"Trackless" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... past, our hurried feet arrive At the last footprint of the scanty five; Take the fifth stride; our wandering eyes explore A tangled forest on a trackless shore; Here, where we stand, the savage sorcerer howls, The wild cat snarls, the stealthy gray wolf prowls, The slouching bear, perchance the trampling moose Starts the brown squaw and scares her red pappoose; At every step the lurking foe is near; ...
— The Poetical Works of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Complete • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... Mohammedans (January, 1492). In August, 1492, he sailed from Palos with 100 men in three small ships, the largest of which weighed only a hundred tons. After a tiresome voyage he landed (12 October, 1492) on "San Salvador," one of the Bahama Islands. In that bold voyage across the trackless Atlantic lay the greatness of Columbus. He was not attempting to prove a theory that the earth was spherical—that was accepted generally by the well informed. Nor was he in search of a new continent. The realization that he had discovered not Asia, but a new world, would have been his bitterest ...
— A Political and Social History of Modern Europe V.1. • Carlton J. H. Hayes
... approaching her mate in the pairing season. And the Princess of Panchala then embraced the second son of Pandu, even as a creeper embraces a huge and mighty Sala on the banks of the Gomati. And embracing him with her arms, Krishna of faultless features awaked him as a lioness awaketh a sleeping lion in a trackless forest. And embracing Bhimasena even as a she-elephant embraceth her mighty mate, the faultless Panchali addressed him in voice sweet as the sound of a stringed instrument emitting Gandhara note. And ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 2 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... In pride unhallowed, O most blind of heart! Confusion but more dark confusion bred, Grief nurtured grief, I cried aloud and said, 'Through trackless ways the soul of man is hurled, No sign upon the forehead of the skies, No beacon, and no chart Are given to him, and the inscrutable world But mocks his scars and fills ...
— Georgian Poetry 1911-12 • Various
... fairly into the desert, which was a trackless waste, I became possessed by a feeling that the man did not know the way. He talked a good deal about the North Star, and the fork in the road, and that we must be sure not ...
— Vanished Arizona - Recollections of the Army Life by a New England Woman • Martha Summerhayes
... the mercantile navy of Britain was better qualified than he to take his ship across the trackless main, and, if need be, carry her safely into port; but seamanship and knowledge of channels and bars and currents avail nothing when the sails and cordage of a ship are unseaworthy and ...
— Jeff Benson, or the Young Coastguardsman • R.M. Ballantyne
... started up out of the snow with surprising strength and agility, and sat on the horse behind Sintram, clasping him tight in his long arms. The horse, startled by the rattling of the bones, and as if seized with madness, rushed away through the most trackless passes. The boy soon found himself alone with his strange companion; for Rolf, breathless with fear, spurred on his horse in vain, and remained far behind them. From a snowy precipice the horse slid, without falling, into a narrow ...
— Sintram and His Companions • Friedrich de la Motte Fouque
... climbing what seemed to be a mountain to the heights above Cincinnati. To this day I associate Ohio’s most interesting city with a lonely carriage ride that seemed to be chiefly uphill, through a region that was as strange to me as a trackless jungle in the wilds of Africa. And my heart began to perform strange tattoos on my ribs I was going to the house of a gentleman who did not know of my existence, to see a girl who was his guest, to whom I had never, as the conventions go, been presented. It did not seem half ...
— The House of a Thousand Candles • Meredith Nicholson
... and Blake sat in the sunshine on the slope of the hill. Beneath them a wide landscape stretched away toward the Ottawa valley, the road to the lonely North, and the girl felt a longing to see the trackless wilds. The distance ...
— The Intriguers • Harold Bindloss
... come, my love, The primrose decks the brae, The vi'let in its rainbow robe Bends to the noontide ray; The cuckoo in her trackless bower Has waken'd from her dream; The shadows o' the new-born leaves Are waving ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume VI - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... instantly to the haven, to follow the strange man's steps if possible. But, on that very morning, many vessels which had been kept by contrary winds back in port, had put to sea, all destined to distant lands and other climes; the grey man had disappeared trackless as ...
— Peter Schlemihl • Adelbert von Chamisso
... rock. It had seemed huge; a brief experience of freedom, a few hours between her and the night's horrors and terrors, and it had shrunk to a tiny prison cell. Surely she would run no risk in journeying through that trackless wilderness; she need not be idle, she could hasten her destiny by following the creek in its lonely wanderings, which must sooner or later bring it to the river. ...
— Susan Lenox: Her Fall and Rise • David Graham Phillips
... come back to me!" she said bravely and proudly, for a moment stopping to face the sun. "He will come back from beyond those hills and trackless woods! He will ...
— Darkness and Dawn • George Allan England
... India. It satisfied and satiated with its rich potency. And breathing this odor and gazing into its deep wells of color, you had strange dreams of those other pilgrims who left home and friends, and journeyed through the perils of a trackless wilderness to plant still farther westward ...
— Aunt Jane of Kentucky • Eliza Calvert Hall
... Trackless pine forests—some belonging to the communes, others to private individuals,—clothe the lower ranges of the mountains through all this part of the island. Vizzavona, which we crossed on our way to Ajaccio, and Aitona, lying to the south-west of the Niolo, belong to the State, and the French Admiralty ...
— Rambles in the Islands of Corsica and Sardinia - with Notices of their History, Antiquities, and Present Condition. • Thomas Forester
... and downward into the black. And with all that mighty activity, with an omnipresent sense of motive and design, this snow-clad desolation of mechanism seemed void of all human presence save themselves, seemed as trackless and deserted and unfrequented by men as some inaccessible ...
— The Sleeper Awakes - A Revised Edition of When the Sleeper Wakes • H.G. Wells
... thrilled with grief and rage For his child slain. Straight from Olympus down He darted, swift and bright as thunderbolt Terribly flashing from the mighty hand Of Zeus, far leaping o'er the trackless sea, Or flaming o'er the land, while shuddereth All wide Olympus as it passeth by. So through the quivering air with heart aflame Swooped Ares armour-clad, soon as he heard The dread doom of his daughter. For the Gales, The North-wind's fleet-winged ...
— The Fall of Troy • Smyrnaeus Quintus
... vast stretch of lonely plain. As we journeyed through it, viewing the trackless hills and rockribbed mountains not far away on either side, mostly barren and uninviting, it was difficult to conceive of that territory ever becoming the permanent homes of men. Yet it is possible, and probable, that the ...
— Crossing the Plains, Days of '57 - A Narrative of Early Emigrant Tavel to California by the Ox-team Method • William Audley Maxwell
... face during these weeks was like the face of a man lost in a trackless desert, seeking vainly for some sign of road to save his life. Sickness and death were as foreign to the young, vital, irrepressible currents of his life, as if he had been a bird or an antelope. But it was not now with him the mere bewildered grief of a sensuous animal nature, ...
— Saxe Holm's Stories • Helen Hunt Jackson
... enforced on them by capital, the stigma of human inferiority is attached to the wage-earners by the legislature. But I must not be led away from my theme by the bitter reflections which arise in one who lives in the Iron Age and knows it is Iron, who feels at times like the lost wanderer on trackless fields of ice, which never melt and will not until earth ...
— National Being - Some Thoughts on an Irish Polity • (A.E.)George William Russell
... Yanna, Yanna, Be quick and let me in! For bitter is the trackless way And far that ...
— Ballads of Lost Haven - A Book of the Sea • Bliss Carman
... scouting and despatch-bearing through the trackless wilderness had aged me. I prided myself I was an old man in worldly wisdom. Patsy Dale had only added three years to her young life. I could even feel much at ease in meeting Ericus Dale. And yet there had been no day during my absence that I did not think of her, ...
— A Virginia Scout • Hugh Pendexter
... I find a more flowery path I follow it. It is a strange fancy that draws the bird through the trackless azure sky. And I must say, too, that in my journeys I have not ...
— Zanetto and Cavalleria Rusticana • Giovanni Targioni-Tozzetti, Guido Menasci, and Pietro Mascagni
... of printing, diffusing knowledge with the speed and universality of light; the establishment of posts, which, after its adoption by Louis the Eleventh, came into frequent use in the beginning of the sixteenth century; and lastly, the compass, which, guiding the mariner unerringly through the trackless wastes of the ocean, brought the remotest regions into contact. With these increased facilities for intercommunication, the different European states might be said to be brought into as intimate relation with one another, as the different ...
— The History of the Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella The Catholic, V2 • William H. Prescott
... on the Kwadocha there were no human beings. Nothing but the unbroken peace of the mountains, in which they were safe. He had ceased to fear their immensity—was no longer disturbed by the thought that in their vast and trackless solitude he might lose himself forever. After what had passed, their gleaming peaks were beckoning to him, and he was confident that he could find his way back to the Finley and down to Hudson's Hope. What a surprise it would be to Father Roland when they dropped ...
— The Courage of Marge O'Doone • James Oliver Curwood
... you go Turning towards a part forbidden, Where the light of the sun is hidden Even in the noon-tide's glow. Through this wilderness of woe Even the hunter in pursuit Of his prey ne'er placed a foot On its trackless wild walks green, Since for ages it has been Shunned alike by ...
— The Purgatory of St. Patrick • Pedro Calderon de la Barca
... the sunset sky or moon I watched that moving zigzag of spread wings In unforgotten Autumns gone too soon, In unforgotten Springs! Creatures of desolation, far they fly Above all lands bound by the curling foam; In misty lens, wild moors and trackless sky These wild things have their home. They know the tundra of Siberian coasts. And tropic marshes by the Indian seas; They know the clouds and night and starry hosts From Crux to Pleiades. Dark flying rune against the western glow— It tells the sweep ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 3 (of 4) • Various
... earth, floating sad and mournfully since sun-set, from some dwelling in the forest's depths, whose locality, but for the sounds, would not be known. Some member of the family has been lost in the woods, and the horn is blown to guide him homewards through the trackless wilderness. How sweet must those sounds be to the benighted wanderer, bearing, as they do, the voice of the heart, and telling of love and affectionate solicitude! But Melancthon has driven his ox-team to the barn, and now, with the baby on his lap, which, like all ...
— Sketches And Tales Illustrative Of Life In The Backwoods Of New Brunswick • Mrs. F. Beavan
... and roofless walls. They had met after months of lonely wanderings: Sidney and Ransford amongst the mountains of the Richtersfeld, Jason from long and arduous expeditions along the Great Fish River and amongst the trackless sands across the river. The talk had been of the dunes; of men lost and dying of thirst a few miles from camp; of terrific storms that lifted the sand in huge masses, and whirled it across the land, overwhelming all it encountered; of whole dunes that were shifted by the wind, ...
— A Rip Van Winkle Of The Kalahari - Seven Tales of South-West Africa • Frederick Cornell
... dead! Beneath the turf we tread, Chief, Pilgrim, Patriot sleep— All gone! how changed! and yet the same, As when faith's herald bark first came In sorrow o'er the deep. Still from his noonday height, The sun looks down in light; Along the trackless realms of space, The stars still run their midnight race; The same green valleys smile, the same rough shore Still echoes to the same wild ocean's roar:— But where the bristling night-wolf sprang Upon his startled prey, Where the fierce Indian's war-cry rang, Through many a bloody fray; ...
— An Ode Pronounced Before the Inhabitants of Boston, September the Seventeenth, 1830, • Charles Sprague
... people, as we have seen, live on the seacoast, and not inland. Only wandering Indians live in the interior. Though Labrador is nearly as large as Alaska, there is no permanent dwelling in the whole interior. It is a vast, trackless, uninhabited wilderness of stunted ...
— The Story of Grenfell of the Labrador - A Boy's Life of Wilfred T. Grenfell • Dillon Wallace
... as yet unknown: no white man had looked upon the Mackenzie river nor upon the vast lakes from which it flows. It speaks well for the quiet intrepidity of Hearne that he was ready alone to penetrate the trackless waste of an unknown country, among a band of savages and amid the rigour ...
— Adventurers of the Far North - A Chronicle of the Frozen Seas • Stephen Leacock
... to recognize the face, but he knew the swing of the broad shoulders. It was Shepard and once more he had the uneasy feeling winch the man always inspired in him. He appeared and reappeared with such facility, and he was so absolutely trackless that he had begun to appear to him as omniscient. Of course the man knew all about Sherburne's advance and could readily ...
— The Shades of the Wilderness • Joseph A. Altsheler
... they departed into the trackless south, Bill-Man, his brothers, and Mesahchie. And when the next year came, the Search Number Two rode at anchor in Mandell Bay. The few Mandell men, who survived because their wounds had prevented their ...
— Children of the Frost • Jack London
... portion north of the Ohio to the United States, but the cession was not yet completed. The region which is now Tennessee belonged to North Carolina, which had begun to make settlements there as long ago as 1758. The trackless forests included between Tennessee and West Florida were still in the hands of wild tribes of Cherokees and Choctaws, Chickasaws and Creeks. Several thousand pioneers from North Carolina and Virginia had already settled beyond the mountains, and the white population ...
— The Critical Period of American History • John Fiske
... at last a cry ran along the decks: "There they are!" Jimmie made out a speck of smoke upon the horizon, and saw it turn into a group of swiftly-flying vessels. He marvelled at the skill whereby they had been able to find the transports on this vast and trackless sea; he marvelled at the slender vessels with their four low, rakish stacks. These sea-terriers were thin skins of steel, covering engines of enormous power; they tore through the water, literally with the speed of an express train, ...
— Jimmie Higgins • Upton Sinclair
... up, roasted, and devoured the slain Huron before the eyes of the prisoners. On the next day they crossed to the southern shore, and ascended the River Richelieu as far as the rapids of Chambly, whence they pursued their march on foot among the brambles, rocks, and swamps of the trackless forest. When they reached Lake Champlain, they made new canoes and re-embarked, landed at its southern extremity six days afterwards, and thence made for the Upper Hudson. Here they found a fishing camp ...
— The Jesuits in North America in the Seventeenth Century • Francis Parkman
... difficulty which they considered as most to be apprehended in the whole expedition was the getting across the desert to Pelusium. In fact, the great protection of Egypt had always been her isolation. The trackless and desolate sands, being wholly destitute of water, and utterly void, could be traversed, even by a caravan of peaceful travelers, only with great difficulty and danger. For an army to attempt to cross them, exposed, ...
— Cleopatra • Jacob Abbott
... against the headlight and frequently their bodies are later picked up from the engine platform beneath. Birds seem rarely to lose their sense of direction, and they pursue their way for hundreds of miles across the trackless ocean. Terns, Gulls, and Murres are known to go many miles in quest of food for their young and return through dense fogs with unerring ...
— The Bird Study Book • Thomas Gilbert Pearson
... to ankles in spotless white, their black boots looking blacker by comparison, they proceeded in the general direction of the distant village, with the order and decorum of sea lords descending on a dockyard for inspection purposes. The trackless sand proved hot and sharp; the dog proved in poor condition from the voyage and the morning's incidental martyrdom, and Byng was generous-hearted. He picked up the dog and carried him; and Scamp displayed his gratitude ...
— Told in the East • Talbot Mundy
... come along yet," vouchsafed Racey, turning into the trail after a swift glance at its trackless, undisturbed surface. ...
— The Heart of the Range • William Patterson White
... my way as birds their trackless way. I shall arrive! what time, what circuit first, I ask not: but unless God send his hail Or blinding fireballs, sleet, or stifling snow, In some time, his good time, I shall arrive: He guides ...
— Leaves of Life - For Daily Inspiration • Margaret Bird Steinmetz
... gleams of brightness, and leaving the interval land in deep shadow. Accustomed to scenes of solitude like the present, the old man, as he left the encampment, proceeded alone into the waste, like a bold vessel leaving its haven to enter on the trackless field of the ocean. He appeared to move for some time without object, or, indeed, without any apparent consciousness, whither his limbs were carrying him. At length, on reaching the rise of one of the undulations, he came to a stand; and, for the first time since leaving the band, ...
— The Prairie • J. Fenimore Cooper
... day, in our soul's course o'er trackless lands, Swayed oft by adverse winds, or swept along In Fate's wild current with the fluttering throng Towards Sin's engulfing maelstrom, spirit hands Will brace our trembling wings, and through the night Point and upbear in ...
— A Woman's Love Letters • Sophie M. Almon-Hensley
... perforce. Where he was bound for was beyond conjecture; he only heard, faintly through his hood, the cheeping and rustling of the canes; bush tendrils swept along his body and told him that he was being carried through the trackless part of the jungle. His journey was short. In ten minutes he was laid on the ground, still with no word from his captors, and in two long breaths no sound remained near him except the voices of the foliage. He lay still a moment, wondering what his fate was to be; then, ...
— Gold Out of Celebes • Aylward Edward Dingle
... straight for Cape Ann, and passed close by the twin lighthouses of Thacher, so near that we could see the lanterns and the stone gardens, and the young barbarians of Thacher all at play; and then we bore away, straight over the trackless Atlantic, across that part of the map where the title and the publisher's name are usually printed, for the foreign city of St. John. It was after we passed these lighthouses that we did n't see the whale, and began to regret the hard fate that took us away from a view of the Isles of Shoals. ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... knew—it was as much a matter of marvel to those who never saw him read, as the existence of the chameleon has been to those who fancied it never eat. His advances in the heart of his mistress were, as we have seen, equally trackless and inaudible, and his triumph was the first that even rivals knew of his love. In like manner, the productions of his wit took the world by surprise,—being perfected in secret, till ready for display, and then seeming to break from under the cloud of his indolence in full maturity ...
— Memoirs of the Life of the Rt. Hon. Richard Brinsley Sheridan V1 • Thomas Moore
... leave Pieria's happy shore To plough the tide where wintry tempests roar? Or shall a youth approach their hallow'd fane, Stranger to Phoebus, and the tuneful train? Far from the Muses' academic grove 'Twas his the vast and trackless deep to rove; Alternate change of climates has he known, And felt the fierce extremes of either zone: Where polar skies congeal the eternal snow, Or equinoctial suns for ever glow, 50 Smote by the freezing, or the scorching blast, 'A ship-boy on the high and giddy mast,' [1] From ...
— The Poetical Works of Beattie, Blair, and Falconer - With Lives, Critical Dissertations, and Explanatory Notes • Rev. George Gilfillan [Ed.]
... brightly. The distant shore line stood out in dark silhouette marking the boundary of the land of silence, where no man lived. A thousand miles of trackless, unknown wilderness lay beyond that dark forest boundary. Charley's imagination pictured it as another world, apart and different from anything he had ever seen. Reared in a great city, it was difficult for him, even after his experience of the past week, to ...
— Left on the Labrador - A Tale of Adventure Down North • Dillon Wallace
... which he braced himself up for his task, for the gulch looked more and more dark and forbidding as he rode on, the sides closed in closer, it seemed, than they had been when he came, and as he strained his eyes forward along the trackless way, bush after bush and rock after rock in the distance sent his heart, as it were, with a bound to his throat, so nearly did his imagination make these objects approach the aspect of savage Indians ...
— The Peril Finders • George Manville Fenn
... wonder why? We were like an army that had burned the bridges behind it. We had scant knowledge of what lay in the track before us. Here we were, more than two thousand miles from home,—separated from it by a trackless, uninhabited waste of country. It was impossible for us to retrace our steps. Go ahead we must, no matter what we were ...
— Ox-Team Days on the Oregon Trail • Ezra Meeker
... she said, and not Eos herself, as with rosy fingers she turns aside the dark clouds of night, could be fairer than was the nymph as she pushed aside the leaves of the trackless wood, and ran forward with white arms outstretched to him who was lord ...
— A Book of Myths • Jean Lang
... such objects no sound objection can be raised. Happily for our country, its peaceful policy and rapidly increasing population impose upon us no urgent necessity for preparation, and leave but few trackless deserts between assailable points and a patriotic people ever ready and generally able to protect them. These necessary links the enterprise and energy of our people are steadily and boldly struggling to supply. All experience affirms that wherever private enterprise will avail it is ...
— State of the Union Addresses of Franklin Pierce • Franklin Pierce
... look rather grave at Camp Vicars. The Americans had endeavored by every means in their power to prevent further hostilities and trouble, but had failed in all their efforts to bring about peace between themselves and the dark-skinned natives of the trackless ...
— The Battle of Bayan and Other Battles • James Edgar Allen
... along the forest road as well as it could, but it had not the strength for a heavy pull like this. It was poorly shod, and stumbled time after time. When going uphill the men had to get down from the sledge and walk, and when they came upon trackless unbeaten ground in the thick of the forest the horse was almost more of ...
— The Emperor of Portugalia • Selma Lagerlof
... latitudes, for in a warmer climate it is a rare thing to find them. Sometimes a few weary land-birds that have strayed from their homeward way, skim over the ocean, or rest upon the masts; how they maintain themselves on the wing cannot be conjectured, but certain it is, they have been seen on the trackless ocean, when no point of land was ...
— Hair Breadth Escapes - Perilous incidents in the lives of sailors and travelers - in Japan, Cuba, East Indies, etc., etc. • T. S. Arthur
... being rested, Robert Moffat bade adieu to Mr. and Mrs. Kitchingman, whose friendship he much valued, and with a guide and drivers for the oxen started onward. Their way led through a comparatively trackless desert, and they travelled nearly the whole night through deep sand. Those were not the days of railway trains, and travelling had to be undertaken in cumbrous, springless bullock-waggons, several spare oxen being taken to provide for losses and casualties. Towards morning ...
— Robert Moffat - The Missionary Hero of Kuruman • David J. Deane
... breath of air stirring the leaves. The unspeakable, unsolvable mystery of it all rested like a weight on the spirits of both men. It, was a disquieting thought that bands of savages, eager to discover and slay, were stealing among the shadows of those trackless plains, and that they must literally feel their uncertain way through the cordon, every sound an alarm, every advancing step a fresh peril. They crossed the swift, deep stream, and emerged dripping, chilled to the marrow by the icy water. ...
— Bob Hampton of Placer • Randall Parrish
... narrow roads with great loss of time, yet wherever they went they rendered the army safe from the enemy, because men unacquainted with such animals were afraid of approaching too nearly. On the ninth day they came to a summit of the Alps, chiefly through places trackless; and after many mistakes of their way, which were caused either by the treachery of the guides, or, when they were not trusted, by entering valleys at random, on their own conjectures of the route. For two days they remained encamped on the summit; and rest was given to the soldiers, exhausted ...
— The History of Rome; Books Nine to Twenty-Six • Titus Livius
... darn funny," he muttered, when he was perfectly sure that there was no car, that there could never have been a car on that trackless ridge. "That's mighty damn funny! You ...
— Casey Ryan • B. M. Bower
... one, ten degrees below zero, and some of our leading members were camping out on their way with food supply from Minot, sixty miles north over a trackless waste of snow. One Monday morning Andrew Crow came in on horseback, with the result of the previous evening's contribution. We get little change here, so we put down the amount to be given on paper, and settle the account as we can by exchanges ...
— The American Missionary — Vol. 48, No. 10, October, 1894 • Various
... in May arrived at Dayton, Ohio, and took command of the troops at that place. Hull had under him such noted officers as Colonels Duncan McArthur, James Findlay and Lewis Cass. With these forces, he marched to Detroit, through an almost trackless wilderness. While on the march with about two thousand men, Hull was informed of the declaration of war, which news at the same time reached the British posts in Canada, and his little army was in imminent peril. The government gave Hull discretionary ...
— Sustained honor - The Age of Liberty Established • John R. Musick,
... solitude and nought to hear save the rustle of the soft night wind beyond the open door of the cave that was my habitation and the far-off, never-ceasing murmur that was the voice of those great waters that hemmed me in,—a desolate ocean where no ships ever sailed, a trackless waste that stretched ...
— Martin Conisby's Vengeance • Jeffery Farnol
... pulled their horse's head this way and that, in apparent confusion, and then began to turn out into the trackless snow at the roadside, in spite of Bartley's frantic efforts to arrest them. They sank deeper and deeper into the drift; their horse plunged and struggled, and then their cutter went over, amidst their ...
— A Modern Instance • William Dean Howells
... hazy—nothing but a wild, bright dream really clear—she questioned Billy Stitts concerning the roads. He was familiar with every route in miles, whether roadway, trail, or "course by compass," as he termed trackless cruising in the desert. He gave her directions with the utmost minutae of detail as to every highway to Starlight. He drew her a plan. She was sure that she could almost ride to Starlight in the dark. ...
— The Furnace of Gold • Philip Verrill Mighels
... home; let us look out for a better country, that is, a heavenly. Let us look out for Him who alone can guide us to that better country; let us call heaven our home, and this life a pilgrimage; let us view ourselves, as sheep in the trackless desert, who, unless they follow the shepherd, will be sure to lose themselves, sure to fall in with the wolf. We are safe while we keep close to Him, and under His eye; but if we suffer Satan to gain an advantage over us, woe ...
— Parochial and Plain Sermons, Vol. VIII (of 8) • John Henry Newman
... With moccasined feet they trod among brittle twigs, dried leaves, and dead branches as silently as the cougar, and they equalled the great wood-cat in stealth and far surpassed it in cunning and ferocity. They could no more get lost in the trackless wilderness than a civilized man could get lost on a highway. Moreover, no knight of the middle ages was so surely protected by his armor as they were by their skill in hiding; the whole forest was to the whites one vast ambush, and to them a sure and ever-present shield. Every ...
— The Winning of the West, Volume One - From the Alleghanies to the Mississippi, 1769-1776 • Theodore Roosevelt
... of the Soul seek further? Must the insatiable thirst of the Spirit launch out upon the trackless infinities of the yet To Be? Must it still penetrate further in the profound beyond, where time ceases to be, where the past, present, and the future, are forever unknown, but exist only as the Deific consciousness of the eternal Now? No. The Soul ...
— The Light of Egypt, Volume II • Henry O. Wagner/Belle M. Wagner/Thomas H. Burgoyne
... that a man must begin from the beginning, and construct his own faith from the foundation; that reason must play its part, lead the soul as far as it could, and set it in the right way; but that the spirit must not halt there, but pass courageously and serenely into the trackless waste, content, if need be, to make mistakes, to retrace its path, only sincerely and gently advancing, waiting for any hint that might fall from the divine spirit, interpreting rather than selecting, divesting itself of preferences and prejudices one by one, and conscious ...
— Beside Still Waters • Arthur Christopher Benson
... question that if a vehicle of any kind had been sent to meet me it had long since departed; the trackless roadway showed that. It was equally evident that if one was coming, I had better meet it on the way than stay where I was and freeze to death. The fence was still visible—the near end—and there was a farmhouse somewhere—so the conductor had said, ...
— Forty Minutes Late - 1909 • F. Hopkinson Smith
... fix upon him as the one to accuse? In a flash he leaped to a startling conclusion. Barry Lapelle! The man who knew all about his thievish transactions and who for months had profited by them. Hides, wool, fresh meats from the secret lairs and slaughter pens back in the trackless wilds, all these had gone down the river on Barry's boats, products of a far-reaching system of outlawry, with Barry and his captains sharing ...
— Viola Gwyn • George Barr McCutcheon
... idea for your lordship's comprehension. I would therefore recommend to you, to make the cracker the model of your conduct. You should snap and bounce at regular intervals; at one moment you should seem a blazing star, and the next be lost in trackless darkness. ...
— Four Early Pamphlets • William Godwin
... before they crown'd him King, Roving the trackless realms of Lyonnesse, Had found a glen, gray boulder and black tarn. A horror lived about the tarn, and clave Like its own mists to all the mountain side: For here two brothers, one a king, had met And fought together; but their names were lost; And each had slain his brother at a blow; ...
— Alfred Tennyson • Andrew Lang
... night, without revisiting the scenes of my boyhood, and wandering through my own fields, accompanied by my beloved sister, and her quite as well beloved friend. How many hours of happiness had I thus passed on the trackless wastes of the Pacific and the Atlantic; and with how much fidelity did memory recall the peculiar graces, whether of body or mind, of each of the dear girls in particular! Since my recent experience in London, Emily Merton would ...
— Afloat And Ashore • James Fenimore Cooper
... gentle rustling of the forest leaves and in the roar of the storm; his power of smell is so delicate that he scents fire long before it becomes visible. By some peculiar instinct the Indian steers through the trackless forests, over the vast prairies, and even across wide sheets of water with unerring certainty. Under the gloomiest and most obscure sky, he can follow the course of the sun[238] as if directed by a compass. These powers would seem ...
— The Conquest of Canada (Vol. 1 of 2) • George Warburton
... by flowers and trees And shade of gentle bigotries. On this side lay the trackless sea, On that the great world's mystery; But all unseen and all unguessed They could not break upon her rest. The world's far splendours gleamed and flashed, Afar the wild seas foamed and dashed; But in her small, dull Paradise, Safe housed from rapture ...
— Pike County Ballads and Other Poems • John Hay
... distant head, With trackless snows for ever white, Where all is still, and cold, and dead, Late shines ...
— Poems • William Cullen Bryant
... have nothing in common with the slumbering world around, not even sleep, Heaven's gift to all its creatures, and be akin to nothing but despair; to feel, by the wretched contrast with everything on every hand, more utterly alone and cast away than in a trackless desert; this is a kind of suffering, on which the rivers of great cities close full many a time, and which the solitude in ...
— Barnaby Rudge • Charles Dickens
... the native of a sea-surrounded nook, a cloud-enshadowed land, which, when the surface of the globe, with its shoreless ocean and trackless continents, presents itself to my mind, appears only as an inconsiderable speck in the immense whole; and yet, when balanced in the scale of mental power, far outweighed countries of larger extent and more numerous population. So true it is, that man's mind alone was the creator of all ...
— The Last Man • Mary Shelley
... hand was laid upon his hip in close proximity to a pistol-pocket, and Persimmon Sneed remembered suddenly that his own pistol was in its holster on his saddle, he could not say how far distant in these wild, trackless woods, and that this man was a notorious offender against the law, sundry warrants for his arrest for horse-stealing having been issued at divers times and places. There had been much talk of an organized band ...
— The Mystery of Witch-Face Mountain and Other Stories • Charles Egbert Craddock
... over, And he turned him home again, Seeking her who was his guiding Star across the trackless main. Strange it seems the eager captain Thus should hurry from his prize, When a thousand scenes of wonder Stood revealed ...
— Successful Recitations • Various
... guilelessness and conscience all At ease to rest upon a grave At night, was it considered. But thus To be, in calm repose, a smile Transcendent on the lips, as if Good spirits hovered near, almost Were past belief of seeing eye. So moved were they, who saw her there, They stole away in awesome hush Along a trackless trail, beneath A ledge of rugged rock. Above Their heads a bowlder's jutting edge Protruded, where, this early morn, Minnepazuka came to ...
— Indian Legends of Minnesota • Various
... was moved by her words. As some poor wretch confined In cells loud with meaningless laughter, whose mind Wanders trackless amidst its own ruins, may hear A voice heard long since, silenced many a year, And now, 'mid mad ravings recaptured again, Singing through the caged lattice a once well-known strain, Which brings back ...
— Lucile • Owen Meredith
... for examining the trackless void night after night when I ought to be in bed. I sacrifice my health in order that the public may know at once of the presence of a red-hot comet, fresh from the factory. And yet, what ...
— Remarks • Bill Nye
... angry coppery glare streamed down upon the white-flecked water which gleamed in the lurid light. It was very cold, but there was a wonderful quality that set the blood tingling in the nipping air. Even upon the high peaks and in the trackless bush, one fails to find the bracing freshness that comes with the dawn ...
— Vane of the Timberlands • Harold Bindloss
... for that far mysterious realm, Whence the fathomless, trackless waters flow. Shall I see a Presence dim, and know A Gracious Hand upon the helm, ...
— Verses • Susan Coolidge
... swags, having entrusted their tools and tents to teamsters, and, travelled quietly, taking four days to accomplish the journey. The route lay through trackless country. As yet few parties from Forest Creek had set out for Simpson's Ranges, and Jim and his friends encountered no other travellers until they were approaching the new rush, and then the road assumed the familiar characteristics, and the noisy, boisterous troops went gaily by. These ...
— In the Roaring Fifties • Edward Dyson
... look to the amount of difficulties which it behoved him to overcome, the inadequacy of the force which he commanded, or the distance which he was called upon to march, in the midst of a hostile population, and through deep and trackless forests, we cannot deny to General Ross the praise which is his due, of having planned and successfully accomplished an expedition which none but a sagacious mind could have devised, and none but a gallant ...
— The Campaigns of the British Army at Washington and New Orleans 1814-1815 • G. R. Gleig
... these that they had found human mercy and tenderness in the breasts of savages who in all else were like ravening beasts. It was rather an agony added to what they had already suffered to know that somewhere in the trackless forests to the westward there was growing up a child who must forget them. The time came when something must be done to end all this and to put a stop to the Indian attacks on the frontiers of Pennsylvania ...
— Stories Of Ohio - 1897 • William Dean Howells
... not till this comparatively advanced stage of the nautical art—when man had obtained a faithful guide in his most devious and trackless wanderings—when he was apparently set free from the unsteady dominion of the seas and of the fickle winds—and amid his labyrinthine course could ever and at once turn his face towards his happy and expectant home;—it was not till this period that science began to lend her most useful ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - April 1843 • Various
... Anthony, I am glad to stand beside you while I tell these women from the other side of the world who has brought them here. This, ladies of Europe, is your great prototype—this the woman who has trodden the trackless fields of the pioneer till the thorns are buried in roses; this, the woman who has lived to hear the hisses turn to dulcet strains of music; the woman who has dared to plead for every good cause under heaven, who opened her door to the fleeing slave and claimed ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume V • Ida Husted Harper
... is going on as it was wont. The waves are hoarse with repetition of their mystery; the dust lies piled upon the shore; the sea-birds soar and hover; the winds and clouds go forth upon their trackless flight; the white arms beckon in the moonlight to the invisible country ...
— A Week's Tramp in Dickens-Land • William R. Hughes
... and yesterday; with every link in the brittle chain of hope, to rivet afresh; our hot enthusiasm subdued, and cool calm reason substituted in its stead; doubt and misgiving revive. As the traveller sees farthest by day, and becomes aware of rugged mountains and trackless plains which the friendly darkness had shrouded from his sight and mind together, so, the wayfarer in the toilsome path of human life sees, with each returning sun, some new obstacle to surmount, some new height ...
— The Life And Adventures Of Nicholas Nickleby • Charles Dickens
... fester like corrupted weeds, And smell to heaven with poison breath Involving all in certain death. For fraud and murder can't be hid Since Eve and Cain did what they did And left us naked through the world, Like meteors in midnight hurled, To darkle in this trackless sphere, Not knowing what ...
— Shakspere, Personal Recollections • John A. Joyce
... High o'er the trackless heath, at midnight seen, No more the windows ranged in long array (Where the tall shaft and fretted arch between Thick ivy twines) the ...
— Lives of the English Poets - From Johnson to Kirke White, Designed as a Continuation of - Johnson's Lives • Henry Francis Cary
... provisions for the morning meal. It was one of the peculiarities of that mountain climate that its rays diffused a kindly warmth over the wintry landscape, as if in regretful commiseration of the past. But it revealed drift on drift of snow piled high around the hut,—a hopeless, uncharted, trackless sea of white lying below the rocky shores to which the castaways still clung. Through the marvellously clear air the smoke of the pastoral village of Poker Flat rose miles away. Mother Shipton saw it, and from a remote pinnacle of her rocky ...
— Short Stories Old and New • Selected and Edited by C. Alphonso Smith
... of gold, what shall I do with thee? Shall I cast thee from me, and bid farewell with longing eyes, as the mariner bids adieu to the last low streak of misty land ere he launches out on the trackless deep? or shall I wear thee on my breast, hid from the vulgar gaze, in memory of whom—of whom? Saronia? Perchance 'twas her! It shall remain. It cannot harm, and shall be near me until ...
— Saronia - A Romance of Ancient Ephesus • Richard Short
... Caroline had spent entirely alone (her uncle being at Whinbury), and whose long, bright, noiseless, breezeless, cloudless hours (how many they seemed since sunrise!) had been to her as desolate as if they had gone over her head in the shadowless and trackless wastes of Sahara, instead of in the blooming garden of an English home, she was sitting in the alcove—her task of work on her knee, her fingers assiduously plying the needle, her eyes following and regulating their movements, her brain working restlessly—when Fanny came to the door, looked ...
— Shirley • Charlotte Bronte
... in the romantic, adventurous, hunting, trapping Wild West days, it seems to have been regarded as the most attractive and promising of all the Pacific countries for farmers. While yet the whole region as well as the way to it was wild, ere a single road or bridge was built, undaunted by the trackless thousand-mile distances and scalping, cattle-stealing Indians, long trains of covered wagons began to crawl wearily westward, crossing how many plains, rivers, ridges, and mountains, fighting the painted savages and weariness and famine. Setting out from the frontier of the ...
— Steep Trails • John Muir
... protest against the erection of these fortresses that George Washington, then twenty-three years of age, was sent by the colony of Virginia to the banks of the Ohio. That journey through the trackless wilderness, attended but by one person, in no slight degree marked him out, and prepared him for his subsequently ...
— A Modern History, From the Time of Luther to the Fall of Napoleon - For the Use of Schools and Colleges • John Lord
... brown nut's heart. About it cling Sweet odors faint; and far stars trembling peep. When through its bowers cool the breezes creep. Strong, indeed, thy boat, well builded! I wis There be yet other craft as firm, Eblis, That o'er these trackless waters boldly glide. Brave Nautilus afar, doth fearless ride, With sails of gossamer. So, too, doth spread, To summer airs, his silken gleaming thread, The water-spider fleet, free sailor true That in the sunshine floats, beneath the blue, Glad skies. And through ...
— Lilith - The Legend of the First Woman • Ada Langworthy Collier
... about those who wait) forms the text of a well-told tale of misplaced affections. As you may expect, if you know Miss YOUNG'S former work, it is a South African story, not concerned however with Boers and natives and the trackless veld, but with coastwise civilization and suburban garden-parties. As before, the author excellently conveys the place-feeling, so well indeed that I was sorry when the love intrigues of the two protagonists necessitated their quitting Africa for a more conventional Italian setting. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 158, April 21, 1920 • Various
... must think as God thinks. He was like one who when just starting in life, wrote these words on the flyleaf of his little Bible—"Man has faith in his compass, yet he cannot understand it. He takes it as his guide across the trackless ocean. He relies implicitly upon it, and well he may trust it. This Book is my compass. I have faith in it, thanks to God: it explains itself; I take it for my guide across the ocean of life—I rely upon it. Man may jeer at my faith, but my compass is vastly ...
— Twilight And Dawn • Caroline Pridham
... Nile and the Atbara, a distance of nearly 400 miles. A bold idea indeed, for not only had every rail and every sleeper to be brought up to Wady Haifa, and thence along the rail itself as it disappeared into the trackless desert, but every mile the railway advanced the work was getting farther away from its base and penetrating deeper into the enemy's country, for at this time Abu Hamed was still held by the dervishes. Water was bored for ...
— Our Soldiers - Gallant Deeds of the British Army during Victoria's Reign • W.H.G. Kingston
... last radiant shining Trackless be hurled where the Autumn wind blows, Slumber enmeshes my soul and the darkness— Love, ...
— Russian Lyrics • Translated by Martha Gilbert Dickinson Bianchi
... library of his friend. In the peaceful evening hours he listens to weird stories of the lonely land of the Far West—early discovery, zealous monkish exploration, daring voyages in trackless unknown seas, and the descent of curious strangers. Bold Sir Francis Drake, Cabrillo, Viscaino, Portala, the good Junipero Serra of sainted memory, live again in ...
— The Little Lady of Lagunitas • Richard Henry Savage
... go to prove my soul. I see my way, as birds their trackless way. In some time, God's good time, I shall arrive He guides me and the bird. In ...
— Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli, Vol. II • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... "Conquerors of the Wilderness." Cutting loose from home and civilization, their all, including their women and children, loaded into wagons, and drawn by slow-moving ox teams, they fearlessly braved three thousand miles of almost trackless wilderness. ...
— Reminiscences of a Pioneer • Colonel William Thompson
... hills, Over whose tops lap forests of cork and fir And reach in places half down their rough slopes. Lower, some few cleared fields square on the thickets Of junipers and longer thorns than furze So clumped that they are trackless even for goats I know two things about that woman: first She is a slave and I am free, and next As mothers need their sons' love she needs mine. Longings to utter fond compassionate sounds Stir through me, checked ...
— Miscellany of Poetry - 1919 • Various
... the eight, one hundred and thirty miles of sun-baked, crab-holed, practically trackless plains, no sign of human habitation anywhere, cracks that would swallow a man—"hardly enough wood to boil a quart pot," the Fizzer says, and a sun-temperature hovering about 160 degrees (there is no shade-temperature on the Downs); shadeless, ...
— We of the Never-Never • Jeanie "Mrs. Aeneas" Gunn
... barely alive—when Gillispie and Henderson got there, three hours later, the very balls of their eyes almost frozen into blindness. But for an instinct stronger than reason they would never have been able to have found their way across that trackless stretch. The children lying unconscious under their coverings were neither dead nor actually frozen, although the men putting their hands on their little hearts could not at first discover the beating. Stiff and suffering as these young fellows were, it was no ...
— A Mountain Woman and Others • (AKA Elia Wilkinson) Elia W. Peattie
... great stores of hidden treasures, of the quantities of precious gems and priceless crystals was fully discounted when, from the Florida coast and the explorers of the Lower Mississippi, men returned with the tale that in the everglades and in the trackless forests, intersected by navigable sloughs, there dwelt a people half of whom were hermaphrodites. Neither the explorers nor their European historiographers seem able to have grasped the true state of affairs. Many believed in the actual existence ...
— History of Circumcision from the Earliest Times to the Present - Moral and Physical Reasons for its Performance • Peter Charles Remondino
... endeavored to allay her fears, although conscious of the peril they were in. The horse was plodding its way through the snow-drifts and it was evident that the animal would soon become exhausted. The blizzard might last all night, or it might continue for three days. On those trackless wastes in such a storm death by freezing was almost certain, unless they reached a place of shelter. The hours dragged by. He kept up an incessant talking with Annie, lest she should fall into the fatal sleep. The ...
— Where Strongest Tide Winds Blew • Robert McReynolds
... she did not like to ride past the hill on the Dollar Sign road, with its hints of unsolved mystery. But she had quickly grown to love the broad, free Indian reservation, with its limitless miles of unfenced hills. She liked to turn off the road and gallop across the trackless ways, sometimes frightening rabbits and coyotes from the sagebrush. Several times she had startled antelope, and once her horse had shied at a rattlesnake coiled in the sunshine. The Indians she had learned to look upon as children. She had visited the cabins and lodges of some of ...
— Mystery Ranch • Arthur Chapman
... the power of opposition; I closed my eyes, stretched out my arms toward the god of my vocation and felt myself drawn with the suddenness of thought through the trackless immensity of space. There was an instant of extreme cold and ...
— A Princess of Mars • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... I reviewed the information I had got; looked into my heart, examined its thoughts and feelings, and endeavoured to bring back with a strict hand such as had been straying through imagination's boundless and trackless waste, into the safe fold ...
— Jane Eyre - an Autobiography • Charlotte Bronte
... the Yo-Semite Fall the canon is threaded by a trail practicable for horses. At its termination we dismounted, sent back our animals, and, strapping their loads upon our own shoulders, struck nearly eastward by a path only less rugged than the trackless crags around us. In some places we were compelled to squeeze sideways through a narrow crevice in the rocks, at imminent danger to our burden of blankets and camp-kettles; in others we became quadrupedal, scrambling up acclivities with which the bald main precipice ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 80, June, 1864 • Various
... may daily see how much he is ahead of time, or how far he is behind time; nay, his path has been literally blazed through the winds for him on the sea; mile-posts have been set up on the waves, and finger-boards planted, and time-tables furnished for the trackless waste, by which the ship-master, on his first voyage to any port, may know as well as the most experienced trader whether he be in the ...
— Choice Specimens of American Literature, And Literary Reader - Being Selections from the Chief American Writers • Benj. N. Martin
... The orders under which he now marched to battle were definite up to a certain point—then, so the record in the War Department reads—he was to use his own discretion and initiative. He was compelled to follow this course—for he marched over a wild and trackless waste, far distant from his base of supplies and absolutely without means of communication with headquarters, and without ability to ascertain the movements of any military force in the field. It is fair ...
— The Vanishing Race • Dr. Joseph Kossuth Dixon
... observation of all who might be passing therein, or scouting along its borders. And on, on, now through open fields, and now through dense forests, now through splashy pools, or rapid rivers, and now over sharp pitches or deep ravines, now in cross-roads or cow-paths, and now in trackless thickets, now over fenny moors, and now along the rocky declivities of mountains,—on, on, did they pursue their toilsome and weary way through the seemingly interminable hours of all the first half ...
— The Rangers - [Subtitle: The Tory's Daughter] • D. P. Thompson
... bird's-eye view. For he has (or ought to have) given the details already; and his summary, without in the least compelling readers to accept it, must give them at least some means of judging whether he has been wandering over a plain trackless to him, or has been pursuing with confidence a well-planned ...
— A History of English Literature - Elizabethan Literature • George Saintsbury
... drifting through sectional dissensions and avowed antagonism to the national authority, he chose as the opening metaphor of his reply to Hayne the description of a ship, drifting rudderless and helpless on the trackless ocean, exposed to perils both known and unknown. The orator knew his audience. To all New England the picture had the vivacity of life. The metaphors of the sea were on every tongue. The story is a familiar one of the Boston clergyman who, in one of his ...
— American Merchant Ships and Sailors • Willis J. Abbot
... miles, in a westerly or inland direction, which commands a view of the great chain of mountains, called Carmarthen hills, extending from north to south farther than the eye can reach. Here we paused, surveying "the wild abyss; pondering our voyage." Before us lay the trackless immeasurable desert, in awful silence. At length, after consultation, we determined to steer west and by north, by compass, the make of the land in that quarter indicating the existence of a river. ...
— A Complete Account of the Settlement at Port Jackson • Watkin Tench
... fearful hour For one so young and fair: The woods had not one sheltering bower, The earth was trackless there, The very boughs in silver slept, As the sea-foam had o'er ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 10, Issue 262, July 7, 1827 • Various
... intellect could devise, towering with its proud canvas over space, and bearing man to greet his fellow-man, over the surface of death!—dashing the billow from her stem, as if in scorn, while she pursued her trackless way—bearing tidings of peace and security, of war and devastation—tidings of joy or grief, affecting whole kingdoms and empires, as ...
— Newton Forster • Frederick Marryat
... of the public defence the nature of whose duties is dual in that they relate to both peace and war. In times of peace the Navy blazes the way across the trackless deep, maps out and marks the dangers which lie in the routes of commerce, in order that the peaceful argosies of trade may pursue safe routes to the distant markets of the world, there to exchange the varied commodities of commerce. It penetrates ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol III, After-Dinner Speeches P-Z • Various
... an empty tomb; Trackless the path, and all unknown; What means this journey through its gloom, ...
— Poems • John L. Stoddard
... Cyrus. After spending some time in these countries, he went on by land still further to the eastward, into the heart of Asia. The country of Scythia was considered as at "the end of the earth" in this direction. Herodotus penetrated for some distance into the almost trackless wilds of this remote land, until he found that he had gone as far from the great center of light and power on the shores of the AEgean Sea as he could expect the curiosity of his countrymen to follow him. He passed thence round ...
— Cyrus the Great - Makers of History • Jacob Abbott
... spot all appeared tranquility and peace. It was without a path, and you would imagine that no human footsteps had ever invaded the calmness of its solitude. It was the eternal retreat of the venerable anchorite; it was the uninhabited paradise in the midst of the trackless ocean. ...
— Imogen - A Pastoral Romance • William Godwin
... conscience, had ever been a supreme duty with the French Protestants, and paramount to everything else. For this they had endured the severest persecutions in France, and had sacrificed houses, lands, kindred and their native homes; they had crossed a trackless ocean, and penetrated the howling wilderness, inhabited by savage tribes—and for what?—To serve their MAKER, and the RIGHTS OF CONSCIENCE. They had been the salt of France, and brought over with them their pious principles, with their Bibles,—the most precious ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I., No. IV., April, 1862 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... drive and Adlekok as guide, and visited the spot. We took a day's rations with us, to use in case we did not get back that night, and started with a head wind and storm that confined our view to the immediate vicinity of the sledge. Our guide, however, took us through this trackless waste of smooth ice, a distance of over twenty-five miles, without deviation from the direct line, with no landmarks or sun to steer by; but on he went with the unerring instinct of a dog, until we struck the land at the western ...
— Schwatka's Search • William H. Gilder
... Portugal turned their attention chiefly to astronomical research and to voyages of discovery and adventure, the national enterprises of their protectors. Joao II. employed Jews in investigations tending to make reasonably safe the voyages, on trackless seas, under unknown skies, for the discovery of long and ardently sought passages to distant lands. In his commission charged with the construction of an instrument to indicate accurately the course of a vessel, the German knight Martin Behaim was assisted by Jews—astronomers, ...
— Jewish Literature and Other Essays • Gustav Karpeles
... conscious torch, whose mighty flame, (The shining signal of a brighter dame) Thro' trackless waves, the bold Leander led, To taste the dang'rous joys of Hero's bed: Sing the stol'n bliss, in gloomy shades conceal'd, And never to the blushing ...
— The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (1753) - Vol. IV • Theophilus Cibber
... awake, or asleep. Ethie's face and Ethie's form were everywhere, and if earnest, longing thoughts could have availed to bring her back, she would have come, whether across the rolling sea, or afar from the trackless desert. But they could not reach her, Ethie did not come, and the term of Richard's governorship glided away, and he declined a re-election, and went back to Olney, looking ten years older than when he left it, with an habitual expression ...
— Ethelyn's Mistake • Mary Jane Holmes
... romantick maid, Whether by nodding towers you tread; Or haunt the desart's trackless gloom, Or hover o'er the yawning tomb; Or climb the Andes' clifted side, Or by the Nile's coy source abide; Or, starting from your half-year's sleep, From Hecla view the thawing deep; Or, at the purple dawn of ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 3 • Boswell, Edited by Birkbeck Hill
... and, perhaps, destroy them, when they can stay no longer. If we pursue them, and carry the war into their dominions, our difficulties will increase every step as we advance, for we shall leave plenty behind us, and find nothing in Canada, but lakes and forests, barren and trackless; our enemies will shut themselves up in their forts, against which it is difficult to bring cannon through so rough a country, and which, if they are provided with good magazines, will soon ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, Vol. 6 - Reviews, Political Tracts, and Lives of Eminent Persons • Samuel Johnson
... As it was, his character gave the keynote not only to the great fortress-capital, but to the whole history of New France. He was an embodiment at once of the religious zeal and of the mediaeval spirit of romance which carried the Bourbon lilies into the trackless wilderness of North America, at a time when English colonisation contented itself with a narrow strip on ...
— Old Quebec - The Fortress of New France • Sir Gilbert Parker and Claude Glennon Bryan
... only a very few years since it came into use, and no one ever thought it was going to turn a trackless scrub into a huge garden. But now from the South Australian border right through to the Murray, farms and comfortable homesteads have taken the place of dense scrub. This last harvest, over three hundred thousand bags of wheat were delivered ...
— A Dictionary of Austral English • Edward Morris
... exemplary conduct of Jackey-Jackey. Since he came on board I have always found him quiet, obliging, and very respectful; when on shore he was very attentive, nothing could abstract him from his object; the sagacity and knowledge he displayed in traversing the trackless wilderness were astonishing; when he found the places he went in search of, he was never flushed with success, but invariably maintained his quiet, unobtrusive behaviour; he was much concerned at not being ...
— Voyage Of H.M.S. Rattlesnake, Vol. 2 (of 2) • John MacGillivray
... tread I crawl Into the dark and trackless hall, Where 'neath the Hat-tree's shadows deep Umbrellas ...
— The Kitten's Garden of Verses • Oliver Herford
... mind wandered from them out of the window, and I noted with a casual eye the advance civilization was making on both sides of the track. I began wandering vaguely from that back to the time when this was a trackless wilderness; and I pictured to myself the advent of the white man, and so on in an aimless sort of a way, from the beginning of our country until I reached the Declaration of Independence, the terms of which have always remained vividly impressed ...
— A Jolly by Josh • "Josh"
... alone!" Was a more victorious bravery ever known? Right across the trackless space The small feet have won their race; And he tosses back thereafter Such a peal of ringing laughter! It laughs out from every face, Proud to own "Baby has ...
— The Nursery, Number 164 - A Monthly Magazine for Youngest Readers • Various
... comrades gaze about them in despair at the wilderness of jungle that closed about them on every side. He saw them cast horrified looks at each other at the situation in which they found themselves—lost in the trackless African forests. ...
— The Boy Aviators in Africa • Captain Wilbur Lawton
... scene of action; the May sun fell burning on the Parisian pavements, while the blood of the adventurer ran slow and cold. The illusions bred of the winter dawn had been dispersed by the light of day; life was no glad enterprise—no climbing of golden heights, but the barren crossing of a trackless region where no hand proffered guidance and false signs misled the weary eyes. One weapon alone was necessary in the pursuance of the gray journey—a sure command—a ...
— Max • Katherine Cecil Thurston
... last remaining refuge safely!" said he, with deep emotion. "And may their flight be quick and sure! For the fate of the world, its hope and its salvation from infinite enslavement, are whirling through the trackless wastes ...
— The Air Trust • George Allan England
... as migrates the sandhill crane, separated the settlements of Yankton and Sioux Falls. Trackless as a desert was the prairie, minus even the buffalo trails of a quarter century before; yet with the sun only as guide, they forged ahead, straight as a line drawn taut from point to point. Nothing stopped their ...
— Where the Trail Divides • Will Lillibridge
... from all possibility of proceeding beyond it in their ordinary manner of creeping along the coast; and they dared not to stretch out into the open sea in quest of smoother water, lest, losing sight of land altogether, they might wander in the trackless ocean, and be unable to find their way home. It is not impossible that they might contemplate the imaginary terrors of the torrid zone, as handed down from some of the ancients, with all its burning soil and scorching vapours; ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. II • Robert Kerr |
