild in its loveliness. To right and left great trees, gnarled and moss-grown, and dipping tangles of blackberry and fern; patches of sunlight, amidst the gloom, that rests lovingly upon a glowing wilderness of late bluebells, and, beyond all these broad glimpses of the glorious, restless ocean, as it sleeps ...
— Rossmoyne • Unknown
... too at the corners of the lightly-closed lips. Rodney's brief regard was rather friendly and affectionate; then he turned from the dreaming Peter to the dreaming world. They had gone to sleep in a dark blue night lit by golden stars, and the olive trees had stood dark and unwhispering about them, gnarled shapes, waiting their transformation. Now there had emerged a white world, a silver mystery, a pale dream; and for Rodney the reality that shone always behind the shadow-foreground dropped the shadows ...
— The Lee Shore • Rose Macaulay
... of the Pamirian fauna appeared wolves and foxes, and flocks of those large wild sheep with gnarled and gracefully curved horns, which are known to the natives as arkars. High in the sky flew the vultures, bearded and unbearded, and amid the clouds of white vapor we left behind us were many crows and pigeons ...
— The Adventures of a Special Correspondent • Jules Verne
... the surface of the soil be seen to slide, together with the small roots of the bushes, denuding great portions of the surrounding rocks. And descending ruinous from these precipices in its boisterous course, let it dash along and lay bare the twisted and gnarled roots of large trees overthrowing their roots upwards; and let the mountains, as they are scoured bare, discover the profound fissures made in them by ancient earthquakes. The base of the mountains may be in great part clothed and ...
— The Notebooks of Leonardo Da Vinci, Complete • Leonardo Da Vinci
... chicken, cooked in some unknown but most savory way. It was long since we had eaten anything of the sort, and, leaping to the ground, with the help of a clasp-knife bought in Nablous, the only eating-utensil our party could boast, we bisected our dinner, and, sitting under a gray old gnarled olive, ate it with such expressions of satisfaction as would not be honest, even if allowable, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, October 1885 • Various
... And as I wait at his coucher, betimes I can drop a word in his ear that may, an' it please God, be to his profit. He is yet tender ground, and the seed may take root and thrive: and I am tough gnarled old root, that can thole a blow or twain, and a rough wind by ...
— In Convent Walls - The Story of the Despensers • Emily Sarah Holt
... then the rock cliff, it must be about as high as—about twice as tall as the trees that grow along the foot of it, and it's highest at the upper end, then there's a big tree standing alone almost in the middle of the valley, and the gnarled, scraggly trees that grow along the top of the rocks, and the valley must be as wide as from here to that clump of trees beyond my wood-pile—about a block, I guess. And there's the big crack in the cliff that starts straight," ...
— The Gold Girl • James B. Hendryx
... print of the hoofs on the broken and rugged track through which the creature had been driven at full speed by his furious master, might easily see, that in more than a dozen of places the horse and rider had been within a few inches of destruction. One bough of a gnarled and stunted oak-tree, which stretched across the road, seemed in particular to have opposed an almost fatal barrier to the horseman's career. In striking his head against this impediment, the force of the blow had been broken in some measure by a high-crowned hat, yet the ...
— St. Ronan's Well • Sir Walter Scott
... be the twenty-second anniversary of Circuit's death, two grizzled old ranchmen, ambling slowly out of Mancos along the Dolores trail, rode softly up to a corner of the burying ground and stopped. There within, hard by, a woman, bent and gnarled and gray as the sage-brush about her, was tenderly decking ...
— The Red-Blooded Heroes of the Frontier • Edgar Beecher Bronson
... the eastern sky Is set thy glancing eye; And though its gracious light Ne'er riseth to my sight, Yet every star that climbs Above the gnarled limbs Of yonder hill, Conveys thy ...
— A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers • Henry David Thoreau
... allowed firearms at that age, so he shaped for himself a weapon that served him well. This was a slender smoothly shaved sapling with a small bunch of gnarled roots at one end. So expert was he in the launching of this primitive spear that he easily brought down birds and small game. When he reached his twelfth year, his father bought him a rifle; and he soon became a crack ...
— Pioneers of the Old Southwest - A Chronicle of the Dark and Bloody Ground • Constance Lindsay Skinner
... in the path brought the end of the grove into view. "Oh, dear!" exclaimed Miss Ferris sadly. "I'd forgotten that Paradise was so very small. Let's go back to that big pine-tree with the great gnarled roots and sit down by the water and forget that we aren't lost ...
— Betty Wales, Sophomore • Margaret Warde
... silvery gray, with a faint moony sparkle, and out came the lovely carving of the rodent waves. All about, its sides were fretted in exquisite curves, and fantastic yet ever graceful knots and twists; as if a mass of gnarled and contorted roots, first washed of every roughness by some ethereal solvent, leaving only the soft lines of yet grotesque volutions, had been transformed into mingled silver and stone. Like a soldier crab that had found a shell to his mind, ...
— Malcolm • George MacDonald
... fog the slender body of the old man became like a little gnarled tree. Then it became a thing suspended in air. It swung back and forth like a body hanging on the gallows. The face beseeched me to believe the story the lips were trying to tell. In my mind everything concerning the relationship of men and women became ...
— Triumph of the Egg and Other Stories • Sherwood Anderson
... respectable—black coat and waistcoat, white stiff cravat, gray trowsers somewhat shrunk in longitude, good serviceable shoe-leather (of the shape, if not also of the size, of river barges), and plenty of unbleached cotton stocking about the gnarled region of his ankles. All this was well enough; nature was beholden to that charity of art which hides a multitude of failings; but the face, where native man looks forth in all his unadornment, that it was which so seldom pre-possessed the many who had never ...
— The Complete Prose Works of Martin Farquhar Tupper • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... general appearance, trunk sometimes dissolving into branches like the American elm, and sometimes continuous to the top. The finest specimens in open land are characterized by a rather short, massive trunk, with stout, horizontal, far-reaching limbs, conspicuously gnarled and twisted in old age, forming a wide-spreading, open head of striking grandeur, the diameter at the base of which is sometimes two or three times the height of ...
— Handbook of the Trees of New England • Lorin Low Dame
... eager hand into an inner pocket. "Ever heard of Angel Light? She's on the stage. It's a fact. She showed me her name herself on a programme last night. There y'are." He triumphed with a photograph, and his gnarled forefinger pointed at an exposed set of teeth under an extraordinary hat. "Eh, ain't that all right? On the stage, too. Met her at the ...
— London River • H. M. Tomlinson
... great men thunder As Jove himself does, Jove would ne'er be quiet, For every pelting petty officer Would use his heaven for thunder: nothing but thunder.— Merciful Heaven! Thou rather, with thy sharp and sulphurous bolt, Splits the unwedgeable and gnarled oak Than the soft myrtle; but man, proud man! Dress'd in a little brief authority,— Most ignorant of what he's most assured, His glassy essence,—like an angry ape, Plays such fantastic tricks before high heaven ...
— Measure for Measure • William Shakespeare [Collins edition]
... nothing of the world, desiring everything, one feels, within, the germ of all the passions? Everywhere some voice appeals to him. All is desire, all is revery. There is no reality which holds him when the heart is young; there is no oak so gnarled that it may not give birth to a dryad; and if one had a hundred arms one need not fear to open them; one has but to clasp his mistress ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... could first remember, Charlotte was supreme ruler of the kitchen of my home. Thin to emaciation and stooped almost to the point of having a hump on her back she was yet wiry and active. Her gnarled old hands could turn out prodigous amounts of work when she chose ...
— Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States From Interviews with Former Slaves - Georgia Narratives, Part 3 • Works Projects Administration
... grown out of a petty feudal organism, like an oak from an acorn in a crevice, gnarled and distorted, though wide-spreading and vigorous. It seemed perilous to deal radically with such a polity, and an almost timid conservatism on the part of its guardians in such an age ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... said, "that's right. You come an' back me up," and reaching out his brown gnarled hand he drew to his side the little girl who had come trustingly forward to him as all children did, and now had slipped her ...
— The Boy With the U. S. Foresters • Francis Rolt-Wheeler
... began to lay his pulpy white hands upon everything which directly or indirectly might produce petroleum. In due season he invited Uncle Jap to dine with him at the Paloma Hotel, in San Lorenzo. The old man, with the hayseed in his hair, and the stains of bitumen upon his gnarled hands, ate and drank of the best, seeing a glorified vision of his Lily crowned with diamonds at last. The vision faded somewhat when Nathaniel began to talk dollars and cents. Even to Uncle Jap, unversed in such high matters ...
— Bunch Grass - A Chronicle of Life on a Cattle Ranch • Horace Annesley Vachell
... glance at the cell which was to be her hateful prison. "For of course I shall spend my time here!" she said to herself. "They may send me here, keep me here for years, if they will; but they cannot make me associate with these people." And she recalled with a shudder the gnarled, horny hand which she had touched in jumping from the cart,—she had never felt anything like it; the homely speech, and the nasal twang with which it was delivered; the uncouth garb (good stout butternut homespun!) and unkempt ...
— Queen Hildegarde • Laura Elizabeth Howe Richards
... the Abbey the monks were trooping in. Under the long green-paved avenues of gnarled oaks and of lichened beeches the white-robed brothers gathered to the sound. From the vine-yard and the vine-press, from the bouvary or ox-farm, from the marl-pits and salterns, even from the distant iron-works of Sowley and the outlying grange of St. Leonard's, they had ...
— The White Company • Arthur Conan Doyle
... forever between him and the harrying shapes, to drown forever in its turbid depths the thronging spectres, to wash away in its yellow flood all stains and color of the past. And now he was leaping from boulder to boulder, from blackened stump to stump, from gnarled bush to bush, caught for a moment and withheld by clinging vines, or plunging downward into dusty hollows, until, rolling, dropping, sliding, and stumbling, he reached the river-bank, whereon he fell, ...
— Mrs. Skaggs's Husbands and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... bring forth fruit in old age, they shall be full of sap and green.' A gnarled old tree may be green in all its branches, and blossom and fruit may hang together there. The ideal of life is, that into each stage we shall carry the best of the preceding, harmonised with the best of ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... the time when the April sun smiles upon the meadow grass till it is very green and long enough to wave in the wind, and all amongst it the blue scilla flowers are like dewdrops reflecting the blue that hangs above the gnarled arms of the still leafless walnut trees. The cottage where Celeste lived was out from the village, among the meadows, and to the most hidden side of it young Fernand came on the eve of the day on which she must leave it for ever. Very ...
— A Dozen Ways Of Love • Lily Dougall
... together. While we tarried in the lowland, we could see blue peaks rising here and there against the sky, and follow babbling brooks hither and thither through the forest. It was more homelike down there than on the hilltop, for in each gnarled tree, in every moss-grown boulder, in every wayside flower, we had a friend that was near to us; but the general bearings of things may well have escaped our notice. In climbing to our lonely vantage-ground, while the ...
— The War of Independence • John Fiske
... verge of a high bank situated at the point of junction between Swanside Beck and the Ribble, stood an old, decayed oak. Little of the once mighty tree beyond the gnarled trunk was left, and this was completely hollow; while there was a great rift near the bottom through which a man might easily creep, and, when once in, stand erect without inconvenience. Beneath the bank the river was deep and still, forming a pool, where the largest and fattest fish ...
— The Lancashire Witches - A Romance of Pendle Forest • William Harrison Ainsworth
... washing the breakfast dishes and put a stick of wood into the broken old cook-stove that had served him and Frank for fifteen years and was feeling its age. Lorraine's breakfast was in the oven, keeping warm. Brit looked in, tested the heat with his gnarled hand to make sure that the sour-dough biscuits would not be dried to crusts, and closed the door upon them and the bacon and fried potatoes. Frank Johnson had the horses saddled and it was time to go, yet Brit lingered, uneasily conscious ...
— The Quirt • B.M. Bower
... which seemed to cling faintly to his clothes, to his very skin. And again, he remembered the Thursday walks. They started at two o'clock for some verdant nook about three miles from Plassans. Often they sought a meadow on the banks of the Viorne, where the gnarled willows steeped their leaves in the stream. But he saw nothing—neither the big yellow flowers in the meadow, nor the swallows sipping as they flew by, with wings lightly touching the surface of the little river. Till six o'clock, seated in groups beneath the willows, ...
— Abbe Mouret's Transgression - La Faute De L'abbe Mouret • Emile Zola
... sighs shall consecrate; in shape Of some fair tomb, here will I heap the turf And call it Adelbright's. Yon aged yew, Whose rifted trunk, rough bark, and gnarled roots Give solemn proof of its high ancientry, Shall canopy the shrine. There's not a flower, That hangs the dewy head, and seems to weep, As pallid blue-bells, crow-tyes and marsh lilies, But I'll plant here, and if they chance to wither, My tears shall ...
— Lives of the English Poets - From Johnson to Kirke White, Designed as a Continuation of - Johnson's Lives • Henry Francis Cary
... robe and his shining black cowl; a spiritual sybarite, shrinking from the sight of the crowd seething in the streets, shrinking from the idea of stripping the rags off the beggar in order to see his tanned and gnarled limbs; shuddering at the thought of seeking for muscles in the dead, cut-open body; fearful of every whiff of life that might mingle with the incense atmosphere of his chapel, of every cry of human passion which might break ...
— Euphorion - Being Studies of the Antique and the Mediaeval in the - Renaissance - Vol. I • Vernon Lee
... forest had been cut, and stood in corn. My old catalpa in the fence corner beside the road and the Bartlett pear under which I had my wild-flower garden were all that was left of the dooryard, while a few gnarled apple trees remained of the orchard, which had been reset in another place. The garden had been moved, also the lanes; the one creek remaining out of three crossed the meadow at the foot of the orchard. It flowed a sickly current over a dredged bed between ...
— At the Foot of the Rainbow • Gene Stratton-Porter
... Idiot was allowed to be present as a very great favour because it was Christmas Eve and snowing so hard, that the room was more crowded than he had ever seen it, and that Mother Figgis, with her round face and her gnarled and knotted hands, was at her very merriest and in the best of tempers. All these things Peter had noticed before Frosted Moses (so called because of his long white beard and wonderful age) made his remark about ...
— Fortitude • Hugh Walpole
... well in on the point, and Walter steered to land some distance out from it. A few strokes of the paddle sent the light canoe gliding in amongst the mangrove bushes that fringed the shore. Climbing out upon the curious gnarled roots, Walter pulled the canoe far enough in to effectually screen it from sight. Next he examined his pistols to see that they were properly loaded, and with a parting word of cheer for his chum, he made his way slowly and cautiously ...
— The Boy Chums in the Forest - or Hunting for Plume Birds in the Florida Everglades • Wilmer M. Ely
... Tennessee spirit who broke down the traditions of conservative rule, swept away the privacies and privileges of officialdom, and, like a Gothic leader, opened the temple of the nation to the populace. She gave us Abraham Lincoln, whose gaunt frontier form and gnarled, massive hand told of the conflict with the forest, whose grasp of the ax-handle of the pioneer was no firmer than his grasp of the helm of the ship of state as it breasted the seas of civil war. She has furnished to this new ...
— The Frontier in American History • Frederick Jackson Turner
... fixed on the quickly vanishing form of Gladys, how was he to see the gnarled root of an oak, that sprung up through the ground, directly in his path? His foot caught in it, and he fell with considerable violence upon his face. He got up again as quickly as he could, cursing ...
— Gladys, the Reaper • Anne Beale
... wood silently. The trees were of great age, the trunks thick and gnarled, with low twisted boughs, running and interlacing in every direction. So thickly were they intertwined that it was twilight in the sombre depths of the wood, although the fierce winds from the North Sea ...
— The Shrieking Pit • Arthur J. Rees
... written, signed and witnessed by Musker and the surgeon, then Anthony Thurston asked once more and very faintly for Millicent. He drew her down beside him and took her hand in his thin, gnarled one ...
— Thurston of Orchard Valley • Harold Bindloss
... went to carving the conquered land into Norman lordships. But where they piloted the way others followed, and city after city along the German Ocean and upon the British coasts became also maritime. For King Alfred had come, and the English oaks were felled, and their gnarled boughs found exceedingly convenient for the curved knees of ships. Upon the Italian stock became engrafted the Norman, and French, and Danish, the North German and Saxon elements. And so, after a century of crusading had thoroughly broken up the stay-at-home notions ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 12, October, 1858 • Various
... the days of Indiana's early statehood, probably as late as 1825, there stood, in what is now the beautiful little city of Vincennes on the Wabash, the decaying remnant of an old and curiously gnarled cherry tree, known as the Roussillon tree, le cerisier de Monsieur Roussillon, as the French inhabitants called it, which as long as it lived bore fruit remarkable for richness of flavor and peculiar dark ruby depth of color. The exact spot where this noble old seedling from ...
— Alice of Old Vincennes • Maurice Thompson
... a number of Indians, according to the custom of their tribe, had been buried. It was a goodly sized elm that had grown straight out of the ground to a height of twenty five feet, at which point the trunk forked into a dozen gnarled and twisted limbs, the peculiar black bark of which, gave them an unnatural appearance. Everywhere among the yellow leaves were perched heaps of decaying garments and bones. In some places, storms ...
— The Story of Paul Boyton - Voyages on All the Great Rivers of the World • Paul Boyton
... father's shoulder and they gazed at us. And indeed it was a noble and joyful sight as they stood there, the old man and the young one, both of powerful and stalwart build, both grown strong in wind and weather, and true and trustworthy men. The slim young pine had indeed somewhat overtopped the gnarled oak, but the crown of the older tree was the broader. Such as the young man was now the old man must have been, and what the son should one day be might be seen—and I rejoiced to think it—in his father's figure and face. Howbeit, ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... deferred in expectation of his presence, and he was much relieved by this arrangement; but still, when the morning dawned clear and frosty, he was cross and irritable, for he could not banish from his mind the thought of the old ivy-covered homestead, with the few gnarled trees overshadowing its gables, its bare sea front turned bravely to the north-west, the elder tree over the back door, the farm servants, all with white favours pinned on their breasts; the gentle ...
— Garthowen - A Story of a Welsh Homestead • Allen Raine
... own wives; the women were in primitive short gowns and petticoats, with the venerable sun-bonnets of Holland origin. The lower part of the valley was cut up into small farms, each consisting of a little meadow and corn-field; an orchard of sprawling, gnarled apple-trees, and a garden, where the rose, the marigold, and the hollyhock were permitted to skirt the domains of the capacious cabbage, the aspiring pea, and the portly pumpkin. Each had its prolific little mansion ...
— Wolfert's Roost and Miscellanies • Washington Irving
... nuts, and the country-houses with their garden clumps of orange, cactus, and palm. As we drew near the base of the mountains, olive-trees of great size and luxuriance covered the earth with a fine sprinkle of shade. Their gnarled and knotted trunks, a thousand years old, were frequently split into three or four distinct and separate trees, which in the process assumed forms so marvellously human in their distortion, that I could scarcely believe ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 122, December, 1867 • Various
... his gate he saw, near at hand, Squire Jonas, now a gnarled but still sprightly octogenarian, leaning upon a fence post surveying the universe at large, as was the squire's daily custom. He called out a good morning and waved his stick in greeting toward the squire ...
— Sundry Accounts • Irvin S. Cobb
... running down to the water's edge, the gallahs and cockatoos rose with gorgeous sunrise effect: a floating gray-and-pink cloud, backed by sunlit flashing white. Direct to the forest trees they floated and, settling there in their myriads, as by a miracle the gaunt, gnarled old giants of the bush all over blossomed with garlands of grey, and pink, ...
— We of the Never-Never • Jeanie "Mrs. Aeneas" Gunn
... system so local, so accidental, and so unstable as Kant's be prescribed as a sort of catechism for all humanity? The tree of knowledge has many branches, and all its fruits are not condemned to hang for ever from that one gnarled and contorted bough. M. Bergson himself "lags behind" Kant on those points on which his better insight requires it, as, for instance, on the reality of time; but with regard to his own philosophy I am afraid he thinks that all previous systems ...
— Winds Of Doctrine - Studies in Contemporary Opinion • George Santayana
... secretly organized, lay in waiting for the offenders, and, after a week or two, made a capture of a well-known sporting-man, whose presence in camp had for some time been regarded with suspicion. Short shrift was afforded him. That same afternoon his gentlemanly person swung dangling from a gnarled pine-tree limb, and his frightened soul ...
— The New Penelope and Other Stories and Poems • Frances Fuller Victor
... gnarled and unlovely fingers she wore a ring which, in the idleness of the mood that possessed me, I examined listlessly. It was an old-fashioned and slender circle of gold, so pale that it looked silvery, such as in times long past ...
— Miriam Monfort - A Novel • Catherine A. Warfield
... and a man staggered blindly over the sill, reeling and clutching at his breast with both gnarled, sinewy hands. ...
— The Fifth Ace • Douglas Grant
... hard old gnarled hand in her own, and her heart was full of joy. The exaltation of the day she rode home was coming to her. Love was the power that could transform the world. People everywhere, all sorts of people, craved love and would respond to it. "If I can cheer ...
— Purple Springs • Nellie L. McClung
... or projecting buttress, on which they might find a foothold. They had good hope of success, for they had seen many such since starting from the shore. Had rest been necessary, they might have obtained it more than once by grasping a branch above, or clinging to one of the great trunks, whose gnarled and knotted sides would ...
— The Castaways • Captain Mayne Reid
... English country town, with that air of cleanliness and quiet prosperity, of excellent sanitation and odd historic corners, side by side with big new modern buildings and exquisite green gardens where the old gnarled apple-trees are afroth with blossom in the spring, which is the peculiar flavour of an English country town. The incongruity is the charm; you step from a modern drapery store, with a respectable display ...
— Lynton and Lynmouth - A Pageant of Cliff & Moorland • John Presland
... were Manisty and Mrs. Burgoyne. Eleanor was sitting in the deep shade of the avenue that ran along the outer edge of the garden. Through the gnarled trunks to her right shone the blazing stretches of the Campagna, melting into the hot shimmer of the Mediterranean. A new volume of French memoirs, whereof not a page had yet been cut, was lying ...
— Eleanor • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... offstage hammering I had heard, tiny bell tones like a fairy xylophone, began again as the door opened, and we passed into a workroom which made me remember nursery tales from a half-forgotten childhood on Terra. For the workers were tiny, gnarled trolls! ...
— The Door Through Space • Marion Zimmer Bradley
... strode briskly along the hot, dusty road toward Drake's. Every now and then a low giggle would escape her lips, and she would put her thin, gnarled fingers to her mouth as if to hide her smile from some observer. "John Webb wasn't tuck in by it, I'll bet," she mused. "He ain't nobody's fool. John's got a long, cool head on 'im, he has. He kin see through a mill-rock without lookin' in ...
— The Desired Woman • Will N. Harben
... the Danube crosses the scene with a graceful slowness, looping itself round the numerous wooded islands therein. The largest of these, immediately under the eye, is the Lobau, which stands like a knot in the gnarled grain represented by the ...
— The Dynasts - An Epic-Drama Of The War With Napoleon, In Three Parts, - Nineteen Acts, And One Hundred And Thirty Scenes • Thomas Hardy
... and when Patty saw the scene in the garden she thought Paris was fairyland indeed. Though called a garden, it was really a stone- paved court, but all round its edge on two sides were large old trees with gnarled and twisted trunks and thick foliage of glossy green. Under the trees were flower-beds full of blossoming plants, and in the branches of the trees themselves were hung vari-coloured globes of electric lights about the size of an orange. The effect of these brilliant spheres in the dark trees ...
— Patty in Paris • Carolyn Wells
... green bank above the crag which faced her, and was sliding down, unable to help himself, towards the point where nothing could prevent his falling headlong into the stream below. The bank, however, was not wholly bare. There were some thin gnarled oaks upon ...
— Helena • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... Clouds float around their summits, and the mist will often wrap them in gloom and give them a strange and awesome look. At the foot of the craggy pass the mountain-torrent of the Pieve roars and tumbles on its way. Far-reaching forests of trees, with weather-beaten gnarled old trunks, stand firm against the mountain storms. Beneath their wide-spreading boughs there is a gloom almost of twilight, showing peeps here and there of deep ...
— Knights of Art - Stories of the Italian Painters • Amy Steedman
... ten thousand feet above the level of the ocean. I am under the deep shadows of a forest. Huge trunks grow around me, hindering a distant view. Where am I? Not in the tropic, surely, for these trees are of a northern sylva. I recognise the gnarled limbs and lobed leaves of the oak, the silvery branches of the mountain-ash, the cones and needles of the pine. The wind, as it swirls among the dead leaves, causes me to shiver; and high up among the twigs there is the music of winter in ...
— The Rifle Rangers • Captain Mayne Reid
... broaden and flow out majestically, like a river sunward. The smile still on his lips, he lit a second candle and a third; a fire stood ready built in a chimney, he lit that also; and the fir-cones and the gnarled olive billets were swift to break in flame and to crackle on the hearth, and the room brightened and enlarged about him like his hopes. To and fro, to and fro, he went, his hands lightly clasped, his breath deeply and pleasurably taken. Victory ...
— Lay Morals • Robert Louis Stevenson
... accordingly, "not able to finish without many tears;" honest sensible Letter (though indifferently spelt), "Berlin, 1st June, 1740;"—lies now in State-Paper Office: "ROYAL LETTERS, vol. xciv., Prussia, 1689-1777."] An unwedgeable and gnarled big block of manhood and simplicity and sincerity; such as we rarely get sight of among the modern sons of Adam, among the crowned sons nearly never. At parting he said to Roloff, "You (ER, He) do not spare me; it is right. You do your duty like an honest Christian man." [Notata ex ore Roloffi ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. X. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—At Reinsberg—1736-1740 • Thomas Carlyle
... Near this gnarled trunk of an ancient tree, and in front of the fireplace, the baroness, seated on one of the antique chairs, presented the type of those adorable women who exist in England, Scotland, or Ireland only. There alone are born ...
— Beatrix • Honore de Balzac
... Island. Men sometimes go there, but none ever return. In the evening of the same day we found Broodviol standing in a deep, miry pit in the forest, surrounded on all sides by trees three hundred feet high. He was a big gnarled, rugged, wrinkled, sturdy old man. His age at that time was a hundred and twenty of our years, or nearly six hundred of yours. His body was trilateral: he had three legs, three arms, and six eyes, placed at equal distances all around ...
— A Voyage to Arcturus • David Lindsay
... poor ones vastly overgrown according to nature's law which provides for the survival of the fittest. This was the law too, which was to be applied to Peter. Would he grow straight and true in this foreign soil or gnarled and misshapen like the cedars and the maples that he saw? Yes. He would grow and straight ...
— The Vagrant Duke • George Gibbs
... painted wood, which poise above the toy chapel carved out of the live rock. The chapel and the crucifix are at one end of a lime-tree avenue a third of a mile long, and the trees are aged beyond strict local knowledge, gnarled and warty and bulbous and great of girth. You climb to Lorette by a gentle ascent, and below the rock-carved chapel lies a precipice—not an Alpine affair at all, but a reasonable precipice for Belgium—say, two or even three hundred feet, and ...
— Schwartz: A History - From "Schwartz" by David Christie Murray • David Christie Murray
... the rattan fastenings. Before the house there was a square space of ground, beaten hard into the level smoothness of asphalte. A big buttressed tree, a giant left there on purpose during the process of clearing the land, roofed in the clear space with a high canopy of gnarled boughs and thick, sombre leaves. To the right—and some small distance away from the large house—a little hut of reeds, covered with mats, had been put up for the special convenience of Omar, who, being blind and infirm, ...
— An Outcast of the Islands • Joseph Conrad
... own sweet peaceableness. I passed out of the town, out of the straggling suburbs, away from tall, puffing chimneys, and under the clanking railway bridge; and then at once the scene opens, wide pasture-lands on either side, and rows of old willows, the gnarled trunks holding up their clustered rods. There on the other side of the stream rises the charming village of Fen Ditton, perched on a low ridge near the water, with church and vicarage and irregular street, and the little red-gabled Hall looking over its barns and stacks. More and ...
— Escape and Other Essays • Arthur Christopher Benson
... Doth she? Will she? So, as wondering we behold, Grows the picture to a sign. Pressed upon your soul and mine; For in every breast that liveth Is that strange, mysterious door;— The forsaken and betangled, Ivy-gnarled and weed-bejangled, Dusty, rusty, and forgotten;— There the pierced hand still knocketh, And with ever patient watching, With the sad eyes true and tender, With the glory-crowned hair,— Still a God ...
— The World's Best Poetry Volume IV. • Bliss Carman
... still rose thick and tall in some of the more inaccessible hollows; and it was interesting to mark, where they encroached furthest on the open waste, how thoroughly they lost the ordinary character of the Scotch fir, and how, sending out from their short gnarled boles immense branches, some two or three feet over the soil, they somewhat resembled in their squat, dense proportions, and rounded contours, gigantic bee-hives. It was of itself worth while undertaking a journey to the Highlands, to witness these last remains of that arboreous ...
— My Schools and Schoolmasters - or The Story of my Education. • Hugh Miller
... and with the ponderous heft Of gnarled branch. And by the time of night O'ertaken, they would throw, like bristly boars, Their wildman's limbs naked upon the earth, Rolling themselves in leaves and fronded boughs. Nor would they call with lamentations loud Around the fields ...
— Of The Nature of Things • [Titus Lucretius Carus] Lucretius
... our way, ever slightly climbing, along the rugged hillside, and soon broke into country very wild and dismal. The pastoral character of the scene lessened and altogether disappeared. The trees grew matted and grotesquely gnarled, huddling together in menacing battalions—save where some plunging rock had burst like a shell, forcing a clearing and strewing the black moss with a jagged wreck of splinters. Here no flowers crept ...
— At a Winter's Fire • Bernard Edward J. Capes
... man," he whined, twisting his gnarled fingers, a suggestion of tears in his voice. "My wife is old, mein herr. You would not be cruel. We have been here for ...
— A Fool and His Money • George Barr McCutcheon
... of English occupation. Stately emperor palms, kitools with crimped green tresses, fan and oil palms, with the slender areca in countless thousands, vary the shadowy vistas branching out in every direction, with huge-leaved creepers and glossy rattans garlanding the gnarled trunks of forest-trees. The sculptured outlines of the splendid traveller's palm adorn the green lawns of European bungalows, embowered in torrents of trailing creepers, the scale of colour descending from white and pink to royal purple and burning crimson. Snowy arums and golden lilies choke ...
— Through the Malay Archipelago • Emily Richings
... is a believer—not I mean in anything in particular, but generally. He likes to believe; he enjoys it; he does it, not on evidence, but on general principles. The deacons of the stories are all crabbed, gnarled, and cross-grained. They are the terrors of the little boys, and the thorn in the flesh to the minister. But Deacon Goodsole is the most cheery, bright, and genial of men. He is like a streak of sunshine. He ...
— Laicus - The experiences of a Layman in a Country Parish • Lyman Abbott
... candle high above her head inspected the strangers with little blinking watery eyes. She was short and bent; she hobbled as she came forward; her face was seamed with deep wrinkles, and the hand which held the candle was knotted and gnarled; wisps of dirty grey hair ...
— The Old Tobacco Shop - A True Account of What Befell a Little Boy in Search of Adventure • William Bowen
... the shallows; its leaves and twigs rotting off, its smaller branches breaking short, until at last, hundreds of miles, perhaps, below the scene of its fall, it would lodge fair in the channel. The gnarled and matted mass of boughs would ordinarily cling like an anchor to the sandy bottom, while the buoyant trunk, as though struggling to break away, would strain upward obliquely to within a few inches of the surface of the muddy water, which—too thick to drink and too thin to plough, ...
— American Merchant Ships and Sailors • Willis J. Abbot
... dank and chill. It was as if the clock had been put back four hours. Only a jagged strip of sky, between projecting crags, announced the advent of day. No living thing seemed to inhabit this region of perpetual twilight. At intervals a gnarled and twisted bush grew out of a cleft, lifting spectral foliage toward where the sun should be, and was not. Silence pervaded the dusk like a living presence; unseen, but so poignantly felt that the whisper of the stream and the crunch of shingle under the horses' ...
— Captain Desmond, V.C. • Maud Diver
... white road; on either hand some half-dozen cottages with roofs of thatch or red tile, backed by trees gnarled and ancient, among which rises the red conical roof of some oast-house. Such, in ...
— The Broad Highway • Jeffery Farnol
... of the tree, the sweetness of the shade which it cast, the cool depths of its foliage, the gentle swaying of the boughs in the soft north wind—all invited him to approach. This he did, until he arrived at the gnarled old bole, and then he leaped into the branches and was filled with delight. The little birds took flight. Romulus sat upon a limb, and then stretched himself at full length upon it and enjoyed the peace and comfort ...
— The Ape, the Idiot & Other People • W. C. Morrow
... in her mother's room on her slow progress upstairs, moved to sudden pity for the frail life now wearing to its close. If that were life she did not want it, with its drab days and futile effort, its incessant deprivations, its hands, gnarled with work that got nowhere, its greatest ...
— A Poor Wise Man • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... out from Fort Hall the vanguard of the remnant of the train, less than a fourth of the original number, saw leaning against a gnarled sagebrush a box lid which had scrawled upon it in straggling letters one word—"California." Here now were to part the pick and ...
— The Covered Wagon • Emerson Hough
... the night under the huge spreading branches of a gnarled birch, a few versts from the scene of our exploit, and early Friday morning were off for Sidanka. When about fifteen versts from the village Dodd suggested a gallop, to try the mettle of our horses and warm our blood. As we were both well mounted, I challenged him to a steeplechase ...
— Tent Life in Siberia • George Kennan
... gravitation, which makes no noise, yet keeps orbs in their orbits, and the whole system in harmony, binding every atom in each planet to the great centre of all attraction, is ten thousand times ten thousand times more powerful. We say the bright lightning is mighty; so it is when it rends the gnarled oak into splinters, or splits solid battlements into fragments; but it is not half so powerful as the gentle light that comes so softly from the skies that we do not feel it, that travels at an inconceivable speed, strikes ...
— Architects of Fate - or, Steps to Success and Power • Orison Swett Marden
... anxiously into futurity. If it were possible to change Miss Thusa's opinions and peculiarities into something after the similitude of her kind! Change Miss Thusa! As soon might you expect to change the gnarled and rooted oak into the flexible and breeze-bowed willow. Her idiosyncrasy had been so nursed and strengthened by the two great influences, time and solitude, it spread like the banyan tree, making a dark pavilion, where legions of weird ...
— Helen and Arthur - or, Miss Thusa's Spinning Wheel • Caroline Lee Hentz
... or Liriodendron Tulipifera, the most magnificent of American foresters, has a trunk peculiarly smooth, and often rises to a great height without lateral branches; but, in its riper age the bark becomes gnarled and uneven while many short limbs make their appearance on the stem. Thus the difficulty of ascension, in the present case, lay more in semblance than in reality. Embracing the huge cylinder, as closely as possible, with his arms and knees, seizing ...
— Short Stories Old and New • Selected and Edited by C. Alphonso Smith
... off an old sealskin cap and began to softly polish his bald head, which was surrounded by a thick hedge of shaggy grey hair, but paused for a moment to give one spot a rub with his great rough, gnarled knuckles. His hands were enormous, and looked as if they had grown into the form most suitable for grasping a pair of oars to tug a ...
— Cormorant Crag - A Tale of the Smuggling Days • George Manville Fenn
... with purple maroon flowers; and an old hog-plum {52b}—Mombin of the French—a huge tree, which was striking, not so much from its size as from its shape. Growing among blocks of lava, it had assumed the exact shape of an English oak in a poor soil and exposed situation; globular-headed, gnarled, stunted, and most unlike to its giant brethren of the primeval woods, which range upward 60 or 80 feet without a branch. We walked up to see the old fort, commanding the harbour from a height of 800 feet. We sat and rested by ...
— At Last • Charles Kingsley
... enacted. "Sirs!" said a voice,—it was Jim's voice, and in it sounded something so earnest and strange, that the men involuntarily turned their heads to look at him. Then this man stood up,—a black man,—a little while before a slave,—the great muscles swollen and gnarled with unpaid toil, the marks of the lash and the branding-iron yet plain upon his person, the shadows of a lifetime of wrongs and sufferings looking out of his eyes. "Sirs!" he said, simply, "somebody's got to die to get us out of ...
— What Answer? • Anna E. Dickinson
... in-door life of a family; but the cottage had somewhat grown with their growth, and thrown out a couple of small bed-chambers, like buds of incipient shanties, from the main trunk. A curiosity of wood-craft it looked, so mossy, gnarled, and weather-beaten, that one could easily have believed it had sprung from the ground without the intervention of hands, a specimen of ...
— Cedar Creek - From the Shanty to the Settlement • Elizabeth Hely Walshe
... many acres. There were deep, black pools in the unbroken shade; stealthy deer, tapirs, peccaries, and agoutis moved like shadows among the columnar trunks. A stream led from it into the distance that appeared greener and still more cheerful. Overhead, in the gnarled branches and leafy boughs were scores of snowy birds, egrets that had chosen the place for a nesting site. Some of them squatted on frail stick platforms; others sat motionless on the tips of the branches. Steady streams were coming and going constantly, resembling giant snowflakes that ...
— The Black Phantom • Leo Edward Miller
... gone to seek him, he had discovered him lying in wait, like a fowler, to catch the sweet sounds that flew from the opened cage of her instrument. He leaned against the wall with his ear laid over the edge, and as near the window as he dared to put it, his rough face, gnarled and blotched, and hirsute with the stubble of neglected beard—his whole ursine face transfigured by the passage of the sweet sounds through his chaotic brain, which they swept like the wind of God, when of old it moved ...
— Robert Falconer • George MacDonald
... meal, they resumed the upward march. Reaching a small cluster of stunted and gnarled pines, they pressed through it and emerged on a great, bleak hillside, almost bare of vegetation. Only here and there grew a tuft of stunted grass or a dwarfed shrub. The temperate zone had given way to the regions of eternal winter. Again and again they were compelled ...
— The Real America in Romance, Volume 6; A Century Too Soon (A Story - of Bacon's Rebellion) • John R. Musick
... one I ever met has, I think, quite your sympathy with exactly what the external world of out-of-doors is to me and has been ever since I can remember. From days when the batch of us went-out-walking with the Nurses, and the round moss-edged holes in the roots of gnarled trees in the hedges, and the red leaves of Herb Robert in autumn, and all the inexhaustible wealth of hedges and ditches and fields, and the Shroggs, and the brooks, were happiness of the keenest kind—to now when it is as fresh and strong as ever; it has been a pleasure ...
— Juliana Horatia Ewing And Her Books • Horatia K. F. Eden
... rocky in many places, and partly covered with scrubby grass. We found half a dozen pits and shafts where the treasure-seekers had been at work. We climbed the little hill where the tree stood,—it was gnarled and broken, "a blasted tree" declared Mr. Daddles ...
— The Voyage of the Hoppergrass • Edmund Lester Pearson
... something never seen by day. Every line shone bright, graceful, curved, rounded, and all thrown with sharp relief against the sky. How magical, exquisitely delicate and fanciful! The great trunks were soft serrated brown, and the gnarled branches stood out in perfect proportions. All works of art must be copied ...
— Tales of lonely trails • Zane Grey |
