"Inextricable" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... that there is nothing in the whole series of operations displayed in inorganic geology which may not be accounted for by the agency of the ordinary forces of Nature. Those movements of subterranean force which thrust up mountain ranges and upheaved continents stand in inextricable connection, on the one hand, with the volcanoes which are yet belching forth lavas and shaking large tracts of ground, as, on the other, with the primitive incandescent state of the earth. Those forces which disintegrated the early rocks, of which detritus formed new beds at the bottom ...
— The World's Greatest Books - Volume 15 - Science • Various
... endeavor of finished scholars, whose training has made them expert in interpreting the aspirations of each age, and in tracing the evolution of the ideals of the past into the realities of the present. And though, as M. Gaston Paris has said, the path of the Arthurian scholar seems at times to be an inextricable maze, yet the value of the results already achieved, and the possibility of still greater results, will doubtless prove a sufficient encouragement to the several generations of scholars which, as Dr. Sommer suggests, are ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 2 • Charles Dudley Warner
... lived hard in thought, in decision, in struggle with personal resentment bred by remembrance of scant courtesy and ingratitude meted out to him. He learned that Messrs. Barking Brothers & Barking's embarrassments did, in point of fact, skirt the edge of ruin. Their affairs were in apparently inextricable confusion, owing to Reginald Barking's reckless speculations, while, to add to the general confusion, that strenuous young man had broken down utterly from nervous verstrain, and was, at the present time, ...
— The Far Horizon • Lucas Malet
... will not admit of so long a commentary as that of her sister. She was merely distinguishable from nothing by her simple good nature, the inextricable entanglement of her thoughts, her love of letter-writing, and her friendship with Lady Maclaughlan. Miss Nicky had about as much sense as Miss Jacky; but, as no kingdom can maintain two kings, so no family ...
— Marriage • Susan Edmonstone Ferrier
... from my prison, and restored to the enjoyment of the air and the light. Perhaps the chance was almost miraculous that led me to this opening. In any other direction, I might have involved myself in an inextricable maze and rendered my destruction sure; but what now remained to place me in absolute security? Beyond the fire I could see nothing; but, since the smoke rolled rapidly away, it was plain that on the opposite side the cavern was ...
— Edgar Huntley • Charles Brockden Brown
... nothing but inextricable confusion in the attempt—confusion, difficulty, and defeat. There will be an Act, and an Act to amend that Act, and another Act to alter so much of such an Act, and then a final Act to repeal them ...
— Cornelius O'Dowd Upon Men And Women And Other Things In General - Originally Published In Blackwood's Magazine - 1864 • Charles Lever
... behind the baggage camels. Luckily for us the very impetuosity of the Black Kendah rush deprived it of most of the fruits of victory, since the two squadrons, being unable to check their horses, ended by charging into each other and becoming mixed in inextricable confusion. Then, I do not know who gave the order, we wheeled our camels in and fell upon them, a struggling, stationary mass, with the result that many of them were ...
— The Ivory Child • H. Rider Haggard
... over them would slip with an astounding rattle to the deck. Listening to these draggings and concussions, I thought me of the haunt from which they came; an isle full of metallic ravines and gulches, sunk bottomlessly into the hearts of splintered mountains, and covered for many miles with inextricable thickets. I then pictured these three straight-forward monsters, century after century, writhing through the shades, grim as blacksmiths; crawling so slowly and ponderously, that not only did toad-stools ...
— The Piazza Tales • Herman Melville
... tolerable proof that you were not a fool. Corrupt things they certainly were; in the line of sculpture they were quite the latest fruit of time. It was the artist's opinion that there is no essential difference between beauty and ugliness; that they overlap and intermingle in a quite inextricable manner; that there is no saying where one begins and the other ends; that hideousness grimaces at you suddenly from out of the very bosom of loveliness, and beauty blooms before your eyes in the lap of vileness; that it is a waste of wit to ...
— Roderick Hudson • Henry James
... which must have weighed hundreds of tons—Krupp guns and gun mountings, twisted almost out of all recognition, masses of machinery ruined beyond redemption, and engines, wagons, rails, and sleepers piled high in inextricable confusion. Many hours, if not days, of unremitting toil would be needed before the line could be reopened for traffic. Thus the main lines of communication of the Germans were severed and a heavy blow struck for ...
— Two Daring Young Patriots - or, Outwitting the Huns • W. P. Shervill
... religion; true, I mean, in the proper understanding of the word, not merely in that flowery or allegorical sense which you have described; a sense in which all religions would be true, only in various degrees. It is quite in keeping with the inextricable mixture of weal and woe, honesty and deceit, good and evil, nobility and baseness, which is the average characteristic of the world everywhere, that the most important, the most lofty, the most sacred ...
— The Essays of Arthur Schopenhauer; Religion, A Dialogue, Etc. • Arthur Schopenhauer
... down upon the busy multitude below. The whole street was a moving mass. There were broad Panama hats, and gaudy turbans, and uncovered heads, and heads laden with water pots, and boxes, and baskets, and trays—all moving and mingling in seemingly inextricable confusion. There could not have been less than fifteen hundred people congregated in that street—all, or nearly all, emancipated slaves. Yet, amidst all the excitements and competitions of trade, ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society
... the spiral contraction travelling down both the main stem and the branches, all of them, one after another, were ultimately brought into contact with the stick. They then wound themselves round it and round one another, until the whole tendril was tied together in an inextricable knot. The tendrils, though at first quite flexible, after having clasped a support for a time, become more rigid and stronger than they were at first. Thus the plant is secured to its support in ...
— The Movements and Habits of Climbing Plants • Charles Darwin
... sight some things that he has written appear pagan enough, and have been regarded as such. The God of Christians seems to inhabit and preside over an amazing Valhalla of pagan divinities; and indeed throughout Mr. Kipling's work the heavens and the earth are mingled in a most inextricable and astonishing fashion. It is said that not long ago, during the launch of a Chinese battleship at one of our British yards, they were burning papers to the gods in a small joss-house upon the pier, while the great vessel, fitted with all the most modern machinery, was leaving the stocks. There ...
— Among Famous Books • John Kelman
... are all much disappointed with the result of the great expectations that had been formed from the Duke of Brunswick's campaign. According to the best accounts I can get, of a business involved in almost inextricable mystery, the flux—which had got into his camp—was the true cause of his retreat. Whatever be the cause, the effect is equally to be regretted. The plan seems now to be, to hold Verdun and Longwy; and to employ the interval before the spring allows them to march forwards ...
— Memoirs of the Court and Cabinets of George the Third, Volume 2 (of 2) - From the Original Family Documents • The Duke of Buckingham
... witch-chant, that wove with braided sound a weird spell about me, a charm fating me for some service, I knew not what. That chant moaned, it wailed, it whispered, it sang gloriously, it bound, it drowned me, it lapped me in an inextricable stream of misty murmuring, till I was perplexed, bewildered, enchanted. I felt surprised at myself, when, at the end of the day's journey, I carried my bag to the hotel, and ate my supper there as usual,—and felt natural again only when, having obtained the ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 30, April, 1860 • Various
... a breeze about a cavern's mouth, more soothing than a melody. Conjecture of my state, after hovering timidly in dread of relapses, settled and assured me I was lying baked, half-buried in an old river-bed; moss at my cheek, my body inextricable; water now and then feebly striving to float me out, with horrid pain, with infinite refreshingness. A shady light, like the light through leafage, I could see; the water I felt. Why did it keep trying to move me? I questioned and sank to the ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... on the scene of the interrupted feast seemed inextricable, while Verus hurried off to Sabina to inform her of what had occurred. But Balbilla had been the first to discover the fire and quite at the beginning, for after sitting industriously at her studies, and before going to ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... know how to control their own motions when a huge wave seizes them, and seems likely to dash them to pieces against the rocks. They love to lie in the sun upon the bare and warm rocks; and here they sleep, crowded together, and lying upon each other in inextricable confusion. ...
— Northern California, Oregon, and the Sandwich Islands • Charles Nordhoff
... assembled alumni crown with their affection the memory of a brother, I dismissed also, upon the same persuasion, all anxious solicitudes, which otherwise would have oppressed me, lest importunate and inextricable preoccupations of time and mind should disable me from presenting as considerable, and as considerate, a survey of the eminent character and celebrated career of Mr. Chase as should comport with them, or satisfy the just exigencies of ...
— Eulogy on Chief-Justice Chase - Delivered by William M. Evarts before the Alumni of - Dartmouth College, at Hanover • William M. Evarts
... previous plan of remaining there, it is improbable that Hilda would have gathered energy to stir from Rome. A torpor, heretofore unknown to her vivacious though quiet temperament, had possessed itself of the poor girl, like a half-dead serpent knotting its cold, inextricable wreaths about her limbs. It was that peculiar despair, that chill and heavy misery, which only the innocent can experience, although it possesses many of the gloomy characteristics that mark a sense of guilt. It was that heartsickness, which, it is to be hoped, we may all of us ...
— The Marble Faun, Volume II. - The Romance of Monte Beni • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... first step backward the sun of his fortunes began to set. Calamity rapidly followed calamity. Wou Sankwei had not known the meaning of defeat in his long career of fifty years, but now, in his old age, he saw his affairs in inextricable confusion. His adherents deserted him, many rebel officers sought to come to terms with the Manchus, and Kanghi's armies gradually converged on Wou Sankwei from the east and the north. Driven out of Szchuen, Wou Sankwei endeavored to make ...
— China • Demetrius Charles Boulger
... that he could not read it. I spoke of the scene of the setting sun. He did not know it. He said Schiller could not live. He thought DON CARLOS the best of his dramas; but said that the plot was inextricable.—It was evident he knew little of Schiller's works: indeed, he said, he could not read them. Buerger, he said, was a true poet, and would live; that Schiller, on the contrary, must soon be forgotten; that he gave himself up to the imitation of Shakespeare, ...
— Biographia Literaria • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... of the same kind may be urged against the opinions mentioned. Nor are the views that are entertained of the offices and pulse of the heart, perhaps, less bound up with great and most inextricable difficulties. The heart, it is vulgarly said, is the fountain and workshop of the vital spirits, the centre from which life is dispensed to the several parts of the body. Yet it is denied that the right ventricle makes spirits, which is rather held to supply nourishment to the lungs. For these ...
— The Harvard Classics Volume 38 - Scientific Papers (Physiology, Medicine, Surgery, Geology) • Various
... now come to the noble Lord at the head of the Government. I do not complain that he is at the head of the Government. The noble Lord the Member for the City of London had thrown everything into such inextricable and unlooked-for confusion that any one next door to him must necessarily occupy the place. But I cannot have confidence in the noble Viscount, because I cannot but recollect that in 1850 he received the condemnation of his foreign policy in the other House of Parliament; ...
— Speeches on Questions of Public Policy, Volume 1 • John Bright
... researches of the Bollandists. It is impossible to explain how these students ignored the worth of the manuscript which Father Theobaldi, keeper of the records of Assisi, mentioned to them, and of which he offered them a copy (A. SS., Oct., t. ii., p. 546f). Father Suysken was thus thrown into inextricable difficulties, and exposed to a failure to understand the lists of biographies of St. Francis arranged by the annalists of the Order; he was at the same time deprived of one of the most fruitful sources of information upon the acts and works of the Saint. Professor ...
— Life of St. Francis of Assisi • Paul Sabatier
... scheme for keeping peace on the Continent, and particularly with Austria, acting officially and publicly; the other faction counteracting and opposing them. These private agents were continually going from their function to the Bastile, and from the Bastile to employment and favor again. An inextricable cabal was formed, some of persons of Rank, others of subordinates. But by this means the corps of politicians was augmented in number, and the whole formed a body of active, adventuring, ambitious, discontented people, despising ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. V. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... may not be in actual or immediate connexion, is nevertheless in some possible or mediated connexion, with every other part however remote, through the fact that each part hangs together with its very next neighbors in inextricable interfusion. The type of union, it is true, is different here from the monistic type of all-einheit. It is not a universal co-implication, or integration of all things durcheinander. It is what I call the strung-along type, ...
— A Pluralistic Universe - Hibbert Lectures at Manchester College on the - Present Situation in Philosophy • William James
... experience will never disclose any fixed order in it; the surface of experience, when not interpreted materialistically, is an inextricable dream. Berkeley and his followers, when they look in this direction, towards nature and the rationale of experience and science, are looking away from their own system, and relying instead on the automatic propensity ...
— Some Turns of Thought in Modern Philosophy - Five Essays • George Santayana
... thicker. Heavy creepers and vines had appeared among the elder bushes, their phenomenal growth often matted thickly together as high as a man's waist. Bushes which formerly had given way at the thrust of a shoulder now hung toughly, suspended by the inextricable grip of the vines. Along the ground the matted creepers caught and clung tenaciously to ankles. The carpet of them hid with fair leaves and blossoms treacherous water holes into which the travelers plunged at times foot deep. In one such ...
— The Plunderer • Henry Oyen
... INVESTIGATING THE DOCTRINE OF ABSTRACT GENERAL IDEAS.—It were an endless as well as an useless thing to trace the SCHOOLMEN, those great masters of abstraction, through all the manifold inextricable labyrinths of error and dispute which their doctrine of abstract natures and notions seems to have led them into. What bickerings and controversies, and what a learned dust have been raised about those matters, and what mighty ...
— A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge • George Berkeley
... Sheridan exhibited, at this moment, of the last, hard struggle of pride and delicacy against the most deadly foe of both, pecuniary involvement,—which thus gathers round its victims, fold after fold, till they are at length crushed in its inextricable clasp. ...
— Memoirs of the Life of Rt. Hon. Richard Brinsley Sheridan Vol 2 • Thomas Moore
... To have to sit by and nurse, For that is single, but this is double, The mind in pain, and the hands in trouble. The life men live is a weary coil, There is no rest from woe and toil; And if there's aught elsewhere more dear Than drawing breath as we do here, That darkness holds In black inextricable folds. ...
— Ionica • William Cory (AKA William Johnson)
... 160 The immortal toil to lime illicit love; Steel were the knots, and steel the twisted thong, Ring link'd in ring, indissolubly strong; On viewless hooks along the fretted roof He hung, unseen, the inextricable woof.— 165 —Quick start the springs, the webs pellucid spread, And lock the embracing Lovers on their bed; Fierce with loud taunts vindictive VULCAN springs, Tries all the bolts, and tightens all the strings, ...
— The Botanic Garden - A Poem in Two Parts. Part 1: The Economy of Vegetation • Erasmus Darwin
... century by the realism of the great schoolmen. It now found a bold supporter in William of Occam (q.v.), and through him became widely accepted. But nominalism was powerless to inspire theology with new life; on the contrary, its intervention only increased the inextricable tangle of the hairsplitting questions with which theology busied itself, and made their ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 3 - "Chitral" to "Cincinnati" • Various
... operations. When I returned into the town at about 5 o'clock this afternoon, the peninsula of Gennevilliers resembled the course at Epsom on a wet Derby Day. To my civilian eyes, cavalry, artillery, and infantry, seemed to be in inextricable confusion. ...
— Diary of the Besieged Resident in Paris • Henry Labouchere
... protests mingled in inextricable confusion. "They won't let me see her except on the sly," cried Thad, making himself heard at last. "They've said I wasn't to come to the house. ...
— Other People's Business - The Romantic Career of the Practical Miss Dale • Harriet L. Smith
... freshened me up so much that the night did not matter. One march to the north of Lu-ku, up the valley of the Anning, lay the district town of Mien-ning, reached by a rough trail that finally wandered off into the inextricable gorges of the Ta Tu Ho. It was in these wild defiles that the last contests of the Taiping rebellion were fought. I looked longingly up the valley, but my way turned off to the right, following the pack-road to the ferry at Fulin. At once on starting the next morning we passed out of the main ...
— A Wayfarer in China - Impressions of a trip across West China and Mongolia • Elizabeth Kendall
... out impassable gulfs. Every bridge had disappeared, and all the surrounding timber rendered useless for constructing more; while, for mile after mile, one continued mass of gnarled and crooked trees, here pitched together in seemingly inextricable tangles, and there piled mountains high, had been felled into the road, which even now had scarcely been made passable by the toiling thousands who, for weeks, had been employed upon it. In consequence of this, and the time spent in making circuits round in the woods to avoid parties of the enemy, ...
— The Rangers - [Subtitle: The Tory's Daughter] • D. P. Thompson
... grating we found no trace of the figures that doubtless once covered the floor of the chapel. All that remained was a huge pendant of angels, cherubs, and saints, swarming as it were to the ceiling in an inextricable knot of arms, legs, wings, faces, and flowing drapery; two circles of saints, bishops, and others, who might be fitly placed in Paradise, rising one above the other high up the walls of the chapel—the lower circle full-length figures, and the other ...
— Ex Voto • Samuel Butler
... the coming weather and foretell the storm; the bird of prey, that incomparable watchman, sees the fallen mule from the heights of the clouds; the blind bats guided their flight without collision through the inextricable labyrinth of threads devised by Spallanzani; the carrier pigeon, at a hundred leagues from home, infallibly regains its loft across immensities which it has never known; and within the limits of its more modest powers a bee, ...
— Social Life in the Insect World • J. H. Fabre
... have thrown the commission into an inextricable daedalus, because nature alone, without any treatment, cures many maladies. In this system of observations, they could not have hoped to learn the exact part performed by magnetism, until after a great number of cures, and ...
— Biographies of Distinguished Scientific Men • Francois Arago
... which we had to force our way, however, was wonderfully thorny. The creepers were thorny, even the bamboos were thorny, while shrubs grew in a zig-zag and jagged fashion, forming an inextricable tangle, through which it was difficult to cut our way. Beautiful birds flitted in and out among the shrubs—grass-green doves, large black cockatoos, golden orioles, and king-crows—their varied and brilliant colours flashing brightly as they darted forth here and there ...
— In the Eastern Seas • W.H.G. Kingston
... I, ready to brave all dangers, all right and reason, plunge into murder itself, on the first summons, and entangle myself in consequences inextricable and horrible (what cared I?) for a woman of whom I knew nothing, but that she was ...
— The Room in the Dragon Volant • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... debauches during which she had flung shame and honour under the feet of the drinking men. She was spared nothing, but heard again of sums gained by petty thefts from the till, small profits made in the buying of milk and eggs. It was a long story of suspense and longing, an inextricable web of falsification and trickery, of terror and lying without end. The memory of no guilt and no torture ...
— The Indian Lily and Other Stories • Hermann Sudermann
... tries to reconcile these differences by the suggestion, that no one will deny, that lights of different magnetic or electric processes may have different velocities; a fact which throws all sidereal astronomy into inextricable confusion, and sets aside all existing time ...
— Fables of Infidelity and Facts of Faith - Being an Examination of the Evidences of Infidelity • Robert Patterson
... the fourteen unfortunate youths and maidens had to be sent from Athens to be devoured by this insatiate beast. We are not told on what food it was fed in the interval, or why Minos did not end the trouble by allowing it to starve in its inextricable den. As the story goes, the living tribute was twice sent, and the third period came duly round. The youths and maidens to be devoured were selected by lot from the people of Athens, and left their city amid tears and woe. But ...
— Historic Tales, vol 10 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris
... Forces. It is not to be inferred from the foregoing sections that the basis of English metre is time. For the basis of English metre is dual: time and stress are inextricable. Beneath all metrical language runs the invisible current of time, but the surface is marked by stress. The warp of the metrical fabric is time; stress is the woof. And from the surface, of course, only the woof is visible. Moreover, the poet's ...
— The Principles of English Versification • Paull Franklin Baum
... scientific definition, of which an unwarrantable hypothesis forms an essential part, carries its condemnation within itself; but, even supposing such a definition were, in form, tenable, the physiologist who should attempt to apply it in Nature would soon find himself involved in great, if not inextricable, difficulties. As we have said, it is indubitable that offspring 'tend' to resemble the parental organism, but it is equally true that the similarity attained never amounts to identity, either in form or in structure. There is always a certain amount of deviation, not only from ...
— The Origin of Species - From 'The Westminster Review', April 1860 • Thomas H. Huxley
... replied Boabdil, bitterly, "and headed by a traitor and a foe. I am meshed in the nets of an inextricable fate!" ...
— Leila, Complete - The Siege of Granada • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... mischievous. The Tories would fall on the individual from political violence, the Radicals on his class or order from hatred to the aristocracy. I believe the adjournment is principally on account of the affairs of Canada, regarding which the Government is in a difficulty that appears inextricable. I have heard a great deal on the subject, enough to show the magnitude of the embarrassment, but not enough to describe ...
— The Greville Memoirs - A Journal of the Reigns of King George IV and King William IV, Vol. III • Charles C. F. Greville
... She had only bamboozled me by her insinuating ways, had drawn me on by her guileful cleverness to pity and promises to befriend her. I had accorded her an active sympathy which in my more sober moments I felt she did not, could not, deserve; if I were not careful she would yet involve me in some inextricable mess. ...
— The Passenger from Calais • Arthur Griffiths
... it is noteworthy that a state of consciousness at any one moment is an exceedingly complex thing. It is made up of a mass of feelings and active impulses which often combine and blend in a most inextricable way. External sensations come in groups, too, but as a rule they do not fuse in apparently simple wholes as our internal feelings often do. The very possibility of perception depends on a clear discrimination of sense-elements, for ...
— Illusions - A Psychological Study • James Sully
... rise in its crust to disruptions, distortions, fissures, and chasms. The passage through which we were moving was such a fissure, through which at one time granite poured out in a molten state. Its thousands of windings formed an inextricable labyrinth through the ...
— A Journey to the Interior of the Earth • Jules Verne
... ivory fairness which cosmetics had not had time to destroy, with charming scarlet lips, long-lashed dark eyes, a dimpled chin, and a great quantity of curling dark hair—the kind of hair which will not lie straight, but twists itself into tight rings, and gets into apparently inextricable tangles, and looks pretty all the time. And this was Ethel Kenyon. Her companion, a woman of forty-five, staid and demure, followed close behind her, giving no sign of surprise when Oliver raised his hat and gently accosted ...
— Brooke's Daughter - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant
... Irish servant, Daniel Hill; or whether, as he himself surmised, the crime was instigated by an unfriendly neighbour, it is impossible to say. Strange adventures of this kind, blending fact and fancy in a now inextricable tangle, are of no unfrequent occurrence in Shelley's biography. In estimating the relative proportions of the two factors in this case, it must be borne in mind, on the one hand, that no one but Shelley, who was alone in the parlour, ...
— Percy Bysshe Shelley • John Addington Symonds
... special way entrusted with the task of saving him from spiritual ruin. She accordingly appears, and takes up the duties which Virgil is surrendering. The manner of her appearance must be noticed—showing as it does the almost inextricable web in which Dante combines fact and allegory. That the "Beatrice" who is introduced is primarily none other than an actual woman of flesh and blood, whom hundreds of then living people had known, who had gone about ...
— Dante: His Times and His Work • Arthur John Butler
... committing an Oversight, betrays a Man to more inextricable Errours, than the Boldness of an enterprizing Author, whose artful Carelesness is more instructive and delightful than all the Pains and Sweat of the Poring ...
— Discourse on Criticism and of Poetry (1707) - From Poems On Several Occasions (1707) • Samuel Cobb
... of all this is, that except now and then by chance, the form of a complete leaf is never seen; but a marvelous and quaint confusion, very definite, indeed, in its evidence of direction of growth, and unity of action, but wholly indefinable and inextricable, part by part, by any amount of patience. You cannot possibly work it out in facsimile, though you took a twelvemonth's time to a tree; and you must therefore try to discover some mode of execution which will more or less imitate, by its own variety and mystery, the variety and ...
— The Elements of Drawing - In Three Letters to Beginners • John Ruskin
... suddenly, before he was aware, into another avenue, leading apparently far into the interior, Gregory was left once more in total darkness. He heard the sound of retreating footsteps, but not a glimmer was visible, and he feared to follow lest he might be entangled in some inextricable labyrinth. He recollected to have heard a vague sort of tradition, that a subterraneous passage once led from the hall to the Ribble bank, whereby the miners had in former days kept their ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 1 (of 2) • John Roby
... who would like to see the real working of an agricultural show such as this should contrive to visit the yard early in the morning of the opening day, some few hours before the public are admitted. The bustle, the crash of excited exhibitors, the cries of men in charge of cattle, the apparently inextricable confusion, as if everything had been put off to the last moment—the whole scene is intensely agricultural. Every one is calling for the secretary. A drover wants to know where to put his fat cattle; a carter wants ...
— Hodge and His Masters • Richard Jefferies
... in distress like the vessel, but after another fashion, had, in the inextricable intersection of shadows which rose up before him, no resource but the footsteps in the snow, and he held to it as the ...
— The Man Who Laughs • Victor Hugo
... labors, he turned his attention to the documents placed in his hands by the notary, endeavoring to find out by himself the nature of his revenues. He thought this would be a very easy matter, but he soon found that it was encumbered with inextricable difficulties. ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... the two races first came in contact at the Fish River, but it could not be done now. Since then they had been developing the country with the labour of these people. They had been advancing by our aid. They had mixed themselves up with these people in an inextricable fashion and then some said "Haul your native policy out of the drawer and begin with a policy of separation." He was sure that the hon. member who had brought in the Bill had no idea of that sort in his mind. Another person had ...
— Native Life in South Africa, Before and Since • Solomon Tshekisho Plaatje
... indeed, and the boy began to believe that he had gotten himself into an inextricable difficulty, for how to reach the steam man and renew the fire, under the circumstances, was a question which might well puzzle an older head ...
— The Huge Hunter - Or, the Steam Man of the Prairies • Edward S. Ellis
... up the French equivalent in the dictionary in order to be able to recognise such a place when I saw it. In my little pocket dictionary I could not find any other word than 'Lombard.' On looking at a map of Paris I found, situated in the middle of an inextricable maze of streets, a very small lane called Rue des Lombards. Thither I wended my way, but my expedition was fruitless. Often, on reading by the light of the transparent lanterns the inscription 'Mont de Piete,' I became very curious to know ...
— My Life, Volume I • Richard Wagner
... herd appeared—a countless herd it seemed to me—plunging up the incline—cows, heifers, calves, bulls, and oxen, all mixed together in one inextricable mass, and every one of them snorting, bellowing, or making some other kind of sound. The din was fearful, the sight bewildering, for the beasts were of all colours, and their long horns flashed like ivory in the moonlight. Indeed, the only thing in the least like ...
— Child of Storm • H. Rider Haggard
... was called to do what seemed to blast all hope of their being fulfilled. What a cruel position to have God's command and God's promise apparently in diametrical opposition! But faith loosened even that seemingly inextricable tangle of contradiction, and felt that to obey was for man, and to keep His promise was for God. If we do our duty, He will see to the consequences. 'Tis mine to obey; 'tis ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus and Numbers • Alexander Maclaren
... honte ou je suis descendue, Implacable Venus, suis—je assez confondue!" Edna felt as if her own great weakness were known to the world, and she bent her face close to her basket and tumbled the contents into inextricable confusion. ...
— St. Elmo • Augusta J. Evans
... and seven maidens whom the Athenians were compelled to send every nine years to Crete, there to be devoured by the Minotaur, a monster with a human body and a bull's head, which Minos kept concealed in an inextricable labyrinth. The third ship was already on the point of sailing with its cargo of innocent victims, when Theseus offered to go with them, hoping to put an end for ever to the horrible tribute. Ariadne, the daughter of Minos, became enamoured of the hero, and having supplied ...
— A Smaller History of Greece • William Smith
... as the guard had put it, 'match-boxed.' They were nothing but a heap of debris,—telescoped into one another in a state of apparently inextricable confusion. It was broad daylight before access was gained to what had once been the interiors. The condition of the first third-class compartment revealed an extraordinary state ...
— The Beetle - A Mystery • Richard Marsh
... Brinhilda at the cottage received me with open-throated peals of laughter, and then made me sit down till I had conquered my qualms and was able to walk back to Edinburgh. Before I went, she showed me a heap of her children, too many, it seemed to me, to be counted; but as they lay in an inextricable mass on the floor in an inner room, there may have seemed more arms and legs forming the radii, of which a clump of curly heads was the center, than there ...
— Records of a Girlhood • Frances Anne Kemble
... in indissoluble toils; this power pursues its work in silence, and before you have begun to know your own self, you are tied and bound, you know not how. When you reach a certain age, you wake up and would like to move. But it is impossible; your hands and arms are caught in inextricable folds. It is God Himself who holds you fast, and remorseless opinion is looking on, ready to laugh if you signify that you are tired of the toys which amused you as a child. It would be nothing if there was only public opinion to brave. But the pity is that all the softest ...
— Recollections of My Youth • Ernest Renan
... faintly indicate its character. The quadruple theme of the sulphur-yellow truth is sung almost uninterruptedly, first by the wood-wind, then by the strings and then by the full brass choir, with the glockenspiel and cymbals added. Into it are woven all of the other themes in inextricable whirls and whorls of sound, and in most amazing combinations and permutations of tonalities. Moreover, there is a constantly rising complexity of rhythm, and on one page of the score the time signature is changed no less than eighteen times. Several times it is ...
— A Book of Burlesques • H. L. Mencken
... greatly; but how inextricable are the subjects which we are discussing! I do not think I said that I thought the productions of Asia were HIGHER (70/1. On the use of the terms "higher" and "lower" see Letters 35 and 36.) than those of Australia. ...
— More Letters of Charles Darwin - Volume I (of II) • Charles Darwin
... things which she felt certain Cecilia could never have written; yet truth and falsehood were so mixed up in every paragraph, circumstances which she herself had witnessed so misrepresented, that it was all to her inextricable confusion. The passages which were to be marked could not now depend upon her opinion, her belief; they must rest upon Cecilia s integrity—and could she depend upon it? The impatience which she had felt ...
— Helen • Maria Edgeworth
... of Darien is only sixty miles in width, it is divided into two parts by a chain of high mountains; at the foot of these the alluvial soil is marvellously fertile, and the vegetation far more luxuriant than any European can imagine. It consists of an inextricable mass of tropical plants, creepers, and ferns, among trees of gigantic size which completely hide the sun, a truly virgin forest, interspersed here and there with patches of stagnant water, where live multitudes of birds, insects, ...
— Celebrated Travels and Travellers - Part I. The Exploration of the World • Jules Verne
... (because the dream appeared to him to be from Jupiter who was a king, and the fire to blaze all around him,) lest he should be unable to escape from the king's territories, but should be hemmed in on all sides by inextricable difficulties. ...
— The First Four Books of Xenophon's Anabasis • Xenophon
... earlier in the action had entirely disbanded. The woods and the bushes were filled with fugitives, soldiers seeking the rear. Vast clouds of smoke drifted everywhere, the air was filled with the odors of exploded gunpowder, cannon were piled in inextricable heaps in the road, and horses, killed by shells or bullets, lay on the guns or between ...
— The Sword of Antietam • Joseph A. Altsheler
... World, one would say that some devil on two sticks had lifted it up in his magic hand to let us see its mysteries. We know now that it consists of an inextricable entanglement of valleys, the mean altitude of which exceeds three thousand metres; we know that it is dominated by the peaks of Gouroumdi and Kauffmann, twenty-two thousand feet high, and the peak of Tagarma, which is twenty-seven thousand feet; we ...
— The Adventures of a Special Correspondent • Jules Verne
... will appear harmonious in all its parts—beautiful and sublime in all its truths—instructive in all its lessons—inspiring the brightest, broadest hopes the mind can conceive. But lay reason aside, in its perusal, and it will be involved in inextricable confusion, ...
— Golden Steps to Respectability, Usefulness and Happiness • John Mather Austin
... Emperor himself endeavored to repair the disaster; he rode with lightening speed hither and thither, commanding, ordering, nay imploring too; but already the night was falling, the confusion became each moment more inextricable, and the effort was a fruitless one. A regiment of the Guards, and two batteries were in reserve behind Planchenoit; he threw them rapidly into position; but the overwhelming impulse of flight drove the mass upon them, and they ...
— The Ontario Readers: The High School Reader, 1886 • Ministry of Education
... hard, to exert their fierce and savage strength for a good purpose, and fling it off at once! This feeble and most sensitive of spirits could do neither, yet continually did one thing or another, which intertwined, in the same inextricable knot, the agony of heaven-defying ...
— The Scarlet Letter • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... be sure, and worthy of all admiration, unless the artist had gone incomparably beyond his subject. Jugglers proclaimed aloud the miracles which they were prepared to work; and posture-makers dislocated every joint of their bodies and tied their limbs into inextricable knots, wherever they could find space to spread a little square of carpet on the ground. In the midst of the confusion, while everybody was treading on his neighbor's toes, some little boys were very solicitous to brush your boots. These lads, I believe, are a product of modern society,—at least, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 11, No. 65, March, 1863 • Various
... specimen of the supposed parasites to which the shell might be attributed, since this shell appears not to be a Beetle's? The reader would hardly suspect how my slight acquaintance with entomology was unsettled by this inextricable maze of contradictory facts. But patience! We may yet obtain ...
— The Glow-Worm and Other Beetles • Jean Henri Fabre
... magician thus disguised, and in his retreat foul spirits personate both knight and lady, and present these false doubles to each. Each sees what seems to be the other's fall from virtue, and, horrified by the sight, the real persons leave the hermitage by separate ways, and wander, in inextricable mazes lost, until fortune and faery bring them together again ...
— English Literature, Considered as an Interpreter of English History - Designed as a Manual of Instruction • Henry Coppee
... bury yourself in a convent would be selfishness; to remain an old maid is to fail in duty. In the first place, can you manage your vast property alone? May you not lose it? You will have law-suits, you will find yourself surrounded by inextricable difficulties. Believe your pastor: a husband is useful; you are bound to preserve what God has bestowed upon you. I speak to you as a precious lamb of my flock. You love God too truly not to find your salvation in the midst of his world, of which you are noble ...
— Eugenie Grandet • Honore de Balzac
... a natural and perfect Generation, they are to be husbanded by another kind of seed, even so it is with Wit which if not applied to some certain study that may fix and restrain it, runs into a thousand Extravagancies, and is eternally roving here and there in the inextricable labyrinth of restless Imagination. ...
— The Present State of Wit (1711) - In A Letter To A Friend In The Country • John Gay
... streaming out from the meeting of a religious congress, there streaming in at the gates of some social function; like bright water confined within long shelves of rock and dyed with myriad scales of shifting colour, they thronged Rotten Row, and along the closed shop-fronts were woven into an inextricable network of little human runlets. And everywhere amongst this sea of men and women could be seen their shadows, meandering like streaks of grey slime stirred up from the lower depths by some huge, never-ceasing finger. The innumerable roar of that ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... look back and mark out a better course of conduct for the girl. But the girl is gone—the past is past, the life is lived. I was full of the humours and delusions of nineteen years, and I saw the glory and delight of my youth wrecked. Existence was merely inextricable confusion in the dark. I never dreamt of a path appearing, of a return of sunshine, of a story like this to ...
— The Late Miss Hollingford • Rosa Mulholland
... as useless to attempt to catalogue as to describe. To realize an equatorial jungle one must see it in all its wonderment of activity and stillness—the heated, steamy stillness through which one fancies that no breeze ever whispers, with its colossal flowering trees, its green twilight, its inextricable involvement, its butterflies and moths, its brilliant but harsh voiced birds, its lizards and flying foxes, its infinite variety of monkeys, sitting, hanging by hands or tails, leaping, grimacing, jabbering, pelting each other with fruits; and its loathsome saurians, lying in ...
— The Golden Chersonese and the Way Thither • Isabella L. Bird (Mrs. Bishop)
... Yes! gentlemen, such will be the judgment of impartial history; and it will be one of the brightest glories of France and the nineteenth century. You will not attenuate, tarnish, eclipse this glory by plunging into a mass of contradictions, complications, and inextricable inconsistency. Know you what would dim for ever the lustre of the French flag? It would be to set it in opposition to the Cross, to the Tiara, which it has delivered. It would be to transform the soldiers of France, the protectors of the Pope, into his oppressors. It would ...
— Pius IX. And His Time • The Rev. AEneas MacDonell
... country; he places the emperour at Milan, and sends his young men to attend him, but never mentions him more; he makes Protheus, after an interview with Silvia, say he has only seen her picture;[2] and, if we may credit the old copies, he has, by mistaking places, left his scenery inextricable. The reason of all this confusion seems to be, that he took his story from a novel, which he sometimes followed, and sometimes forsook, sometimes ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson in Nine Volumes - Volume V: Miscellaneous Pieces • Samuel Johnson
... various arms and legs to their respective owners, are straining every muscle and fibre of their bodies against each other, and yet are so well balanced that the dense clump of humanity stands absolutely motionless. In the centre is an inextricable chaos where shoulders heave and heads rise and fall. At the edges are a fringe of legs—legs in an extreme state of tension— ever pawing for a firmer foothold, and apparently completely independent of the rest of their owners, whose heads and bodies have bored their way Into the melee. ...
— The Firm of Girdlestone • Arthur Conan Doyle
... pensions or hotels, quite unconscious of anything that is outside Baedeker, their one anxiety to get 'done' or 'through' and go on somewhere else. The result is, they mix up towns, rivers, palaces in one inextricable whirl. You know the American girl in Punch who says: 'Say, poppa, what did we see at Rome?' And the father replies: 'Why, guess Rome was the place where we saw the yaller dog.' There's travelling for you. ...
— A Room With A View • E. M. Forster
... administration, and bringing into order the various conflicting authorities which had been handed down from ancient times, royal courts and manor courts, church courts, shire courts, hundred courts, forest courts, and local courts in special franchises, with all their inextricable confusion of law and custom and procedure. Under Henry I. two courts, the Exchequer and the Curia Regis, had control of all the financial and judicial business of the kingdom. The Exchequer filled a far more important place in the national life than the Curia Regis, for the power ...
— Henry the Second • Mrs. J. R. Green
... in the night, save that they were louder and harsher. Over and over they floundered and rolled. The mud and water flew about. Long legs, shaggy paws, wet, wriggling tail, and squawking beak, fur and feathers—all turning and squirming in inextricable confusion. It was hard telling which was having the best of the melee, when, on a sudden, the struggle ...
— Happy Days for Boys and Girls • Various
... grapevine, of unusual size and luxuriance, had twined and twisted itself up into the tree, and, after wreathing the entanglement of its tendrils around almost every bough, had caught hold of three or four neighboring trees, and married the whole clump with a perfectly inextricable knot of polygamy. Once, while sheltering myself from a summer shower, the fancy had taken me to clamber up into this seemingly impervious mass of foliage. The branches yielded me a passage, and closed again ...
— The Blithedale Romance • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... power. He bequeathed to his descendants the dignity he had won, and thus became the founder of the line of Tycoons. Down to the latter half of the sixteenth century the Tycoons were active and efficient rulers; but the same fate overtook them which had befallen the Mikados. Immeshed in the same inextricable web of custom and law, they degenerated into mere puppets, hardly stirring from their palaces and occupied in a perpetual round of empty ceremonies, while the real business of government was managed by the council of state. In Tonquin the monarchy ran a similar course. ...
— The Golden Bough - A study of magic and religion • Sir James George Frazer
... the kind that rouse suspense and satisfy it, can be read more than once, and never be quite without novelty. There is often, in his books, too much story, as in The Mayor of Casterbridge, where the plot extends into almost inextricable entanglements; and yet that is precisely one of the books that can be re-read. Is it on account of that concealed poetry, never absent though often unseen, which gives to these fantastic or real histories a meaning beyond the meaning ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... were even more appalling, for here the retreating soldiery and the fugitive civilians were mixed in inextricable confusion. By mid-afternoon on Wednesday the road from Antwerp to Ghent, a distance of forty miles, was a solid mass of refugees, and the same was true of every road, every lane, every footpath leading in a westerly or a northerly direction. The people fled in motor-cars ...
— Fighting in Flanders • E. Alexander Powell
... wail shrieks through the solitude, making night hideous—but in vain: the axle-tree has given way; the vehicle has overset, and marchionesses, chamber-maids, bandboxes, and philosophers are weltering in inextricable chaos. The carriage was in the stage next Nangis, about half-way to that town, when the hind axle-tree broke, and it tumbled on the road to M. de Voltaire's side. Madame du Chatelet and her maid fell above him, with all their bundles and bandboxes, for these were not ...
— Old Roads and New Roads • William Bodham Donne
... successfully achieved, and of a moral action: thus we talk of an intellectual beauty, of a beautiful action, of a moral beauty. Many philosophers, especially aestheticians, have lost their heads in their pursuit of these most varied uses: they have entered an inextricable and impervious verbal labyrinth. For this reason it has hitherto seemed convenient studiously to avoid the use of the word beautiful to indicate successful expression. But after all the explanations that have been given, and all danger of misunderstanding being now dissipated, and since, on ...
— Aesthetic as Science of Expression and General Linguistic • Benedetto Croce
... were both gazing upon the track of the earthquake wave, and all around them trees were lying torn-up by the roots, battered and stripped of their leafage, some piled in inextricable confusion, others half buried in mud. Some again had soft white coral sand heaped over them. Here, the surface had been swept bare to the dark rock which formed the base of the island or continent upon which they had been cast; there, mud lay ...
— Fire Island - Being the Adventures of Uncertain Naturalists in an Unknown Track • G. Manville Fenn
... their ranks now filled, now thinned, with each alternation of courage and fear. As soon as Antonius saw them waver, he kept thrusting at them in massed column. The line bent and then broke, and the inextricable confusion of wagons and siege-engines prevented their rallying. The victorious troops scattered along the cross-road ...
— Tacitus: The Histories, Volumes I and II • Caius Cornelius Tacitus
... these squares end in failure. For a time the French abandon the attack, but only to renew it and then follows a remarkable scene. The French charge with unprecedented fury, and the squares are partially broken, while friends and enemies, wounded or killed, are mingled in inextricable confusion. ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume 4 (of 10) • Various
... consummated on our soil in violation of our laws, even though the offense be against a subject or citizen of such sovereign. The Mexican statute in question makes the claim broadly, and the principle, if conceded, would create a dual responsibility in the citizen and lead to inextricable confusion, destructive of that certainty in the law which is an essential ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... to get that field which joined to Gray's mill, and who well knew that the pride of the O'Doughertys would resist the idea of selling to him any part or parcel of the lands of Rosanna, devised a scheme to reduce Simon to immediate and inextricable distress. Simon was, as it might have been foreseen, negligent in discharging the duties of his office, which was that ...
— Tales & Novels, Vol. 2 • Maria Edgeworth
... sleeping hours were still more painful. To sleep was to be the feverish fool of vague wild visions, in which Charlotte and Dr. Doddleson, the editor of the Cheapside, the officials of the British Museum reading-room, Diana Paget, and the Sheldons, figured amidst inextricable confusion of circumstances and places. Throughout these wretched dreams he had some consciousness of himself and the room in which he was lying, the July moon shining upon him, broad and bright, through ...
— Charlotte's Inheritance • M. E. Braddon
... did not impress me favourably. For he looked sour, yellow, and discontented as we tramped over the wet stones along by towering warehouses, stacks of chests, and huge buttresses of barrels on one side, and with the great basins of water choked with shipping, all apparently in the most inextricable confusion, till we reached a great loftily masted ship and passed up the sloping gangway ...
— Sail Ho! - A Boy at Sea • George Manville Fenn
... which is too involved to be analyzed, centers about the efforts of Alphonso to redeem his beloved Isabella from, the harem of the Vizier Mustapha. Spaniards, Turks, keepers and inhabitants of the harem, and a "young lady disguis'd in the habit of an Eunuch," mingle in inextricable intrigue. Some of the worst absurdities and the most bathetic lines occur in the parts of the two lovers for which Mrs. Haywood disclaims responsibility, but even the best passages of the play add nothing to the credit of the reviser. Her ...
— The Life and Romances of Mrs. Eliza Haywood • George Frisbie Whicher
... easy compared with the combing. The boy's mop was such a tangled web, that the comb at first refused to pass through it; and when, encouraged by the Captain, the urchin did at last succeed in rending its masses apart various inextricable bunches came away bodily, and sundry teeth of the comb were left behind. At last, however, it was reduced to something like order, to the immense satisfaction of Mrs ...
— Rivers of Ice • R.M. Ballantyne
... honourable service, a service included among that select quaternity, to be outside of which was to be a nonentity—the Navy, the Army, the Church, and the Bar. The naval officer, then as now, did not soil his hands, wore a sword, and was swathed in an inextricable meshwork of red tape, service codes, and High Toryism. He had his own peculiar notions of studying a profession, looked askance at the new-fangled method of driving a ship, honestly thinking, with Ruskin, that a "floating kettle" was a direct contravention of the laws of God. ...
— An Ocean Tramp • William McFee
... labyrinthine of metaphysics, must be perpetually trodden. In vain is it proclaimed that they lead back only to the point of ignorance from which they started; in vain is it demonstrated that certain problems are indemonstrable. If the same race of men lived for ever upon the earth, such inextricable problems might at length be set at rest. But each new generation finds them as fresh and attractive as if they had never been touched, never probed and tortured by fruitless examination; to each generation they appear in all the unabated ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 379, May, 1847 • Various
... furrows served to divide the lands instead of turf balks, which were of course always being altered. Another difficulty arose from there being no check to high winds, which would sometimes sweep the whole of the crops belonging to different farmers in an inextricable heap ...
— A Short History of English Agriculture • W. H. R. Curtler
... inextricable masculinity in our idea of government which so revolts at the idea of women as voters. "To govern:" that means to boss, to control, to have authority; and that only, to most minds. They cannot bear to think of the woman as having control over even their own affairs; to control is ...
— The Forerunner, Volume 1 (1909-1910) • Charlotte Perkins Gilman
... alongside the Bible. I do, raley. I think I may put it ahead of the Bible. For if it wurn't fer spellin'-books and sich occasions as these, where would the Bible be? I should like to know. The man who got up, who compounded this work of inextricable valoo was a benufactor to the whole human race or any other." Here the spectacles fell off. The Squire replaced them in some confusion, gave the top of his head another twist, and felt of his glass eye, ...
— The Hoosier Schoolmaster - A Story of Backwoods Life in Indiana • Edward Eggleston
... The difficulty becomes more inextricable in passing from specific little incidents to an estimation of the general nature of the man. The logicians lucidly describe definition as being per genus et differentiam. You have the characteristics ...
— The Book-Hunter - A New Edition, with a Memoir of the Author • John Hill Burton
... in the river itself, he made his way to the heap of debris. It was the drift-pile made by the river, which at this point cast out from its bosom logs and trees and all manner of debris brought over the falls and down the gorge, a great heap piled in inextricable confusion as high as a tall fir tree, and as ...
— A Mating in the Wilds • Ottwell Binns
... imperiously laid his hand upon that globe, which he seemed desirous of subjecting by the strength of his pride and courage. The one resembled the eagle, that hovers above his prey—the other the reptile, that envelops its victim in its inextricable folds. ...
— The Wandering Jew, Complete • Eugene Sue
... weary—if it indeed be possible for them to weary—of contemplating the exterior of these tremendous woods, try to penetrate a little into their interior. What an inextricable chaos it is! The sands of a sea are not more closely pressed together than the trees are here: some straight, some curved, some upright, some toppling,—fallen, or leaning against one another, or heaped high upon each other. Climbing lianas, which cross from one ...
— Two Years in the French West Indies • Lafcadio Hearn
... into palsy, leave him bewildered in dismay—when darkness, which experience cannot pierce, wraps the conscience, as sudden night wraps the traveller in the desert—when error entangles his feet in its inextricable web—when, still desirous of the right, he sees before him but a choice of evil; and the Angel of the Past, with a flaming sword, closes on him the gates of the Future. Then, Faith flashes on him, with a light from the cloud. Then, he clings to ...
— Harold, Complete - The Last Of The Saxon Kings • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... dreams, in which the lost one was presented before her in all sorts of frightful situations. In these dreams which came to her in the silent watches of the night, she never seemed to look upon her husband as dead. He always seemed to be living, but surrounded by inextricable complications involving great trouble and danger. She sometimes awoke from these night visions with a loud cry which startled the household, and proved how greatly her nerves had been shaken by the untoward circumstances of ...
— The Gerrard Street Mystery and Other Weird Tales • John Charles Dent
... worth reading," returned Hester, "as it ought to be read, until you understand it at least as well as the poet himself. To do a poem justice, the reader must so have pondered phrase and word as to reproduce meaning and music in all the inextricable play of their lights and shades. I never came near doing the kind of thing I mean with any music till I had first learned it thoroughly by heart. And that too is the only way in which I can get to ...
— Weighed and Wanting • George MacDonald
... stairway, we found ourselves at the top of the cliff and confronted by a dense undergrowth of jungle, consisting for the most part of an inextricable tangle of tough creepers, interspersed with shrubs and trees of various kinds, many of which seemed to be fruit bearers. Among these we recognised the plantain, banana, custard-apple, loquat, granadilla, guava, pawpaw, ...
— Turned Adrift • Harry Collingwood
... foliage; meadows slipped away from the heights, plunging seaward, as if wearying for the ocean; and through the whole this line of green roadway threaded its path with sinuous grace, serpentining, coiling, braiding in land and sea in one harmonious, inextricable blending of incomparable beauty. One could quite comprehend, after even a short acquaintance with this road, that two gentlemen of Paris, as difficult to please as Daubigny and Isabey, should have seen points of excellence ...
— In and Out of Three Normady Inns • Anna Bowman Dodd
... effect of any political phenomenon, we should notice how far its influence tends to the production of abundance or scarcity, and not simply of cheapness or dearness of price. We must beware of trusting to absolute prices, it would lead to inextricable confusion. ...
— Sophisms of the Protectionists • Frederic Bastiat
... the muddle of the station. Five such installments came, with their absurd air of disorderly flight with the loot of innumerable outfit shops and provision stores, that, one would think, they were lugging, after a raid, into the wilderness for equitable division. It was an inextricable mess of things decent in themselves but that human folly made look like ...
— Heart of Darkness • Joseph Conrad
... a great magician at certain times and seasons, albeit his power fails at others. [Footnote: From this point of the legend onward there is an inextricable confusion as regards the four different versions. While the hero is decidedly a Badger in the Micmac, I regard the great ferocity, craft, and above all the vitality which he displays as far more characteristic of the Lox or Wolverine of the Passamaquoddy. What ...
— The Algonquin Legends of New England • Charles Godfrey Leland
... galleries, and as he removes with awe and trembling the dust and clay from the brittle monuments lest he destroy their outlines, and obliterate their inscriptions, so it behoves the student of the history of religion to set to work carefully, lest he should miss the track, and lose himself in an inextricable maze. The relics which he handles are more precious than the ruins of Babylon; the problems he has to solve are more important than the questions of ancient chronology; and the substructions which he hopes one day to lay bare are the world-wide ...
— Chips From A German Workshop - Volume I - Essays on the Science of Religion • Friedrich Max Mueller
... of conduct set forth by its great Teachers, there existed the most complete freedom of opinion, and where the most divergent and numerous philosophic sects consequently developed, there has always been perfect unanimity regarding the doctrine of rebirth, and in that inextricable forest of metaphysical speculations two giant trees have always overtopped the rest: the tree of Karma and the tree ...
— Reincarnation - A Study in Human Evolution • Th. Pascal
... the two wedges, and would not let Nathan have them, and Nathan held the beetle away behind him so that Rollo should not have that. Thus they seemed to be in inextricable difficulty. Rollo did not ...
— Rollo's Experiments • Jacob Abbott
... two companions disappeared in a copse. It was a dense thicket made of huge cypresses, sycamores, tulip-trees, olives, tamarinds, oaks, and magnolias. The different trees intermingled their branches in inextricable confusion, and quite hid the view. Michel Ardan and Maston walked on side by side phasing silently through the tall grass, making a road for themselves through the vigorous creepers, looking in ...
— The Moon-Voyage • Jules Verne
... Notables took place on the 22nd of February, when M. de Calonne had the opportunity he desired of explaining his magnificent plans. On the 5th of April, the Assembly was adjourned to the 12th; and in the interval the Minister was dismissed and exiled. France became involved in inextricable confusion, and the Notables were finally dissolved at the ...
— Memoirs of the Courts and Cabinets of George the Third - From the Original Family Documents, Volume 1 (of 2) • The Duke of Buckingham and Chandos
... to say that I have given some year or two of more or less profane contemplation to this question, and have now engaged a large corps of men, under the direction of Mr. Frank Lyon as attorney for the Commission, to seek a way out of the inextricable maze of express company figures. Whether we will be able to find the light before the Infinite Hand that controls our destinies cuts short the cord, is a question to which no certain answer can be given. ...
— The Letters of Franklin K. Lane • Franklin K. Lane
... positions, the party of Order found itself tangled in inextricable contradictions. If it voted against the revision, it endangered the "status quo," by leaving to Bonaparte only one expedient—that of violence and handing France over, on May 2, 1852, at the very time ...
— The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte • Karl Marx
... those princes whose history appeared to them most important and instructive. I shall follow the same plan, and hope to be forgiven, for not having involved either myself or my readers in a labyrinth of almost inextricable difficulties, from which the most able can scarce disengage themselves, when they pretend to follow the series of history, and reduce it to fixed and certain dates. The curious may consult the learned pieces,(402) in which this subject is treated in ...
— The Ancient History of the Egyptians, Carthaginians, Assyrians, • Charles Rollin
... bowed a little stiffly, and said, in an excited voice, that really she had no idea, but she was very happy indeed, she was sure, and so was Mr. Newt. When she had tied her sentence in an inextricable knot, she ...
— Trumps • George William Curtis
... Lord.' How can He be both? Jesus' question is in two forms,—'If He is son, how does David call Him Lord?' or, if He is Lord, 'how then is He his son?' Take either designation, and the other lands you in inextricable difficulties. ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Matthew Chaps. IX to XXVIII • Alexander Maclaren
... Villeroy—men between whom there was no friendship, but, on the contrary, constant rancour—had material in him to render valuable services at this particular epoch. Everything depended on patience, tact, watchfulness in threading the distracting, almost inextricable, maze which had been created by personal rivalries, ambitions, and jealousies in the state he represented and the one to which he was accredited. "I ascribe it all to God," he said, in his testament to his children, "the impenetrable workman who in His goodness ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... method, that I lost a prodigious deal of time and had bewildered my head to such a degree, that I was hardly capable of doing, seeing or comprehending anything. I fortunately perceived, at length, that I was in the wrong road, which would entangle me in an inextricable labyrinth, and quitted it ...
— The Confessions of J. J. Rousseau, Complete • Jean Jacques Rousseau
... continent, and particularly with Austria, acting officially and publicly, the other faction counteracting and opposing them. These private agents were continually going from their function to the Bastile, and from the Bastile to employment, and favour again. An inextricable cabal was formed, some of persons of rank, others of subordinates. But by this means the corps of politicians was augmented in number, and the whole formed a body of active, adventuring, ambitious, discontented people, despising the regular ministry, despising the courts at which they ...
— Political Pamphlets • George Saintsbury
... deceiving England, had agreed to all these proceedings. But in fact the Spanish ambassador had opposed them most strenuously at Ratisbon in the name of his king, as well as in that of the Infanta Isabella.[426] He prophesied with accurate foresight new and inextricable embarrassments as the consequence. The Papal Nuncio complained that the resistance of the ambassador weakened the Catholics and emboldened the Protestants. But his remonstrance had no effect on the Emperor. After his previous experiences Ferdinand ...
— A History of England Principally in the Seventeenth Century, Volume I (of 6) • Leopold von Ranke
... very strange-looking thing this Paganism; almost inconceivable to us in these days. A bewildering, inextricable jungle of delusions, confusions, falsehoods and absurdities, covering the whole field of Life! A thing that fills us with astonishment, almost, if it were possible, with incredulity,—for truly it is not easy ...
— Sartor Resartus, and On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History • Thomas Carlyle
... by a sudden uproar. The camp was in confusion. Sleepy voices tossed back and forth in inextricable babble. Hilary was on his feet in an instant, instinctively slipping his automatic into his blouse. Grim looked huge at ...
— Slaves of Mercury • Nat Schachner
... that 'papa might be well,' and he might go home; but where home was there was no discovering, except that there had been journeys by puff puff; and Louey, and Aunt Emma, and Nurse, and sea, and North something, and 'nasty man,' were in an inextricable confusion. ...
— That Stick • Charlotte M. Yonge
... First Book, from the rough and imperfect draft I had already made. What I now wrote became the basis of that part of the subsequent Treatise; except that it did not contain the Theory of Kinds, which was a later addition, suggested by otherwise inextricable difficulties which met me in my first attempt to work out the subject of some of the concluding chapters of the Third Book. At the point which I had now reached I made a halt, which lasted five years. ...
— Autobiography • John Stuart Mill
... few tunes to which they sang all the psalms and hymns. The proper mode of rendering these was through the nose. With the lapse of time and the advent of a new generation, these tunes became jangled together in inextricable confusion. The practice was for a deacon as leader to read a line of the psalm or hymn, and the congregation sang at it as best they could, each one using such tune as he chose, and often sliding from one tune to another in the same line or improvising as he went on. Finally, ...
— The Two Hundredth Anniversary of the Settlement of the Town of New Milford, Conn. June 17th, 1907 • Daniel Davenport
... threes, bore consequently upon the Bavarian Uhlans (an ill-disciplined and ill-affected body), and then, falling back in disorder, became entangled with the artillery and the left centre of the line, and in one instant thirty thousand men were in inextricable confusion. ...
— Burlesques • William Makepeace Thackeray
... often have we been gravely told, that it was caused by the writings of Voltaire, Rousseau, and Helvetius. Ridiculous! I have read the history of those times and have read it very differently. I am forced to understand that the inextricable and utter embarrassment of the French finances, the selfish and insolent luxury of the nobles, the desperate wretchedness of the lower orders of the people, and the profligate licentiousness of ...
— A Sketch of the Life of the late Henry Cooper - Barrister-at-Law, of the Norfolk Circuit; as also, of his Father • William Cooper
... was made, and proved difficult enough, for where the trees were not close and their roots interlaced, there were openings where masses of volcanic rock were tumbled-together in inextricable confusion, and the way over them was made more difficult by the bushy, shrubby growth and creepers ...
— Jack at Sea - All Work and no Play made him a Dull Boy • George Manville Fenn
... between the slow, but sure progress of cultivation, carried on in the natural way, and the attempt to force improvements, which, however flattering the prospect at first, soon produced a load of debt, and inextricable embarrassments. He might even appeal to the statements of the West Indians themselves, who allowed that more than twenty millions were owing to the people of this country, to show that no system could involve them so deeply as that, on which they had hitherto ...
— The History of the Rise, Progress and Accomplishment of the Abolition of the African Slave Trade by the British Parliament (1808) • Thomas Clarkson
... Colorado winds! Land of the eastern Chesapeake! land of the Delaware! Land of Ontario, Erie, Huron, Michigan! Land of the Old Thirteen! Massachusetts land! land of Vermont and Connecticut! Land of the ocean shores! land of sierras and peaks! Land of boatmen and sailors! fishermen's land! Inextricable lands! the clutch'd together! the passionate ones! The side by side! the elder and younger brothers! the bony-limb'd! The great women's land! the feminine! the experienced sisters and the inexperienced sisters! Far breath'd ...
— Leaves of Grass • Walt Whitman
... direction of the firing. We had got but half-way to camp, when we were met and almost borne down by an enormous crowd, consisting of men, women, and children of every shade of colour, animals and baggage all mixed up in inextricable confusion. On they rushed, struggling and yelling as if ...
— Forty-one years in India - From Subaltern To Commander-In-Chief • Frederick Sleigh Roberts
... introduced into the text by this insertion is bewildering in the extreme; and yet the result is but a typical specimen of the inextricable tangle which was produced by the systematic endeavours of later and pious editors to reduce the poem to the proper level of orthodoxy. Another instance is to be found in Job's reply to the third discourse of Bildad: in two ...
— The Sceptics of the Old Testament: Job - Koheleth - Agur • Emile Joseph Dillon
... sea; on it is the cruel love of the bull, the disguised stealth of Pasiphae, and the mingled breed and double issue of the Minotaur, record of a shameful passion; on it the famous dwelling's laborious inextricable maze; but Daedalus, pitying the great love of the princess, himself unlocked the tangled treachery of the palace, guiding with the clue her lover's blind footsteps. Thou too hadst no slight part in the work he wrought, O Icarus, did grief allow. Twice had he essayed to portray thy fate ...
— The Aeneid of Virgil • Virgil
... her own child, to weep while taking from him the right to console her, was more than she could do. No, there was nothing for her but death. To die as soon as possible, to escape shame by a complete disappearance, to unravel in this way an inextricable situation. But where to die! How? There are so many ways of departure! And she called them all up mentally while she walked. Life flowed around her, its luxury at this time of the year in full flower, round the Madeleine and its market, in a space marked off by the perfume of carnations and roses. ...
— The Nabob • Alphonse Daudet
... was Mr. Darwin's system? Who can make head or tail of the inextricable muddle in which he left it? The "Origin of Species" in its latest shape is the reduction of hedging to an absurdity. How did Mr. Darwin himself leave it in the last chapter of the last edition of the "Origin of Species"? ...
— Essays on Life, Art and Science • Samuel Butler
... so huge that it did not give the impression of a barracks, but had rather the character of a fantastic village—as though a hundred hamlets had been swept together in one inextricable heap. Originally it had been a little frame building of one story with a gabled roof. Then it had gradually become an embryo town; it budded in all directions, upward as well, kaleidoscopically increasing to a vast mass of little bits of facade, high-pitched roofs, deep bays, and overhanging ...
— Pelle the Conqueror, Complete • Martin Andersen Nexo
... the bill. Then we borrowed each other's arms and legs in an inextricable tangle and sang "Auld Lang ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward
... boy and yelping dog eagerly interested in something from which a blue dull smoke rises out of pot or pan; but dark-browed and silent, their limbs slack, like the ropes above them, entangled as they are in those inextricable meshes about the patched knots and heaps of ill-reefed sable sail. What a majestic sense of service in all that languor! the rest of human limbs and hearts, at utter need, not in sweet meadows or soft air, but in harbour slime and biting fog; so drawing their breath ...
— A Book of English Prose - Part II, Arranged for Secondary and High Schools • Percy Lubbock
... primary centers of consciousness. From the constellation of your nerve-nodes, from the great field of your poles, the nerves run out in every direction, ending on the surface of the body. Inwardly this is an inextricable ...
— Fantasia of the Unconscious • D. H. Lawrence
... feasibility of peace "on the sole condition of acknowledging the supremacy of the Constitution,—all other questions to be settled in a convention of the people of all the States." The President might well have been thrown into inextricable confusion of mind, betwixt the assaults of avowed enemies, the denunciations and predictions of inimical friends, the foolish advice of genuine supporters. It is now plain that all the counsel which was given to him was bad, from ...
— Abraham Lincoln, Vol. II • John T. Morse
... evening of the fourth day Tom got our work into an inextricable tangle, and took a reflective stroll out into the kitchen. He came back looking hopelessly discouraged. On the fifth ...
— The Van Dwellers - A Strenuous Quest for a Home • Albert Bigelow Paine
... the jungle was its thorniness. The shrubs were thorny; the creepers were thorny; the bamboos even were thorny. Everything grew zigzag and jagged, and in an inextricable tangle, so that to get through the bush with gun or net or even spectacles, was generally not to be done, and insect-catching in such localities was out of the question. It was in such places that the Pittas often lurked, and when ...
— The Malay Archipelago - Volume I. (of II.) • Alfred Russel Wallace
... to cut like clay, to fold like silk, to grow like living branches, to leap like living flame. Canopy crowning canopy, pinnacle piercing pinnacle—it shoots and wreathes itself into an enchanted glade, inextricable, imperishable, fuller of leafage than any forest, and fuller of ...
— Our Fathers Have Told Us - Part I. The Bible of Amiens • John Ruskin
... Chair, sharply, and they obeyed. "That, as I have said, was a serious thing. And it was—but for only one of them. But the matter has become graver; for the honour of both is now in formidable peril. Shall I go even further, and say in inextricable peril? Both left out the crucial fifteen words." He paused. During several moments he allowed the pervading stillness to gather and deepen its impressive effects, then added: "There would seem to be but one way whereby this could happen. I ask ...
— The Man that Corrupted Hadleyburg • Mark Twain |
