"Fretted" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Owyhee. Eastward, with devious course, among the Wind-river Mountains, Through the Sweet-water Valley precipitate leaps the Nebraska; And to the south, from Fontaine-qui-bout and the Spanish sierras, Fretted with sands and rocks, and swept by the wind of the desert, Numberless torrents, with ceaseless sound, descend to the ocean, Like the great chords of a harp, in loud and solemn vibrations. Spreading ...
— Elson Grammer School Literature, Book Four. • William H. Elson and Christine Keck
... with soft ooze and fringed with arrowy sedge, As once I wandered in the morning sun, With reeking sandal and superfluous gun, How oft, as Fancy whispered in the gale, Thou wast the Avon of her flattering tale! Ye hills, whose foliage, fretted on the skies, Prints shadowy arches on their evening dyes, How should my song with holiest charm invest Each dark ravine and forest-lifting crest! How clothe in beauty each familiar scene, Till all was classic on my ...
— The Poetical Works of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Complete • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... Corner; but on the contrary, some of Mrs. Knight's visitors brought with them large, old-fashioned work-bags, from which the ends of the polished knitting-needles were discernible; while another apologized for the magnitude of her work, saying that "her man had fretted about his trousers until she herself began to think it was time to finish them; and so when she found Miss Mason wasn't to be there, she had just brought ...
— The English Orphans • Mary Jane Holmes
... her father's, where she remained until her death, and where, we read, "with parents and grandparents, Mary found a home whose blessings filled her heart." Being an only child, with four elderly persons, Mary was likely to be too much petted or too much fretted. We are glad to know that she was not fretted or over-trained. In a letter of retrospect, she writes, "For many years a word of blame never reached my ears." An early friend of the family writes, "It has been said that Mary was much indulged; ...
— Daughters of the Puritans - A Group of Brief Biographies • Seth Curtis Beach
... long, Jacqueline had sustained existence. Her nourishment was ever the latest "frisson," to use her own word. She craved thrills of emotion, ecstatic thrills. Naturally, then, three weeks of ocean had fretted the restless lass as ...
— The Missourian • Eugene P. (Eugene Percy) Lyle
... conditions of existence, and in time modify the almost immutable nature of man. For this new spirit, this love of the fact and of truth, this passion for reality will do away with the foolish fears and futile hopes which have fretted the childhood of our race, and will slowly but surely establish on broad foundations the Kingdom of Man upon Earth. For that is the meaning and purpose of the change which is now coming over the world. The faiths and convictions ...
— The Man Shakespeare • Frank Harris
... meet a constant run of company more choice than at a watering-place, and all without any expense. When your cousin comes back to town, be sure to let me know, that I may call upon her. Susan Goldsborough is fretted enough that she was not apprised of her being here, and so are some of the Longacres; they ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII. No. 3. March 1848 • Various
... Manasseh, and Benjamin left, was now barely equal in area and population to Judah. Their tribute weighed heavily on the Israelites; passing armies had laid waste their fields, and townsmen, merchants, and nobles alike, deprived of their customary resources, fretted with impatience under the burdens and humiliations imposed on them by their defeat; convinced of their helplessness, they again looked beyond their own borders for some nation or individual who should restore to them their ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 7 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... every one of his commissions. And in the midst of all this the clock stopped. That settled the matter for Aunt Tildy. She neglected the pudding, she forgot the pies, and she let the turkey bake and bake in the overheated oven while she fretted about that clock; and when it was finally set going, after long and careful investigation by Eph, and frantic but successful attempts on the part of Aunt Tildy to keep the heaven-born inventor from ruining it forever, it ...
— Good Cheer Stories Every Child Should Know • Various
... undisturbed foundations, there will be the least heard of loquacious and noisy expressions of its power; which expressions arise most, not where the current is most violent, but where (being possibly the weakest) it is most fretted with resistance. ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey
... imagine to ourselves His Godlike eye penetrating at that moment every churchyard and every grave: the mausoleums of the great—the grassy sods of the poor; the marble cenotaph of the noble and illustrious slumbering under fretted aisle and cathedral canopy—the myriads whose requiem is chanted by the bleak winds of the desert or the chimes of the ocean! The child carried away in the twinkling of an eye—the blossom just opening, and then frost-blighted; the aged sire, cut down like a ...
— Memories of Bethany • John Ross Macduff
... narrowness and regularity. The little square loopholes in the gables lifted their diminutive eyebrows in contempt; even the green door looked blank and scowling, as though at a possible rival. I fancy the housekeeper fretted at the larger curtain covering this wide, unwinking eye, and the extra labor required on cleaning-days. But this one great square window was the sole redeeming feature beneath the roof of the ancient farm-house. Beneath the roof, I say. The roof itself was, and is, and ever shall be the great ...
— Homes And How To Make Them • Eugene Gardner
... of Ann, it was banishing the things it could not assimilate. Those hurt looks, fretted looks, that hard look, already Kate had come to know them, would come, but always to go as Ann would swiftly raise her head to get the song of a bird, or yield her face to the caress of a soft spring breeze. Katie was grateful to the benign breezes, rich with the messages of opening buds, full, ...
— The Visioning • Susan Glaspell
... The crystal drops, That trickle down the branches, fast congealed, Shoot into pillars of pellucid length, And prop the pile they but adorned before. Here grotto within grotto safe defies The sunbeam; there, embossed and fretted wild, The growing wonder takes a thousand shapes Capricious, in which fancy seeks in vain The likeness of some object ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 427 - Volume 17, New Series, March 6, 1852 • Various
... experience and naval skill of Raleigh received their full recognition. From the very first he was treated with the highest consideration. Howard wrote to Cecil on April 16—and Essex on the 28th used exactly the same words—'I pray you, hasten away Sir Walter Raleigh.' They fretted to be gone, and Raleigh was not to be found; malignant spirits were not wanting to accuse him of design in his absence, of a wish to prove himself indispensable. But fortunately we possess his letters, and we see that he was well and appropriately occupied. ...
— Raleigh • Edmund Gosse
... mind he had the good fortune one day to meet with an excellent Divine who inhabited a neighbouring parish, and was possessed of no less a sum than L29,000. This Ecclesiastic, seeing his whilom jocund Face fretted with the Marks of Care, put a hand gently ...
— On Nothing & Kindred Subjects • Hilaire Belloc
... whole town being in the act of climbing the further cliff, to reach the downs on which the races were to be held. The green hillside was black with trudging spectators and the long sky line was fretted with them. When I say there was no one at the inn, I forget the gentleman at the door who informed me positively that he would give me no breakfast; he seemed to have staid at home from the races expressly to give himself this pleasure. But I went further and fared better, and ...
— The Galaxy - Vol. 23, No. 1 • Various
... fingers and squinted through. Next he retreated across the room and stood with his legs apart in the very attitude of wisdom. He cast a stern eye upon the picture and gravely tapped his chin. At last when the artist was fretted to an extremity, F—— came forward and so cordially praised the picture that the artist, being now warmed and comforted, presently excused himself in a high excitement and rushed away to start another picture while the pleasant spell was ...
— There's Pippins And Cheese To Come • Charles S. Brooks
... I envy solid folk Who sit of evenings by the fire, After their work and doze and smoke, And are not fretted by desire. ...
— Spirits in Bondage • (AKA Clive Hamilton) C. S. Lewis
... acted the Aricie to Mme. de Stael's Phedre. This life that seems to us so fascinating, has been described too often to need repetition. It had its tumultuous elements, its passionate undercurrents, its romantic episodes. But in spite of its attractions Mme. de Stael fretted under the peaceful shades of Coppet. Its limited horizon pressed upon her. The silence of the snowcapped mountains chilled her. She looked upon their solitary grandeur with "magnificent horror." The repose of nature was an ...
— The Women of the French Salons • Amelia Gere Mason
... woods, with a cheery camp fire blazing close to where the restless river fretted and ...
— In Camp on the Big Sunflower • Lawrence J. Leslie
... very walls are wrought into universal ornament; encrusted with tracery, and scooped into niches, crowded with the statues of saints and martyrs. Stone seems, by the cunning labour of the chisel, to have been robbed of its weight and density; suspended aloft as if by magic; and the fretted roof achieved with the wonderful minuteness and airy security ...
— Lectures Delivered in America in 1874 • Charles Kingsley
... yes! I ust to fret about everything—fretted for fear it would blow and for fear it wouldn't blow." His eyes were on the shifting green waves. "I never put down a net nor a lobster-pot that I didn't see 'em bein' chewed up or knocked to pieces. I'd see a shark a-swimmin' right through a big hole—rip-p—tear. I could see it as plain as ...
— Uncle William - The Man Who Was Shif'less • Jennette Lee
... and attracted the notice of my father when he was in that part of the State in 1861. He was never known to tire, and, though quiet and sensible in general and afraid of nothing, yet if not regularly exercised, he fretted a good deal especially in a crowd of horses. But there can be no better description of this famous horse than the one given by his master. It was dictated to his daughter Agnes at Lexington, Virginia, after the war, in response to some artist who had ...
— Recollections and Letters of General Robert E. Lee • Captain Robert E. Lee, His Son
... voice of God [Hageman]; green calm below, blue quietness above [Whittier]; hanging in a golden chain this pendant World [Paradise Lost]; nothing in nature is unbeautiful [Tennyson]; silently as a dream the fabric rose [Cowper]; some touch of nature's genial glow [Scott]; this majestical roof fretted with golden fire [Hamlet]; through knowledge we behold the ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... trace of cloud on that sunshine. They are redolent of the "olden time;" and as they fall softly on the ear, the antique hall, with its groined roof, and mullioned window, glowing with rich heraldic devices, through which the many-tinted lights fall tenderly on arch and pillar, and elaborately fretted walls, studded with ancestral armour, rises up before us; and with the melting tones of the lute, mingles the low, clear voice of a gentle maiden, whose small foot and brocaded train are just seen from behind yonder deeply sculptured oaken screen. What innocence ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 364, February 1846 • Various
... energy and fulfilment came; when I voluntarily doubled, trebled, quadrupled the tasks he set, to please him as I thought, his kindness became sternness; the light changed in his eyes from a beam to a spark; he fretted, he opposed, he curbed me imperiously; the more I did, the harder I worked, the less he seemed content. Sarcasms of which the severity amazed and puzzled me, harassed my ears; then flowed out the bitterest inuendoes against the "pride of intellect." I was vaguely threatened ...
— Villette • Charlotte Bronte
... that, when it was built, it rose in the midst of other work fanciful and beautiful as itself; that every dwelling-house in the middle ages was rich with the same ornaments and quaint with the same grotesques which fretted the porches or animated the gargoyles of the cathedral; that what we now regard with doubt and wonder, as well as with delight, was then the natural continuation, into the principal edifice of the city, ...
— Stones of Venice [introductions] • John Ruskin
... the moment inflicted a slight wound on Isaac's hand. The cut was not serious, but Isaac would not allow it to be properly treated, and subsequently died from an attack of brain fever. The War Chief was sorely grieved at the result of his hasty action, and fretted about it until the end of his days. He is said to have hung the dirk up in his room and to have often wept as he gazed upon it. The other source of trouble to Brant was the revolt against his rule of a small minority among the tribes. This movement was led by Brant's ...
— The War Chief of the Six Nations - A Chronicle of Joseph Brant - Volume 16 (of 32) in the series Chronicles of Canada • Louis Aubrey Wood
... converse about books. Nor, though the faculty had been but little cultivated, was he devoid of an eye for the curious in nature. On directing his attention, one morning, to a well-marked impression of lepidodendron, which delicately fretted with its lozenge-shaped network one of the planes of the stone before me, he began to describe, with a minuteness of observation not common among working men, certain strange forms which had attracted his notice when employed among the grey flagstones of Forfarshire. I long after recognised ...
— My Schools and Schoolmasters - or The Story of my Education. • Hugh Miller
... home worthy of being loved. But when he made up his mind to go he left all his home cares behind; and, like Abraham of old, he said to these servants of life: "Stay ye here while I go yonder to worship; and I will return again unto you." He consequently never fretted about home in his absence; but was habitually calm and self-possessed. Even a rainy day or high water did not interfere with the equilibrium of ...
— Life and Labors of Elder John Kline, the Martyr Missionary - Collated from his Diary by Benjamin Funk • John Kline
... it quickened us all with a new life. The horses fretted for their heads, and went off at a gallop, needing no cluck or spur. We pulled up at the chateau well before the luncheon hour. D'ri took the horses, and I was shown to the library, where the count came shortly, to give ...
— D'Ri and I • Irving Bacheller
... its western portal may still be read, graven on a brazen plate, the words, 'Come unto Me, all ye that labour and are heavy-laden, and I will give you rest.' For four hundred years noisy crowds have fought, and sorrowed, and fretted, beneath the dim inscription in an unknown tongue; and no eye has looked at it, nor any heart responded. It is but too sad a symbol of the reception which Christ's offers meet amongst men, and—blessed be His name!—its ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... the ice. Lucy's backwardness in music had long been a grievance with her mother, who, as she lay in bed and listened to the girl practicing below had fretted over the thought that she could obtain no good teacher for her in Marsden. Mrs. Porson's offer was therefore too tempting to be refused, and as it was necessary to appear to reciprocate the kindness of that lady, she determined to make an ...
— Through the Fray - A Tale of the Luddite Riots • G. A. Henty
... saw nothing of Gid. It was known that he was at home, for Jim Taylor had told the news of his return. At this neglect the Major was fretted, and one morning he sent word to Gid that he must come at once and give an account of himself. It was nearly noon when the old fellow arrived. Clumsily he dismounted from his horse, and meekly he made his way into the yard, tottering ...
— An Arkansas Planter • Opie Percival Read
... it encounters an obstacle to its plans, regards that obstacle as an enemy, and remarks in language brutally frank, though not wholly elegant: "We will lick him first and then decide who is right." In 1770 King George III, who fretted at all seasons at the slowness with which he was able to break down the ascendency of the Whigs, manipulated the Government so as to make Lord North Prime Minister. Lord North was a servant, one might say a lackey, after the ...
— George Washington • William Roscoe Thayer
... down a residential street. Underfoot the pavement trembled at a distant blast. They skirted a crack, kept going. Occasional golems stood in awkward poses or lay across sidewalks. One, clad in black, tilted awkwardly in a gothic entry of fretted stone work. "I guess there won't be any church this ...
— It Could Be Anything • John Keith Laumer
... picture on the wall, went farther, Rose knew; but whether into the past or the future, or whether it was searching into the reason of this new eagerness of hers to be away and at work, she could not tell. However it might be, it vexed and fretted her, and she showed it by sudden impatient movements, which recalled ...
— Janet's Love and Service • Margaret M Robertson
... justice in the sense of wrong discernible upon her features when the very self looked forth from them. All through his life John Hewett had suffered from the same impulse of revolt; less sensitively constructed than his daughter, uncalculating, inarticulate, he fumed and fretted away his energies in a conflict with forces ludicrously personified. In the matter of his second marriage he was seen at his best, generously defiant of social cruelties; but self-knowledge was denied him, and circumstances condemned his life to futility. Clara inherited his temperament; transferred ...
— The Nether World • George Gissing
... some weird Mendelssohnian music, and when the note of plaintiveness and mystery had been well established, the curtain rose upon the great armoury of the castle, a dim indistinguishable light shining upon its fretted roof and masses of faintly gleaming steel. The scene which followed, in which the Countess Hilda, disguised as the traditional phantom of the Hohenzollerns, whose appearance bodes misfortune and death to those who behold it, throws herself across the path of her rival in the hope of driving her ...
— Miss Bretherton • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... in there," fretted Grandma Padgett. The woman with her arms over the half door had ...
— Old Caravan Days • Mary Hartwell Catherwood
... Josh rowed steadily on till he was skirting round the edge of the perpendicular mass of rock about whose base the waves foamed and fretted, as if weary with their efforts at trying to wash it down. The birds squealed and hissed, and now and then one uttered a doleful wail as it swept here and there, showing its pearly grey breast and the delicate white feathers ...
— Menhardoc • George Manville Fenn
... to seek about for lovers, and of a class whose sensibilities were shocked by this lapse. Her mother looked mollified, and gazed at the girl's pretty face with satisfaction in its comeliness for a few moments in silence. She was a delicate woman, fretted by her nerves and the difficulty of making ends meet, but she had real pleasure in her two girls, whose good looks and clever taste in their clothes, made them ...
— Women of the Country • Gertrude Bone
... the ceiling's fretted height, Each pannel in achievements clothing, Rich windows that exclude the light, And passages that lead ...
— Memoirs of the Court of Queen Elizabeth • Lucy Aikin
... then slides on again, slipping and trickling over his stone cloak. It splashes from the lead conduit of a gargoyle, and falls from it in turmoil on the stones in the Cathedral square. Where are the people, and why does the fretted steeple sweep about in the sky? Boom! The sound swings against the rain. Boom, again! After it, only water rushing in the gutters, and the turmoil from the spout of the gargoyle. Silence. ...
— Some Imagist Poets - An Anthology • Richard Aldington
... these letters, and were much puzzled, as the reports from the Savannah Congregation spoke only of pleasant relations with the Salzburgers, and requests for union of the two forces. Probably Bolzius was fretted by their refusal to join him, even as the leaders at Halle resented the independence of Herrnhut, and after Gronau's death, in 1745, the pastors of Ebenezer steadily opposed the efforts of the Moravians to recommence a ...
— The Moravians in Georgia - 1735-1740 • Adelaide L. Fries
... the wonders of life, for "there is no work, nor device, nor knowledge, nor wisdom in the grave, whither thou goest!"—to the graceful building, which in its perfect proportion transcended the rude forms of nature, the fretted gothic and massy saracenic pile, to the stupendous arch and glorious dome, the fluted column with its capital, Corinthian, Ionic, or Doric, the peristyle and fair entablature, whose harmony of form is to the eye as musical concord to ...
— The Last Man • Mary Shelley
... sitting on the hickory before my door, so had I my chuckle or suppressed warble which he might hear out of my nest. My days were not days of the week, bearing the stamp of any heathen deity, nor were they minced into hours and fretted by the ticking of a clock; for I lived like the Puri Indians, of whom it is said that "for yesterday, today, and tomorrow they have only one word, and they express the variety of meaning by pointing backward for yesterday forward for tomorrow, and overhead for the passing day." This was ...
— Walden, and On The Duty Of Civil Disobedience • Henry David Thoreau
... clouds. Looking westward the dark river wound away to the sea, ringed here and there by the highly decorated bridges of light-toned granite peculiar to Maasau. Revonde, in the sunshine, shone in the colours of a moss-grown stone, gray and green, the twin ridges on which it stood fretted and embossed to their summits with the palaces and pinnacles, the spires and towers, and gardens of the spreading city. The Grand Duke, as they rounded the mounting road to the parade ground, looked back upon Revonde with a lingering glance. Selpdorf who was seated opposite ...
— A Modern Mercenary • Kate Prichard and Hesketh Vernon Hesketh-Prichard
... affairs—a—touch of gout, say, in the one, and a touch of willfulness in the other—happen to bring them to the same spot. Sir Hugo was an easy-tempered man, tolerant both of differences and defects; but a point of view different from his own concerning the settlement of the family estates fretted him rather more than if it had concerned Church discipline or the ballot, and faults were the less venial for belonging to a person whose existence was inconvenient to him. In no case could Grandcourt have ...
— Daniel Deronda • George Eliot
... may only beat like rain against its crystal walls, yet the souls of Merimna's heroes were half aware of some sorrow far away as some sleeper feels that some one is chilled and cold yet knows not in his sleep that it is he. And they fretted a little in their starry home. Then unseen there drifted earthward across the setting sun the souls of Welleran, Soorenard, Mommolek, Rollory, Akanax, and young Iraine. Already when they reached Merimna's ramparts ...
— The Sword of Welleran and Other Stories • Lord Dunsany
... and went on to say that he was uneasy about his father's health. John Jacks had fallen of late into a habit of worry about things great and small, as though age were suddenly telling upon him. He fretted over public affairs; he suffered from the death of old friends, especially that of John Bright, whom he had held in affectionate regard for a lifetime. Irene was glad to hear this expression of anxiety. For it sometimes seemed ...
— The Crown of Life • George Gissing
... Peter,—Where are, and what has become of, you? I have received no letters for these two years, and I have fretted myself to death. I received your letter about the rascally court-martial; but perhaps you have not heard that the little scoundrel is dead. Yes, Peter; he brought your letter out in his own ship, and that was his death-warrant. I met him at a private party. He brought up your name— I allowed him ...
— Peter Simple and The Three Cutters, Vol. 1-2 • Frederick Marryat
... once-white lutestring negligee of their mother's, which three of them had laid their accounts with figuring in at the approaching celebration. The old gentleman was the only one in the family who took the least of the general happiness. He had got into a habit of being fretted about everything that happened, and he could not entirely divest himself of it even upon this occasion. His parsimonious turns, too, had considerably increased; and his only criterion of judging of anything was according to what it ...
— Marriage • Susan Edmonstone Ferrier
... puppies, and, would you believe it! he drowned every one of them—said they were ill-bred, or something. And they weren't, they couldn't have been; they were perfectly beautiful, and my darling Scrub fretted herself nearly to death after them. I begged almost on my knees that he would leave her one, and he wouldn't." Her eyes are now full of tears. "He is a beast!" says she. This last word seems almost comic, coming ...
— The Hoyden • Mrs. Hungerford
... that they will not be permitted to bring the people into the promised land—a warning which was followed soon afterwards by the death of Aaron on Mount Hor. Edom haughtily refused Israel permission to pass through her land (xx.). Sore at heart, they fretted against God and Moses, and deadly serpents were sent among them in chastisement, but the penitent and believing were restored by the power of God and the intercession of Moses. Then Israel turned north, and began her career of conquest by defeating Sihon, king of the ...
— Introduction to the Old Testament • John Edgar McFadyen
... shadowy recesses of fretted stone and admirably carved wood emanations seemed to rise as from the long-forgotten past—tons of incense burnt hundreds of years ago, and millions of closely packed supplicants, rich and poor, following each other in secula seculorum! Lady Caroline ...
— The Martian • George Du Maurier
... the refining moralities of Pope, the lofty errors of Lucretius, and the sublime relics of our "dead kings of melody." [Shakspeare and Milton] And over the hearth was a picture, taken in more prosperous days, of one who had been and was yet to the tenant of that abode, better than fretted roofs and glittering banquets, the objects of ambition, or even the immortality of fame. It was the face of one very young and beautiful, and the deep, tender eyes looked down, as with a watchful fondness, upon the lucubrator and his ...
— The Disowned, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... Lakes fretted into lagoons by thin white slivers of shingle; rivers full of tumbled and dishevelled logs; forests in green, in which the crimson maple leaf burns brightly; vast amphitheatres of cliff-like hills; mounds of the stark Laurentine rock pushing up through trees like bald heads ...
— Westward with the Prince of Wales • W. Douglas Newton
... are lowering me to the level of my cousins of the old world and turning me into that absurd creature, a king in exile. Their will be done! Peace to the late Emperor of Mauretania. He has strutted and fretted his hour ...
— The Teeth of the Tiger • Maurice Leblanc
... set on a rocky slope at the junction of the Min and the Yangtse. But how changed was the Great River since I crossed it at Lung-kai, four hundred miles to the west. There it dashed furiously along, dammed in between precipitous cliffs and fretted to foam by rocky reefs. Now it flowed broad and deep and quiet between soft wooded banks, bearing many craft on ...
— A Wayfarer in China - Impressions of a trip across West China and Mongolia • Elizabeth Kendall
... noticing from which direction the sand had been thrown, and in a moment he was standing where the heap had been, which Charlie and Bub had shovelled away. Stooping down now, he saw where the earth had been fretted by the stone as it had been pulled out and in; then he placed his ear to the ground, and listened intently; instantly he glided from the cellar, and stood with folded ...
— The Cabin on the Prairie • C. H. (Charles Henry) Pearson
... letter over. Mahon fretted. He could see on its face the Division headquarters stamp—Lethbridge—but why all this ceremony and pother about an official note that came almost every day? He recalled suddenly that his wife would ...
— The Return of Blue Pete • Luke Allan
... once a living witness to the soul within—I could fancy that death may have sanctified it with even more beauty than this bust of the self-tormented young man shows. Have we not all seen the anguish of thought-fretted faces smoothed out by the ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... from before daybreak, church-bells—and Lucca abounds in belfries fretted tier upon tier, with galleries of delicate marble colonnettes, all ablaze in the ...
— The Italians • Frances Elliot
... start. He was the very picture of health and symmetry; when he flung up his head you'd think the blood was running from his nose, his nostrils were so ruddy bright. He cantered off in great impatience, and fretted and fumed because the little fellow on his back would be the master, and not let him have his play—down the slope, and round the corner by the trees. It was beautiful to watch him, his motions were so easy, so graceful. At ...
— The Kellys and the O'Kellys • Anthony Trollope
... the King to his fathers' place, Where the tombs of the Sun-born stand: Where the gray apes swing, and the peacocks preen On fretted pillar and jewelled screen, And the wild boar couch in the house of the Queen On the drift of the ...
— The Works of Rudyard Kipling One Volume Edition • Rudyard Kipling
... eager hands for the rare stuffs and precious stones devout men brought from overseas, finding a place for the best of every ordered craft; their shame an uncouth line or graceless arch, their glory each completed pinnacle and fretted spire; ever restoring, enlarging, repairing, spendthrift of money and time in the service of the ...
— The Gathering of Brother Hilarius • Michael Fairless
... a dark, dingy ante-room, luxuriously furnished with faded tapestry, and divans which lined the walls; and fretted and fidgeted, while the two girls watched him over their embroidery out of the corners of their eyes, and agreed that he was a very stupid person for showing no inclination ...
— Hypatia - or, New Foes with an Old Face • Charles Kingsley
... from feeling easy over their guest, and ardently wished that the girl's father would cut short his visit to France and return to take her back with him to America. And while these two worthy ladies worried and fretted, Opal Ledoux laughed ...
— One Day - A sequel to 'Three Weeks' • Anonymous
... bare-limbed Maenads in his train, Dionysus danced round the wine-jar on naked must-stained feet, while, satyr-like, the old Silenus sprawled upon the bloated skins, or shook that magic spear which was tipped with a fretted fir-cone, and wreathed with dark ivy. And no one came to trouble the artist at his work. No irresponsible chatter disturbed him. He was not worried by opinions. By the Ilyssus, says Arnold somewhere, there was no Higginbotham. ...
— Intentions • Oscar Wilde
... in height, and the rock immediately below them is steeply, but irregularly, scarped all round the hill. The long line of battlements which crowns the steep scarp on the east is broken only by the lofty towers and fretted domes of the noble palace of Raja Man Singh. On the opposite side, the line of battlements is relieved by the deep recess of the Urwahi valley, and by the zigzag and serrated parapets and loopholed bastions which flank the ...
— Rambles and Recollections of an Indian Official • William Sleeman
... far spent. Her mother, having been refused admittance, had fumed and fretted herself to sleep. The house was very still. She opened her window and looked out. Clouds obscured the stars, and it ...
— A Face Illumined • E. P. Roe
... high-pitched roof, shaking the water from her black locks as she ran, like a Skye terrier escaped from his bath. This attic was Maggie's favorite retreat on a wet day, when the weather was not too cold; here she fretted out all her ill humors, and talked aloud to the worm-eaten floors and the worm-eaten shelves, and the dark rafters festooned with cobwebs; and here she kept a Fetish which she punished for all her misfortunes. This was the trunk of a large wooden ...
— The Mill on the Floss • George Eliot
... ridiculous buoyancy of youth! What luckless pigs are we who moon and fret and grow besodden with the waters of our misfortunes! This cheeky corkiness of youth! Shove it under the fretted sea of trouble, and free it will twist, up it will bob. Weight it and drop it into the deepest pool; just when it should be drowned, pop! and it is again ...
— Once Aboard The Lugger • Arthur Stuart-Menteth Hutchinson
... prevailed upon the cautious Walley to dash across the river and make a desperate charge up the hill, and in at the back door of the town. But Walley was, after all, a merchant and not a soldier, and would not do it. Gering fretted on his chain, sure that Iberville was with the guns against the ships, and would return to harass his New Englanders soon. That evening it turned bitter cold, and without the ammunition promised by Phips, with little or no food and ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... not one of those in the mouths of the caves durst come near them, but lay still out of fear, some of the armed men girt on their armor, and by both their hands took hold of the chain by which the chests were let down, and went into the mouths of the caves, because they fretted that such delay was made by the robbers not daring to come out of the caves; and when they were at any of those mouths, they first killed many of those that were in the mouths with their darts, and afterwards ...
— The Antiquities of the Jews • Flavius Josephus
... there was in him that which transcended Forsyteism. For it is written that a Forsyte shall not love beauty more than reason; nor his own way more than his own health. And something beat within him in these days that with each throb fretted at the thinning shell. His sagacity knew this, but it knew too that he could not stop that beating, nor would if he could. And yet, if you had told him he was living on his capital, he would have stared ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... emitted the damp odour of sepulchral vaults, and the large cabinets of cast-iron looked like the cages of some feudal Bastille. The eating room and drawing-room, with an interior boudoir, were magnificent apartments, the ceiling was fretted and adorned with stucco-work, which already was broken in many places, and looked in others damp and mouldering; the wood panelling was shrunk and warped, and cracked; the doors, which had not been hung for more than two years, were, nevertheless, already swinging ...
— Chronicles of the Canongate • Sir Walter Scott
... three Rover boys the Golden Star could not make the trip from Cedarville to Ithaca fast enough. They fretted over every delay, and continually wondered if there was any likelihood of their missing the train which was to take them to Oak Run, the nearest railroad station to Valley Brook ...
— The Rover Boys in the Jungle • Arthur M. Winfield
... was to be their first fragile link with certain strenuous new northern writers, translations of whom in every tongue had just then descended, Gothlike, upon Europe, to the great energising of its various literatures. She it was too who first handed them the fretted golden key to the enchanted garden of the Pre-Raphaelites, and the striking head of the young Dante in sepia, which had hung in a sort of shrine-recess in Henry's study, had been copied for him from Rossetti's ...
— Young Lives • Richard Le Gallienne
... deeper than in the south. The company at Bath, that wanted to attend the Queen's birth-day, were strangely incommoded: many carriages of persons, who got, in their way to town from Bath, as far as Marlborough, after strange embarrassments, here met with a ne plus ultra. The ladies fretted, and offered large rewards to labourers, if they would shovel them a track to London; but the relentless heaps of snow were too bulky to be removed; and so the 18th passed over, leaving the company in very uncomfortable circumstances at the Castle ...
— The Natural History of Selborne • Gilbert White
... From error him who owns this grave, Be every harsher thought suppressed, And sacred be the last long rest. HERE, where the end of earthly things Lays heroes, patriots, bards, and kings; Where stiff the hand, and still the tongue, Of those who fought, and spoke, and sung; HERE, where the fretted aisles prolong The distant notes of holy song, As if some angel spoke again, "All peace on earth, goodwill to men;" If ever from an English heart, Oh, HERE let prejudice depart, And, partial feeling cast aside, ...
— Marmion: A Tale of Flodden Field • Walter Scott
... and the tall, dirty old houses looked almost grand in the sunlight as we left Nine Elms. The distant city came nearer and shone brighter, and when the fretted front of the Houses of Parliament went by us like a fairy palace, and towers and blocks of buildings rose solidly one behind another in shining tints of white and grey against the blue summer sky, and when ...
— A Great Emergency and Other Tales - A Great Emergency; A Very Ill-Tempered Family; Our Field; Madam Liberality • Juliana Horatia Gatty Ewing
... as confidential with him as before! "I cannot understand it!" his parched lips whispered. "Who can guarantee now that even in Petersburg"... And he did not finish the question, and yawned again, shivering and shaking all over. Memories—bright and gloomy—fretted him alike; suddenly it crossed his mind how some days before she had sat down to the piano and sung before him and Ernest the song, "Old husband, cruel husband!" He recalled the expression of her face, ...
— A House of Gentlefolk • Ivan Turgenev
... essences from Idumean palm, What ambergris, what sacerdotal wine, What Arab myrrh, what spikenard, would be thine, If I could swathe thy memory in such balm! Oh, for wrecked gold, from depths for ever calm, To fashion for thy name a fretted shrine; Oh, for strange gems, still locked in virgin mine, To stud the pyx, where thought would bring sweet psalm! I have but this small rosary of rhyme,— No rubies but heart's drops, no pearls but tears, To lay upon the ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 1 (of 4) • Various
... followed by the Grand Dukes and the Emperor, the clear voices of the choir cutting through the frosty air, the ladies of the Court standing near the window and crossing themselves as the Czar stood motionless beneath the gilded and fretted canopy,—I could have recalled it all ... but I swore profanely and declared emphatically that ALL RELIGION WAS A COBWEB AND A SNARE to emancipated minds.... I pretended to get violently MAD about it and told him ...
— Rescuing the Czar - Two authentic Diaries arranged and translated • James P. Smythe
... ever the same suggestion of hideous monster life,—of goblin convulsions and strange fiend-like agonies in some age gone by. One's very footsteps have an unnatural, metallic clink, and one's garments brushing over the rough surface are torn and fretted by its sharp, remorseless touch,—as if its very nature were so pitiless and acrid that the slightest ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 09, No. 51, January, 1862 • Various
... the earth, seems to me a sterile promontory; this most excellent canopy, the air, look you, this brave o'erhanging firmament, this majestical roof fretted with golden fire, why, it appears no other thing to me than a foul and pestilent congregation of vapours. What a piece of work is a man! how noble in reason! how infinite in faculty! in form and moving how express and admirable! in action how like an angel! ...
— Familiar Quotations • John Bartlett
... examined by Cortes about the bearded men with horses, they said that these people dwelt at a place called Nito, at the distance of seven suns, or days journey from their village, and offered to guide us to that place. At this time Cortes was exceedingly sad and ill-humoured, being fretted by the difficulties and misfortunes of his march, and his conscience upbraided him for the cruelty he had committed upon the unfortunate king of Mexico. He was so distracted by these reflections, that he could not sleep, and used to walk about at night, as a relief ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. IV. • Robert Kerr
... good-by. Peter wandered out on the door-steps when Mary's back was turned, took cold, and was threatened with croup. Mrs. Forcythe was half sick herself from worry and fatigue. And all this time Mary, instead of helping, was one of her mother's chief anxieties. She fretted and complained continually. Every thing went wrong. Each article put into the boxes cost her a flood of tears. Each friend who dropped in, renewed the sense of loss. She scarcely noticed her mother's pale ...
— Nine Little Goslings • Susan Coolidge
... week after this she saw neither of them again, but her honest soul was fretted by the word she had given against a true friend; so, when she saw Dermott riding along the river-bank, she called to him from the rocks upon ...
— Katrine • Elinor Macartney Lane
... mysterious, it is also wise. "Great is our Lord, and of great power; his understanding is infinite." That infinite understanding watches over, and arranges, and directs all the affairs of His Church and of the world. We are perplexed at every step, embarrassed by opposition, lost in confusion, fretted by disappointment, and ready to conclude, in our haste, that all things are against our own good and our Master's honor. But "this is our infirmity"; it is the dictate of impatience and indiscretion. We forget the "years of the right ...
— The world's great sermons, Volume 3 - Massillon to Mason • Grenville Kleiser
... made their way through the trellised panes, and served to render sufficiently distinct the more prominent objects around; the eye, however, struggled in vain to reach the remoter angles of the chamber, or the recesses of the vaulted and fretted ceiling. Dark draperies hung upon the walls. The general furniture was profuse, comfortless, antique, and tattered. Many books and musical instruments lay scattered about, but failed to give any vitality to the scene. I felt ...
— The Haunters & The Haunted - Ghost Stories And Tales Of The Supernatural • Various
... to these the fault, If memory o'er their tomb no trophies raise, Where through the long-drawn aisle and fretted vault The pealing anthem ...
— The Hundred Best English Poems • Various
... both usually perpetuates it. Hannah, reproached as she was by Peninnah for her barrenness, does not seem to have returned railing for railing. The haughty behaviour, indeed, of her rival, made her the more deeply sensible of her affliction, and fretted her almost into despondency. Day after day, she was ridiculed for what implied no blame, and admitted of no remedy. With how much greater reason might she have retorted upon Peninnah her malignant temper and provoking tongue! What was her natural infirmity, in comparison with the slanderer's ...
— Female Scripture Biographies, Vol. I • Francis Augustus Cox
... not know whether a minute had gone by or many hours, when some shivering sense of sound made me look up at the casement above, a high, vast casement fretted with dusky gold and many colours, and all kinds of sculptured stone. The sun was making a glory as of jewels on its painted panes. Some of them were open; I could see within the chamber Hilarion's fair and delicate head, and his face drooped ...
— Wisdom, Wit, and Pathos of Ouida - Selected from the Works of Ouida • Ouida
... science is as the difference between a dust-flecked ray in a barn and the sublime arch of the Milky Way in the skies. Its God was strictly proportioned to its dimensions. His sole solicitude was about a handful of truculent nomads. He worried and fretted over them in a peculiarly and distractingly human way. One day he coaxed and petted them beyond their due, the next he harried and lashed them beyond their deserts. He sulked, he cursed, he raged, he grieved, according to his mood and the circumstances, but all to no purpose; ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... of its thousand shrubberies, and thrill anew with undefinable delight, at the deep hollow note of the church-bell, breaking, each, hour, with sullen and sudden roar, upon the stillness of the dusky atmosphere in which the fretted Gothic steeple lay embedded and asleep. It gives me, perhaps, as much of pleasure, as I can now in any manner experience to dwell upon minute recollections of the school and its concerns. Steeped in misery as I am—misery, ...
— International Miscellany of Literature, Art and Science, Vol. 1, - No. 3, Oct. 1, 1850 • Various
... and chafed and fretted under restraint. Insanity returned upon her with redoubled force, soon after. She used blasphemous and indecent language, and cut up her blankets to make pantaloons. She picked the lock of her room, and tried various plans of escape. When Friend Hopper went to see her again, some weeks ...
— Isaac T. Hopper • L. Maria Child
... that to which the Sheikh drew his attention, for a party of about a dozen unhappy fellaheen, joined together by a long chain, which in several cases had fretted their black skins into open sores, were being driven along by a Baggara mounted upon a slight, swift-looking camel, from whose high back he wielded a long-lashed whip, and flicked with it from time to time at the ...
— In the Mahdi's Grasp • George Manville Fenn
... he went away, with a promise of returning in a short time. The abbess was inwardly fretted at the disappointment, but imagined it was only occasioned by the motive he pretended, till a young nun who was her confidante in all things, and had happened to cross the cloyster when Natura and Elgidia were talking together before prayers, and ...
— Life's Progress Through The Passions - Or, The Adventures of Natura • Eliza Fowler Haywood
... built of wood, but they are painted in many colours. The rounded domes of the mosques are white, and the minarets, tall, slender, and fretted, are white, with golden tops, or white and blue. I can give you no idea how beautifully the shapes of the mosques and minarets break the uniformity of the mass of houses, nor how the gay colours, the white and the gold, shone like gems against a cloudless ...
— Miscellanea • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... the boats that swung from the buoys. On the one side there was the open sea, on the other the piled-up granite, which rose up like hand-built buttresses, composed of vast squared masses rising tier upon tier. At their foot the foam fretted and beat, and the forests of seaweed washed to and fro, presenting an almost impenetrable barrier to any one wishing to land; though here it was impossible, for the racing current formed another barrier, which a boat propelled by ...
— A Terrible Coward • George Manville Fenn
... And in chastest beauty joyest, Forms most delicate, pure, and clear, Frost-caught star-beams, fallen sheer In the night, and woven here In jewel-fretted tapestries. ...
— The Ontario High School Reader • A.E. Marty
... of any more important public building, let us imagine our own India House adorned in this way, by historical or symbolical sculpture: massively built in the first place; then chased with has-reliefs of our Indian battles, and fretted with carvings of Oriental foliage, or inlaid with Oriental stones; and the more important members of its decoration composed of groups of Indian life and landscape, and prominently expressing the phantasms of Hindoo worship in their subjection ...
— Selections From the Works of John Ruskin • John Ruskin
... Hercules is himself only in presence of an herculean labor. But on that day he could not concentrate, and because of a trifle! He felt like a giant disabled by a grain of dust in the eye—yes, a mere grain of dust! "I must love Josephine even more than I realize, to be fretted by such a paltry thing," thought he. And after patiently enduring the client for half an hour without being able to grasp the outlines of the project, he rose abruptly and said: "I must get into my mind the points you've given me before we can go further. So I'll not ...
— The Grain Of Dust - A Novel • David Graham Phillips
... boys. She did not know whether they were really getting on, whether she was doing the best for them, whether their father would be satisfied. She had no friends near her, no one to speak to; so she brooded over these problems, exaggerated them, and fretted. ...
— Twenty-One Days in India; and, the Teapot Series • George Robert Aberigh-Mackay
... her more than three or four and twenty. Thus happily formed by nature, and habited in a suit of velvet, overlaid with Cyprus-work of gold, blazing with jewels, about her head, and her feet clad in silver-fretted sandals, Lennox thought she looked more like some triumphant queen, than a wife who had so lately shared captivity with an outlawed husband.** Murray started at such unexpected magnificence in his aunt. But ...
— The Scottish Chiefs • Miss Jane Porter |
