"Fastness" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... in a great measure it checked his fiery ardour, and induced most of his more timorous following to climb with most perturbed activity over the rocks. The ancient more slowly followed, and then from behind the fastness of his rocky shield, he spoke spears and boomerangs to us, though he used none. He, however, poured out the vials of his wrath upon us, as he probably thought to some purpose. I was not linguist enough to be able to translate all he said; but I am sure my free interpretation of the ...
— Australia Twice Traversed, The Romance of Exploration • Ernest Giles
... located. Had this place been occupied uninterruptedly, like Cuzco and Ollantaytambo, Machu Picchu would have retained its ancient name, but during the centuries when it was abandoned, its name was lost. Examination showed that it was essentially a fortified place, a remote fastness protected by natural bulwarks, of which man took advantage to create the most impregnable stronghold in the Andes. Our subsequent excavations and the clearing made in 1912, to be described in a subsequent volume, has shown that this was the chief ...
— Inca Land - Explorations in the Highlands of Peru • Hiram Bingham
... sublime justice to a weak sense of compassion, I waved her back to her fastness until after ...
— Vesty of the Basins • Sarah P. McLean Greene
... such terrible weapons as these, it requires at the present day great courage, great coolness, and very extraordinary steadiness of nerve to face a lion or a tiger in his mountain fastness, with any hope of coming off victorious in the contest. But the danger was, of course, infinitely greater in the days of Genghis Khan, when pikes and spears, and bows and arrows, were the only weapons with ...
— Genghis Khan, Makers of History Series • Jacob Abbott
... swift surety of an executioner, and in revenge for his many arboral murders the woodland had taken captive his mind, captured and chained it as Prospero did Ariel. The resounding footsteps of Progress driven on so mercilessly in this mad age could not reach his fastness. It did not concern him that men were thinking, investigating, inventing. His senses responded only to the sonorous music of the woods; a steadfast wind ringing metallic melody from the pine-tops contented him as the sound ...
— A Mountain Woman and Others • (AKA Elia Wilkinson) Elia W. Peattie
... forged ahead until, with the dawning of a new day, he entered the low foothills that guard the approach to the fastness ...
— Thuvia, Maid of Mars • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... from the frozen eaves Many an icy splinter. On the hillside, in the hollow, Weaving wreaths of snow: Now in gusts of solemn music Lost in murmurs low; Howling now across the wold In its shroudlike vastness, Like the wolves about a fold In some Alpine fastness, Hungered ...
— In The Yule-Log Glow—Book 3 - Christmas Poems from 'round the World • Various
... her fastness in Frank's attic, while Julius repaired to Raymond's room, and found him as usual lying tranquil, with his mother's chair so near that she could hand him the cool fruit or drink, or ring to summon other help. Their time together seemed ...
— The Three Brides • Charlotte M. Yonge
... land during the last two years, and the more important I think the "mission" of every quiet, refined, self-respecting woman—the more mistaken I think those who would forfeit it by noisy self-assertion, masculinity, or fastness. In all this wild West the influence of woman is second only in its benefits to the influence of religion, and where the last unhappily does not exist the first continually exerts its restraining power. The last morning came. I cleaned up my room and ...
— A Lady's Life in the Rocky Mountains • Isabella L. Bird
... lay the heavy chest of their desire. At the same instant Muda Saffir with fifty of his head-hunting Dyaks emerged from the jungle east of the camp, bent on discovering the whereabouts of the girl the Malay sought and bearing her away to his savage court far within the jungle fastness ...
— The Monster Men • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... and scramble down the rocks, drinking cup in hand, and slake our thirst at this crystal fountain. Was ever a more delightful draught for thirsty mortals than from this little pool hidden away here in this mountain fastness? It is a place in which druids and wood-nymphs might revel, surrounded on all sides by stately trees and moss-grown rocks, fringed with ferns of all kinds, from the delicate maidenhair to the wide-spreading shield variety, bordered with blue and gold lupine ...
— Byways Around San Francisco Bay • William E. Hutchinson
... brave men, apparently Abishai, Benaiah, and Eleazar, heard the wish. Between their mountain fastness and the dearly loved spring lay the host of the Philistines; but their love for their leader feared no enemies. It was not only water that he longed for, but the water from the fountain which he had loved in his childhood. ...
— A Book of Golden Deeds • Charlotte M. Yonge
... ready with story hid in the fastness of their solitude, and it is a joy to think that those great pines, pointing ever upwards, go for the most part to carry the sails of great ships seeking afar under open sky. The forest holds other wonders still. It seems but last night ...
— The Roadmender • Michael Fairless
... had questioned him, perhaps with threats, till he had confessed that he had betrayed them to the preventives; then they had gagged him, hustled him downstairs to a waiting closed carriage, and then they had quietly driven him on, undisturbed, to their fastness in the cliff. It was sad to see a man fallen so low, a man who had been at the University, and master of a school. It was sad to see him, his flabby face all fallen in and white from excess of fear, and to see his eyes lolling about from one to another man, trying to find a little ...
— Jim Davis • John Masefield
... But nothing of him stirred. Air came and went through those parted and relaxed lips with the perfect efficiency of a healthy natural function. And yet he was not asleep. His obstinate and tremendous spirit was now withdrawn somewhere, into some fastness more recondite than sleep; not far off; not detached, not dethroned; but undiscoverably hidden, and beyond any summons. Edwin gazed and gazed, until his heart could hold no more of the emotion which this mysteriously impressive spectacle, at once majestic and poignant, distilled ...
— Clayhanger • Arnold Bennett
... we saw the fair face of that great rock Capri— already scarred and gashed by the gun emplacements and hiding-places that were to make it a fastness—we reckoned nothing of the imminent slaughter, though the fury of preparation hung about in puffs and clouds of dust at a hundred points amidst the grey; but, indeed, I made a text of that and talked. There, you know, ...
— The Country of the Blind, And Other Stories • H. G. Wells
... good in our past moved me, and on that good I will take leave of you for a while. It's time to make an end of this long letter. I am going out for a breath here of the May air, in which spring is breaking through the dry fastness of winter with a sort ...
— The Diary of a Superfluous Man and Other Stories • Ivan Turgenev
... to draw him into separate detachments, in successive skirmishes to profit of their superior aim and activity, and of their better knowledge of the country, and to keep up its confidence by a system of short and gradual retreats from fastness to fastness,—from river beyond river." p. l29.—These sentences, taken at hap-hazard from two consecutive leaves, are not unfair specimens of the literary merits of this intrepid attempt to convert the history of the nation, at its most critical period, into a collection ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 4, February, 1858 • Various
... beyond infections and noise and any distractions, surgery had made for itself a house of research and a healing fastness. The building itself would have seemed very wonderful to eyes accustomed to the flimsy architecture of an age when power was precious. It was made of granite, already a little roughened on the outside by ...
— The World Set Free • Herbert George Wells
... interests. In its immediate vicinity exists the life of the prairie ranch on the one hand and that of the mining-camp on the other; while dominating all as it were—town, prairie, and mountain fastness—rises the great Peak which has now for so many years been the goal of pilgrimage to men and women from the Eastern States in pursuit of health, of fortune, or of the free, open-air life of the prairie. If, from acquaintance with these fictitious characters set in a very real environment, ...
— Peak and Prairie - From a Colorado Sketch-book • Anna Fuller
... answer at once, but stood pale and trembling, as if an icy wind had struck him, before her, she pulled the pricking vines loose from her dress, and came out. "How do you do, Lot?" she said, again. Still Lot did not answer, and after a minute she turned with impatient dignity as if to enter her fastness again; but ...
— Madelon - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... fastness, n. fixedness, immovability, firmness, security, impregnability; fortress, stronghold, citadel; swiftness, celerity, ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming
... jack pines at the back of the Arrowhead ranch house had lured me to mid—afternoon slumber. The day was hot and the morning had been toilsome—four miles of trout stream, rocky, difficult miles. And my hostess, Mrs. Lysander John Pettengill, had ridden off after luncheon to some remote fastness of her domain, leaving me and ...
— Somewhere in Red Gap • Harry Leon Wilson
... picturesque Dutch settlement which grew into the greatest city of the New World. He did more than that, for, persevering in the search and sailing far to the north, he came, at last, into the great bay also named for him, where tragic fate lay waiting. For there, in that icy fastness of the north, his mutinous crew bound him, set him adrift in a small boat, and ...
— American Men of Action • Burton E. Stevenson
... and fine-nerved. Woman is especially subject to it. A girl may put on her brother's boots, and they will not affect her spirit strongly; but as soon as she puts on her brother's hat, she gives him a manly nod. The same philosopher who fathers his dulness on me, asserts that the modern vice or fastness ('Trotting on the Epicene Border,' he has it) is bred by apparently harmless practices of this description. He offers to turn the current of a Republican's brain, by resting a coronet on his forehead for ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... appear—and it is, we repeat, a possibility, if perhaps a remote one—how could it be fought against? Something might be done by torpedoes; but, so far as our past knowledge goes, man has no means of seriously diminishing the numbers of any animal of the most rudimentary intelligence that made its fastness ...
— Certain Personal Matters • H. G. Wells
... S——k, and Charles S——th, may recall to the memory of some people in Edinburgh still, three young men, who, with good education, fair talents, and graces from nature, might have played a respectable role in the drama of life, had it not been for a tendency to "fastness," a disease which seems to increase with civilisation. In their instance the old adage of Aristotle, simile gaudet simili, was exemplified to the letter; and the union confirmed in each a mind which, originally impatient of authority, fretted itself ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, XXII • various
... colour lake, seems to be untenable. Then, again, the chemical composition and constitution of the dyes of this group are so varied that an explanation which would hold good for one might not do so for another. The relative fastness of the dyes against washing and soaping precludes the idea of a merely mechanical absorption of the dye by the fibre; on the other hand the great difference in the fastness to soaping and light between the same dyes on cotton and wool would show that there has not been a true ...
— The Dyeing of Cotton Fabrics - A Practical Handbook for the Dyer and Student • Franklin Beech
... vessel twice as large as the largest warship Fenor boasted; completely provisioned, armed, and powered for a cruise of one hundred years at high acceleration. It is hidden in a remote fastness of the jungle. I am placing in that vessel a group of the finest, brainiest, most highly advanced and intelligent of our men and women, with their children. We shall journey at our highest speed to a certain ...
— Skylark Three • Edward Elmer Smith
... unnecessary to say that the winter passed too quickly with them, and the time came for "making a new crop" all too soon. They left the school reluctantly and returned to the mountain home, taking with them a spirit of progress, which will make even a rugged fastness into a ...
— The American Missionary — Volume 48, No. 7, July, 1894 • Various
... all sides, and had evidently been built for the accommodation of those whose business it was to keep watch on the frontier, and at the appearance of an enemy to alarm the country by signals—probably by a fire. Resolute men might have defended themselves in this little fastness against many assailants, who must have been completely exposed to their arrows ...
— The Bible in Spain • George Borrow
... and popular series tells vividly the story of four adventure-loving lads, who, with their guardian, spent their summer vacations in the saddle in search of recreation and healthful adventure. Long journeys over mountain, through the fastness of primitive forest and across burning desert, lead them into the wild places of their native land as well as into many strange and exciting experiences. There is not a dull moment in ...
— The Story of Young Abraham Lincoln • Wayne Whipple
... enclosure,' was the name of a Pequot fastness in a swamp, in Groton, Conn. Roger Williams wrote this name "Cuppacommock," and understood its meaning to be "a refuge, or hiding place." Eliot has kuppohkomuk for a planted 'grove,' in Deut. xvi. 21, and for a landing-place or safe harbor, ...
— The Composition of Indian Geographical Names - Illustrated from the Algonkin Languages • J. Hammond Trumbull
... his spirit, and I saw him whetting his dreadful tusks for the battle." Wilson was "the beautiful leopard," and Lockhart "the scorpion,"—names which were afterwards hurled back at them with interest. Walter Scott was described as "the great magician who dwelleth in the old fastness, hard by the river Jordan, which is by the Border." Mackenzie, Jameson, Leslie, Brewster, Tytler, Alison, M'Crie, Playfair, Lord Murray, the Duncans—in fact, all the leading men of Edinburgh were hit ...
— A Publisher and His Friends • Samuel Smiles
... to fumble in his pockets, and drawing out a brownish rag, possibly a handkerchief, knotted in several places, proceeded to untie one of the knots. The doctor watched him without speaking. Ultimately, from some fastness in the rag a half-sovereign was extracted, and was laid upon the table by Sweeny. The clerk, a well-dressed young gentleman, whose attitude had throughout been one of the extremest aloofness, made an entry in his book ...
— All on the Irish Shore - Irish Sketches • E. Somerville and Martin Ross
... meet, he first saw the lady who was to be his wife in the hunting-field. She was Miss Garscube of Garscube, an only child and an heiress. She was a fast young lady when as yet fastness was a rare development:—a harbinger of the fast period, the one swallow that presages summer, but does not make it—and as such much in the mouths of ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 17, - No. 97, January, 1876 • Various
... was afforded by our view of the Wartburg, which we passed during the only sunlit hour of this journey. The sight of this mountain fastness, which, from the Fulda side, is clearly visible for a long time, affected me deeply. A neighbouring ridge further on I at once christened the Horselberg, and as we drove through the valley, pictured to myself the scenery for the third act of my Tannhauser. This ...
— My Life, Volume I • Richard Wagner
... vainly, the Lancers rode recklessly to induce those human rock limpets to come out and cut them off. Cronje knew the mettle of our men, and an ironic laugh played round his iron mouth, and still he stayed within his native fastness; but Death sat ever at his elbow, for our gunners dropped the lyddite shells and the howling shrapnel all along his lines, until the trenches ran blood, and many of his guns were silenced. In the valley behind his outer line of hills his dead lay piled in hundreds, ...
— Campaign Pictures of the War in South Africa (1899-1900) - Letters from the Front • A. G. Hales
... fastness at Estwich she defied him in letters, but every letter of hers seemed to leave some loophole open for further argument, and Ogilvy replied valiantly from a perfectly safe distance, vowing that he meant to marry her some day in spite of herself and threatening ...
— The Common Law • Robert W. Chambers
... idler, especially such an idler as Oakley. Master Francis was what young gentlemen fresh from school or at college, sucking ensigns, precocious templars, et id genus omne, are accustomed to call a "fast" man; the said fastness not referring, as Johnson's dictionary teaches us it might do, to any particular strength or firmness of character, but merely to the singular rapidity with which such persons get through their money and into debt. At the time ...
— Tales from Blackwood, Volume 7 • Various
... civilization reigns, and claiming to suffice all; they are emigrating, they know not whither, if it be only towards the heights; there they are descending from their high, narrow, clerical, shut-in fastness. ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern — Volume 11 • Various
... wearing a smart Paris hat with a high cerise crown. She said it had once belonged to the fastest woman in South Africa, who had given it to her as a joke, but she did not mention the lady's name, nor say in what her "fastness" consisted. This was characteristic of visitors at Ho-la-le-la: they sometimes stated facts, but never talked scandal. When April asked them to call her by her own name, instead of "Diana," they did so without comment, accepting ...
— Blue Aloes - Stories of South Africa • Cynthia Stockley
... time, if I can ever pursue my investigations in peace, you will knock at this door and I shall have vanished! But I shall know of your visit, and the very sound of your footfall will reach my ear, even if I am inhabiting some remote mountain fastness!' ...
— Marm Lisa • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... physically afraid of him, not because he had any power to move her, but because in sheer bullock-like strength he was too much for her, as in tenacity he had equally an advantage. As a skirmisher, or in guerrilla warfare, in which he might always retire to a hidden fastness, baffling pursuers by innumerable ruses and doublings, Jenny could hold her own. On the plain, in face of superior strength, she had not the solid force needed to resist strong will and clear issues. Alf looked steadily ...
— Nocturne • Frank Swinnerton
... from the Spaniards he took refuge in Vilcapampa, and established his court and government there. The Sun temple, the convent of virgins, and the other institutions of the Incas at Cuzco, were transferred to this mountain fastness. Even handsome edifices were erected. Here the Incas continued to maintain their independence ...
— History of the Incas • Pedro Sarmiento de Gamboa
... lovely of you, Myrtilla! But what courage! How did you ever dare venture into this wild and savage spot,—this mountain-fastness of Bohemia?" ...
— Young Lives • Richard Le Gallienne
... Vecchio, or the Old Market. This piazza, though it had been the scene of a provision-market from time immemorial, and may, perhaps, says fond imagination, be the very spot to which the Fesulean ancestors of the Florentines descended from their high fastness to traffic with the rustic population of the valley, had not been shunned as a place of residence by Florentine wealth. In the early decades of the fifteenth century, which was now near its end, the Medici and other powerful families of the popolani ...
— Romola • George Eliot
... advanced nations of the East obtained communication with the Grecian continent and isles? What more probable than that the maritime and roving Phoenicians entered the seas of Greece, and were tempted by the plains, which promised abundance, and the mountains, which afforded a fastness? Possessed of a superior civilization to the hordes they found, they would meet rather with veneration than resistance, and thus a settlement would be obtained by an inconsiderable number, more in right of intelligence ...
— Athens: Its Rise and Fall, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... touching that gang which is known as the Three Points. Pugsy said: "Dere's trouble down where I live. Dude Dawson's mad at Spider Reilly, an' now de Table Hills are layin' for de T'ree Points. Sure." He had then retired to his outer fastness, yielding further details jerkily and with the distrait air of ...
— Psmith, Journalist • Pelham Grenville Wodehouse
... had lost their queen and beloved, the Lady of Abundance, they were both restless and fierce, for the days of sorrow hung heavy on their hands. So on a time a great company of them had ado with the Burgers somewhat recklessly and came to the worse; wherefore some drew back into their fastness of the Scaur and the others still rode on, and further west than their wont had been; but warily when they had the Wood Perilous behind them, for they had learned wisdom again. Thus riding they had tidings of an host of the Burg of the Four Friths who were resting in ...
— The Well at the World's End • William Morris
... would to a child, and then, a moment later, she would bring out some cynical scrap of wisdom, evidently the fruit of bitter experience, which sounded strange coming from her lips. Yet, despite the utter unconventionality, there was no hint of fastness about her, and even when she touched by implication on her way of life, she did so with a kind of frank simplicity, hiding nothing and ...
— People of Position • Stanley Portal Hyatt
... remembered garrulously that he had as yet seen nothing of the rubber-neck-boat-birds and suggested that they were even now graciously "hollering like an'thing" in some remote fastness of the park. So Patrick gave commands and the march was resumed with bliss now beaming on all the faces so lately clouded. Every turn of the endless walks brought new wonders to these little ones who were gazing for the first time upon the great world ...
— Little Citizens • Myra Kelly
... the Romans bade raise on high, Fierce in the fight. The warriors became 130 Widely dispersed. Some war took away; Some with labor their lives preserved Upon that march; some half-alive Fled to the fastness and life protected Behind the stone-cliffs, held their abode 135 Around the Danube; some drowning took off In the stream of the river at the end of their life. Then was of the proud ones the force in joy; They followed the foreigners ...
— Elene; Judith; Athelstan, or the Fight at Brunanburh; Byrhtnoth, or the Fight at Maldon; and the Dream of the Rood • Anonymous
... Faith; well knowing that to dispute the information of her brother, was in effect to close his mouth. "Now tell me of Conanchet, the present Narragansett Sachem—he who hath leagued with Metacom, and hath of late been driven from his fastness near ...
— The Wept of Wish-Ton-Wish • James Fenimore Cooper
... and presently stood down on the shore, near the edge of the stream, while the colonel, on the bank above the eddy, played the fish that had taken his bait and sought to depart with it to some watery fastness to devour it at his leisure. But the hook and tackle ...
— The Golf Course Mystery • Chester K. Steele
... the half-breed had been hiding in this mountain fastness. Talpers had supplied him with "grub" and weapons. He had moved camp once in a while for safety's sake, but had felt little fear of capture. As a trailer McFann had few equals, and he knew every swale in the prairie and every nook in the mountains ...
— Mystery Ranch • Arthur Chapman
... of country." It was in the immediate neighbourhood of the wild country to the north, half forest, half bog, the wood and hill of Aharlo, or Arlo, as Spenser writes it, which was the refuge and the "great fastness" of the Desmond rebellion. It was amid such scenes, amid such occupations, in such society and companionship, that the poet of the Faery Queen accomplished as much of his work as was given him to do. In one of his later poems, he thus contrasts the peace of England ...
— Spenser - (English Men of Letters Series) • R. W. Church
... found that as the snow bore our horses very well, traveling was infinitely easier than it was last fall, when the rocks and fallen timber had so much obstructed our march." But with the best of fortune, at least five days must be spent in getting through this dreadful fastness. Unfamiliar as they were with the route, the chances against getting through at all were tenfold. "During these five days, too, we have no chance of finding either grass or underwood for our horses, the snow being so deep. To proceed, ...
— Lewis and Clark - Meriwether Lewis and William Clark • William R. Lighton
... with willows, whence its name, "Willow Marsh." Across this isthmus Proctor hastily threw his regiment of about nine hundred regulars, while Tecumseh, with his brigade of about two thousand warriors, ambushed himself in the fastness of the swamp. On this occasion, as had he, indeed, on every other occasion of the kind, the Indian leader displayed a degree of generalship which stands without parallel in the annals of savage warfare. Pivoting his brigade on the right of the English ...
— Burl • Morrison Heady
... consents ("B to QB4"), and set about removing her child to a place of safety. She invokes the aid of Roqueblanc, an independent chieftain, who, spurred on by love for her, throws all his forces on to her side, offering at the same time his well-guarded fastness as a sanctuary for her boy. ("Castles.") Then the queen musters all her own troops and leads them into battle by the ...
— If I May • A. A. Milne
... situation that had placed him at enmity with her kinsfolk, yet he realized there was no help for this. The Morgans were a law unto themselves. Hardened men with a hardened code, they lived in their fastness like Ishmaelites. Counselled by their leader, old Duke Morgan, brains of the clan and influential enough to keep outside the penalties of the law themselves, their understanding with the outlaws of the Sinks was apparently complete, and the hospitality of one or another of their ...
— Nan of Music Mountain • Frank H. Spearman
... purses under his eyes become injected with hot blood; the man of peace vanishes, transfigured into a choleric and formidable man of war. Still, she does not come out of her absorption to look at him: her eyes are steadfast with a mechanical reflection of Richard's stead-fastness.) ...
— The Devil's Disciple • George Bernard Shaw
... them. I select for mention a few only, adding one or two not included by him. Karl the Great lies in the Unterberg, near Salzburg, and also in the Odenberg, where Woden himself, according to other legends, is said to be. Siegfried, the hero of the Nibelungen Lied, dwells in the mountain fastness of Geroldseck. Diedrich rests in the mountains of Alsace, his hand upon his sword, waiting till the Turk shall water his horses on the banks of the Rhine. On the Gruetli, where once they met to swear the oath which freed their country, lie the three founders ...
— The Science of Fairy Tales - An Inquiry into Fairy Mythology • Edwin Sidney Hartland
... the great life struggle which is before them. Such boys are apt to do well in the world. Many, however, after being released from the stores, imitate the ways of the clerks and salesmen. They affect a fastness which is painful to see in boys so young. They sport an abundance of flashy jewelry, patronize the cheap places of amusement, and are seen in the low concert saloons, and other vile dens of the city. It is not difficult to predict ...
— Lights and Shadows of New York Life - or, the Sights and Sensations of the Great City • James D. McCabe
... together on the Ertak for nearly two years, Earth time. We went through some tight places together. I remember our experience, shortly after I took over the Ertak, on the monstrous planet Callor, whose tiny, gentle people were attacked by strange, vapid Things that come down upon them from the fastness of the ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science January 1931 • Various
... America. At Fort Edward, where General Webb lay with five thousand men, the startling news had just been received that the French general, Montcalm, was moving up the Champlain Lake with an army "numerous as the leaves on the trees," with the forest fastness of Fort William Henry ...
— The Worlds Greatest Books - Vol. II: Fiction • Arthur Mee, J. A. Hammerton, Eds.
... sennight strove ye. In swimming he topped thee, had more of main! Him at morning-tide billows bore to the Battling Reamas, whence he hied to his home so dear beloved of his liegemen, to land of Brondings, fastness fair, where his folk he ruled, town and treasure. In triumph o'er thee Beanstan's bairn {8b} his boast achieved. So ween I for thee a worse adventure — though in buffet of battle thou brave hast been, in struggle grim, — if Grendel's ...
— Beowulf • Anonymous
... weary of the long struggle, were willing to return to the bosom of the Church if only the cup (calix), and thus communion under both kinds (sub utraque), were guaranteed to them, with two or three secondary matters. Not so the Taborites, who drew their name from a mountain fastness which they fortified and called Mount Tabor. These, the Ultras, the democratic radical party, separating themselves off as early as 1419, had left Huss and his teaching very far behind. Ignoring the whole historical development ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... climbed to their dark fastness, and of those who came none had ever shone with such blinding radiance ...
— Rosemary in Search of a Father • C. N. Williamson
... around seemed to me like the shadow of death—especially so, from the peril we were in through the deadly feud existing at the time between the Indians and white men. I penetrated for full a quarter of a mile into this fastness in a lateral direction, and, in doing so, suddenly startled two immense white birds of the adjutant species, which were standing in a swamp surrounded by majestic cedar trees. I could easily have brought one down with my rifle, but I thought it wanton cruelty to do so. They were, I should ...
— An Englishman's Travels in America - His Observations Of Life And Manners In The Free And Slave States • John Benwell
... error is seldom expelled from philosophy by a single victory. It retreats slowly, defends every inch of ground, and often, after it has been driven from the open country, retains a footing in some remote fastness. The essences of individuals were an unmeaning figment arising from a misapprehension of the essences of classes, yet even Locke, when he extirpated the parent error, could not shake himself free from that which was its fruit. He distinguished two sorts ...
— A System Of Logic, Ratiocinative And Inductive • John Stuart Mill
... directly on the trail of the party. The alarm was given; they all came to a halt, and held a council of war. Some conjectured that the band of Indians, whose trail they had discovered in the neighborhood of the stray horse, had been lying in wait for them in some secret fastness of the mountains; and were about to attack them on the open plain, where they would have no shelter. Preparations were immediately made for defence; and a scouting party sent off to reconnoitre. They soon came galloping ...
— The Adventures of Captain Bonneville - Digested From His Journal • Washington Irving
... turned his back upon the village of Mbonga and melted away into the leafy fastness ...
— Tarzan of the Apes • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... was sleeping. There seemed no chance of breakfast for some time, so I sauntered down to the water-front. The Chinamen were already busy in their shops. The sky had still the pallor of dawn, and there was a ghostly silence on the lagoon. Ten miles away the island of Murea, like some high fastness of the ...
— The Moon and Sixpence • W. Somerset Maugham
... the billowy archduke would have no little difficulty in recovering her from this fastness; and since she was assured that this green wood life was the very thing the princess needed, she was resolved to give him no help herself. She was pleased to learn that she was in no way responsible for ...
— The Terrible Twins • Edgar Jepson
... I do not care how fine a road you may put me on, I want to know where it comes out. My text declares it: "The redeemed of the Lord come to Zion." You know what Zion was. That was the King's palace. It was a mountain fastness. It was impregnable. And so heaven is the fastness of the universe. No howitzer has long enough range to shell those towers. Let all the batteries of earth and hell blaze away; they can not break in those gates. Gibraltar was taken, Sebastopol was taken, ...
— New Tabernacle Sermons • Thomas De Witt Talmage
... bridge and were driving out among the parks and estates that cover the small islands, set like jewels among the white fastness of the river Neva. Here and there the river was solid ice, in other places the thin ice was decorated with a light ...
— The Red Cross Girls with the Russian Army • Margaret Vandercook
... these dim shapes passed to the left there came again the sight of the expanse across which the disarmed men in red had been marching. And then the black ruins, and then again the beleaguered white fastness of the Council. It appeared no longer a ghostly pile, but glowing amber in the sunlight, for a cloud shadow had passed. About it the pigmy struggle still hung in suspense, but now the red defenders ...
— The Sleeper Awakes - A Revised Edition of When the Sleeper Wakes • H.G. Wells
... Lacedaemon, koile Sparte, "hollow Sparta," under the sheltering walls of Taygetus, the broken and rugged forms of which were attributed to earthquake, but without proper walls of its own. In that natural fastness, or trap, or falcon's nest, it had no need of them, the falcon of the land, with the hamlets (polichnia) a hundred and more, dispersed over it, in jealously enforced seclusion from ...
— Plato and Platonism • Walter Horatio Pater
... practical lady felt that he was really a very good young man. His father liked him for his own sake; but as Adam Johnstone had been gay in his youth, in spite of his sober Scotch blood, even beyond the bounds of ordinary "fastness," the fact of his being fond of Brook was not of itself a guarantee that the latter was such a very good young man as his mother said that he was. Somehow or other Brook had hitherto managed to keep clear of any entanglement ...
— Adam Johnstone's Son • F. Marion Crawford
... a relief," he said, waving a graceful hand in a neatly limited gesture, which everybody's eyes followed, his own included. "It is a relief and a retreat. The windows open, the blinds closed—that is as it should be. It is a retreat, a fastness, a bastion against the heat's assault. For me, a quiet room—a quiet room and a book, a volume in the hand, held lightly between the fingers. A volume of poems, lines metrical and cadenced; something by a sound Victorian. We have no ...
— Penrod • Booth Tarkington
... passionate refutation the Senior Surgeon burst out laughing,—boisterously, hilariously like a crazy school-boy. Bluntly from an overhanging ledge of rock the echo of his laugh came mocking back at him. Down from some unvisioned mountain fastness the echo of that echo came wafting faintly ...
— The White Linen Nurse • Eleanor Hallowell Abbott
... had reached their harbor in the land of the Greeks over the fastness 250 of flood, they left their vessels, their olden water-homes, lashed by the sea, bound with anchors, to await upon the surging deep the fate of the men, when the warrior queen with her band of heroes 255 should again seek the eastern ways. Many a woven corselet, trusty ...
— The Elene of Cynewulf • Cynewulf
... essential benefits to Ireland. On the other hand, those who had hitherto opposed them in vain redoubled their efforts, and became exceedingly clamorous. Then it was that Lord North found it necessary to come out of his fastness, and to interpose between the contending parties. In this character of mediator, he declared, that, if anything beyond the first six resolutions should be attempted, he would oppose the whole, but that, if we rested there, the original motions should have his support. On this a sort of convention ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. VI. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... tryin' to be an outlaw in this damned dude-ridden country," wailed the disappointed Weaver. "Outlaws usual have a den or a cave or a mountain fastness, or somethin', anyhow—accordin' to all the literchoor I've read on the subject. If 'Firebrand's' got one, he's mighty ...
— 'Firebrand' Trevison • Charles Alden Seltzer
... the rescue, and the enemy retreated. Alfred, careful of the city and its means of defence, built a stronghold—very possibly in the interval between these two invasions—upon the high ground that the Briton had chosen for his fastness, and on which the Castle rose in after-days. Rather more than a hundred years later Athelstan strengthened the city by repairing the Roman walls. But it is with an event of greater importance that ...
— Devon, Its Moorlands, Streams and Coasts • Rosalind Northcote
... and Washington improved the time to fall back to Northcastle, five miles, where, in the rocky fastness, he could defy the whole British army. To add to his advantages, the day on which the British commander decided upon an attack, after the arrival of reinforcements, a violent rain set in, and continued through the day, rendering an attack impossible, so that the Americans ...
— From Farm House to the White House • William M. Thayer
... within the icy domes Of yon far Schreckhorn—ay, or higher, where, Veil'd since eternity, the Jungfrau soars, Still to the tyrant would I make my way; With twenty comrades minded like myself, I'd lay his fastness level with the earth! And if none follow me, and if you all, In terror for your homesteads and your herds, Bow in submission to the tyrant's yoke, Round me I'll call the herdsmen on the hills, And there beneath heaven's ...
— Wilhelm Tell - Title: William Tell • Johann Christoph Friedrich von Schiller
... small islands, among which Brownsea is conspicuous. Here we stood leaning over the northern battlement contemplating the face of a delightful country, smiling in peace,—from the stern and rugged fastness of war. ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction No. 485 - Vol. 17, No. 485, Saturday, April 16, 1831 • Various
... the night, all spake the language of the God of the oppressed. He was seldom seen in a large company, and never drank a drop of ardent spirits. Like John the Baptist, when he had delivered his message, he would retire to the fastness of the mountain, or seek the desert, where he could meditate ...
— History of the Negro Race in America from 1619 to 1880. Vol. 2 (of 2) - Negroes as Slaves, as Soldiers, and as Citizens • George Washington Williams
... old legend, within the trunks of trees and perished with their homes. So it was an impious act to destroy a tree without cause. This nymph of the woods has emerged from the tree-trunk home or from some rocky fastness and taken the urn of a naiad, a sister nymph of brook and fountain, to give drink to the gentle, confident fawn that is her charge. The little animal is lapping the stream that flows from the overturned vase. This study in white marble follows tradition ...
— The Sculpture and Mural Decorations of the Exposition • Stella G. S. Perry
... promontory, and almost surrounded by the ocean, was the den of a pirate named Angria, whose ships had long been the terror of the Arabian seas. Admiral Watson, who commanded the English squadron, burned Angria's fleet, while Clive attacked the fastness by land. The place soon fell, and a booty of a hundred and fifty thousand pounds sterling ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 2 of 8 • Various
... one being left to look to the bodies of the slain—neither to bury nor remove them. Like the battle-field, too, it becomes the haunt of wolves and other wild beasts; who find among the fallen trunks, if not food, a fastness securing them from the pursuit both of hound and hunter. Here in hollow log the black she-bear gives birth to her loutish cubs, training them to climb over the decaying trunks; here the lynx and red couguar choose their cunning convert; here the racoon rambles over his beaten ...
— The Wild Huntress - Love in the Wilderness • Mayne Reid
... amounted in the aggregate during that time to 365. They had crossed the Tugela, they had relieved Ladysmith, they had forced Laing's Nek, and now it was to them that the honour had fallen of following the enemy into this last fastness. Whatever criticism may be directed against some episodes in the Natal campaign, it must never be forgotten that to Buller and to his men have fallen some of the hardest tasks of the war, and that these tasks have always in the end been successfully carried out. The controversy about the ...
— The Great Boer War • Arthur Conan Doyle
... of safety.] Refuge — N. refuge, sanctuary, retreat, fastness; acropolis; keep, last resort; ward; prison &c 752; asylum, ark, home, refuge for the destitute; almshouse^; hiding place &c (ambush) 530; sanctum sanctorum &c (privacy) 893 [Lat.]. roadstead, anchorage; breakwater, mole, port, haven; ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... boat might have been cut off. Away dashed the gallant fellows after her. Whatever might happen, I resolved not to attempt to escape myself unless I could bring off the rest of the boats or the survivors of their people with me, though, from the fastness of my own boat, I might possibly have effected that object. My men behaved admirably, though exposed to so hot a fire; not a murmur escaped them at the delay, while they lay on their oars waiting for the appearance of the missing boat. The other two boats I saw coming on, and they soon caught ...
— Hurricane Hurry • W.H.G. Kingston
... that God had made her to be his mate. Suddenly a white cliff loomed up on the beach before them and from its depths came a tremendous knocking, as though some one were endeavouring to escape from a hopeless fastness of stone. ...
— Master of the Vineyard • Myrtle Reed
... look in winter, remote as it is from the haunts of men. A fitting refuge, it might be, for a great spirit heavy with the sins of the world below. Such a place might have been chosen, in the olden time, for a monastery—a gray fastness built against the black forest over the crag looking down upon the green clumps of spruces against the snow. Some vague longing for such a refuge was in Cynthia's heart as she gazed upon that silent place, and then the waters had already begun to run westward—the waters of ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... in a dim romantic laboratory may light upon a placid formula and, like Aladdin, roll back the portals of the enchanted fastness with ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 159, December 8, 1920 • Various
... escorted by a chosen band, they were assailed by a wild and warlike race, inhabitants of an island called Sarrope, in the midst of a great lake, who put the warriors to flight, bore the maidens captive to their watery fastness, espoused them all, and, as we are assured, "loved them above ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, August, 1863, No. 70 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various
... ablest men that Ulster yielded; and, by the confession of gentlemen of the first plantation, had oftener put them to their defence than any enemy they had to do with, not suffering them to cut a bough or build a cabin without blows. When Tyrone was driven to his fastness, Glenconkeine, O'Cahan sent him 100 horse and 300 foot, and yet made good his own country against the army lying round about him, adding, that his defection 'did undo the earl, who, as he had his country sure behind him, cared ...
— The Land-War In Ireland (1870) - A History For The Times • James Godkin
... filled the place and the rich picture of the stage glowed beneath it, Laura found herself face to face with the strange inference that the evil of Selina's nature made her wish—since she had given herself to it—to bring her sister to her own colour by putting an appearance of 'fastness' upon her. The girl said to herself that she would have succeeded, in the cynical view of London; and to her troubled spirit the immense theatre had a myriad eyes, eyes that she knew, eyes that would know her, that would see her sitting ...
— A London Life; The Patagonia; The Liar; Mrs. Temperly • Henry James
... own, Mrs. Lovegrove. It is all of less than no consequence to me, except for the sake of Cedar Lodge, how a certain gentleman spends his time. But Peachie's interests must be protected. With an establishment such as ours a good name is everything. 'You cannot be too particular; for any talk of fastness, and the place must go down,' as she ...
— The Far Horizon • Lucas Malet
... This fastness was called La Roque de Tayac, because the village of Tayac faces it on the other side of the river. Although only a few fragments of the masonry that was formerly attached to the rock remain, the chambers ...
— Two Summers in Guyenne • Edward Harrison Barker
... walk. But Farringford, lying low in the shelter of the hills, proved too hot in summer; Freshwater was discovered by tourists too often inquisitive about the great; and so, after ten or twelve years, he was searching for another home, some remoter fastness set on higher ground. This he discovered on the borders of Surrey and Sussex near Haslemere, where Black Down rises to a height of 900 feet above the sea and commands a wide prospect over the blue expanse of the ...
— Victorian Worthies - Sixteen Biographies • George Henry Blore
... of wild emotion Strike the ocean Of the poet's soul, erelong From each cave and rocky fastness, In its vastness, Floats some fragment ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... the forest has been of use to Jacques, not only warming him with fallen wood, but giving him shelter in days of sore trouble, when my lord of the chateau, with all his troopers and trumpets, had been beaten from field after field into some ultimate fastness, or lay overseas in an English prison. In these dark days, when the watch on the church steeple saw the smoke of burning villages on the sky-line, or a clump of spears and fluttering pennon drawing nigh ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. XXII (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... Cirta in Numidia at a time when the dusky chief there—one named Hazim Rhan—had made a haul of six malcontents who I understood had conspired against his authority. It seems that these rebels had a leader who had succeeded in escaping to his desert fastness, and whom Hazim Rhan greatly desired to capture. To gain this object he commanded the six prisoners to betray their leader; this they refused to do, whereupon the dusky prince ordered their ears to be cut off and threatened them that unless they spoke on the morrow, their tongues would ...
— "Unto Caesar" • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... the migration was effected—with what blending of statecraft, heroism, treachery, and cruelty—is a subject which does not come within the purview of a history of the Church. Suffice it to say that, at the date to which our narrative has now arrived, Rauparaha was securely settled in the island fastness of Kapiti, while his Ngatitoas had their habitations on the mainland opposite. They had ravaged the south of the island, as the Ngapuhi under Hongi had devastated the north; and Rauparaha was the most powerful and influential personage in ...
— A History of the English Church in New Zealand • Henry Thomas Purchas
... my dear," he told his spouse, in his fastness under a gnarled tree root. "However, there's no objection to the children having a look if it amuses them." He cast a discriminating eye round the larder, and frowned heavily. "Hell! you don't mean to say that we've got that ...
— Mufti • H. C. (Herman Cyril) McNeile
... there retired To his last fastness; overthrown by few. Him a laborious thrust of roadway slew. Then man to play devorant straight ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... introspection. She made a difference. How strange for him to realize that! He felt grateful to her. He had been forced into outlawry; she had been stolen from her people and carried into captivity. They had met in the river fastness, he to instil hope into her despairing life, she to be the means, perhaps, of keeping him from sinking to the level of her captors. He became conscious of a strong and beating desire to see ...
— The Lone Star Ranger • Zane Grey |
