"Labyrinthine" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... robust eloquence, touched not unfrequently with flashes of fancy, and kindled at times into heat of imagination. The main fault of his style is one more commonly found in the prose than in the verse of his time—a quaint and florid obscurity, rigid with elaborate rhetoric and tortuous with labyrinthine illustration; not dark only to the rapid reader through closeness and subtlety of thought, like Donne, whose miscalled obscurity is so often "all glorious within," but thick and slab as a witch's gruel with forced and barbarous eccentricities of articulation. ...
— The Age of Shakespeare • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... Constructive Crime, a crime which the revengeful, or the purchased judge distils out of an honest or a doubtful deed, in the alembic he has made out of the law broken up and recast by him for that purpose, twisted, drawn out, and coiled up in serpentine and labyrinthine folds. For as the sweet juices of the grape, the peach, the apple, pear, or plumb may be fermented, and then distilled into the most deadly intoxicating draught to madden man and infuriate woman, so by the sophistry of a State's Attorney and a Court Judge, well trained ...
— The Trial of Theodore Parker • Theodore Parker
... fifteen-foot sawfish. There was water to float the power boat in the channels between the banks, and families of porpoises or dolphins were always ready to serve as pilots and point the path through these labyrinthine waterways. A school of porpoises, rolling in the water and leaping in the air, passed the motor boat as if they had been telephoned for in the greatest haste. Two minutes later, a quarter of a mile away, a great splashing could be seen and huge bodies hurled ...
— Dick in the Everglades • A. W. Dimock
... the boat, our silent boatman, like a spectral gondolier, rowed us silently along the labyrinthine canals of this dim and ghostly Venice. Vathek Beckford would have made them waterways ...
— France and the Republic - A Record of Things Seen and Learned in the French Provinces - During the 'Centennial' Year 1889 • William Henry Hurlbert
... since: Tedious land for a social Prince; Halting, he scanned the outs and ins, Endless, labyrinthine, grim, Of the solitude that made him wince, ...
— Poems • Christina G. Rossetti
... the attics. There were no ceilings in the house; the cross-beams were simply white-washed and the spaces plastered over. Both rooms on the first floor and the dining-room below were wainscoted and adorned with the labyrinthine designs which taxed the patience of the eighteenth century joiner; but the carving had been painted a dingy ...
— The Collection of Antiquities • Honore de Balzac
... from being carried beyond its just limit. Price, the most judicious of landscape-gardeners, would scarcely have desired to alter arrangements which have quite enough of the varied and the picturesque to satisfy those who do not contend for eternal labyrinthine mazes and perpetually waving lines. There is one straight avenue in front, but the principal carriage-road has just the kind of curve most desirable, sweeping round some fine trees which group themselves for the purpose ...
— Notes of an Overland Journey Through France and Egypt to Bombay • Miss Emma Roberts
... and crimson upon cloud and water; of violet domes and bell-towers etched against the orange of a western sky; of moonlight silvering breeze-rippled breadths of liquid blue; of distant islands shimmering in sunlitten haze; of music and black gliding boats; of labyrinthine darkness made for mysteries of love and crime; of statue-fretted palace fronts; of brazen clangour and a moving crowd; of pictures by earth's proudest painters, cased in gold on walls of council chambers where Venice sat enthroned a queen, where nobles swept the floors with robes ...
— New Italian sketches • John Addington Symonds
... for Kantos Kan, and leaving Dejah Thoris in charge of Tars Tarkas I took a dozen warriors and hastened to the dungeons beneath the palace. The jailers had all left to join the fighters in the throne room, so we searched the labyrinthine prison without opposition. ...
— A Princess of Mars • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... fitting thoughts inspired; By a dread parting was thy fame acquired, Thy mournful destiny we sorrow'd o'er, For weal and woe thou left'st us evermore, And then again the passions' wavering force Drew us along in labyrinthine course; And we, consumed by constant misery, At length must part—and parting is to die! How moving is it, when the minstrel sings, To 'scape the death that separation brings! Oh grant, some god, to one who suffers so, To tell, half-guilty, ...
— The Poems of Goethe • Goethe
... were strains that appealed to the very finest susceptibilities of men's natures, and there were elements that gratified low egoism, tickled gossiping curiosity, and fascinated timorous superstition. His need of personal predominance, his labyrinthine allegorical interpretations of the Scriptures, his enigmatic visions, and his false certitude about the Divine intentions, never ceased, in his own large soul, to be ennobled by that fervid piety, that passionate sense of the infinite, that active ...
— Romola • George Eliot
... territory embraces some sixty thousand acres, and who, during a widowed life of twenty-two years, has borne the stress and strain of Irish estate administration, with its eternal and wearisome chopping and changing of law, its labyrinthine complications, its killing responsibilities. Lady de Burgho is, after all, very far from dead, exhibiting in fact a marvellous vitality, and discoursing of the ins and outs of the various harassing Land Acts, and the astute diplomacy needful to save something from ...
— Ireland as It Is - And as It Would be Under Home Rule • Robert John Buckley (AKA R.J.B.)
... canyon with the trails. There was nothing else for him to think. Rustlers could not fly, nor cattle jump down thousand-foot precipices. He was only proving what the sage-riders had long said of this labyrinthine system of deceitful canyons and valleys—trails led down into Deception Pass, but no rider had ever ...
— Riders of the Purple Sage • Zane Grey
... the spring and peace of Macon to this muddy and war-distracted country! Going to sleep in the moonlight and soft air of Italy, I seem to have waked embedded in Lapland snow." Sidney wrote: "Have you ever wandered, in an all night's dream, through exquisite flowery mosses, through labyrinthine grottoes, 'full of all sparkling and sparry loveliness', over mountains of unknown height, by abysses of unfathomable depth, all beneath skies of an infinite brightness caused by no sun; strangest of all, — wandered about in wonder, as if you had lived an eternity in the familiar contemplation ...
— Sidney Lanier • Edwin Mims
... personality in those offices was the girl whose name imaged to everyone little more than a pencil, notebook, and typewriting machine. The vividest personality was Frederick Norman. In the list of names upon the outer doors of the firm's vast labyrinthine suite, on the seventeenth floor of the Syndicate Building, his name came last—and, in the newest lettering, suggesting recentness of partnership. In age he was the youngest of the partners. Lockyer was archaic, Sanders an antique; Benchley, actually only about fifty-five, ...
— The Grain Of Dust - A Novel • David Graham Phillips
... in the 15th century; was the author of "Morte d'Arthur," being a translation in prose of a labyrinthine selection of Arthurian legends, which was finished in the ninth year of Edward IV., and printed fifteen years after by Caxton "with ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... adventure—he who had never thought himself cut out for them, and it fairly helped him that he was able at moments to say to himself that he mustn't fall below it. At his hotel, alone, by night, or in the course of the few late strolls he was finding time to take through dusky labyrinthine alleys and empty campi, overhung with mouldering palaces, where he paused in disgust at his want of ease and where the sound of a rare footstep on the enclosed pavement was like that of a retarded dancer in a banquet-hall deserted—during these interludes he ...
— The Wings of the Dove, Volume II • Henry James
... loved this man, and how it all had come about, was a mystery that puzzled her sorely; but she had no labyrinthine heart in which to play hide and seek with her own consciousness. And so vividly conscious was she now of this new and absorbing passion, that she hastily turned her face from her companions toward the cloudy sky, ...
— A Face Illumined • E. P. Roe
... seemed suddenly very quiet,—quite soundless save for the beating of our hearts. On every side opened red and yellow ways, sunny glades, labyrinthine paths, long aisles, all dim with the blue haze like the cloudy incense in stone cathedrals, but nothing moved in them save the creatures of the forest. Without the hollow there was no sign. The leaves looked undisturbed, or others, drifting down, had hidden any marks there ...
— To Have and To Hold • Mary Johnston
... to go again to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre," said the Lady in a voice of dutiful reminder, "we have not half seen it." So we went down to the heart of Jerusalem and entered the labyrinthine shrine. ...
— Out-of-Doors in the Holy Land - Impressions of Travel in Body and Spirit • Henry Van Dyke
... in darkness is thus shrouded for even duskier purposes.—Miss MacMahon had begun to inquire who Mr. Murphy was, and he had, accordingly, begun to explain who he was not. This explanation had wrapped his identity in the most labyrinthine mystery, but Miss MacMahon detected in the rapid, incomprehensible fluctuations of his story a heart torn by unmerited misfortune, and whose agony could only be alleviated by laying her own dear head against ...
— Here are Ladies • James Stephens
... points will, without doubt, eventually receive more ample treatment at the hands of some future historian, Mr. Miller has performed a most useful service in affording a guide by the aid of which the historical student can find his way through the labyrinthine maze of Balkan politics. He begins his story about the time when Napoleon had appeared like a comet in the political firmament, and by his erratic movements had caused all the statesmen of Europe to diverge temporarily from their normal and conventional orbits, ...
— Political and Literary essays, 1908-1913 • Evelyn Baring
... and extraordinary thing in the world had happened, yet Betty Dalrymple asked no questions. Had she done so, it is probable that Mr. Heatherbloom would have been physically unequal to the labyrinthine explanation the occasion demanded. For a brief spell the girl had continued to regard him and she had seemed about to speak further. Then the blue light of her gaze had slowly turned and her lips remained mute. He was glad of this; of course he would later have to tell ...
— A Man and His Money • Frederic Stewart Isham
... aversion to this lady's person, concludes that the blessedness with which she promises to crown his labours is neither more nor less than moonshine, and accordingly makes the best of his way out of her labyrinthine maze of argument into the attractive arms of Pleasure, bursts the bonds of verbal subtlety, exchanges credulity for common sense, and pronounces, with great justice, that toil is toilsome, and that pleasure ...
— Works, V3 • Lucian of Samosata
... creed. No restraint is placed upon the practice of any religion exercised with due regard to morality. Proselytism in public schools is declared illegal. [267] The prolonged discussion of the friars' position and claims encouraged them to hope that out of the labyrinthine negotiations might emerge their restoration to the Philippine parishes. For a while, therefore, hundreds of them remained in Manila, others anxiously watched the course of events from their refuges in the neighbouring British and Portuguese colonies, and the unpopular Archbishop Bernardino ...
— The Philippine Islands • John Foreman
... I felt the labyrinthine enchantments of that enchanted land were closing about me—a slender web, grey, almost impalpable, finer than fairy silk, was winding itself about my feet. My eyes were opening to things I had not dreamed. She ...
— The Ninth Vibration And Other Stories • L. Adams Beck
... the poem harks back to Rogero, who, having again fallen into a magician's hands, prowls through the labyrinthine rooms of his castle, seeking Bradamant, whom he imagines calling to him for help. Meantime the lady whom he is thus seeking is safe at Marseilles, but, hearing at last of her lover's plight, she too visits the magic castle, and would have been decoyed into its dungeons had not ...
— The Book of the Epic • Helene A. Guerber
... that was quite within my privileges, and forthwith the opportunity would be accorded me. I was looking for paper, when there came the order for all of us to move out into the courtyard. With a line of soldiers on either side, we were marched through labyrinthine passages and up three flights of stairs. Here we were divided into two gangs, my gang being led off into a room already nearly filled. We were told that it was our temporary abode, and we were to make the best of it. It was an administrative office of the ...
— In the Claws of the German Eagle • Albert Rhys Williams
... soul Are infinite, but how to be revealed? On what impassive matter must the whole Inveterate coil of good and ill be sealed! How much too simple all the tale of deeds To pattern out these labyrinthine things, These knots of bright unreason, ghostly bredes Veiled weavers weave, moving with silver wings Within the duskling sense. Most diverse visions Their visionaries darkly reconcile At one sad end. Fate's delicate derisions Through the same hell of penance may beguile Two women, who ...
— The Hours of Fiammetta - A Sonnet Sequence • Rachel Annand Taylor
... the water, evidently a stream. He was in hopes that on reaching the bank, and following along the water's edge, he might find the continuation of the road at some point where the stream was fordable. After making his way with much labour and loss of time through the labyrinthine tangle of the thicket, he arrived at the bottom of the cascade, just at the moment when Costal and Clara were about entering upon the ceremony ...
— The Tiger Hunter • Mayne Reid
... always a subtle, lurking something still unexpressed, which something is the real essence of the matter, and which your penetration is expected to divine. In their writings they are eccentric, vague, labyrinthine, pretentious, transcendental,[35] and frequently ungrammatical. These men, if write they must, should confine themselves to the descriptive; for when they enter the essayist's domain, which they are very prone to do, they write what I will venture ...
— The Verbalist • Thomas Embly Osmun, (AKA Alfred Ayres)
... your own Edward the Confessor, to the farthest shrine of the opposite Arabian and Indian world, I must show you how the glittering and iridescent dominion of Daedalus prevails; and his ingenuity in division, interposition, and labyrinthine sequence, more widely still. Only this last summer I found the dark red masses of the rough sandstone of Furness Abbey had been fitted by him, with no less pleasure than he had in carving them, into wedged hexagons—reminiscences of the ...
— Aratra Pentelici, Seven Lectures on the Elements of Sculpture - Given before the University of Oxford in Michaelmas Term, 1870 • John Ruskin
... entangling meshes spread, of his loose and flowing hair, Vast and boundless as the woods upon the Himalaya's brow, Nor ever may the struggling floods rush headlong to the earth below. Opening, egress was not there, amid those winding, long meanders. Within that labyrinthine hair, for many an ...
— National Epics • Kate Milner Rabb
... rais'd thee higher to the Spheres of Heaven, Man's first, last home: and thou with ravish'd sense Listenest the lordly music flowing from Th' illimitable years. I am the Spirit, The permeating life which courseth through All th' intricate and labyrinthine veins Of the great vine of Fable, which, outspread With growth of shadowing leaf and clusters rare, Reacheth to every corner under Heaven, Deep-rooted in the living soil of truth: So that men's hopes and fears take ...
— The Suppressed Poems of Alfred Lord Tennyson • Alfred Lord Tennyson
... "Waring," having run clear of the labyrinthine reefs, steamed up and was out of sight ...
— In the Footprints of the Padres • Charles Warren Stoddard
... Dr. Themison, and he counselled his girl to humour her mother as far as could be: particularly in relation to Dudley, whom Nataly now, womanlike, after opposing, strongly favoured. How are we ever to get a clue to the labyrinthine convolutions and changeful motives of the sex! Dartrey's theories were absurd. Did Nataly think them dangerous for a young woman? The guess hinted at a clue of some sort to the secret ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... upward—hounds leaped upward— monstrous snake-heads peered upward out of cracks and caves. Did he not see them move, writhe? or was it the ever-shifting light of the flashes? Did he not hear them howl, yell at him? or was it but the wind, tortured in their labyrinthine caverns? ...
— Two Years Ago, Volume II. • Charles Kingsley
... up to you I turn, O lustrous stars, Or downwards in love's labyrinthine wood, Leaving my fleshly frame in mouldering earth, Could I but pity find in her, one day Would many years redeem, and to the dawn With bliss enrich ...
— The Sonnets, Triumphs, and Other Poems of Petrarch • Petrarch
... fair, most mellific damsel, your unworthy servitor was erring enchanted in the paradise of your divine idea when that the horrific alarum did wend its fear-begetting course through the labyrinthine corridors of his ...
— The Panchronicon • Harold Steele Mackaye
... uttering a simple signal, but nothing could have induced him to do so. He had his gun, knife, and tomahawk,—all the weapons he could carry and all that were possibly needed. He had learned long before to trail his people through the labyrinthine forest, and in a year more he expected to go upon his first war trail. He hated with an inextinguishable hatred the pale face who had overthrown him in the wrestling bout and then had struck him a blow in the face, which, figuratively speaking, compelled him to carry his nose ...
— Camp-fire and Wigwam • Edward Sylvester Ellis
... among the dense undergrowth, but it is a still grander book for the reader to lose himself in. In the dingle, best of all, he can "forget his own troublesome personality as completely as if he were in the depths of the ancient forest along with Gurth and Wamba." Labyrinthine, however, as the autobiography may at first sight appear, the true lover of Borrow will soon have little difficulty in finding the patteran or gypsy trail (for indeed the Romany element runs persistently as a chorus-thread ...
— Isopel Berners - The History of certain doings in a Staffordshire Dingle, July, 1825 • George Borrow
... the end of Barney Bill, and Paul found himself thrillingly alone in London. At first its labyrinthine vastness overwhelmed him, causing him to feel an unimportant atom, which may have been good for his soul, but was not agreeable to his vanity. By degrees, however, he learned the lay of the great thoroughfares, especially those leading to the quarters where artists congregate, ...
— The Fortunate Youth • William J. Locke
... dugouts, of grotesquely carved prows and gaudy paint common among Pacific tribes, escorted Vancouver's boats northward the second week in June through the labyrinthine passageways of cypress-grown islets to Burrard Inlet. To Peter Puget was assigned the work of coasting the mainland side and tracing every inlet to its head waters. Johnstone went ahead in a small boat to reconnoitre the way out of the Pacific. On both sides ...
— Vikings of the Pacific - The Adventures of the Explorers who Came from the West, Eastward • Agnes C. Laut
... 29, the island of Ceylon disappeared below the horizon, and at a speed of twenty miles per hour, the Nautilus glided into the labyrinthine channels that separate the Maldive and Laccadive Islands. It likewise hugged Kiltan Island, a shore of madreporic origin discovered by Vasco da Gama in 1499 and one of nineteen chief islands in the island group of the Laccadives, located between latitude ...
— 20000 Leagues Under the Seas • Jules Verne
... ill-contrived geese; and I record the matter here for the sake of the moral,—that we should never pass judgment on the merits of any person or thing, unless we behold them in the sphere and circumstances to which they are specially adapted. In still another part of the Garden there is a labyrinthine maze, formed of an intricacy of hedge-bordered walks, involving himself in which, a man might wander for hours inextricably within a circuit of only a few yards. It seemed to me a sad emblem of the mental and moral perplexities in which we sometimes go astray, petty in scope, yet large ...
— Our Old Home - A Series of English Sketches • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... light comprise a number of chambers, big and little, placed at different heights. We shall have no clear idea of the relation of these different chambers to one another, or of the mode of access to them through the labyrinthine passages and the numerous stairways, until the whole edifice has ...
— The Prehistoric World - Vanished Races • E. A. Allen
... disobedience, self-willed departure from God. That disobedience may be as virulently active in a trifle as in a deed that men call great. Self-will is the tap root of all sin, however labyrinthine the outgrowth from it. ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... led I can't say; we never dared explore their obscure and mysterious recesses. They may have ended in the cour des miracles for all we knew—it was nearly fifty years ago—and they may be quite virtuous abodes of poverty to-day; but they seemed to us then strange, labyrinthine abysses of crime and secret dens of infamy, where dreadful deeds were done in the dead of long winter nights. Evidently, to us in those days, whoever should lose himself there would never see daylight again; so we loved to visit them after ...
— The Martian • George Du Maurier
... horrified by contemplation of the fate that awaited her—a fate from which it seemed, there was no escape. It was only too evident that these creatures possessed no gentle or chivalric sentiments to which she could appeal, and that she might escape from the labyrinthine mazes of their underground ...
— The Chessmen of Mars • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... it has ever been to hunt through Shakespeare's plays and sonnets on the false scent of a fantastic trail, to put thaumaturgic trust in a dark dream of tracking his untraceable personality through labyrinthine byways of life and visionary crossroads of character, it is yet surely no blind assumption to accept the plain evidence in both so patent before us, that he too like other men had his dark seasons of outer or of inner life, ...
— A Study of Shakespeare • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... the early ages of Christianity, the Christians took refuge in the vast catacombs which stretched for miles in every direction under the city of Rome, and are supposed to have been of Etruscan origin. There, amid labyrinthine windings, deep caverns, hidden chambers, chapels, and tombs, the persecuted fugitives found refuge, and there they performed the ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike
... a height that the obelisks, the colossi, and the entrance pylon were buried to a depth of 40 feet, while inside the building the level of the native village was 50 feet above the original pavement. Seven months ago the first court contained not only the local mosque, but a labyrinthine maze of mud structures, numbering some thirty dwellings, and eighty strawsheds, besides yards, stables, and pigeon-towers, the whole being intersected by innumerable lanes and passages. Two large mansions—real mansions, spacious and, in Arab fashion, luxurious,—blocked the ...
— Letters from Egypt • Lucie Duff Gordon
... gained what we thought was our cave, only to find that it was not, and then we realized that we were lost in the labyrinthine mazes of the great cavern. We retraced our steps and sought the point from which we had started, but only succeeded in losing ourselves the more. Ajor was aghast—not so much from fear of our predicament; but that she should have failed in the functioning ...
— The People that Time Forgot • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... preconcerted, silent signal, every horse's head in line, every left hand down, saber or lance exactly poised, every foot motionless, horse and rider still as if wrought from bronze. And then he tells of the labyrinthine evolutions when the long line moving over the school floor coils and uncoils itself more swiftly than any serpent, each horse moving at speed, each one obeying as implicitly as any creature of brass and iron moved by steam. ...
— In the Riding-School; Chats With Esmeralda • Theo. Stephenson Browne
... dreamed not. He would sit him down Thinking to work his problems as of old, And find the star he thought so plain a blur, The columned figures labyrinthine wilds Without my comment, blind and senseless scrawls That vexed him with their riddles; he would strive And struggle for a while, and then his eye Would lose its light, and over all his mind The cold gray mist would ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... or broken into millioned frets of blue, red and starry fire; the danger above and the danger below; the dark mysterious caverns of the sea, rich with coral grots and grove and abounding marine life; the impenetrable gloom of the ship's hold, whose unimaginable darkness and labyrinthine intricacy of machinery set obstacles at every turn and move and step; the darkness; the fury; the hues and shape, all that art can make or Nature fashion, gild or color wrought into one grand tablature of splendor ...
— Lippincott's Magazine Of Popular Literature And Science, No. 23, February, 1873, Vol. XI. • Various
... return from a Canadian foray, bearing with them plate, candlesticks, and a silver statue that they had rifled from the Church of St. Francis. An Indian who had undertaken to guide the party through the Notch proved faithless, and led them among labyrinthine gorges to the head of Israel's River, where he disappeared, after poisoning one of the troopers with a rattlesnake's fang. Losing all reckoning, the Rangers tramped hither and thither among the snowy hills and sank down, one by one, ...
— Myths And Legends Of Our Own Land, Complete • Charles M. Skinner
... retrieve the error of his first forgetfulness, here, after a moment's struggle for the necessary remembrance, drew the papers from the labyrinthine receptacle which concealed them; and Henry uttered an exclamation of joy as, after cutting the silk, his eye glanced over ...
— The Last Of The Barons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... while to add, for the benefit of those only who care to be provided with a clue (not to be found in the judgment) through the somewhat labyrinthine details of the question under discussion, a summary of its history. The Russian rules as to contraband are contained in several documents—viz. the "Regulations as to Naval Prize" of 1895, Arts. 11-14; the "Admiralty Instructions" of 1900, Arts. 97, 98, and the appended "Special ...
— Letters To "The Times" Upon War And Neutrality (1881-1920) • Thomas Erskine Holland
... a vagrant, in all the vanity of conscious sanctimony, standing in the middle of the attentive peasants, like the nave and felloes of a cart-wheel—if I may be permitted the loan of an apt similitude—repeating some piece of unfathomable and labyrinthine devotion, or perhaps warbling, from Stentorian lungs, some melodia sacra, in an untranslatable tongue; or, it may be, exhibiting the mysterious power of an amber bade fastened as a Decade to his paudareens* lifting a chaff or light bit ...
— The Ned M'Keown Stories - Traits And Stories Of The Irish Peasantry, The Works of - William Carleton, Volume Three • William Carleton
... feel very much as my father felt one day when we were going to the country mill to get a grist ground, and I, a boy of seven years, sat in the back part of the wagon, and our yoke of oxen ran away with us and along a labyrinthine road through the woods, so that I thought every moment we would be dashed to pieces, and I made a terrible outcry of fright, and my father turned to me with a face perfectly calm, and said: "De Witt, what are you crying about? ...
— New Tabernacle Sermons • Thomas De Witt Talmage
... is to fly on paper wings! From "Greek Heroes" to the Iliad was no day's journey, nor was it altogether pleasant. One could have traveled round the word many times while I trudged my weary way through the labyrinthine mazes of grammars and dictionaries, or fell into those dreadful pitfalls called examinations, set by schools and colleges for the confusion of those who seek after knowledge. I suppose this sort of Pilgrim's Progress was justified by the end; but it seemed interminable to me, in spite of the ...
— Story of My Life • Helen Keller
... apparently capricious abstraction of himself from the society not only of his friends, but of his own family, in which he from time to time persisted. He confessed to occasional accesses of an almost irresistible impulse to flee to the labyrinthine shelter of some great city like London or Paris,—there to dwell solitary amid a multitude, buried by day in the cloister-like recesses of mighty libraries, and stealing away by night to some obscure lodging. Long indulgence in seclusion, and in habits of study the most lawless possible in respect ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 8, Slice 2 - "Demijohn" to "Destructor" • Various
... that both these embryo historians had to draw their first information about history from the Jewish German paraphrase of "Yosippon," an historical compilation, is counterbalanced by careful instruction in Rabbinical literature, whose labyrinthine ways soon became paths of ...
— Jewish Literature and Other Essays • Gustav Karpeles
... him through the labyrinthine passages in which a stranger would infallibly have lost his way, he explained the various objects of interest—especially pointing out the racks where thousands on thousands of old telegrams are kept, for a short time, for reference in case of dispute, and then destroyed. He found the man in grey ...
— Post Haste • R.M. Ballantyne
... entered with some trouble near the top, and out of some labyrinthine passages we descended a spiral staircase, with a low wall to hold by in descending, all cut into the solid but soft rock; there were also small channels for conducting water from above to the bottom—these ...
— Byeways in Palestine • James Finn
... through a labyrinthine avenue made up of Palms, which on that side of the City seem to be plentiful, and over these palms in extraordinary profusion the vines of the red flowered honeysuckle. You cannot see beyond the wall of green on either side in this winding way, and only as you gaze upward does the ...
— The Certainty of a Future Life in Mars • L. P. Gratacap
... Slone climbed to a cedared plateau that rose for a whole day's travel, and then split into a labyrinthine maze of canyons. There were trees, grass, water. It was a high country, cool and wild, like the uplands he had left. For days he camped on Wildfire's trail, always relentlessly driving him, always watching for the trap he hoped to find. And the red stallion spent much of this time of flight in looking ...
— Wildfire • Zane Grey
... one contrives to possess a public garden for the evening disport of its citizens; night-life being the true life of the south. Charming they are, most of them; none more delectable than that of old Messina—a spacious pleasaunce, decked out with trim palms and flower-beds and labyrinthine walks freshly watered, and cooled, that evening, by stealthy breezes from the sea. The grounds were festively illuminated, and as I sat down near the bandstand and watched the folk meandering to and fro, I ...
— Old Calabria • Norman Douglas
... Victoria and not by Cannon Street, and its centre was now in Exhibition Road. It shone, pale amber, blue-grey and tenderly spacious and fine under clear autumnal skies, a London of hugely handsome buildings and vistas and distances, a London of gardens and labyrinthine tall museums, of old trees and remote palaces and artificial waters. I lodged near by in West Brompton at a ...
— Tono Bungay • H. G. Wells
... like this, making no secret of himself, of her influence over him. It was embarrassing; it declared so much, assumed so much, that had never been declared or assumed in any other way. But her stripped and beaten young Samaritan was no labyrinthine courtier, bescented and bedraped and bedyed with worldliness and conventions: he came ever in her presence naked of soul. It was this that empowered her to take the measure of his feeling for her: it ...
— The Reign of Law - A Tale of the Kentucky Hemp Fields • James Lane Allen
... know:—Yet on the past Of this dear England if in thought we gaze, About her seems a constant sunshine cast; In summer calm we see and golden haze The little London of Plantagenet days; Quaint labyrinthine knot of toppling lanes, And thorny spires aflame ...
— The Visions of England - Lyrics on leading men and events in English History • Francis T. Palgrave
... in respect to all violations of law by the Chinese, have sought out their gambling-dens with great diligence, and made many arrests. The Chinese, not to be baffled,—besides resorting to labyrinthine passages, underground apartments, barricades of various kinds, and other modes of secluding themselves, to indulge in their games undisturbed,—have adopted one medium after another in place of cards, substituting something that could be quickly concealed in case the police should surprise them. ...
— Life at Puget Sound: With Sketches of Travel in Washington Territory, British Columbia, Oregon and California • Caroline C. Leighton
... Dayton sparkled as he paused in his recital, running his fingers through his hair, and for a time evidently wandering in the labyrinthine walks of the soul's mathematics, whose beautifully defined laws might make all things straight, and it was only the sight of John's towering form in the doorway that roused him, ...
— The Harvest of Years • Martha Lewis Beckwith Ewell
... uneven walls of the more tortuous ancient vaults which give access to these labyrinthine corridors are thousands of casks of wine—some in single rows, others in triple tiers—forming the reserve stock of the establishment. As may be supposed, a powerful vinous odour permeates these vaults, in ...
— Facts About Champagne and Other Sparkling Wines • Henry Vizetelly
... what we inevitably exclaim as we watch Victorien Sardou, in whom French ingenuity culminated and caricatured itself, laying the foundations of one of his labyrinthine intrigues. The absurdities of "preparation" in this sense could scarcely be better satirized than in the following page from Francisque Sarcey's criticism of Nos Intimes (known in English as Peril)—a page which is intended, not ...
— Play-Making - A Manual of Craftsmanship • William Archer
... drizzly, sleety day, in a winter toward the latter part of the last century, a party of Shawnee Indians crossed from the Kentucky cane-brakes into Ohio. Penetrating its deep, labyrinthine forests, they came upon a double cabin, where dwelt two widows, with several children. These they inhumanly massacred, and burnt their dwellings to the ground. Then, laden with their plunder, they set out on their return ...
— The Riflemen of the Miami • Edward S. Ellis
... and strife endure, shall Achilles, Godfrey, Satan, and Mephistopheles be types; for they are artistic expressions of essential and historical realities. But though the beck of curiosity lead us through the labyrinthine plot of a novel, long as Gibbon's way through the Dark Ages, yet, when we have finished it, the bubble collapses, the little heavens which had been framed about us roll away, and most rarely does a character remain poetically significant in ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 6, No. 34, August, 1860 • Various
... universal capacity for the fine arts in the nation at this epoch, is perhaps impossible. Yet the fact remains, that he who would comprehend the Italians of the Renaissance must study their art, and cling fast to that Ariadne-thread throughout the labyrinthine windings of national character. He must learn to recognise that herein lay the sources of their intellectual strength as well as the secret of ...
— Renaissance in Italy Vol. 3 - The Fine Arts • John Addington Symonds
... essentially characteristic of Edison, not only in economy of manufacture, but in all his work, no matter of what kind, whether it be experimenting, investigating, testing, or engineering. To follow him through the labyrinthine paths of investigation contained in the great array of laboratory note-books is to become involved in a mass of minutely detailed searches which seek to penetrate the inmost recesses of nature by an ultimate ...
— Edison, His Life and Inventions • Frank Lewis Dyer and Thomas Commerford Martin
... on the market-place, and up to that moment His Worship Signor Malipizzo might have been lost to the world, so deeply immersed was he in threading the labyrinthine mazes of an exceptionally intricate affiliation case—a warm document, after his own heart. The sound of the scream suspended his labours. Like a gouty parrot he hopped down from his seat of judgment, spat on the floor, limped to the window and ...
— South Wind • Norman Douglas
... home of St. Benedict awaited us in the form of a builded and pictured-over maze of chapels and shrines, cells and corridors, stupefying rock-chambers and caves, places all at an extraordinary variety of different levels and with labyrinthine intercommunications; there the spirit of the centuries sat like some invisible icy presence that only permits you to stare and wonder. I stared, I wondered, I went up and down and in and out and lost myself in the fantastic fable of the innumerable hard facts themselves; ...
— Italian Hours • Henry James
... chanted commands, the four who were executing the figure went through labyrinthine manoeuvers, forward and back, dividing and reuniting. The old clergyman held out his hand to Mrs. Crittenden, laughing as he swung her briskly about. 'Gene bent his great bulk solemnly to swing his own little daughter. Then with neat exactitude, on the stroke of the beat, they were all ...
— The Brimming Cup • Dorothy Canfield Fisher
... decomposed surface, like the piled-up skulls in the great underground cemetery of the Parisians. Massy trees, with their green fantastic roots rising high over the scanty soil, and forming many a labyrinthine recess for the frog, the toad, and the newt, stretch forth their gnarled arms athwart the stream. In front of the opening, with but a black deep pool between, there lies a midway bank of huge stones. Of these, not a few ...
— The Cruise of the Betsey • Hugh Miller
... and decoration. The arrangement of Aegean palaces is of two main types. First (and perhaps earliest in time), the chambers are grouped round a central court, being engaged one with the other in a labyrinthine complexity, and the greater oblongs are entered from a long side and divided longitudinally by pillars. Second, the main chamber is of what is known as the megaron type, i.e. it stands free, isolated ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... Heaven, I think, has rightly been pronounced his greatest poem, for whilst in its wealth of melody, its magnificence of imagery, and its pathos, it is unsurpassed, it reveals also the finest depths of his thought as he takes us "down the labyrinthine ways" of his mind's flight. But next to that I would put The Making of Viola, a poem which no other, except Rossetti or his ...
— Personality in Literature • Rolfe Arnold Scott-James
... another, did callisthenics. Oh, that was going too far, of course; it was more real than that. But it was true that it was only their minds that met. And it seemed to be true that in the realm of mind they were content to live. Had they, like herself, deep labyrinthine, half-lit caverns down underneath those north-lighted, logically ordered apartments where Rose always found them? If they had they never let her ...
— The Real Adventure • Henry Kitchell Webster
... palazzita between the basilica and the imperial apartments, to which its encircling colonnade served as a corridor of communication, indicated that the lady was not a favourite of low degree, to be hidden away in some Rosalind's bower of the immense labyrinthine palace, while the most valuable statues in the entire villa, such as the replica of the Cnidian Venus by Praxiteles, the Eros bending the bow, by the same master, made this temple of love and Venus a fitting pavilion for an empress. Such it may well have ...
— Romance of Roman Villas - (The Renaissance) • Elizabeth W. (Elizbeth Williams) Champney
... low spring tides, the coral reef is uncovered, small rock-cod, slim eels, parrot-fish, perch, soles, the lovely blue-spotted sting-ray, catfish, flathead, etc., are poked out unceremoniously with spears or sharp-pointed sticks from labyrinthine mazes, or from the concealment afforded by the flabby folds and fringes of the skeleton-less coral (ALCYONARIA), or from among the weeds and stones—a kind of additional sense leading the black to the discovery of fish in places that a white man would never dream of ...
— Tropic Days • E. J. Banfield
... young men then walked on arm and arm for some distance. They seemed to be walking more for the sake of a little conversation than for any thing else, for they went slowly, and after winding about among the labyrinthine streets for ten or twenty minutes, took their way ...
— Lizzy Glenn - or, The Trials of a Seamstress • T. S. Arthur
... maze-following ability, such as experiments have shown some rodents to have, can not be stated without precise experimentation. Marked ability to follow a maze would not be at all surprising in view of the labyrinthine character of the underground passages which make ...
— Life History of the Kangaroo Rat • Charles T. Vorhies and Walter P. Taylor
... best. She continued to ask herself only "was I right?" and it was by the answer to that question that she would abide, whether in the stony content of accomplished righteousness, or in an enduring remorse that pointed to a goal in whose labyrinthine possibilities her soul lost itself and ...
— At Fault • Kate Chopin
... Duke's paper offers me such a wealth of opportunities that choice becomes embarrassing. I must bear in mind the good old adage, "Non multa sed multum." Tempting as it would be to follow the Duke through his labyrinthine misunderstandings of the ordinary terminology of philosophy and to comment on the curious unintelligibility which hangs about his frequent outpourings of fervid language, limits of space oblige me to restrict myself to those points, the discussion of ...
— Collected Essays, Volume V - Science and Christian Tradition: Essays • T. H. Huxley
... been for Derry a place of dreams. He loved every inch of it. The sunset view of the city from the west front; the bronze doors on the east, the labyrinthine maze of the corridors; the tesselated floors, the mottled marble of the balustrades; the hushed approach to the Supreme Court; the precipitous descent into the galleries of House and Senate, the rap of the Speaker's gavel—the rattle of argument as political foes ...
— The Tin Soldier • Temple Bailey
... Hilda's reappearance, she and the sculptor were straying together through the streets of Rome. Being deep in talk, it so happened that they found themselves near the majestic, pillared portico, and huge, black rotundity of the Pantheon. It stands almost at the central point of the labyrinthine intricacies of the modern city, and often presents itself before the bewildered stranger, when he is in search of other objects. Hilda, looking up, proposed that ...
— The Marble Faun, Volume II. - The Romance of Monte Beni • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... has passed away. Like the fabulous creations we have read of in the tales of childhood, palaces, temples, boulevards, and theatres have sprung up on the site of the antiquated and labyrinthine city. Under the dynasty of the Napoleons the capital was rebuilt with lavish magnificence. Accustomed to gaze on the splendor of the sun, we seldom advert to its real magnificence in our universe; but pour its golden flood on the sightless eyeball, and all ...
— Alvira: the Heroine of Vesuvius • A. J. O'Reilly
... vermicular; mazy, tortuous, sinuous, flexuous, anfractuous^, reclivate^, rivulose^, scolecoid^; sigmoid, sigmoidal [Geom.]; spiriferous^, spiroid^; involved, intricate, complicated, perplexed; labyrinth, labyrinthic^, labyrinthian^, labyrinthine; peristaltic; daedalian^; kinky, knotted. wreathy^, frizzly, crepe, buckled; raveled &c (in disorder) 59. spiral, coiled, helical; cochleate, cochleous; screw-shaped; turbinated, turbiniform^. Adv. in and out, round and round; a ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... police. The rules as to their conduct, their uniforms, their rights, and their duties, down to such minute carefulness as that they may not smoke on duty "except when engaged in peculiarly dirty and offensive labor," are here, as in all official matters in Germany, outlined in labyrinthine detail. Sickness, death, accident, are all provided for with a pension, and there are also certain gifts of money for long service. The police and the street-cleaning department co-operate to enforce the law, where private companies or the city-owned street-railways ...
— Germany and the Germans - From an American Point of View (1913) • Price Collier
... lights shone behind several of the small windows in the facade of the huge labyrinthine building. Without any hesitation de Batz turned down the Rue du Temple, and soon found himself in front of the main gates which gave on the courtyard beyond. The sentinel challenged him, but he had the pass-word, and explained that he desired to ...
— El Dorado • Baroness Orczy
... Chateau. Every vestige, save the crumbling walls of the fortress, of this by far the largest portion of the old town has entirely disappeared, and picnics are now made under the shade of beautiful avenues of trees which replace the labyrinthine streets ...
— Lippincott's Magazine Of Popular Literature And Science, April 1875, Vol. XV., No. 88 • Various
... suspension bridge spanning the Valley of the Tacon, a depth of fifty yards. Higher up, a handsome viaduct spans the Valley of La Bienne, on either side of these two stretch clusters of houses, some sloping one way, some another, with picturesque effect. To find your way in these labyrinthine streets, alleys, and terraces is no easy matter, whilst at every turn you come upon the sound of wheels, betokening some manufactory of the well-known, widely imported St. Claude ware, consisting ...
— Holidays in Eastern France • Matilda Betham-Edwards
... the strong sensory-stimulus of glowing color, of dazzling light; in the more complex motory-stimulus of intricate, abrupt and plastic form.... He delighted in the angular, indented, intertwining, labyrinthine varieties of line and surface which call for the most delicate, and at the same time most agile, adjustments of the eye. He caught at the edges of things.... Spikes and wedges and swords run riot ...
— A Study of Poetry • Bliss Perry
... into labyrinthine shops; he stood with Marie before long counters, while she inspected fine fabrics and, drawing off her glove, felt them critically with her fine hand. He watched her eagerly and devotedly, as if he read the concentration of ...
— Married Life - The True Romance • May Edginton
... blowholes for the volcanic gases that had tortured Mercury with the raising of the titanic mountains, sprawled in a labyrinthine network through those same vast peaks. Only the galleries lying next the valleys had been explored. Man's habitation on Mercury ...
— A World is Born • Leigh Douglass Brackett
... spared him, however, by the recognition of a newspaper reporter who took it for granted that the ambassador to Forsland had come to meet the funeral cortege of the marine and who led him through a labyrinthine passage that brought him past the gates and under the ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1915 - And the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... railing had gone, and I clung to the belfry-blinds while I surveyed the cold waters of Lake Erie on the north, the rise of Little Mountain on the south, and, between them the broad tract of rolling country divided by the Chagrin River. I descended through labyrinthine passages, and came again to the ground and to the outer air with a sense of relief after my two hours' sojourn within the ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 26, August, 1880 - of Popular Literature and Science • Various
... Robin-a-dale hung back, made protest. "Go!" said his master, whereupon Robin went indeed—not to the awaiting boat, but with a defiant cry end a rush across the sloping sand into the thick wood. The green depths which received him were so labyrinthine, so filled with secret places wherein to hide, that an hour's search might not dislodge him. The sometime Captain of the Cygnet let pass his wilfulness, signed to the boats to push off, awaited in silence the fulfilment of all his commands; then ...
— Sir Mortimer • Mary Johnston
... in poverty, dodging creditors through the labyrinthine gloom of the town. Chronic embarrassment was caused by Shelley's extravagant credulity. His love of the astonishing, his readiness to believe merely because a thing was impossible, made him the prey of every impostor. Knowing that he was ...
— Shelley • Sydney Waterlow
... Usually abstract thinking develops man's capacity for apprehending the bent of his mind at certain moments and laying it to heart, but my inclination for abstract thought developed my consciousness in such a way that often when I began to consider even the simplest matter, I would lose myself in a labyrinthine analysis of my own thoughts concerning the matter in question. That is to say, I no longer thought of the matter itself, but only of what I was thinking about it. If I had then asked myself, "Of what am I thinking?" the true answer would have been, "I am thinking of what I am thinking;" and if ...
— Boyhood • Leo Tolstoy
... Canton: a human hive of industry: a maze of labyrinthine alleys crowded with people, the alleys or streets too narrow to get the full ...
— Where Half The World Is Waking Up • Clarence Poe
... rapidly along the silent and deserted street. It wound its tortuous way at first on the crest of the hill, skirting the majestic temple of Magna Mater with its elevated portico and noble steps that lost themselves in the shadows of labyrinthine colonnades. ...
— "Unto Caesar" • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... his memory by the necessity of practicing them—albeit behind the back of Moses—while he had them still fresh in his mind; for he would naturally resort to every human and inhuman device to wile away the dragging decades consumed in tracing the labyrinthine sinuosities of his course in the wilderness. When a man has assurance that he will not be permitted to arrive at the point for which he set out, perceiving that every step forward is a step wasted, he will pretty certainly use his feet to a better ...
— The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce, Volume 8 - Epigrams, On With the Dance, Negligible Tales • Ambrose Bierce
... loves it with an indescribable awe, which too often withdraws the genial sap of his activity from the columnar trunk, the sheltering leaves, the bright and fragrant flower, and the foodful or medicinal fruitage, to the deep root, ramifying in obscurity and labyrinthine way-winning - ...
— Confessions of an Inquiring Spirit etc. • by Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... appetite for such dinners, it is not necessary that he should devour more than three, provided he pays for the whole fourteen. 'Shortly before the hand on the dial over the doorway points to five, crowds of gentlemen may be seen hurrying through the labyrinthine paths that intersect the Temple in all directions, and concentrating at the yard before the hall, for dinner there waits for no man, and, better still, no man waits for dinner. Gowns are provided for the student in the robing-room, for the use of which a small term-fee is paid, and, thus ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 461 - Volume 18, New Series, October 30, 1852 • Various
... o'clock on the morning of the 12th, and while eating a hurried breakfast the ship steamed inshore. We were fully prepared for the undertaking; but finding the leads in the ice more favorable than on the preceding evening, the little steamer jammed and crashed along in a labyrinthine course not without great difficulty, for at times she was completely beset by great masses of ice, which she steamed against at full speed for several minutes before they showed sign of giving way, and it seemed that all endeavors to get out of the pack would be futile. Happily, ...
— The First Landing on Wrangel Island - With Some Remarks on the Northern Inhabitants • Irving C. Rosse
... me the opportunity to see also Monument Valley, and the mysterious and labyrinthine Canyon Segi with ...
— Tales of lonely trails • Zane Grey
... lightly, I must rise here to refute Their poisonous message. Three days since, I stood With this man in the sacred halls of God, And witnessed in his heart the glory grow Of God's bright hope. Then suddenly from Hell, Or from his own deep, labyrinthine heart, Sprang fiends to snatch him back from heaven's clear gate And God's deliverance. And his bitter lips, By thirst so nearly quenched made bitterer yet, Cried blasphemies against the powers of heaven And all ...
— Mr. Faust • Arthur Davison Ficke
... open, and he is hurled down with no by your leave, gobbled up, willing or unwilling. Sometimes there is a desperate fight just over the trap-door, in which he does sometimes, but not always, come off victor. At other times he suddenly finds himself rambling through those labyrinthine passages, to his surprise and that of the woman, who, however, perceives him instantly. There is no such fallacy as that a girl turns in terror or in any other sentiment from the knowledge of this dweller below the trap-door. A woman of experience may, after that ...
— The Californians • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... there Suffices to upturn to the warm air Half-germinating spices, mere decay Produces richer life, and day by day New pollen on the lily-petal grows, And still more labyrinthine buds the rose." ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... and pen, and sacrifice to Apollo hours which it was much more to my taste to employ in worshipping another god whom his cold nature knew only by name. We drank coffee, I paid the bill, and we went about rambling through the labyrinthine alleys of ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt |
