"Thorny" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... say says, writing of Afghanistan:—"I found a great many nests in May and June. The first (27th May) was situated in the centre of a dense thorny creeper, and contained six eggs, white, faintly washed with pale green, and spotted and blotched with purplish stone-colour and pale brown. The nest was composed of green grass, moss, cotton-wool, thistle-down, rags, ...
— The Nests and Eggs of Indian Birds, Volume 1 • Allan O. Hume
... place, yet not pedantic, Edinburgh will compare favourably with much larger cities. A hard and disputatious element has been commented on by strangers: it would not touch Fleeming, who was himself regarded, even in this metropolis of disputation, as a thorny table-mate. To golf unhappily he did not take, and golf is a cardinal virtue in the city of the winds. Nor did he become an archer of the Queen's Body Guard, which is the Chiltern Hundreds of the distasted golfer. He did not even frequent ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson, Volume 9 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... friends in youth; But whispering tongues can poison truth; And constancy lives in realms above; And life is thorny; and youth is vain; And to be wroth with one we love, Doth work like ...
— Early Reviews of English Poets • John Louis Haney
... but a single outcast, one would rather hear the sound of that wretch's voice than be doomed to the silence of such inhuman solitude. During the day he kept entirely aloof,—generally at sea fishing,—affording me time for a long siesta in a nook near the shore, penetrated by a thorny path, which Gallego could not have traced without hounds. On the fourth night, when the pirate left our hut for his accustomed excursion, I resolved to follow; and taking a pistol with renewed priming, I pursued his steps at a safe ...
— Captain Canot - or, Twenty Years of an African Slaver • Brantz Mayer
... Christ made perfect; and what was the best path for Jesus Christ is surely good enough for us, even though it be a rough and thorny one. Let us lie still beneath God's hand; for though His hand be heavy upon us, it is strong and safe beneath us too; and none can pluck us out of His hand, for in Him we live and move and have our being. He waits for us year after year, with patience which cannot tire; therefore, ...
— Out of the Deep - Words for the Sorrowful • Charles Kingsley
... heavens! it seemed months, years, a lifetime! These revolutions of mind are not to be measured by time. It had come to this that the late fellow of Oriel, so aristocratic in his tastes, so temperate in his likings, had entered certain devious paths, where hidden pitfalls and thorny enclosures warn the unwary traveller of unknown dangers, and in which he was walking, not blindfold, but by strongest will and intent, led by impulse like a mere boy, and not daring to raise his eyes to the future. "And what Grace would have said!" And for the ...
— Not Like Other Girls • Rosa N. Carey
... were decapitated. Such petty measures of warfare served merely to annoy the vampires and to whet their diabolical ingenuity for the contrivance of new devices. Since the law of 1872 went into effect, however, the scoundrels have been compelled to travel a thorny road. Scores of arrests have been made, and in many cases the criminals have been ...
— The Lock and Key Library/Real Life #2 • Julian Hawthorne
... forest extended its gloomy arms athwart the horizon; but did not arrest my aerial journey. The thick boughs groaned and crashed beneath me, as I was dragged through their matted foliage; my limbs lacerated and torn, and my hair tangled amid the thorny branches. Vainly I endeavoured to cling to the twigs which impeded my passage, but they eluded my frenzied grasp, or snapped in my hands, while my cries for help were drowned in the thundering sweep of the mighty gale. Onward—onward. I was ...
— The Monctons: A Novel, Volume I • Susanna Moodie
... the three worlds, the son of Indra, with a calm mind, and firmly adhering to his purpose, then devoted himself, without the loss of any time, to ascetic austerities. And he entered, all alone, that terrible forest abounding with thorny plants and trees and flowers and fruits of various kinds, and inhabited by winged creatures of various species, and swarming with animals of diverse kinds, and resorted to by Siddhas and Charanas. And when the son of Kunti entered that forest destitute of human beings, sounds ...
— Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa Bk. 3 Pt. 1 • Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa
... it was very still all about them, they moved on again. They climbed over the rocks and further up the canon. Here there were more trees and thicker darkness, and their progress was painfully slow. They skirted patches of thorny bushes; they went on hands and knees up sharp inclines. They stopped frequently, panting and straining their ears for some sound to tell them of a pursuer; they went on again, side by side or ...
— Daughter of the Sun - A Tale of Adventure • Jackson Gregory
... was pretty odious, too, and we were all of passionate tempers. Besides, with all this reading, I didn't do particularly well at school. How could I when day after day I would march off from the house, leaving a smooth bed behind me in my room? We were thorny people. Quarrels were frequent. My mother had a phrase which set my teeth on edge—'Don't you talk, Martin, until you are earning your living'—the sort of remark that stings and stays in a boy's memory as something unfair. ...
— The Summons • A.E.W. Mason
... Lord James stooped and crept through the narrow passage under the thorny wall. As he straightened up on the inner side, Blake caught and gripped his hand in ...
— Out of the Primitive • Robert Ames Bennet
... they grew bolder, and showed not the least fear of the camp fires, which were always kept alight. They paid no heed to the noise and tumult they caused, or even to gunshots fired at them in the darkness. A tall, thick fence of tough, thorny bushes was erected round each camp as a protection, but the lions always jumped over or broke through it when they wanted a man. In the daytime the Colonel followed their tracks, which were plainly visible through the thickets, but of course could not be perceived ...
— From Pole to Pole - A Book for Young People • Sven Anders Hedin
... little feet, more white than snow, If through the thorny brake ye go, My loving heart I'll set below To ...
— Beltane The Smith • Jeffery Farnol
... the court-yard, sheds constructed of rough reddish brown stones, and covered with a thatch of palm-branches; in these the agricultural implements were stored, and the senator's slaves lived. In front lay a heap of black charcoal, which was made on the spot by burning the wood of the thorny sajala species of acacia; and there too lay a goodly row of well smoothed mill-stones, which were shaped in the quarry, and exported to Egypt. At this early hour the whole unlovely domain lay in deep shadow, and was crowded ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... Gesell. zu Konigsberg' February 3, 1865 s. 4. See also Dr. Caspary's paper in 'Transactions of the Hort. Congress of Amsterdam' 1865.) the case of a six-year-old white moss-rose, which sent up several suckers, one of which was thorny, and produced red flowers, destitute of moss, exactly like those of the Provence rose (R. centifolia): another shoot bore both kinds of flowers, and in addition longitudinally striped flowers. As this white moss-rose had been grafted on the Provence rose, Prof. Caspary attributes the ...
— The Variation of Animals and Plants under Domestication - Volume I • Charles Darwin
... potentates receive Of good peculiarly their own? Sweet ease, and unaffected joy, Domestic peace, and sportive pleasure, The regal throne and palace fly, And, born for liberty, prefer Soft silent scenes of lovely leisure To what we monarchs buy so dear, The thorny pomp of scepter'd care. My pain or bliss shall ne'er depend On fickle fortune's casual flight, For, whether she's my foe or friend, In calm repose I'll pass the night; And ne'er by watchful homage own I court ...
— Translations of German Poetry in American Magazines 1741-1810 • Edward Ziegler Davis
... must not be understood as pretending to settle the thorny question of a reconciliation between freedom of choice and pre-determination or prevision. All I there contend for is that no mechanical or scientific determinism, subject to special conditions in a limited region, can be used to contradict freedom of the will, under generalised ...
— Life and Matter - A Criticism of Professor Haeckel's 'Riddle of the Universe' • Oliver Lodge
... before breakfast to seek the glacier that once came into the fiord, knowing from the size and muddiness of the stream that drains it that it must be quite large and not far off. I came in sight of it after a hard scramble of two hours through thorny chaparral and across steep avalanche taluses of rocks and snow. The front reaches across the canyon from wall to wall, covered with rocky detritus, and looked dark and forbidding in the shadow cast by the cliffs, ...
— Travels in Alaska • John Muir
... wisdom and the justice with which our fathers bound contending colonies into confederation and blended different habits and rival interests into a harmonious whole, so that shoulder to shoulder they entered on the trial of the revolution, step with step trod its thorny paths until they reached the height of national independence and founded the constitutional representative ...
— Speeches of the Honorable Jefferson Davis 1858 • Hon. Jefferson Davis
... counsel. After fifteen years he had retired from this, too, and had become, what he insisted nature had always intended him to be, a gentleman of leisure. He retained a directorship in the trust company, was a trustee of his university, and was a thorny and inquiring member ...
— The Happiest Time of Their Lives • Alice Duer Miller
... true and tried, Our leader frank and bold; The British soldier trembles When Marion's name is told. Our fortress is the good greenwood, Our tent the cypress-tree; We know the forest round us, As seamen know the sea. We know its walls of thorny vines, Its glades of reedy grass, Its safe and silent ...
— Poems • William Cullen Bryant
... cried the boy in desperation, but the madwoman did not heed him, so he followed panting. They had now passed the cultivated fields and were near the wood; Basilio saw his mother enter it and he also went in. The bushes and shrubs, the thorny vines and projecting roots of trees, hindered the movements of both. The son followed his mother's shadowy form as it was revealed from time to time by the moonlight that penetrated through the foliage and into the ...
— The Social Cancer - A Complete English Version of Noli Me Tangere • Jose Rizal
... could lead only to wrong action. It would cost him nothing to carry out his large, beneficent purposes. Indeed, they would add to his pleasures and enhance his reputation. She was but a woman, and saw no other path of escape from the conditions of her lot except the thorny one of self-abnegation. ...
— The Earth Trembled • E.P. Roe
... while the waggon jolted on over the rough ground or rolled smoothly over the flat plain, crushing down the thick buffalo-grass, or smashing some succulent, thorny cactus with a peculiar whishing sound that seemed to penetrate far through the silence of the night. They were journeying nearly due north, and so far they had got on quite a couple of miles without a horse uttering its shrill neigh, and it was possible that by now, silent as was the night, their ...
— The Silver Canyon - A Tale of the Western Plains • George Manville Fenn
... wealth of beauty's store. But I did not heed the fragrance of flow'ret or of tree, For my eyes were on that rosebud, and it grew too high for me. In vain I strove to reach it through the tangled mass of green, It only smiled and nodded behind its thorny screen. Yet through that summer morning I lingered near the spot: Oh, why do things seem sweeter if we possess them not? My garden buds were blooming, but all that I could see Was that little mocking wild rose, hanging ...
— Poems Teachers Ask For • Various
... his mouth, and in bitterest moments, in the times of profoundest defection, he could always find relief in the pages of him whom he reverently calls "my master." Later in life he could see a parallel between the thorny and chequered career of Camoens and his own. Each spent his early manhood on the West Coast of India [74], each did his country an incalculable service: Camoens by enriching Portugal with The Lusiads, Burton by his travels and by presenting to England vast stores of Oriental ...
— The Life of Sir Richard Burton • Thomas Wright
... left a place of call on the mainland called Pangu; they were steaming straight out of a bay. To the east a massive headland closed the view, with the tilted edges of the rocky strata showing through its ragged clothing of rank bushes and thorny creepers. The wind had begun to sing in the rigging; the sea along the coast, green and as if swollen a little above the line of the horizon, seemed to pour itself over, time after time, with a slow and thundering fall, into ...
— End of the Tether • Joseph Conrad
... rising mountains, red with heather bells, Sweet the bubbling fountains and the dewy dells, Sweet the snowy blossom of the thorny tree, Sweeter is young ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume VI - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... what point does statecraft permit superstition to be destroyed? This is a very thorny question; it is like asking up to what point one should make an incision in a dropsical person, who may die under the operation. It is a matter for the ...
— Voltaire's Philosophical Dictionary • Voltaire
... and of labors; but if ill, it is the chief of perils for the soul, the chief of evils, of miseries, and of shames. Wherefore, it is throughout a doubtful affair. And well did the aforesaid Pope Adrian IV. say, that the Chair of Peter was thorny, and his Mantle full of sharpest stings, and so heavy as to weigh down and bruise the stoutest shoulders; and, added he, Does not that man deserve pity, who strives for a woe ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 7, No. 43, May, 1861 • Various
... Goya, who from the first plucked success from its thorny setting, was soon forgotten, and until Gautier in 1840 recorded his impressions in his brilliant Voyage en Espagne, critical literature did not much concern itself with the versatile Spaniard. And Gautier's sketch of a few pages still remains the most comprehensive estimate. From ...
— Promenades of an Impressionist • James Huneker
... bones of those That strove in other days to pass, Are wither'd in the thorny close, Or scatter'd blanching on [1] the grass. He gazes on the silent dead: "They perish'd in their daring deeds." This proverb flashes thro' his head, "The many fail: the ...
— The Early Poems of Alfred Lord Tennyson • Tennyson
... The keoho, a thorny shrub, caught at my clothes as I left the trail. Its weapons of defence serve often as pins for the native, who in the forest improvises for himself a hat or umbrella of leaves. Beside me, too, was the putara, a broad-leaved bush and the lemon hibiscus, with its big, yellow flower, black-centered, ...
— White Shadows in the South Seas • Frederick O'Brien
... conical, pyramidal; mucronate^, mucronated^; spindle shaped, needle shaped; spiked, spiky, ensiform^, peaked, salient; cusped, cuspidate, cuspidated^; cornute^, cornuted^, cornicultate^; prickly; spiny, spinous^, spicular; thorny, bristling, muricated^, pectinated^, studded, thistly, briary^; craggy &c (rough) 256; snaggy, digitated^, two-edged, fusiform [Micro.]; dentiform^, denticulated; toothed; odontoid^; starlike; stellated^, stelliform^; sagittate^, sagittiform^; arrowheaded^; arrowy^, barbed, spurred. acinaciform; ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... flower—sure enough," said Cai, looking about him in admiration. He had not visited the new garden for some weeks, and on the last visit it had been but an unpromising patch stuck about with stiff, thorny twigs, all leafless, the most of them projecting but a few inches above the soil. The plants were short yet, and the garden itself far from beautiful; but the twigs had thrown up shoots, and on the shoots had opened, or were opening, roses that drew even ...
— Hocken and Hunken • A. T. Quiller-Couch
... of movement through the jungle; and that the smaller ones are carried towards them by currents of air. Their nets are stretched across the path from four to eight feet above the ground, suspended from projecting shoots, and attached, if possible, to thorny shrubs; and they sometimes exhibit the most remarkable scenes of carnage and destruction. I have taken down a ball as large as a man's head consisting of successive layers rolled together, in the heart of which was the original den of the ...
— Sketches of the Natural History of Ceylon • J. Emerson Tennent
... here in all its glory, blooming in May, and yielding great quantities of clear, pale honey, which is greatly prized in every market it has yet reached. This species grows chiefly in the valleys and low hills. The Black Sage on the mountains is part of a dense, thorny chaparral, which is composed chiefly of adenostoma, ceanothus, manzanita, and cherry—not differing greatly from that of the southern portion of the Sierra, but more dense and continuous, and taller, and remaining longer in bloom. Stream-side gardens, so charming a feature of both ...
— The Mountains of California • John Muir
... for the bird—the plain brown munia—seems more appropriate than that with which the species has since been saddled by Blanford. The nest of this little bird is more loosely put together and more globular than that of the amadavat. It is usually placed low down in a thorny bush. The number of eggs laid varies from six to fifteen. These, like those of the red munia, are white. June seems to be the only month in the year in which the eggs of this species have not been found. In the United Provinces more nests ...
— A Bird Calendar for Northern India • Douglas Dewar
... the place to plunge into the thorny questions which surround the thought of the tempted Christ. However these may be solved, the great fact remains, that His temptations were most real and unceasing. It was no sham fight which He fought. The story of the wilderness is the story of a most real conflict; and that conflict ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... third part of the camels are employed in carrying water, and even with this quantity the camels are often left for three or four days without any. They never use mules in this part of the journey; they neither find the sheh[12], nor the thorny plant so common in the deserts ...
— An Account of Timbuctoo and Housa Territories in the Interior of Africa • Abd Salam Shabeeny
... ah! I feel my body must be free From that hard knot which is its richest prize, Ere medicine old or incantations new Can heal the wounds which pierced me in that wood, Thorny and troublous, where I play'd such part, Leaving it halt who enter'd ...
— The Sonnets, Triumphs, and Other Poems of Petrarch • Petrarch
... became so. As though she were a pioneer woman who had been toiling here for years, she came to know the brush stick by stick—the long valuable branch that she could never quite get out from under the others; the thorny bough that pricked her hands every time she tried to reach ...
— Free Air • Sinclair Lewis
... somehow or other, their intercourse together had not its old charm. Formerly they talked constantly of the future—of the bright days in store for them. Now, with a sharp and uneasy pang, Rienzi turned from all thought of that "gay tomorrow." There was no "gay tomorrow" for him! Dark and thorny as was the present hour, all beyond seemed yet less cheering and more ominous. Still he had some moments, brief but brilliant, when, forgetting the iron race amongst whom he was thrown, he plunged into scholastic reveries of the ...
— Rienzi • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... nicely, Clementina," she said. She added, in careless acknowledgement of her own failure to direct her choice, "I see you didn't need my help after all," and the thorny point which Clementina felt in her praise was rankling, when Lord Lioncourt began ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... Heath (Erica arborea), a native of the South of France, Corsica, and some other localities, for the purpose of making tobacco-pipes was introduced into this country. The word "brier" or "briar" has no connexion whatever with the prickly, thorny briar which bears the lovely wild rose. It is derived from the French bruyere, heath—the root of the White Heath being the material known as "briar" or "brier," and at first as "bruyer." The Oxford Dictionary quotes an advertisement from the ...
— The Social History of Smoking • G. L. Apperson
... clearly present in our minds, we should hardly suggest for legislation such laws as would bring about the existing state of things. With the Epistle of St. James in our thoughts there are some points in our present legal system which most persons find it difficult to justify. But it is a thorny subject, and I do not want to dogmatise. It is, perhaps, just the one very point with respect to which great caution is needed, much charity, much forbearance. You cannot ride rough-shod over old ...
— Churchwardens' Manual - their duties, powers, rights, and privilages • George Henry
... forest, full of beautiful trees, and green glades, and thorny thickets, there lived a long time ago a wood-cutter and his wife, who had only one child, a little girl. She was so pretty, and so good, that the sun seemed to shine more brightly when its light fell upon her rosy little face, and the birds would seem ...
— Childhood's Favorites and Fairy Stories - The Young Folks Treasury, Volume 1 • Various
... writer concludes: "Materialism, when its defect is discovered and understood, points on to idealism. Idealism, when its defect is disclosed, points to Christian theism." For those who have not come to Christian theism by this thorny and circuitous path, the mode in which the idealist extricates himself from his self-wrought entanglement may seem of little interest; but inasmuch as they take for granted the existence of that same multitude of mutually impenetrable ...
— The Faith of the Millions (2nd series) • George Tyrrell
... hedge of thorns, lay over the old castle. Many brave and gallant Princes tried to force their way through the magic hedge, in order to solve the mystery and to see for themselves the beautiful maiden who lay in an enchanted sleep behind that thorny barrier. But the thorns caught them, and held them from going forward or back, and the gallant youths ...
— Favorite Fairy Tales • Logan Marshall
... in June; but now the Old Lady's garden was full of blossoms and every morning Sylvia found a bouquet of them by the beech—the perfumed ivory of white narcissus, the flame of tulips, the fairy branches of bleeding-heart, the pink-and-snow of little, thorny, single, sweetbreathed early roses. The Old Lady had no fear of discovery, for the flowers that grew in her garden grew in every other Spencervale garden as well, including the Stewart garden. Chris Stewart, when he was teased about the music teacher, merely smiled and held his peace. Chris knew ...
— Chronicles of Avonlea • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... well has a flat wooden cover over it now, with an iron bar to keep it in place, lest some one be careless and fall in, though now the wild blackberry vines have nearly hidden it from sight. Even now when only young leaves are on the brambles, the thorny stems make a network over the cover. The old Paxton House was gone before my time," Mrs. Derby said, "but a part of its fine wall remains. It was upon that wall that ...
— Dorothy Dainty at Glenmore • Amy Brooks
... like venerable trunks crowned with delicate and pendent mosses. They spread out in great branches meeting in the vault overhead, the intervals of the arches being filled with an inextricable network of foliage, thorny sprigs and light branches, twining and intertwining, and figuring the aerial dome of a mighty forest. As in a great wood, the lateral aisles are almost equal in height to that of the center, and, on all sides, at equal ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Vol VIII - Italy and Greece, Part Two • Various
... a strip of linen tied round his head, a ragged cotton shirt, a pair of "shorts" that were hardly any protection from the thorny cacti, and a pair of badly-worn "veldt schoen" as the sum total of his clothing and footgear von Gobendorff awaited the fall of night in the depths of a ...
— Wilmshurst of the Frontier Force • Percy F. Westerman
... could only experience the marvellous change which Dr. Barstow described so eloquently last Sunday evening, might I not do right easily and almost spontaneously? It is so desperately hard to do right now! If conversion will render my steep, thorny path infinitely easier, then surely I ought to seek this change by every means in my power. Indeed, there must be a change in me, or I shall lose even the foothold I have gained. I am subjected, all day long, to insult and annoyance. At times I am almost desperate ...
— A Knight Of The Nineteenth Century • E. P. Roe
... back with Mem'ry, hand in hand, to bring And lay upon my sore and bleeding breast, Grim-visaged Recollection's thorny rose. I gained, and failed. One day could ride and walk, The next would find me prostrate: while a flock Of ghostly thoughts, like phantom birds, would flit About the chambers of my heart, or sit, Pale spectres of the past, with folded wings, Perched, silently, upon the ...
— Maurine and Other Poems • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... sea-level, winding up with ice-cream of a highly civilized description, but Clover could scarcely eat for wondering how all these things had come there so soon, so very soon. It seemed like magic,—one minute the solemn peaks and passes, the prairie-dogs and the thorny plain, the next all these portieres and rugs and etchings and down pillows and pretty devices in glass and china, as if some enchanter's wand had tapped the wilderness, and hey, presto! modern civilization had sprung up like Jonah's ...
— Clover • Susan Coolidge
... words induced an abrupt lull. The audience turned to him, still thorny and sulky it was true, but yet they turned; and one among them demanded ...
— Australia Felix • Henry Handel Richardson
... shower was not long in drenching our travellers. Below them, the roads, intersected by "nullahs," a sort of instantaneous torrent, were soon rendered impracticable, entangled as they were, besides, with thorny thickets and gigantic lianas, or creeping vines. The sulphuretted hydrogen emanations, which Captain Burton mentions, ...
— Five Weeks in a Balloon • Jules Verne
... been upheaved, since first formed by its minute architects, owing to some volcanic convulsion far down in the depths of the ocean. Masses of coral worn by time lay scattered about, amid which grew shrubs and tangled creepers, with here and there a few taller trees; but as the shrubs were not of a thorny species we pushed through them or leaped over them, Dick and Nat coming down on their noses more than once in our progress. Seeing a knoll, or rather a mass of coral, thrown up higher than the rest ahead I made ...
— The Cruise of the Dainty - Rovings in the Pacific • William H. G. Kingston
... ushered in the night on which they died, The boy his mother kissed, and fondly cried, "Weep not, dear mother!—mother, do not weep! You told me and my sister, death was sleep— That the good Saviour, who from heaven came down, And who for our sake wore a thorny crown— You often told us how He came to save Children like us, and conquered o'er the grave; And I have read in his blessed book, How in his hand a little child He took, And said that such in heaven should greatest be: Then, weep not, mother—do not weep ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, Volume XXIV. • Revised by Alexander Leighton
... gazelle, beautiful as Eve. Airy and etherial as a vision, and yet sharply defined amid the surrounding shadows, stood this daughter of Hindostan: I could read on her delicate brow the thought that had brought her hither. The thorny creeping plants tore her sandals, but for all that she came rapidly forward. The deer that had come down to the river to quench her thirst, sprang by with a startled bound, for in her hand the maiden ...
— Fairy Tales of Hans Christian Andersen • Hans Christian Andersen
... few seemingly impossible, opportunities to delay this advance. Every creek was made an excuse for making a stand, every forest became a means of stalling the enemy, every railroad or country road embankment had to yield its chance of putting a new obstacle into the thorny path of the advancing invader. Whenever the latter seemed to ease up for a moment, either to gain contact with his main forces or to rest up after especially severe forced marches, the Russians were on hand ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume IV (of 8) • Francis J. (Francis Joseph) Reynolds, Allen L. (Allen Leon)
... For this trick, Pepper and some of the others got after the Pornellites and made them prisoners in a cave, from which they could escape only by going out a back way, through some water and mud, and thorny bushes. ...
— The Mystery at Putnam Hall - The School Chums' Strange Discovery • Arthur M. Winfield
... the brazen belfries chime Across the hills and through the dales, And o'er the breasts of meadowed vales, Beneath the smiles of Christmas time! Rough sorrow's thorny fingers grow As soft and waxen as a child's, And balmy pleasures o'er the wilds Chant ...
— Oklahoma and Other Poems • Freeman E. Miller
... finished, there is always for the author a most doleful hour, when, retracing his steps, he thinks of what he has attempted, the difficulties of the task, the unlikeliness that he has overcome them. Misprints taking wrong numbers by the hand, black and thorny creatures, dance their wild dance round him. He is awe-stricken, and shudders; he wonders at the boldness of his undertaking; "Qu'allait-il faire dans cette galere?" The immensity of the task, the insufficience of the means stand in striking contrast. He had started ...
— A Literary History of the English People - From the Origins to the Renaissance • Jean Jules Jusserand
... superstition. Their mutual resolution was supported by the example of millions, of either sex, of every age, and of every rank; and each proselyte who entered the gates of a monastery, was persuaded that he trod the steep and thorny path of eternal happiness. [25] But the operation of these religious motives was variously determined by the temper and situation of mankind. Reason might subdue, or passion might suspend, their influence: but they acted most forcibly ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 3 • Edward Gibbon
... his heart a strange wish for exploring The thorny and briery place, And, lo, a path through the deepest thicket Opened before ...
— On the Tree Top • Clara Doty Bates
... river called Shigogo and Shipanga are bordered by a low level expanse of marshy country, with occasional clumps of palm-trees and a few thorny acacias. The river itself spreads out to a width of from three to four miles, with many islands, among which it is difficult to navigate, except when the river is in flood. In front, a range of high hills from the north-east crosses ...
— A Popular Account of Dr. Livingstone's Expedition to the Zambesi and Its Tributaries • David Livingstone
... favor; to be marked and branded as a social outlaw, under good society's interdict of food and fire; to hold property, liberty, and life itself at the mercy of lawless mobs. All this William Leggett clearly saw. He knew how rugged and thorny was the path upon which, impelled by his love of truth and the obligations of humanity, he was entering. From hunted and proscribed Abolitionists and oppressed and spirit-broken colored men, the Pariahs of American ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... to deploy. To hasten this, he himself led the Black Watch in single file through the bush, and desired Lieutenant-Colonel Ewart to guide the remainder of the brigade round the obstruction. The three battalions in rear, easily avoiding the small patch of thorny shrubs, rejoined more quickly than had been expected, and soon fell into their proper places. When the brigade-major reported their arrival, Major-General Wauchope issued instructions for deployment on the Black Watch, but not in the same order of battalions as he had laid down ...
— History of the War in South Africa 1899-1902 v. 1 (of 4) - Compiled by Direction of His Majesty's Government • Frederick Maurice
... two blocks of shattered mineral. Azaleas made a big snow-bed just above the well. The shoulder of the hill waved white with Mediterranean heath. In the crannies of the ledge and about the spurs of the tall pine, a red flowering stone-plant hung in clusters. Even the low, thorny chaparral was thick with pea-like blossom. Close at the foot of our path nutmegs prospered, delightful to the sight and smell. At sunrise, and again late at night, the scent of the sweet bay-trees filled the canyon, and the down-blowing night ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 2 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... in the underbrush, for it was evident it could not be far off. The bloody track could be followed for some distance; in fact, in one place the thorny roots of the remarkable pachiuba palm-tree, the roots that the women here use for kitchen graters, had torn off a bunch of long, beautiful hair from the sides of the jaguar, which very likely was weak and was dragging itself to some cluster of trees where it could ...
— In The Amazon Jungle - Adventures In Remote Parts Of The Upper Amazon River, Including A - Sojourn Among Cannibal Indians • Algot Lange
... Veniero—shall I save it twice? Would that I could save them and Venice also! All these men, or their fathers, were my friends Till they became my subjects; then fell from me As faithless leaves drop from the o'erblown flower, And left me a lone blighted thorny stalk, 310 Which, in its solitude, can shelter nothing; So, as they let me ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 4 • Lord Byron
... covered on the bottom with stones among which grew dwarfish, thorny shrubs. A high rock full of crevices and fissures formed its southern wall. The Arabs discerned all this by the light of quiet but more and more frequent lightning flashes. Soon they also discovered ...
— In Desert and Wilderness • Henryk Sienkiewicz
... forest—great cotton trees, thirty or forty feet in circumference, and rising to the height of from two to three hundred feet. Round the tops of these many birds were flitting, but in the underbrush there was no sign or sound of life. Thorny ...
— Through Three Campaigns - A Story of Chitral, Tirah and Ashanti • G. A. Henty
... first on polemical points of divinity, and diverged from this thorny path, into the neighbouring and twilight walk of mysticism. He talked of secret warnings—of the predictions of sad-eyed prophets—of the visits of monitory spirits, and the Rosicrucian secrets of the Cabala; all which topics he treated of with such apparent conviction, nay, ...
— Peveril of the Peak • Sir Walter Scott
... high. Trunk somewhat thorny, the branches horizontal, arranged in stars of 3-4. Leaves compound with 7 leaflets, lanceolate, entire, glabrous. Flowers in umbels of 8 or more flowerets. No common peduncle, the individual ones long. Calyx, 5 obtuse sepals, slightly ...
— The Medicinal Plants of the Philippines • T. H. Pardo de Tavera
... chalcedony. A thousand stony needles lifted their ragged points as if to defy the lightning. The only vegetation was a spiny cactus, clinging closely to the rocks, wearing their grayish and yellowish colors, lending no verdure to the scene, and harmonizing with its thorny inhospitality. ...
— Overland • John William De Forest
... for life so fierce; nowhere else is the enemy so goaded by hunger and thirst to desperate measures. It is a place for internecine warfare Hence, all desert plants are quite absurdly prickly. The starving herbivores will attack and devour under such circumstances even thorny weeds, which tear or sting their tender tongues and palates, but which supply them at least with a little food and moisture: so the plants are compelled in turn to take almost extravagant precautions. Sometimes the leaves end ...
— Science in Arcady • Grant Allen
... if weak Woman chance to go astray, If strongly charm'd she leave the thorny Way, And in the softer Paths of Pleasure stray, Ruin ensues, Reproach and endless Shame; And one false Step entirely damns her Fame: In vain, with Tears, the Loss she may deplore, In vain look back to what she was before, She sets, like Stars that ...
— The Life and Romances of Mrs. Eliza Haywood • George Frisbie Whicher
... thorny waste; Hot noontide lies on all the way, And with its scorching breath makes haste Each freshening dawn to burn and slay, Yet patiently I bide and stay: Knowing the secret of my fate, The hour of bloom, dear Lord, I wait, Come when it will, or soon ...
— Verses • Susan Coolidge
... many a tale it hath, The auld kirk-yard, Of life's crooked thorny path To the auld kirk-yard. But mortality's thick gloom Clouds the sunny world's bloom, Veils the mystery of doom, In ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume V. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... us nothing about the comparative acreage of the path and the rocky and thorny soils on the one hand, and of the fertile soil on the other. It is not meant to teach the proportion of success to failure, but to exhibit the fact that the reception of the word depends on men's dispositions. The good soil has none of the faults of the rest of ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Matthew Chaps. IX to XXVIII • Alexander Maclaren
... commentary on the work of hack writers that this youth should have written as a note to his translation of "The Suicide's Grave," {85} that it was not translated for its sentiments but for its poetry; "although the path of human life is rough and thorny, the mind may always receive consolation by looking forward to the world to come. The mind which rejects a future state has to thank itself for its utter misery and hopelessness." His malady was ...
— George Borrow - The Man and His Books • Edward Thomas
... was fast reaching a culminating point. The boys were vastly interested in it, and since the long evenings had passed Tim had discarded books and fallen back into his old evil ways. So between them and Ella Anne, life was made a thorny ...
— Treasure Valley • Marian Keith
... never for a moment uncompanioned by nightingale, cicala and firefly—I began to suffer from footsoreness, a bodily affliction against which romance, that certain salve for the maladies of the soul, is no remedy, or very little. Crossing the hills, over burning roads, through thorny brakes or by slopes of harsh grass, my heels and the balls of my toes became alarmingly inflamed; and an acacia-spine, lodging in the sole of one foot, made matters no better. That second day of mine I could barely ...
— The Fool Errant • Maurice Hewlett
... alternate striae of silver, and various shades of brown and black, though there were scarce two marked exactly alike. They had a transparent dorsal and two pectoral fins, which were all I observed, and a long thin snout or beak; the mouth was just at the end of it, on the top: some of them were thorny on the back; we caught also some crabs; a very minute blue fish; a black and red insect resembling a flea; a species of Diphyes; a very small kind of polypus; and one or two small jellyfish. A land bird flew on ...
— Journals Of Two Expeditions Of Discovery In North-West And Western Australia, Vol. 2 (of 2) • George Grey
... one hundred rupees, and then bound Ramoutar, his father and two sons, and took them off to the jungles; and there tortured them all for seven days. He then had the two boys, one nine years old and the other five, suspended to a tree and flogged; and Ramoutar himself tied to a thorny tree and beaten till the blood flowed down and drenched his waistband, because he could pay nothing, and would not sign a bond to pay two thousand rupees. His sufferings and the sight of those of his two sons made him at last sign one for one thousand rupees. He ...
— A Journey through the Kingdom of Oude, Volumes I & II • William Sleeman
... cheeks are like yon crimson gem, The pride of all the flowery scene, Just opening on its thorny stem; An' she has ...
— Poems And Songs Of Robert Burns • Robert Burns
... distinguished from all that innovators, uninfluenced by the spirit of religion, vainly, boast as such. Specially, our Holy Father has been pleased by the energy, tact, and truly well-directed zeal, with which you have succeeded in bringing to a satisfactory conclusion the thorny and difficult business of the Spighi property, on which all the welfare of our well-beloved Sisters in Christ the Augustines of St. Barnaba so greatly depends. The lady superior of that well- deserving house is, as you are aware, the sister of his Eminence the Cardinal Lattoli; and so signal ...
— A Siren • Thomas Adolphus Trollope
... It was a lonely spot, and as it grew darker the loneliness seemed to increase. On all sides were the immense trees and dense brushwood, while the stream was dotted with little islands, covered with reeds and rushes and small, thorny bushes. ...
— Young Hunters of the Lake • Ralph Bonehill
... hedge, but though it was low it was very thorny, and while he was trying to find a place to get through, he looked over and spied a hare crouched in the rough grass, just under the hedge between it and the wheat. The hare was lying on the ground; she did not move, though she ...
— Wood Magic - A Fable • Richard Jefferies
... Gard's first act on entering his library was to telephone to a well known detective agency—no surprising thing on his part, for not infrequently he made use of their services to obtain sundry details as to the movements of his opponents, and when, as often happened, cranks threatened the thorny path of wealth and prominence, he had found protection with the ...
— Out of the Ashes • Ethel Watts Mumford
... begun—the past five years having seen its growth from a very humble and insignificant beginning to its present promising proportions—holds the solution of at least one equation of the problem. To have made cooking and industrial training the fashion is to have cleared away at a leap the thorny underbrush and tangled growth on that Debatable Ground, the best education for the poor, and to find one's feet firmly set in a way leading to a Promised Land to which every believer in the new system is an accredited ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 26, September 1880 • Various
... vein at first: the thorny point Of bare distress hath ta'en from me the show Of smooth civility: yet am I inland bred, And know some nurture. But forbear, I say; He dies that touches any of this fruit Till I and ...
— As You Like It • William Shakespeare [Collins edition]
... Yet, oft beneath its influence bowed, A beam of hope will burst the cloud, And heaven's celestial shore appears Slow rising o'er the tide of years, Guiding the spirit's darkling way Through thorny paths to endless day. Then the toils of life are done, Youth and age are both as one; Sorrow never more can sting, Neglect or pain the bosom wring; And the joys bless'd spirits prove, Far exceeds ...
— Life in the Clearings versus the Bush • Susanna Moodie
... forth a tender green tendril and clasp her kind friend's helping hand, which, if rough and thorny, was certainly ...
— Parables from Flowers • Gertrude P. Dyer
... wonderful trees we passed. I remember the wild plantains, with huge leaves split into slips, and their red seed-pods hanging down at the end of twisted ropes; the tall palms, with their feathery tops; the monster aloes, with their long flashy thorny leaves; and the ferns as large as trees, and yet as beautifully cut as those in our own country, which clothed every hillside where a fountain flowed forth; and then the countless variety of creepers, whose beautiful tracery crowned every rock, and hung down in graceful festoons ...
— Old Jack • W.H.G. Kingston
... who doubted his motives, could not but admire his courage. It did, indeed, require something more than audacity to head a revolt against the administration. No man knew better the thorny road that he must now travel. No man loved his party more. No man knew better the hazard to the Union that must follow a rupture in the Democratic party. But if Douglas nursed the hope that Democratic senators would follow his lead, he was sadly disappointed. Three only ...
— Stephen A. Douglas - A Study in American Politics • Allen Johnson
... must have an outlet. He circled round it, clambering over fallen trees and forcing his way through thorny vines, till he saw, amid roots of alder-bushes, a streamlet flow from the lakeside. This he hopefully followed. Not far had he gone before a dull roar met his ears, breaking the sullen silence of the woods. It was the sound of falling waters. He hastened forward. The wood ...
— Historic Tales, Vol. 1 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris
... service, and to secure to himself the happiness which results from sobered fancy, a generous heart, and an approving conscience,—here was Ernest Maltravers, backed, too, by the appliances and gifts of birth and fortune, perversely shutting up genius, life, and soul in their own thorny leaves, and refusing to serve the fools and rascals who were formed from the same clay, and gifted by the same God. Morbid and morose philosophy, begot by a proud spirit on a ...
— Alice, or The Mysteries, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... the route lay through fertile gardens and fields. Then suddenly the cultivation ended abruptly on the edge of a sandy desert that, seamed with nullahs, or deep, steep-sided ravines, and dotted with tall clumps of thorny cactus, stretched away to the horizon. The road became a barely discernible track; but the two sowars cantered on, confidently heading for the spot where the ...
— The Jungle Girl • Gordon Casserly
... the young friend who had been consigned to his care by a dying mother; he feared to renew the intercourse, until her character was developed; while poor Mabel had little thought how closely she was watched along the humble and thorny paths ...
— Turns of Fortune - And Other Tales • Mrs. S. C. Hall
... the pride that, in spite of the prohibition of the Almighty, sought to know all things, 'to become as gods.' Meekness, humility, self-abnegation, affection, are the beautiful flowers that grow by the wayside; but the pathway is not the less thorny, and no good can be accomplished by ...
— Continental Monthly, Volume 5, Issue 4 • Various
... complaisance towards the Princes whose strong support and permanent friendship they sought to secure and keep to the Reformation. The friendly Duke of Hessen, Philip I, had, besides his legitimate wife, a sweetheart, willing to yield to his wishes, but only under the condition that he marry her. It was a thorny problem. A divorce from the wife, in the absence of convincing reasons, would give great scandal; on the other hand, a marriage with two women at a time was an unheard of thing with a Christian Prince of modern days; it would give rise to no less a scandal. All this notwithstanding, Philip, ...
— Woman under socialism • August Bebel
... them. Eusden, Colley Cibber, Dennis, Theobald, Blackmore, Smyth, and Lord Hervey are among the prominent criminals placed in Pope's pillory, and the student of the age may find an idle entertainment in tracking the poet's thorny course, while he gives an unenviable notoriety to names of which the larger number were 'born ...
— The Age of Pope - (1700-1744) • John Dennis
... do Show me the steep and thorny way to Heaven, Whilst like a puff'd and reckless libertine Himself the primrose path of dalliance treads, And recks not ...
— Sabbath in Puritan New England • Alice Morse Earle
... flow in gleaming light Through my dull head. And hurt me. I clearly feel that I shall soon slip away— Thorny roses of my skin, don't prick like that. The night grows moldy. The poison light of the lampposts Has smeared it with green muck. My heart is like a bag. My blood freezes. The world is dying. My ...
— The Verse of Alfred Lichtenstein • Alfred Lichtenstein
... May Comes no more with golden weather; Fields, and woods, and sunshine gay, Purple skies, and purple heather. We have had our holyday, And I sit with folded hands, In the twilight looking back Over life's uneven track— Thorny wilds, and ...
— The Coming of the Princess and Other Poems • Kate Seymour Maclean
... the only woman I had to judge by, and when our Kate got into her very best Sunday gown she got into her tantrums along with it, and poor Jack, what with awe of her finery and anxiety lest he should anger the minx, commonly had a thorny time of it. With Margaret it was just the opposite. When we got in, she excused herself and went off to her own room, coming back, after a weary time, in such a glory of silks and satins that I blinked my eyes before her dazzlements. What made it worse was that there was a comb—as she ...
— The Yeoman Adventurer • George W. Gough
... the thorny roses culled from Hautia's gifts, and holding up their blighted cores, thus plumed and turbaned Yoomy sang, leaning against ...
— Mardi: and A Voyage Thither, Vol. I (of 2) • Herman Melville
... nor floating veil, but on thee, Theseus, in their stead, was she musing: on thee she bent her heart, her thoughts, her love-lorn mind. Ah, woeful one, with sorrows unending distraught, Erycina sows thorny cares deep in thy bosom, since that time when Theseus fierce in his vigour set out from the curved bay of Piraeus, and gained the Gortynian roofs of the ...
— The Carmina of Caius Valerius Catullus • Caius Valerius Catullus
... trees, low and round, like roofs of verdure resting on their circle of supports, figs opened by the heat, fell, flattening on the ground like enormous drops of purple sugar. Prickly pears raised their thorny, wall-like trunks on either side of the road, and among their dusty roots whisked flexible, little animals, with long emerald green ...
— The Dead Command - From the Spanish Los Muertos Mandan • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... thorny the pathway 'neath our feet, Though nothing in life be left that's sweet; Though friends prove faithless in trial's hours And love a curst and poisonous flower; Though Belial stalk in priestly gown And virtue's reward is fortune's frown; Though true hearts bleed and the coward slave Tramples in ...
— Volume 1 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... will go 'so,' I will be amused." He presented a top-like triangular appearance for one staggering second. The Tinleys did not go 'so' at all, and consequently they lost the satirical man, and were called 'the ballet-dancers' by Adela which thorny scoff her sisters permitted to pass about for a single day, and no more. The Tinleys were their match at epithets, and any low contention of this kind obscured for them the social summit they hoped to attain; the dream whereof was their ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... Ye spotted snakes with double tongue, Thorny hedgehogs, be not seen; Newts and blind-worms do no wrong, Come not near our fairy queen. Philomel, with melody Sing in our sweet lullaby, Lulla, lulla, lullaby, lulla, lulla, lullaby; Never harm. Nor spell nor charm, Come our lovely lady nigh So ...
— Sleep-Book - Some of the Poetry of Slumber • Various
... The thorny question of etiquette was the next matter to receive Washington's attention. Personally he favored the easy hospitality to which he was accustomed in Virginia, but he knew quite well that his own taste ought not to be decisive. The forms that he might adopt would become precedents, and hence action ...
— Washington and His Colleagues • Henry Jones Ford
... them. Scarcely had they penetrated the interior for fifty yards when they found themselves in a perfect network of trailing vines. Then, after having pulled and cut their way through for fifty yards more, they came to a spot that was rocky and covered with a tangle of thorny bushes. ...
— The Rover Boys on Treasure Isle - The Strange Cruise of the Steam Yacht • Edward Stratemeyer
... about 4 P.M., and they invariably, retire to the thickest and most thorny jungle in the neighbourhood of their feeding-place by 7 A.M. In these impenetrable haunts they ...
— The Rifle and The Hound in Ceylon • Samuel White Baker
... wounded, helpless man across the saddle, this stretch of thorny and contorted desert was practically impassable. Yet Gale headed into it unflinchingly. He would carry the Yaqui as far as possible, or until death make the burden no longer a duty. Blanco Sol plodded on over the dragging ...
— Desert Gold • Zane Grey
... some sacred caves in Burmah. Lighting our torches, and each man taking one, we mounted the steep, tortuous, and slippery foot-path of damp, green stones, through the thorny shrubs that beset it, to the low entrance to the outer cavern. Stooping uncomfortably, we passed into a small, vacant antechamber, having a low, dripping roof, perpendicular walls, clammy and green, and a rocky floor, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 26, December, 1859 • Various
... Christ and His Vicar, and upon me, freeing me from my defects and ignorance; but upon His Bride, by giving her the refreshment of peace and renewal, with much endurance (for in no way without toils can be uprooted the many thorny faults that choke the garden of Holy Church), and that God will give him grace in those parts where he wants to be a manly man, and not to look back, for any toil or persecution that may befall him from his wicked sons; constant and persevering, let him not avoid weariness, but let him ...
— Letters of Catherine Benincasa • Catherine Benincasa
... alone of all the world can understand—forgive and pity your son who has found the cross too heavy—the crown too thorny—to bear! I go to join my unhappy mother across the river that men call death—and there together we shall await the coming of the husband and father we could neither of us claim in this miserable, gray old world. Father Paul—dearest and best ...
— One Day - A sequel to 'Three Weeks' • Anonymous
... together to help each other gain Heaven, to be prop and staff to each other on the narrow, toilsome way that leads to eternal life, to level and lighten that way for each other through love, meekness, and long-suffering—for it is rough and thorny. Now when gloomy days come, when faults break out in one or the other, or both, then think not of bad luck, as if that made you unhappy, but of the dear God, who has long seen all these faults and who has brought you together just so that one should cure the other and help him to mend ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VIII • Various
... of thirst; no pool or stream or well anywhere along the road. A wave of dust rose from the white, wild sides of a small canyon, swayed mistily on the hoary crest of huizache trees and the greenish stumps of cactus. Like a jest, the flowers in the cactus opened out, fresh, solid, aflame, some thorny, others diaphanous. ...
— The Underdogs • Mariano Azuela
... a while, and he went on till the brake began to grow more dense and he had to force his way through the thicket. Then to his disgust he found himself entangled in a little wilderness of thorny palms, out of which he had a hard struggle to free himself, and he stood at last, panting and exhausted, rubbing the bleeding spots beneath the rents in his ...
— Hunting the Skipper - The Cruise of the "Seafowl" Sloop • George Manville Fenn
... The thorny place is one who hears, And does the truth receive; But finds that cares of life and wealth, ...
— The Parables Of The Saviour - The Good Child's Library, Tenth Book • Anonymous
... harebells o'er the lee; Ye stately foxgloves fair to see; Ye woodbines hanging bonnilie, In scented bow'rs; Ye roses on your thorny ...
— Language of Flowers • Kate Greenaway
... at him with her big, wistful eyes, "'cause you look like you could find it, somehow. You see, Prince, you've got grey eyes so brave an' true—an' you're big an' strong an' could carry me an' Hermy over the thorny places when we get very, ...
— The Definite Object - A Romance of New York • Jeffery Farnol
... delicious meads; While here enchanted gardens to him rise, And airy fabrics there attract his eyes, His wandering feet the magic paths pursue; And while he thinks the fair illusion true, The trackless scenes disperse in fluid air, And woods and wilds, and thorny ways appear: A tedious road the weary wretch returns, And, as he goes, ...
— The Tatler, Volume 1, 1899 • George A. Aitken
... farewells in this case, for if I never again meet these individual mountains, I carry with me their memory, eternal and incomparably glorious. Let us peep into this nook: I got plentiful blackberries there in the spring, together with stains and thorny scratches. I haul myself over the ferry and back, for old acquaintance' sake; the current is so lazy, it seems incredible that the same waters are almost impassable at some seasons. I succeed in wrecking a whole armada ...
— In the Footprints of the Padres • Charles Warren Stoddard
... breakfast at the quiet little settlement of Inenge, where cattle were abundant, but grain so scarce that the villagers were living on calabash seeds. Proceeding thence across fields delightfully checkered with fine calabash and fig trees, we marched, carrying water through thorny jungles, until dark, when we bivouacked for the night, only to rest and push on again next morning, arriving at Marenga Mkhali (the saline water) to breakfast. Here a good view of the Usagara hills is obtained. Carrying water with us, we next marched half-way to the ...
— The Discovery of the Source of the Nile • John Hanning Speke
... it makes it wholesome). Then the wild vines have clusters of the color of amber; and the people of the country say they are the grape of Eshcol; and sweeter than honey: but, indeed, if anybody else tastes them, they are like gall. Then there are thickets of bramble, so thorny that they would be cut away directly, anywhere else; but here they are covered with little cinque-foiled blossoms of pure silver; and, for berries, they have clusters of rubies. Dark rubies, which you only see are red after gathering ...
— The Ethics of the Dust • John Ruskin
... muscular strength is so exclusively brought into play that the nervous power, which makes intelligence, sinks to a very low ebb. People like that must have something tangible which they can lay hold of on the slippery and thorny pathway of their life, some sort of beautiful fable, by means of which things can be imparted to them which their crude intelligence can entertain only in picture and parable. Profound explanations and fine distinctions ...
— The Essays of Arthur Schopenhauer; Religion, A Dialogue, Etc. • Arthur Schopenhauer
... grass has kept something of its greenness, and the season of blossoming stays by the beautiful stream. There is a wanton tangling and mingling of the waste-loving flowers, such as the yellow toad-flax, the bristling viper's bugloss, the thorny ononis that spreads a hue of pink as it creeps along the ground, sky-blue chicory on wiry stems, large milk-white blooms of datura, and purple heads of centaurea calcitrapa, whose spines are avoided like those of a hedgehog by people who walk with bare feet. Upon the banks, ...
— Two Summers in Guyenne • Edward Harrison Barker
... Then, as if aspiring too, she would seek the highest point on some high down, and sitting on her horse survey the prospect before her—the sea of rounded hills, hills beyond hills, stretching away to the dim horizon, and over it all the vast blue dome of heaven. Sky and earth, with thorny brakes and grass and flowers and wild creatures, with birds that flew low and others soaring up into heaven—what was the secret meaning it had for her? She was like one groping for a key in a dark place. Not a human figure visible, not a sign of human occupancy on ...
— Dead Man's Plack and an Old Thorn • William Henry Hudson
... distinct from it. Genius you have, but genius unconcentrated, undisciplined. I see, though you are too diffident to say so openly, that you shrink from the fame of singer, because, fevered by your reading, you would fain aspire to the thorny crown of author. I echo the hard saying of the Maestro: I should be your worst enemy did I encourage you to forsake a career in which a dazzling success is so assured, for one in which, if it were your true vocation, you would not ask whether you were fit for it; you would be impelled to it by ...
— The Parisians, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... was to inflict on himself this sweet torture. Never did he fail to wake at the appointed hour, a strong effort of will broke through all the heaviness of sleep, and he would rise up, joyful though weeping, and reverently set his thorny bed upon the floor, offering his pain with his praise. When he had whispered the last word, and had risen from the ground, his body would be all freckled with drops of blood; he used to view the marks with pride. Here and there ...
— The Hill of Dreams • Arthur Machen
... the thorny-ground hearer. He may be a man of talent, perhaps a genius. Naturally thoughtful and ambitious, he covets both wealth and honors. He is not entirely forgetful of the claims of religion upon him. He goes to church ...
— Life and Labors of Elder John Kline, the Martyr Missionary - Collated from his Diary by Benjamin Funk • John Kline
... pines to the bushes of dogwood and sassafras, and the rotting, ancient stumps and fallen logs, by the uncontrollable, all-spreading vine. It was such a fantastic thicket as one might look to find in fairyland, thorny and impenetrable: here as tall as a ten years' pine, there sunken away to the height of the wild honeysuckles; everywhere backed by blue sky, heavy with odors, filled, with the flash of wings and the songs of birds. To the east the thicket fell away to low and marshy grounds, ...
— Audrey • Mary Johnston
... with a halo of wavy silver hair. His step was alert, his whole form illuminate with life." He is sketched for us addressing the college, in chapel, one September morning of 1876, on the supremacy of Greek literature, "urging in conclusion all who would venture upon Hadley's Grammar as the first thorny stretch toward that celestial mountain peak, to rise." It is Professor Katharine Lee Bates, writing in 1892, who gives us the picture: "My next neighbor, a valorous little mortal, now a member of the Smith faculty, was the first upon her feet, pulling me after ...
— The Story of Wellesley • Florence Converse
... lilac-bushes, mock-orange, and bridal-wreath. Back of the house was a neglected rose garden, surrounded by a low stone wall over which the long suckers trailed and matted. They had wound their pink, thorny tentacles, layer upon layer, about the lock and the hinges of the rusty iron gate. Even the porches of the house, and the very windows, were damp and heavy with growth: wistaria, clematis, honeysuckle, and trumpet vine. The garden was grown up with trees, especially that part ...
— A Collection of Stories, Reviews and Essays • Willa Cather
... haughty Herod who jeered at His royal title, and bade the mocking soldiers crown Him king. There are the very men who with impious hands placed upon His form the purple robe, upon His sacred brow the thorny crown, and in His unresisting hand the mimic scepter, and bowed before Him in blasphemous mockery. The men who smote and spit upon the Prince of life, now turn from His piercing gaze, and seek to flee from the overpowering glory of ...
— The Great Controversy Between Christ and Satan • Ellen G. White
... bear upon it, it becomes desperate. I should be wrong to complain. Passion, a passive sentiment! This word has a contradictory meaning for me. I am a lover as Napoleon was an emperor: nobody forced the crown upon him, he took it and crowned himself with his own hand. If my crown happens to be a thorny one, whom can I accuse? Did not ...
— Gerfaut, Complete • Charles de Bernard
... There is the whole of the thorny subject of the relation of faith and works packed into a nutshell. It is exactly what James said and it is exactly what a better than James said. When the Jews came to Him with their externalism, and thought that God was to be pleased by a whole rabble of separate good actions, ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... young man to pursue it as a profession unless forced into it by his own irresistible impulses. Its nobility he ranked very high, but not its remunerativeness. He regarded it as a luxury for the rich and leisurely, but a very thorny and discouraging path for a poor man. How few have ever got a living by it, unless allied with other callings,—as a managing clerk, or professor, or lecturer, or editor! The finest productions of Emerson were originally delivered as lectures. Novelists and dramatists, I think, are ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XIII • John Lord
... trying to emulate fair Lady Rose, held their heads so very high that they, of course, did not hear the low, soft cry, "Oh, will no one give me shelter?" At last there came an answer, "I will, gladly," in a shy and trembling tone, as though fearing to be presumptuous, from a thick thorny bush which helped to protect the more dainty beauties from the rough blasts of a sometimes too boisterous wind; in consideration of which service the flowers considered the briar as a good, useful sort of thing, respectable enough in its common way, but not as an equal or associate, ...
— Happy Days for Boys and Girls • Various
... he knew full well that with his scanty stock of English ammunition scattered over the sterile floor of his literary magazine, he could not have the effrontery, impudence, or presumption to enter the list of philosophical and scientific disputation with one who has traversed the thorny paths of literature, explored its mazy windings, and who is thoroughly and radically fortified, as being encompassed with the impenetrable shield of genuine science. This red, hot, fiery, unguarded locust, in the inanity of his mind's incomprehensibleness, ...
— The Hedge School; The Midnight Mass; The Donagh • William Carleton
... stumping over Several verdant fields of clover! Subject of unnumbered knockings! Tattered' coat and ragged stockings, Slouching hat and roving eye, Tell of SETTLED vagrancy! Wretched wanderer, can it be The poor laws have leaguered thee? Hear'st thou, in thy thorny den, Tramp of rural policemen, Inly fancying, in thy rear Coats of blue and buttons clear, While to meet thee, in the van Stalks some vengeful alderman?— Each separate sense bringing a notion Of forms that teach thee locomotion! Beat and battered altogether, ...
— What's Mine's Mine • George MacDonald
... maturing into juicy berries. If possible, set the blackberries off by themselves, for it is hard to prevent the strong roots from travelling all over the garden. The blackberry likes a rich, moist, mellow soil, and, finding it, some varieties will give you canes sixteen feet high. You do not want rank, thorny brambles, however, but berries. Therefore the blackberry should be put where it can do no harm, and, by a little judicious repression, a great deal of good. A gravelly or sandy knoll, with a chance to mow all round the patch, is the best place. ...
— The Home Acre • E. P. Roe
... delicate-footed spring seemed to have come again with her lap full of leaves and blossoms. The trees cast aside their long-worn garniture of green, and flaunted proudly in gorgeous robes of gold and crimson. The blushing rose once more sought the thorny stem that had slept so long desolate; and the changeful-hued touch-me-not looked up smilingly from the pallid grass, where nestled thousands of purple violets peeping out timidly from their shady nooks; and the waning year ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII No. 6 June 1848 • Various
... me these things do seem But burning traces of some ill-starred dream; I grieve that e'er thy soul should long to claim The thorny diadem of worldly fame. Life's mystery to thee is yet unknown; Why dost thou seek its misery to own? With all a woman's power thou this night Hast led me on by th' fascinating light Of thy dear eyes and voice, till ...
— Love or Fame; and Other Poems • Fannie Isabelle Sherrick
... observant of headmasters could have detected no evidence that he had been engaged in a vulgar fight. Walton, on the other hand, looked as if he had been engaged in several—all violent. Kennedy went off to his study to change, feeling that he had advanced a long step on the thorny path that led to ...
— The Head of Kay's • P. G. Wodehouse |
