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Loom   Listen
noun
Loom  n.  (Zool.) See Loon, the bird.






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Loom" Quotes from Famous Books



... pursues the coloured adventures of a ray of light. Rhythmically more involved and contrapuntal than The Maids, this canvas, with its brilliant broken lights, its air that circulates, its tender yet potent conducting of the eye from the rounded arm of the seductive girl at the loom to the arched area with its leaning, old-time bass-viol, its human figures melting dream-like into the tapestried background, arouses within the spectator much more complicated etats d'ame than does Las Meninas. ...
— Promenades of an Impressionist • James Huneker

... advice or reasoning. He was right. Many went to their cabins to look after their most precious treasures, while the officers and men commenced active preparations for escaping to the islet, whose towering cliffs now began to loom heavily through the ...
— Under the Waves - Diving in Deep Waters • R M Ballantyne

... guise of prejudice, turned, in many cases, the liberties previously granted to the Jews into a scrap of paper. On the other hand, the dangers of this extreme Diaspora Judaism, at first little thought of, began to loom larger and larger. The rush for emancipation threatened not only to disrupt the unity of the Jewish people throughout the world, which had been maintained during the ages of suffering and persecution, but it also led large and important ...
— The Menorah Journal, Volume 1, 1915 • Various

... leave her little farm; so Jimmie, well content, had a fine new frame house built close to her old home; and as soon as the wedding was over he was to bring his loom from the Glen and they would begin their ...
— The Silver Maple • Marian Keith

... though not quite lately. Someone passed down the valley swift and singing. Yes, with locks spreaded like a son of morning; But if he seemed too tall to be a man It was that men had been so long unseen, Or shapes loom larger through a moving snow. And he was gone and food had not been given him. When snow slid from an overweighted leaf, Shaking the tree, it might have been a bird Slipping in sleep or shelter, whirring wings; Yet never bird fell out, save once a dead one— And in two days the snow had ...
— Georgian Poetry 1911-12 • Various

... beloved than the people who proclaim these things now. The writers who told of these things and the dangers to which they were leading unfortunately suggested no remedy. They thought they could drive women back to the water pitcher and the loom, but that was impossible. The clock of time will not turn back. Neither is it by a return to hand-sewing, or a resurrection of quilt-patching that women of the present day will save the race. The old avenues of labor are closed. It is no longer necessary ...
— In Times Like These • Nellie L. McClung

... not mentioned Hubert herself, until her father had named him; and in fact it is probably safe to say that during Hubert's visit to the north, which had lasted three or four months, he had made greater progress towards his goal, and had begun to loom larger than ever in the heart of this serene grey-eyed girl, whom he ...
— By What Authority? • Robert Hugh Benson

... the first time how far flung was the battle line of the contending armies; and on hard-fought fields, hundreds and hundreds of miles away from Washington and Richmond, the mud-splashed figure of Grant began to loom through heavy clouds ...
— On the Trail of Grant and Lee • Frederick Trevor Hill

... her Menelaus to free, To Proteus the pavilion gave away; Which, passing through the line of Ptolemy, To Cleopatra fell; from her in fray Agrippa's band on the Leucadian sea Bore off the treasure, amid other prey. Augustus and Tiberius heired the loom, Kept till the time ...
— Orlando Furioso • Lodovico Ariosto

... not out of commission, and for them it was like working a loom playing bullets back and forth across the zone of a hundred yards which the British had to traverse. The British had been told to charge and they charged. Theirs not to reason why; that was the glory of the thing. ...
— My Year of the War • Frederick Palmer

... words are ringing, Hark! a dull and wailing tone From the temple's gate upspringing,— Dead lies Thetis' mighty son! Eris shakes her snake-locks hated, Swiftly flies each deity, And o'er Ilion's walls ill-fated Thunder-clouds loom heavily! ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller

... bulky figure of Inspector Weymouth would loom up grotesquely against the star-sprinkled blue, as he paused to take breath; the next moment Nayland Smith would be leading the way again, and I would find myself contemplating some sheer well of blackness, with nausea threatening me because it ...
— The Hand Of Fu-Manchu - Being a New Phase in the Activities of Fu-Manchu, the Devil Doctor • Sax Rohmer

... through the kiosque's grated ogive straying, The sea-breeze mingles with the Moka's fume, Where softly o'er thy form the moonbeams playing Glance on thy couch, rich from Palmyra's loom...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII No. 6 June 1848 • Various

... Rheims lay before us. The inhabitants were pouring forth to meet us. We saw them coming over the plain, as we watched the walls and buildings, glowing in the mystic radiance of the summer's evening, loom up larger and grander and sharper before us. It ...
— A Heroine of France • Evelyn Everett-Green

... silent tomb. Fix'd is the term to all the race of earth; And such the hard condition of our birth, No force can then resist, no flight can save— All sink alike, the fearful and the brave. No more—but hasten to thy tasks at home, There guide the spindle and direct the loom: Me, glory summons to the martial scene— The field of combat is the sphere of men; Where heroes war, the foremost place I claim, The first in danger, as ...
— Mosaics of Grecian History • Marcius Willson and Robert Pierpont Willson

... horses, they rode to Rome. Here they found the wives of the three princes merrily engaged at a banquet. They then rode on to Collatia. It was now late at night, but they found Lucretia, the wife of their cousin, neither sleeping nor feasting, but working at the loom, with her handmaids busily engaged ...
— Historic Tales, Volume 11 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris

... and lo! a girl, not beautiful, but, as it were, rather strange and fascinating. She was lithe like a serpent and undulated in her walk. Her dress was sea-green silk of a rare loom, and clung closely about her. It had scales upon it of dull gold, which gave back a lustrous under-gleam of coppery red as she moved. She had a pale, eager face, lined with precision enough, but filled more with passion than womanly charm. Her eyes were emerald and ...
— Red Axe • Samuel Rutherford Crockett

... "polders" upon the sea and the extension of the area of rich low meadows, the quantity of wool increased considerably, and, more raw material becoming available, the cloth industry developed accordingly. From the building of a protective dyke to the weaver bending over his loom and to the ship carrying valuable Flemish cloth from Bruges to London or any other part of the European coast, there is a natural chain of thought. But the progress accomplished along the coast may also be connected ...
— Belgium - From the Roman Invasion to the Present Day • Emile Cammaerts

... made out very clearly, but there seem insuperable difficulties in proving Hengist and Horsa themselves. This strikes me as a characteristic of the author's[12] profession. He has to deal with parents actual and possible, but the offspring are seen evanescently, often loom in the distance, and sometimes can't be got to exist even when most ...
— The Book-Hunter - A New Edition, with a Memoir of the Author • John Hill Burton

... come through our grey old gate into the evening light and the spectacle of London hurrying like a cataract, London in black and brown and blue and gleaming silver, roaring like the very loom of Time. We came out into the new world no teacher has yet had the power and courage to grasp and expound. Life and death sang all about one, joys and fears on such a scale, in such an intricacy as never Greek nor Roman knew. The interminable procession of horse omnibuses went lumbering past, bearing ...
— The New Machiavelli • Herbert George Wells

... had rendered tame. These arose when they saw strangers, and ramped upon their hinder paws, and fawned upon Eurylochus and his men, who dreaded the effects of such monstrous kindness; and staying at the gate they heard the enchantress within, sitting at her loom, singing such strains as suspended all mortal faculties, while she wove a web, subtile and glorious, and of texture inimitable on earth, as all the housewiferies of the deities are. Strains so ravishingly sweet ...
— THE ADVENTURES OF ULYSSES • CHARLES LAMB

... vaguely, their faces upturned, making vain efforts to lure down the elusive creature. The haze of very early morning pervades the garden which is the scene of their faint aspiration. One cannot see very clearly there. The ladies' furbelows are blurred against the foliage, and the lilac-bushes loom through the air as though they were white clouds full of rain. One cannot see the ladies' faces very clearly. One guesses them, though, to be supercilious and smiling, all with the curved lips and the raised eyebrows of Experience. For, in their time, all these ladies, and all their ...
— Yet Again • Max Beerbohm

... time, away in the country homestead and cottage, the good Marsian or Sabine mother is a veritable pattern of domestic probity and discipline. If she possesses handmaids, she teaches them their work in the kitchen or at the loom; if she possesses none, she brings up her big daughters in the right ways of modesty, frugality, and obedience to the gods; and her tall sons religiously obey her when she sends them out to chop the firewood in the rain ...
— Life in the Roman World of Nero and St. Paul • T. G. Tucker

... an excellent harbor for shipping, while Burlington Heights loom up on the north in all their wild and terrific grandeur. Near the bay resides Mr. McNab, so notorious in the history of the Canadian revolution. We went in a large company to look at his beautiful grounds and residence, ...
— Twenty-Two Years a Slave, and Forty Years a Freeman • Austin Steward

... nearly three degrees. When it struck our earth there was to be a magnificent spectacle, no doubt, for those who were on the right side of our planet to see, but beyond that nothing. It was doubtful whether we were on the right side. The meteor would loom larger and larger in the sky, but with the umbra of our earth eating its heart of brightness out, and at last it would be the whole sky, a sky of luminous green clouds, with a white brightness about the horizon, west and east. Then a pause—a pause of not very ...
— In the Days of the Comet • H. G. Wells

... and they pushed on through the snow. After a time, the ground got steeper, and when they crossed the noisy beck and scrambled up a shaly bank, Kit was glad to see a broken wall loom among the tossing flakes. This was the shaft-house of an abandoned mine, and there was a sheep-fold, built with pulled-down material, close by. He shouted and waited until he heard the dogs bark and a rattle of stones. The ...
— The Buccaneer Farmer - Published In England Under The Title "Askew's Victory" • Harold Bindloss

... imagine, for we cannot describe, such a movement through an avenue of living beings, and extending six miles in length. Upon one bridge a tri-colored flag was displayed; near another the motto of "Vote by ballot" was seen; in a field near Eccles, a poor and wretchedly dressed man had his loom close to the roadside, and was weaving with all his might; cries of "No Corn Laws," were occasionally heard, and for about two miles the cheerings of the crowd were interspersed with a continual hissing and hooting ...
— Railway Adventures and Anecdotes - extending over more than fifty years • Various

... invention of new kinds of machinery, and more especially that of steam as a motor power, which together inaugurated a revolution in the methods of production generally. Production on a small scale gave way to production on a large. The independent weavers, for example, each with his own loom, were wholly unable to compete with the mechanisms of the new factory; their looms, by being superseded, were virtually taken away from them; and these men, formerly their own masters, working with their own implements, and living by the sale of their own ...
— A Critical Examination of Socialism • William Hurrell Mallock

... clear, and in the light of the cold, leaping stars they caught occasional glimpses of the loom of mountains on either hand. At eleven o'clock, from below, came a dull, grinding roar. Their speed began to diminish, and cakes of ice to up-end and crash and smash about them. The river was jamming. One cake, forced upward, slid across their cake and carried one ...
— Smoke Bellew • Jack London

... parting interview. He received the strangers with ceremonious politeness, and called their attention to the throne or royal seat upon which he had coiled his limbs. The chair is said to have been an heir-loom of at least twenty generations. Each leg of the article rests on the skull of some native king or chief, and such is the fanatical respect for the brutal usages of antiquity, that every three years the people of Dahomey are ...
— Captain Canot - or, Twenty Years of an African Slaver • Brantz Mayer

... lever, at one side of it, and towards the end in which the wheel is fixed (Plate 2. Fig 10. which is a vue d'oiseau) in the same manner as the treadle of a common lathe is managed, and as the treadle of a loom is ...
— Practical Education, Volume II • Maria Edgeworth

... via Atbara, from Gozerajup, during the season of flood. At the present time, the growth is restricted to the supply required by the Arabs for the manufacture of their cloths. These are woven by themselves, the weaver sitting in a hole excavated in the ground before his rude loom, shaded by a rough thatch about ten feet square, supported upon poles. There is a uniformity in dress throughout all the Nubian tribes of Arabs, the simple toga of the Romans this is worn in many ways, as occasion may suggest, very similar to the Scotch plaid. The quality of cotton ...
— The Nile Tributaries of Abyssinia • Samuel W. Baker

... we seemed to be standing on a fragment of a wrecked world enveloped in a whirling tempest of stinging snowflakes. Now and then a black volcanic crag, inaccessible as the peak of the Matterhorn, would loom out in the white mist far above our heads, as if suspended in mid-air, giving a startling momentary wildness to the scene; then it would disappear again in flying snow, and leave us staring blindly into vacancy. A long fringe of icicles hung round the visor of my ...
— Tent Life in Siberia • George Kennan

... old cniht when they inquired the reason for his abstraction. Perhaps it was the future that was engrossing his mind, but sometimes it came to him dimly as a strange thing how so small a matter as a slip of a girl in a page's dress could loom so large that there was no corner of manor or tower but recalled some trick of her tossing curls, some echo of her ringing laughter. The platform whereon they had walked in the moonlight, facing death together, he shunned as he would have shunned a grave; ...
— The Ward of King Canute • Ottilie A. Liljencrantz

... prevailing language. Its chief trade was in saddles, ponchos, straw hats, and fruit. Here was the cotton factory, or quinta, of Sr. Pareja. Three miles from Otovalo was the enterprising Indian village of Cotocachi, at the mountain of the same name. It was noted for its hand-loom products. A heap of ruins now marks the locality. It is a doomed spot, suffering more than any other ...
— The Andes and the Amazon - Across the Continent of South America • James Orton

... who were dreamers or lovers. From the little open space where the halt had taken place, three beautiful long walks, shady and undulating, stretched out before them. These walks were covered with moss or with leaves that formed a carpet from the loom of nature; and each walk had its horizon in the distance, consisting of about a hand-breadth of sky, apparent through the interlacing of the branches of the trees. At the end of almost every walk, evidently in great ...
— Ten Years Later • Alexandre Dumas, Pere

... mantle of night; like a veil it hides all blemishes and permits only fair outlines to be observed. Details are lost in vast shadows; huge buildings loom up vaguely towards the heavens, impressive masses of masonry; the bridges, outlined by rows of electric lights, are strings of pearls about the throat of the dusky river. The red, white, and green lights of invisible boats below ...
— Two Thousand Miles On An Automobile • Arthur Jerome Eddy

... of the foemen of the war-delivered land; And they tell how the ships of the merchants come free and go at their will, And how wives in peace and safety may crop the vine-clad hill; How the maiden sits in her bower, and the weaver sings at his loom, And forget the kings of grasping and the greedy days of gloom; For by sea and hill and township hath the Son of Sigmund been, And looked on the folk unheeded, and the ...
— The Story of Sigurd the Volsung • William Morris

... thinking of turning toward camp, I stole up to the crest of one of the ridges, and looked over into the valley some sixty yards off. Immediately I caught the loom of some large, dark object; and another glance showed me a big grizzly walking slowly off with his head down. He was quartering to me, and I fired into his flank, the bullet, as I afterward found, ranging forward and piercing one lung. At the shot ...
— Public Speaking • Irvah Lester Winter

... serious flirtation. Pedestalled and in bronze she might have stood with the noblest of her heroic sisters as "Liver-and-Bacon Enlivening the World." She belonged to Cypher's. You expected to see her colossal figure loom through that reeking blue cloud of smoke from frying fat just as you expect the Palisades to appear through a drifting Hudson River fog. There amid the steam of vegetables and the vapours of acres of "ham and," the ...
— The Four Million • O. Henry

... leeward, not less than four miles distant, the loom of the land was only just visible. Well he realized that it would be many long hours before the boat, with her masts and sails still fast in, could drive near enough to enable them to make a landing. For, ...
— Labrador Days - Tales of the Sea Toilers • Wilfred Thomason Grenfell

... absurdities, under his eyes in full activity; vociferous quacks and snapping dupes, hypocrites, posturers, extravagants, pedants, rose-pink ladies and mad grammarians, sonneteering marquises, high-flying mistresses, plain-minded maids, inter-threading as in a loom, noisy as at a fair. A simply bourgeois circle will not furnish it, for the middle class must have the brilliant, flippant, independent upper for a spur and a pattern; otherwise it is likely to be inwardly dull as well as outwardly correct. Yet, though the King was benevolent toward ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith

... not the shadows of death to make the figure of the late President loom large in the estimate ...
— Messages and Papers of William McKinley V.2. • William McKinley

... sickness, yet I now felt an energetic strength in all my frame, and soon gained the upper deck, but what a sight! dead, wounded and living, intermingled in a state too shocking to describe; not a mast standing, a dreadful loom of the land, and breakers all around us.—The Indefatigable, on the starboard quarter, appeared standing off, in a most tremendous sea, from the Penmark rocks, which threatened her with instant destruction. To the great humanity of her ...
— Thrilling Narratives of Mutiny, Murder and Piracy • Anonymous

... hundred yards of lace of various makes and ages? An heir-loom! Indeed! Then, of course, the ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 101. October 10, 1891 • Various

... great deal of worry is wholly due to physical causes. Overworked nerves always see things distorted. Huge phantom shapes loom up before us. Overwork always makes a sensitive spirit worry, and worry usually makes us overwork until we drop from exhaustion. When the cause is here, there are some simple human helps. Some—a good bit—of ...
— Quiet Talks on Service • S. D. Gordon

... and toilers, and lists their occupations in pages that will live; Millet shows us wood-gatherers, charcoal-burners, shepherds, gleaners, washerwomen, diggers, quarrymen, road laborers, men at the plow, and women at the loom. Then he shows the noon-hour, the moments of devotion, the joys of motherhood, the silent pride of the father, the love of brother and sister and of husband and wife. And again in the dusk of a winter night we see black-lined against the sky the ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 4 (of 14) - Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Painters • Elbert Hubbard

... gestures. Were it not for his /Letters/, which are full of warm exuberant power, we might almost doubt whether Gray was a man of genius; nay, was a living man at all, and not rather some thousand-times more cunningly devised poetical turning-loom, than that of Swift's Philosophers in Laputa. Johnson's prose is true, indeed, and sound, and full of practical sense: few men have seen more clearly into the motives, the interests, the whole walk and conversation ...
— Autobiography • Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

... the enraptur'd knight, For now the two fair damsels met his sight; Each on her arm resplendent vestments brought, Fresh from the loom, magnificently wrought: Enrob'd in them, with added grace he mov'd, As one by nature form'd to be belov'd; And, by the fairy to the banquet led, And placed beside her on one genial bed, Whiles the twain handmaids every want supplied, Cates were his fare to mortal man denied: Yet was there one, ...
— The Lay of Marie • Matilda Betham

... night, O leave the shore And lighted streets of Plymouth town, Pull out into the Deep once more! There, in the night of their renown, The same great waters roll their gloom Around our midget period; And the huge decks that Raleigh trod Over our petty darkness loom! Along the line the cry is passed From all their heaven-illumined spars, Clear as a bell, from mast to mast, It rings against the stars: Before ...
— Collected Poems - Volume Two (of 2) • Alfred Noyes

... man is a seamless garment—its woof his thoughts, its warp his deeds. When for him the roaring loom of time stops and the thread is broken, foolish people sometimes point to certain spots in the robe and say, "Oh, why did he not leave that out!" not knowing that every action of man is a sequence ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 1 of 14 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Good Men and Great • Elbert Hubbard

... however, the sadder Sam'l grew. He never laughed now on Saturdays, and sometimes his loom was silent half the day. Sam'l felt that Sanders's was the kindness of a friend for a ...
— Stories by English Authors: Scotland • Various

... project in precipices from five to fifteen hundred feet in height; trees find a place for their roots in every rift among the rocks; festoons of clematis and wild-vine hang in graceful drapery from base to summit, and the dark mountain shadows loom over the lake-like expanse below. The hand wearies of writing of the loveliness of this river. I saw it on a perfect day. The Indian summer lingered, as though unwilling that the chilly blasts of winter should blight the loveliness of this beauteous scene. The gloom of autumn ...
— The Englishwoman in America • Isabella Lucy Bird

... shades of evening, crepuscule, cockshut time|; break of day, daybreak, dawn. moonlight, moonbeam, moonglade[obs3], moonshine; starlight, owl's light, candlelight, rushlight, firelight; farthing candle. V. be dim, grow dim &c. adj.; flicker, twinkle, glimmer; loom, lower; fade; pale, pale its ineffectual fire [Hamlet]. render dim &c. adj.; dim, bedim[obs3], obscure; darken, tone down. Adj. dim, dull, lackluster, dingy, darkish, shorn of its beams, dark 421. faint, shadowed forth; glassy; cloudy; misty &c. (opaque) 426; blear; muggy|, fuliginous[obs3]; ...
— Roget's Thesaurus

... please, fate yet a way would find; Man makes his fate according to his mind. The weak low spirit, fortune makes her slave; But she's a drudge, when hectored by the brave: If fate weaves common thread, he'll change the doom, And with new purple spread a nobler loom. ...
— The Works Of John Dryden, Volume 4 (of 18) - Almanzor And Almahide, Marriage-a-la-Mode, The Assignation • John Dryden

... Africa the figure of the grim old President will loom large and striking—picturesque, as the figure of one who by his character and will made and held his people; magnificent, as one who in the face of the blackest fortune never wavered from his aim or faltered ...
— The Transvaal from Within - A Private Record of Public Affairs • J. P. Fitzpatrick

... Father; "but my grandmother used to weave the yarn into cloth on a loom. And she made the cloth into clothes for her children ...
— Bobby of Cloverfield Farm • Helen Fuller Orton

... leather, some being nearly equal to the most delicate kid-skin; in which character it somewhat differs from the South Sea cloth, as that bears a resemblance rather to paper, or to the manufacture of the loom. The country people now conform in a great measure to the dress of the Malays, which I shall therefore describe in this place, observing that much more simplicity still prevails among the former, who look upon the others as coxcombs who lay out all their substance on their ...
— The History of Sumatra - Containing An Account Of The Government, Laws, Customs And - Manners Of The Native Inhabitants • William Marsden

... scholarship and accomplishments and wealth who have heretofore enjoyed prominence, do not feel themselves up to the work, the people will call the cobbler from his stall, the factory-boy from his loom, the yeoman from his plough, but the work shall be done. Fishermen and tent-makers renovated the world. The Roman centurion was sent to a fisherman who lodged at the house of a tanner by the seaside, to hear what, should ...
— The American Union Speaker • John D. Philbrick

... left. As I neared the little village the sad event returned obstinately to my memory. Everything about the place, as I looked at it once again, suggested tragic deeds. At every turn in the road I seemed to see the ghost of the colonel loom. And despite myself, I evoked in my imagination his cries, his struggles, his looks on that horrible night ...
— Brazilian Tales • Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis

... that even when the Cymric folk gave up wearing the skins of animals, and put on pretty clothes woven on a loom, and ate out of dishes, instead of clam shells, there were still some fairies that kept to the notions and fashions of the cave days. To one of these, came ...
— Welsh Fairy Tales • William Elliot Griffis

... same stamp, and would have operated in the very same manner, to the removing of the pious Quaker's doubts. Faith! ye lack faith! cries this prophet in our streets; and when reproved and distressed scepticism enquires where truth is to be found, he bids it back to the loom or the forge, to its tools and its workshop, of whatever kind these may be—there to forget ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine—Vol. 54, No. 333, July 1843 • Various

... the fields, in an uncultivated, undrained wilderness. Tucking your trowsers up to your knees you will wade through the bogs, you will lose yourself among rude hillocks, you will be out of the reach of humanity. The unfinished dome of the Capitol will loom before you in the distance, and you will think that you approach the ruins of some western Palmyra. If you are a sportsman, you will desire to shoot snipe within sight of the President's house. There is much unsettled land within the States of ...
— Volume 2 • Anthony Trollope

... event took place. My good Viking opened his mouth, and spoke. The prodigy occurred, as, jacknife in hand, he was bending over the midship oar; on the loom, or handle, of which he kept our almanac; making a notch for every set sun. For some forty-eight hours past, the wind had been light and variable. It was more than suspected that a ...
— Mardi: and A Voyage Thither, Vol. I (of 2) • Herman Melville

... this great international gathering is, that it is not confined to rank or grade. The million toilers from mine, and factory, and workshop, and loom, and office, and field, share with their more wealthy neighbours the feast of reason and imagination spread out in ...
— Three Years in Europe - Places I Have Seen and People I Have Met • William Wells Brown

... could see that the only light in the room came from a dull blue flame which flickered from a small brass tripod in the centre. It threw a livid, unnatural circle upon the floor, while in the shadows beyond we saw the vague loom of two figures which crouched against the wall. From the open door there reeked a horrible poisonous exhalation which set us gasping and coughing. Holmes rushed to the top of the stairs to draw in the fresh air, and then, dashing into the room, he threw up the window and hurled ...
— Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes • Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

... land, Captain Wilson; thick as it is, I think I can make out the loom of it—shall we wear round, ...
— Mr. Midshipman Easy • Captain Frederick Marryat

... belched flame till the fight had run Into night; and now, in the distance dim, We could see, by the flashes, the dull, dark loom Of their hull, as it bore toward the Port of Doom, Away on the water's misty rim— Cradock and his few hundred men, Never, in time, ...
— New York Times Current History: The European War, Vol 2, No. 1, April, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various

... minute, each one takes a lot out of the big fellow's life. Unlike the guns of smaller calibre, they cannot be used over and over again. They are too powerful to be used in actual trench warfare, but let a fortress, or a mountain that has perversely got in the way of operations, loom up ahead, and down it goes! Also the big shells have been found exceedingly useful in knocking in the roofs of German tunnels underground, even those that are quarried out ninety ...
— The Stars & Stripes, Vol 1, No 1, February 8, 1918, - The American Soldiers' Newspaper of World War I, 1918-1919 • American Expeditionary Forces

... senses of mankind: but I much doubt whether, if this state of mind had been universal, or long-continued, the business of the world could have gone on. The necessary art of social life would have been little cultivated. The plough and the loom would have stood still. Agriculture, manufactures, trade, and navigation, would not, I think, have flourished, if they could have been exercised at all. Men would have addicted themselves to contemplative and ascetic lives, instead of lives of ...
— Evidences of Christianity • William Paley

... storehouses were piled full of rotting harvests that the farmers toiled from dawn till dusk to grow, and the warehouses fed the moth with the stuffs that the operative had woven his life into at his loom. Then followed, with a blind and mad succession, a time of famine, when money could not buy the super-abundance that vanished, none knew ...
— A Traveler from Altruria: Romance • W. D. Howells

... was going to be published soon, and all the rest were helping her "make her fix." Coverlets were being got into the loom, and the great wheel and little wheel going all day Jamie liked to help them "quill." But the best of all, both for him and me, were the quiltings; for these brought all ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 79, May, 1864 • Various

... excellence upon the ground chosen for the work, is absurd. At the touch of a true artist, the plainest face turns comely. As subject-matter the face is no more than suggestive, as ground, merely a loom round which the beatus artifex may spin the ...
— The Works of Max Beerbohm • Max Beerbohm

... closer yet in His wooing. The web of life's daily run, with its strange mixing and blending, shadings and tints, is of His weaving. He sits at life's loom ever watching and weaving. Were He but recognized oftener and His hand allowed to guide the skein, how different ...
— Quiet Talks about Jesus • S. D. Gordon

... room. If you would have a view of humanity in its simplicity, visit one of these mountain homes. You will find everything of the most primitive kind. The hum of the spinning-wheel and the heavy thud of the loom will greet your ears. In one room you will very often see several beds, while the rest of the furniture will consist of a few wooden chairs, a table and perhaps a cupboard, and into this one room will be gathered the whole family, the women with old shawls ...
— American Missionary, Volume 50, No. 8, August, 1896 • Various

... parallel with the coast, carried on the crest of the big tide-bore which every day passes down the east coast of Kadiak between the long, parallel islands which make an inland channel many miles in extent. As the boys called now they could hear an echo on each side of them, and indeed could see the loom of the rock-bound shore; but all about them hissed and danced these fighting waves, tossing the dory a dozen ways at once, and all the time there came astern the long roll of the mighty Pacific in its power, the Japan current and the coast tide in unison forcing a boiling current down the ...
— The Young Alaskans • Emerson Hough

... the street. One trifle, strange in its way, he remembered afterwards. Holding the roll of paper in his hand that would make the mill his, he went, in his slow, grave way, down the long passage to the loom-rooms. There was a crowd of porters and firemen there, as usual, and he thought one of them hastily passed him in the dark passage, hiding behind an engine. As the shadow fell on him, his teeth chattered with a chilly shudder. He smiled, thinking how superstitious people would say that some one trod ...
— Margret Howth, A Story of To-day • Rebecca Harding Davis

... set jauntily on the crown of her head. But in her costume the two articles that most surprised Madame de Hell were an embroidered cambric handkerchief and a pair of black mittens, significant proofs that the products of the French loom found their way even to the toilet of a Kalmuk lady. Among the princess's ornaments must not be forgotten a large gold chain, which, after being twisted round her glossy tresses, was passed through her gold earrings and then allowed ...
— Celebrated Women Travellers of the Nineteenth Century • W. H. Davenport Adams

... goodman mends his armor, And trims his helmet's plume; When the goodwife's shuttle merrily Goes flashing through the loom,— With weeping and with laughter Still is the story told, How well Horatius kept the bridge In the brave ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 6 • Charles H. Sylvester

... child, honey, child, the world is full of pleasure, Of bridal-songs and cradle-songs and sandal-scented leisure. Your bridal robes are in the loom, silver and saffron glowing, Your bridal cakes are on the hearth: O whither ...
— The Golden Threshold • Sarojini Naidu

... share. The artist has done nothing more felicitous and interesting than this view of a rich dim, rather generalized French interior (the perspective of a hall with a shining floor, where screens and tall Japanese vases shimmer and loom), which encloses the life and seems to form the happy play-world of a family of charming children. The treatment is eminently unconventional, and there is none of the usual symmetrical balancing of the figures in the foreground. The place is regarded as a whole; it is a scene, a comprehensive ...
— Picture and Text - 1893 • Henry James

... work for feet and fingers, when you first come into your "blind" under the early dawn; but the blood soon warms up as the warning cries from the markers become more frequent; the pulse quickens as the dark specks or lines loom nearer, defined against the dull red or silvery gray of the sky-line; chills and shivers are all forgotten, as your first "red-head," pioneer of a whole "skeen" from the river—crashes down yards behind you, on the hard, wet sand that fringes ...
— Border and Bastille • George A. Lawrence

... although there are no great mills sending forth volumes of smoke, Newtownards is really a manufacturing town. Those clean, regular streets, with their two-storey houses, uniform as a district in the east of London, are inhabited by weavers. In each house there is one loom at least, in most two or three, and in some as many as six. The manufacture of woollen and cotton goods of finer qualities than can be produced by the power-loom is carried on extensively. I saw one man working at a piece of plaid of six colours, a colour on ...
— The Land-War In Ireland (1870) - A History For The Times • James Godkin

... certainly felt as if I had. But, however strong the contrast between us three small humans and the vast stretches of empty ocean and desert coast, there was no diminution about Farallone, but the contrary. I have never seen the presence of a man loom so strongly and so large. He sat upon his rock with a kind of vastness, so bold and strong he seemed, ...
— IT and Other Stories • Gouverneur Morris

... imagination of readers to invest the bare recital of facts with the due amount of romance. If, however, a true understanding of this most modern form of naval war is to be obtained, the human aspect must loom large ...
— Submarine Warfare of To-day • Charles W. Domville-Fife

... said he, to Helen, "fear not for the future, for it is a merciful and loving God who lays his rod upon you; and though the clouds of darkness loom heavily around you, with Him nothing is impossible; and He could, in one moment, disperse them, if it were better for you. May you be purified by the affliction He sends. Good night, once more, and remember ...
— A Book For The Young • Sarah French

... She saw that her son was now indeed a man. Penelope spoke no word to him, for a new thought had come into her mind. She turned round on the stairs and went back with her hand-maids to the chamber where her loom and her distaff were. And as she went up the stairway and away from them her wooers muttered one to the other that she would soon have to choose one ...
— The Adventures of Odysseus and The Tales of Troy • Padriac Colum

... familiar with at least one or several other branches of industry; and from this again it follows that the man can take advantage of any favourable circumstance that may occur in such other branch or branches of industry, and can exchange the plough for the loom, the turning-lathe for the hammer, or even any of these for the writing-desk or the counting-house; and by this means there can be brought about that marvellous equilibrium in the most diverse sources of income which is the foundation of the ...
— Freeland - A Social Anticipation • Theodor Hertzka

... always hungry. A system of loan banks, which has now been adopted in part by the Government, has been of great service to the small agriculturalists. The invention of an extremely simple and yet greatly improved hand loom has proved, and will prove, very valuable to the weavers. New plans of relief in times of scarcity and famine have also greatly helped in some districts to win the confidence of the people. Industrial schools, chiefly for orphan children, have also been a feature ...
— Regeneration • H. Rider Haggard

... hoe, some sharp stakes to make the drills with, and the machete—which is an iron bill-hook, and serves for pruning, woodcutting, and now and then for less peaceful purposes. Sometimes one sees women weaving cotton-cloth, or manta, as it is called, in a loom of the simplest possible construction; or sitting at their doors in groups, spinning cotton-thread with the malacates, and apparently finding as much material for gossip ...
— Anahuac • Edward Burnett Tylor

... particular,' Mr. Guppy's phrase for a fog. When you are once ensconced in your garden seat by the driver, you go lumbering through a world of bobbing shadows, where all is weird, vague, grey, dense; and where great objects loom up suddenly in the mist and then disappear; where the sky, heavy and leaden, seems to descend bodily upon your head, and the air is full of a kind ...
— Penelope's English Experiences • Kate Douglas Wiggin

... them to live in luxury; and if British policy prevents their countrymen from paying them, it is to the British Parliament they should look for redress, and not to our Executive. When they shall awaken to the fact that "cheap labor" with the spade, the plough, and the loom, brings with it necessarily "cheap labor" with the pen, they will become opponents, and cease to be advocates of the system under which they suffer. All that, in the mean time, we can say to them is, that we protect our own authors by giving them ...
— Letters on International Copyright; Second Edition • Henry C. Carey

... the young husband found a well-prepared and ample repast awaiting him, and each evening also upon his return; but the wife all day sat at her loom, weaving silk after a fashion unlike anything which had ever been seen before in that province. For as she wove, the silk flowed from the loom like a slow current of glossy gold, bearing upon its undulations strange forms of violet and crimson ...
— Some Chinese Ghosts • Lafcadio Hearn

... they talked, knitted stockings; or, with distaff in hand, twirled the spindle, making flax into thread for spinning, or wool into woof and web for weaving. Hearing a shuttle, he looked in at an open door, and found a young girl busily weaving a heavy blue cloth at a queer old loom; not far from her, an elderly woman was weaving flax thread into coarse, heavy linen goods. Passing along, he heard the whir of millstones, and, entering a house, saw a girl working one of the handmills ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 3, No. 1 January 1863 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various

... skilled musician as well as a poet—he lived the sane and diligent life of the Oriental craftsman. All the legends agree on this point: that Kabr was a weaver, a simple and unlettered man, who earned his living at the loom. Like Paul the tentmaker, Boehme the cobbler, Bunyan the tinker, Tersteegen the ribbon-maker, he knew how to combine vision and industry; the work of his hands helped rather than hindered the impassioned meditation of his ...
— Songs of Kabir • Rabindranath Tagore (trans.)

... and a Latin inscription engraved thereon recording the event. This was presented to the farmer, and is still in the possession of his descendants, and no doubt will be long preserved as an heir-loom in the family of ...
— The World of Waters - A Peaceful Progress o'er the Unpathed Sea • Mrs. David Osborne

... Nine months have passed since Act II. ANSYA, plainly dressed, sits before a loom weaving. ...
— Redemption and Two Other Plays • Leo Tolstoy et al

... garrison to a rooinek, and starting on the homeward march refreshed with coffee and biltong, and driving the towns-people before them as prisoners of War. The desperate perils presented by the conjectural and largely non-existent mine were thenceforth to loom largely and luridly in the telegrams ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves

... that stained-glass atmosphere something of the consciousness of the market boy, who seemed to stand always at the kitchen door. Curiously enough there were instants even now when I felt vaguely aware that, however large I might appear to loom in my physical presence, a part of me was, in reality, still on the outside, hovering uncertainly beyond the threshold. There were things I had never learned—would never learn; things that belonged so naturally to the people with whom I lived that they seemed only aware of them when brought ...
— The Romance of a Plain Man • Ellen Glasgow

... tints of her fairest flowers, the sea brought great ribbons of silvery mist, the wind was the shuttle, the sky was the loom and the Sun ...
— Nature Myths and Stories for Little Children • Flora J. Cooke

... her; and then through her closed eyes and her slumber did the Hall-Sun see a marvel; for she who was kissing her was young in semblance and unwrinkled, and lovely to look on, with plenteous long hair of the hue of ripe barley, and clad in glistening raiment such as has been woven in no loom on earth. ...
— The House of the Wolfings - A Tale of the House of the Wolfings and All the Kindreds of the Mark Written in Prose and in Verse • William Morris

... plot, and not thrown in in chunks. As for how to do it, "Each mind," says Emerson, "has its own method. A true man never acquires after college rules." But of one thing make sure: Plan your human appeal from the start, so that the actual climax may loom up distinctly from the time you write your very first scene. As Jean Paul has said, "The end we aim at must be known ...
— Writing the Photoplay • J. Berg Esenwein and Arthur Leeds

... Being's floods, in Action's storm, I walk and work, above, beneath, Work and weave in endless motion! Birth and Death, An infinite ocean; A seizing and giving The fire of Living: 'Tis thus at the roaring Loom of Time I ply, And weave for God the ...
— Among Famous Books • John Kelman

... which tents are made; for my father gave me that trade, for which I thank him, for by it I have earned my living these many years, in various countries and cities. At an early age I was a skilful hand at the loom, and at the same time learned in the Scriptures, and my father, seeing a Rabbi in me, sent me to Jerusalem, and while I was taught the law I remember hearing of the Baptist, and the priests of the Temple muttering against him, but they were afraid to send men against him, ...
— The Brook Kerith - A Syrian story • George Moore

... LOOM. A word, which has crept into use since the French expedition to Egypt, to express the extraordinary refraction which light undergoes when strata of air, of different densities, extend above each other. The mirage, ...
— The Sailor's Word-Book • William Henry Smyth

... depleted as years have passed; with struggle and objection, no doubt, but inevitably shrinking. Out went the shears and the carders, out went the dye tub and the spinning-wheels; big wool wheel, little flax wheel, all gone. Out went the clattering loom; out went the quilting-frame, the candle-mould, the little mallet to break up the ...
— The Forerunner, Volume 1 (1909-1910) • Charlotte Perkins Gilman

... "The roaring loom of Time weaves on. The globe cools out. Life mercifully ceases from upon its surface. The atmosphere and water disappear. ...
— The Crack of Doom • Robert Cromie

... of Richard Arkwright in 1769, and the mule of Samuel Crompton ten years later, machines were provided which could spin any quantity of fiber likely to be offered. And when, in 1787, Edmund Cartwright, clergyman and poet, invented the self-acting loom to which power might be applied, the series was complete. These inventions, supplementing the steam engine of James Watt, made the Industrial Revolution. They destroyed the system of cottage manufactures in England and gave birth to the ...
— The Age of Invention - A Chronicle of Mechanical Conquest, Book, 37 in The - Chronicles of America Series • Holland Thompson

... steering oar and was trying to hold the longboat into the wind. He had stood there since sundown, huge and untiring, legs braced and the bucking wood cradled in his arms. More than human he seemed, there under the icicle loom of the stern-post, his gray hair and beard rigid with ice. Beneath the horned helmet, the strong moody face turned right and left, peering into the darkness. Cappen felt smaller than usual when he ...
— The Valor of Cappen Varra • Poul William Anderson

... that are to be used for the "weft" or "filling" go directly into the shuttles of the weavers after being spun; but those which are to be used for "warp" are wound first on spools, then on beams to go into the loom. ...
— Makers of Many Things • Eva March Tappan

... girl was all at once aware that she was tired and a little timid of what lay before her. She had written to Shade Buckheath, a neighbour's boy with whom she had gone to school, now employed as a mechanic or loom-fixer in one of the cotton mills, and from whom she had received a reply saying that she could get work in Cottonville if she would ...
— The Power and the Glory • Grace MacGowan Cooke

... common purpose; to contests in which there is no intention to continue or repeat the match, and in which no rules control. Weeds compete with flowers and crowd them out. The factory competes with the hand loom and banishes it. The trust competes with the small firm and puts it out of business. The result is monopoly. When plants or inventions are thus said to compete for a place, there is frequently no room for both competitors, and no social gain by keeping both in the field. Competition ...
— The Ethics of Coperation • James Hayden Tufts

... Baffin's Bay. "The scene apparent on going on deck after breakfast was splendid, and unlike anything I ever saw before. The subdued light of the moon thrown over such a vast expanse of ice, in the distance the loom of a berg, or the shadow of the hummocks (the Arctic hedge-rows), the only thing to break the even surface, a few stars peeping out, as if gazing in wonder at the spectacle,—all united to render the prospect striking, and lead one to contemplate ...
— Heads and Tales • Various

... palaces? Who gave thee power upon the soul of man To lift him up through wonder into joy? God! let the radiant cliffs bear witness, God! Let all the shining pillars signal, God! He only, on the mystic loom of light. Hath woven webs of loveliness to clothe His most majestic works: and He alone Hath delicately wrought the cactus-flower To star the desert floor with ...
— The Poems of Henry Van Dyke • Henry Van Dyke

... stepmother wakened, and she knew not why. She sat up in her bed, and knew not why. She knew not why, and she looked into the room, and there, by the light of a burning fish's tail—'twas such a light the folk used in those days—was a woman, weaving. She had no loom, and shuttle she had none. All with her hands she wove a wondrous cloth. Stooping and bending, rising and swaying with motions beautiful as those the Northern Lights make in a midwinter sky, she wove a cloth. The warp was blue and mystical ...
— The Shape of Fear • Elia W. Peattie

... loyal man may in certain circumstances be more emphatically expressed by a rude, extemporaneous symbol, hastily constructed of intractable materials, than by the most elaborate and leisurely products of the needle or the loom. In such cases, the will of the man is everything; the wealth of the man nothing. The meanest rag suddenly thrown across the shoulders, arranged so as unequivocally to express the wearer's faith may be a better evidence of loyalty than the ...
— The Parables of Our Lord • William Arnot

... and paper-knives, artificial flowers and stamped cards are made and sold as souvenirs of the Exposition. In addition to these, and several grades better, are a couple of Lahore shawlmakers, dusky Asiatics, engaged with native loom and needle in making the shawls for which India is celebrated. Then we have a jacquard loom worked by manual power, and the large embroidering-machine of Lemaire of Naude, and the diamond-workers of Amsterdam working in a glazed room which affords an excellent opportunity ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 22. October, 1878. • Various

... of pure hinoki or sun-wood, and thatched, while the use of metal is as far as possible avoided. To the gods, as the norito show, offerings of various kinds were made, consisting of the fruits of the soil, the products of the sea, and the fabrics of the loom. ...
— The Religions of Japan - From the Dawn of History to the Era of Meiji • William Elliot Griffis

... TV-pick-up." The voice repeated, several times, the wavelength, and somebody got an auxiliary screen tuned in. There was nothing visible in it but the darkness of the valley, the star-jeweled sky, and the loom of the East Konk Mountains. "We still can't see her, but we ought to, any moment; radar shows her well above the mountains. Ah, there she is; she just obscured Beta Hydrae V; she's moving toward that big constellation to the ...
— Ullr Uprising • Henry Beam Piper

... not so much on their own account, as for the sake of standing well in the world, in whose opinion he knew he had suffered by his treachery towards them in the matter of their farm. She found her husband seated in an old arm-chair, which, having been an heir-loom in the family for many a long year, had, with one or two other things, been purchased in at the sheriff's sale. There was that chair, which had come down to them from three or four generations; an old ...
— The Black Prophet: A Tale Of Irish Famine • William Carleton

... attack. There was no moon—only a meagre starlight when they set forth from Chaussey. The journey was made in little more than an hour, and Rullecour himself was among the first to see the shores of Jersey loom darkly in front. Beside him stood the murderous pilot who was leading in the expedition, the ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker

... to body your spirit speeds on; It seeks a new form when the old one is gone; And the form that it finds is the fabric you wrought On the loom of the mind, with the ...
— Poems of Sentiment • Ella Wheeler Wilcox

... the field of making the useful necessities was the construction of a water wheel; the building of a sawmill, from which lumber was turned out to make their dwelling; a loom was put up which enabled them to weave clothing; and, finally, a wagon, which arose from the desire to utilize a herd of yaks, which they succeeded ...
— The Wonder Island Boys: The Tribesmen • Roger Finlay

... silent all th' folk i' this hall, So, as any one on yo can hear a pin fall, And John o' Bill Olders, just shut up thi prate, For I've summat to say an I mun let it aat; For I mun hev silence whatever betide, Or I'll cum aat o'th' loom and sum ...
— Th' History o' Haworth Railway - fra' th' beginnin' to th' end, wi' an ackaant o' th' oppnin' serrimony • Bill o'th' Hoylus End

... began to loom into view over the house-tops, rounded, toppling masses of grey, lit up with sullen orange against the pale limpid blue of the sky. I stood and looked at all these objects. I had come out here to think—thoughts had deserted me. I could ...
— The Inheritors • Joseph Conrad

... as the clock ticks hours. Years loom, years pass; the shadows rise.... Like the twilight breathing over holy flowers Once my love drew near. And ...
— Perpetual Light • William Rose Benet



Words linked to "Loom" :   brood, figure loom, jacquard, lift, appear, rear, look, hover, carpet loom, eclipse, power loom, tissue, overshadow, predominate, weave, dominate, seem, bulk large, tower, high-warp loom, figured-fabric loom, hang, handloom, rise



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