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More "Cobweb" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... been about a law that was inconvenient to Darius himself, or to these advocates of the constitution as it has always been, some way of getting round it would have been found out. If the king had been bold enough to assert himself, he could have walked through the cobweb. But this is one of the miseries of yielding to evil counsels, that one step taken calls for another. 'In for a penny, in for a pound.' Therefore let us all take heed of small compliances, and be sure that we can never say about any doubtful course, 'Thus far will I go, and no farther.' ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ezekiel, Daniel, and the Minor Prophets. St Matthew Chapters I to VIII • Alexander Maclaren
... systems underlying systems of ways contrived for water and steam and fire. On either hand tower facades pierced by scores of tiers of windows,—cliffs of architecture shutting out the sun. Above, the pale blue streak of sky is cut by a maze of spidery lines,—an infinite cobweb of electric wires. In that block on the right there dwell nine thousand souls; the tenants of the edifice facing it pay the annual rent of a million dollars. Seven millions scarcely covered the cost of those bulks overshadowing ...
— Kokoro - Japanese Inner Life Hints • Lafcadio Hearn
... the shoe that he had just finished, close before the young boor's eyes, upon the cobweb; then he folded his arms in imitation of Klaus, stared at him ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Vol. 56, No. 346, August, 1844 • Various
... thin, her nose aquiline, her lips fallen in, a cobweb of wrinkles round her eyes, down her cheeks, under her chin. But ...
— The Goose Girl • Harold MacGrath
... things more misty to our comprehension, we are sitting by a dormer window in a high, "hip-roofed" garret of a mansion built just before the Revolution, and the air is redolent of ancient memories. The very cobweb that swung across the window just now has a venerable appearance, entirely inconsistent with the fact that the housemaid's broom was supposed to have whisked across these beams but yesterday. But then the housemaids of to-day, as everybody knows, are, as a source of ...
— Lippincott's Magazine Of Popular Literature And Science, April 1875, Vol. XV., No. 88 • Various
... had to be made by slow, laborious feeling, aided only by such dim reflections of the gibbous moon as glimmered through a window, cobweb-hung, or through some ...
— Darkness and Dawn • George Allan England
... of lichen green, They creep from the mullen's velvet screen; Some on the backs of beetles fly From the silver tops of moon-touched trees, Where they swung in their cobweb hammocks high, And rocked about in the evening breeze; Some from the hum-bird's downy nest— They had driven him out by elfin power, And, pillowed on plumes of his rainbow breast, Had slumbered there till the charmed hour; Some ...
— Selections From American Poetry • Various
... the utmost impatience, repairing the breaches of its web, and taking no sustenance that I could perceive. At last, however, a large blue fly fell into the snare, and struggled hard to get loose. The spider gave it leave to entangle itself as much as possible, but it seemed to be too strong for the cobweb. I must own I was greatly surprized when I saw the spider immediately sally out, and in less than a minute weave a new net around its captive, by which the motion of its wings was stopt; and when it was fairly hampered in this ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. IV (of X)—Great Britain and Ireland II • Various
... peculiar tact, sought to entangle Le Gardeur's thoughts in an elaborate cobweb of occupations rivalling that of Arachne, which she had woven to catch every leisure hour of his, so as to leave him no time to brood over the pleasures of the Palace of the Intendant or the charms of Angelique ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby
... we dreamed of flight, this little voyager was coasting the clouds. I can follow him far across the meadow in the cobweb basket as his filmy balloon floats shimmering ...
— The Hills of Hingham • Dallas Lore Sharp
... back of an elderly hackney, and on four ancient angels, still showing signs of devotion like mutilated martyrs—while over all, the grand pointed roof, untouched by reforming wash, showed its lines and colors mysteriously through veiling shadow and cobweb, and a hoof now and then striking against the boards seemed to fill the vault with thunder, while outside there was the answering bay ...
— Daniel Deronda • George Eliot
... two some fortnight after, That yet maintains you, and your house in laughter. ITEM, the Babylonian song you sing; ITEM, a fair Greek poesy for a ring, With which a learned madam you bely. ITEM, a charm surrounding fearfully Your partie-per-pale picture, one half drawn In solemn cyprus, th' other cobweb lawn. ITEM, a gulling impress for you, at tilt. ITEM, your mistress' anagram, in your hilt. ITEM, your own, sew'd in your mistress' smock. ITEM, an epitaph on my lord's cock, In most vile verses, and cost me more pain, Than had I made 'em good, to fit your vein. Forty things ...
— The Humourous Poetry of the English Language • James Parton
... trees with thick gnarled roots. At the base of one of the trees, Time or a lightning stroke has hollowed a sort of chamber. Rising slopes carpeted with heather. Rabbit holes. Mosses. Toadstools. Stretched between two ferns, a great cobweb, spangled with water-drops. At the rise of the curtain, RABBITS are discovered on every side among the underbrush, peacefully inhaling the evening air. A time of serene silence ...
— Chantecler - Play in Four Acts • Edmond Rostand
... it for a rule, No creature smarts so little as a fool. Let peals of laughter, Codrus! round thee break, 85 Thou unconcern'd canst hear the mighty crack: Pit, Box, and gall'ry in convulsions hurl'd, Thou stand'st unshook amidst a bursting world. Who shames a Scribbler? break one cobweb thro', He spins the slight, self-pleasing thread anew: 90 Destroy his fib or sophistry, in vain, The creature's at his dirty work again, Thron'd in the centre of his thin designs, Proud of a vast extent of flimsy lines! Whom have I hurt? has Poet yet, ...
— The Rape of the Lock and Other Poems • Alexander Pope
... she pressed another button. A thousand tiny pipes, concealed in the ribs of the stone roof, gave forth a shower of fine spray, filling the long fernery with a hazy mist of cobweb fineness. Very soon millions of globules of moisture gathered on leaf, stock, frond, plume and tiny tip of every leaflet, reflecting each ray of light with diamond-like brilliancy. Pressing another button to shut off ...
— Solaris Farm - A Story of the Twentieth Century • Milan C. Edson
... and trail that wanders, like a cobweb hanging high, Just a hazy thread outlining mid-way of the stream and sky, Where the Fraser River canyon yawns its pathway to the sea, But half the world has shouldered up between its ...
— Flint and Feather • E. Pauline Johnson
... cleanliness, had imparted an air of no little comfort. The old oaken floor of the sitting-room had been polished to something like its original richness and brilliancy of hue, and reflected the firelight in a way that warmed you to look at it. There was not a cobweb to be seen; and though old Bruin snuffed round the room suspiciously, Farmer Nutt gave it as his conscientious opinion that every rat had had a taste of the "pyson." There was no question but that if one could get over the dulness of ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 349, November, 1844 • Various
... answer to Burke, but it is much more. The vivid pages of history in which he explains and defends the French Revolution which Burke had attacked and misunderstood, are only an illustration to his main argument. He expounds the right of revolution, and blows away the cobweb argument of legality by which his antagonist had sought to confine posterity within the settlement of 1688. Every age and generation must be free to act for itself. Man has no property in man, and the claim of one generation to govern beyond the grave is of ...
— Shelley, Godwin and Their Circle • H. N. Brailsford
... the wall paper slips down from the walls and crumples to a heap on the floor. The paint and varnish drop from the woodwork like so much sand. Every cobweb and speck of dust rolls off and falls in a little ...
— Common Science • Carleton W. Washburne
... Yorkshire they are said to kill the large chalk trout of Driffield as well as the small limestone and grit fish of Craven; if so, the gentlemen of the Driffield Club, who are said to think nothing of killing three-pound fish on midge flies and cobweb tackle, must be (as canny Yorkshiremen are likely enough to be) the best anglers ...
— Prose Idylls • Charles Kingsley
... was a cobweb of stars for Beauty who came In the whisper of leaves or a bird's lone cry in the glen, On dawn-lit hills and horizons girdled with flame I sought for the triumph that troubles the faces ...
— Counter-Attack and Other Poems • Siegfried Sassoon
... quietly, without any display, if you wish to please me,' she said; and with a wave of her cobweb handkerchief she signified that the conference ...
— Tracy Park • Mary Jane Holmes
... attempt to draw on his new trousers, to the astonishment of all his messmates, who had now gathered round him, found them separated in the middle of each of his legs. He might as well have attempted to clothe himself with cobweb continuations; they came to pieces almost with a shake. The waistcoat and coat were in the same predicament; they had not the principle of continuity in them. Everybody was lost in amazement, except Mr ...
— Rattlin the Reefer • Edward Howard
... stairways of an amphitheater. Nearly in the heart of the place rose the audacious and exquisitely embroidered tower of the town-house, three hundred and sixty-six feet in height; a miracle of needlework in stone, rivaling in its intricate carving the cobweb tracery of that lace which has for centuries been synonymous with the city, and rearing itself above a facade of profusely decorated and brocaded architecture. The crest of the elevation was crowned by the towers of the old ducal palace of Brabant, with its extensive ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. X (of X) - America - II, Index • Various
... must ha' bubbled the messenger in spite of the search he may have made. I found the popinjay here with your father, the pair as thick as thieves—and your father with a paper in his hand as fine as a cobweb. 'Sdeath! I'll be ...
— The Lion's Skin • Rafael Sabatini
... spiders make of their webs? (Trapping prey, supporting egg cases, protection, and means of moving, as in the case of cobweb spiders.) ...
— Ontario Teachers' Manuals: Nature Study • Ontario Ministry of Education
... The Filar or cobweb Micrometer (Ramsden's micrometer) eyepiece (Fig. 58) consists of an ocular having a fine "fixed" wire stretching horizontally across the field (Fig. 59), a vertical reference wire—fixed—adjusted at right angles to the first; and a fine wire, parallel to the reference wire, which can be moved ...
— The Elements of Bacteriological Technique • John William Henry Eyre
... your sails, And yield unto the weather of the tempest. You think your power's infinite as your malice, And would do all your anger prompts you to; But you must wait occasions, and obey them: Sail in an egg-shell, make a straw your mast, A cobweb all your cloth, and pass unseen, Till you have 'scaped the rocks that are ...
— English Literature For Boys And Girls • H.E. Marshall
... bring the osier creel! Bring me flies of fifty kinds, Bring me showers, and clouds, and winds, All things right and tight, All things well and proper, Trailer red and bright, Dark and wily dropper; Casts of midges bring, Made of plover hackle, With a gaudy wing, And a cobweb tackle. ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volumes I-VI. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... rose,—and stood a moment trying to control herself,—a pretty little pitiful figure in her dainty, garden-party frock, a soft white chiffon hat tied on under her rounded chin with a knot of pale blue ribbon, and a tiny cobweb of a lace kerchief in her hand with which ...
— God's Good Man • Marie Corelli
... strict enquiry of the Guardians of the Law, and afterwards resisted pertinaciously, until time and the most mature and reiterated discussion shall have proved its utility, nay, its necessity. The old saying is still true in all its points—Touch but a cobweb in Westminster Hall, and the old spider will come out in defence of it. This caution may sometimes postpone the adoption of useful amendments, but it operates to prevent all hasty and experimental innovations; and it is surely better that existing evils should be endured ...
— Political Pamphlets • George Saintsbury
... the tube of a thermometer; and so, as women are curious, you know, Katy amused herself with investigating the causes of these little phenomena, and, before she knew it, got her foot caught in a cobweb that held her fast, and constrained her, whether she would or no, to marry a poor man that nobody ...
— The Atlantic Monthly , Volume 2, No. 14, December 1858 • Various
... bird; Faint sunlight through the casement falls On cupids painted on the walls At play with doves. Precisely set Awaits the slender legged spinet Expectant of its happy lot, The while the player stays to twist The cobweb ruffle from his wrist. A pause, and then—(Ah, whisper not) Monseigneur plays ...
— The Dreamers - And Other Poems • Theodosia Garrison
... leaning on my sword, from the sight of my revenge, and with great bodily pain crawled back to the road. And, dear Margaret, the rimy trees were now all like pyramids of golden filagree, and lace, cobweb fine, in the red firelight. Oh! most beautiful! And a poor wretch got entangled in the burning sails, and whirled round screaming, and lost hold at the wrong time, and hurled like stone from mangonel high into the air; then a dull thump; it was his carcass ...
— The Cloister and the Hearth • Charles Reade
... school, where the light was dim and the air was decidedly musty, two small boys were crouched, playing a silent game of 'stag knife.' Besides being dark and evil-smelling under there, it was damp; great clammy masses of cobweb hung from the joists and spanned the spaces between the piles. The place was haunted by strange and fearsome insects, too, and the moving of the classes above sent showers of dust down between the cracks in the worn floor. But those boys were satisfied ...
— The Gold-Stealers - A Story of Waddy • Edward Dyson
... patience, accuracy, and watchfulness. Hazlitt thought the most sensible people to be met with are intelligent men of business and of the world, who argue from what they see and know, instead of spinning cobweb distinctions of what ...
— Character • Samuel Smiles
... parted from May. He broke off there, rose, drank a glass of water, and lighted a cigarette. He shook himself into wakefulness, condemned himself for this debauch of weak-minded thinking, found the time to be three o'clock, and brushed the whole cobweb tangle from his mind. He knew that sudden warmth after cold will often induce sleep—a fact proved by incidents of his campaigns—so he trudged up and down and opened his window and let the cool breath of the night chill his forehead ...
— The Grey Room • Eden Phillpotts
... little," and she pointed to a cobweb stretching from a dead twig to a weed. Hansei looked and slowly ...
— Child Stories from the Masters - Being a Few Modest Interpretations of Some Phases of the - Master Works Done in a Child Way • Maud Menefee
... the train was hanging over the deep, misted cauldron of the valley, again and again it slipped delicately over the span of cobweb across the sky that is a Canadian bridge. In this land of steep gradients, sharp curves and lattice bridges, the train was divided into two sections, and each, with two engines to pull it, climbed ...
— Westward with the Prince of Wales • W. Douglas Newton
... "There," said she; "The light is sweet when one has smelled of graves, Down in unholy heathen gloom; farewell." She pointed to a gateway, strong and high, Reared of hewn stones; but, look! in lieu of gate, There was a glittering cobweb drawn across, And on the lintel there were writ these words: "Ho, every one that cometh, I divide What hath been from what might be, and the line Hangeth before thee as a spider's web; Yet, wouldst thou enter thou must break the line, Or else forbear ...
— Poems by Jean Ingelow, In Two Volumes, Volume I. • Jean Ingelow
... had imposed upon her soul fell away at that like bonds of cobweb. She laid her hand upon his wrists, tears stood in ...
— Mistress Wilding • Rafael Sabatini
... element of human character so potential for weal or woe as firmness. To the merchant and the man of business it is all-important. Before its irresistible energy the most formidable obstacles become as cobweb barriers in its path. Difficulties, the terror of which causes the timid and pampered sons of luxury to shrink back with dismay, provoke from the man a lofty determination only a smile. The whole history of our race—all nature, indeed—teems with examples to show what wonders may be accomplished ...
— How to Get on in the World - A Ladder to Practical Success • Major A.R. Calhoon
... gnat and cobweb-time, When yellow begins to show in the leaf, That your old gamut changed its chime From those true tones—of span so brief! - That met my beats of joy, of ...
— Late Lyrics and Earlier • Thomas Hardy
... with a diameter almost exactly one-eleventh part of its length. The framework, built of aluminium, consisted of sixteen hoops, connected by longitudinal pieces, and kept rigid by diagonal wire stays. Before it was covered it resembled a vast bird-cage, and looked as frail as a cobweb, but was stronger and stiffer than it looked. It was divided by aluminium bulkheads into seventeen compartments; of these all but the two end compartments contained separate balloons or gas-bags. Two ...
— The War in the Air; Vol. 1 - The Part played in the Great War by the Royal Air Force • Walter Raleigh
... marshes the sounds begin Of a far-away fairy violin, Faint and reedy and cobweb thin." Cobweb thin, the accompaniment took up the plaintive chirping till the Maestro sang ...
— The Happy Venture • Edith Ballinger Price
... inches of solid water-tight wood. It will readily be understood that such a ship's side, with its rounded form, would of itself offer a very good resistance to the ice; but to make it still stronger the inside was shored up in every possible way, so that the hold looks like a cobweb of balks, stanchions, and braces. In the first place, there are two rows of beams, the upper deck and between decks, principally of solid oak, partly also of pitch pine; and all of these are further connected with each other, as well as with the sides of the ship, ...
— Farthest North - Being the Record of a Voyage of Exploration of the Ship 'Fram' 1893-1896 • Fridtjof Nansen
... of that letter by heart. She had read it while she drove towards the depot, and when she dismissed the carriage it was with a vague idea of flying to Lockhaven, and brushing all this cobweb of unreason away, and claiming her right to take her place at her husband's side. But as she sat in the station, waiting, every sentence of the letter began to burn into her heart, and she slowly realized ...
— John Ward, Preacher • Margaret Deland
... the day been from the dawn, All chequer'd was the sky, Thin clouds like scarfs of cobweb lawn Veil'd heaven's most glorious eye. The wind had no more strength than this, That leisurely it blew, To make one leaf the next to kiss That ...
— The Children's Garland from the Best Poets • Various
... come again, this time like a messenger bearing a command, to call him back to a duty which he believed he had relinquished and put down forever. And solely because it would be treasonable to that duty which still clung to him like a tenacious cobweb, he was riding into the smoke of ...
— Trail's End • George W. Ogden
... bear us away? We look thru the miles of air, The cold blue miles between us and the city, Over the edge of eternity we look On all the lights, A thousand times more numerous than the stars; Oh lines and loops of light in unwound chains That mark for miles and miles The vast black mazy cobweb of the streets; Near us clusters and splashes of living gold That change far off to bluish steel Where the fragile lights on the Jersey shore Tremble like drops of wind-stirred dew. The strident noises of the city Floating up to us Are ...
— Rivers to the Sea • Sara Teasdale
... with a kiss the Princess, And broke enchantment's chain, The sleepy old castle wondered, In its cobweb-cumbered brain, At the tide of life and pleasure That poured ...
— Point Lace and Diamonds • George A. Baker, Jr.
... which were still in his pocket, and brought them out. The trio amused themselves by watching Sidney Drew's face through the magnifying lenses. They were disappointed in the result, however, as the pictures, when so enlarged, revealed all the cobweb of fine cracks on the film. Mr. Drew's nose, the most amusing feature known to the movies, lost its quaintness when ...
— The Haunted Bookshop • Christopher Morley
... spoke Mother Goose, as she reached up quite high and brushed a cobweb off the sky with her broom. "That will not do, either. I must see about getting Mother Hubbard and her dog something to eat. You can stay with her later. Oh, I have it!" suddenly cried the lady who was riding on ...
— Uncle Wiggily and Old Mother Hubbard - Adventures of the Rabbit Gentleman with the Mother Goose Characters • Howard R. Garis
... that the heart of girl could desire, and a mother's forethought provide for her darling's use when she was far-away. A dress of cobweb Indian muslin embroidered in silk, a fan of curling feathers, a dear little satin pocket in which to keep the lace handkerchief, rolls of ribbons, dainty white shoes, with straggly silk ...
— About Peggy Saville • Mrs. G. de Horne Vaizey
... a tickling cobweb from his cheek. As the window from which he had descended came into range he stared, loose-jawed. Then be chuckled, as thoroughbred adventurers generally chuckle when they find themselves at the bottom of the sack, ...
— The Drums Of Jeopardy • Harold MacGrath
... and beheld the jewels and marbles and round, smooth, soft women of Italy's ancient civilization. But at the same time he had the unmistakable, the terrifying feeling of dare-devil sacrilege. What were his coarse hands doing, dabbling in silks and cobweb laces and embroideries? Silk fascinated him; but, while he did not like calico so well, he felt at home with it. Yes, he had seized her, had crushed her madly in the embrace of his plowman arms. But that seemed now a freak of courage, a drunken man's deed, ...
— The Fashionable Adventures of Joshua Craig • David Graham Phillips
... the voices? Yes; something that brushed my stupor from me as though it were a cobweb; something that made me hush my breath, and strain with all my ears ...
— Dead Man's Rock • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... you than any furry rabbit, Or glossy goose's oily plumes, or velvet earlap yielding, Or feeble age's heavy thighs, or flimsy filthy cobweb; ...
— The Poems and Fragments of Catullus • Catullus
... his ministrations, I pinned a brilliant at my throat—a gift from Lady Coleville—and shook over it the cobweb lace so it should sparkle like a star through a thin cloud. Then passing my small sword through the embroidered slashing of my coat, and choosing a handkerchief discreetly perfumed, I regarded myself at ease, thinking of ...
— The Reckoning • Robert W. Chambers
... the lower classes, he portrayed the pariahs of Jewish society and their oppressors (Dos kleine Menshele, "A Humble Man"), the life of Jewish beggars and vagrants (Fishke der Krummer, "Fishke the Cripple"), and the immense cobweb which had been spun around the destitute masses by the contractors of the meat tax and their accomplices, the alleged benefactors of the community (Die Taxe, oder die Bande Stodt Bale Toyvos, "The Meat Tax, or the Gang of Town Benefactors"). His trenchant satire on the "tax" hit the mark, ...
— History of the Jews in Russia and Poland. Volume II • S.M. Dubnow
... exile! The memories of all this folk, flown guests and masters of the still-abiding palace-chambers, haunt us as we hurry through. They are but filmy shadows. We cannot grasp them, localise them, people surrounding emptiness with more than withering cobweb forms. ...
— New Italian sketches • John Addington Symonds
... professor back to the front office, where he found his hostesses, Miss Jenny and Miss Nelly Downey, waiting to welcome him. Nice, delicate, refined-looking old maiden ladies they were—tall, thin, and fair complexioned, with fine, gray hair, and cobweb lace caps and pale gray dresses, and having pleasant smiles and ...
— Self-Raised • Emma Dorothy Eliza Nevitte Southworth
... "Mounsieur Cobweb; good mounsieur, get you your weapons in your hand, and kill me a red-hipp'd humble-bee on the top of a thistle, and, good mounsieur, bring ...
— The Writings of John Burroughs • John Burroughs
... pretty, and had cost a great deal, no doubt. It was very kind of Judy's mother to give it. Nevertheless round the bracelet crept a sort of cobweb of thoughts and feelings which were not all of pleasure. It was too late to examine into them now. Matilda wrapped up the trinket again and put it away, and went to bed; as happy as it seemed possible for her ...
— Trading • Susan Warner
... it—God bless him!—it is a subject for perpetual merriment to think of such a man's being taken for a true Huguenot and enmeshed, even for a while, in the nasty cobweb of Geneva. But in the last thing I shall quote, when he is Bacchic for the vine, you will see ...
— Avril - Being Essays on the Poetry of the French Renaissance • H. Belloc
... oncoming silk, Rhythmic, incessant, Like the motion of leaves... Fragments of color In glowing surprises... Pink inuendoes Hooded in gray Like buds in a cobweb Pearled at dawn... Glimpses of green And blurs of gold And delicate mauves That snatch at youth... And bodies all rosily Fleshed for the airing, In warm velvety surges Passing ...
— The Ghetto and Other Poems • Lola Ridge
... with one hand and grasped the bottle with the other. Penn seized the moment when his eyes were directed upwards at the cobweb festoons that adorned the cellar, and the sound of gurgling was in his throat, to whisper in ...
— Cudjo's Cave • J. T. Trowbridge
... clearness of diction, your perspicuity which leaves no cobweb of misty doubt wherewith to drape my shivering moral deformity! To 'see ourselves as others see us' is as disappointing as the result of plunging one's hand into the 'grab-bag', but at least it brings the stimulating tingle of a new sensation. Suppose each knows perfectly well that as ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... you known much worsted sold at the rate of 7, 12s. per lb.?-No, not very much, because there are very few who can spin it so fine. It is just like a cobweb. ...
— Second Shetland Truck System Report • William Guthrie
... duchess more perfectly, radically, unaffectedly nonchalante than she: a weak, transient amaze was all she knew of the sensation of wonder. Most of her other faculties seemed to be in the same flimsy condition: her liking and disliking, her love and hate, were mere cobweb and gossamer; but she had one thing about her that seemed strong and durable enough, and that ...
— Villette • Charlotte Bronte
... journeys to the heavens to seek some gift of his ancestors, the ingenious fancy keeping always before it an objective picture of this heavenly superstructure—bearing him thither upon a cloud or bird, on the path of a cobweb, a trailing vine, or a rainbow, or swung thither on the tip of a bamboo stalk. Arrived in the region of air, by means of tokens or by name chants, he proves his ancestry and often substantiates his claim in tests of power, ability thus ...
— The Hawaiian Romance Of Laieikawai • Anonymous
... the young poplar leaves, flecked here and there with pale drops of sunshine, which filtered through the thickly clustered boughs. When the wind passed in the high tree-tops, the shadows, soft and fine as cobweb, rippled over her dress, and a loose strand of her dark hair waved gently about her ear. The life—the throbbing vitality within—her seemed to vivify the very air she breathed, and he felt all at once that the glad thrill which stirred his ...
— The Deliverance; A Romance of the Virginia Tobacco Fields • Ellen Glasgow
... under that cobweb spread like a tent over the white clovers. A fairy would be very likely to creep in ...
— Aunt Jo's Scrap-Bag VI - An Old-Fashioned Thanksgiving, Etc. • Louisa M. Alcott
... who had unmasked—because she would not be known!—Very pretty, indeed!—Oh! these slight cobweb airs of modesty! so easily seen through. Hence such advantages against us are taken by the men. She had looked out of her window, and seen no arms quartered with his own; for you know, my lady, I would never permit any to be procured for me: so, she doubted not, it seems, but he was an unmarried ...
— Pamela (Vol. II.) • Samuel Richardson
... did not produce the effect as is charged by these men, how can the same word, when used by Noah, do it? And yet, on these assumptions, the faith of more than half the world seems to be now based. To expose these cobweb fabrics, called by some reason, on this subject, and Christian philanthropy by others, in which are involved, such tremendous conclusions, for weal or for wo, of so large a portion of the biped creation, that we feel like apologizing to our readers, for answering such learned ...
— The Negro: what is His Ethnological Status? 2nd Ed. • Buckner H. 'Ariel' Payne
... flies on the chamber window; Brave shines the sun through the freckled pane; Fearless the cobweb swings from the ceiling — Indolent ...
— Poems: Three Series, Complete • Emily Dickinson
... Barrow 'larn' him"; so Graham buckled to for over an hour. It is nice to see a young fellow so anxious to learn. Later on he came in with his hand bound up. He had cut it with a hatchet, happily not badly, and wanted me to dress it, his mother having already put a cobweb on. ...
— Three Years in Tristan da Cunha • K. M. Barrow
... because I think the Spirit with which he writes and the intelligence containd in his Letter, will afford Satisfaction to you and the Circle of our Friends. "It is certain, says he, that the Peace of Europe hangs upon a Cobweb. It is certain that, Portugal & Russia excepted, all Europe wishes us Success. The Ports of France, Spain and the Mediterranean are open to us on the Terms of Neutrality. We have already receivd a Benevolence in this Country, ...
— The Writings of Samuel Adams, vol. III. • Samuel Adams
... of an arrival, the bridegroom stood forth, the resemblance to Sans Foy was only too striking, while the party swept up the church, the bride in the glories of cobweb veil, white satin, &c., becomingly drooping on her uncle's arm, while he beamed forth, expansive in figure and countenance, with delight. Little Jasper Henderson, anxious and patronising to his tiny ...
— Modern Broods • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... urgent destiny That (as great states-men for their generall end In politique justice make poore men offend) Enforceth my offence to make it just. 65 What shall weak dames doe, when th' whole work of Nature Hath a strong finger in each one of us? Needs must that sweep away the silly cobweb Of our still-undone labours, that layes still Our powers to it, as to the line, the stone, 70 Not to the stone, the line should be oppos'd. We cannot keepe our constant course in vertue: What is alike at all parts? every day Differs from other, every houre and minute; I, every thought in ...
— Bussy D'Ambois and The Revenge of Bussy D'Ambois • George Chapman
... is like molten glass cooled but not congealed, and the few motes in it are pure and beautiful like the imperfections in glass. You may often detect a yet smoother and darker water, separated from the rest as if by an invisible cobweb, boom of the water nymphs, resting on it. From a hilltop you can see a fish leap in almost any part; for not a pickerel or shiner picks an insect from this smooth surface but it manifestly disturbs the equilibrium of the whole lake. It is wonderful with what elaborateness ...
— Walden, and On The Duty Of Civil Disobedience • Henry David Thoreau
... anger on her cheeks as she sat back against her cushions; more tears fell, which, regardless of her pearly complexion, she wiped away with a cobweb of a handkerchief, while she sat and hated Courtland, and the whole tribe of college men, her cousin Bill Ward included, for getting her into a scrape like this. Defeat was a thing she could not brook. She had never, since she came out of short frocks, been so defeated ...
— The Witness • Grace Livingston Hill Lutz
... prize because they are pretty, after which she sets them in a closet or drawer quite out of the way. Then, with a soft cloth fastened over the broom, she has the walls wiped down, and with a hair brush which comes for the purpose she removes every speck of dust and cobweb from the cornices and corners. A knitted cover of soft lampwick over a broom is excellent for wiping a dusty or a ...
— Holiday Stories for Young People • Various
... the Duchessa lightly. "A rather pretty soap-bubble burst and turned into an unpleasant cobweb, that's all. So—well, I've just been brushing my mind clear of both the cobweb and ...
— Antony Gray,—Gardener • Leslie Moore
... shining through it. The conservatory was in the shape of a half sphere, and entirely of glass. From its dome, more than a hundred feet above our heads, hung a globe of white fire that gave forth a soft clear light. Terminating, as it did, the long vista of arches with their transparent hangings of cobweb texture, it presented a picture of ...
— Mizora: A Prophecy - A MSS. Found Among the Private Papers of the Princess Vera Zarovitch • Mary E. Bradley
... pickle-fork and grew vegetables for pickling, Mrs. Vinegar, who was a sharp, bustling, tidy woman, swept, brushed, and dusted, brushed and dusted and swept to keep the house clean as a new pin. Now one day she lost her temper with a cobweb and swept so hard after it that bang! bang! the broom-handle went right through the glass, and crash! crash! clitter! clatter! there was the pickle-jar house about her ears all in ...
— English Fairy Tales • Flora Annie Steel
... and in the House where they abide, as long as they abide in it, there is no Room for Satan to enter. But let this Morning's Work, Deb, be a Warning to you, not thus to transgress again. As long as we are in peaceful Communion among ourselves, there is a fine, invisible Cobweb, too clear for mortal Sight, spun from Mind to Mind, which the least Breath of Discord rudely breaks. You owe to your Mother a Daughter's Reverence; and if you behave like a Child, you must look to ...
— Mary Powell & Deborah's Diary • Anne Manning
... perfectly exciting to see all those fluffy white members of my family fortune scratching and clucking about my feet that I prolonged the process of the feeding by scattering only a few grains at a time until great shafts of golden morning sun were thrusting themselves in through the dim dusk and cobweb-veiled windows. ...
— The Golden Bird • Maria Thompson Daviess
... which it had entered. Wondering how far it would have moved before the sermon was over, and whether it would have shone so very bright if God had made no covenant with Abraham, she was earnestly watching it pass from spot to spot, and from cobweb to cobweb, as if already it fled before the coming darkness of the long winter night, when she caught a glimpse of a very peculiar countenance turned in the same direction—that is, not towards the ...
— Alec Forbes of Howglen • George MacDonald
... barons then came to the hall; the swindlers held their arms up as if they held something in their hands and said: "These are the trousers!" "This is the coat!" and "Here is the cloak!" and so on. "They are all as light as a cobweb, and one must feel as if one had nothing at all upon the body; but that is just the ...
— Fairy Tales of Hans Christian Andersen • Hans Christian Andersen
... it was a metal ring, to which were attached golden strings, fine as gossamer threads: behind the first ring was a second, and further in still others, all stringed like the first, so that looking into the cell it appeared filled with a mist of golden cobweb. ...
— A Crystal Age • W. H. Hudson
... that. Iron glove meant iron hand that day, and John Lackland knew it. Sternly those assembled barons told him that the time for smooth words was past. "The divine right" of kings had been held up to the broad light of a modern day, and found to be motheaten by time. Its fabric was thin as cobweb, and there was nothing "divine" about it; nothing but the plain fact that "king's right" was merely the might of the strong, not the right of the just, and if it must come to that, they were muscular Christians ...
— The Iron Star - And what It saw on Its Journey through the Ages • John Preston True
... to free himself from these cobweb bindings that held him fast at Shagarack. Another Commencement over, his debts paid, he went home; to make a little pause on that landing-place of life's journey before taking his last start ...
— Hills of the Shatemuc • Susan Warner
... incident of the day happened just as I was falling asleep; sometimes then an unwelcome bat found his way into the room and circled wildly about the lighted candles; or an enormous moth buzzed in and we would chase him with a cobweb-broom. Or again a storm descended upon us and the great trees lashed their branches against the house, and the old shutters slammed back and forth, and ...
— The Story of a Child • Pierre Loti
... relation of propinquity or derivation between existences. Yet when sounds were attached to an event or emotion, the sounds became symbols for that disparate fact. The net of vocal relations caught that natural object as a cobweb might catch a fly, without destroying or changing it. The object's quality passed to the word at the same time that the word's relations enveloped the object; and thus a new weight and significance was added to sound, previously ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... open, and there stood the most lovely Christmas tree they had ever seen or imagined, all dazzling with silver; silver cones, silver fish, silver nuts and acorns, and red candles, and over all an exquisitely spun cobweb of frost. "That's my surprise for you all," said Hansi, who could hardly contain herself for joy. "I found the tree, and the dear, darling Heinzelmen brought it ...
— Fairy Tales from the German Forests • Margaret Arndt
... pardon," rejoined the theatrical gentleman; "but till I can forget the blunderbuss fired from the upsetting coach, the cobweb over the poor's-box, and the gay parson and undertaker at the harlot's funeral, I cannot allow of the comparison. Besides, I admire Hogarth for another reason: did he consider an engraver's to be an infradig. profession? No, for he was the ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 17, Number 489, Saturday, May 14, 1831 • Various
... anybody should happen to see you." Mrs. Henson merely laughed. The dogs were gambolling around her like so many kittens. They did not seem to heed Henson in the joy of her presence. He came on again, he made a grab for her dress, but the rotten fabric parted like a cobweb in his hand. A warning grunt came from one of the dogs, but Henson ...
— The Crimson Blind • Fred M. White
... choke a person to death?" he inquired severely, appearing at the end of the porch, a cobweb upon his brow. And, continuing, he put into practice a newly acquired phrase, "You better learn to be more considerick ...
— Penrod • Booth Tarkington
... a head the States cannot be united, and all attempts to conduct the measures of the continent will prove but governmental farces. So long as any individual State has power to defeat the measures of the other twelve, our pretended union is but a name, and our confederation a cobweb." He illustrates his point by the analogy of the Constitution of Connecticut. It is clear that by the head of the Union he meant the combined executive and legislative force, which in the Constitution was vested in the President and Congress. He recognizes the necessity ...
— Noah Webster - American Men of Letters • Horace E. Scudder
... time to look about the office. It was as clean as blackened, splintered planks could be made; even the ceiling had been attacked and every trace of cobweb removed. ...
— Calumet "K" • Samuel Merwin and Henry Kitchell Webster
... a thing first, and then searches for proof to bolster his opinion. Every observer must have noticed the tenuous, cobweb quality of reasons that are deemed sufficient to the person who thinks he knows, or whose interests lie in a certain direction. The limitations of men seem to make it necessary that pure truth should come to us through men who are stripped for eternity. ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 5 (of 14) • Elbert Hubbard
... soul had for its daily food the bread of spiritual dryness. Then, too, dear Mother, Our Lord allowed you, unconsciously, to treat me very severely. You found fault with me whenever you met me. I remember once I had left a cobweb in the cloister, and you said to me before the whole community: "It is easy to see that our cloisters are swept by a child of fifteen. It is disgraceful! Go and sweep away that cobweb, and ...
— The Story of a Soul (L'Histoire d'une Ame): The Autobiography of St. Therese of Lisieux • Therese Martin (of Lisieux)
... olive-and-crimson furniture, the pictures in cheap gilt frames, the heavily gilded wall-paper, and the throws of thin silk over the picture corners must prove to him the standing of her family. She felt an ignoble satisfaction in it, for a certain measure of commonness clung to the girl like a cobweb. She was as yet too young to bloom free of her environment, her head was not yet over the barrier of her daily lot; her heart never would be, and that was her glory. Young Lloyd handed her the roll of valedictory as soon as ...
— The Portion of Labor • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... slight bend of the head, and still without looking up. At this moment de Sigognac entered the green-room; he was masked and in full costume, just buckling around his waist the belt of the big sword he had inherited from Matamore, with the cobweb dangling from the scabbard. He also marched straight up to Isabelle, and was received ...
— Captain Fracasse • Theophile Gautier
... through a web and tangle of fog. It was not one of the regular yellow devils who come and eat up London, first this part, and then that, then disgorge a little, choking it all up only to snap at it and swallow it down all bewildered a quarter of an hour after. This was a cobweb fog spun, as it might be, by some malignant central spider hidden darkly in his lair. The vapouring-like filmy threads twisted and twined their way all over London, and for four days and nights the town was a city of ghosts. Buildings ...
— The Captives • Hugh Walpole
... have conjured up? He confesses to me that he sleeps soundly. This advantage I do not possess. It is not in my power to pass the sponge over my poor brain even as I pass it over the blackboard. The network of ideas remains and forms as it were a moving cobweb in which repose wriggles and tosses, incapable of finding a stable equilibrium. When sleep does come at last, it is often but a state of somnolence which, far from suspending the activity of the mind, actually maintains and quickens it more than waking would. During ...
— The Life of the Fly - With Which are Interspersed Some Chapters of Autobiography • J. Henri Fabre
... new Isis.—Help me, Hathor. Nephoris, tell the usher to see that the fan-bearers and the other attendants, women and men, are in their places.—Here are the pearl and diamond necklaces for your throat and bosom. Take care of the robe. The transparent bombyx is as delicate as a cobweb, and if you tear it No, you must not refuse. We all know how it pleases him to see his goddess in divine majesty and beauty." Cleopatra, with glowing cheeks and throbbing heart, made no further objection ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... that she passed over the compliment with a gesture like that of brushing away a cobweb. Her eyes were like deep, clear wells of ...
— The Last Shot • Frederick Palmer
... Ester, you are crushing one of them against that green box) suggested the thought; but you surely do not consider it strange, when I have such an array of collars already, that I did not pay thirty dollars for that bit of a cobweb ...
— Ester Ried • Pansy (aka. Isabella M. Alden)
... who is trusted by the Bedawin, and who brought with him a guide of the Faw'idah-Juhaynah, one Rjih ibn Ayid. This fellow was by no means a fair specimen of his race: the cynocephalous countenance, the cobweb beard, and the shifting, treacherous eyes were exceptional; the bellowing voice and the greed of gain were not. He had a free passage for himself, his child, and eight sacks of rice, with the promise of a napoleon ...
— The Land of Midian, Vol. 2 • Richard Burton
... recalled Emily's prudence; who concealed her emotion under a smile, and bade Annette lead her to the picture. It was in an obscure chamber, adjoining that part of the castle, allotted to the servants. Several other portraits hung on the walls, covered, like this, with dust and cobweb. ...
— The Mysteries of Udolpho • Ann Radcliffe
... quite different. On the 13th May I observed a nest of I. tiphia on a young mango-tree, at the edge of a croquet-ground in our garden. I shot both male and female and took the eggs; the nest was placed on the upperside of a sloping bough, was covered outside with cobweb, and lined with thin dry grass. It contained two fresh eggs of a delicate pink colour, with broad irregularly-shaped dashes of light brown down the sides of the shell, not tending to coalesce in any way at either apex. Another pair also built their ...
— The Nests and Eggs of Indian Birds, Volume 1 • Allan O. Hume
... the fire had been, sat the young mistress of the house half hid in a great arm-chair. Soft white folds fell all around her, and two small blue velvet slippers took their ease upon a footstool; with white laces giving their cobweb finish here, there and everywhere. A book was in her hand, and on her shoulder the grey kitten purred secure, in spite of the silky curls which now and then made puss into a pillow. Now and then. For while Miss Kennedy sometimes made ...
— Wych Hazel • Susan and Anna Warner
... veturilo. Coach-maker veturilfaristo. Coachman veturigisto. Coal karbo. Coalesce kunigxi. Coalition kunigxo. Coarse (manner) vulgara. Coast marbordo. Coat vesto. Coat of arms blazono. Coat (walls, etc.) sxmiri. Coax logi. Cobalt kobalto. Cobweb araneajxo. Cock (trigger) cxano. Cock (tap) krano. Cock (rooster) koko. Cockerel kokido. Cock's comb kresto. Cocoa kakao. Cocoa-nut kokoso. Cod gado. Code legxaro. Codicil kodicilo. Coddle ...
— English-Esperanto Dictionary • John Charles O'Connor and Charles Frederic Hayes
... Dan thought, and the result of his cogitations was that on the Monday he stole a sheaf of Nicholas's most complicated cobweb-like diagrams from their hiding-place in the wall, and brought them with him when he went by appointment to meet his patron off beyond Knockfinny. And when Mr. Willett said to him: "Well, Dan, ...
— Strangers at Lisconnel • Barlow Jane
... unknown to us, where at work in a small room, we came upon our glass blower and the coveted copy of that lovely table-garden. This man had made four, and one was still in his possession. We brought it back to America, a gleaming jewelled cobweb, and what happened was that the very ethereal quality of its beauty made the average taste ignore it! However, a few years have made a vast difference in table, as well as all other decorations, and to-day the same Venetian gardens have their ...
— The Art of Interior Decoration • Grace Wood
... confusedly implicated. The intrigue, 'a dark kind of treason,' as Rushworth calls it, 'a sham plot' as it is styled by Sir John Hawles, belongs to our story only so far as the cross machinations involved Ralegh. His slender relation to it is as hard to fix as a cobweb or a nightmare. Even in his own age his part in it was, as obsolete Echard says, 'all riddle and mystery.' Cobham had an old acquaintance with the Count of Arenberg, Minister to the Archduke Albert and the Infanta Isabel, joint sovereigns of the Low Countries. The Infanta was that ...
— Sir Walter Ralegh - A Biography • William Stebbing
... cold applause Which counteracts the fostering breath of praise, And shades with cypress the young poet's bays: Pale and dejected, mark, how genius strives With poverty, and mark, how well it thrives; The shabby cov'ring of the gentle bard, Regard it well, 'tis worthy thy regard, The friendly cobweb, serving for a screen, The chair, a part of what it once had been; The bed, whereon th' unhappy victim slept And oft unseen, in silent anguish, wept, Or spent in dear delusive dreams, the night, To wake, ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 13, - Issue 350, January 3, 1829 • Various
... the Prince, clapping his hands. "Come here and let me decorate you, my friend." And as John bowed before him the Prince placed upon his bosom a beautiful star of diamonds that gleamed and sparkled like a cobweb full ...
— John of the Woods • Abbie Farwell Brown
... fortunes of Scotland hang on a spider's thread? Did not a cobweb save the life of Mahomet, or Ali, or a mediaeval saint—no matter which? Was not a spider the solace of the Bastille? Have not I lain for hours on a summer morning watching the tremulous lines of the beautiful ...
— Dynevor Terrace (Vol. I) - or, The Clue of Life • Charlotte M. Yonge
... many antelopes, but the rhinoceros had gone through their nets like a cobweb. Several buffaloes had been seen, but they had broken out in a different direction. Lieut. Baker had killed three leucotis, Abd-el-Kader had killed one, and had hit a native in the leg with a bullet, while aiming at a galloping antelope. I had ...
— Ismailia • Samuel W. Baker
... took a look, and then Dan showed them the lovely plumage on a moth's wing, the four feathery corners to a hair, the veins on a leaf, hardly visible to the naked eye, but like a thick net through the wonderful little glass; the skin on their own fingers, looking like queer hills and valleys; a cobweb like a bit of coarse sewing silk, and the ...
— Little Men - Life at Plumfield With Jo's Boys • Louisa May Alcott
... at myself for caring so much for you when you are so hard on me. I suppose it is because you are my guardian, and I have no one else, scarcely, to love." I was beginning to think I must either escape hastily to my room, or apply the bit of cobweb lace once more to my eyes, which, if I could judge from my feelings, would soon be saturated with ...
— Medoline Selwyn's Work • Mrs. J. J. Colter
... into his service clothes he was surprised to feel a new vigor in his limbs and a new strength of purpose in his mind. His brain was clearer than it had been for a long time. The last cobweb was gone, and for the moment at least he was lifted out of himself as by a strong, invigorating drink. When he stood in his old boots and felt the familiar drag of his cartridge-belt, when he tested his free muscles, he ...
— Heart of the Sunset • Rex Beach
... miserable sense of impotence and dismay. Yes, this was the place beyond question. Through the picket fence she could make out the looming shadows of many buildings, and spidery iron structures that seemed to cobweb the darkness, and—and—Her face mirrored her misery. She had thought of a single building. Where, inside there, amongst all those rambling structures, with little time, perhaps none at all, to search, was she ...
— The White Moll • Frank L. Packard
... Neither were they restrained by the President's proclamation. The Constitution assigned the duty of negotiating and ratifying treaties to the President and Senate; but to the perfervid Anti-Britishers the Constitution was no more than an old cobweb to be brushed away at pleasure. The Jay Treaty could not be put into effect without money for expenses; all bills involving money must pass the House of Representatives; therefore, the House would actually control the operation ...
— George Washington • William Roscoe Thayer
... to picture the workshop, lighted at either end, and dark in the middle; the walls covered with handbills and begrimed by friction of all the workmen who had rubbed past them for thirty years; the cobweb of cordage across the ceiling, the stacks of paper, the old-fashioned presses, the pile of slabs for weighting the damp sheets, the rows of cases, and the two dens in the far corners where the master printer and foreman ...
— Two Poets - Lost Illusions Part I • Honore de Balzac
... flowers that looked as if they were embroidered on it, and now it had assumed an ivory tint. Two breadths had been taken out of the skirt, people were so slim at present. But the court train was left. The bertha, as we should call it now, was as a cobweb, and the lace from the puff sleeve falling over the arm of ...
— A Little Girl in Old Boston • Amanda Millie Douglas
... third, to what was called ontology, or the science which treated of the qualities and attributes which were common to both the subjects of the other two sciences. But if subtleties and sophisms composed the greater part of the metaphysics or pneumatics of the schools, they composed the whole of this cobweb science of ontology, which was ...
— An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations • Adam Smith
... I, back to him, 'I'll giye up the succession;' says I, 'and what is more, I'll grant that you have been called by the Lord, and that I have not; but the Lord that called you,' says I, 'was Lord Foxhunter.' Man, you'd tie his Lordship wid a cobweb, he ...
— The Poor Scholar - Traits And Stories Of The Irish Peasantry, The Works of - William Carleton, Volume Three • William Carleton
... range of those high, square rocks wherein the men dwelt; and hating them deeply, he turned and pressed on in the opposite direction over a gentle rise and across a little valley; till suddenly, among the trees, he came upon a curious barrier of meshed stuff, something like a gigantic cobweb. Through the meshes he could distinctly see the country beyond, and it seemed to be just the country he desired, more wooded and inviting than what he had traversed. Confidently he pushed upon the woven obstacle; but ...
— Kings in Exile • Sir Charles George Douglas Roberts
... mournful made-up eyes I felt as if my wicked French heels were on their necks. I noticed one girl, particularly; there was something so gallant about her cracked and polished shoes, her mended gloves, her collar, laundered to a cobweb thinness, and about the improbable sea-shell pink in her hollow cheeks. She had a sort of eager, sharpened sweetness in her face and a regular ...
— Jane Journeys On • Ruth Comfort Mitchell
... it the offspring Of an unruly mind. Like some strong man Whom pygmies in his sleep have bound with threads Of twisted cobweb, and he to their plan Is captive while he sleeps, but quickly shreds His bonds when he ...
— Letters from Mesopotamia • Robert Palmer
... appetite, and organs of reproduction that take hold on eternity,—all find room to consist in the small creature. So do we put our life into every act. The true doctrine of omnipresence is, that God reappears with all his parts in every moss and cobweb.[107] The value of the universe contrives to throw itself into every point. If the good is there, so is the evil; if the affinity, so the repulsion; if ...
— Essays • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... modern dressmaking can bestow. Nell knew too little of dress to fully appreciate the exquisite perfection of the toilette de la danse; she could only admire and wonder. It was of a soft cream silk, rendered still softer in appearance by cobweb lace, in which, as if caught by the filmy strands, as in a net, were lustrous pearls. Diamonds glittered in the hair which served them as a setting of gold. Her very gloves were unlike those of the other women, and seemed to fit ...
— Nell, of Shorne Mills - or, One Heart's Burden • Charles Garvice
... the other, his person responding passively to the rapid vibrations imparted. 'O, be tender, please—a little softer, there's a dear nephew! My arm is no more than a cobweb.' ...
— The Trumpet-Major • Thomas Hardy
... Aurora's morning gown. She was sewing; lining with snowy lawn innumerable pockets in a square basket that she held in her lap. The pockets were small, the needles were fine, the thread was a length of cobweb. Everything about the basket was small except the hopes that she was stitching into it; they were so great that her heart could scarcely hold them. Nature was stirring everywhere. The seeds were springing in the warm earth. The hens were clucking to their downy chicks ...
— A Village Stradivarius • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... stood upon a little bridge spanning a chasm like a cobweb. A low parapet divided it from the awful gulf. On the other side the mountain lifted its jagged face, clammy with icicles, and far over all towered the sterile peaks, above the reach of clouds or lightnings, ...
— Bohemian Days - Three American Tales • Geo. Alfred Townsend
... committed against infinite love and tender mercy, their unspeakable atrocity, but will acknowledge the truth of these words, "Because I am God, and not man, therefore the children of men are not consumed"—just as it is because the ship rides by a cable, and not a cobweb, that, when sails are rent, and yards are gone, and breakers are foaming on the reef, she mounts the billows and survives the storm. That we are not suffering the pains of hell, that we have hopes of heaven and ever shall ...
— The Angels' Song • Thomas Guthrie
... prompt replies are cold, And stately prudence snaps her cobweb hold. Had the good widow tried, or wish'd to speak, This was a bond she could not, dared not break; Their hearts (you never saw their likeness, never) Were join'd, indissolubly join'd for ever. Why need ...
— May Day With The Muses • Robert Bloomfield
... beautiful woman clothed in a splendid trailing gown, trimmed with exquisite lace as fine as cobweb. This was the important Sorceress known as Glinda the Good, who had been of great assistance to both Ozma and Dorothy. There was no humbug about her magic, you may be sure, and Glinda was as kind as she was powerful. She greeted Dorothy most lovingly, and kissed Button-Bright and ...
— The Road to Oz • L. Frank Baum
... Women beware Women Middleton plays on the word:— "Fab. When she was invited to an early wedding, She'd dress her head o'ernight, sponge up herself, And give her neck three lathers. Gaar. Ne'er a halter.") Laugh and lye downe Launcepresado Law, the spider's cobweb Legerity Letters of mart Leveret Limbo Line of life Linstock Long haire, treatise against (An allusion to William Prynne's tract The Unlovelinesse of Love-Lockes.) Loves Changelings Changed, MS. play founded on Sidney's Arcadia Low ...
— A Collection Of Old English Plays, Vol. IV. • Editor: A.H. Bullen
... marvelous to see how John Dolittle with his fat heavy fingers undid that cobweb cord and unrolled the leaf, whole, without tearing it or hurting the precious beetle. The Jabizri he put back into the box. Then he spread the leaf ...
— The Voyages of Doctor Dolittle • Hugh Lofting
... missed, gripped and missed. Then he caught it and held on. He was holding firmly now with both hands. But how his arms ached! With his feet he began kicking for the ladder, which, swinging and bagging in the wind, seemed as elusive as a cobweb. At last, when strength was leaving him, he doubled up his knees and struck out with both feet. They fell upon something and stuck there. They had found a round of the ladder. Hugging the ropes, he panted for breath, then slowly worked himself ...
— Panther Eye • Roy J. Snell
... by super-excellent housekeeping. Not a taint of the littleness that sometimes grows therefrom,—not a trace of the narrowness of mind that over-attention to such pursuits is too apt to bring;—on every important occasion aunt Miriam would come out free and unshackled from all the cobweb entanglements of housewifery; she would have tossed housewifery to the winds if need were (but it never was, for in a new sense she always contrived to make both ends meet). It was only in the unbroken ...
— Queechy • Susan Warner
... moment. There might as well have been but one for, within the hall and without, the eyes of all seemed fastened on that. Some strange caprice had prompted Evelyn Darrah to wear black that night—a grenadine, with cobweb lace and glinting spangles and sweeping train, the bodice cut low and displaying her shapely arms and neck and shoulders, enhancing the grace of her tall and slender form. Her dark hair was coiled in masses, yet here and there a curl ...
— Tonio, Son of the Sierras - A Story of the Apache War • Charles King
... Mr Chester. 'Dear me! I hope the aged soul has not caught her foot in some unlucky cobweb by the way. She is there at last! Come ...
— Barnaby Rudge • Charles Dickens
... into the Green Park that he might cross to Victoria Station and take the Underground into the City. For so late in January it was warm; sunlight, through the haze, sparkled on the frosty grass—an illumined cobweb of a day. ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... resided a powerful force in the sword; so powerful, that the grain of gold was beaten to a flat surface, thin as the covering of mist that we breathe on the glass-pane; and it shone at the sword's point, so that the thin threads of the cobweb seemed to swell to cables, for one saw the strong twistings of numberless small threads. And the voice of Knowledge seemed over the whole world, so that the age of miracles appeared to have returned. Thin iron ties were laid over the earth, and along these the ...
— Pictures of Sweden • Hans Christian Andersen
... a Montreal lumber room The Discobolus standeth and turneth his face to the wall; Dusty, cobweb-covered, maimed and set at naught, Beauty crieth in an attic and no man ...
— The Note-Books of Samuel Butler • Samuel Butler
... in the centre of a buttercup. He would get it and be back before it was time for Stingy to dance. He measured his way quickly over to the buttercup, his little back fairly popped into the air every other half second as he went furiously humping himself along. He found the cobweb covered with the gold dust of the buttercup, and taking it up hastily he hurried back. He knew just the spot where Stingy would dance before Silkie, beside a ...
— The Cheerful Cricket and Others • Jeannette Marks
... leaning up against the cushions at the end, cautiously, so as not to disarrange her hat. Esther drew up the narrow skirt, exposing slender legs encased in gossamer stockings and six inches or so of a diaphanous under-garment, pink georgette, delicate as a cobweb and scented like the rest of its owner with an indefinable and slightly cloying perfume. On the white skin just below the hip there showed startlingly a blue-black bruise, the size of a franc piece—the ...
— Juggernaut • Alice Campbell
... one,' asks George Eliot, in 'Middlemarch,' 'ever pinched into its pilulous smallness the cobweb of pre-matrimonial acquaintance?' And, to press the metaphor, the cobweb, as far as Mark and Mabel were concerned, brilliantly as it shone in all its silken iridescence, would have rolled up into a particularly ...
— The Giant's Robe • F. Anstey
... worsted sold at the rate of 7, 12s. per lb.?-No, not very much, because there are very few who can spin it so fine. It is just like a cobweb. ...
— Second Shetland Truck System Report • William Guthrie
... ordinances defaced. On Rue Beaubourg, the women cried from the windows to the men employed in erecting a barricade: 'Courage!' The agitation reached even to Faubourg Saint-Germain. At the headquarters on Rue de Jerusalem, which is the centre of the great cobweb that the police spreads over Paris, everyone trembled; their anxiety was immense, for they saw the possibility that the Republic would triumph. In the courtyards, in the bureaus, and in the passages, the clerks and sergents-de-ville began to talk with ...
— Napoleon the Little • Victor Hugo
... chief of the men of Lothian fell, pierced by an arrow, and all his followers were put to flight. For the Almighty was offended at them and their strength was rent like a cobweb. ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... pieces of Latin poetry. His works in all were forty-four in number: and it is said that on the very day of his death (it took place in 735) he was dictating to his amanuensis, and had just completed a book. His works are wonderful for his time, and not the less interesting for a fine cobweb of fable which is woven over parts of them, and which seems in keeping with their venerable character. Thus, in speaking of the Magi who visited the infant Redeemer, he is very particular in describing their age, appearance, and offerings. Melchior, the first, was old, had gray hair, and ...
— Specimens with Memoirs of the Less-known British Poets, Complete • George Gilfillan
... think of that, I'm entirely reconciled to staying here," returned Kit. "Poppycheek, you are a wonderful dancer! You're like a butterfly skimming over a cobweb!" ...
— Patty's Suitors • Carolyn Wells
... the satisfaction of having her hair dressed, wearing her point lace bertha and aigret, and showing us who is who, and the remainder who are not. For she is well born, intricately related to the original weavers of the social cobweb, and knows every one by name and sight; but has found lately, I judge, that this knowledge unbacked by money is no longer a social power that carries beyond mixed tea and charity entertainments. Never mind, Lavinia Dorman is a dear! Ah, if she would ...
— People of the Whirlpool • Mabel Osgood Wright
... Much resembling a Cobweb, or a confus'd lock of these Cylinders, is a certain white substance which, after a fogg, may be observ'd to fly up and down the Air; catching several of these, and examining them with my Microscope, I found them to be much of the same form, looking most like to a flake of Worsted ...
— Micrographia • Robert Hooke
... space may be infinite, and force infinite. There may be heat as much greater than the sun's, as the sun's heat is greater than a candle's: and force as much greater than the force by which the world swings, as that is greater than the force by which a cobweb trembles. Now, on hear and force, life is inseparably dependent; and I believe, also, on a form of substance, which the philosophers call "protoplasm." I wish they would use English instead of Greek words. When I want to know why a leaf is green, they tell ...
— The Queen of the Air • John Ruskin
... as if it were keeping time to an inaudible tune, as she sat there stiffly erect. Her skin was pale and withered; and her cheeks were wrinkled in fine lines, like the crossings of a cobweb. Her eyes might once have been blue; but they had become nearly colourless, and, looking at her, one might easily imagine that she was blind. She had a singularly sweet smile, and a musical voice, which though sad, had no trace of whining. If it had not been for her smile and her voice, I think ...
— An Arrow in a Sunbeam - and Other Tales • Various
... of 'em have carpentered 'em theirselves, though I taught 'em how to do that after the pattern Sonny got me to make his by—an' you'll find all sorts o' specimens of what they designate ez "summer an' winter resorts" in pieces of bark an' cobweb an' ol' twisted tree-leaves in every one ...
— Sonny, A Christmas Guest • Ruth McEnery Stuart
... exactly one-eleventh part of its length. The framework, built of aluminium, consisted of sixteen hoops, connected by longitudinal pieces, and kept rigid by diagonal wire stays. Before it was covered it resembled a vast bird-cage, and looked as frail as a cobweb, but was stronger and stiffer than it looked. It was divided by aluminium bulkheads into seventeen compartments; of these all but the two end compartments contained separate balloons or gas-bags. ...
— The War in the Air; Vol. 1 - The Part played in the Great War by the Royal Air Force • Walter Raleigh
... other boxes by hangings of tapestry. One of the most beautiful effects of all was made by the ceiling, where the chandeliers shone through a network of strings of smilax and white and green electric lights radiating from the center like the strands of a cobweb. As may be guessed, the brilliancy of the audience was in harmony with that of the audience-room. The price of tickets for the stalls on the main floor was thirty dollars, and the chairs in the other parts of the room cost proportionately. Persons who could pay such ...
— Chapters of Opera • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... it," said the teacher, lifting his broad shoulders and smiting them with his hands. "God has been house cleaning. The dome of the sky is all swept and dusted. There isn't a cobweb ...
— Darrel of the Blessed Isles • Irving Bacheller
... what he meant when he wrote it all. Taking a stump of cedar pencil from his pocket, one end of it much gnawn, he added a few scrawls to the inscriptions, and then stood on the seat to look out of the round window, which was darkened by an old cobweb. ...
— Wood Magic - A Fable • Richard Jefferies
... thumb and forefinger, shaking out the pink folds till the signature in violet ink flaunted before the violet eyes of its owner, then, crushing it as if it were a cobweb, she tossed it toward ...
— Infelice • Augusta Jane Evans Wilson
... difficulties, and had mastered the alphabet, which was an Egyptian Temple in itself, there then appeared a procession of new horrors, called arbitrary characters; the most despotic characters I have ever known; who insisted, for instance, that a thing like the beginning of a cobweb, meant expectation, and that a pen-and-ink sky-rocket, stood for disadvantageous. When I had fixed these wretches in my mind, I found that they had driven everything else out of it; then, beginning again, I forgot them; while I was picking them ...
— David Copperfield • Charles Dickens
... silk, Rhythmic, incessant, Like the motion of leaves... Fragments of color In glowing surprises... Pink inuendoes Hooded in gray Like buds in a cobweb Pearled at dawn... Glimpses of green And blurs of gold And delicate mauves That snatch at youth... And bodies all rosily Fleshed for the airing, In warm velvety ...
— The Ghetto and Other Poems • Lola Ridge
... you are there to be tried. If you could justify yourself to the world, or to the women of whose folly you take advantage, by the fallacious arguments which you have so ready for that purpose, such cobweb sophistry cannot weaken the force ...
— A Description of Millenium Hall • Sarah Scott
... Chase, a degree of the normal Augustan condescension to the archaic—the vision which informs the earlier couplet poem on the English poets. Both in his quotation from Sidney ("... being so evil apparelled in the Dust and Cobweb of that uncivil Age, what would it work trimmed in the gorgeous Eloquence of Pindar?") and in his own apology for the "Simplicity of the Stile" there is sufficient prescription for all those improvements that either a Ramsay or a Percy were soon actually to undertake. And some of the Virgilian ...
— Parodies of Ballad Criticism (1711-1787) • William Wagstaffe
... kind of fair, full of stalls, wares, and shopkeepers: in which the theologist sells his stuff, which at the same time supplies food and warmth. The critic disposes of his cobweb linen and transparent lawn, of no shelter from the cold. The philologist, his embroidered vests, Corinthian vases, and Phrygian marble. The physician letters and syllables. The lawyer, men. The antiquary, old shoes. The alchymist, himself. The poet, smoke. The orator, paint. The historian, fame—and ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor, Vol. I, No. 5, May 1810 • Various
... finished reading he folded the paper and looked dreamily at the cobweb in the corner. He wished to be understood as having no opinion whatever to express. Cranston sat in silence with lips compressed under his heavy moustache. Davies never moved. His blue eyes were ...
— Under Fire • Charles King
... objects of art, furniture, etc. One room only of the maternal mansion was permitted to contribute its quota to the completion of the bridal dwelling—the wing, never since inhabited, in which Philip had made his essay as a painter—and, without variation of a cobweb, and, with whimsical care and effort on the part of Miss Fanny, this apartment was reproduced at Revedere—her own picture on the easel, as it stood on the night of his abandonment of his art, and palette, pencils and colors ...
— Stories by American Authors (Volume 4) • Constance Fenimore Woolson
... elderly hackney, and on four ancient angels, still showing signs of devotion like mutilated martyrs—while over all, the grand pointed roof, untouched by reforming wash, showed its lines and colors mysteriously through veiling shadow and cobweb, and a hoof now and then striking against the boards seemed to fill the vault with thunder, while outside there was the answering bay of ...
— Daniel Deronda • George Eliot
... upon the steps in helpless dismay, and tears began to drop from Eliza's eyes, when Mother Mayberry appeared upon the scene of action, stiff and rustling as to black silk gown, capped with a cobweb of lace over the water-waves and most ...
— The Road to Providence • Maria Thompson Daviess
... to drive them to intenser hostility, and to send them away to plot His death. That is what comes of making religion a round of outward observances. The Pharisee is always blind as an owl to the light of God and true goodness; keen-sighted as a hawk for trivial breaches of his cobweb regulations, and cruel as a vulture to tear with beak and claw. The race is not extinct. We all carry one inside us, and need God's help to ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Matthew Chaps. IX to XXVIII • Alexander Maclaren
... our educational evolution is perhaps worth summarizing. In the early days of colonization the Church of England spun an educational cobweb, which it has been very difficult to sweep away, and which still remains in a fragmentary state as an evidence of past good service. When the education of the first settlers was in danger of being altogether neglected, the Church put forth the ...
— Town Life in Australia - 1883 • R. E. N. (Richard) Twopeny
... hit the Jesuits hard. They had put the poor cobweb-spinners in mind of the humiliating fact, which they have had thrust on them daily from that time till now, and yet have never learnt the lesson, that all their scholastic cunning, plotting, intriguing, bulls, pardons, indulgences, and the rest of it, are, ...
— Westward Ho! • Charles Kingsley
... the first month's rent. Immediately he attempted to devise some means of raising the sum he needed, but before he had reached the very next corner the clear north wind had blown the trouble away like a cobweb. With all his strength and industry and determination, he was still a very young man, and perplexity had no hold upon him since passion had taken its ...
— Casa Braccio, Volumes 1 and 2 (of 2) • F. Marion Crawford
... gladness in the chirp of the birds, and content in the drone of the insects; and all the squirrels in the place seemed to be gadding on joyful errands, for one could not turn a corner that a group of them did not scatter from before his feet. So common a thing as a dewdrop caught in a cobweb became more beautiful than jewel-spangled lace. The rustling of the quail in the brush, even the glimpse of a coiled snake basking on a sunny spot of earth, was fraught with interest because it spoke of life, glad and ...
— The Thrall of Leif the Lucky • Ottilie A. Liljencrantz
... which eluded his grasp. He gripped and missed, gripped and missed. Then he caught it and held on. He was holding firmly now with both hands. But how his arms ached! With his feet he began kicking for the ladder, which, swinging and bagging in the wind, seemed as elusive as a cobweb. At last, when strength was leaving him, he doubled up his knees and struck out with both feet. They fell upon something and stuck there. They had found a round of the ladder. Hugging the ropes, he panted for breath, then slowly worked himself to ...
— Panther Eye • Roy J. Snell
... over her black dress, and as she moved it fluttered up and caught on the chain round her throat. "Unfasten me, please, Val," she said, bending her fair neck, and Val was obliged laboriously to disentangle the silken cobweb from the spurs of her clear-set diamonds, a process which fascinated Lawrence, whose mind was more French than English in its permanent interest in women. Certainly Val's office of friend of the family was not less delicate because Laura, secure in her few ...
— Nightfall • Anthony Pryde
... owl, his old neighbour and friend, Who, being a bird in whom marmot confided, Had hired his cottage, in which he resided. The landlord just hinted, that when he lived there, He had kept the old hovel in charming repair; The walls neatly mended, the parlour swept clean, And never a cobweb nor grain to be seen; But that now this once pleasant and rural retreat, By his tenant, the owl, was no longer kept neat; That the little round chamber, and long slanting hall, For the want of attention, were likely to fall; Such a mess and confusion ...
— The Quadrupeds' Pic-Nic • F. B. C.
... man, young Hermes, who, as all Olympus knew, was for ever at some piece of mischief, insisted on meddling with his father's work, and got leave to fashion the human ear out of a shell that he chanced to have by him, across which he stretched a fine cobweb that he stole from Arachne. But he hollowed and twisted the shell in such a fashion that it would turn back all sounds except very loud blasts that Falsehood should blow on a brazen horn, whilst the impenetrable web would keep out all such whispers as Truth ...
— Wisdom, Wit, and Pathos of Ouida - Selected from the Works of Ouida • Ouida
... four gentlemen that you suppose Lucy to have refused?" said I, with as indifferent an air as I could assume, affecting to destroy a cobweb with my rattan, and even carrying my acting so far as to make an attempt at ...
— Afloat And Ashore • James Fenimore Cooper
... walked through the weeds to Honeycutt's door. The door was closed, the windows down—dirty windows, every corner of every pane with its dirty cobweb trap and skeletons of flies. As he lifted his foot to the first of the three front steps he heard voices. Nor would any man who had once listened to the deep, sullen bass of Swen Brodie have forgotten or have ...
— The Everlasting Whisper • Jackson Gregory
... looked up to avoid imaginary dangers, and then back again to see a horse rolling on the ground, the gaunt man standing and slashing over it at a rent and fluttering mass of grey that streamed and wrapped about them both. And thick and fast as thistle-down on waste land on a windy day in July the cobweb masses ...
— The Country of the Blind, And Other Stories • H. G. Wells
... of its structure: the voussoirs begin to show themselves confidently, and fight for precedence with the architrave lines; and there is an entanglement of the two structures, in consequence, like the circular and radiating lines of a cobweb, until at last the architrave lines get worsted, and driven away outside of the voussoirs; being permitted to stay at all only on condition of their dressing themselves in mediaeval costume, as in ...
— The Stones of Venice, Volume I (of 3) • John Ruskin
... what was meant by the phrase, "automobile elation." She seemed to feel an uplifting of her spirit, and a strange thrill of exquisite happiness, while all trace of nervousness or petty worry was brushed away like a cobweb. ...
— Patty's Summer Days • Carolyn Wells
... that I found the signs of completed incubation; but I always came too late; the young Cigales had departed. At most I sometimes found one hanging by a thread to its natal stem and struggling in the air. I supposed it to be caught in a thread of gossamer, or some shred of cobweb. ...
— Social Life in the Insect World • J. H. Fabre
... you ever see a fairy in a rose-leaf coat and cap Swinging in a cobweb hammock as he napped his ...
— Child Songs of Cheer • Evaleen Stein
... sails, And yield unto the weather of the tempest. You think your power's infinite as your malice, And would do all your anger prompts you to; But you must wait occasions, and obey them: Sail in an egg-shell, make a straw your mast, A cobweb all your cloth, and pass unseen, Till you have 'scaped the rocks that ...
— English Literature For Boys And Girls • H.E. Marshall
... midst of this growing confusion a party entered one of the most prominent boxes that drew the general attention in that part of the house. A lady in crimson velvet, with some gossamer lace about her arms and bosom, and a cobweb of the same rich material floating from the thick braids of her coal-black hair, came into the box, followed by a gentleman so like her that people exclaimed ...
— The Old Countess; or, The Two Proposals • Ann S. Stephens
... the theatrical gentleman; "but till I can forget the blunderbuss fired from the upsetting coach, the cobweb over the poor's-box, and the gay parson and undertaker at the harlot's funeral, I cannot allow of the comparison. Besides, I admire Hogarth for another reason: did he consider an engraver's to be an infradig. ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 17, Number 489, Saturday, May 14, 1831 • Various
... Rosemary, with a forced laugh. She was endeavouring to brush her mood away as though it were an annoying cobweb. "I've grown ...
— Master of the Vineyard • Myrtle Reed
... dangerous dream, Till wakened by the morning beam; When, dazzled by the eastern glow, Such startler cast his glance below, And saw unmeasured depth around, 700 And heard unintermitted sound, And thought the battled fence so frail, It waved like cobweb in the gale; Amid his senses' giddy wheel, Did he not desperate impulse feel, 705 Headlong to plunge himself below, And meet the worst his fears foreshow? Thus, Ellen, dizzy and astound, As sudden ruin yawned around, By crossing terrors wildly ...
— Lady of the Lake • Sir Walter Scott
... in the vault, the yellow bills hanging from a cobweb of strings; why should they terrify her; what did they threaten? Dully, and from a distance, Monica heard the voice ...
— The Lost Road • Richard Harding Davis
... footboard, was the limping Achilles, with the arrow of Paris festering in his heel. This ancient veteran, with his back to the field, was the fugitive AEneas, leaving Troy behind. And these, around me, belonged to the columns of Barbazona, scattered at Legnano by the revengeful Milanese. Cobweb, and thick dust, and faded parchment had somewhat softened those elder events; but in their day they were tangible, practical, and prosaic, like this scene. Years will roll over this, as over those, and folks will read at firesides, half doubtfully, half wonderingly, the story of this ...
— Campaigns of a Non-Combatant, - and His Romaunt Abroad During the War • George Alfred Townsend
... the Babylonian song you sing; ITEM, a fair Greek poesy for a ring, With which a learned madam you bely. ITEM, a charm surrounding fearfully Your partie-per-pale picture, one half drawn In solemn cyprus, th' other cobweb lawn. ITEM, a gulling impress for you, at tilt. ITEM, your mistress' anagram, in your hilt. ITEM, your own, sew'd in your mistress' smock. ITEM, an epitaph on my lord's cock, In most vile verses, and cost ...
— The Humourous Poetry of the English Language • James Parton
... contouring comes only with practice but by the use of expedients a fairly accurate contoured map can be made. In contouring an area the stream lines and ravines form a framework or skeleton on which the contours are hung more or less like a cobweb. These lines are accurately mapped and their slopes determined and the contours are ...
— Manual of Military Training - Second, Revised Edition • James A. Moss
... under the influence of some invisible charm, its white-washed elbows never struck upon the sight of the else all-seeing boots; spider never rushed from his cell with the post-haste speed with which he issued from his dark recess, to pick the slightest cobweb that ever harnessed Queen Mab's team, from other coats; a gnat, a wandering hair left its location, swept by the angry brush from the broad-cloth of those who paid their bills—as far as I was concerned—all were inoculated with this strange ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 1, Complete • Various
... her desire to present him in all his dignity, and she moved, conscious of the graceful turn of a pretty ankle, which, encircled with a string of pearls, and clothed in flesh-coloured silk, of the most cobweb texture, rose above the crimson sandal. Her jewelled tiara, too, gave dignity to the frown with which the offended King of Shadows greeted his consort, as each entered upon the scene at the head of ...
— St. Ronan's Well • Sir Walter Scott
... misgivings from my own mind, I got the key of the house from Paul, explored it thoroughly, and was satisfied that no improper visitor had recently entered the drawing-room at least, as the windows were strongly bolted on the inside, and a large cobweb, heavy with dust, hung across the doorway. This did no great credit to Paul's stewardship, but was, perhaps, a slight relief to me. Nor could I see a trace of anything uncanny outside the house. When Severance went with me, next day, the coast was equally clear, and I ...
— Oldport Days • Thomas Wentworth Higginson
... the marshes the sounds begin Of a far-away fairy violin, Faint and reedy and cobweb thin." Cobweb thin, the accompaniment took up the plaintive chirping till the Maestro ...
— The Happy Venture • Edith Ballinger Price
... to be aware that it is useless to scheme for me; that in doing so you but sow the wind to reap the whirlwind? I sweep your cobweb projects from my path, that I may pass on unsullied. I am anchored on a resolve you cannot shake. My heart, my conscience shall dispose of my hand—they only. Know ...
— Shirley • Charlotte Bronte
... all nonsense!" broke in Lucian, impatient of this cobweb spinning. "I don't believe a word of Ferruci's story. If Vrain lived in Jersey Street as Wrent, why should ...
— The Silent House • Fergus Hume
... has a veil resembling a cobweb. The gills generally become cinnamon-colored. They grow on the ground in woods, during late summer and autumn. Some of our most beautiful mushrooms belong to this group. The veil is not ...
— Among the Mushrooms - A Guide For Beginners • Ellen M. Dallas and Caroline A. Burgin
... instant the wall paper slips down from the walls and crumples to a heap on the floor. The paint and varnish drop from the woodwork like so much sand. Every cobweb and speck of dust rolls off and falls in a ...
— Common Science • Carleton W. Washburne
... be understood that such a ship's side, with its rounded form, would of itself offer a very good resistance to the ice; but to make it still stronger the inside was shored up in every possible way, so that the hold looks like a cobweb of balks, stanchions, and braces. In the first place, there are two rows of beams, the upper deck and between decks, principally of solid oak, partly also of pitch pine; and all of these are further ...
— Farthest North - Being the Record of a Voyage of Exploration of the Ship 'Fram' 1893-1896 • Fridtjof Nansen
... Shaykh Furayj, and the ex-Wakl, Mohammed Shahdah, who is trusted by the Bedawin, and who brought with him a guide of the Faw'idah-Juhaynah, one Rjih ibn Ayid. This fellow was by no means a fair specimen of his race: the cynocephalous countenance, the cobweb beard, and the shifting, treacherous eyes were exceptional; the bellowing voice and the greed of gain were not. He had a free passage for himself, his child, and eight sacks of rice, with the promise of a ...
— The Land of Midian, Vol. 2 • Richard Burton
... tree. It first roots in the soil of earth, and then lifts its branches to the heavens. Unless it does so lift its branches it is stunted and deformed, and is not a tree. Unless it roots in earth it is not a tree, but an air-plant or a cobweb. ...
— A Woman of the World - Her Counsel to Other People's Sons and Daughters • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... knowledge, Otto," said Rosalie, and pressed his hand; "have never rejoiced in such a clear head as thine; but I have that which thou canst not as yet possess—experience. In trouble, as well as in joy, youth transforms the light cobweb into the cable. Self-deception has changed the blood in thy veins, the thoughts in thy soul; but do not forever cling to this one black spot! Neither wilt thou! it will spur thee on to activity, will enervate thy soul, not depress thee! The melancholy surprise ...
— O. T. - A Danish Romance • Hans Christian Andersen
... dull flies on the chamber window; Brave shines the sun through the freckled pane; Fearless the cobweb swings from the ceiling — ...
— Poems: Three Series, Complete • Emily Dickinson
... a banquet smiles, A common cheer for all;... e'en humble Giles, Who joys his trivial services to yield Amidst the fragrance of the open field; Oft doom'd in suffocating heat to bear The cobweb'd barn's impure and dusty air; To ride in murky state the panting steed, Destin'd aloft th' unloaded grain to tread, Where, in his path as heaps on heaps are thrown, He rears, and plunges the loose mountain down: Laborious ...
— The Farmer's Boy - A Rural Poem • Robert Bloomfield
... the air was full of singing-birds, and there was a little old woman looking at her, with the funniest cap, and a withered face not bigger than you may see when you look at the baby through the big end of a spyglass: the cap was a morning-glory, and it was tied underneath the chin with bleached cobweb, and the streamers and bows were just like the colors ...
— Stories of Childhood • Various
... in his very first attempt to draw on his new trousers, to the astonishment of all his messmates, who had now gathered round him, found them separated in the middle of each of his legs. He might as well have attempted to clothe himself with cobweb continuations; they came to pieces almost with a shake. The waistcoat and coat were in the same predicament; they had not the principle of continuity in them. Everybody was lost in amazement, except Mr Pigtop, ...
— Rattlin the Reefer • Edward Howard
... chairs, and other wooden objects. I use no sort of alcoholics. His old mother carried on the management of the house. "An evil appearance he had," answered the Jew. She thought over the doings of the past day. It is as light as a cobweb. The train of the dress was long. They ...
— The Esperanto Teacher - A Simple Course for Non-Grammarians • Helen Fryer
... this would have been disagreeable; but in Lamb, thin even to meagreness, spare and wiry as an Arab of the desert, or as Thomas Aquinas, wasted by scholastic vigils, the affection of sleep seemed rather a network of aerial gossamer than of earthly cobweb—more like a golden haze falling upon him gently from the heavens than a cloud exhaling upwards from the flesh. Motionless in his chair as a bust, breathing so gently as scarcely to seem certainly alive, he presented the image of repose midway between life and death, like the repose of sculpture; ...
— Biographical Essays • Thomas de Quincey
... slender that the mind could hardly grasp it. It was about one-third the diameter of a red corpuscle of blood and its weight had been estimated as about .00685 milligrams, truly a fairy thread. It was finer than the most delicate cobweb and could be seen with the naked eye only when a strong light was thrown on it so as to catch ...
— Guy Garrick • Arthur B. Reeve
... Something in the voices? Yes; something that brushed my stupor from me as though it were a cobweb; something that made me hush my breath, and strain with ...
— Dead Man's Rock • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... runnings away! Where would you go? I'm come to fetch you home; and I hope you'll be a dutiful daughter and not encourage my son to further disobedience. I was embarrassed how to punish him when I discovered his part in the business: he's such a cobweb, a pinch would annihilate him; but you'll see by his look that he has received his due! I brought him down one evening, the day before yesterday, and just set him in a chair, and never touched him afterwards. ...
— Wuthering Heights • Emily Bronte
... interesting, I quote it. He says that on the 21st of September, 1741, intent upon field diversions, he rose before daybreak, but on going out he found the whole face of the country covered with a thick coat of cobweb drenched with dew, as if two or three setting-nets had been drawn one over the other. When his dogs attempted to hunt, their eyes were blinded and hoodwinked, so much that they were obliged to lie down and scrape themselves. This appearance was followed by a most lovely day. About 9 ...
— Essays in Natural History and Agriculture • Thomas Garnett
... fostering breath of praise, And shades with cypress the young poet's bays: Pale and dejected, mark, how genius strives With poverty, and mark, how well it thrives; The shabby cov'ring of the gentle bard, Regard it well, 'tis worthy thy regard, The friendly cobweb, serving for a screen, The chair, a part of what it once had been; The bed, whereon th' unhappy victim slept And oft unseen, in silent anguish, wept, Or spent in dear delusive dreams, the night, To wake, next morning, but to curse the light, Too deep distress the artist's hand reveals; ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 13, - Issue 350, January 3, 1829 • Various
... at them, shuddered. It was Boolba's idea—nobody but Boolba would have thought of it. Every garment was of red, blood red, a red which seemed to fill the room with harsh sound. Stockings of finest silk, shoes of russian leather, cobweb underwear—but all of the same hideous hue. In Russia the word "red" is also the word "beautiful." In a language in which so many delicate shades of meaning can be expressed, this word serves a double purpose, doing duty for that which, ...
— The Book of All-Power • Edgar Wallace
... the States cannot be united, and all attempts to conduct the measures of the continent will prove but governmental farces. So long as any individual State has power to defeat the measures of the other twelve, our pretended union is but a name, and our confederation a cobweb." He illustrates his point by the analogy of the Constitution of Connecticut. It is clear that by the head of the Union he meant the combined executive and legislative force, which in the Constitution was vested in the President and Congress. He recognizes the necessity ...
— Noah Webster - American Men of Letters • Horace E. Scudder
... nothing more. This time, however, he had a black eye, just a friendly slap he had run up against in a playful moment. His curly hair, already streaked with grey, must have dusted a corner in some low wineshop, for a cobweb was hanging to one of his locks over the back of his neck. He was still as attractive as ever, though his features were rather drawn and aged, and his under jaw projected more; but he was always lively, as he would sometimes say, with ...
— L'Assommoir • Emile Zola
... been, sat the young mistress of the house half hid in a great arm-chair. Soft white folds fell all around her, and two small blue velvet slippers took their ease upon a footstool; with white laces giving their cobweb finish here, there and everywhere. A book was in her hand, and on her shoulder the grey kitten purred secure, in spite of the silky curls which now and then made puss into a pillow. Now and then. For while Miss Kennedy sometimes made believe to read, an sometimes really sang—pouring out scraps ...
— Wych Hazel • Susan and Anna Warner
... of bells! So, with just half an eye, I peeped from the nest, and those lilies close by, With threads of a cobweb, were swung to and fro By ...
— Voices for the Speechless • Abraham Firth
... in the newspapers an account of a philosopher in Germany who made caterpillars manufacture for him a veil of cobweb. The caterpillars were enclosed in a glass case, and, by properly-disposed conveniences and impediments, were induced to work their web up the sides of the glass case. When completed it weighed four-fifths of a grain. Herschel saw ...
— The Life and Letters of Maria Edgeworth, Vol. 2 • Maria Edgeworth
... that lead their adherents to believe that they hold the keys to our future abodes. Winwood Reade in his "Martyrdom of Man," discussing the moral value of the fears of hell-fire, states, "a metaphysical theory cannot restrain the fury of the passions; as well attempt to bind a lion with a cobweb. Prevention of crime, it is well known, depends not on the severity, but on the certainty of retribution. The supposition that the terrors of hell-fire are essential or even conducive to good morals is contradicted by the facts of history. In the Dark Ages there was not a man or woman from Scotland ...
— The Necessity of Atheism • Dr. D.M. Brooks
... justice make poore men offend) Enforceth my offence to make it just. 65 What shall weak dames doe, when th' whole work of Nature Hath a strong finger in each one of us? Needs must that sweep away the silly cobweb Of our still-undone labours, that layes still Our powers to it, as to the line, the stone, 70 Not to the stone, the line should be oppos'd. We cannot keepe our constant course in vertue: What is alike at all parts? every day Differs from other, every houre and minute; I, every ...
— Bussy D'Ambois and The Revenge of Bussy D'Ambois • George Chapman
... her aside as if she had been a cobweb in his path, and with a wild cry of joy and vengeance he burst through the half-open door. Offitt turned at the noise, and saw Sam coming, and knew that the end of his life was there. His heart was like water within him. He made a feeble effort ...
— The Bread-winners - A Social Study • John Hay
... the regular yellow devils who come and eat up London, first this part, and then that, then disgorge a little, choking it all up only to snap at it and swallow it down all bewildered a quarter of an hour after. This was a cobweb fog spun, as it might be, by some malignant central spider hidden darkly in his lair. The vapouring-like filmy threads twisted and twined their way all over London, and for four days and nights the town was a city of ghosts. Buildings loomed ...
— The Captives • Hugh Walpole
... cobweb Micrometer (Ramsden's micrometer) eyepiece (Fig. 58) consists of an ocular having a fine "fixed" wire stretching horizontally across the field (Fig. 59), a vertical reference wire—fixed—adjusted at right angles to the first; and a fine wire, parallel to the reference wire, which can be moved ...
— The Elements of Bacteriological Technique • John William Henry Eyre
... an useful activity. Every exertion is encouraging, because to present amusement it joins the promise of some future good. The intervals of leisure are filled by the society of real friends, whose affections are not thinned to cobweb, by being spread over a thousand objects. This is the picture, in the light it is presented to my mind; now let me have it in yours. If we do not concur this year, we shall the next; or if not then, in a year or two more. You ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson
... come from beds of lichen green, They creep from the mullen's velvet screen; Some on the backs of beetles fly From the silver tops of moon-touched trees, Where they swung in their cobweb hammocks high, And rocked about in the evening breeze; Some from the hum-bird's downy nest— They had driven him out by elfin power, And, pillowed on plumes of his rainbow breast, Had slumbered there till the charmed hour; Some had lain in the scoop of the rock, ...
— Selections From American Poetry • Various
... the McKeesport shore or were bolstered high upon the beach; a fleet of Yough steamers had their noses to the wharf; a half-dozen fishermen were setting nets; and, high over all, with lofty spans of iron cobweb, several railway and wagon bridges spanned ...
— Afloat on the Ohio - An Historical Pilgrimage of a Thousand Miles in a Skiff, from Redstone to Cairo • Reuben Gold Thwaites
... a weak, transient amaze was all she knew of the sensation of wonder. Most of her other faculties seemed to be in the same flimsy condition: her liking and disliking, her love and hate, were mere cobweb and gossamer; but she had one thing about her that seemed strong and durable enough, and that ...
— Villette • Charlotte Bronte
... perfectly proportioned. She was most curiously dressed in a frock cut to the knee, and actually in nothing else at all. It left her bare-legged and bare-armed, and was made, as he puts it himself, of stuff like cobweb: "those dusty, drooping kind which you put on your finger to stop bleeding." He could not recognise the web, but was sure that it was neither linen nor cotton. It seemed to stick to her body wherever it touched ...
— Lore of Proserpine • Maurice Hewlett
... uttered, recalled Emily's prudence; who concealed her emotion under a smile, and bade Annette lead her to the picture. It was in an obscure chamber, adjoining that part of the castle, allotted to the servants. Several other portraits hung on the walls, covered, like this, with dust and cobweb. ...
— The Mysteries of Udolpho • Ann Radcliffe
... she was invited to an early wedding, She'd dress her head o'ernight, sponge up herself, And give her neck three lathers. Gaar. Ne'er a halter.") Laugh and lye downe Launcepresado Law, the spider's cobweb Legerity Letters of mart Leveret Limbo Line of life Linstock Long haire, treatise against (An allusion to William Prynne's tract The Unlovelinesse of Love-Lockes.) Loves Changelings Changed, MS. play founded on Sidney's Arcadia Low ...
— A Collection Of Old English Plays, Vol. IV. • Editor: A.H. Bullen
... the Wheat obeyed. Almost blasphemous in his effrontery, he had tampered with these laws, and had roused a Titan. He had laid his puny human grasp upon Creation and the very earth herself, the great mother, feeling the touch of the cobweb that the human insect had spun, had stirred at last in her sleep and sent her omnipotence moving through the grooves of the world, to find and crush the disturber of her ...
— The Pit • Frank Norris
... and felt refreshed by the scrub he gave himself; but somehow he did not feel right. His head burned, and he was glad to get out in the open air, in the hope that a little exercise would clear his brain and drive away the cobweb-like fancies which seemed to interfere with ...
— The Queen's Scarlet - The Adventures and Misadventures of Sir Richard Frayne • George Manville Fenn
... saying of Gonsalvo, the great and famous commander, that was wont to say a gentleman's honor should be de tela crassiore, of a good strong warp or web, that every little thing should not catch in it; when as now it seems they are but of cobweb-lawn or such light stuff, which certainly is weakness, and not true greatness of mind, but like a sick man's body, that is so tender that it feels everything. And so much in maintenance and demonstration of the wisdom and justice of the law of ...
— The World's Best Orations, Vol. 1 (of 10) • Various
... are but pleasing fantasies, the cobweb visions of those dreaming varlets, the poets, to which I would not have my judicious readers attach any credibility. Neither am I disposed to credit an ancient and rather apocryphal historian who asserts that the ingenious Wilhelmus was ...
— Little Masterpieces of American Wit and Humor - Volume I • Various
... heart of girl could desire, and a mother's forethought provide for her darling's use when she was far-away. A dress of cobweb Indian muslin embroidered in silk, a fan of curling feathers, a dear little satin pocket in which to keep the lace handkerchief, rolls of ribbons, dainty white shoes, with straggly silk stockings rolled ...
— About Peggy Saville • Mrs. G. de Horne Vaizey
... guarded against accidents," said Martin; and he held out to her the third finger of his left hand, and wound at its base were the two hairs, in a ring as fine as a cobweb. She took his finger between two of hers and laughed, and ...
— Martin Pippin in the Apple Orchard • Eleanor Farjeon
... Piercie Shafton sate still as a stone, in the chair in which he had deposited himself, his hands folded on his breast, his legs stretched straight out before him and resting upon the heels, his eyes cast up to the ceiling as if he had meant to count every mesh of every cobweb with which the arched roof was canopied, wearing at the same time a face of as solemn and imperturbable gravity, as if his existence had depended on the ...
— The Monastery • Sir Walter Scott
... cooled but not congealed, and the few motes in it are pure and beautiful like the imperfections in glass. You may often detect a yet smoother and darker water, separated from the rest as if by an invisible cobweb, boom of the water nymphs, resting on it. From a hilltop you can see a fish leap in almost any part; for not a pickerel or shiner picks an insect from this smooth surface but it manifestly disturbs the equilibrium of the whole lake. It is wonderful with what elaborateness this simple ...
— Walden, and On The Duty Of Civil Disobedience • Henry David Thoreau
... for our turn and they looked at me with their mournful made-up eyes I felt as if my wicked French heels were on their necks. I noticed one girl, particularly; there was something so gallant about her cracked and polished shoes, her mended gloves, her collar, laundered to a cobweb thinness, and about the improbable sea-shell pink in her hollow cheeks. She had a sort of eager, sharpened sweetness in her face ...
— Jane Journeys On • Ruth Comfort Mitchell
... the activity of friendship, Chi ha l'amor nel petto, ha lo sprone a i fianchi: "Who feels love in the breast, feels a spur in his limbs:" or its generous passion, Gli amici legono la borsa con un filo di ragnatelo: "Friends tie their purse with a cobweb's thread." They characterised the universal lover by an elegant proverb—Appicare il Maio ad ogn' uscio: "To hang every door with May;" alluding to the bough which in the nights of May the country people are accustomed to plant before the door of their mistress. If we turn to ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... omit weaveth at the web of all the human future; even your naught is a cobweb, and a spider that liveth on the blood of ...
— Thus Spake Zarathustra - A Book for All and None • Friedrich Nietzsche
... in restoring the candle to consciousness, the light fell upon a tall, shy-looking man of about thirty-five, with long, hay-colored beard and mustache, upon which the rain-drops stood in clusters, like the night-dew on patches of cobweb in a meadow. It was an honest face, with unworldly sort of blue eyes, that looked out from under the broad visor of the infantry cap. With a deferential glance towards us, the new-comer unstrapped his knapsack, spread his blanket over it, ...
— Quite So • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... pages of history in which he explains and defends the French Revolution which Burke had attacked and misunderstood, are only an illustration to his main argument. He expounds the right of revolution, and blows away the cobweb argument of legality by which his antagonist had sought to confine posterity within the settlement of 1688. Every age and generation must be free to act for itself. Man has no property in man, and the claim ...
— Shelley, Godwin and Their Circle • H. N. Brailsford
... a great curiousness be well, Who have to learn themselves and all the world, In you, that are no child, for still I find Your face is practised when I spell the lines, I call it,—well, I will not call it vice: But since you name yourself the summer fly, I well could wish a cobweb for the gnat, That settles, beaten back, and beaten back Settles, till one could yield for weariness: But since I will not yield to give you power Upon my life and use and name and fame, Why will ye never ask some other boon? Yea, by God's rood, I ...
— Idylls of the King • Alfred, Lord Tennyson
... lamp, The dew's falling fast, and your fine speckled wings Will be wet with the close-clinging damp. Lady Bird! Lady Bird! fly away home, The fairy bells tinkle afar; Make haste, or they'll catch ye, and harness ye fast, With a cobweb, to Oberon's car. Lady Bird! Lady Bird! fly away now To your home in the old willow-tree, Where your children so dear have invited the ant, And a few cosy ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 13, Issue 353, January 24, 1829 • Various
... faces well. I may meet her any day, or never meet her at all, but any direct approach we must give up. The more I think of it, the graver it appears. If it be a police affair, no letter reaches her unopened. Rest assured of that. She is like a fly in a cobweb. Chance may help us, but so far the luck has ...
— A Diplomatic Adventure • S. Weir Mitchell
... here The army of the stars appear. The neighbour hollows dry or wet, Spring shall with tender flowers beset; And oft the morning muser see Larks rising from the broomy lea, And every fairy wheel and thread Of cobweb dew-bediamonded. When daisies go, shall winter time Silver the simple grass with rime; Autumnal frosts enchant the pool And make the cart-ruts beautiful; And when snow-bright the moor expands, How shall your children clap their hands! To make this earth our hermitage, A cheerful and ...
— Poems of To-Day: an Anthology • Various
... but a wee corner of my kingdom, where to-day and to-morrow are the same—past and present one. A maid-of-honor wishes to go to town. I'll send her in the closet. My slave, the geometrical spider, must spin her a warm cobweb—and when you open the closet, be sure and not disturb ...
— The Aldine, Vol. 5, No. 1., January, 1872 - A Typographic Art Journal • Various
... this time like a messenger bearing a command, to call him back to a duty which he believed he had relinquished and put down forever. And solely because it would be treasonable to that duty which still clung to him like a tenacious cobweb, he was riding into the smoke of the ...
— Trail's End • George W. Ogden
... staggered away terror-stricken, leaning on my sword, from the sight of my revenge, and with great bodily pain crawled back to the road. And, dear Margaret, the rimy trees were now all like pyramids of golden filagree, and lace, cobweb fine, in the red firelight. Oh! most beautiful! And a poor wretch got entangled in the burning sails, and whirled round screaming, and lost hold at the wrong time, and hurled like stone from mangonel high into the air; then a dull thump; it was his carcass ...
— The Cloister and the Hearth • Charles Reade
... of the elastic membrane, just beneath the ectoderm, is a plexus or cobweb of nervous cells and fibrils. As in every nervous system, three elements are here to be found. 1. An afferent or sensory nerve-fibril, which under adequate stimulus is set in vibration by some cell of the epidermis ...
— The Whence and the Whither of Man • John Mason Tyler
... Maria Ampudia's house for La Tulita. She look handsome, that witch! Holy Mary! When she walk it was like the tule in the river. You know. Why she have that name? She wear white, of course, but that frock—it is like the cobweb, the cloud. She has not the braids like the other girls, but the hair, soft like black feathers, fall down to the feet. And the eyes like blue stars! You know the eyes of La Tulita. The lashes so long, and black like the hair. And the sparkle! No eyes ever sparkle like ...
— The Splendid Idle Forties - Stories of Old California • Gertrude Atherton
... flies of fifty kinds, Bring me showers, and clouds, and winds, All things right and tight, All things well and proper, Trailer red and bright, Dark and wily dropper; Casts of midges bring, Made of plover hackle, With a gaudy wing, And a cobweb tackle. ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volumes I-VI. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... playde, Augustus, wantonly, Tuning our song unto a tender Muse, And, like a cobweb weaving slenderly, Have onely playde: let thus much then excuse This Gnats small poeme, that th'whole history 5 Is but a iest; though envie it abuse: But who such sports and sweet delights doth blame, Shall lighter seeme than this ...
— The Poetical Works of Edmund Spenser, Volume 5 • Edmund Spenser
... Henson merely laughed. The dogs were gambolling around her like so many kittens. They did not seem to heed Henson in the joy of her presence. He came on again, he made a grab for her dress, but the rotten fabric parted like a cobweb in his hand. A warning grunt came from one of the dogs, ...
— The Crimson Blind • Fred M. White
... semicircles and stairways of an amphitheater. Nearly in the heart of the place rose the audacious and exquisitely embroidered tower of the town-house, three hundred and sixty-six feet in height; a miracle of needlework in stone, rivaling in its intricate carving the cobweb tracery of that lace which has for centuries been synonymous with the city, and rearing itself above a facade of profusely decorated and brocaded architecture. The crest of the elevation was crowned by the towers of the old ducal palace ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. X (of X) - America - II, Index • Various
... a Fast-Fish? Alive or dead a fish is technically fast, when it is connected with an occupied ship or boat, by any medium at all controllable by the occupant or occupants,—a mast, an oar, a nine-inch cable, a telegraph wire, or a strand of cobweb, it is all the same. Likewise a fish is technically fast when it bears a waif, or any other recognised symbol of possession; so long as the party waifing it plainly evince their ability at any time to take it alongside, as well as their intention so ...
— Moby Dick; or The Whale • Herman Melville
... higher, Philip lay very quiet. Somehow the moonlit stillness of the forest had altered indefinably. Its depth and shadows jarred. Fair as it was, it had harbored things sinister and evil. And who might say—there was peace of course in the moon-silver rug of pine among the trees, in the gossamer cobweb there among the bushes jeweled lightly in dew, in the faint, sweet chirp of a drowsy bird above his head—but the moon-ray which lingered in the heart of the wild geranium would presently cascade through the trees to light ...
— Diane of the Green Van • Leona Dalrymple
... when he withdrew, that watcher would have discovered, on peeping through the key-hole of his door, that he was engaged in one of the oddest of occupations for such a man,—sweeping down from the ceiling, by means of a walking-cane, a long cobweb which lingered on high in the corner. Keeping it stretched upon the cane he gently opened the door, and set the candle in such a position on the mat that the light shone down the corridor. Thus guided by its rays he passed out slipperless, till he reached the door of ...
— Two on a Tower • Thomas Hardy
... Pepper!" she exclaimed, in an injured tone. One eye was draped by a cobweb, gained by diving into the closet's extreme corner after a missing slipper, gone for some weeks; and in other ways Alexia's face presented a very unprepossessing appearance. "You said you'd help me with my room ...
— Five Little Peppers and their Friends • Margaret Sidney
... close proximity to the castle were some of the darkest and narrowest streets of the city. One of these was Cobweb Corner; and here, in a small attic, dwelt a humpbacked, plain-visaged little man, who the whole day long loved to think about the king. He was called "Caspar ...
— Fifty-Two Stories For Girls • Various
... black sordidness and soddenness which displays but one redeeming quality—the characteristic San Franciscan candor. That openness is physical as well as spiritual. The city, dropped over its many hills like a great loose cobweb weighted thickly with the pearl cubes of buildings, with its wide streets; its frequent parks; its broad-spaced residential areas; its gardened houses in which high windows crystallize every view and sun parlors ...
— The Native Son • Inez Haynes Irwin
... madly from task to task and pausing always in just such fashion in the midst of each to stand dreamily immobile, everything else forgotten for the moment in an effort to visualize it—to understand that it was real, after all, and not just a cobweb fabric of her own fancy, like the dreams she was always weaving to make the long ...
— Once to Every Man • Larry Evans
... I think of it, Will, there is something else. I never remembered it at the time, but when my old woman was sweeping a cobweb off the rafters the other day she said: 'Why, here is Will's father's fiddle', and, sure enough, there it was. It had been up there from the day you came into the house, and if we noticed it none of us ever ...
— By Conduct and Courage • G. A. Henty
... Prince, clapping his hands. "Come here and let me decorate you, my friend." And as John bowed before him the Prince placed upon his bosom a beautiful star of diamonds that gleamed and sparkled like a cobweb full ...
— John of the Woods • Abbie Farwell Brown
... head that if you had the orderin' of Bussa you wouldn' be long about it? The town'll think it, anyway. We're a small popilation in Troy, all tied up in neighbourly feelin's an' hangin' together till—as the sayin' is—you can't touch a cobweb without hurtin' a rafter. What the town's cryin' out for is a new broom—a man with ideas, eh, Mr Philp?—above all, a man who's independent. So first of all they'll flatter ye up into standin' for the Parish Council, and put ye head ...
— Hocken and Hunken • A. T. Quiller-Couch
... a door on his left was thrown open, a flood of sunshine burst into the cobweb-hung loft, and an officer and a private of cavalry came rustling through the straw till they were within the scope of the wounded lad's gaze, and a chill of misery ran through him like a shudder as he saw Scarlett Markham, followed by Samson's ...
— Crown and Sceptre - A West Country Story • George Manville Fenn
... croaking of the frogs, dominating all the other noises of the night, and uniting in one mighty chorus in the marshes along the river. An owl was hooting from a distant tree, and the hum of innumerable insects sounded on every side. Here and there a glittering, dew-spangled cobweb stretched across our path, a barrier of silver, and required more than ordinary resolution to be brushed aside. As we turned nearer to the river, the ground grew softer and the underbrush more thick, and I knew that we had ...
— A Soldier of Virginia • Burton Egbert Stevenson
... Fairies to attend on thee; And they shall fetch thee Iewels from the deepe, And sing, while thou on pressed flowers dost sleepe: And I will purge thy mortall grossenesse so, That thou shalt like an airie spirit go. Enter Pease-blossome, Cobweb, Moth, Mustardseede, ...
— The First Folio [35 Plays] • William Shakespeare
... pleasure, shall, with us, in that day, be ordinary. If there were ten thousand bars of iron, or walls of brass, to separate between us, and our pleasure and desire, at that day, they should as easily be pierced by us, as is the cobweb, or air by the beams of the sun: And the reason is, because to the Spirit, wherewith we shall be inconceivably filled at that day, nothing is impossible (Matt 17:20); and the working of it at that day, shall be in that nature and measure as to swallow up all impossibilities. He "shall change ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... wove it all that day in his web, and the next morning he brought her a long piece of the loveliest spider-lace as fine as a cobweb. Little Freckle Frog ...
— How Freckle Frog Made Herself Pretty • Charlotte B. Herr
... Indeed, the whole affair was so dream-like, of so unsubstantial, so gossamer a lightness, that merely to speculate upon her romance would have been to shatter it, as one might put a finger through a fairy cobweb. ...
— The Making of a Soul • Kathlyn Rhodes
... returned with flowers in her hand, and without looking at me, seated herself once more upon the marble. She was as delicate as a shade. An oval face with severe profile, surrounded by nut-brown hair; I could not see her eyes. Her drapery was of cobweb-colored gauze, the clasp of her girdle a simple buckle of soft, shaded vermilion. Face and hands were bloodlessly pale; her figure tall, slight, and fine. Thus she sat there; delicately, and yet with color and warmth, she contrasted with ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries - Masterpieces of German Literature Vol. 19 • Various
... moment—the ordinary commonplace courtiers; the lovers, men and women in the condition of all conditions in which fairy-powers might get a hold of them; the quarrelling king and queen of Fairyland, with their courtiers, Blossom, Cobweb, and the rest, and the court-jester, Puck; the ignorant, clownish artisans, rehearsing their play,—fairies and clowns, lovers and courtiers, are all mingled in one exquisite harmony, clothed with a night of early summer, ...
— The Seaboard Parish Vol. 3 • George MacDonald
... suitable to each other in size. The work of the best knitter in the world would appear ill done if the needles were too fine or too coarse. In the former case, the work would be close and thick; in the latter it would be too much like a cobweb. ...
— Enquire Within Upon Everything - The Great Victorian Domestic Standby • Anonymous
... had "done" a chair-cover in cross-stitch that her mother said ought to get the first prize, and was dead sure to take the third; Mary 'Liza was knitting a pair of shell-pattern, openwork stockings as fine as a cobweb, in which there would not be a knot or a dropped stitch, and Paulina Hobson was putting her eyes out over a linen-cambric handkerchief under Miss Davidson's direction. Fine sewing and embroidery were taught ...
— When Grandmamma Was New - The Story of a Virginia Childhood • Marion Harland
... valley lands of the Dry Belt? Ever spend days and days in a swinging, swaying coach, behind a four-in-hand, when "Curly" or "Nicola Ned" held the ribbons, and tooled his knowing little leaders and wheelers down those horrifying mountain trails that wind like russet skeins of cobweb through the heights and depths of the Okanagan, the Nicola and the Similkameen countries? If so, you have listened to the call of the Skookum Chuck, as the Chinook speakers call the rollicking, tumbling streams that sing their way through the canyons with a music so dulcet, so insistent, that ...
— Legends of Vancouver • E. Pauline Johnson
... Twenty-five years—it's a long time! LEILA. Think how we loved her! QUEEN. Loved her? What was your love to mine? Why, she was invaluable to me! Who taught me to curl myself inside a buttercup? Iolanthe! Who taught me to swing upon a cobweb? Iolanthe! Who taught me to dive into a dewdrop—to nestle in a nutshell—to gambol upon gossamer? Iolanthe! LEILA. She certainly did surprising things! FLETA. Oh, give her back to us, great Queen, for your sake if not for ours! (All kneel in supplication.) QUEEN (irresolute). ...
— The Complete Plays of Gilbert and Sullivan - The 14 Gilbert And Sullivan Plays • William Schwenk Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan
... consult me! And who is Master Kerneguy, or what is he to me, that my son must stay and take the chance of mischief, and this your Scotch page is to escape in his dress? I will have no such contrivance carried into effect, though it were the finest cobweb that was ever woven in Doctor Rochecliffe's brains.—I wish you no ill, Louis; thou art a lively boy; but I have been somewhat too lightly treated ...
— Woodstock; or, The Cavalier • Sir Walter Scott
... Cobweb[46], out of which great flyes breake and in which the little are hangd: the Tarriers snaphance[47], limetwiggs, weavers shuttle & blankets in which fooles & wrangling coxcombes are tossd. Doe I ...
— A Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. II • Various
... tears of anger on her cheeks as she sat back against her cushions; more tears fell, which, regardless of her pearly complexion, she wiped away with a cobweb of a handkerchief, while she sat and hated Courtland, and the whole tribe of college men, her cousin Bill Ward included, for getting her into a scrape like this. Defeat was a thing she could not brook. She had never, since she came out of short frocks, been so defeated in her life! ...
— The Witness • Grace Livingston Hill Lutz
... Mother Goose, as she reached up quite high and brushed a cobweb off the sky with her broom. "That will not do, either. I must see about getting Mother Hubbard and her dog something to eat. You can stay with her later. Oh, I have it!" suddenly cried the lady who was riding on the back of the white gander, "you can ...
— Uncle Wiggily and Old Mother Hubbard - Adventures of the Rabbit Gentleman with the Mother Goose Characters • Howard R. Garis
... inert weight on other men's shoulders, did remember in some mysterious fashion to return the books he borrowed, enriched often, as Lamb proudly records, with marginal notes which tripled their value. His conduct in this regard was all the more praiseworthy inasmuch as the cobweb statutes which define books as personal property have never met with literal acceptance. Lamb's theory that books belong with the highest propriety to those who understand them best (a theory often advanced in defence of depredations which Lamb would have scorned to commit), ...
— Americans and Others • Agnes Repplier
... resistance, appetite, and organs of reproduction that take hold on eternity,—all find room to consist in the small creature. So do we put our life into every act. The true doctrine of omnipresence is, that God reappears with all his parts in every moss and cobweb.[107] The value of the universe contrives to throw itself into every point. If the good is there, so is the evil; if the affinity, so the repulsion; if the force, so ...
— Essays • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... must keep a House like an Emperor for your sake, you old Sorceress? Huzzy, I'll have every Cobweb taken ...
— Prefaces to Terence's Comedies and Plautus's Comedies (1694) • Lawrence Echard
... attributes which were common to both the subjects of the other two sciences. But if subtleties and sophisms composed the greater part of the metaphysics or pneumatics of the schools, they composed the whole of this cobweb science of ontology, which was likewise ...
— An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations • Adam Smith
... again the train was hanging over the deep, misted cauldron of the valley, again and again it slipped delicately over the span of cobweb across the sky that is a Canadian bridge. In this land of steep gradients, sharp curves and lattice bridges, the train was divided into two sections, and each, with two engines to pull it, climbed through ...
— Westward with the Prince of Wales • W. Douglas Newton
... surprised at myself for caring so much for you when you are so hard on me. I suppose it is because you are my guardian, and I have no one else, scarcely, to love." I was beginning to think I must either escape hastily to my room, or apply the bit of cobweb lace once more to my eyes, which, if I could judge from my feelings, would soon be saturated with ...
— Medoline Selwyn's Work • Mrs. J. J. Colter
... scooped into niches, crowded with statues of saints and martyrs. Stone seems, by the cunning labor 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 of a cobweb. ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume I. - Great Britain and Ireland • Various
... daring rush At Barry's hunt and won "the brush," When sportsmen gathered full of glee Around the famed J.P., M.D. And here diverging from my road Into a little episode, I'll tear at once with gesture brief From memory's book a comic leaf, A tale from cobweb's volume hoary Of this Sangrado in his glory, Many will recollect the story. Edward Barry, grave J.P., Sometimes was given to a spree, Which interfered with the precision Of magisterial decision. So Edward Barry ...
— Recollections of Bytown and Its Old Inhabitants • William Pittman Lett
... fire was replenished. The door to the closet was gone, and in its recess a pair of trousers hung limply, while Henrietta's scant wardrobe was ranged along the black-painted wall outside. The long, cobweb-hung windows, bare of blind or curtain, showed a black-mirrored surface against ...
— The Long Day - The Story of a New York Working Girl As Told by Herself • Dorothy Richardson
... with copper. There is another very rare sort of ore, which has only been found in the mine of Cotamiso at Potosi, being threads of pure silver entangled, or wound up together, like burnt lace, and so fine that it is called arana, or spider ore, from its resemblance to a cobweb. ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 11 • Robert Kerr
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