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More "Riddle" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... boy," the other said impressively, "a few years ago, it was found out that there were trout in these streams above falls which would be absolutely impassable to any fish. How could they get there? It was a riddle. The only possible answer was that the fish must be older than the falls, that the stream had worn away its bed, bit by bit, until an impassable barrier from below had been created, but that the trout had gone on in the upper creeks, ...
— The Boy With the U. S. Fisheries • Francis Rolt-Wheeler
... does not tremble. It is as though she had taken measurements; and the edge of her weapon does not swerve by a hair's breadth. Need I give you any further proofs or examine all the other details with you? Surely not. You now possess the key to the riddle; and you know as I do that only a lunatic can behave in this way, stupidly, savagely, mechanically, like a striking clock or the ...
— The Eight Strokes of the Clock • Maurice Leblanc
... noise of protest. He gazed into the darkness of the landing, and presently, by the light from the bedroom, could distinguish the vague boundaries of it. The chair, invisible, was on the left. He opened the door wider to the nocturnal riddle of the house. His hand clasped the notes in his pocket. No sound! He listened for the ticking of the lobby clock and could not catch it. He listened more intently. It was impossible that he should not hear the ticking of the lobby clock. Was he dreaming? Was he under some delusion? Then it ...
— The Price of Love • Arnold Bennett
... I believe you are too candid to counterfeit. Your easy solution of that great human riddle given the world, to find happiness. The Athenian and Alexandrian schools dwindle into nothingness. Commend me to your 'categories,' O Queen of Philosophy." She withdrew her searching eyes, and fixed them moodily on the ...
— Beulah • Augusta J. Evans
... is there no guarantee of the temporal immortality of the human soul, that is to say of its eternal survival after death; but, in any case, this assumption completely fails to accomplish the purpose for which it has always been intended. Or is some riddle solved by my surviving for ever? Is not this eternal life itself as much of a riddle as our present life? The solution of the riddle of life in space and time lies outside space and time. (It is certainly not the solution of any problems of natural science ...
— Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus • Ludwig Wittgenstein
... sighed Bert in mock despair. "Frieda has made us explain all the old jokes we knew this summer, and I don't see how that one was overlooked. Did you ever hear the riddle about when a door is not ...
— The Wide Awake Girls in Winsted • Katharine Ellis Barrett
... and fro and stopped in front of Philippe. Philippe, he half thought, had perhaps not done his utmost. Philippe perhaps had still one stage to travel. But how was Le Corbier to find out? How was he to fathom that mysterious soul and read its insoluble riddle? Le Corbier knew those men endowed with the missionary spirit and capable, in furtherance of their cause, of admirable devotion, of almost superhuman sacrifice, but also of hypocrisy, of craft, sometimes of crime. What was this Philippe ...
— The Frontier • Maurice LeBlanc
... violently in love with me; and though I say it who shouldn't, as the phrase goes, my wife was not the only woman of rank in London who had a favourable opinion of the humble Irish adventurer. What a riddle these women are, I have often thought! I have seen the most elegant creatures at St. James's grow wild for love of the coarsest and most vulgar of men; the cleverest women passionately admire the most illiterate of our sex, and so on. There ...
— Barry Lyndon • William Makepeace Thackeray
... you: To the rich men that eat up a realm there cometh a time when they whom they eat up, that is the poor, seem poorer than of wont, and their complaint goeth up louder to the heavens; yet it is no riddle to say that oft at such times the fellowship of the poor is waxing stronger, else would no man have heard his cry. Also at such times is the rich man become fearful, and so waxeth in cruelty, and of that cruelty do ...
— A Dream of John Ball, A King's Lesson • William Morris
... What a riddle she has been to him all the time—flitting about the house so pale and inaccessible, so silent, too, in general, since that night when he had wrestled with her in the drawing-room. One moment of fresh battle between them there has been—in the park—on ...
— Helbeck of Bannisdale, Vol. II • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... glasses and slowly shook his head. Something was forming itself in his mind, this was evident. He walked around the ledge and back again. Finally, he said: "I wish it were night, it might help to solve the riddle." ...
— The Wonder Island Boys: Adventures on Strange Islands • Roger Thompson Finlay
... silence, the lift of an eyebrow—things which had no apparent meaning a dozen years ago, which were either unnoticed or forgotten in an instant—are alive with monitions now. Not to have seen! Not to have guessed 'It looks incredible. A mule might have begun to read the riddle. ...
— Despair's Last Journey • David Christie Murray
... Pigott eventually saved Parnell and his followers. But the last word on that has not yet been spoken. Another pen than mine may, perchance before long, tell the whole truth about that tragic episode, and explain what is still an unsolved riddle in all dispassionate minds. Without challenging and exciting the strongest racial prejudices, it will be impossible to lift the veil, and I have no intention of affording even the slightest preliminary peep behind the scenes of that dramatic affair. The wheels ...
— The Reminiscences of an Irish Land Agent • S.M. Hussey
... sit in silence upon his cloud? There was a general call for the purse-bearer, but he floated in silence, and was inexplicable. The purse-bearer was not to be bullied into any sudden reading of the riddle. Then there came on a general debate about money matters, in which the purse-bearer did say a few words, but he said nothing as to the great question at issue. At last up got Mr Palliser, towards the close of the evening, and occupied a full hour in explaining what ...
— Can You Forgive Her? • Anthony Trollope
... world a place of torture or undying bliss, death the prime object of our meditation, and lifelong abandonment of our fellow-men the highest mode of existence. Why, then, should monks, so persuaded of the riddle of the earth, have placed themselves in scenes so beautiful? Why rose the Camaldolis and Chartreuses over Europe? white convents on the brows of lofty hills, among the rustling boughs of Vallombrosas, in the grassy meadows of Engelbergs,—always the eyries ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece • John Addington Symonds
... as we think, I'll do my best to take it away; but, in order to do that, I have, of course, got to go inside of her skull right to the brain itself, and the trouble might be here, or here, or here." He touched her now profusion of curls at different cranial points. "That is the riddle which you and I must solve, and I have got to look to you for the key. The human brain is still a book of mystery to us. Some day, physicians will be able to read it with full understanding; but so far, we ...
— 'Smiles' - A Rose of the Cumberlands • Eliot H. Robinson
... The riddle was too great for solving. Perhaps Wilbur had disappeared merely to play a practical jest on her; but that supposition was too childish to be retained an instant. Perhaps—perhaps Pierre himself had discovered her, but having vowed never to see her again, he cared for her like the invisible ...
— Riders of the Silences • John Frederick
... I'll soon solve for you my poor little riddle. Miss Mildred, you know that I have loved you ever since you waked up an awkwad, lazy, country fellow into the wish ...
— Without a Home • E. P. Roe
... face—well," said the earl, softly. "But yet," he added, in an altered and reflective tone, "the boy is to me a riddle. That he will be bold in battle and wise in council I foresee; but would he had more of a young man's honest follies! There is a medium between Edward's wantonness and Richard's sanctimony; and he who in the heyday of ...
— The Last Of The Barons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... the time what it was that my husband "owed" Mrs. Underwood. The riddle was solved ...
— Revelations of a Wife - The Story of a Honeymoon • Adele Garrison
... who had some glimmering of the necessity, had not been allotted the necessary time, for he too had had to conquer to remain. His father had more than almost any of the Afghan sovereigns {155} who preceded him failed to read the riddle. He fell before a better general, and his rootless system died at once, leaving not a trace behind it. Penetrated, then, with the necessity of founding a system that should endure, and recognising very gradually, that ...
— Rulers of India: Akbar • George Bruce Malleson
... victory hovering nearer to St. George than himself, and a rivalry begun in good-humor was likely to take a different cast. In his pique, Marlboro' bade his host farewell, and returned to Blue Bluffs; but it was idle riding, for every day found him again at The Rim, like the old riddle,— ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 80, June, 1864 • Various
... was the pair of snowshoes. It was the season of light travel. A single Englishman touring the world as the crow flies occupied the car. He looked at me so askance that I made an opportunity of talking to him. I should like to read his "Travels" to see what he made out of the riddle. In similar circumstances, and without explanation, I had fun talking French and swapping boulevard reminiscences with a member of a Parisian theatrical troupe making a long jump through northern Wisconsin. And once, at six of the morning, letting myself into my own house with a latch-key, ...
— The Mountains • Stewart Edward White
... a riddle, but I think I see an answer at any rate to half of it. Then the marriage would still take place, but ...
— Lysbeth - A Tale Of The Dutch • H. Rider Haggard
... pry'thee, dear Ibrahim, read me this riddle: if the devil gets into water and kills, why don't he kill when he gets ...
— Captain Canot - or, Twenty Years of an African Slaver • Brantz Mayer
... he sat himself upon the edge of the sluice-box for some thoughtful minutes, and his mind traveled back over many scenes and incidents. But it dwelt chiefly upon Jessie Mowbray and her dead father. And it struggled in a great effort to solve the riddle of ...
— The Triumph of John Kars - A Story of the Yukon • Ridgwell Cullum
... significant historical fact of this Fourth Book is the connection which it makes between Egypt and Greece. In another Greek legend, that of OEdipus, the same connection is made through the Sphinx, whose riddle the Greek hero solves, whereat ...
— Homer's Odyssey - A Commentary • Denton J. Snider
... co-trustee in no very amiable way, and now replied to that gentleman's greeting with a somewhat stiff "How do you do?" "Where on earth did I see you before, my gentleman?" said he to himself, and having put the riddle, he ...
— Roger Ingleton, Minor • Talbot Baines Reed
... ponder on your evident dejection, But my carefulest reflection leaves the riddle still unread. How do you yourself explain your dismal tendency to wander By the melancholy ...
— Shapes of Clay • Ambrose Bierce
... published in 1844 is now exceedingly rare; yet many of the pieces belong to a high order of excellence. In ease and grace of versification they resemble Longfellow, but in thought they are more like Emerson or Goethe. Consider this opening from "The Riddle": ...
— Cambridge Sketches • Frank Preston Stearns
... Dixon, Doolittle, Guthrie, Hendricks, Johnson, McDougall, Morgan, Nesmith, Norton, Riddle, Saulsbury, Stewart, Stockton, Van Winkle, ...
— History of the Thirty-Ninth Congress of the United States • Wiliam H. Barnes
... confronted by a riddle which has never been clearly interpreted. Why did Ishida seek asylum from Ieyasu whom he had persistently intrigued to overthrow, and why did Ieyasu, having full knowledge of these intrigues, grant asylum? Possibly ...
— A History of the Japanese People - From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era • Frank Brinkley and Dairoku Kikuchi
... world-poet. Attempting to solve this problem Emerson coolly assumed that the men of the Elizabethan age were so great that Shakespeare himself walked about among them unnoticed as a giant among giants. This reading of the riddle is purely transcendental. We know that Shakespeare's worst plays were far oftener acted than his best; that "Titus Andronicus" by popular favour was more esteemed than "Hamlet." The majority of contemporary poets ...
— The Man Shakespeare • Frank Harris
... at me again, and then I had already determined to meet the request he was not bold to ask. I believed, equally with the physician, from the conduct and expressions of young Harrington, that the riddle of his present condition waited for explanation in the village, whose name seemed like a load upon his heart, and constituted the whole of his discourse since he had arrived amongst us. It was there he yearned to be. It was necessary only to mention the word to throw ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - April 1843 • Various
... Indians. In the course of the next summer (after doing much mischief in a smaller way in the meantime), they gathered together to the number of six hundred, and led on by Colonel Bird, a British officer, came down upon Riddle's and Martin's stations, at the forks of Licking river. They had with them six cannons, and managed their matters so secretly, that the first news of their approach was given to the settlers by the roar of their guns. Of course it was of no use to resist; the pickets could not defend ...
— The Adventures of Daniel Boone: the Kentucky rifleman • Uncle Philip
... and hitherto unsolved riddle of Tibet, Petrie," he replied—"a mystery concealed from the world behind the veil of Lamaism." He stood up abruptly, glancing at a scrap of paper which he took from his pocket—"Suite Number 14a," he said. "Come along! We have not a moment to waste. ...
— The Hand Of Fu-Manchu - Being a New Phase in the Activities of Fu-Manchu, the Devil Doctor • Sax Rohmer
... demanded the major, astonished. "Going to let that plane close in on us, and maybe riddle us?" ...
— The Flying Legion • George Allan England
... Among other extremely curious terra-cottas I must also mention three pots with three rows of perforations; they have the usual handle on one side and three feet on the other; also three large vases with perforations right round, on all sides, from the bottom to the top; their use is a riddle to me; can they have served as bee-hives? Also a vessel in the form of a pig, with four feet, which are, however, shorter than the belly, so that the vessel can not stand upon them; the neck of the vessel, which is attached to the back of the pig, is connected with the ...
— Museum of Antiquity - A Description of Ancient Life • L. W. Yaggy
... and will grant it: by deeds, when, by what we do, we probe another's prudence, will or power. Either of these may happen in two ways. First, openly, as when one declares oneself a tempter: thus Samson (Judges 14:12) proposed a riddle to the Philistines in order to tempt them. In the second place it may be done with cunning and by stealth, as the Pharisees tempted Christ, as we read in Matt. 22:15, sqq. Again this is sometimes done explicitly, as when anyone intends, by word or deed, to put some ...
— Summa Theologica, Part II-II (Secunda Secundae) • Thomas Aquinas
... of its influence. This thesis of the relation of heterogeneous ethnic and social elements to each other, with all the consequences proceeding from it, contains within it the key to the solution of the entire riddle of the natural process of human history. We shall see this thesis illustrated ever and everywhere in the past and the present in the interrelations of heterogeneous ethnic and social elements and become convinced of its universal ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... outside lecturers were invited, because the friends of the measure were met by a strongly-expressed wish that the women of Michigan should speak for themselves. Short speeches were made by May Stocking Knaggs, Catharine A. F. Stebbins, Emily B. Ketcham, Lucy F. Andrews, Elizabeth Eaglesfield, Frances Riddle Stafford, Harriet A. Cook, Mrs. R. M. Kellogg, Phebe B. Whitfield and Mary B. Clay of Kentucky who was then residing in the State. Mrs. Clara Bewick Colby being present, she was invited to make the ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume IV • Various
... better believe him. Well for you, if you can believe him; for to believe him, you must understand him first; and I can tell you, you won't arrive at that understanding by looking out the word 'pietas' in your White-and- Riddle. If you do you will find those tiresome contractions, Etym. Dub., stop your inquiry very briefly, as you go back; if you go forward, through the Italian pieta, you will arrive presently in another group of ...
— Val d'Arno • John Ruskin
... but one reading of the riddle, consistent with the whole character of the people: they clung to the Stuarts because they were obedient to the precepts and duties of religion, and labored under the belief, however mistaken, that from ...
— Irish Race in the Past and the Present • Aug. J. Thebaud
... chance, be it one in ten thousand, of building such a bridge? Those who have suffered and been strong, those whom we love and respect, those who have the honest faith in human nature which enables them to read aright the riddle of this strange world, those who by faith walk over burning ploughshares and dread no evil, those are the people who write the best letters of condolence. They do not dwell on our grief, or exaggerate it, although they are evidently writing to us with a lump in the ...
— Manners and Social Usages • Mrs. John M. E. W. Sherwood
... general set out to solve the riddle of the universe. They differ in their statement of the problem, in the purpose of the attempt, and in their methods of attempting the solution. Some will wonder how this marvellous universe ever came into existence, and will consider the question of the existence of things to ...
— Rudolph Eucken • Abel J. Jones
... with a deep sense of pathos that she should have died before she had spent her money. That seemed to him a dark and pitiable mystery; and he looked from the coins in his hand to the dead woman, and back again to the coins, shaking his head over the riddle of man's life. Henry V. of England, dying at Vincennes just after he had conquered France, and this poor jade cut off by a cold draught in a great man's doorway, before she had time to spend her couple of whites - it seemed ...
— New Arabian Nights • Robert Louis Stevenson
... letter this morning owing to an alarm of illness seizing grandfather. He had been taken with a sudden faintness. Of course we sent for the doctor, but before he arrived the faintness had passed, so he looked wise at us, like a prize riddle which had to be guessed before his next visit, left us his autograph (a wonderful hieroglyphic), and went away. Since then grandfather has been in the hands of a less taciturn practitioner, whom he calls the 'flower ...
— The Christian - A Story • Hall Caine
... from a Spanish plot, which was refused by the players, and was therefore given by him to Mr. Bullock, who, having more interest, made some slight alterations, and brought it upon the stage, under the title of Woman's a Riddle, but allowed the unhappy author no ...
— Lives of the Poets: Addison, Savage, and Swift • Samuel Johnson
... do play 'thread the woman's needle.' An' slap the maidens a-darten drough: Or try who'll ax em the hardest riddle, Or soonest tell woone a-put us, true; Or zit an' ring, O, The bells, ding, ding, O, Upon our knee by ...
— Poems of Rural Life in the Dorset Dialect • William Barnes
... her the man had turned his back forever, that only the ashy road of the ruined remained for her to tread. And that was how the great news that Nature had looked upon her for a mother came to Joan Tregenza. Here was the riddle of the mysterious voice unraveled; here was the secret of her physical sorrows made clear. She looked wildly from one to the other—from the man to the woman; then she tottered a step away, clutching her money and her little picture to her breast; and then she rolled ...
— Lying Prophets • Eden Phillpotts
... with all my heart," said Mr. Maule, who thought that he could read the riddle which had been ...
— Phineas Redux • Anthony Trollope
... she dropped her eyes again on the various groups beneath with Hugh and Ramsey central among them and did not even see that Hugh was answering the same riddle from Ramsey. ...
— Gideon's Band - A Tale of the Mississippi • George W. Cable
... the feminine mind! He had flattered himself that he had reached the end of her superficial attractions; and in a minute, by some startling metamorphosis, she was changed from a being of transparent shallows into the immemorial riddle of sex. She might be anything, or everything, except the ingenuous girl of ...
— One Man in His Time • Ellen Glasgow
... herself any one complicated physical and psychological human being really and truly 'conveys' to another by means of the simple contract known as the "plighted troth" or that of a larger deed called the called the "solemnization of matrimony", is a riddle difficult of solution; and as to how much one may claim on the strength of one or other of these indentures, that is a more difficult ...
— Hints for Lovers • Arnold Haultain
... and agitation.... Besides, he was beginning to be sick of Olga Ivanovna, and more than once after a violent outbreak of passion for her, he would look at her, as he sometimes did at Rogatchov. Lutchinov always remained a riddle to every one. In the coldness of his relentless soul you felt the presence of a strange almost southern fire, and even in the wildest glow of passion a breath of icy chill seemed to come from ...
— The Jew And Other Stories • Ivan Turgenev
... of my youth Come to me over the sea, Come in a vision to me, Come with your shimmer and song; Ye have known all of the truth, Witness to both shall ye bear; Read me the riddle of wrong, Solve me the cords of ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... license of my position. Since then, for three years I have been the prisoner of my Parliament,—but now—now, and for the rest of the time granted to me on earth, I will live my life in the belief that its riddle must surely meet with God's own explanation. To me it has become evident that the laws of Nature make for Truth and Justice; while the laws of man are framed on deception and injustice. The two sets of laws contend one against the other, and the finite, after foolish and vain ...
— Temporal Power • Marie Corelli
... the sin-offering, and the burnt-offering. That was not it, and so he went from book to book until he had reached the twelfth and thirteenth verses of the fourteenth chapter of the book of Judges. He was just reading in that place about Samson's riddle, when his ...
— Queer Stories for Boys and Girls • Edward Eggleston
... your grace by what strange and happy chance this riddle has been read?" said the ...
— The Ontario Readers: The High School Reader, 1886 • Ministry of Education
... nevertheless an important step to have found that there was a relation between them. A century passed away, and Guettard's specimen, preserved at the Jardin des Plantes, waited with Sphinx-like patience for the man who should solve its riddle. ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 57, July, 1862 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... did not cross, although it is hard for any one who has read The Riddle of the Sands to refrain. Had we been there in the nesting season I might have wandered in search of the sea birds' and the plovers' eggs, just for old sake's sake, as I have in the island of Coll, but we were too late, and The Helder had depressed us. It was off ...
— A Wanderer in Holland • E. V. Lucas
... primary tendency in man 'to transfer the sense of his own nature, in the radical explanation of all phenomena whatever.' Writing in the same key, Schopenhauer calls man 'a metaphysical animal.' He is speaking of the need man feels of a theory, in regard to the riddle of existence, which forces itself upon his notice; 'a need arising from the consciousness that behind the physical in the world, there is a metaphysical something permanent as the foundation of constant change.' Though not here alluding to the ghost theory, this bears indirectly ...
— Tracks of a Rolling Stone • Henry J. Coke
... eyes. The riddle of his surroundings was confusing but his mind was quite clear—evidently his sleep had benefited him. He was not in a bed at all as he understood the word, but lying naked on a very soft and yielding ...
— The Sleeper Awakes - A Revised Edition of When the Sleeper Wakes • H.G. Wells
... left for a short time above the horizon after sunset, it is by no means an easy object to observe on account of the mists which usually hang about low down near the earth. One opportunity, however, offers itself from time to time to solve the riddle of an "intra-Mercurial" planet, that is to say, of a planet which circulates within the path followed by Mercury. The opportunity in question is furnished by a total eclipse of the sun; for when, during an eclipse ...
— Astronomy of To-day - A Popular Introduction in Non-Technical Language • Cecil G. Dolmage
... mysteriously as a fairy in a nursery legend. And, lastly, she turns up in the shape of a court-page, and swaggers along London Bridge at this hour of the night, chanting a love song. Faith! it would puzzle the sphinx herself to read this riddle, I've a notion!" ...
— The Midnight Queen • May Agnes Fleming
... balance between the interest on mortgages and the products of the soil. Those who, from 1802 till 1827, had merely laughed at the little man as they saw him trotting to Saint-Thibault and attending to his business, like a merchant living on his vineyards, found the answer to the riddle when the ant-lion seized his prey, after waiting for the day when the extravagance of the Duchesse de Maufrigneuse culminated in the sale ...
— Parisians in the Country - The Illustrious Gaudissart, and The Muse of the Department • Honore de Balzac
... against each of these assertions. For it was not the goddess of Fortune which pursued Bismarck in the ungainly shape of his former friend, that spiteful Prince Gortschakoff. The Frankfort assembly had left the Austrian riddle unsolved, and apparently insoluble. There was no hand in the country firm or skilful enough, no brain sufficiently hard or enlightened as to the needs of the day—not the king's, not Count Arnim's, nor ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 4 of 8 • Various
... be up there, I own! See! curling smoke and flames right blue! To see the Evil One they travel; There many a riddle to unravel. ...
— Faust • Goethe
... direction of the broken ship's lantern. He traces the angle with his finger. The gesture ends with an accusing finger pointing at Red Joe. He whistles softly. For a moment his eye rests upon the gun, which leans against the clock. He has guessed the riddle. He advances casually, but with dirk in hand. He comes in front of Joe. Suddenly he presses the blade of his dirk against ...
— Wappin' Wharf - A Frightful Comedy of Pirates • Charles S. Brooks
... traveller has travelled thither, it has travelled very quick, to have folks christened already by the name of the supposed author. But if you object that no child so lately christened could be arrived at years of maturity to be elected into parliament, I reply (to solve the riddle) that the person is an Anabaptist, and not christened till full age, which sets all right. However it be, the accident is very singular that these two names ...
— Selected English Letters (XV - XIX Centuries) • Various
... all looks again! Oh, I love this old kitchen so! Baby dear, only look at it wid him pitty, pitty eyes, and him tongue out of his mousy! But who put the flour-riddle up there. And look at the pestle and mortar, and rust I declare in the patty pans! And a book, positively a dirty book, where the clean skewers ought to hang! Oh, ...
— Lorna Doone - A Romance of Exmoor • R. D. Blackmore
... figure of the unending wheel to symbolize all processes and procedures: a world, a universe, without termini. Sometimes I think them right, but then again my western mind will not have it that the riddle of the Sphinx may not be solved. Our assurance meets every challenge; mystery may make us humble; we may be baffled; but we do not despair because we know we are Gods to whom all doors must open eventually. That seems to be the real underlying ...
— The Letters of Franklin K. Lane • Franklin K. Lane
... allegory. Argument or truth, dressed out in such fanciful garb, gained double force and acceptance. We may not be able to follow a poet in his wanderings; his local allusions may obscure to us much of his meaning; the doctrine of his allegory may be to us largely a riddle; and the connection between the body of its thought and illustration and the application, or solution, of the poetical conundrum may be past our comprehension; but the [Page 112] play of the poet's fancy, whether childish or mature, is an interesting study, and brings us closer ...
— Unwritten Literature of Hawaii - The Sacred Songs of the Hula • Nathaniel Bright Emerson
... in spite of the telegram not having been delivered. Telegrams have failed to connect before. But they had not been there. If they had stayed with friends we did not know where they were now. It was a riddle. Not getting any light on the subject we decided to eat our dinner ...
— The Campfire Girls Go Motoring • Hildegard G. Frey
... of a riddle, Mr McKay. I suppose you consider a man with ten thousand a year rich, and a ...
— The Buffalo Runners - A Tale of the Red River Plains • R.M. Ballantyne
... her attentively nowadays, when she was unaware of his gaze, to try if her face offered any answer to the riddle. It could not be suggested that she was ill. Never in her life had she been looking so well. She had thrown herself, all at once, and with what was to him an unaccountable energy, into the creation and management of a flower-garden. She ...
— The Damnation of Theron Ware • Harold Frederic
... Mr. and Mrs. Martin are occupying the spare room below us, and the Lundbergs have also turned out to make room for Mr. and Mrs. Dam. Where our hosts have taken up their abode meanwhile remains a riddle for the present. (The riddle was solved in a subsequent tour of inspection of the house, when I found that the one resident couple had retired to the garret and the other to a workshop on the ...
— With the Harmony to Labrador - Notes Of A Visit To The Moravian Mission Stations On The North-East - Coast Of Labrador • Benjamin La Trobe
... be a simple and convenient solution of the riddle if the work of analysis made it at all possible for us to trace the meaningless and intricate dreams of adults back to the infantile type, to the realization of some intensely experienced desire of the day. But there is no warrant for such an expectation. Their dreams are generally ...
— Dream Psychology - Psychoanalysis for Beginners • Sigmund Freud
... and the phenomenon was accounted for by every cause but the right one. Yet even those who most confidently solved the riddle were the most eagerly employed in investigating its true meaning. The seconds were of course applied to. Arundel Dacre was proverbially unpumpable; but Peacock Piggott, whose communicative temper was an ...
— The Young Duke • Benjamin Disraeli
... sight. Instead of trying to explain away the fundamental truth of Fatalism by superficial twaddle and foolish evasion, a man should attempt to get a clear knowledge and comprehension of it; for it is demonstrably true, and it helps us in a very important way to an understanding of the mysterious riddle of our life. Predestination and Fatalism do not differ in the main. They differ only in this, that with Predestination the given character and external determination of human action proceed from a rational Being, and with Fatalism from an irrational ...
— The Essays Of Arthur Schopenhauer • Arthur Schopenhauer
... impulsive being, rebelling against the rules of life and the general philosophy of his fellow-creatures, and shrinking with a shy, uncomprehended pride from the companionship of society. Shelley's disposition was a marked and rare one, but there is nothing of the riddle in it; for thousands, of his temperament, may always be found going strangely through the world, here and there, and the interpretation of such a character could be made extremely interesting, and even instructive, by any one capable of ...
— Atlantic Monthly Vol. 6, No. 33, July, 1860 • Various
... and curiosity, and loveliness, how they put us all to shame. I see them, flashing by in a subway train, golden sphinxes, whose riddles (as Mr. Cabell said of Woman) are not worth solving. Yet they are all the more appealing for that fact. For surely to be a riddle which is not worth solving, and still is cherished as a riddle, is the greatest mystery of all. What strange journeys lie before them, and how triumphantly they walk the precipices as though they ...
— Plum Pudding - Of Divers Ingredients, Discreetly Blended & Seasoned • Christopher Morley
... pasture-land, in the forest of Inglewood), meets a bold baron, who challenges him to fight, unless he can win his ransom by returning on New Year's Day with an answer to the question, What does a woman most desire? Arthur relates the story to Gawaine, asks him and others for an answer to the riddle, and collects their suggestions in a book ('letters,' 24.1). On his way to keep his tryst with the baron, he meets an unspeakably ugly woman, who offers her assistance; if she will help him, Arthur says, she shall wed with Gawaine. She gives him ...
— Ballads of Romance and Chivalry - Popular Ballads of the Olden Times - First Series • Frank Sidgwick
... riddle, monsieur?" she asked. "All kinds of solutions come to me, madam, but none that seem to entirely fit ...
— Princess Maritza • Percy Brebner
... days' debate, ministers were defeated (June 11) by the narrow figure of thirteen in a House of six hundred and thirty-seven. Mr. Gladstone did not speak, but he answered the riddle that had for long so much harassed the wirepullers, by going into the lobby with Disraeli and his flock. The general sense of the majority was probably best expressed by Mr. Bright. Since the fall of the government of Sir Robert Peel, he said, there had been no good handling of the liberal party ...
— The Life of William Ewart Gladstone, Vol. 1 (of 3) - 1809-1859 • John Morley
... him again. Afterwards, on becoming reconciled to him, she bestows on him a dog and a dart, which Diana had once given her. The dog is turned into stone, while hunting a wild beast, which Themis has sent to ravage the territories of Thebes, after the interpretation of the riddle of the Sphinx, ...
— The Metamorphoses of Ovid - Vol. I, Books I-VII • Publius Ovidius Naso
... but, on the other hand, you will find but few of the great artists of the ages who have not been thrilled and haunted with the deep desire to help others, to increase their peace and joy, to interpret the riddle of the world, to give a motive for living a fuller life than the life of the drudge and the ...
— The Silent Isle • Arthur Christopher Benson
... immediately, for my albumess will be catechised on this subject; and how can I prompt her? Lake Leman, I know, and Lemon Lake (in a punch bowl) I have swum in, though those lymphs be long since dry. But Maggiore may be in the moon. Unsphinx this riddle for me, for my shelves have no gazetteer. And mayest thou never murder thy father-in-law in the Trivia of Lincoln's Inn New Square Passage, where Searl Street and the Street of Portugal embrace, nor afterwards make absurd proposals ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb (Vol. 6) - Letters 1821-1842 • Charles and Mary Lamb
... martyrs to the front, who perish in the effort to solve the deadly riddle. We would pour out billions of money in the fight if need come. Rich men will spend all they possess rather than die, and see those they love die of it. Nations will do the same. Compromises are not considered; no one talks of reforming the Black Death. Unless ...
— The Subterranean Brotherhood • Julian Hawthorne
... Merle, "I've an idea that that's the handsomest women I ever saw! I think you're reading the riddle all wrong. Perhaps she's the ...
— The Chouans • Honore de Balzac
... terrible experiences he had been through had aroused new strength in him. He had endured, with princely pride, all the terrors of death and of the most terrible humiliation. He had reflected in the solitude of his prison on the greatest riddle of life—on death and what is beyond. He had realized that there was nothing left for him but submission, patience, and quiet waiting. But bitter, heart-rending misfortune is a school which develops ...
— The German Classics Of The Nineteenth And Twentieth Centuries, Volume 12 • Various
... reverence. But on the deeper grounds of religious faith his silence is significant. He is silent, and the doubt of Hamlet deepens his silence, about the after-world. "To die," it may be, was to him as it was to Claudio, "to go we know not whither." Often as his questionings turn to the riddle of life and death he leaves it a riddle to the last without heeding the common theological solutions around him. "We are such stuff as dreams are made of, and our little life is rounded ...
— History of the English People, Volume V (of 8) - Puritan England, 1603-1660 • John Richard Green
... where we are going, and what it is all about. It can never have been a greater puzzle than now, when we are all busily engaged in killing each other. And at every stage there have been those who have cried, "Lo, here!" and "Lo, there!" and have called men to witness that they have read the riddle and have torn the secret from the heart of ...
— Pebbles on the Shore • Alpha of the Plough (Alfred George Gardiner)
... people arrested were a nondescript collection of tramps. Most of them had committed other offences for which the police had not arrested them. One bewildered-looking gentleman gave himself up (as if he were a riddle), but the police would have none of him, and restored him forthwith to his friends and keepers. The number of candidates for each new opening in ...
— The Grey Wig: Stories and Novelettes • Israel Zangwill
... impressions but rather with an amnesia similar to that observed in neurotics for later experiences, the nature of which consists in their being detained from consciousness (repression). But what forces bring about this repression of the infantile impressions? He who can solve this riddle will ...
— Three Contributions to the Theory of Sex • Sigmund Freud
... come, little Tiny, Let's hear what you have to tell Learned of the years you've scampered Over the hill and dell— What! Only a bark for answer? Now, Tiny, that isn't the thing Will help unravel the riddle Of wonderful, ...
— Our Boys - Entertaining Stories by Popular Authors • Various
... answer immediately. The idea, the amazing, ridiculous idea which had burst upon me suddenly began to lose something of its absurdity. Somehow it began to look like the answer to my riddle. I realized that my main objection to the Campbell prescription had been that I must take it alone or with ...
— Kent Knowles: Quahaug • Joseph C. Lincoln
... lady swore "to take no rest on a night when the moon was full until she had gone to bed with her bridegroom." That is the kernel of the entire myth, the nave and yet apparently conclusive folk interpretation of the riddle of moon walking, at least in its most ...
— Sleep Walking and Moon Walking - A Medico-Literary Study • Isidor Isaak Sadger
... ask—were all the infinitely numerous kinds of animals and plants created as eggs or seed, or as full grown? To this it is sufficient to reply, was your primordial organism, or were your four or five progenitors created as egg, seed, or full grown? Neither theory attempts to solve this riddle, nor yet the riddle of the Omphalos." The latter point, which Mr. Darwin refuses to give up, is at page 483 of the "Origin," "and, in the case of mammals, were they created bearing the false marks of nourishment ...
— More Letters of Charles Darwin - Volume I (of II) • Charles Darwin
... the same light by which it was written: we are referred by it, therefore, to sources of interpretation above itself. God was hidden in the sky; the book in another sky; who shall reveal God hidden in the book? After so many ages, it has become a riddle as difficult of solution as any for which it offers solution: the last and best puzzle of the exulting old Sphinx, who will never be cheated of her jest. Our Christianity misses the highest value of the book, as it indicates the resource of universal man. We use the cover as some ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 76, February, 1864 • Various
... thought that was uppermost in a thousand of those vigilant minds, even as it was uppermost in mine, was the riddle—how much they understood of us. Did they grasp that we in our millions were organized, disciplined, working together? Or did they interpret our spurts of fire, the sudden stinging of our shells, our steady investment of their encampment, as we should the furious unanimity of ...
— The War of the Worlds • H. G. Wells
... night Phobar kept his telescope pointed at the probable spot, but search as he might, the heavens showed nothing new. In the morning he sought eagerly for news of any discovery made by fellow-watchers, but they, too, had found nothing unusual. Could it be that the mystery would now fade away, a new riddle of ...
— Raiders of the Universes • Donald Wandrei
... these comparisons. Life is deeper and wider than any particular lesson to be learned from it; and just when we think that we have at last guessed its best meanings, it laughs in our face with some paradox which turns our solution into a new riddle. ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 8 • Various
... of Jesus: whether, in short, we may not throw the gospels into the waste-paper basket, or put them away on the fiction shelf of our libraries. I venture to reply that we shall be, on the contrary, in the position of the man in Bunyan's riddle who found that "the more he threw away, the more he had. "We get rid, to begin with, of the idolatrous or iconographic worship of Christ. By this I mean literally that worship which is given to pictures and statues of him, ...
— Preface to Androcles and the Lion - On the Prospects of Christianity • George Bernard Shaw
... all came Greek corruption, Greek worship, Greek vice. For years the mysteries of Dionysus and the orgies of the Maenads were celebrated on the slopes of the Aventine and in those deep caves that riddle its sides, less than a mile from the Forum, from the Capitol, from the house of the rigid Cato, who found fault with Scipio of Africa for shaving every day and liking Greek verses. The evil had first ...
— Ave Roma Immortalis, Vol. 2 - Studies from the Chronicles of Rome • Francis Marion Crawford
... Blindness is but a sea-shell kindly placed Beside the ear, and in its varying tone, Who will, may make life's secret all his own. And thus misfortunes bless, for blindness brings A power to pierce the depths of hidden things, To walk where reason and fair fancy lead, To read the riddle of men's thoughts, to read The soul's arcana in each subtler tone, And make man's joys and sorrows all ...
— Five Lectures on Blindness • Kate M. Foley
... the wisest baffled in even guessing at this riddle, as they were a third time, when one Prosper B. Shaw came with the story that while rowing down in the drainage canal, he had come upon, floating gently along, dissevered at the knee joint, twelve ...
— The Strange Adventures of Mr. Middleton • Wardon Allan Curtis
... western gate, Luke Havergal, There are the crimson leaves upon the wall. Go, — for the winds are tearing them away, — Nor think to riddle the dead words they say, Nor any more to feel them as they fall; But go! and if you trust her she will call. There is the western gate, Luke ...
— The Children of the Night • Edwin Arlington Robinson
... there was which puzzled myself, and I sought in my brain a key to that riddle almost as sedulously as Madame had sought a guide to useful knowledge in my toilet drawers. How was it that Dr. John, if he had not been accessory to the dropping of that casket into the garden, should have known that it was dropped, and appeared so promptly on the spot to seek it? So ...
— Villette • Charlotte Bronte
... corps was now raised to $5 a week, and all set to work to try to solve the riddle of how a girl was to pay her board bill, her basket bill, her washing bill, and all the small expenses of the theater—powder, paint, soap, hair-pins, etc.—to say nothing of shoes and clothing, out of her earnings. Clara Morris and the Bradshaws solved the problem ...
— Ten American Girls From History • Kate Dickinson Sweetser
... piece to complete the answer to our riddle," I affirmed,—I really thought so at the time,—"and you can get it for me. Don't bother your aunt; she will keep back all essentials, anyway. Your uncle and aunt and Felix Page all came from the same ...
— The Paternoster Ruby • Charles Edmonds Walk
... me the rest. It'll be of the same quality, devil a doubt, and it doesn't help us to solve the riddle that's before us." ...
— Captain Blood • Rafael Sabatini
... myself," the Carl gurgled through a mouthful of blackberries, "and as I am myself, how can it be myself? That is a silly riddle," he burbled. ...
— Irish Fairy Tales • James Stephens
... guilefull & abusing, for what els is your Metaphor but an inuersion of sence by transport; your allegorie by a duplicitie of meaning or dissimulation vnder couert and darke intendments: one while speaking obscurely and in riddle called AEnigma: another while by common prouerbe or Adage called Paremia: then by merry skoffe called Ironia: then by bitter tawnt called Sarcasmus: then by periphrase or circumlocution when all might be said in ...
— The Arte of English Poesie • George Puttenham
... the facts of life seem often to us, and are felt often by some of us, to shatter it to atoms; to riddle it through and through with shot. But, if we bring the Pattern-life to bear upon the illumination of all life, and if we learn the lessons of the Cradle and the Cross, and rise to the view of human life which emerges from the example of Jesus Christ, then we get back ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... grave, and with her chin in her two cupped palms, stared out across the river at the heaped bluffs and down at the pink-and-white patch of fruit-trees. She was trying, as the young will always try, to solve the riddle of life; and she was baffled and unhappy because she could not find any answer at all that pleased both her ideals and her reason. And then she heard a man's voice lifted up in riotous song, and she turned her head toward the opening of the gorge and listened, her eyes brightening ...
— The Ranch at the Wolverine • B. M. Bower
... hit it," assented Gladwin. "So I've come home to investigate—sleuthing expedition, you might say. Didn't want him to hear I was coming and climb out. Now you've got the answer to the gumshoe riddle. My plan is to lie low and have you look him up. Nothing else on foot, Whitney? Haven't gone into mustard or Wall street, ...
— Officer 666 • Barton W. Currie
... reality, living the life of the cattle men, sharing their duties and their hardships, participating in wild, daring night rides, facing appalling storms, battling with swollen torrents, bravely facing many perils, and tow eventually Tad Butler and his companions solved the Veiled Riddle of the Plains, thus bringing great happiness to others as well ...
— The Pony Rider Boys in Montana • Frank Gee Patchin
... Little is known of his boyhood. He was supposed to have been brought to the district by Highlanders who were in the habit of bringing to Crieff cartloads of split pine from Rannoch Forest, which they sold to riddle-makers to make riddle rims. During one of those visits the child is supposed to have been left. He was called Alastair, owing to his supposed Highland descent, and Bane, because of his white hair. As he grew up to manhood he showed symptoms of a wandering ...
— Chronicles of Strathearn • Various
... morning I was back on time. 'Well, Mr. Riddle,' says I, when he opened the bedroom door, 'and how is ...
— The Gentle Grafter • O. Henry
... those who know nothing about it; but he could not approve of his selfishness, cold-blooded calculations, and least of all of the manner in which he forgot his "white gifts," to adopt those that were purely "red." On the other hand, Pathfinder was a riddle to Captain Sanglier. The latter could not comprehend the other's motives; he had often heard of his disinterestedness, justice, and truth; and in several instances they had led him into grave errors, on that principle by which a frank and ...
— The Pathfinder - The Inland Sea • James Fenimore Cooper
... Lord's supper, and other solemn appointments; especially considering the nature of right church constitution, and the severity of God towards those that came unprepared to his table of old (1 Cor 11:28-30). A riddle indeed, That the Lord should, without a word, so severely command, that all which want light in baptism, be excluded church privileges; and yet against his word, admit of persons unprepared, to the Lord's ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... Inverness and Brady. I anticipate no trouble, and if there is no trouble, we shall return within an hour. If we are not back within three hours, blast this entire area with atomic grenades, and riddle it with the rays. Is ...
— The Death-Traps of FX-31 • Sewell Peaslee Wright
... of Monsters. Laius. Oedipus. The Oracle. Sphinx. The Riddle. Oedipus made King. Jocasta. Origin of Pegasus. Fountain of Hippocrene. The Chimaera. Bellerophontic Letters. The Centaurs. The Pygmies. Description of the Griffin. The Native Country. ...
— TITLE • AUTHOR
... teaches or instructs. Think of it—I! That definition should be revised to read, 'Teacher: one who, conveying certain information to others, reads in fifty faces unanswerable questions as to the riddle of existence.' 'School: a place where the presumably wise are convinced of their own folly.' Note well, my friend: I am a gray sister, in a gray serge suit that fits, with white cuffs and collar, and with chalk on my fingers. Oh, it's not what I'm required to teach, but what ...
— A Hoosier Chronicle • Meredith Nicholson
... the dispatches were in a complicated cipher which resisted all attempts at solution. The Tribune published samples from time to time, keeping interest alive in the hope that somebody might solve the riddle. Finally two members of the Tribune staff were successful in discovering the key to the cipher in a way that recalls the paper-covered detective story. The newspaper aroused and excited public interest ...
— The United States Since The Civil War • Charles Ramsdell Lingley
... great tomb. Very few thoroughly explored this relic of the ancients, but its great antiquity, alleged by some authorities to date long prior to the creation as fixed by the Christian calendar, and the riddle associated with it, demanded that everyone should at least go and gaze on its face for a little while. Here it was customary to submit to the camera man. Many photographs were thus secured which, when posted, were of great interest to ...
— The 28th: A Record of War Service in the Australian Imperial Force, 1915-19, Vol. I • Herbert Brayley Collett
... said, I thought ye would ask me a riddle, Sir, and ye ask about Yu[109] and Ch'iu.[110] He that holds to the Way in serving his lord and leaves when he cannot do so, we call a great minister. Now Yu and Ch'iu I ...
— The Sayings Of Confucius • Confucius
... to make us familiar with those types exhibited in the temple and alluded to by the inspired writers of the New Testament; to use a Puritan expression, he would enable us to plough with our spiritual Samson's heifer to expound the riddle, and thus discover the dark patterns of heavenly things (Heb 9:23,24). Among the many striking objects to which Bunyan directs our wondering eyes, a few should excite our deeper attention while we accompany him ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... gather up any bits and pieces of jewellery and such like as would please me, and if the collection isn't a good one I'll maybe blow an arm off you, jist as a mark of my displeasure. As for the rest, if you ain't good I'll riddle the brain-pan of one of yeh jist to convince the others that I ...
— The Missing Link • Edward Dyson
... that system of deceit necessary to carry on his various professions, I never found anything in Melchior's conduct which could be considered as criminal. On the contrary, he was kind, generous, and upright in his private dealings, and in many points, proved that he had a good heart. He was a riddle of inconsistency it was certain; professionally he would cheat anybody, and disregard all truth and honesty; but, in his private character, he was scrupulously honest, and, with the exception of the assertion relative to Fleta's birth and parentage, he had ...
— Japhet, In Search Of A Father • Frederick Marryat
... merriment, which by no means relieved me. "Shall I give you some good advice?" continued Gulab-Sing, changing his tone for a more serious one. "Don't trouble your head with such vain speculations. The day when this riddle yields its solution, the Rajput Sphinx will not seek destruction in the waves of the sea; but, believe me, it won't bring any profit to the Russian Oedipus either. You already know every detail you ever will learn. So leave the rest to ...
— From the Caves and Jungles of Hindostan • Helena Pretrovna Blavatsky
... cry about," said Nyoda, "don't you know that wild ducks are game birds? It's a bit out of season and you mustn't shoot any more, but I must congratulate you on your aim." Sahwah was a living riddle to her. Fearless as an Indian in the woods and possessing the skill with a rifle to bring down a bird on the wing, she was so tender-hearted that she could not bear to think of having killed any living thing! Nyoda bade her cheer up and pluck the fowl ...
— The Camp Fire Girls in the Maine Woods - Or, The Winnebagos Go Camping • Hildegard G. Frey
... He looked deep into her eyes for seconds, and then she felt him drawing her irresistibly to him. She yielded herself as driftwood yields to a racing flood, no longer caring for the interpretation of the riddle, scarcely remembering its existence; heard him laugh above her head—a brief, exultant laugh—as he clasped her. And then came ...
— The Tidal Wave and Other Stories • Ethel May Dell
... intervene ere their hopes will be fulfilled. If their troubles are short, so may be their joys; but long troubles may bring longer happiness. Choose you which you will, my masters—I will read you a riddle; let me hear ...
— The Golden Grasshopper - A story of the days of Sir Thomas Gresham • W.H.G. Kingston
... different. He inquired for Rincer and the cold in his nose, told Mrs. Rincer a riddle, asked Miss Rincer when she would be ready to marry him, and paid his compliments to Miss Brett, the other young lady in the bar, all in a minute of time, and with a liveliness and facetiousness which set all these ladies in a giggle; and he gave a cluck, expressive of great satisfaction, as he ...
— The History of Pendennis • William Makepeace Thackeray
... that professed moralists and philosophers did much to help me out of the dilemma; but the riddle which history presented I found solved in the pages of Shakspeare. There the crooked appeared straight; the inaccessible, easy; the incomprehensible, plain. All I sought, I found there; his characters combine history and real life; they are complete individuals, whose hearts and ...
— Characteristics of Women - Moral, Poetical, and Historical • Anna Jameson
... I must own! Already fire and eddying smoke I view; The impetuous millions to the devil ride; Full many a riddle will be ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... My idea of the Chinese had been derived, like that of most Americans, from books and chance observation of the handful of Kwangtung men who are earning their living among us by washing our clothes. Silent, inscrutable, they flit through the American scene, alien to the last. What lies behind the riddle of their impassive faces? Perhaps I could find an answer. Then, too, it was clear, even to the most unintelligent, that a change was coming over the East, though few realized how speedily. I longed to see the old China before I made ready to welcome the new. But ...
— A Wayfarer in China - Impressions of a trip across West China and Mongolia • Elizabeth Kendall
... was mostly his hope of chancing on some clue to the mystery of Dorothy Calender—bewitching riddle that she was!—that fascinated his imagination so completely. Aside from her altogether, the great house that stood untenanted, yet in such complete order, so self-contained in its darkened quiet, intrigued him equally with the train of inexplicable events that had brought ...
— The Black Bag • Louis Joseph Vance
... any other. She had not yet the power or the knowledge to dress effectively, but she was already learning intuitively such things as harmony and colour-values. She gave an eye to neatness and cleanliness, and knew how to riddle the costumes of girls of her own class, beginning with May Pearcey. She also was becoming aware of all Miss Jubb's deficiencies. Higher than her own class she could not well go, because she never had opportunities for seeing well-dressed ...
— Coquette • Frank Swinnerton
... magistrates and Mr. Bashfield pored over the moulds and the prisoner's shoes, and examined the photographs against the light. Then the chairman asked: "Are these all the facts, or have you something more to tell us?" He was evidently anxious to get the key to this riddle. ...
— John Thorndyke's Cases • R. Austin Freeman
... dear Ibrahim, read me this riddle: if the devil gets into water and kills, why don't he kill when he gets ...
— Captain Canot - or, Twenty Years of an African Slaver • Brantz Mayer
... Dogess were, I am more particularly struck by the subdued richness and power that characterises the picture as a whole. Look at this flag with the winged lions, how they flutter in the breeze as if they swayed the world. O beautiful Venice!" He began to recite Turandot's[3] riddle of Lion of the Adriatic, "Dimmi, qual sia quella terribil fera," &c. He had hardly come to the end when a sonorous masculine voice broke in with Calaf's[4] solution, "Tu quadrupede fera," &c. Unobserved by the friends, a man of tall and noble appearance, ...
— Weird Tales, Vol. II. • E. T. A. Hoffmann
... I still can harp, and carp, and fiddle. What farther hath befallen or may befall The hero of this grand poetic riddle, I by and by may tell you, if at all: But now I choose to break off in the middle, Worn out with battering Ismail's stubborn wall, While Juan is sent off with the despatch, For which all Petersburgh ...
— Don Juan • Lord Byron
... how my divinity could be improved," said Bessie, with a wild laugh. "I'm not sentimental, but I'm emotional, and he gives me emotions. He's a riddle, and I'm all the time guessing at him. You get the answer to the kind of men we know easily; and it's very nice, but it doesn't amuse you so much as trying. Now, Mr. Durgin—what a name! I can see it makes you creep—is ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... sufficiently wretched, but as the audience was admitted without cost, they were too polite to express any disapprobation. We recorded all our doings in a little weekly paper, published, I believe, by Jemmy Riddle, at the corner of Chestnut and Third-Street, opposite the tavern kept by that sturdy ...
— She Would Be a Soldier - The Plains of Chippewa • Mordecai Manuel Noah
... one riddle, here is the other," and Miss Carleton handed her lover a small note, covered with a fine, delicate chirography whose perfectly formed characters revealed a mind accustomed to the study of minute details and appreciative ...
— That Mainwaring Affair • Maynard Barbour
... assumption of the Trinitarian doctrine of Christ. If Christ were indeed the Son of God, standing to God in such a relation that what He did was likewise the doing of God the Father, we can understand the apostle's meaning. On any other hypothesis his language is a riddle of which the key has been lost. A further question still remains to be answered. I said just now that if St. Paul had written, "Christ commendeth His own love towards us, in that He died for us," we could have understood Him. But here, also, something is implicit which requires to be made explicit. ...
— The Teaching of Jesus • George Jackson
... cunning handiwork. To others, including the writer, they seem, in their manifold variety, to be daughters of Athens. But, if so, what especial claim these women had to be set up in effigy upon Athena's holy hill is an unsolved riddle. ...
— A History Of Greek Art • F. B. Tarbell
... he bore the lady whom most he loved, to expound to her what he had said touching Filippello. He answered thus:—"You have adjured me by her to whom I dare not deny aught that you may ask of me; my riddle therefore I will presently read you, provided you promise me that neither to him nor to any one else will you impart aught of what I shall relate to you, until you shall have ocular evidence of its truth; which, so ...
— The Decameron, Volume I • Giovanni Boccaccio
... the power and knowledge of the one and the weakness and ignorance of the other,—these are the "sentiments" that have kept our soulless systems from driving men off to die in holes like those that riddle the sides of the hill opposite the Monastery of St. Saba, where the miserable victims of a falsely-interpreted religion starved and withered ...
— The Professor at the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes (Sr.)
... public school where Bunthorne is a popular and imitated character. But when we reach aesthetic boys, we pass out of the savage stage into hobbledehoyhood. The bigger boys at public schools are often terribly "advanced," and when they are not at work or play, they are vexing themselves with the riddle of the earth, evolution, agnosticism, and all that kind of thing. Latin verses may not be what conservatives fondly deem them, and even cricket may, it is said, become too absorbing a pursuit, but either or both are better than precocious freethinking ...
— Adventures among Books • Andrew Lang
... facts of life seem often to us, and are felt often by some of us, to shatter it to atoms; to riddle it through and through with shot. But, if we bring the Pattern-life to bear upon the illumination of all life, and if we learn the lessons of the Cradle and the Cross, and rise to the view of human life which emerges from the example of Jesus Christ, then we get back the old conviction, transfigured ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... that she was entirely unconnected with the riddle did nothing to help me to solve it. I had, however, to solve it for the Belgian authorities, and I did so by giving a certificate that Alresca had died of "failure of the heart's action." A convenient phrase, whose convenience imposes ...
— The Ghost - A Modern Fantasy • Arnold Bennett
... a list with some of the most eminent persons in the United States. So true is it that your letters are really of consequence to me. I now allude to that of the 19th instant, covering a fable and riddle. If the whole performance was your own, which I am inclined to hope and believe, it indicates an improvement in style, in knowledge of the French, and in your handwriting. I have therefore not only read it several times, but shown ...
— Memoirs of Aaron Burr, Complete • Matthew L. Davis
... all too soon; Failure brings no kind of stigma - Dance we to another tune! String the lyre and fill the cup, Lest on sorrow we should sup; Hop and skip to Fancy's fiddle, Hands across and down the middle - Life's perhaps the only riddle That ...
— Songs of a Savoyard • W. S. Gilbert
... her riddle I read) Was a woman of genius: whose genius, indeed, With her life was at war. Once, but once, in that life The chance had been hers to escape from this strife In herself; finding peace in the life of another From the passionate ...
— Lucile • Owen Meredith
... be sure the trade had found an answer to the riddle; and the answer was that, on close inspection, Neave had found the collection less impeccable than he had supposed. It was a preposterous answer—but then there was no other. Neave, by this time, was pretty generally recognized as having the subtlest flair of any collector in Europe, ...
— Tales Of Men And Ghosts • Edith Wharton
... that always there have been worlds in process of formation, in the nebulous stage, worlds completely formed and worlds in process of dissolution; that heterogeneity, in short, is eternal. Another way, it will be seen, of not solving the riddle. ...
— Tragic Sense Of Life • Miguel de Unamuno
... white, None dare pass by day or night; Three times three—the riddle tell! The answer lies ...
— The Lost Treasure of Trevlyn - A Story of the Days of the Gunpowder Plot • Evelyn Everett-Green
... the solemn feeling that comes to the man who knows himself to be among the first of his race to gaze on a great natural wonder. He and Imbrie alone had seen this sight. What of the riddle of Imbrie? Doctor, magician, skulker in the night, madman perhaps—and Clare's husband! Must he be haunted by him all his life? But the noble spectacle before Stonor's eyes calmed his nerves. All will be clear ...
— The Woman from Outside - [on Swan River] • Hulbert Footner
... to those great white eyeballs, and that it was only a pitch-black world which it could tolerate. Perhaps, indeed, it was the glare of my lantern which saved my life at that awful moment when we were face to face. So I read the riddle. I leave these facts behind me, and if you can explain them, do so; or if you choose to doubt them, do so. Neither your belief nor your incredulity can alter them, nor affect one whose task is ...
— The Last Galley Impressions and Tales - Impressions and Tales • Arthur Conan Doyle
... sex—the great master of the tragedy of the moral intelligence. Taking the step from JULIUS CAESAR to HAMLET as corresponding to this movement in his mind, we may say that where the first play exhibits the concrete perception of the fatality of things, "the riddle of the painful earth"; in the second, in its final form, the perception has emerged in philosophic consciousness as a pure reflection. The poet has in the interim been revealed to himself; what he had perceived ...
— Montaigne and Shakspere • John M. Robertson
... ma'am, that we've been a-drinking together; and when we've been a-drinking together, I say that a man is my friend. Doctor Wood is my friend, madam—the Reverend Doctor Wood. We've passed the evening in company, talking about politics, madam—politics and riddle-iddle-igion. We've not been flaunting in tea-gardens, and ogling ...
— Catherine: A Story • William Makepeace Thackeray
... offices, and had warned her to beware of arousing Von Holzen's anger. Indeed, her use of Percy Roden was at an end, and yet she would not let him go. Cornish was puzzled, and so was Dorothy. Percy Roden was gratified, and read the riddle by the light of his own vanity. Mrs. Vansittart was not, perhaps, the first woman to puzzle her neighbours by refusing to relinquish that which she did not want. She was not the first, perhaps, to nurse a subtle desire to play ...
— Roden's Corner • Henry Seton Merriman
... but in the passion and the worship of love was surely a never-failing fountain of growth and power; this the draught that would leave no bitter aftertaste, its enjoyment the final and all-sufficient answer to the riddle of life. Rossetti put into utterance for her so much that she had not dared to entrust even to the voice of thought. Her spirit and flesh became one and indivisible; the old antagonism seemed at an end ...
— The Unclassed • George Gissing
... light; dig out, grub up, fish up; unearth, disinter. solve, resolve, elucidate; unriddle, unravel, unlock, crack, crack open; pick up, open the lock; find a clue, find clew a to, find the key to the riddle; interpret &c. 522; disclose &c. 529. trace, get at; hit it, have it; lay one's finger, lay one's hands upon; spot; get at the truth, arrive at the truth &c. 494; put the saddle on the right horse, hit the right nail on the head. be near the truth, be warm, get ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... derisively at her own affected ignorance. She would guess again and again, and assume the most gleeful surprise upon at last giving the proper answer, and then she would laugh jubilantly, and mockingly scout herself with having given out "a fool-riddle" that she could ...
— Complete Works of James Whitcomb Riley • James Whitcomb Riley
... Energy of Purpose; John Brown's Grave; Ristori, Fechter, and the Drama; Planchette's Diary; Death of Eliza Riddle Field. ...
— The Life Radiant • Lilian Whiting
... ridiculous errors, which he has made so frequently. The explanation of it all, is that curious figure that sits so silent, remote, and friendless on the front Opposition bench. Lord Randolph is still the riddle which nobody can read. Whenever Mr. Balfour appears Lord Randolph does his best to efface himself, even in the places which men select on the front bench. Here is a hint of that eternal conflict and play of ferocious appetites and passions which is going on in the ...
— Sketches In The House (1893) • T. P. O'Connor
... Very peculiar, certainly. Who on earth can have amused himself with drawing a misshapen flint? There must be some riddle in it; some aenigma, as insoluble to me ...
— Gryll Grange • Thomas Love Peacock
... in the mean time, have not relinquished the inquiry, and try, as they become more closely acquainted with your mode of life and thought, to guess many a riddle, to solve many a problem; indeed, with the assistance of an old liking, and a connection of many years' standing, they find a charm even in the difficulties which present themselves. Yet a little assistance here and there ...
— Autobiography • Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
... "The riddle is solved," exclaimed the husband excitedly tossing the letter across the table to his wife. "I noticed the missing toe when I removed the skin. It is a great relief to ...
— Black Bruin - The Biography of a Bear • Clarence Hawkes
... certainly be a simple and convenient solution of the riddle if the work of analysis made it at all possible for us to trace the meaningless and intricate dreams of adults back to the infantile type, to the realization of some intensely experienced desire of the day. But there is no warrant for such an ...
— Dream Psychology - Psychoanalysis for Beginners • Sigmund Freud
... him the evening before. It is true that his meditations, too, were of a fairly tranquil character. He fancied that this strange girl interested him from the psychological point of view, as something of the nature of a riddle, the solution of which was worth racking his brains over. 'Ran away with an actress living as a kept mistress,' he pondered, 'put herself under the protection of that princess, with whom she seems to have lived—and no love affairs'? It's ...
— Dream Tales and Prose Poems • Ivan Turgenev
... came there upon the floor was a riddle which I was too much bewildered to explain by any natural means. Joseph, who burst in upon me, in my extremity of pain and difficulty, solved it at once. It had fallen out of the glove, where it had lain folded, silent, unnoticed, during all this intervening period ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 10, August, 1858 • Various
... tragic irony that came of them. Aye, and he was inclined to blame the gods for not having kept him still longer in the dark and so made the irony still more awful. Why had they not caused the telegram to be delayed in transmission? They ought to have let him go and riddle Zuleika with his scorn and his indifference. They ought to have let him hurl through her his defiance of them. Art aside, they need not have ...
— Zuleika Dobson - or, An Oxford Love Story • Max Beerbohm
... could devise for the recovery of this precious and priceless jewel; and that, furthermore, the safety and even lives of many innocent persons depended on the stranger's exertions, and the speedy execution of his mission. But how to begin, or in what quarter to commence the search, was a riddle worthy of the Sphinx. A most unexpected and novel situation for this rude dweller in woods and morasses, to be suddenly thrust forth into a mighty city, without guide or direction, more ignorant of his errand than any of its inhabitants. ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 2 (of 2) • John Roby
... If the riddle be not already guessed, a few words will explain the simple machinery by which this "coming event" was made to cast its "shadow before." Three men had plotted the robbery and murder of Mr. Higginbotham; two of them successively lost courage and fled, each delaying the crime one night ...
— Twice Told Tales • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... of this councillorship query remained, of course, a riddle to her, yet she handed him the paper without replying. It was a coarse wood-cut, representing a splendid meteor "as seen in the town of Cologne," which was to be read below ...
— Andersen's Fairy Tales • Hans Christian Andersen
... of human nature easily recognized in her one of those characters which Goethe has so aptly named "problematical," for she was one of those individuals who are always dissatisfied and at variance with themselves and with the world, who are a riddle to themselves, and who can never be relied on, and with the interesting and captivating, though unfortunate contradictions in her nature, she made a strong impression on everybody, even by her mere outward appearance. ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume IV (of 8) • Guy de Maupassant
... in the forest of Inglewood), meets a bold baron, who challenges him to fight, unless he can win his ransom by returning on New Year's Day with an answer to the question, What does a woman most desire? Arthur relates the story to Gawaine, asks him and others for an answer to the riddle, and collects their suggestions in a book ('letters,' 24.1). On his way to keep his tryst with the baron, he meets an unspeakably ugly woman, who offers her assistance; if she will help him, Arthur says, she shall wed with Gawaine. She gives him the true answer, ...
— Ballads of Romance and Chivalry - Popular Ballads of the Olden Times - First Series • Frank Sidgwick
... must solve the riddle of this new Sphinx, or be devoured. Though Mr. Lincoln's policy in this critical affair has not been such as to satisfy those who demand an heroic treatment for even the most trifling occasion, and who will not cut their coat ...
— The Writings of James Russell Lowell in Prose and Poetry, Volume V - Political Essays • James Russell Lowell
... vacant sky? And thou, who on the ocean of thy days Dost like a swimmer patiently contend, And though thou steerest with a shoreward gaze Misdoubtest of a harbour or an end, What would the threat, or what the promise be, Could I but read the riddle of ...
— The Meaning of Good—A Dialogue • G. Lowes Dickinson
... to our recruiting difficulties in Parliament. True enough. We have our recruiting difficulties still. Lord Derby has not apparently solved the riddle; for riddle it is, in a country of voluntary service, where none of the preparations necessary to fit conscription into ordinary life, with its obligations, have ever been made. The Government and the House of Commons are just now wrestling ...
— The War on All Fronts: England's Effort - Letters to an American Friend • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... within himself that he had now explained this seeming riddle, he took no farther trouble about whose, or what these children were, but resolved to take care of them during their infancy, and afterwards to put them into such a way as he should find their genius's rendered them most fit for, in order ...
— The Fortunate Foundlings • Eliza Fowler Haywood
... Judas remain an unsolved riddle. The Gospels leave no doubt that money played a part with him. But could a man whom Jesus selected and trusted be actuated by so sordid a motive alone? Was he perhaps embittered because he had staked his ambition ...
— The Social Principles of Jesus • Walter Rauschenbusch
... reconciliation were taking place elsewhere. Cottle was asking Ashby his riddle; D'Arcy was laying down the law in the admiring hearing of Ramshaw and Lickford as to the cooking of sprats on the shovel; while Fisher minor was telling the sympathetic Mrs Stratton all about the people at home. Mr Stratton ...
— The Cock-House at Fellsgarth • Talbot Baines Reed
... Scripture. Interpretation is ordinarily from one language into another, or from the language of one period into that of another; it may also be a statement giving the doubtful or hidden meaning of that which is recondite or perplexing; as, the interpretation of a dream, a riddle, or of some difficult passage. Definition, explanation, exposition, and interpretation are ordinarily blended in a commentary, which may also include description. A comment is upon a single passage; a commentary ...
— English Synonyms and Antonyms - With Notes on the Correct Use of Prepositions • James Champlin Fernald
... is better able to solve this difficult problem than you," said Lord Evandale. "We will carry this box full of secrets to our boat, where you will, at your leisure, decipher this historic document and read the riddle set by these hawks, scarabaei, kneeling figures, serrated lines, winged uraeus, and spatula hands, which you read as readily ...
— The Works of Theophile Gautier, Volume 5 - The Romance of a Mummy and Egypt • Theophile Gautier
... pots with three rows of perforations; they have the usual handle on one side and three feet on the other; also three large vases with perforations right round, on all sides, from the bottom to the top; their use is a riddle to me; can they have served as bee-hives? Also a vessel in the form of a pig, with four feet, which are, however, shorter than the belly, so that the vessel can not stand upon them; the neck of the vessel, which is attached to the back of the pig, is connected with the hinder part by a ...
— Museum of Antiquity - A Description of Ancient Life • L. W. Yaggy
... hesitation is over. We have grasped the nettle firmly, and as shrewdly as firmly, and have taken no hurt. It remains only to pluck it. For heaven's sake no over-confidence or premature elation; but there is really good hope that Sir Redvers Buller has solved the Riddle of the Tugela—at last. At last! I expect there will be some who will inquire—'Why not "at first"?' All I can answer is this: There is certainly no more capable soldier of high rank in all the army in Natal than Sir Redvers Buller. For three months he ...
— London to Ladysmith via Pretoria • Winston Spencer Churchill
... be a bare possibility of saving her companion; and the wish to save herself at the same time, and in the very teeth as it were of the Koshare, grew stronger and stronger. It waxed to an intense longing for life and revenge. But what was to be done? There was the riddle, and to solve it she thought and thought. Shotaye became oblivious of all around her, completely absorbed ...
— The Delight Makers • Adolf Bandelier
... moreover what she herself knows of it is but a part of what it really is. Complete frankness seems to be impossible to her, and complete self-knowledge seems to be forbidden her. If she is a sphinx to us, it is because she is a riddle of doubtful meaning even to herself. She has no need of perfidy, for she is mystery itself. A woman is something fugitive, irrational, indeterminable, illogical, and contradictory. A great deal of forbearance ought to be shown her, and a good deal of prudence exercised with regard ...
— Amiel's Journal • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... nowhere, rushed toward the trap as the tiger approached, entered and dropped the door, blazed away at the beast, who turned tail and limped off into the jungle. Ai! It was a sight for eyes. They could laugh behind Umballa's back, the gutter born, the iron heeled upstart; they could riddle (confidentially) the council with rude jests. The law was the law; and none, not even the priests in their shaven polls and yellow robes, might slip beyond the law as it read. The first ordeal was over. Nor, as the law read, could they lay hands upon this brave young ...
— The Adventures of Kathlyn • Harold MacGrath
... document making you the heir to a vast estate. As a matter of fact, I don't know what they contained; the surprise of the drawers themselves was enough for me. I need not add that I did not guess the riddle myself; but nothing that I can call to mind impressed me more than when, one day, my father solved it for me with his little brass wand. At intervals, afterwards, I was allowed to work the miracle myself, always with the same thrill of mysterious ...
— Hawthorne and His Circle • Julian Hawthorne
... enough but it took more than twenty years to solve the riddle. In the year 1802 a French professor by the name of Champollion began to compare the Greek and the Egyptian texts of the famous Rosetta stone. In the year 1823 he announced that he had discovered the meaning of fourteen little figures. A short time later he died from overwork, but ...
— The Story of Mankind • Hendrik van Loon
... is a curious commentary on Lichtenberg's prophecy. But whether the end be seventy years hence, or seven hundred,—be the close of the mortal history of humanity as far distant in the future as its shadowy beginnings seem now to lie behind us,—this only we may foretell with confidence,—that the riddle of man's nature will remain unsolved. There will be that in him yet which physical laws will fail to explain,—that something, whatever it be, in himself and in the world, which science can not ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. VI (of X)—Great Britain and Ireland IV • Various
... cruiser, all too slow for the anxious hearts of those aboard. For there was not one of the Wolverines who did not expect from this aimless traveller of desert seas at the least a leading clue to the riddle ...
— The Mystery • Stewart Edward White and Samuel Hopkins Adams
... ingenious a series of books for little folks as has ever appeared since "Alice in Wonderland." The idea of the Riddle books is a little group of children—three girls and three boys decide to form a riddle club. Each book is full of the adventures and doings of these six youngsters, but as an added attraction each book is filled with a lot of the best ...
— Tom Swift among the Fire Fighters - or, Battling with Flames from the Air • Victor Appleton
... monster that would eat Whatever stranger she could get; Unless his ready wit disclos'd The subtle riddle she propos'd. Oedipus was resolv'd to go, And try what strength of parts would do. Says Sphinx, on this depends your fate; Tell me what animal is that Which has four feet at morning bright, Has two at noon and three at night? 'Tis man, said he, who, ...
— The Humourous Poetry of the English Language • James Parton
... curious to solve the riddle. A door which she had often noticed, but never seen opened, now stood wide open, and the old quadrangular garden, which was James Steadman's particular care, smiled at her in the golden evening light. Seen thus, ...
— Phantom Fortune, A Novel • M. E. Braddon
... light of the full moon, the lady swore "to take no rest on a night when the moon was full until she had gone to bed with her bridegroom." That is the kernel of the entire myth, the nave and yet apparently conclusive folk interpretation of the riddle of moon walking, at least ...
— Sleep Walking and Moon Walking - A Medico-Literary Study • Isidor Isaak Sadger
... meantime I wish to goodness we had a good scud o' cash among us, an' we safe an' snug in America! Now shake hands an' good bye—an' mark me—if you dhrame of America an' a long purse any o' these nights, come to me an' I'll riddle your dhrame for you." ...
— The Black Prophet: A Tale Of Irish Famine • William Carleton
... of the curious structure of the leaves of Trifolium resupinatum remains a riddle. The stomata and (speaking from memory) the trichomes differ on the two halves of the ...
— More Letters of Charles Darwin Volume II - Volume II (of II) • Charles Darwin
... mouth came the sneer of one propounding a riddle already solved—"it is not meet, is it, to thresh on the Sabbath day? Yet since you permit your followers to do so, how are we to distinguish between what is ...
— Mary Magdalen • Edgar Saltus
... recognised as containing truth, it is difficult to believe that in the highest things we depend upon the key-note of the soul. Knowledge thereby becomes an intimate personal concern. But this is what it really is to the Mystic. Tell some one the solution of the riddle of the universe! Give it him ready-made! The Mystic will find it to be nothing but empty sound, if the personality does not meet the solution half-way in the right manner. The solution in itself is nothing; it vanishes ...
— Christianity As A Mystical Fact - And The Mysteries of Antiquity • Rudolf Steiner
... faith, that spoils all the former, for these farthingales take up all the room now-a-days; 'tis not a woman, questionless. Shall I be put down with a riddle? Sirrah Heuresis, search the corners of your conceit, and find ...
— A Select Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. IX • Various
... do all you can, my child. You'll get over it the sooner, if you work hard on it at first. We've all been through it. Nearly everybody in this part of the country has tried at one time or another to guess the Cromarty riddle." ...
— Patty's Friends • Carolyn Wells
... said Lord Ronald, "For I am yours in word and in deed; Play me no tricks," said Lord Ronald, "Your riddle is hard ...
— Lady Clare • Alfred, Lord Tennyson
... him if he should. Though he has made some clever escapes, I'll admit, that may not always be his fortune. The pitcher may go to the well once too often. He's a cunning rascal—no doubt knows this riddle—and therefore I begin to fear he has taken himself off,—at least for a long while. He may return again, but how the deuce are we to sustain this constant espionage? It would weary down the devil! ...
— The White Chief - A Legend of Northern Mexico • Mayne Reid
... portrait of the poet being, by mistake, marked thirteen) Cowley published some of his early effusions, under the title of 'Poetical Blossoms.' While at school he produced a comedy of a pastoral kind, entitled, 'Love's Riddle,' but it was not published till he went to Cambridge. To that university he proceeded in 1636, and two years after, there appeared the above-mentioned comedy, with a poetical dedication to Sir Kenelm Digby, one of the marvellous men of ...
— Specimens with Memoirs of the Less-known British Poets, Complete • George Gilfillan
... intention to return to his hut for the night, and he stood for a moment contemplating the dark village. His busy thoughts decided for him that there was nothing further to be done to-night. He told himself that opportunity must be his guide in the riddle with which he was confronted. He must rush nothing, and he felt, somehow, that the opportunity would come. He turned his eyes in the direction of his home, and as he was about to move off he became aware of a footstep crossing the market-place ...
— The One-Way Trail - A story of the cattle country • Ridgwell Cullum
... going mad, she asked herself? And like a dreadful answer to a riddle inscrutable her white lips whispered those haunting unforgettable words: "I beheld Satan—as ...
— The Knave of Diamonds • Ethel May Dell
... last, and the large dews rolled down his forehead. "Sidney!" said he, "there is a mystery here that I comprehend not. But my mind now is very confused. If she loves you—if!—is it possible for a woman to love two? Well, well, I go to solve the riddle: ...
— Night and Morning, Volume 5 • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... Faerie, thou who hast sounded to the deeps that circumfluent ocean called "practical human life," and hast taught the acutest of its navigators to consider how far its courses are guided by orbs in heaven,—canst thou solve this riddle which, if it perplexes me, must perplex so many? What is the real distinction between the rare genius and the commonalty of human souls that feel to the quick all the grandest and divinest things which the rare genius places ...
— The Parisians, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... powers. Terror of darkness! O, thou king of flames! That with thy music-footed horse dost strike The clear light out of crystal on dark earth, And hurl'st instructive fire about the world, Wake, wake, the drowsy and enchanted night That sleeps with dead eyes in this heavy riddle; Or thou great prince of shades where never sun Sticks his far darted beams, whose eyes are made To shine in darkness, and see ever best Where sense is blindest: open now the heart Of thy abashed oracle, that for fear Of some ill it includes, would fain lie hid, And ...
— A History of English Literature - Elizabethan Literature • George Saintsbury
... the riddle of the Sphinx! Angelique's life, as she had projected it, depended upon ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby
... daring to expresse my paine, To you, great Lord, the causer of my care, In clowdie teares my case I thus complaine Unto your selfe, that onely privie are. But if that any Oedipus unware Shall chaunce, through power of some divining spright, To reade the secrete of this riddle rare, And know the purporte of my evill plight, Let him rest pleased with his owne insight, Ne further seeke to glose upon the text: For griefe enough it is to grieved wight To feele his fault, and ...
— The Poetical Works of Edmund Spenser, Volume 5 • Edmund Spenser
... of that sort would have no difficulty in hoodwinking the stablemen," declared Merrihew, certain that he had solved the riddle. ...
— The Lure of the Mask • Harold MacGrath
... wouldst wend with me, To leave both tower and town, Thou first must guess what life lead we That dwell by dale and down. And if thou canst that riddle read, As read full well you may, Then to the greenwood shalt thou speed, As blythe as Queen ...
— Lyra Heroica - A Book of Verse for Boys • Various
... me not, good sir; the world to me A riddle is at best—my heart has had No tutor. From my childhood until now My thoughts have been ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII. No. 3. March 1848 • Various
... so Chesterton tells us in the 'Riddle of the Ivy,' he happened to be leaving Battersea, and being asked where he was going, calmly replied to 'Battersea.' Which is really to say that we find our way to Brixton more eagerly by way of Singapore than by way of Kennington. In a few words, it is what we mean when ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Patrick Braybrooke
... search, Mr. Martin found only one worm, and this one escaped only by accident, for several of the birds had been within a quarter of an inch of it. "So eager are woodpeckers in search, of codling moths that they have often been known to riddle the shingle traps and paper bands which are placed to attract the larvae about ...
— Our Vanishing Wild Life - Its Extermination and Preservation • William T. Hornaday
... this inexhaustible abundance, particularly of wild fruits, came; for in the forest clearings which we had passed through pasturage and agriculture were evidently only subordinate industries. At the end of the second day's march, however, the riddle was solved; for when we had reached the considerable river called the Guaso Amboni, which falls into the Indian Ocean, we found spreading out before us farther than the eye could reach a high plateau which, so far as we could see, had the character of an open park-land, bearing, especially ...
— Freeland - A Social Anticipation • Theodor Hertzka
... guarantee of the rights of man, and should therefore be surrendered as soon as its object contradicts these rights of man. But the practice is only the exception and the theory is the rule. If, however, we regard the revolutionary practice as the correct position of the relation, the riddle still remains to be solved, why the relationship was inverted in the consciousness of the political liberators, the end appearing as the means, and the means as the end. This optical illusion of their consciousness ...
— Selected Essays • Karl Marx
... quite a riddle!" said she.—"To chuse to remain here month after month, under privations of every sort! And now to chuse the mortification of Mrs. Elton's notice and the penury of her conversation, rather than return to the superior companions who have always ...
— Persuasion • Jane Austen
... could not give, escaped an appreciative and full, almost overfull, recognition which startled me. For she had understood me—understood me almost better than I had understood myself. It seemed to me that while I had labored to interpret, partially, a psychological riddle, she, coming after, had comprehended its bearings better than I had, though confining herself strictly to my own words and emphasis. The scene ended (and it ended rather suddenly), she dropped her eyes, and moved her hand nervously ...
— Stories by American Authors (Volume 4) • Constance Fenimore Woolson
... it all looks again! Oh, I love this old kitchen so! Baby dear, only look at it wid him pitty, pitty eyes, and him tongue out of his mousy! But who put the flour-riddle up there. And look at the pestle and mortar, and rust I declare in the patty pans! And a book, positively a dirty book, where the clean skewers ought to ...
— Lorna Doone - A Romance of Exmoor • R. D. Blackmore
... is a kind of fatality that concerns the disposition of matter in Nature. Oil fields and rubber trees existed, one might say, as enigmas, until the internal combustion engine and motor cars dawned on the world and explained their riddle. This was their fate. And of Mesopotamia, who shall say that it may not be concerned with a yet unborn attitude in us Europeans when we will turn wholly to the produce of ...
— In Mesopotamia • Martin Swayne
... unpleasant thoughts, Grayson sat at his desk in the office of the ranch trying to unravel the riddle of a balance sheet which would not balance. Mixed with the blue of the smoke from his briar was the deeper azure of a spirited monologue in which ...
— The Mucker • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... no road or ready way to virtue; it is not an easy point of art to disentangle ourselves from this riddle or web of sin. To perfect virtue, as to religion, there is required a panoplia, or complete armour; that whilst we lie at close ward against one vice, we lie not open to the assault of another. There go ...
— The Worlds Greatest Books, Volume XIII. - Religion and Philosophy • Various
... bridegroom with the King's daughter at one side of him and the waiting-maid on the other, but the waiting-maid was blinded, and did not recognize the princess in her dazzling array. When they had eaten and drunk, and were merry, the aged King asked the waiting-maid as a riddle, what a person deserved who had behaved in such and such a way to her master, and at the same time related the whole story, and asked what sentence such an one merited? Then the false bride said: "She deserves no better fate than to be stripped entirely ...
— The Junior Classics, Volume 1 • Willam Patten
... PARTY was headed by the industrious and indomitable Horace Greeley. His claim to the feelings of humanity should never be disputed; but as a practical man who sought to solve the riddle of every-day life he placed his practical views in the foreground. As a political economist he reasoned that slave labor was degrading to free labor; that free labor was better than slave labor, and, therefore, he most earnestly desired its abolition. Wherever you turn in his writings this idea gives ...
— History of the Negro Race in America from 1619 to 1880. Vol. 2 (of 2) - Negroes as Slaves, as Soldiers, and as Citizens • George Washington Williams
... is a most pig-headed sot! (aloud) Young man, you cannot know the risk you run. Th' alternative's in earnest—not in fun. Dame Turandot will spin you a tough riddle, That's not to be "got thro' like any fiddle." Not such as this, which any child might guess— (Though the Emperor could not, I must confess;) "What gives a cold, cures a cold, and pays the doctor's ...
— Turandot: The Chinese Sphinx • Johann Christoph Friedrich von Schiller
... no serious fault to find with these tactics. On the contrary. But I rather think that in the first Act an incident was introduced (no doubt in the spirit of the little girl's explanation a propos of her riddle, "That was just put in to make it more difficult"), which was not quite cricket as it is played by the best people in ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 158, June 2, 1920 • Various
... to his food and to everybody and everything that presented itself before him was a riddle that I never solved. A materialistic friend suggested that he was adjusting the focus of his wonderful eyes, and the action was certainly like that of an optician examining a lens; but I feel that there was something more ceremonial about it. This ...
— Concerning Animals and Other Matters • E.H. Aitken, (AKA Edward Hamilton)
... and though the past is unhappily beyond recall, since our Maker Himself cannot undo the work of yesterday, or obliterate events embalmed in vanished time, yet there is always the future; and if we could but read the past aright, which we never can, then the future would prove less of a painful riddle ...
— The Grey Room • Eden Phillpotts
... the sweet and wholesome freshness of life, being the way of its renewal. Sweeter than the honey which Samson found in the lion's carcass is this everlasting sweetness of Death; and it is a mystery deeper than the strong man's riddle. ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 1 • Charles Dudley Warner
... KING RICHARD. Hoyday, a riddle! neither good nor bad! What need'st thou run so many miles about, When thou mayest tell thy tale the nearest way? Once more, ...
— The Life and Death of King Richard III • William Shakespeare [Collins edition]
... flying faster—my soul is so free. Let us jest, Mariet! Here is a riddle, guess it: For whom will the cannons roar soon? You think, for me? No. For you? no, no, not for you, Mariet! For little Noni, for him—for little Noni who is boarding the ship to-night. Let him wake up from this thunder. How our little Noni ...
— The Crushed Flower and Other Stories • Leonid Andreyev
... food in the kitchen and hurried back to his guests. There was the riddle of the Quantocks to solve: there were the tableaux vivants imminent: there was the little red-haired boy coming in soon. ...
— Queen Lucia • E. F. Benson
... "A riddle slice; a candle box; two ventilators; two glasses for the wash-hand stand; one tin dust pan; one small tin tea kettle; one pair of candlesticks; one carpet brush; one flower dredge; three tin extinguishers; two mats; a pair of slippers; ...
— Reminiscences of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Robert Southey • Joseph Cottle
... of the ballet corps was now raised to $5 a week, and all set to work to try to solve the riddle of how a girl was to pay her board bill, her basket bill, her washing bill, and all the small expenses of the theater—powder, paint, soap, hair-pins, etc.—to say nothing of shoes and clothing, out of her earnings. Clara Morris and the Bradshaws ...
— Ten American Girls From History • Kate Dickinson Sweetser
... her, for there was not another female for him in the whole wide world—they all think that for the time being—and of course he married her. Then he made a seven-day feast, and unfortunately he amused the company with a riddle. Of course his wife was dying to know the answer, and her people threatened her if she did not find it out, and altogether it was a lively discussion, and she made his life a burden and a delusion and she ...
— Fair to Look Upon • Mary Belle Freeley
... a great deal of talent and was her favorite. She was much importuned by the rival suitors. She appeared before them one day with a basket filled with plums in her hand; and said she would give her hand in marriage to whoever of them should guess the following arithmetical riddle. She said: "One of you shall take half the plums that are in this basket, and one over: another shall take half of what remains, and one over: the third shall take half of what still remains and three over, and then all the plums will have ...
— After Waterloo: Reminiscences of European Travel 1815-1819 • Major W. E Frye
... makes them gay, Miss Lawless and Miss Barlow make them sad. No one denies that sadness is nearer the reality, but it is unreasonable to call Lever insincere. Naturally careless and lighthearted he does not trouble himself with the riddle of the painful world; the distress which touches him most nearly is a distress for debt. But if Lever is not realistic he is natural; he follows the law of his nature as an artist should; he sees life through his own medium; and if books are to be valued as companions, ...
— Irish Books and Irish People • Stephen Gwynn
... to cry about," said Nyoda, "don't you know that wild ducks are game birds? It's a bit out of season and you mustn't shoot any more, but I must congratulate you on your aim." Sahwah was a living riddle to her. Fearless as an Indian in the woods and possessing the skill with a rifle to bring down a bird on the wing, she was so tender-hearted that she could not bear to think of having killed any living ...
— The Camp Fire Girls in the Maine Woods - Or, The Winnebagos Go Camping • Hildegard G. Frey
... particularly fond of any kind of riddle. They seized upon this floral enigma with delight, and began to puzzle it out with the help of the illustrated catalogue of plants given in the ...
— The Manor House School • Angela Brazil
... that all? Lovers Quarrels are soon Adjusted; I'll to 'em, unfold the Riddle, and bring 'em back—take no care, but go in and dress you for the Ball; Mopsophil has Habits which your Lovers sent to put on: the Fiddles, Treat, and all are ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn, Vol. III • Aphra Behn
... looked as if there was some treachery at work to ruin their happiness; but Sir William racked his brain in vain to solve the riddle. ...
— Virgie's Inheritance • Mrs. Georgie Sheldon
... that, which distinguishes too many of our more recent versifiers; the one conveying the most fantastic thoughts in the most correct and natural language; the other in the most fantastic language conveying the most trivial thoughts. The latter is a riddle of words; the former an enigma of thoughts. The one reminds me of an odd passage in ...
— Biographia Literaria • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... wretched and foolish since the race began, and will be till it ends; one chorus of lamentation has ever been rising, in countless dialects but with a single meaning; the plausible schemes of philosophers give no solution to the everlasting riddle; the nostrums of politicians touch only the surface of the deeply-rooted evil; it is folly to be querulous, and as silly to fancy that men are growing worse, as that they are much better than they used to be. The evils under which we suffer are not skin-deep, to be eradicated by changing ...
— Samuel Johnson • Leslie Stephen
... the Nazarene came and seized his seat beneath the sun, The votary of the Riddle-god, whose one is ...
— The Kasidah of Haji Abdu El-Yezdi • Richard F. Burton
... sheep-farmer at such seasons on damp, boggy farms. The beams were laden with skins besmeared with blood, that dangled overhead to catch the conservative influences of the smoke; and on a rude plank-table below, there rose two tall pyramids of braxy-mutton, heaped up each on a corn-riddle. The shepherd—a Highlander of large proportions, but hard, and thin, and worn by the cares and toils of at least sixty winters—sat moodily beside the fire. The state of his flocks was not cheering; and, besides, he had seen a vision ...
— My Schools and Schoolmasters - or The Story of my Education. • Hugh Miller
... explained. The child, having conceived a great fondness for her schoolmistress, wished to please the latter by attention to her lessons. In addition, she was jealous; afraid lest the mistress should prefer some other girl. In many instances, where a child's behaviour is puzzling, such a solution of the riddle will become apparent when it is looked for. Boys, again, endeavour by feats of strength to make the greatest possible impression upon the girls of their choice, in gymnastic exercises, for example, in athletic sports, and games. Coquetry also occasionally manifests itself ...
— The Sexual Life of the Child • Albert Moll
... clear-headed and sane to have a monomania about a non-existent trouble. Dear, dear,' the doctor shook his head sadly, 'I shall never understand human nature; there is always an abyss below an abyss, and the firmest seeming ground is usually quagmire when you come to step on it. George Pendle is a riddle which would puzzle the Sphinx. Hum! hum! another fabulous beast. Well, well, I can only wait and watch until I discover the truth, and then—well, what then?—why, nothing!' And Graham, having talked himself into a cul-de-sac of ...
— The Bishop's Secret • Fergus Hume
... to-morrow does the council meet To fix a day for Edward's coronation. Who can expound this riddle? ...
— Jane Shore - A Tragedy • Nicholas Rowe
... or man, the loss of a particle never occurs. Death consequently is but the constituent of a change. When it comes, that which was living assumes a state that has in it the potentiality of another form. A tenement has crumbled and a tenant gone forth. Though just where is the riddle. ...
— The Lords of the Ghostland - A History of the Ideal • Edgar Saltus
... The governor was greatly mystified. That the marquis should still call the Chevalier by his former title of count added to this mystery. Since when did fathers set out for sons of the left hand? He soon gave up the riddle, confident that the marquis himself would solve it ...
— The Grey Cloak • Harold MacGrath
... I cannot tell you what it was. I cannot tell any one what it was. I undertook to find the answer. From France the riddle took me far away to another country—and there, after a year's work, I found half the answer. The other half is in London. And I am in London to ...
— The Crooked House • Brandon Fleming
... face as a beacon burning on a hill-top, and, climbing the difficult ascent, looked forth into the surrounding obscurity more hopefully than hitherto. For myself, there had been epochs in my life when I, too, might have asked of this prophet the master word that should solve me the riddle of the universe, but, now, being happy, I feel as if there were no question to be put, and therefore admired Emerson as a poet of deep and austere beauty, but sought nothing from him as a philosopher. It was good nevertheless to meet ...
— Two Thousand Miles On An Automobile • Arthur Jerome Eddy
... festive tables, from which the guests had risen to greet them. The courtiers sought to read in their countenances the solution of that riddle which had occupied them since the arrival of the Prussian ambassador, and about which they had ...
— Frederick The Great and His Family • L. Muhlbach
... and when that was gone, We left an air behind us, which alone Was able to make the two next companies Eight witty; though but downright fools were wise. When I remember this, * * * I needs must cry I see my days of ballading grow nigh; I can already riddle, and can sing Catches, sell bargains, and I fear shall bring Myself to speak the hardest words I find Over as oft as any with one wind, That takes no medicines, but thought of thee Makes me remember ...
— Specimens with Memoirs of the Less-known British Poets, Complete • George Gilfillan
... his spotlessly gloved hand to his helmet and replied, "Yes, sir." But as yet no solution of the riddle ...
— 'Jena' or 'Sedan'? • Franz Beyerlein
... Friends. Our efforts to preserve peace, our measures as to the Indians, as to slavery, as to religious freedom, were all in consonance with their professions. Yet I never expected we should get a vote from them, and in this I was neither deceived nor disappointed. There is no riddle in this, to those who do not suffer themselves to be duped by the professions of religious sectaries. The theory of American Quakerism is a very obvious one. The mother society is in England. Its ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson
... the omens said to him: 'Whatever it is which you have in mind, Vespasian, whether it is to build a house or to enlarge your estate, or to increase the number of your slaves, there is granted to you a great habitation, vast acres, and a multitude of men.' Rumour had immediately seized on this riddle and now began to solve it. Nothing was more talked of, especially in Vespasian's presence: such conversation is the ...
— Tacitus: The Histories, Volumes I and II • Caius Cornelius Tacitus
... that pass, by the breeze that blows, by the pebble that falls, by the hour that strikes; on a certain day, man, that trembling, stumbling being, the plaything of chance and of the passing moment, rises suddenly before the riddle that is called human life, feels that there is within him something greater than this abyss,—honour! something stronger than fatality,—virtue! something more mysterious than the unknown,—faith! and alone, feeble and naked, he says to all this formidable mystery that ...
— Napoleon the Little • Victor Hugo
... chrysoprase being substituted for cards; and in some inexplicable manner it permitted him to concentrate upon whatever problem filled his thoughts. It was purely accidental that he saw Patti to-night or recalled her art. Coming upon the last photograph without having found a solution of the riddle of Two-Hawks he relaxed the mental pressure; and his sight reestablished ...
— The Drums Of Jeopardy • Harold MacGrath
... and Nutrition, p. 41. For discussions of this question from a variety of different points of view, see Life and Matter, by Lodge; The Riddle of the Universe, Haeckel; The Correlation of Spiritual Forces, by Hartmann; "Consciousness and Force," Met. Mag., Oct. 1910; the article on "Consciousness and Energy," by Professor Montague, in Essays in Honour of William James, ...
— The Problems of Psychical Research - Experiments and Theories in the Realm of the Supernormal • Hereward Carrington
... ("Of Knowledge"), Der Genesende ("The Convalescent"—the soul delivered of its desires), Das Tanzlied ("Dancing Song"), Nachtlied ("Night Song"). We are shown a man who, worn out by trying to solve the riddle of the universe, seeks refuge in religion. Then he revolts against ascetic ideas, and gives way madly to his passions. But he is quickly sated and disgusted and, weary to death, he tries science, but rejects it again, and succeeds in ridding himself of the uneasiness its knowledge brings by laughter—the ...
— Musicians of To-Day • Romain Rolland
... village, were it only to keep alive the celebration of the Fourth of July. I conjectured that there might have been another victory over the Russians, that perhaps the northern side of Sebastopol had surrendered; but soon I saw the riddle that these merry bells were proclaiming. There were a great many private carriages, and a large concourse of loungers and spectators, near the door of the church that stands close under the eaves of the Abbey. Gentlemen and ladies, ...
— Passages From the English Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... the Bandolier among the woolly-haired, naked cannibals of the Solomon Group and thereabout, landing at places where no other recruiter would get out of his boat, and taking a box of trade goods with him, sit calmly down on the beach surrounded by savages who might without a moment's warning riddle him with spears or club him from behind. But Proctor knew no fear, although his armed boat's crew and the crew of the covering boat would call to him to get aboard again and shove off. Other labour ships there were cruising on the same ground who lost men often ...
— Rodman The Boatsteerer And Other Stories - 1898 • Louis Becke
... the Count, "you see how easy it is to ask questions, but how difficult to answer them. Why, I myself, who have been at Peronne with the Duke for this week and better, cannot resolve this riddle any more than you, and yet, Sir Squire, upon the solution of that question depends the said point, whether you are prisoner or free man, and, for the present, I must hold you as the former.—Only, if you have really and honestly been of service to my kinswoman, and for you are ...
— Quentin Durward • Sir Walter Scott
... that Beaumaroy knew of his old friend before they met—indeed he knew scarcely as much. He told the brief story to Doctor Mary in the parlor. She heard him listlessly; all that was not much to the point on which her thoughts were set, and did not answer the riddle which the scene in the Tower put to her. She was calm now—and ashamed that she ...
— The Secret of the Tower • Hope, Anthony
... niece, the Countess von Truchsess, who is not merely lady of honor, but also reader to the queen, to read to her majesty the last numbers of the Berlin Telegraph, which I have just received. This seems like a riddle, but it is not. That journal contains charges against the queen, which, it appears to me, render it impossible for her to declare so loudly and publicly in favor of a continued alliance with the Russian emperor. Her majesty, therefore, must be informed of the contents of those articles; ...
— Napoleon and the Queen of Prussia • L. Muhlbach
... in a tone rather of sadness than of anger; but Marlow did not choose to perceive any thing serious in her words, and he replied, laughing: "Nay, dear Mrs. Hazleton, you do not read the riddle aright. It shows, when rightly interpreted, that your society is so charming that I cannot resist its influence when once within the spell, even for the sake ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 2, No. 4, March, 1851 • Various
... seed of David to take root, and from there it spread over all Ireland, then to Scotland, thence to England, and Jacob's Stone in Westminster Abbey marks the journey of David's throne, and has always kept with the seed, and they have been always crowned on it. Ezekiel's riddle is at once solved. The tender twigs were Zedekiah's daughters. One of these twigs was planted by the great waters in a land of traffic. Our Episcopalian friends intended by their beautiful service to aid the members of their communion to read in order, and through the Bible, or a given ...
— The Lost Ten Tribes, and 1882 • Joseph Wild
... and writer on politics, etc. Three English Statesmen, Lectures on the Study of History, Rational Religion and Rationalistic Objections, The Political Destiny of Canada, Guesses at the Riddle of Existence, Revolution or Progress, etc.; books on Cowper, ...
— A Short Biographical Dictionary of English Literature • John W. Cousin
... people, how came He to tower above all teachers, and to sway the world? 'With whom took He counsel? and who instructed Him, and taught Him?' The character and work of Christ, compared with the circumstances of His origin and environment, are an insoluble riddle, except on one supposition—that He was the ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Mark • Alexander Maclaren
... valley of shadows, Empty the power of kings; Blind is the favor of fortune, Hungry the caverns of death. Dim is the light from beyond, Unanswered the riddle of life." ...
— Women in the fine arts, from the Seventh Century B.C. to the Twentieth Century A.D. • Clara Erskine Clement
... set me the riddle, then?" Ferrol continued, his eyes fixed with apparent carelessness ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... interest on mortgages and the products of the soil. Those who, from 1802 till 1827, had merely laughed at the little man as they saw him trotting to Saint-Thibault and attending to his business, like a merchant living on his vineyards, found the answer to the riddle when the ant-lion seized his prey, after waiting for the day when the extravagance of the Duchesse de Maufrigneuse culminated in the sale of ...
— Parisians in the Country - The Illustrious Gaudissart, and The Muse of the Department • Honore de Balzac
... (after I had had leisure to meditate on the foregoing philosophical dialogue), "mate, I'll give you a riddle!" ...
— The Adventures of a Three-Guinea Watch • Talbot Baines Reed
... run, and it was madness to stay and confront the thing. What, then, could he do? The sun had slid down the sky and the red of another swift dusk was heralding the short night before he shook his head somberly and gave the fatal riddle up. ...
— The Planetoid of Peril • Paul Ernst
... only, was the puzzled inquirer whose self-communings I had just read. This fact raised a new problem far me to work upon, and I could but ask when these lines were written—before or after Mr. Pfeiffer's death and whether he had ever succeeded in solving the riddle he had suggested, or whether it was still a baffling mystery to him. I was so moved by the suggestion conveyed in his final and half-finished sentence, that I soon lost sight of these lesser inquiries in the more important one connected with the filigree ball. For I had seen ...
— The Filigree Ball • Anna Katharine Green
... human nature easily recognized in her one of those characters which Goethe has so aptly named "problematical," for she was one of those individuals who are always dissatisfied and at variance with themselves and with the world, who are a riddle to themselves, and who can never be relied on, and with the interesting and captivating, though unfortunate contradictions in her nature, she made a strong impression on everybody, even by her mere outward appearance. She was ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume IV (of 8) • Guy de Maupassant
... an analysis of things conducted on the presumption that scientific knowledge is the key to unlock the mystery and resolve the riddle ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... great past. It is the mind, the thought, the spoken word, of man that is most intimately he; not his face, nor his figure, nor his clothes. Unfortunately, the translation of these writings is no easy task. Those of Central America are still an unsolved riddle. Those of Babylon have been slowly pieced together like a puzzle, a puzzle to which the learned world has given its most able thought. Yet they are not fully understood. In Egypt we have had ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 1 • Various
... languid manner which was the natural defense against the outer world of a man all compact of imagination and sleepless energy; the touch in him of "the imperishable child," combined with the brooding intensity of the explorer who is always guessing at the next riddle; the fun, simplicity, bonhomie he showed with those who knew him well—all these are vividly present ...
— A Writer's Recollections (In Two Volumes), Volume II • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... went presently. She was glad to be alone in the room, glad there was no moon, and she turned her face over on the pillow and cried softly. After all, life was a riddle—two ways and not knowing which to take, both having a curiously lonely ending. Could she not bear it better alone? If he should go away as her father had done, if she should stay here in the old house, and then Cousin Eunice would fold her hands in that silent clasp, Rachel would slip into ...
— A Little Girl in Old Salem • Amanda Minnie Douglas
... personally how fine this has been. To have—the girls here, I know is due to your—special generosity, and some day I hope I'll have a chance to tell you what it has meant to me. Just now," he smiled broadly, "those freshies have me bound in their riddle game and I can't talk intelligently; tongue-tied," ...
— Jane Allen: Junior • Edith Bancroft
... subtle-, knotty point; vexed question, vexata quaestio, poser, puzzle, &c. (see riddle); paradox; hard-, nut to crack; bone to pick, crux, pons asinorum, where the ...
— Journalism for Women - A Practical Guide • E.A. Bennett
... fighting to the death with any other young man over a matter of passion, hurt pride, or thwarted desire. As much as in the dead head of Van Horn or of any man, he realized that in this live puppy might reside the clue to existence, the solution of the riddle. ...
— Jerry of the Islands • Jack London
... was busy with this mystery. It was fairly to be assumed that his committee did not want his autograph to distribute for a souvenir; they must want it for some vital purpose, to meet some new move of the bosses. The answer to this riddle was not slow in coming: having failed in their effort to find money on him, the bosses had framed up a letter, which they were exhibiting as having been written by the would-be check-weigh-man. His friends wanted his signature to disprove ...
— King Coal - A Novel • Upton Sinclair
... stood outside a tenement door, awaiting the return of the doctor from a visit to a poor sick soul inside the tenement, he became deeply moved by the ragged children playing in the gutters and reaching into garbage barrels for crusts of bread. He said: "Ah! here's the riddle of civilization. I wish I could help to solve ...
— Wit, Humor, Reason, Rhetoric, Prose, Poetry and Story Woven into Eight Popular Lectures • George W. Bain
... first and find his store of riddles soonest exhausted. In fact, from childhood the Finn is taught to think and invent by means of riddles; in his solitude he ponders over them, and any man who evolves a good one is a hero in his village. They meet together for "riddle evenings," and most amusing are the punishments given to those who cannot answer three in succession. He is sent to Hymyl, which is something ...
— Through Finland in Carts • Ethel Brilliana Alec-Tweedie
... apparatus, and, for the rest, well-meaning enough, and with small private illuminations (somewhat tallowy, it is to be feared) of his own. To him, there, 'Pastor of the First Church in Jaalam,' our Hosea presents himself as a quite inexplicable Sphinx-riddle. A rich poverty of Latin and Greek,—so far is clear enough, even to eyes peering myopic through horn-lensed editorial spectacles,—but naught farther? O purblind, well-meaning, altogether fuscous Melesigenes-Wilbur, there are things in him incommunicable by stroke of birch! ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell
... of the tribe of Judah—He is the answer to Samson's riddle, for in His wounds is found the honeycomb of the strongest charity, and from this strength proceeds the sweetness of our greatest consolation. And certainly since our Lord's dying for us, as all Scripture testifies, is the climax of his love, it ought also to be the strongest of all our motives ...
— The Spirit of St. Francis de Sales • Jean Pierre Camus
... puzzled myself, and I sought in my brain a key to that riddle almost as sedulously as Madame had sought a guide to useful knowledge in my toilet drawers. How was it that Dr. John, if he had not been accessory to the dropping of that casket into the garden, should have known that it was dropped, and appeared so promptly on the spot to seek it? So strong ...
— Villette • Charlotte Bronte
... without a division. The original resolution being again before the Senate, Mr. Clark renewed his amendment declaring that John P. Stockton was not elected a senator from New Jersey, on which the yeas were 22 and the nays 21. As thus amended the resolution passed by 23 yeas to 20 nays. Mr. Riddle of Delaware voted with the majority for the purpose of moving a reconsideration on a succeeding day—a privilege from which he was excluded by the action of Mr. Clark of New Hampshire, who made the motion at once with the object of securing its defeat and ...
— Twenty Years of Congress, Volume 2 (of 2) • James Gillespie Blaine
... necessary to carry on his various professions, I never found anything in Melchior's conduct which could be considered as criminal. On the contrary, he was kind, generous, and upright in his private dealings, and in many points, proved that he had a good heart. He was a riddle of inconsistency it was certain; professionally he would cheat anybody, and disregard all truth and honesty; but, in his private character, he was scrupulously honest, and, with the exception of the assertion relative to Fleta's birth and parentage, he had never told me a lie, ...
— Japhet, In Search Of A Father • Frederick Marryat
... Romanism, 329 Church of Rome not founded by either Paul or Peter, ib. Its probable origin, 330 Little known of its primitive condition, ib. Its early episcopal succession a riddle, 331 Martyrdom of Telesphorus, 332 Heresiarchs in Rome, ib. Its presiding presbyter called bishop, and invested with additional power, ib. Beginning of the Catholic system, ib. Changes in the ecclesiastical constitution ...
— The Ancient Church - Its History, Doctrine, Worship, and Constitution • W.D. [William Dool] Killen
... paper down. Now, O my Gul Bahar"—and he took her hand, and carried it to his cheek, and pressed it softly there—"deal me no riddle. What is it you say? One may do well, yet ...
— The Prince of India - Or - Why Constantinople Fell - Volume 2 • Lew. Wallace
... why they both acquiesced so readily to his remaining outside in the car. It was part of their mutual plan to thus leave him in ignorance. Yet they had made a mistake in taking him along at all. This error alone gave him now an opportunity to unravel the riddle. But did it? What did he know? Merely that Coolidge had not gone to this house on an errand of charity; that the occupant called himself, temporarily, perhaps, Jim Hobart; that his family consisted of two women, undescribed except as to age; and that all ...
— The Case and The Girl • Randall Parrish
... Vivian Grey, as we know, wanted also to conquer the Marquis of Carabas; and the odd combination between a mystic philosopher and a mere political charlatan displays Disraeli's peculiar irony. Intellect with him is a double-edged weapon: it is at once the faculty which reads the dark riddle of the universe, and the faculty which makes use of Tapers and Tadpoles. Our modern Daniel is also a shrewd electioneering agent. Cynics, indeed, have learned in these later days to regard mystery as too ...
— Hours in a Library - New Edition, with Additions. Vol. II (of 3) • Leslie Stephen
... into the darkness of the landing, and presently, by the light from the bedroom, could distinguish the vague boundaries of it. The chair, invisible, was on the left. He opened the door wider to the nocturnal riddle of the house. His hand clasped the notes in his pocket. No sound! He listened for the ticking of the lobby clock and could not catch it. He listened more intently. It was impossible that he should not hear the ticking of the lobby clock. Was he dreaming? Was he under some delusion? Then ...
— The Price of Love • Arnold Bennett
... stopping near Zora's oak. Here lay the reading of the riddle: with infinite work and pain, some one had dug a canal from the lagoon to the creek, into which the former had drained by a long and crooked way, thus allowing it to empty directly. The canal went straight, ...
— The Quest of the Silver Fleece - A Novel • W. E. B. Du Bois
... a hero who would come to the fore when things were at their very worst—a Du Guesclin, a Joan of Arc perhaps, or even another Napoleon I. Ah, if only the Prince Imperial were not so young! Cornudet listened to them with the smile of a man who could solve the riddle of Fate if he would. His pipe perfumed the whole kitchen with ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Vol. 1 (of 8) - Boule de Suif and Other Stories • Guy de Maupassant
... simple and convenient solution of the riddle if the work of analysis made it at all possible for us to trace the meaningless and intricate dreams of adults back to the infantile type, to the realization of some intensely experienced desire of the day. But there is no warrant for such an expectation. Their dreams are generally full of the ...
— Dream Psychology - Psychoanalysis for Beginners • Sigmund Freud
... leaves the third, bliss, to correspond with will, and some people are rather puzzled with that, and they ask: "What is the correspondence between bliss and will?" But if you come down to desire, and the objects of desire, you will be able to solve the riddle. The nature of the Self is bliss. Throw that nature down into matter and what will be the expression of the bliss nature? Desire for happiness, the seeking after desirable objects, which it imagines will give it the happiness ...
— An Introduction to Yoga • Annie Besant
... warn the flippant. It would be appalling if admirers of Literary (and other) Lapses were to send blithely to the libraries for Mr. LEACOCK'S latest and find themselves landed with The Unsolved Riddle of Social Justice (LANE). And yet I don't know. Here is a subject which even the flippant cannot long ignore. And a man of the world with a clear head and a mastery of clearer idiom than a professor of political economy ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, April 7, 1920 • Various
... Out of that wooing and winning grew the first of the encounters which culminated in the destruction of the temple of Dagon, when "the dead which he slew at his death were more than they which he slew in his life." So his yielding to the pleadings of his wife when she betrayed the answer to his riddle and his succumbing to the wheedling arts of Delilah when he betrayed the secret of his strength (acts incompatible with the character of an ordinary strong and wise man) were of the type essential to the machinery ...
— A Second Book of Operas • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... harp, men asked themselves as they read, have produced so diverse tones? The riddle is solved when we learn that the first part only was from Kinglake's pen: having vindicated his friend's ability and good faith, her right to speak and to be heard attentively, he left the survey of her views, with which he probably disagreed, to ...
— Biographical Study of A. W. Kinglake • Rev. W. Tuckwell
... and chance observation of the handful of Kwangtung men who are earning their living among us by washing our clothes. Silent, inscrutable, they flit through the American scene, alien to the last. What lies behind the riddle of their impassive faces? Perhaps I could find an answer. Then, too, it was clear, even to the most unintelligent, that a change was coming over the East, though few realized how speedily. I longed to see the old China before I made ready to welcome the new. ...
— A Wayfarer in China - Impressions of a trip across West China and Mongolia • Elizabeth Kendall
... in a puzzled way. The professor was a riddle to him. He represented no type which had come within the orbit of his experience. With the arrival of the champagne, the professor became almost eloquent. He leaned forward, gazing stealthily down at the ...
— The Tempting of Tavernake • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... the year should fall on the centre of the so-called altar or sacrificial stone placed in the middle of the circle, began to be noised about the country, and accepted by every one as the true reading of an ancient riddle. But I gather from natives in the district that it is an old custom for people to go and watch for sunrise on the morning of June 21. A dozen or a score of natives, mostly old shepherds and labourers who lived near, would go and sit ...
— Afoot in England • W.H. Hudson
... manage to procure them. It was more than an ordinary man was qualified to cope with, to make his observations, write his letters, and look after their transmission, without having to attend to his nag, and do an odd turn of cooking at a pinch. The riddle was how to get the horse—a sound hardy animal that would not call for elaborate grooming, or refuse a feed of barley. Horse-flesh was at a premium, but he thought I might be able to have what I wanted at ...
— Romantic Spain - A Record of Personal Experiences (Vol. II) • John Augustus O'Shea
... catch them, has touched them with his refining art and has spoiled them. The playwright has striven to transfer from the field to the stage a cotton-picking scene and has made a travesty of it. To transfer the passions of man and to music-riddle them is an art with stiff-jointed rules, but the charm of a cotton-picking scene is an essence, and is breathed but cannot be caught. Here seems to lie a sentiment that no other labor invites, and ...
— An Arkansas Planter • Opie Percival Read
... thither, set thy father there. Let not that dreadful seat be empty long, But place me there a greater monster still. There will I sit and of my fate propose A riddle dark that no man shall resolve. * * * * * What riddle like to this could she propose, That curse of Thebes, who wove destructive words In puzzling measures? What so dark as this? He was his grandsire's son-in-law, and yet His father's rival; brother of his sons, And father of his brothers: ...
— Post-Augustan Poetry - From Seneca to Juvenal • H.E. Butler
... you cannot imagine how irksome the repetition of that jest became. The vast drifting indifference in between my meetings impressed me more and more. I realised the vagueness of my own plans as I had never done before I brought them to the test of this experience. I was perplexed by the riddle of just how far I was, in any sense of the word, taking hold at all, how far I wasn't myself flowing ...
— The New Machiavelli • Herbert George Wells
... convinced within himself that he had now explained this seeming riddle, he took no farther trouble about whose, or what these children were, but resolved to take care of them during their infancy, and afterwards to put them into such a way as he should find their genius's rendered them most fit for, in ...
— The Fortunate Foundlings • Eliza Fowler Haywood
... say that professed moralists and philosophers did much to help me out of the dilemma; but the riddle which history presented I found solved in the pages of Shakspeare. There the crooked appeared straight; the inaccessible, easy; the incomprehensible, plain. All I sought, I found there; his characters combine history and real life; they are complete individuals, ...
— Characteristics of Women - Moral, Poetical, and Historical • Anna Jameson
... lived at Corrivarlich a noted sheep-stealer named Alastair Bane. Little is known of his boyhood. He was supposed to have been brought to the district by Highlanders who were in the habit of bringing to Crieff cartloads of split pine from Rannoch Forest, which they sold to riddle-makers to make riddle rims. During one of those visits the child is supposed to have been left. He was called Alastair, owing to his supposed Highland descent, and Bane, because of his white hair. As he grew up to manhood he showed symptoms of a wandering ...
— Chronicles of Strathearn • Various
... following exposition will show how much Irenaeus and the later old Catholic teachers learned from the Gnostics. As a matter of fact the theology of Irenaeus remains a riddle so long as we try to explain it merely from the Apologists and only consider its antithetical relations to Gnosis. Little as we can understand modern orthodox theology from a historical point of view—if the comparison be here allowed—without keeping in mind ...
— History of Dogma, Volume 2 (of 7) • Adolph Harnack
... this ancient dame a foe to mirth. Her ballad, jest, and riddle's quaint device, Oft cheered the shepherds round their social hearth; Whom levity or spleen could ne'er entice To purchase chat or laughter at the price Of decency. Nor let it faith exceed, That Nature forms a rustic taste so nice. Ah! had they been of court or city breed, ...
— The Minstrel; or the Progress of Genius - with some other poems • James Beattie
... rivers whose waters find two oceans, and their valleys are the natural highways up which railroads wind to the crest of the continent. To the mountain engineer the waterway is the sphinx that holds in its silence the riddle of his success; with him lies the problem of providing a railway across ranges which often defy the hoofs ...
— Whispering Smith • Frank H. Spearman
... to ascertain if I was right in my suppositions, made me agree to this plan. We were soon off, and galloping across the park. Rosa was in tearing spirits; she had been somewhat alarmed in the morning, but the idea of a quiproquo, the amusement of a practical riddle, the fun of pursuing her assailant, (whose offence had not been of a nature which would make its results to him so serious as to check any levity on the subject) tickled her fancy exceedingly, and she kept her companions in a continual, roar of laughter. We rode about in different directions ...
— Ellen Middleton—A Tale • Georgiana Fullerton
... Barnstable, drawing his pistol, "Mr. Black will please note that while I am standing by the bulwarks I shall be watching indeed. Should he make an attempt to escape from the vessel I shall riddle him ...
— The Cruise of the Jasper B. • Don Marquis
... mystery that will be cleared up some day," concluded Smith; "but to date the riddle remains intact." He glanced at the clock. "I have an appointment with Weymouth; therefore, leaving you to the task of solving this problem which thus far has defied my own efforts, I ...
— The Devil Doctor • Sax Rohmer
... told him of her meeting with Micah Dow. It silenced him; not, however, on account of its pathos, as she thought, but because it interpreted the riddle of Rob's behavior. ...
— The Little Minister • J.M. Barrie
... me again, and then I had already determined to meet the request he was not bold to ask. I believed, equally with the physician, from the conduct and expressions of young Harrington, that the riddle of his present condition waited for explanation in the village, whose name seemed like a load upon his heart, and constituted the whole of his discourse since he had arrived amongst us. It was there ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - April 1843 • Various
... rights of man, and should therefore be surrendered as soon as its object contradicts these rights of man. But the practice is only the exception and the theory is the rule. If, however, we regard the revolutionary practice as the correct position of the relation, the riddle still remains to be solved, why the relationship was inverted in the consciousness of the political liberators, the end appearing as the means, and the means as the end. This optical illusion of their consciousness would still be the same ...
— Selected Essays • Karl Marx
... you're driving at," said Newall. "It's a bit of a riddle; but if you want a thrashing as well as your friend, I dare say you can be obliged, but he comes first. Let him speak for himself. You can speak for yourself after. Now, ...
— The Hero of Garside School • J. Harwood Panting
... the years of exile. For, mark you, I was always the victor. Here, too, are coloured prints from Epinal. It was on them that I began to spell out those signs which to the learned reveal a few faint traces of the Mighty Riddle. Yes, the sorriest little coloured daub that ever came out of a village in the Vosges consists of print and pictures, and what is the sum and substance of Science after all ...
— Marguerite - 1921 • Anatole France
... Dodd: "She is not a child, mother, after all; and how can it be wrong to tell her the truth, or right to suppress the truth? Well then, Ju, there's an advertisement in the 'Tiser, and it's a regular riddle. Now mind, I don't really think there is anything in it; but it is a droll coincidence, very droll; if it wasn't there are ladies present, and one of them a district visitor, I would say, d—d droll. So droll," continued ...
— Hard Cash • Charles Reade
... jewels and an old glove. Nay, nay, Lord Percy. My word is given. You shall neither go yourself nor send your servants after the fellow. He is absolutely safe from molestation from me and mine." Her eyes now rested with curious insistence on Lord Farquhart's face, but he could not read the riddle in them. "And now"—the lady leaned back wearily—"if this clamor might all cease! I am desperately weary. Get me to my aunt's house with as much ...
— Ainslee's, Vol. 15, No. 6, July 1905 • Various
... seemingly not of us, which some dreamers have sought to interpret as inherited remembrances,—recollections of pre-existence.... Vainly you ask yourself:—"Whose voice?—whose face?" It is neither young nor old, the Face: it has a vapoury indefinableness that leaves it a riddle;—its diaphaneity reveals no particular tint;—perhaps you may not even be quite sure whether it has a beard. But its expression is always gracious, passionless, smiling—like the smiling of unknown friends in dreams, ...
— Masterpieces of Mystery In Four Volumes - Mystic-Humorous Stories • Various
... with numb, sore fingers. She looked at her hands; they well stained with blood from many cuts. Her skirt was torn and soiled; her stockings were in strips; her knees were bruised. But as she rose to her feet and once more searched the riddle of a crag-broken world, her heart was ...
— Judith of Blue Lake Ranch • Jackson Gregory
... or ready way to virtue; it is not an easy point of art to disentangle ourselves from this riddle or web of sin. To perfect virtue, as to religion, there is required a panoplia, or complete armour; that whilst we lie at close ward against one vice, we lie not open to the assault of another. There go so many circumstances to piece up one good ...
— The Worlds Greatest Books, Volume XIII. - Religion and Philosophy • Various
... forehead. He gazed at her with a steady, puzzled look, and at last a faint, half-quizzical smile relaxed his lips. What could this strange idea, this whim be, so unlike all Eastern maiden's usual fancies? He had not yet solved the riddle, nor found the clue! he would do so, but in the meantime she must be left her freedom. In all noble natures power brings with it a terrible responsibility, and the habit of stern self-control and long forbearance. Ahmed's complete power over the frightened piece of humanity before him brought ...
— Six Women • Victoria Cross
... could," said the artist. "I have passed weeks trying to catch it. The thing is too subtle, and it is not a grand type, like what we are used to in the academies. But besides the riddle, I like Miss Dudley for herself. The way she takes my brutal criticisms of her painting makes my heart bleed. I mean to go down on my knees one of these days, and confess to her that I know nothing about it; only if her style is right, my art ...
— Esther • Henry Adams
... guide him which they had received, and, moreover, rather astonished that the former had not come to greet him, according to her usual custom, when he entered the house after an absence of some hours, had his tale to tell and his riddle to solve. ...
— Bessie Bradford's Prize • Joanna H. Mathews
... her," said Mrs. Maxa. "It is a riddle to me, too, how she succeeded in entering this garden. I knew nothing about it till yesterday evening when the children came home from the castle. I am terribly afraid that Maezli has ...
— Maezli - A Story of the Swiss Valleys • Johanna Spyri
... been linked with a co-author on programs and three-sheets, because a collaborator, a professional mender of plays, had been called in at the last moment to riddle the drama's somber story with a few "laughs." A character policeman, a comedy jury foreman, and a subplot of love story between the character policeman and an Irish cook had been "written in." The last act entirely revised, a happy ...
— Star-Dust • Fannie Hurst
... quite different. He inquired for Rincer and the cold in his nose, told Mrs. Rincer a riddle, asked Miss Rincer when she would be ready to marry him, and paid his compliments to Miss Brett, the other young lady in the bar, all in a minute of time, and with a liveliness and facetiousness which set all these ladies in a giggle; and he gave a cluck, expressive of great satisfaction, as ...
— The History of Pendennis • William Makepeace Thackeray
... spoken in a harsh, cynical tone, and Lionel had turned cold at his words. He stood a long while in silence there, turning them over in his mind and considering the riddle which they presented him. He thought of asking his brother bluntly for the key to it, for the precise meaning of his disconcerting statement, but courage failed him. He feared lest Sir Oliver should confirm his own dread ...
— The Sea-Hawk • Raphael Sabatini
... Man" ought to have been called an "Epigram on Man," or, better still, should have been propounded as a riddle, to which the word "Man" was to supply the solution. But an antithesis, epigram, or riddle on man of 1300 lines, is rather long. It seems so especially as there is no real or new light cast in it on man's nature or destiny. (We ...
— Poetical Works of Pope, Vol. II • Alexander Pope
... on the strange tastes of those who desired for some reason the temporary company of these unfortunate females, so unpleasing to the eye, to the ear, to the mind, to the smell; desired it so much that they would pay money for it. Why? Against that riddle the non-comprehension of her sex beat itself, baffled. She might put it the other way round, try to imagine herself desiring, paying for, the temporary attentions of some dirty, common, vapid, and patchouli-scented man—and still she got no nearer. For ...
— Dangerous Ages • Rose Macaulay
... tone breathed a note of strong contradiction while his glance was the glance of experience. I had said that I carried no hope of becoming rich; that the members of my tribe were born with their hands open and had such hold of money as a riddle has of water. It was this which moved him to ...
— Wolfville Nights • Alfred Lewis
... Ministers, Worship, Discipline, and Customs of the Early Church; with an Introduction, containing a Complete and Chronological Analysis of the Works of the Antenicene Fathers. Compiled from the Works of Augusti, and other sources. By the Rev. J. E. RIDDLE, M.A., Author of an English-Latin and Latin-English Dictionary, Luther and his ...
— The History of the Rise, Progress and Accomplishment of the - Abolition of the African Slave-Trade, by the British Parliament (1839) • Thomas Clarkson
... Tryon's turn to ponder. The road to the Glendora was the worst in the country, but it didn't take him long to read the riddle. ...
— Blue Aloes - Stories of South Africa • Cynthia Stockley
... in the main a discussion of certain celebrated mysteries, as viewed in the light of the discoveries set forth in the writer's earlier work "The Riddle ...
— Historic Ghosts and Ghost Hunters • H. Addington Bruce
... dead, the Nazarene came and seized his seat beneath the sun, The votary of the Riddle-god, whose one is three ...
— The Kasidah of Haji Abdu El-Yezdi • Richard F. Burton
... abandoning chemical means and turning to physics that he had met with success, he said. Cathode rays had finally proved the key to the riddle. ...
— Spawn of the Comet • Harold Thompson Rich
... puts on a nightcap, is like my eyes and ears. It can now only understand what is of the earth—what you can understand, Gogo, who are still of the earth. I forget, as one forgets an ordinary dream, as one sometimes forgets the answer to a riddle, or the last verse of a song. It is on the tip of the tongue; but there it sticks, ...
— Peter Ibbetson • George du Marier et al
... of the ages? His heart seemed gripped by the void; he felt he could no longer live if his faith in the reason of men and their mutual love was destroyed, if he was forced to acknowledge that the Credo of his life and art rested on a mistake, that a dark pessimism was the answer to the riddle of the world. ...
— Clerambault - The Story Of An Independent Spirit During The War • Rolland, Romain
... at her for some seconds as if trying to read some riddle in her countenance. "You are a very remarkable young woman," he said at last. "I wouldn't part with you for a king's ransom. So you think I might turn that very unreasonable hatred of ...
— The Obstacle Race • Ethel M. Dell
... speak of the causes and results of Pessimism. It can touch the practical side of the riddle of life by asking certain questions, the answers to which lie within the province of human experience. Among ...
— The Philosophy of Despair • David Starr Jordan
... means to reconcile sinners to a holy and infinite Majesty; to be a just God, and YET a Saviour; to be just to his law, just to his threatening, just to himself, and yet save sinners, can no way be understood till thou understandest why Jesus Christ did hang on the tree; for here only is the riddle unfolded, 'Christ died for our sins,' and therefore can God in justice save us (Isa 45:21). And hence is Christ called the Wisdom of God, not only because he is so essentially, but because by him is the greatest revelation of his wisdom towards man. In redemption, therefore, ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... little French girl brought up in an old chateau in Normandy by an aunt who is a recluse and devote. A child of this type transplanted suddenly to the realistic atmosphere of New York must inevitably have much to suffer. The quaint little figure blindly trying to guess the riddle of duty under these unfamiliar conditions is pathetic, and Mrs. Burnett touches it in with delicate strokes." ...
— Sara Crewe - or, What Happened at Miss Minchin's • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... who used axes and chisels of iron; who shot balista stones over 20 lbs. in weight; and whose daily food was the bos longifrons. A people who made paved roads, and sunk artesian wells, and used Roman beads and pins. The riddle of Burghead should not now be very difficult to read." (Notes on further Excavations at Burghead, pp. 14 sq.). For a loan of Mr. Young's pamphlets I am indebted to ...
— Balder The Beautiful, Vol. I. • Sir James George Frazer
... metaphysical notions to the plain dictates of nature and common sense, I find my understanding strangely enlightened, so that I can now easily comprehend a great many things which before were all mystery and riddle. ...
— Three Dialogues between Hylas and Philonous in Opposition to Sceptics and Atheists • George Berkeley
... decide to use it, we should do so grossly and notably, or in some conventional disguise: are questions of plastic style continually rearising. And the sphinx that patrols the highways of executive art has no more unanswerable riddle to propound. ...
— The Art of Writing and Other Essays • Robert Louis Stevenson
... and Towsley felt unequal to solving the riddle, although it was he who always was first among the fellows to find the answers to the printed riddles on the children's page of the weekly Express. He shut his eyes a moment, to see things a little better, and after the ...
— Divided Skates • Evelyn Raymond
... spend the entire summer trying to solve this riddle for all time, concentrating on it to the exclusion of everything else. They drove west in a station wagon stuffed with equipment and tracking a U-Haul-It ...
— The Hohokam Dig • Theodore Pratt
... the moral intelligence. Taking the step from JULIUS CAESAR to HAMLET as corresponding to this movement in his mind, we may say that where the first play exhibits the concrete perception of the fatality of things, "the riddle of the painful earth"; in the second, in its final form, the perception has emerged in philosophic consciousness as a pure reflection. The poet has in the interim been revealed to himself; what he had perceived he now conceives. And this is the secret of the ...
— Montaigne and Shakspere • John M. Robertson
... The idea, the amazing, ridiculous idea which had burst upon me suddenly began to lose something of its absurdity. Somehow it began to look like the answer to my riddle. I realized that my main objection to the Campbell prescription had been that I must take it alone ...
— Kent Knowles: Quahaug • Joseph C. Lincoln
... expressed the same thought,—"To find no contradiction in the union of old and new; to contemplate the Ancient of Days and all his works with feelings as fresh as if all had then sprung forth at the first creative fiat, this characterizes the mind that feels the riddle of the world, and may help to unravel it. To carry on the feelings of childhood into the powers of manhood; to combine the child's sense of wonder and novelty with the appearances which everyday for perhaps forty ...
— Specimens of the Table Talk of S.T.Coleridge • Coleridge
... makes wedlock that, which if it be not, It were a shame for modest lips to speak it, And silly doves are better mates than we? And yet our love is Jesus' due,—and all things Which share with Him divided empery Are snares and idols—'To love, to cherish, and to obey!' . . . . . O deadly riddle! Rent and twofold life! O cruel troth! To keep thee or to break thee Alike seems ...
— The Saint's Tragedy • Charles Kingsley
... not surprising that pictures, with all their attraction for eye and mind, are, to many honest and intelligent people, too much of a riddle to be altogether pleasant. What with the oracular dicta of self-constituted arbiters of taste, the discrepancies of popular writers on Art, the jargon of connoisseurship, the vagaries of fashion, the endless theories about color, style, chiaro 'scuro, composition, design, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 4, February, 1858 • Various
... scared look remained. Whenever she turned her eyes suddenly upon her mother, she found her looking at her with a strange, searching intentness. It was plain that Mrs. Dinneford saw in Edith's face as great a change and mystery as Edith saw in hers, and the riddle of her husband's countenance, so altered since morning, was harder even than Edith's ...
— Cast Adrift • T. S. Arthur
... the faith that for his "I wish" there were no limits. At present his vanity, too, was wounded painfully. There was, besides, in Lygia's opposition and resistance, and in her flight itself, which was to him incomprehensible, a kind of riddle. In trying to solve this riddle he racked his head terribly. He felt that Acte had told the truth, and that Lygia was not indifferent. But if this were true, why had she preferred wandering and misery to his love, his tenderness, and a residence in his splendid mansion? To this question ...
— Quo Vadis - A Narrative of the Time of Nero • Henryk Sienkiewicz
... said, smiling benignantly upon her. "You cannot annoy me this morning. I am myself again," and Dick's eyes turned sharply upon him. "All my old powers of observation have returned, my old interest in the great dark riddle of human life has re-awakened. The brain, the sedulous, active brain, resumes its work to-day asking questions, probing problems. I rose early, Margaret," he flourished his hands like one making a speech, "and walking in the fields ...
— Witness For The Defense • A.E.W. Mason
... influence that this madman of the mountains, this wild hunter, this leader of the black wolf pack, had on me to impel me to trail him over the mountains? Was it mental telepathy? Could he really be my father? Somehow I felt convinced that soon I would be face to face with the riddle, soon I would know the facts and the truth about my parents. It seemed unthinkable that all these weeks of wilderness travel had been for naught and that the Wild Hunter was nothing but a strange, eccentric ...
— The Black Wolf Pack • Dan Beard
... to see that," said the China Cat. "You are so new and shiny any one would know you were just made. Well, now what shall we do? Who has a game to suggest or a riddle to ask?" and, as she spoke, she put out her paw and began to roll a red rubber ball on the shelf near her. For, though she was very stiff in the daytime, being made of china like a dinner plate, the Cat could easily move about at night if ...
— The Story of a Nodding Donkey • Laura Lee Hope
... worried me. Her odds and ends of conversation pecked at me like a small bird. She told me a riddle which filled me with nausea, and finally a limerick which I had heard three times ...
— A Diary Without Dates • Enid Bagnold
... should have made!" thought Jerome Fandor, giving himself a mental hug of satisfaction.... "Ah! They arrest the individuals I want to set talking!... The police imagine they are going to push in first and find out the answer to the riddle!... We shall see!" ...
— Messengers of Evil - Being a Further Account of the Lures and Devices of Fantomas • Pierre Souvestre
... thou cost for Vice prepare, And joys the good shall know; Thou canst the crooked heart unmask and bare; Thou canst the riddle of our fate declare, And keep account with Woe. With thee a home smiles for the exiled one— There ends the thorny strife. Unto my side a godlike vision won, Called TRUTH, (few know her, and the many shun,) And check'd the reins of life. "I will repay thee in ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 54, No. 334, August 1843 • Various
... what different conclusions they arrive at. Each man interprets the hieroglyphic in his own way; and the painter, perhaps, had a meaning which none of them have reached; or possibly he put forth a riddle, without himself knowing the solution. There is such a necessity, at all events, of helping the painter out with the spectator's own resources of feeling and imagination, that you can never be sure how much of the picture you have yourself made. There is no doubt that the public is, to a certain ...
— Passages From the French and Italian Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... read my riddle," she said, "And answer me questions three; And but ye read them richt," she said, "Gae ...
— Ballad Book • Katherine Lee Bates (ed.)
... the more for the great tragic irony that came of them. Aye, and he was inclined to blame the gods for not having kept him still longer in the dark and so made the irony still more awful. Why had they not caused the telegram to be delayed in transmission? They ought to have let him go and riddle Zuleika with his scorn and his indifference. They ought to have let him hurl through her his defiance of them. Art aside, they need not ...
— Zuleika Dobson - or, An Oxford Love Story • Max Beerbohm
... gone differently these past months,—no, from his birth and from hers, too,—if every circumstance of society had not conspired to put them apart, who knows! They might have solved a riddle or two together and been happy. But it was all foolish speculation now, and it was well that their differences should be emphasized at this last chance meeting; that she should be hostile to him. He summed the matter up thus, and, as if ...
— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick
... mostly his hope of chancing on some clue to the mystery of Dorothy Calender—bewitching riddle that she was!—that fascinated his imagination so completely. Aside from her altogether, the great house that stood untenanted, yet in such complete order, so self-contained in its darkened quiet, intrigued him equally with the train of inexplicable events that had brought him within ...
— The Black Bag • Louis Joseph Vance
... this for a riddle for the sisters. I am longing to ask Violet who this gentleman is who seems to know all the negroes so well.' (Scratched out.) 'What nonsense I have written! I was listening to some letters they were reading from the ...
— Heartsease - or Brother's Wife • Charlotte M. Yonge
... to decide, the small guide continued to ply him with questions, until he came to the conclusion that the best plan would be to give a portion of the story, otherwise, in case he met the men, Jim might ask them to solve the riddle. ...
— Messenger No. 48 • James Otis
... husband, was at his counting-house. When he came home, his wife said to him, "Cassim, I know you think yourself rich, but Ali Baba is infinitely richer than you. He does not count his money, but measures it." Cassim desired her to explain the riddle, which she did, by telling him the stratagem she had used to make the discovery, and showed him the piece of money, which was so old that they could not tell in what ...
— Fairy Tales Every Child Should Know • Various
... civilization and enlightment is a good deal like that in the old riddle of the man who had a fox, a goose, and a basket of corn to carry across the river and could carry only one at a time. If you remember, he carried the goose across first, leaving the fox with the corn, ...
— Analyzing Character • Katherine M. H. Blackford and Arthur Newcomb
... pleasantly flattered into contentment with itself—a contentment not disturbed by the occasional censure of practices which good taste condemns as ungraceful, or prudence as prejudicial to happiness. But the man of keener insight, who, instead of wrestling with the riddle of life, seeks for a time to forget it, and to place in its stead the rounded representation of activity which the novelist supplies, cannot but find the vanity of hiding his face from the presence which he dreads. Out of heart with the world about him—conscious of ...
— An Estimate of the Value and Influence of Works of Fiction in Modern Times • Thomas Hill Green
... socialism. At night the opposing hosts rest on their arms, searching the heavens for the riddle of life and death, and wondering what their tomorrow will bring forth. Around a thousand camp fires the steady conviction is being driven home that this sacrifice of life might all be avoided. It seems difficult to realize that millions of men, skilled by years ...
— History of the American Negro in the Great World War • W. Allison Sweeney
... little, having no breath to spare, for the ground was growing more steep and broken towards the second rise, up which we clambered, sliding and falling, grasping frozen heather till we reached the top. The hill was now a riddle of peat hags and binks, like a bee's skep, a place of treachery and slimy death, although the frost would have most of the sinking pools in its iron hand; but we never stopped the long stride that seemed so slow to me at first. Dan bent and twisted ...
— The McBrides - A Romance of Arran • John Sillars
... seeking the best welfare of England. The differences regarded only the expedients which were proper for the moment. One could see that foes furious in the arena might at the same time be closest personal friends. It was not a riddle that in the tea-rooms and the smoking-rooms Greek and Trojan could sit together in friendly tete-a-tete, or that such incidents could occur as the genial congratulations extended by Gladstone to Joseph Chamberlain over the ...
— The Last Leaf - Observations, during Seventy-Five Years, of Men and Events in America - and Europe • James Kendall Hosmer
... explained Thrush, "and go on so dividing them until you come down to the indivisible unit which is the answer to the riddle. Animal or Vegetable? Vegetable or Mineral? Northern or Southern Hemisphere? Ah! I thought your childhood was not so very much longer ...
— The Camera Fiend • E.W. Hornung
... Nigel replied. "He must have come to the conclusion that the key to the riddle he was trying to solve was in China, and gone on there. Look here, Maggie," he continued, after a moment's hesitation, "do you think anything could be done ...
— The Great Prince Shan • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... Vin," said the dame, reducing her voice almost to a whisper, "we should not want gold at will neither, could we but read the riddle of that lady!" ...
— The Fortunes of Nigel • Sir Walter Scott
... greatest singer Who tries the loftiest themes, He is the true joy bringer Who tells his simplest dreams, He is the greatest poet Who will renounce all art And take his heart and show it To any other heart; Who writes no learned riddle, But sings his simplest rune, Takes his heart-strings for a fiddle, ...
— Memories and Anecdotes • Kate Sanborn
... Vienna joker), who is feared on account of his racy wit. She enjoined him at the same time, in view of the presence of the girls, not to treat them to any of his spicy jests. The Hungarian agreed and appeared at the party. To the amazement of the lady, he proposed the following riddle: ''One can enter from in front, or from behind, only one has to stand up.' Observing the despair of the lady, he, with a sly, innocent look, said, 'But well then, what is it? Simply a trolley car.' Next day the daughter of the ...
— Hidden Symbolism of Alchemy and the Occult Arts • Herbert Silberer
... Tailed Panther. "This is the worst riddle I ever run up ag'inst an' the more I think about it the more riddlin' ...
— The Texan Star - The Story of a Great Fight for Liberty • Joseph A. Altsheler
... marry him? Not the sea, nor the sky, nor the great mysterious midnight, when he opens his casement and gazes into starry space will give him answer; riddle that no Oedipus will ever come to unravel; this sphinx will never throw herself from the rock into the clangour of the seagulls and waves; she will never divulge her secret; and if she is the woman and not a woman of thirty, ...
— Confessions of a Young Man • George Moore
... presume not God to scan; The proper study of mankind is man. * * * * * Created half to rise, and half to fall; Great lord of all things, yet a prey to all; Sole judge of truth, in endless error hurled; The glory, jest, and riddle of the world! Essay on Man, Epistle II. ...
— The World's Best Poetry — Volume 10 • Various
... and exclusive.[9] "I have often slept two in a bed," the suave but inelegant Napoleon was heard to say at a subsequent meeting, "but never three." Savary declared that the smiling and complacent young Czar thought the remark delightful. The meaning of the riddle, if riddle there be, was, of course, that Austria could no longer count as an equal in the Continental Olympus, the membership of which was thus reduced ...
— The Life of Napoleon Bonaparte - Vol. III. (of IV.) • William Milligan Sloane
... an interesting sight, particularly a Northbury cab. Shall I make a riddle for you on the spot, Miss Bell? What is the sole surviving curiosity still to be found ...
— The Honorable Miss - A Story of an Old-Fashioned Town • L. T. Meade
... Your open enemy avowed, Did not the House o' Commons crowd Of frauds and shams play up to him, And shelve "the Female Franchise" whim Only the other day? Sheer diddle! Have you not nous to read the riddle? How wondrous prompt was W.G. To back up SMITH! With what sly glee The "Woman's-Rightists" did subside. And—sub silentio—let you slide! Your Grand Old Man, dears,—well, he's human. He doesn't want some Grand Old Woman As colleague ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 101, August 22, 1891 • Various
... Dr. Chalmers had upon his hearers, and upon the readers of his "Astronomical Discourses." No one was satisfied with his arguments, no one could answer them, but every one wanted to try what he could make of them, as we try to find out a riddle. "By his so potent art," the art of laying down problematical premises, and drawing from them still more doubtful, but not impossible, conclusions, "he could bedim the noonday sun, betwixt the green sea and the azure vault set roaring war," and almost compel the stars in their courses to ...
— The Spirit of the Age - Contemporary Portraits • William Hazlitt
... a lot about 'em. I was one myself once, though not long—not so long as my clothes. They were very long, I recollect, and always in my way when I wanted to kick. Why do babies have such yards of unnecessary clothing? It is not a riddle. I really want to know. I never could understand it. Is it that the parents are ashamed of the size of the child and wish to make believe that it is longer than it actually is? I asked a nurse once why it ...
— Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow • Jerome K. Jerome
... untraversed deserts are vanishing from the map, it is an amazing relief to know that an unsolved, nay more, that an insoluble, mystery is standing on one's very hearth-rug. No wonder great philosophers have spent their lives in vain in looking for the riddle of existence, when they never dreamt of looking for it at home. Why woman is so peculiarly mysterious, why the laws of her nature are so specially unintelligible to a common world, we have not yet been informed. What is asserted is simply the fact of this ...
— Modern Women and What is Said of Them - A Reprint of A Series of Articles in the Saturday Review (1868) • Anonymous
... the body that gave it lodgment, disintegrate again into indistinguishable spirit dust? Close upon the heels of the existing consciousness of self treads the shadow-like doubt of its hereafter. Will analogy help to answer the grewsome riddle of the Sphinx? Are the laws we have learned to be true for matter true also for mind? Matter we now know is indestructible; yet the form of it with which we once were so fondly familiar vanishes ...
— The Soul of the Far East • Percival Lowell
... 'The riddle that has worried me three weeks he has solved in a way which is simplicity itself. He has got ...
— A Laodicean • Thomas Hardy
... eats a part of the food, but delivers the message. The stranger shrewdly guesses its meaning, and sends back a reply that convicts the Negress of theft of a part of the gift. The other story opens with the "bride-wager" riddle, and later enumerates many instances of the ingenuity of the clever young wife. See Phillott and Azoo, "Some Arab Folk-Tales from Hazramaut," Nos. I and XVII (in ...
— Filipino Popular Tales • Dean S. Fansler
... down the canal, ever and anon we see some empty returning boat (called "light boat" in the technical canal phrase) rounding a curve before us, It comes nearer: the horses walk the same tow-path: how are the boats to pass without confusion? Ah, the riddle is solved. Our captain (who holds the helm while the boy, his assistant, is down in the cabin preparing supper) calls out suddenly, at the last moment, "Whoa!" The well-trained horses instantly stop; the momentum of the boat carries it on; ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 26, September 1880 • Various
... first with the wicked; but, indeed, He received it with a rich, since God's providence was watching over the dead body of His Servant. [Hebrew: vitN], in so far as it refers to the first clause, receives its limitation by the second. Before their fulfilment, the words had the character of a holy riddle; but the fulfilment has solved this riddle. The designation of Joseph of Arimathea as [Greek: anthropos plousios] in Matt. xxvi. 57, is equivalent to an express quotation. Although it was by a special divine providence that ...
— Christology of the Old Testament: And a Commentary on the Messianic Predictions. Vol. 2 • Ernst Hengstenberg
... of, and telling her Stories of Nuns, and endeavouring to bring her to the Knowledge of the true God: But of all Discourses, Caesar liked that the worst, and would never be reconciled to our Notions of the Trinity, of which he ever made a Jest; it was a Riddle he said would turn his Brain to conceive, and one could not make him understand what Faith was. However, these Conversations fail'd not altogether so well to divert him, that he liked the Company of us Women much above the Men, for he ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn - Volume V • Aphra Behn
... Boyce will be less of a riddle to all of us before long!" he said hastily, as though the words escaped him. "Shall we get out ...
— Marcella • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... white feather," said Mrs. Adair, "all soiled and speckled with dust. Can you read the riddle of that feather?" ...
— The Four Feathers • A. E. W. Mason
... said to have visited Solomon, "to prove him with hard questions," by which have generally been understood enigmatical puzzles. Some of these are to be found in sacred writ, of which the riddle which Samson proposed to the young men of Timnath, is a very ancient and curious specimen. It appears from the writings of the ancients, that the Greeks and all the Eastern nations, were singularly attached to enigmas. Plutarch, ...
— Female Scripture Biographies, Vol. I • Francis Augustus Cox
... We shall guess it all too soon; Failure brings no kind of stigma - Dance we to another tune! String the lyre and fill the cup, Lest on sorrow we should sup; Hop and skip to Fancy's fiddle, Hands across and down the middle - Life's perhaps the only riddle That we ...
— Songs of a Savoyard • W. S. Gilbert
... thought, there will be anything left of the mission of Jesus: whether, in short, we may not throw the gospels into the waste-paper basket, or put them away on the fiction shelf of our libraries. I venture to reply that we shall be, on the contrary, in the position of the man in Bunyan's riddle who found that "the more he threw away, the more he had. "We get rid, to begin with, of the idolatrous or iconographic worship of Christ. By this I mean literally that worship which is given to pictures and statues of him, and to finished and unalterable stories about him. The test of ...
— Preface to Androcles and the Lion - On the Prospects of Christianity • George Bernard Shaw
... the Macquarie was now, to a certain extent, cleared up, but there still remained another riddle to solve in the course and outlet of the Darling. Sturt, the discoverer of this river, was destined to find the answer ...
— The History of Australian Exploration from 1788 to 1888 • Ernest Favenc
... the solution of the little riddle propounded by Pascal in one passage of his Thoughts: "Two faces that are alike, although neither of them excites laughter by itself, make us laugh when together, on account of their likeness." It might just as well be said: "The gestures of a public ...
— Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic • Henri Bergson
... a good deal. But "From Papa" caught my eye on a little parcel. I seized it and unfolded. From papa, and he so far away! But I guessed the riddle before I could get to the last of the folds of paper that wrapped and enwrapped a little morocco case. Papa and mamma, leaving me alone, had made provision beforehand, that when this time came I ...
— Daisy • Elizabeth Wetherell
... so delighted at the way in which the farmer's daughter had solved the riddle that he immediately married her and made her his Queen. And they lived very happily together though no children came to them. The King depended upon her for advice in all his affairs and would often have her seated by him when he was ...
— Europa's Fairy Book • Joseph Jacobs
... Laius was one day killed on the road as he was airing himself in his chariot. Shortly after, a terrible plague broke out in Thebes, and the Sphinx ravaged all the neighborhood. The Sphinx gave out that the plague would cease and his ravages be ended, when this riddle was solved:—'What animal walks on four feet in the morning, two at noon day, and three in the evening.' None of the wise men could solve it, and so their misfortune continued. At length, Iocasta the Queen, said that whoever could solve the riddle, should be king and have her hand in marriage. ...
— The Girl's Cabinet of Instructive and Moral Stories • Uncle Philip
... Bill," Our chaplain quizzingly cried, "Wilt thou riddle me redes of a dumpling still With thy 'how came the apple inside'?" "Nay," answered Bill, "but I quest for truth, And I find it not on your shelf! I will face your Hyrcanian bear, forsooth, And look at ...
— Collected Poems - Volume Two (of 2) • Alfred Noyes
... it must have been the riddle that settled us; but the motion and the close air likewise hurried our departure. We had not been gone long, we heard next morning, ere two or even three out of the five fell sick. We thought it little wonder ...
— Essays of Travel • Robert Louis Stevenson
... this clew to the riddle, he dropped the book again at his side and skilfully kicked it far out into the room. Captain Wattles had seen nothing. He was a man who took in only one thing at ...
— Agatha Webb • Anna Katharine Green
... the long level of the sand-bank, I perceived a group that became discernible as three persons attached to an invalid's chair, moving leisurely toward us. I was in the state of mind between divination and doubt when the riddle is not impossible to read, would but the heart cease its hurry an instant; a tumbled sky where the break is coming. It came. The dear old days of my wanderings with Temple framed her face. I knew her without need of pause or retrospect. The crocus raising its cup pointed ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... toward explaining both the physiological and the structural gradations and relations between the two kingdoms, and the arrangement of all their forms in groups subordinate to groups, all within a few great types; that it reads the riddle of abortive organs and of morphological conformity, of which no other theory has ever offered a scientific explanation, and supplies a ground for harmonizing the two fundamental ideas which naturalists and philosophers conceive to have ruled the organic world, though they ...
— Darwiniana - Essays and Reviews Pertaining to Darwinism • Asa Gray
... tell your worship that for a man to whip himself in cold blood is a hard thing, especially if the stripes fall upon an ill-nourished and worse-fed body. Let my lady Dulcinea have patience, and when she is least expecting it, she will see me made a riddle of with whipping, and 'until death it's all life;' I mean that I have still life in me, and the desire to make good what I ...
— Don Quixote • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... some of that grace of patience which comes to her sex like an instinct born of centuried servitude. How her husband ever fascinated so fascinatingly elusive a creature is a mystery to all who know him and a miracle to all who know her; but who has ever guessed the riddle of a woman's heart? Surely no man yet known to the world, except possibly Balzac, and he only occasionally by some sort of electric, psychological accident. The true story of Mrs. Blaine's infelicities has been carefully hidden from the public, although some superserviceable, would-be ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 24, November, 1891 • Various
... boy, he was a man—strong, fearless, happy-hearted. How could the plains make cowards out of such as he? They had made a man of Jondo, who had all excuse to play the coward. The mystery of the human mind is a riddle past my reading—and I had always thought of Beverly's as an open book. The only one to whom I could turn now was not Eloise, nor my uncle, nor Mat nor Rex, but Jondo, John Doe, the nameless man, with whom Esmond ...
— Vanguards of the Plains • Margaret McCarter
... hand from that bell," retorted von Schalckenberg, sternly, levelling the pistol, quick as light, at the count's head. "Utter a sound above a whisper, or move so much as an eyelid, and I will riddle your worthless brain with bullets. My little exhibition just now was simply intended to convey to you, in a thoroughly practical manner, some idea of the capabilities of this weapon of mine. I have fired two shots from it, and there are consequently eighteen left; furthermore, ...
— With Airship and Submarine - A Tale of Adventure • Harry Collingwood
... Cross impressed upon his forehead, the effect which it produced upon the Beholders, and many other circumstances give this supposition the colour of truth. The Cardinal is fully persuaded of it; and for my own part I am inclined to adopt the only solution which offers itself to this riddle. I return to the narrative from which ...
— The Monk; a romance • M. G. Lewis
... representations of the king, effigies of which are frequently placed before temples on each side of the approach; the most famous of the sphinxes was the one which waylaid travellers and tormented them with a riddle, which if they could not answer she devoured them, but which Oedipus answered, whereupon she threw herself into the sea. "Such a sphinx," as we are told in "Past and Present," "is this life of ours, to all men and nations. Nature, like the Sphinx, is of womanly celestial loveliness ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... Marriage is the nest-building instinct, turned by the Devil himself into an institution to hold the human soul in chains. The whole story of marriage is told in the old riddle: "Why do birds in their nests agree? Because if they don't, they'll fall out." That's it. Marriage is a nest so small that there is no room in it for disagreement. Now it may be all right for birds to ...
— King Arthur's Socks and Other Village Plays • Floyd Dell
... understand nothing, but the great peace of perfect security. She let him hold her still, with her head against his shoulder and his dear face near, so near she seemed to lose sense of her own identity. All the answer to her life's riddle lay there, behind the love that emptied her soul of need. Out of the blissful unspeakable light some ...
— Christopher Hibbault, Roadmaker • Marguerite Bryant
... when we were only an hour's run from Mudros, there came by wireless the inspiring news that solved the riddle of the chain of transports in the Mediterranean and the empty hospitals in Alexandria. The simple typed message that was pinned on the notice-board, and could scarcely be read for the crowds surrounding it, ran: "We have landed ...
— Tell England - A Study in a Generation • Ernest Raymond
... grandee of Spain,' and his Excellency is so, I take it three or four times over: 'Secondly, I will have the Toison' he has it long since: 'Thirdly, the Conde de Chincon shall treat me with EXCELLENCY.' The riddle of this is, that the said Conde de Chincon, being no Grandee, and nominated for Ambassador Ordinary to the Emperor, though since excused of going for want of health, or other allegations, doth, upon that account alone, during ...
— Memoirs of Lady Fanshawe • Lady Fanshawe
... Laius, Creon, succeeds to the throne of Thebes. The country around is vexed with a terrible monster, with the face of a woman, the wings of a bird, and the tail of a lion, called the Sphinx, who has learned from the Muses a riddle, which she proposed to the Thebans, and on every failure to resolve it one of them was devoured. But no person can solve the riddle. The king offers his crown and his sister Jocasta, wife of Laius, in marriage to any one who would explain the ...
— Ancient States and Empires • John Lord
... still seeking for an answer to this riddle when the editors of "The Ladies' Home Journal" asked me to consider the preparation of a series of articles. "We have done some sharp destructive work in our criticisms of the schools," they said. "Now we are going to do some constructive writing. We are in search ...
— The New Education - A Review of Progressive Educational Movements of the Day (1915) • Scott Nearing
... length of the arcade while he endeavored to work out the solution of her second riddle, and then he ...
— A Woman's Will • Anne Warner
... drawing his pistol, "Mr. Black will please note that while I am standing by the bulwarks I shall be watching indeed. Should he make an attempt to escape from the vessel I shall riddle him with bullets." ...
— The Cruise of the Jasper B. • Don Marquis
... directly to the invasion was that some week-end guest of the East Cliff Hotel left a copy of "The Riddle of the Sands" in the coffee-room, where von Gottlieb found it; and the fact that Ford attended the Shakespeare Ball. Had neither of these events taken place, the German flag might now be flying over Buckingham Palace. And, then again, ...
— The Red Cross Girl • Richard Harding Davis
... yet at school, he produced a comedy, called, Love's Riddle, though it was not published, till he had been some time at Cambridge. This comedy is of the pastoral kind, which requires no acquaintance with the living world, and, therefore, the time at which it was composed adds little to the ...
— Lives of the Poets, Vol. 1 • Samuel Johnson
... no man is your enemy: no man is your friend. All alike are your teachers. Your enemy becomes a mystery that must be solved, even though it take ages: for man must be understood. Your friend becomes a part of yourself, an extension of yourself, a riddle hard to read. Only one thing is more difficult to know—your own heart. Not until the bonds of personality are loosed, can that profound mystery of self begin to be seen. Not till you stand aside from it will it in any way reveal itself to your ...
— Light On The Path and Through the Gates of Gold • Mabel Collins
... long and innocent intimacy which made frankness now seem a violation of the precedent of years, I found that the desire was born in me, born anew with Jerry's awakening consciousness, to stand by my guns, and await the results of his lessons from the world. He must solve the riddle of the Great ...
— Paradise Garden - The Satirical Narrative of a Great Experiment • George Gibbs
... silence the weird mesh in which he had become involved. What did it all mean? What brought these people to Baldpate Christmas week? His eyes sought the great safe back of the desk, and stayed there a long time. In that safe, he was sure, lay the answer to this preposterous riddle. When his thoughts came back to the table he found Mr. Bland eying him narrowly. There was a troubled look on the haberdasher's lean face that could never be ascribed ...
— Seven Keys to Baldpate • Earl Derr Biggers
... wagons conveying all the wild beasts of a caravan; and on that a company of summer soldiers marching from village to village on a festival campaign, attended by the "brass band." Now look at the scene, and it presents an emblem of the mysterious confusion, the apparently insolvable riddle, in which individuals, or the great world itself, seem often to be involved. What miracle shall set all things ...
— Twice Told Tales • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... for Joyce's protection. St. Ange was impossible as a working basis—his thoughts flew to Filmer. Yes; as soon as Joyce could explain, he would go for Filmer and together they would solve this riddle for the poor, ...
— Joyce of the North Woods • Harriet T. Comstock
... dusk so that they seemed to live. Robert saw them too. That was his mother walking at Christine's side, and then his father—— In a sort of shattering vision Robert saw him, a man of promise, black-browed with the riddle of his failure, a man of many hungers, seduced by rootless passions, lured to miserable shipwreck because he could not keep to any course, because he could not ...
— The Dark House • I. A. R. Wylie
... bethought him that there was no longer the need for him to come to a decision in the matter that had brought him to England, and his laugh was almost of relief. The riddle he could never have solved for himself in a manner that had not shattered his future peace of mind, was solved and well solved if this ...
— The Lion's Skin • Rafael Sabatini
... to science by Crookes's observations, which human knowledge now entered as if taking it by storm, was that of the radioactive processes of the mineral stratum of the earth. Many new and surprising properties of electricity were discovered there - yet the riddle of electricity itself, instead of coming nearer, withdrew ...
— Man or Matter • Ernst Lehrs
... protection, guard, defense, traverse, fender; mask, disguise; sieve, riddle; jube, parclose, rood ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming
... read my uncle's riddle,' said Stanley;'the cautious old soldier did not care to hint to me that I might hand over to you this passport, which I have no occasion for; but if it should afterwards come out as the rattle-pated trick of a young ...
— Waverley, Or 'Tis Sixty Years Hence, Complete • Sir Walter Scott
... was at first quite a riddle to the boys. But the fact was, he was so thoroughly disgusted at the remissness of those whose duty had been to have watched that night, that he felt that a great disgrace had come to them all. The idea of allowing five wolverines ...
— Winter Adventures of Three Boys • Egerton R. Young
... was a far-seeing and cunning man—too far-seeing and cunning to allow himself to thrive by simple and straightforward means—and he held his peace, till he could read more plainly the meaning of this riddle, merely added carelessly, 'Well—marriage do alter a man, 'tis true. I ...
— Victorian Short Stories, - Stories Of Successful Marriages • Elizabeth Gaskell, et al.
... pressing the hand which was extended to him. "If we ever meet again, it will probably solve a curious riddle; namely, whether you are not disgusted with the caravan and ...
— The Disowned, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... Tom at school, Begging I'll let him learn the fiddle; Another from that precious fool, Miss Pyefinch, with a stupid riddle. ...
— The Humourous Poetry of the English Language • James Parton
... to another man; But parted—and you're as a ship unknown That to poor castaways at dawn is shown As strange as dawn, so strange they fear a trick Of eyes long-vexed and hope with falseness sick. Parted, and like the riddle of a dream, Dark with rich promise, does your beauty seem. I wonder at your patience, stirless peace, Your subtle pride, mute pity's quick release. Then are you strange to me and sweet as light Or dew; as strange and dark as starless night. Then let this restless parting ...
— Poems New and Old • John Freeman
... tempest, will intervene ere their hopes will be fulfilled. If their troubles are short, so may be their joys; but long troubles may bring longer happiness. Choose you which you will, my masters—I will read you a riddle; let me hear if ...
— The Golden Grasshopper - A story of the days of Sir Thomas Gresham • W.H.G. Kingston
... gently. "However, I feel I cannot offer any excuse for their past conduct; yet," continued the Pleasant-Faced Lion wisely, as he jogged contentedly on, homewards towards Balham, "I have a fair proposition to make to you, although it may seem somewhat in the nature of a riddle to you ...
— The Tale of Lal - A Fantasy • Raymond Paton
... especially for unhappy souls who have grappled with fate and think themselves worsted. Perhaps they find a melancholy pleasure in the company of ghosts who have escaped from similar defeats; perhaps they seek to read the riddle of the universe, as they stand, elbows on rail, studying ...
— Calvary Alley • Alice Hegan Rice
... the Princess's answer to the riddle of the nineteenth day in A Digit of the Moon. I am this middle thing, and it is only the very bad and very good that ...
— The Reflections of Ambrosine - A Novel • Elinor Glyn
... an assassin or not, it is beyond all doubt that her husband was one of the assassins of her servant Rizzio, who was murdered in her very presence. Mary's son, James VI., stands in the strangest relation to an extraordinary assassination of any man in history. The Gowrie Conspiracy is yet a riddle. According to one class of historical critics, the Earl of Gowrie and his brother, Alexander Ruthven, were bent upon assassinating the King; while another class are quite as positive that the King was bent upon assassinating the Ruthvens, and that he accomplished his ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 93, July, 1865 • Various
... of biology. No definition of Life, indeed, that has yet appeared can be said to be even approximately correct. Its mysterious quality evades us; and we have to be content with outward characteristics and accompaniments, leaving the thing itself an unsolved riddle. At the same time Mr. Herbert Spencer's masterly elucidation of the chief phenomena of Life has placed philosophy and science under many obligations, and in the paragraphs which follow we shall have to incur a further debt on ...
— Natural Law in the Spiritual World • Henry Drummond
... on previous occasions, Jalaladdeen rolled about for some time on his couch, sleepless and perplexed with care. It appeared to him like an unsolvable riddle. ...
— Eastern Tales by Many Story Tellers • Various
... wend with me, To leave both tower and town, Thou first must guess what life lead we That dwell by dale and down. And if thou canst that riddle read, As read full well you may, Then to the greenwood shalt thou speed, As ...
— Lyra Heroica - A Book of Verse for Boys • Various
... resolves disorder into order, formlessness into form. The trouble with the Futurist is that he catches the full force of the primal impression, then later loads it with his own subjective fancies. The outcome is bound to be a riddle. ...
— Ivory Apes and Peacocks • James Huneker
... in great cosmical masses, and has fed our sun during all the ages required by the geologist for the structure of the earth's crusts? It may be that in this phenomenon we have the key to the great riddle of the universe, with which profounder secrets of matter than any we have penetrated will be opened to ...
— Side-lights on Astronomy and Kindred Fields of Popular Science • Simon Newcomb
... love for the books not only as a means of relief to herself. Evidently she held it admirable in itself and a promise bearing in some mysterious manner on his future. His mother's approval flattered him, but otherwise her attitude was a riddle which he did not care to solve as long as it brought him permission to explore at will this newly discovered world of perfectly safe enjoyment. In the end, however, that strange reverence shown by his mother ...
— The Soul of a Child • Edwin Bjorkman
... little,' repeated Bazarov. 'Perhaps you are right; perhaps, really, every one is a riddle. You, for instance; you avoid society, you are oppressed by it, and you have invited two students to stay with you. What makes you, with your intellect, with your beauty, live ...
— Fathers and Children • Ivan Sergeevich Turgenev
... could understand you, Doctor, but I never shall," she sighed hopelessly, as she endeavoured to make herself comfortable among the tumbled bed-clothes. "I give you up as a difficult riddle." ...
— Banked Fires • E. W. (Ethel Winifred) Savi
... the first of men who have tried to find in vain how and when a relationship becomes an entanglement. He ought to break off now, and the riddle was just why he should feel this compunction in breaking off now. He had disappointed her, and he ought not to have disappointed her; that was the essential feeling. He had never realized before as he realized now this peculiar quality of his own mind and the gulf into which ...
— Soul of a Bishop • H. G. Wells
... love was this, which had no respect to persons? I knew I could claim no exclusive right to the least corner of her heart, and yet she said: "All my heart is yours. What more can you ask?" I was not able to solve the riddle of her mysterious nature, but as I heard her tuneful voice and watched her beautiful face as she talked with Antonia, the very picture of innocent happiness, I realized with great intensity that I loved her more than ever. And I resolved to be patient, and try to lead ...
— Daybreak: A Romance of an Old World • James Cowan
... solving this great riddle in human life and conduct—this incessant doing by mankind of that which they know they ought not to do, and neglecting to do that which they know ought to be done—may be found in the fact that so few are trained to regard, in every thing, the sacred rights of conscience. They are referred ...
— The Young Woman's Guide • William A. Alcott
... other way to rob an apple tree but by standing a-tip-toe, or climbing up to the apples, when they should come down to thee?" said the second boy. "Truly thy head will never save thy heels; but here's a riddle for thee: ...
— Last Words - A Final Collection of Stories • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... the world, and in all kinds of disguises. Now he is the most beautiful and noble of the Greek gods, Apollo; now he is Odin, with a single eye; now he is Hercules, the hero, with his twelve great labours for the good of men; now he is Oedipus, who met the Sphinx and solved her riddle. In the early times men saw how everything in the world about them drew its strength and beauty from the sun; how the sun warmed the earth and made the crops grow; how it brought gladness and hope and ...
— Myths That Every Child Should Know - A Selection Of The Classic Myths Of All Times For Young People • Various
... undervalued the treasure. When, at length, we had concluded our examination, and the intense excitement of the time had, in some measure, subsided, Legrand, who saw that I was dying with impatience for a solution of this most extraordinary riddle, entered into a full detail of all the circumstances ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 1 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... Nay, nay, Lord Percy. My word is given. You shall neither go yourself nor send your servants after the fellow. He is absolutely safe from molestation from me and mine." Her eyes now rested with curious insistence on Lord Farquhart's face, but he could not read the riddle in them. "And now"—the lady leaned back wearily—"if this clamor might all cease! I am desperately weary. Get me to my aunt's house with as much ...
— Ainslee's, Vol. 15, No. 6, July 1905 • Various
... Thus Wyndham breathing thickly, with his eyes Dilating in the darkness, "Darrell—he! I set my springe for other game than this; Of hare or rabbit dreamed I, not of wolf. His frequent visitations have of late Perplexed me; now the riddle reads itself. A proper man, a very proper man! A fellow that burns Trinidado leaf And sends smoke through his nostril like a flue! A fop, a hanger-on of willing skirts— A murrain on him! Would Elizabeth In some mad freak had clapped ...
— Wyndham Towers • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... no guarantee of the temporal immortality of the human soul, that is to say of its eternal survival after death; but, in any case, this assumption completely fails to accomplish the purpose for which it has always been intended. Or is some riddle solved by my surviving for ever? Is not this eternal life itself as much of a riddle as our present life? The solution of the riddle of life in space and time lies outside space and time. (It is certainly ...
— Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus • Ludwig Wittgenstein
... through the three first weeks of July. The world at large did not at all know why the Duke was doing so unwonted a thing,—why he should undertake so new a trouble. But Lady Glencora knew, and Madame Goesler shrewdly guessed, the riddle. When Madame Goesler's unexpected refusal had reached his Grace, he felt that he must either accept the lady's refusal, or persevere. After a day's consideration, he resolved that he would accept it. The top brick of the chimney was ...
— Phineas Finn - The Irish Member • Anthony Trollope
... not, good sir; the world to me A riddle is at best—my heart has had No tutor. From my childhood until now My thoughts have been ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII. No. 3. March 1848 • Various
... you—you and all the ghosts that you can conjure up. You think that you frighten me; you wish that I should pay you dearly for your secret. But you shall know that I am not at all of a timorous nature, and that I shall pay no money for the solution of a riddle which I may perhaps be able to solve without your help. I warn you, sir, you secret-vender, be well on your guard! You have your spies, but I have my police, and they inform me about every thing out of the usual course. It is known, sir, that you are carrying on a correspondence ...
— Marie Antoinette And Her Son • Louise Muhlbach
... point; vexed question, vexata quaestio, poser, puzzle, &c. (see riddle); paradox; hard-, nut to crack; bone to pick, crux, pons asinorum, where ...
— Journalism for Women - A Practical Guide • E.A. Bennett
... voice was like the snap of a whip. "Try it. Try it. I'll hunt you down like a wolf and riddle ...
— The Sheriff's Son • William MacLeod Raine
... all that is was ever bound to be; Since grim, eternal laws our Being bind; And both the riddle and the answer find, And both the carnage and the calm decree; Since plain within the Book of Destiny Is written all the journey of mankind Inexorably to the end; since blind And mortal puppets playing ...
— Rhymes of a Red Cross Man • Robert W. Service
... twenty-five years ago. Then the scheme of organization was thoroughly bad—and the department was at its high-water mark of honest and effective activity. Now the scheme of organization is excellent—but the less said about the way it works the better. The answer to the riddle is this: today the New York police force is headed by Tammany; the name of the particular Tammany man who is Commissioner does not matter. In those ...
— Theodore Roosevelt and His Times - A Chronicle of the Progressive Movement; Volume 47 in The - Chronicles Of America Series • Harold Howland
... slowly shook his head. Something was forming itself in his mind, this was evident. He walked around the ledge and back again. Finally, he said: "I wish it were night, it might help to solve the riddle." ...
— The Wonder Island Boys: Adventures on Strange Islands • Roger Thompson Finlay
... and to sway the world? 'With whom took He counsel? and who instructed Him, and taught Him?' The character and work of Christ, compared with the circumstances of His origin and environment, are an insoluble riddle, except on one supposition—that He was the ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Mark • Alexander Maclaren
... do these things, but what can we say of those who have been taught the plan of salvation through faith in the Lord Jesus Christ, and yet will go on talking pertly about God in nature, and of their ability to find themselves in him by studying him in his works? God in nature, without Christ, is a riddle, a perplexity, a mystery. ...
— Oowikapun - How the Gospel Reached the Nelson River Indians • Egerton Ryerson Young
... woman a riddle," she thought. "I wonder if that is because she could never be natural. If woman has been a riddle in the past, I wonder if this ...
— Mary Minds Her Business • George Weston
... refuge of despair, oblivion:—Janet seemed to herself all these in the same moment that she was conscious of being seated on the cold stone under the shock of a new misery. All her early gladness, all her bright hopes and illusions, all her gifts of beauty and affection, served only to darken the riddle of her life; they were the betraying promises of a cruel destiny which had brought out those sweet blossoms only that the winds and storms might have a greater work of desolation, which had nursed her like a pet fawn into tenderness and fond expectation, only that she might ...
— Scenes of Clerical Life • George Eliot
... like my uncle. I remember hearing mamma read a bit of one of the letters of condolence which said 'His was one of the most beautiful lives I have ever known,' and I never forgot it. It stayed in my mind like a riddle, till I gradually found out that the beauty was in the good he ...
— Magnum Bonum • Charlotte M. Yonge
... had once loved Kent, this calm show of indifference puzzled Maude Lyngern sorely. But to the Dowager Lady it was no such riddle. ...
— The White Rose of Langley - A Story of the Olden Time • Emily Sarah Holt
... and how it differs from and falls short of the mysticism of Shelley and Browning. Rossetti, unlike Browning, is not the least metaphysical; he is not devoured by philosophical curiosity; he has no desire to solve the riddle of the universe. All his life he was dominated and fascinated by beauty, one form of which in especial so appealed to him as at times almost to overpower him—the beauty of the face of woman.[11] But this beauty is not an end in itself; it is not the desire of possession ...
— Mysticism in English Literature • Caroline F. E. Spurgeon
... so obvious to us that we are inclined to attach no importance to it, seemed, itself, to be something wonderful. Here in Geometry and Arithmetic, here was order and harmony unsurpassed and unsurpassable. What wonder then that Pythagoras concluded that the solution of the mighty riddle of the Universe was contained in the mysteries of Geometry? What wonder that he read mystic meanings into the laws of Arithmetic, and believed Number to be the explanation and origin of all ...
— Bygone Beliefs • H. Stanley Redgrove
... days things looked gloomy to us, but the decree came from a higher power. No pen, no statesman, in fact, no divine could have solved the riddle which bound us at that time; nothing but the great God of War. And you and your fathers, your ancestors, if you please, of whom I profess to be one [applause], had to resort to the great arbiter of battles, and call upon Jove himself. And now ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol III, After-Dinner Speeches P-Z • Various
... Heaven, but he that came down,' is intelligible as a free comment near the end of the first century; but has no meaning in our Lord's mouth at a time when the Ascension had not been heard of." (p. 84.)—"The Apocalypse" in like manner, to "cease to be a riddle," must be "taken as a series of poetical visions which represent the outpouring of the vials of wrath upon the City where our LORD was slain." (p. 84.) ... (Is it possible that a Minister of the Gospel of CHRIST can speak thus concerning the Divine record?) ... "The second of the Petrine ...
— Inspiration and Interpretation - Seven Sermons Preached Before the University of Oxford • John Burgon
... away with Pablo at her heels, Bill Conway unburdened himself of a slightly ribald little chanson entitled: "What Makes the Wild Cat Wild?" In the constant repetition of this query it appeared that the old Californian sought the answer to a riddle not even remotely connected with the mystifying savagery of ...
— The Pride of Palomar • Peter B. Kyne
... to get into our hands some time or other, and he knows what we'll do with him if he should. Though he has made some clever escapes, I'll admit, that may not always be his fortune. The pitcher may go to the well once too often. He's a cunning rascal—no doubt knows this riddle—and therefore I begin to fear he has taken himself off,—at least for a long while. He may return again, but how the deuce are we to sustain this constant espionage? It would weary down the devil! It will become as tiresome as the siege of Granada was to the good ...
— The White Chief - A Legend of Northern Mexico • Mayne Reid
... as are immediately fetch'd from Nature, and rang'd thro' the Circle of the Sciences to fetch their Ideas from thence. But as the Resemblances of such Ideas to the Subject must necessarily lie very much out of the common Way, and every Piece of Wit appear a Riddle to the Vulgar; This, that should have taught them the forced, quaint, unnatural Tract they were in (and induce them to follow a more natural One), was the very Thing that kept them attach'd to it. The ostentatious Affectation of abstruse ...
— Eighteenth Century Essays on Shakespeare • D. Nichol Smith
... So the riddle of the Tugela had at last been solved. Even now, with all the light which has been shed upon the matter, it is hard to apportion praise and blame. To the cheerful optimism of Symons must be laid some of the blame ...
— The Great Boer War • Arthur Conan Doyle
... thus in fancy, as in books A man may see the naiads of the brooks;— As one entranced by potions aptly given May see the angels where they walk in Heaven, And may not greet them in their high estate. For who shall guess the riddle wrought of Fate Till he be dead? And who that lives a span Shall thwart the Future where ...
— A Lover's Litanies • Eric Mackay
... Frankly, I wish you success—trust that you can demonstrate beyond a peradventure of a doubt that all my objections to the Single Tax are fallacious, that it is indeed the correct solution of that sphinx riddle which we must soon answer or be destroyed. At a time when the industrial problem is pressing upon us with ever increasing power, it is discouraging to hear grown Americans prattling of "unhorsing" economic adversaries—priding themselves on polemical fence, like shyster lawyers, and seeking ...
— Volume 10 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... "freedom of will." The ridiculous imperial folly of Caligula is but a special form of man's arrogant assumption of divinity. Only when we have abandoned this untenable illusion, and taken up the correct cosmological perspective, can we hope to reach the solution of the Riddle of ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great - Volume 12 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Scientists • Elbert Hubbard
... religion of Christ do not, however, disturb the faith of Browning in the Christian revelation of Divine love. In Cleon he exhibits the failure of Paganism, even in its forms of highest culture, to solve the riddle of life and to answer the requirements of the human spirit. All that regal power liberally and wisely used can confer belongs to Protus in his Tyranny; all that genius, and learning and art can confer is ...
— Robert Browning • Edward Dowden
... revealed now in one stroke to the dying lieutenant—all the secrets of the war, all the problems he had brooded over for many months past. So he had the key to the riddle. These people evidently did not get their heads back until they were about to die. Somewhere—somewhere—far back—far back of the lines, their heads had been unscrewed and replaced by records that could do nothing but play the Rakoczy March. Prepared in this ...
— Men in War • Andreas Latzko
... through had aroused new strength in him. He had endured, with princely pride, all the terrors of death and of the most terrible humiliation. He had reflected in the solitude of his prison on the greatest riddle of life—on death and what is beyond. He had realized that there was nothing left for him but submission, patience, and quiet waiting. But bitter, heart-rending misfortune is a school which develops not only the ...
— The German Classics Of The Nineteenth And Twentieth Centuries, Volume 12 • Various
... pass, by the breeze that blows, by the pebble that falls, by the hour that strikes; on a certain day, man, that trembling, stumbling being, the plaything of chance and of the passing moment, rises suddenly before the riddle that is called human life, feels that there is within him something greater than this abyss,—honour! something stronger than fatality,—virtue! something more mysterious than the unknown,—faith! ...
— Napoleon the Little • Victor Hugo
... loved and married; because you have stood out manfully against this strange modern insanity, and refused to give up, when you were made a bishop, the wife whom God had given you. You, I thought, could solve the riddle for ...
— Hypatia - or, New Foes with an Old Face • Charles Kingsley
... friend to keep things dark;" then to Mrs. Dodd: "She is not a child, mother, after all; and how can it be wrong to tell her the truth, or right to suppress the truth? Well then, Ju, there's an advertisement in the 'Tiser, and it's a regular riddle. Now mind, I don't really think there is anything in it; but it is a droll coincidence, very droll; if it wasn't there are ladies present, and one of them a district visitor, I would say, d—d droll. So droll," ...
— Hard Cash • Charles Reade
... moment increased twofold the housekeeper's domestic activity. Suddenly she would stand still, and placing her forefinger on her upper lip she would remain motionless, as if she were seeking in her mind the explanation of some mystery or the key to some riddle, gesticulating with expressive eloquence, and, so to say, thinking ...
— Stories by Foreign Authors: Spanish • Various
... great, and their respective schools.' Pope's men, it seems, never had been famous—Voltaire's might cease to be so, but as yet they had not ceased; as yet they commanded interest. Now mark how I will put three bullets into that plank, riddle it so that the leak shall not be stopped by all the old hats in Heidelberg, and Schlosser will have to swim for his life. First, he is forgetting that, by his own previous confession, Voltaire, not less than Pope, had 'immortalized a ...
— The Notebook of an English Opium-Eater • Thomas de Quincey
... strange one on which I happened to light? Who knows? the mystery may have some quite simple solution. I saw two children, attired like little princes, taken from their mother and consigned to other care; and a fortnight afterwards, one of them barefooted and like a beggar. Who will read this riddle of The ...
— Roundabout Papers • William Makepeace Thackeray
... this riddle!" he kept muttering. Then he would glare at Ruth impatiently and execrate the squeamishness of women. Ruth sat on the divan with her face between her hands, trying to force herself to realize the full extent ...
— Told in the East • Talbot Mundy
... astonishment to see the day after, the Journal des Debats of the 13th of September, an extract from his narrative, copied almost literally: he then endeavoured to discover whence the editors could have obtained these details; it cost him but little time to solve the riddle. ...
— Narrative of a Voyage to Senegal in 1816 • J. B. Henry Savigny and Alexander Correard
... thy father there. Let not that dreadful seat be empty long, But place me there a greater monster still. There will I sit and of my fate propose A riddle dark that no man shall resolve. * * * * * What riddle like to this could she propose, That curse of Thebes, who wove destructive words In puzzling measures? What so dark as this? He was his grandsire's son-in-law, and yet His father's rival; brother of his sons, And father of his brothers: at one ...
— Post-Augustan Poetry - From Seneca to Juvenal • H.E. Butler
... not to be justify'd too fast: Hear all, and then let justice hold the scale. What follow'd was the riddle that confounds me. Through a close lane, as I pursu'd my journey, And meditating on the last night's vision, I spy'd a wrinkled hag, with age grown double, Picking dry sticks, and mumbling to herself; Her eyes with scalding rheum were gall'd and red: Cold palsy ...
— The Orphan - or, The Unhappy Marriage • Thomas Otway
... question," she replied. "I am no priest. But this I know: I have done no evil, and my conscience nevertheless is sore. Solve me the riddle, Malcolm, if you can." ...
— Dorothy Vernon of Haddon Hall • Charles Major
... almost resembled be an ethereal existence. The dark-blue eyes had an expression of soul and feeling which attracted even the simple domestics at the hall. The physician assured them that her chest was sound, and that her malady was to him a riddle. A beautiful summer, he thought, would work beneficially ...
— O. T. - A Danish Romance • Hans Christian Andersen
... are tributes to Beauty, unworthy to stand alone; yet perversely, in my mind, now at the end, I know not whether I mean the Thought for the Fancy—or the Fancy for the Thought, or why the book trails off to playing, rather than standing strong on unanswering fact. But this is alway—is it not?—the Riddle of Life. ...
— Darkwater - Voices From Within The Veil • W. E. B. Du Bois
... of thirty the face of a woman is a book written in a foreign tongue, which one may still translate in spite of all the feminisms of the idiom; but on passing her fortieth year a woman becomes an insoluble riddle; and if any one can see through an old woman, it is ...
— Analytical Studies • Honore de Balzac
... campaigner. The jokes at the Flag, the dinners at the Flag, the committee of the Flag, were the theme of their constant conversation. Goby fifty years old, unattached, and with dyed moustaches, was the affable comrade of the youngest member of his club: when absent, a friend wrote him the last riddle from the smoking-room; when present, his knowledge of horses, of cookery, wines, and cigars, and military history, rendered him a most acceptable companion. He knew the history and achievements of every regiment in the army; of every general and commanding officer. He was known to have been 'out' ...
— The Newcomes • William Makepeace Thackeray
... Woman prepared her morning meal. "Who am I?" had become the obsessing riddle of her life. She was no longer a young woman, being in her fifty-third year. In the eyes of the white man's law, it was required of her to give proof of her membership in the Sioux tribe. The unwritten law of heart prompted her naturally to say, "I am a being. I am Blue-Star Woman. A ...
— American Indian stories • Zitkala-Sa
... those bygone hours in which she had asked herself—'what remains?' Religious faith?—No!—Life was too horrible! Could such things have happened to her in a world ruled by a God?—that was her question, day and night for years. But books, facts, ideas—all the riddle of this various nature—that one might still amuse oneself with a little, till one's own light went out in the same darkness that had already ...
— Eleanor • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... people shall throb and vibrate in pulsations of sublime unity. At present we are only a people in the making, and very few there are calling themselves Americans who have any idea of what America is and means in relation to history. By and by we shall all apprehend the riddle more wisely, and be more worthy of the ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No 4, October, 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... with serious face. The ships were within pistol shot of each other, the men on the English decks all at their guns, the Americans off guard, lounging on the lumber piles. Quick as flash a cannon shot rips across the Chesapeake's bows, followed by a broadside, and another, and yet another, that riddle the American decks to kindling wood before the astonished officers can collect their senses. Six seamen are dead and twenty-three wounded when the Chesapeake strikes her colors to surrender; but the Leopard does not want a captive. ...
— Canada: the Empire of the North - Being the Romantic Story of the New Dominion's Growth from Colony to Kingdom • Agnes C. Laut
... motives of Judas remain an unsolved riddle. The Gospels leave no doubt that money played a part with him. But could a man whom Jesus selected and trusted be actuated by so sordid a motive alone? Was he perhaps embittered because he had staked his ambition on the Galilean Messiah and Jesus failed to act the ...
— The Social Principles of Jesus • Walter Rauschenbusch
... Nay, chide me not, good sir; the world to me A riddle is at best—my heart has had No tutor. From my childhood until now My thoughts have been on simple ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII. No. 3. March 1848 • Various
... way of showing your strength. A Napoleon is ready to be swayed by the woman he loves; he loses nothing by it; but as for such as you, you believe that you are nothing apparently, you do not wish to be ruled.—Five-and-thirty, my dear boy,' she continued, turning to me, 'that is the clue to the riddle.—"No," does he say again?—You know quite well that I am thirty-seven. I am very sorry, but just ask your friends to dine at the Rocher de Cancale. I could have them here, but I will not; they shall not come. And then perhaps my poor little monologue may engrave ...
— A Prince of Bohemia • Honore de Balzac
... against those who slay. Do you know this one who rides at the head, smiling, swinging his sword well and smiling all the time? It is he who said in the mountains that riddle of the end and the beginning—who knew that to the heart of nature we must come, for either the end or the beginning of this, our life. Do you see upon his breast the red rose? I think he rides to battle with the rose, knowing what ...
— The Singing Mouse Stories • Emerson Hough
... the bell sounded and the girls returned to their seats with the riddle still unsolved. Nothing more was seen of the mysterious paper, and Grace came to the conclusion that it had been ...
— Grace Harlowe's Junior Year at High School - Or, Fast Friends in the Sororities • Jessie Graham Flower
... entangle the ground unnecessarily, and keep the mind upon the stretch to remember, when it should only feel. We think this a fault with Mr Fuseli; it often renders him obscure, and involves his style of aphorisms in the mystery of a riddle. ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 54, No. 338, December 1843 • Various
... crib where they won't find me, Though they're crying "Kitty!" all over the house. Hunt for the Slipper! and riddle-my-ree! A cat can keep ...
— Verses for Children - and Songs for Music • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... Greg Holmes, "I'm not going to bother my head, to-night, as to why we came here. I'm going to get a ten hour nap, and in the morning I'll try to solve the riddle for you, Dick, of ...
— The High School Boys in Summer Camp • H. Irving Hancock
... Shrope!" commanded the queen sharply. "Thy wits are addled. Who is there who will read the riddle ...
— In Doublet and Hose - A Story for Girls • Lucy Foster Madison
... the next riddle wasn't of the simple kind—or else I'm even a bigger ass than I endeavour to look! ...
— Simon • J. Storer Clouston
... dispatches were in a complicated cipher which resisted all attempts at solution. The Tribune published samples from time to time, keeping interest alive in the hope that somebody might solve the riddle. Finally two members of the Tribune staff were successful in discovering the key to the cipher in a way that recalls the paper-covered detective story. The newspaper aroused and excited public interest by publishing specimens and eventually ...
— The United States Since The Civil War • Charles Ramsdell Lingley
... come, riddle-me-ree, And tell me what my name may be. I am nearly one hundred and thirty years old, And therefore no chicken, as you may suppose;— Tho' a dwarf in my youth (as my nurses have told), I have, every year since, ...
— The Complete Poems of Sir Thomas Moore • Thomas Moore et al
... he starts to jump at us I ought to try to riddle him, Paul, don't you think?" pleaded the other, as he drew both hammers of his ...
— The Banner Boy Scouts Snowbound - A Tour on Skates and Iceboats • George A. Warren
... his two frames together and continued his life. A letter from him to his friend explaining matters crossed a letter from the friend, in which he told how he also had been aware of his presence. The incident is narrated in detail in Mr. Funk's "Psychic Riddle." ...
— The Vital Message • Arthur Conan Doyle
... the world? 'With whom took He counsel? and who instructed Him, and taught Him?' The character and work of Christ, compared with the circumstances of His origin and environment, are an insoluble riddle, except on one supposition—that He was the word and power ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Mark • Alexander Maclaren
... a serious light; so, if any of the following anecdotes seem to treat of Umbrellas in too mocking or frivolous a vein, it is the fault of the bad taste of the British public, not ours, who have merely compiled. However, we may commence with a very neat little French riddle. ...
— Umbrellas and their History • William Sangster
... to riddle the upper wall and the door with bullets. Several times they attempted a rush, but were unable to withstand the heavy magazine fire which met them, when within twenty yards of the house. Twice they attempted to pile faggots at the side of the door, but the defence was so strong ...
— Through Three Campaigns - A Story of Chitral, Tirah and Ashanti • G. A. Henty
... sir, what your errand is. Noel has sent you here to scold me. He forbade my going to his house, but I couldn't help it. It's annoying to have a puzzle for a lover, a man whom one knows nothing whatever about, a riddle in a black coat and a white cravat, a ...
— The Widow Lerouge - The Lerouge Case • Emile Gaboriau
... been asleep: her thoughts were too busy, her brain too much tormented with trying to find some plausible answer to the riddle which agitated her: "Who had planned this abominable robbery? Was it indeed Victor de Marmont himself? or had a greater, a mightier mind than his discovered the secret of this swift journey to Paris and ordered the ...
— The Bronze Eagle - A Story of the Hundred Days • Emmuska Orczy, Baroness Orczy
... princess is said to have visited Solomon, "to prove him with hard questions," by which have generally been understood enigmatical puzzles. Some of these are to be found in sacred writ, of which the riddle which Samson proposed to the young men of Timnath, is a very ancient and curious specimen. It appears from the writings of the ancients, that the Greeks and all the Eastern nations, were singularly attached to enigmas. Plutarch, in his Feast of the Seven Sages, introduces ...
— Female Scripture Biographies, Vol. I • Francis Augustus Cox
... when what thou sayest would have been as a riddle to me, and I would have said: Here are we merry, though we be few; and if ye lack more company, let me ride to the Tofts and come back with a half score of lads and lasses, and thus let us eke our mirth; and maybe they will tell us whitherward to ride. But ...
— Child Christopher • William Morris
... commoner, and you are a famed magistrate; if you are no more knowing than I, you have no right to fine me at all. Now I stand with one foot on one side my threshold and the other foot on the other side; tell me whether I mean to go in or come out. If you cannot guess my riddle, you should not ...
— Childhood's Favorites and Fairy Stories - The Young Folks Treasury, Volume 1 • Various
... might be aware of a gathering storm, though the brain received as yet no clear message. She felt, struggling with that diffused kindness and young vanity, something like discomfort and fear. So her mood was complex enough, unharmonized, parted between opposing currents. She was a riddle to herself. ...
— Foes • Mary Johnston
... inured to slavish obedience, confirmed in him the faith that for his "I wish" there were no limits. At present his vanity, too, was wounded painfully. There was, besides, in Lygia's opposition and resistance, and in her flight itself, which was to him incomprehensible, a kind of riddle. In trying to solve this riddle he racked his head terribly. He felt that Acte had told the truth, and that Lygia was not indifferent. But if this were true, why had she preferred wandering and misery to his love, his tenderness, and a residence in his splendid mansion? To this ...
— Quo Vadis - A Narrative of the Time of Nero • Henryk Sienkiewicz
... brace,' said bold Jim, 'and they 're spent, And I won't load again for a make-believe rent.' 'Then,' said Ephraim—producing his pistols—'just give My five hundred pounds back—or, as sure as you live, I'll make of your body a riddle or sieve.' Heigho! yea thee and ...
— Handy Andy, Vol. 2 - A Tale of Irish Life • Samuel Lover
... simple one, your excellency. I shall cause my niece, the Countess von Truchsess, who is not merely lady of honor, but also reader to the queen, to read to her majesty the last numbers of the Berlin Telegraph, which I have just received. This seems like a riddle, but it is not. That journal contains charges against the queen, which, it appears to me, render it impossible for her to declare so loudly and publicly in favor of a continued alliance with the Russian emperor. Her majesty, therefore, must be informed of the contents of ...
— Napoleon and the Queen of Prussia • L. Muhlbach
... letters of each line, read collectively, form a name, word, or sentence. The word comes from the Greek akros, extreme, and stichos, order or line. The acrostic was formerly in vogue for valentine and love verses. When employed as a riddle it is ...
— Enquire Within Upon Everything - The Great Victorian Domestic Standby • Anonymous
... a care; Labour not to be justify'd too fast: Hear all, and then let justice hold the scale. What follow'd was the riddle that confounds me. Through a close lane, as I pursu'd my journey, And meditating on the last night's vision, I spy'd a wrinkled hag, with age grown double, Picking dry sticks, and mumbling to herself; ...
— The Orphan - or, The Unhappy Marriage • Thomas Otway
... "Forty years ago Ah was laying by a pool just as Ah seen ye this morning, looking and trying hard to read the riddle of the spring Peeper. Ah lay there all day, aye, and mony anither day, yes, it was nigh onto three years before Ah found it oot. Ah'll be glad to save ye seeking as long as Ah did, if that's yer mind. Ah'll show ye ...
— Two Little Savages • Ernest Thompson Seton
... said this, he of course could have no idea how near he was hewing to the truth. That walk was fated to have a very considerable influence on the course of events, and also upon the solving of the riddle; but ...
— The Chums of Scranton High - Hugh Morgan's Uphill Fight • Donald Ferguson
... that if a secret is to be kept at all, it must be worth the keeping; if a riddle is propounded, its answer must be pleasing and ingenious, or the audience will resent having been led to cudgel its brains for nothing. This is simply a part of the larger principle, before insisted on, that when a reasonable expectation is aroused, it can ...
— Play-Making - A Manual of Craftsmanship • William Archer
... again, and then I had already determined to meet the request he was not bold to ask. I believed, equally with the physician, from the conduct and expressions of young Harrington, that the riddle of his present condition waited for explanation in the village, whose name seemed like a load upon his heart, and constituted the whole of his discourse since he had arrived amongst us. It was there he yearned to be. It was necessary only to mention the word to throw ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - April 1843 • Various
... mistake!" cried the prince, who was tired and a little cross, and very thirsty; "there is some mistake! The princess's birthday will be the day after to-morrow, the date for which we were invited. Go and find out the meaning of this riddle." ...
— St. Nicholas Magazine for Boys and Girls, Vol. 5, July 1878, No. 9 • Various
... from metaphysical notions to the plain dictates of nature and common sense, I find my understanding strangely enlightened, so that I can now easily comprehend a great many things which before were all mystery and riddle. ...
— Three Dialogues between Hylas and Philonous in Opposition to Sceptics and Atheists • George Berkeley
... wondering where the ravens, which frequented the neighbourhood of the river and its mountainous cliffs, built their nests; but wondering did not help him, and he gave up the riddle, and began, in his pleasant holiday idleness, to look about at other things in the unfrequented wilderness through which the river ran. To trace the raven by following it home seemed too difficult, but it was easy to ...
— The Black Tor - A Tale of the Reign of James the First • George Manville Fenn
... him as guilty of the theft, and the feeling that he could never give them proof to the contrary, had rankled in his heart more, perhaps, than he himself suspected; and now that he had at last discovered a solution to the riddle, and could prove beyond the possibility of a doubt who was the guilty party, he longed to ease his soul by talking the matter over with some one who knew the circumstances of the case. Joe Crouch was ...
— Soldiers of the Queen • Harold Avery
... said in answer to Vincent's look of surprise. "They would riddle us here on horseback in the open. Besides, we must dismount ...
— With Lee in Virginia - A Story of the American Civil War • G. A. Henty
... know," said the physician nodding, "but our ways run side by side without ever touching, and our final goal is the reading of a riddle, of which there are many solutions. You believe yourself to have found the right one, and ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... moment, and before the lovely presence confronting him could fully note the depth of his quick distress a wave of self-condemnation brought what seemed to him the answer of the riddle: that this was rightly she, the same angelic incarnation of wisdom and rectitude, as of gentleness and beauty, to whom in yesterday's sunset hour of surprise and ecstatic yearning he had implied things so contrary to their ...
— John March, Southerner • George W. Cable
... and most divine of poets, was unaware of the impossibility of knowing a thing badly: for it was no less a person than he who said of Margites that 'he knew many things, but knew them all badly.' The solution of the riddle is this, I imagine:—By 'badly' Homer meant 'bad' and 'knew' stands for 'to know.' Put the words together;—the metre will suffer, but the poet's meaning is clear;—'Margites knew all these things, but it was bad for him to know them.' And, obviously, if it was ...
— Alcibiades II • An Imitator of Plato
... all men lies sleeping the love of order. How to achieve order out of our strange jumble of forms, out of democracies and monarchies, dreams and endeavours is the riddle of the Universe and the thing that in the artist is called the passion for form and for which he also will laugh in the face of death is in all men. By grasping that fact Caesar, Alexander, Napoleon and our own Grant have made heroes of the dullest clods that walk and not a man of all the thousands ...
— Marching Men • Sherwood Anderson
... acquaintance at Belfast, a town in Maine, two hundred miles distant from Salem. After poring over it in vain, he handed it to his son, Nathaniel Phippen Knapp, a young lawyer; to him also the letter was an inexplicable riddle. The receiving of such a threatening letter, at a time when so many felt insecure, and were apprehensive of danger, demanded their attention. Captain Knapp and his son Phippen, therefore, concluded to ride to Wenham, seven miles distant, and show the letter to Captain Knapp's other ...
— The Great Speeches and Orations of Daniel Webster • Daniel Webster
... attributes of beauty, wit, and talent. They exist: that is enough; that is their genius. Whether they control, or are at the mercy of, those secret forces; whether they have in fact learnt, but may not speak, the true answer to the eternal Why; whether they are not perhaps a riddle even to their own simple selves: these are points which ...
— Tales of the Five Towns • Arnold Bennett
... of those who had now no alternative but to be consumed in the flames or to surrender themselves to the merciless foe. The bullets were still rattling against the house, and fifteen hundred warriors were greedily watching to riddle with balls any one who should attempt to escape. The flames were crackling and roaring around the besieged, and their only alternative was to perish in the fire, or to go out and meet the bullet and the tomahawk of the savage. When the first forks of flame touched ...
— King Philip - Makers of History • John S. C. (John Stevens Cabot) Abbott
... this island Timar found health and rest. It became his home, and for the summer months every year he would slip away from Komorn, and no one, not even Timea, guessed his secret. When he returned Timea's cold white face was still an unsolved riddle to her husband. She would greet him kindly, but never was there any token that she loved him. Timar's ever-increasing business operations were excuse for his long absences, but all the same the double life he was leading ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Volume V. • Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton, Eds.
... not be explained are facts. So, use 'em. A riddle is proof there is a key to it. Nor is it a riddle when you've got the key. Life is as simple as ...
— King—of the Khyber Rifles • Talbot Mundy
... and illiberal on every subject are usually those who know nothing about it; but he could not approve of his selfishness, cold-blooded calculations, and least of all of the manner in which he forgot his "white gifts," to adopt those that were purely "red." On the other hand, Pathfinder was a riddle to Captain Sanglier. The latter could not comprehend the other's motives; he had often heard of his disinterestedness, justice, and truth; and in several instances they had led him into grave errors, on that principle by ...
— The Pathfinder - The Inland Sea • James Fenimore Cooper
... lie in the Turkish-looking sobriquet of "Mufti;" its vowels and its consonants are full of strict intention I never saw cause why the most charming of essayists hid himself in "Elia," but he may for all that have had pregnant reasons; even so, (but that slender wit could read my riddle,) you shall perhaps find fault with my Mussulman agnomen; still you and I equally participate in this shallow secret, and within so brief a word is concealed the key to unlock the casket that tempts your curiosity: however, the less said of ...
— The Complete Prose Works of Martin Farquhar Tupper • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... delicate they are also pressing questions, questions which, like the mythical riddle of the Sphynx, not to answer means to be destroyed, yet the sentimental difficulties, are accentuated by modern progress, for the public conscience becomes more sensitive as problems become more grave. But as science has prepared the bridge ...
— The Fertility of the Unfit • William Allan Chapple
... a growing, number of beardless, ambitious boys, who advance, head erect, and the heart that Princess Tourandocte of the Mille et un Jours—each one of them fain to be her Prince Calaf. But never a one of them reads the riddle. One by one they drop, some into the trench where failures lie, some into the mire of journalism, some again into the ...
— Lost Illusions • Honore De Balzac
... you, Doctor, but I never shall," she sighed hopelessly, as she endeavoured to make herself comfortable among the tumbled bed-clothes. "I give you up as a difficult riddle." ...
— Banked Fires • E. W. (Ethel Winifred) Savi
... easy riddle," exclaimed Edward; "why, my dear Fergus, what you saw was no more than a Cumberland ...
— Red Cap Tales - Stolen from the Treasure Chest of the Wizard of the North • Samuel Rutherford Crockett
... against which the fiercer devil within me would rise in vain. I have read that the tiger can be awed by the human eye, and you compel me into submission by a spell equally unaccountable. You are a singular man, and it seems to me a riddle, how we could ever have been thus connected; or how—but we will not rip up the past, it is an ugly sight, and the fire is just out. Those stories do not do for the dark. But to return;—were it only for the sake ...
— Eugene Aram, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... for this that he had had them! His love and hers—this had been his shield through all. What he saw in her grave face, her mournful eyes uplifted to his own—this was the solution of the riddle of his life, the reason for his moods of melancholy, the answer to a thousand unspoken prayers. He felt his heart thrill strong and full, felt his blood spring in strong current through his veins, until they strained, until he felt his nerves tingle as he stood, silent, ...
— The Magnificent Adventure - Being the Story of the World's Greatest Exploration and - the Romance of a Very Gallant Gentleman • Emerson Hough
... of Luxor, the mighty pyramids, last of all the sphynx, that fabled creature with the face of a woman, the body of a tigress and the heart of both. In fancy we can see her, crouched on a rock beside the great highway to Thebes, propounding her fatal riddle to the bewildered passers by, till ...
— What Philately Teaches • John N. Luff
... friend whom I have again found—and who has disappeared. Just so,—abruptly—No matter, perhaps, after all! What happens, must happen. In short—and to continue my riddle, behold me feeding these ducks. God knows why! I detest the creatures. The state feeds them badly, Monsieur le Ministre, I tell you: they are famished. Well? well?" she said to a species of Indian duck, bolder than the others, who snapped at the hem of ...
— His Excellency the Minister • Jules Claretie
... His heart seemed gripped by the void; he felt he could no longer live if his faith in the reason of men and their mutual love was destroyed, if he was forced to acknowledge that the Credo of his life and art rested on a mistake, that a dark pessimism was the answer to the riddle of the world. ...
— Clerambault - The Story Of An Independent Spirit During The War • Rolland, Romain
... more limited than that of Tragedy, that it is destructive, disintegrating, negative, concerned with smaller issues and more temporary questions; and that Euripides may reasonably be held a better teacher, a keener, above all a more helpful, reader of the riddle of life, than his mighty assailant. This is how Aristophanes has been described, by ...
— An Introduction to the Study of Browning • Arthur Symons
... to circumscribe our lawful prince, Is wilful treason in the largest sense: And they who once rebel, must certainly Their God, and king, and former oaths defy; If ye allow no mal-administration Could cancel the allegiance of the nation, Let all our learned sons of Levi try, This ecclesiastic riddle to untie; How they could make a step to call the prince, And yet ...
— The True-Born Englishman - A Satire • Daniel Defoe
... wise men in Chiltistan, and they found the riddle easy to read. The melons were the infidels which would be cut to pieces, even as a knife cuts a melon. The grain was ...
— The Broken Road • A. E. W. Mason
... A riddle is it still unto me, this dream; the meaning is hidden in it and encaged, and doth not yet fly above ...
— Thus Spake Zarathustra - A Book for All and None • Friedrich Nietzsche
... like a piece of paper, her dark eyes staring at the ceiling, her awful immobility broken by sudden shivering fits with a loud chattering of teeth in the shadowy silence of the room, the blinds pulled down, Mrs Fyne sitting by patiently, her arms folded, yet inwardly moved by the riddle of that distress of which she could not guess the word, and saying to herself: "That child is too emotional— much too emotional to be ever really sound!" As if anyone not made of stone could be ...
— Chance - A Tale in Two Parts • Joseph Conrad
... sphinx, by posing her. Reference to the story of Oedipus, who answered the riddle of the Sphinx, whereupon she destroyed herself. "Pose" her, i.e., with a problem she ...
— The De Coverley Papers - From 'The Spectator' • Joseph Addison and Others
... solved the riddle," cried Scraps, dancing with glee. "Those fence-boards are made of wood, and if the Woozy stands close to the fence and lets his eyes flash fire, they might set fire to the fence and burn it up. Then he could walk away ...
— The Patchwork Girl of Oz • L. Frank Baum
... at Thebes, and consequently in the best situation for asking and answering such a question; not as the birthplace of Pindar, but as the capital of Boeotia, where the first riddle was propounded and solved. ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 2 • George Gordon Byron
... was the riddle of the Sphinx! Angelique's life, as she had projected it, depended upon the answer ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby
... in, curious to solve the riddle. A door which she had often noticed, but never seen opened, now stood wide open, and the old quadrangular garden, which was James Steadman's particular care, smiled at her in the golden evening light. ...
— Phantom Fortune, A Novel • M. E. Braddon
... feigning to relent, turned back and laughed it into his ear. "It is a love-token! To hold him to the fair promises he made at its giving, and to remind him of her, and to win her a crown, and to do so many strange wonders that no tongue can number them! Are you not ashamed to have failed on so easy a riddle?" ...
— The Ward of King Canute • Ottilie A. Liljencrantz
... hitherto, in that sweet repose of confidence which belongs to contented love, had she even felt the curious desire to disobey,—now, that chamber drew her towards it. Perhaps THERE might be found a somewhat to solve the riddle, to dispel or confirm the doubt: that thought grew and deepened in its intenseness; it fastened on her as with a palpable and irresistible grasp; it seemed to raise her limbs ...
— Zanoni • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... Indian methods of warfare in the American wilderness, he was surprised on the Monongahela by a small force of Indians and French under the Canadian Beaujeu, who were concealed in ravines, from which they were able in perfect security to prevent the advance of the English, and literally riddle them with bullets until they fled in dismay and confusion, leaving behind them a great store of munitions and provisions besides a large sum of money in specie. Braddock died from the wounds he received, and the remnant of his beaten regiments retired ...
— Canada • J. G. Bourinot
... unsteadily regarded her. "Point is, where are you going? All dressed up and somewhere to go! I'll bet you have! I've seen you jazzing about the place when you haven't seen me, Dods. And heard about you! There was a chap with me watching you at the Riddle Club the other night ...
— This Freedom • A. S. M. Hutchinson
... what he can weigh and measure, and looking up to find above himself that which is too high for him to understand, would be an anomaly as lawless and incredible as the wildest fabled monster, the Minotaur or the Chimera, the Titan—the Sphynx itself—nay a more delirious riddle than any that in dreams ...
— Famous Reviews • Editor: R. Brimley Johnson
... is like a pilgrimage Whats his life then that lives in mariage Tis Sisiphus his toyle that with a stone Doth doe what surely for ease must be done His laboures Journey's endles, tis no Riddle Since he's but halfe on's ...
— The Works of Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher - Vol. 2 of 10: Introduction to The Elder Brother • Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher
... said the Ring Tailed Panther. "This is the worst riddle I ever run up ag'inst an' the more I think about it the more ...
— The Texan Star - The Story of a Great Fight for Liberty • Joseph A. Altsheler
... determined to overlook nothing. There was something of value at stake now, and my mind was as busy as my hands and eyes. How did he ever succeed in getting to Billie? I had locked her door, and taken away the key. It was not until I invaded the last room on the main floor that I solved this riddle—the two apartments formed a suite with connecting door between. However he was not there now, and all that remained to search ...
— Love Under Fire • Randall Parrish
... Sir Robert Harley to seize the regalia in 1643, no keys were produced by the Dean, the locks were therefore broken, and new ones were put on by order of the House. The whole question of the Pyx Chapel is one of vast interest, and much of its history is still an insoluble riddle. It is enough to tell our party that the regalia and Crown jewels were kept here for many centuries, and that in later times the pyx, a box containing the standard pieces of gold and silver money, took the place of the ancient treasure. The pyx is now in the Mint, and quite recently ...
— Westminster Abbey • Mrs. A. Murray Smith
... chancellor, vice chancellor, and lord high chancellor, salute these gentlemen from me, and promise each one of them ten thousand Polish florins. Take care, though, to stipulate for some time to be allowed us for the fulfillment of these promises, for where the money is to come from is as yet a riddle to ourselves. Such is my commission, ...
— The Youth of the Great Elector • L. Muhlbach
... do. Yes, there are precedents for that. A riddle would be quite in accordance with Court etiquette. Ask him a riddle if ...
— In Brief Authority • F. Anstey
... and moreover what she herself knows of it is but a part of what it really is. Complete frankness seems to be impossible to her, and complete self-knowledge seems to be forbidden her. If she is a sphinx to us, it is because she is a riddle of doubtful meaning even to herself. She has no need of perfidy, for she is mystery itself. A woman is something fugitive, irrational, indeterminable, illogical, and contradictory. A great deal of forbearance ought to be shown ...
— Amiel's Journal • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... feeding sparingly, saving his wages against the coming bleak winter in his fireless attic in an Edinburgh wynd. He talked to Marcella, dogmatically, prodigiously, unanswerably. On her legends and fairy-tales and poetry he poured contempt. He read the "Riddle of the Universe" and the "Kritic of Pure Reason," orating them to Marcella as they worked together in the harvest field. She did not even understand their terminology. He had a quite unreasoning belief in the stolidly utilitarian of German philosophers ...
— Captivity • M. Leonora Eyles
... for the riddle seemed quite unreadable, and as we had already sat up until long past midnight I begged for my candle, and proposed to defer our conversation until the morning. Jack, declaring that none of the beds in the damp old house was ...
— The Jolliest School of All • Angela Brazil
... why he did so is a question for philosophy in the highest sense of that word. The fact of his having done so is matter of history. Shall I solve my own riddle? ...
— Sanitary and Social Lectures and Essays • Charles Kingsley
... long before expressed the same thought,—"To find no contradiction in the union of old and new; to contemplate the Ancient of Days and all his works with feelings as fresh as if all had then sprung forth at the first creative fiat, this characterizes the mind that feels the riddle of the world, and may help to unravel it. To carry on the feelings of childhood into the powers of manhood; to combine the child's sense of wonder and novelty with the appearances which everyday for perhaps forty ...
— Specimens of the Table Talk of S.T.Coleridge • Coleridge
... mean by that?" inquired Chillingworth; "you are a complete riddle to-night, Jack; what is the matter ...
— Varney the Vampire - Or the Feast of Blood • Thomas Preskett Prest
... consciousness. The explanation may be all wrong in the eyes of omniscience. All one can say is that it is a practical working basis, and is good enough for mundane purposes. But if I am asked if I can solve the riddle of the Universe I can only answer, No. Brunetiere then retorts that science is bankrupt. But this is equivocal. It only means that it cannot meet demands beyond its power ...
— Alfred Russel Wallace: Letters and Reminiscences Vol 2 (of 2) • James Marchant
... about (it did not occur to him that the gossip about his family's great wealth had any thing to do with it). He could not account for it by any process of reasoning, and was simply obliged to accept the fact and give up trying to solve the riddle. He found himself dragged into society and courted, wondered at and envied very much as if he were one of those foreign barbers who flit over here now and then with a self-conferred title of nobility and marry some rich ...
— The Gilded Age, Complete • Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner
... father, while I stared at the Colonel, whose quiet, imperturbable face was for the first time such a riddle to me that I hardly heeded what the elder man said. "You have talked enough, Juliet, and denied enough. I will now speak to Mr. Adams and see what he has to say. Last night my daughter, who, as all the ...
— The Old Stone House and Other Stories • Anna Katharine Green
... society as long as possible, and the children's play was never hushed on his account. Nor did he forget the young visitor. When the elder daughter, to whom my visit was made, was at school, he would care for my entertainment by telling a story, or propounding a riddle, or providing an entertaining book to beguile the time till ...
— The Life and Letters of Elizabeth Prentiss • George L. Prentiss
... but I zaid five poun'. The wager was laid, but the money not down. Zinging right fol de ree, fol de riddle lee While I am a-zinging I'd five ...
— Nic Revel - A White Slave's Adventures in Alligator Land • George Manville Fenn
... nonsense, Hannah. You know nothing about it," cried Lavinia angrily. "Let me manage my own affairs my own way and tell me what mother's doing. You read me a riddle about her ...
— Madame Flirt - A Romance of 'The Beggar's Opera' • Charles E. Pearce
... own, was much concerned, to know why the boar was brought in with a cap upon his head; and therefore having run out my tittle-tattle, I told my interpreter what troubled me: To which he answered, "Your boy can even tell ye what it means, for there's no riddle in it, but all as clear as day. This boar stood the last of yester-nights supper, and dismiss'd by the guests, returns now as a free-man among us." I curst my dulness, and asked him no more questions, ...
— The Satyricon • Petronius Arbiter
... themselves, as CORNEILLE did, with some flat design, which (like an ill riddle) is found out ere it be half proposed; such Plots, we can make every way regular, as easily as they: but whene'er they endeavour to rise up to any quick Turns or Counter-turns of Plot, as some of them have attempted, since ...
— An English Garner - Critical Essays & Literary Fragments • Edited by Professor Arber and Thomas Seccombe
... cab is an interesting sight, particularly a Northbury cab. Shall I make a riddle for you on the spot, Miss Bell? What is the sole surviving curiosity still to be found out of ...
— The Honorable Miss - A Story of an Old-Fashioned Town • L. T. Meade
... brothers," said the man, "and each knows a riddle. If you guess them our whole property shall be yours, but if not, your first child must ...
— Roumanian Fairy Tales • Various
... pity's sake, and in the name of One Whom mayhap ye will know one day. He died that ye should live! Bear that in mind and ponder on it. Mayhap ye will find the solution to that riddle. That such as you should live in eternity, therefore did He die.... When ye have understood this and can explain the value of your lives as compared with His, come and tell it to the praefect of Rome and he will shower on you wealth ...
— "Unto Caesar" • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... Vicar's voice exclaim'd, "You rush at once into the middle;" And little Bess, with accent sweeter, Cried, "O dear Sir! but who is Peter?" Said Stephen,—"'Tis a downright riddle!"] ...
— The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, Vol. II. • William Wordsworth
... rode on a little slower than erst: Upon my soul and my salvation I swear it, that the men yonder be of the worst unfriends to thee that may be in the world. And now, lady, I promise thee that I will unravel thee the riddle, and tell thee the whole truth of these haps, whatsoever may come of my words, when we be in a safer place than this; and meantime I beseech thee to trust in me thus far, as to believe that I am leading thee ...
— The Water of the Wondrous Isles • William Morris
... drawn, pleading face long and earnestly. No longer was I mystified. I remembered her talk with me a couple of days before, and I read her riddle. ...
— The Red Planet • William J. Locke
... my faith, that spoils all the former, for these farthingales take up all the room now-a-days; 'tis not a woman, questionless. Shall I be put down with a riddle? Sirrah Heuresis, search the corners of your conceit, and find ...
— A Select Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. IX • Various
... Tupper, and Trautmann. Wyatt (Boston, 1912, Belles Lettres edition) used as a basis for these translations. His numbering is always one lower than the other editions, since he rejects one riddle. ...
— Old English Poems - Translated into the Original Meter Together with Short Selections from Old English Prose • Various
... wildly and even weakly, and he constantly looked away at the railway line, almost as if he feared the train more than the pointed steel. Syme, on the other hand, fought fiercely but still carefully, in an intellectual fury, eager to solve the riddle of his own bloodless sword. For this purpose, he aimed less at the Marquis's body, and more at his throat and head. A minute and a half afterwards he felt his point enter the man's neck below the jaw. It came out clean. Half mad, he thrust again, and made what should have ...
— The Man Who Was Thursday - A Nightmare • G. K. Chesterton
... which puzzled myself, and I sought in my brain a key to that riddle almost as sedulously as Madame had sought a guide to useful knowledge in my toilet drawers. How was it that Dr. John, if he had not been accessory to the dropping of that casket into the garden, should have known that it was dropped, and appeared so promptly ...
— Villette • Charlotte Bronte
... Who knows? the mystery may have some quite simple solution. I saw two children, attired like little princes, taken from their mother and consigned to other care; and a fortnight afterwards, one of them barefooted and like a beggar. Who will read this riddle of The ...
— Roundabout Papers • William Makepeace Thackeray
... Zeus had a mind to destroy them, but at last resolved to inflict on them a punishment worse than death. He sent Hermes to one of the chief cities with a scroll on which a few magic letters were written, and the wise men declared they contained a riddle. Its solution would bring immortal happiness. The whole human race, neglecting all ordinary pursuits, applied itself ceaselessly to the solution of the mystery. Professors were appointed to lecture on it, it was attacked on all sides by induction, deduction, and by flights of ...
— More Pages from a Journal • Mark Rutherford
... larger Occidental comprehension, its commonest superstitions, however condemned at Tokyo have rarest value as fragments of the unwritten literature of its hopes, its fears, its experience with right and wrong—its primitive efforts to find solutions for the riddle of the Unseen flow much the lighter and kindlier superstitions of the people add to the charm of Japanese life can, indeed, be understood only by one who has long resided in the interior. A few of their beliefs are sinister—such as that in demon-foxes, which public ...
— Glimpses of an Unfamiliar Japan - First Series • Lafcadio Hearn
... and the answer, a big one, to this great riddle will come," cried the captain. "Can't you see, man? the lads are busy there getting ready for your friend to speak. Another moment or two and you will hear what he says—that Don Ramon is President of this Republic, and his seat in the ...
— Fitz the Filibuster • George Manville Fenn
... I did, on my own account, when I came back, was to take a night-walk to Norwood, and, like the subject of a venerable riddle of my childhood, to go 'round and round the house, without ever touching the house', thinking about Dora. I believe the theme of this incomprehensible conundrum was the moon. No matter what it was, I, the moon-struck slave of Dora, perambulated ...
— David Copperfield • Charles Dickens
... Rapally—I hope I don't understand you; it's not possible; you would not humiliate me. Come, come, it's a riddle, and I am too stupid to solve it. I give it up. Don't tantalise me any ...
— Celebrated Crimes, Complete • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... the brass nail. The drawers contain diamonds, probably, or some closely folded document making you the heir to a vast estate. As a matter of fact, I don't know what they contained; the surprise of the drawers themselves was enough for me. I need not add that I did not guess the riddle myself; but nothing that I can call to mind impressed me more than when, one day, my father solved it for me with his little brass wand. At intervals, afterwards, I was allowed to work the miracle myself, always with the same thrill of mysterious delight. The desk was human to me; ...
— Hawthorne and His Circle • Julian Hawthorne
... do—I know a lot about 'em. I was one myself once, though not long—not so long as my clothes. They were very long, I recollect, and always in my way when I wanted to kick. Why do babies have such yards of unnecessary clothing? It is not a riddle. I really want to know. I never could understand it. Is it that the parents are ashamed of the size of the child and wish to make believe that it is longer than it actually is? I asked a nurse once why ...
— Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow • Jerome K. Jerome
... that, which if it be not, It were a shame for modest lips to speak it, And silly doves are better mates than we? And yet our love is Jesus' due,—and all things Which share with Him divided empery Are snares and idols—'To love, to cherish, and to obey!' . . . . . O deadly riddle! Rent and twofold life! O cruel troth! To keep thee or to break thee Alike seems sin! O thou ...
— The Saint's Tragedy • Charles Kingsley
... goes with the manse," said Robert. "His case is a paradox. He is always marrying, and yet never is married. Quite a riddle isn't it?" ...
— Hester's Counterpart - A Story of Boarding School Life • Jean K. Baird
... Earth new strength, Fresh from his fall, and fiercer grapple joyn'd, Throttl'd at length in the Air, expir'd and fell; So after many a foil the Tempter proud, Renewing fresh assaults, amidst his pride 570 Fell whence he stood to see his Victor fall. And as that Theban Monster that propos'd Her riddle, and him, who solv'd it not, devour'd; That once found out and solv'd, for grief and spight Cast her self headlong from th' Ismenian steep, So strook with dread and anguish fell the Fiend, And to his crew, that sat consulting, brought Joyless triumphals of his ...
— The Poetical Works of John Milton • John Milton
... the Chevalier. Here was a man to explain the captain's riddle. "Will you announce to his Eminence that I have returned from Rome, and also explain why you are looking at me with such bulging eyes? Am I a ghost?" The Chevalier, being rich, was one of the few who were never overawed by the grandeur of Mazarin's ...
— The Grey Cloak • Harold MacGrath
... since it regards the whole of nature as one, and sees only efficient causes at work in it. Dualism, on the contrary, holds that nature and spirit, matter and force, the world and God, inorganic and organic nature, are separate and independent existences. Cf. The Riddle of the Universe chapter 12.) At this point the science of human evolution has a direct and profound bearing on the foundations of philosophy. Modern anthropology has, by its astounding discoveries during the second half of the nineteenth century, ...
— The Evolution of Man, V.1. • Ernst Haeckel
... were peopled with prospectors, but one by one they dropped away. The chief constable was loath to leave the riddle unsolved; he had the instinct of the sleuth-hound on the scent of blood. He had been a pursuer of bad works amongst the convicts for a long time, both in Van Diemen's Land and in Victoria, and had helped to bring many men to the gallows ...
— The Book of the Bush • George Dunderdale
... Bible is not a riddle, neither inconsistent with itself; but if you take off one leg of a pair of compasses, the measuring power ...
— Queechy, Volume II • Elizabeth Wetherell
... gave vent to his merriment, which by no means relieved me. "Shall I give you some good advice?" continued Gulab-Sing, changing his tone for a more serious one. "Don't trouble your head with such vain speculations. The day when this riddle yields its solution, the Rajput Sphinx will not seek destruction in the waves of the sea; but, believe me, it won't bring any profit to the Russian Oedipus either. You already know every detail you ever will learn. So leave the ...
— From the Caves and Jungles of Hindostan • Helena Pretrovna Blavatsky
... when the payment that landlords demand Was a source of continual woe, When the tenant preferred to adhere to his land, And the agent preferred him to go: When their claims to adjust and the balance to strike Was a riddle to baffle the Sphinx,— But they're reconciled now, by resolving alike That they never ...
— Lyra Frivola • A. D. Godley
... far as a rational explanation of the universe is covered, although it does not offer an explanation of the "ultimate," or "the riddle of the universe," does insist that any view held be one that shall be based on truth and conformity to reality. It further maintains that if a view be propagated it should be held in the same position that any scientific proposition ...
— The Necessity of Atheism • Dr. D.M. Brooks
... the air was hazy with multitudes of floating frost particles, and the tramp through the forest speedily brought the roses back to her cheeks. Bill carried the bundle of linen on his back, and trudged steadily through the woods. But the riddle of his destination was soon read to her, for a two-mile walk brought them out on the shore of a fair-sized lake, on the farther side of which loomed the conical ...
— North of Fifty-Three • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... "riddles," betwixt two open doors. On the Bishop making his appearance, the honest man ceased his winnowing operations, and in the gladness of his heart stepped briskly forward to welcome his pastor; but in his haste he trod upon the rim of the riddle, which rebounded with great force against one of his shins. The accident made him suddenly pull up; and, instead of completing the reception, he stood vigorously rubbing the injured limb; and, not daring in such a venerable presence to give vent to the ...
— Reminiscences of Scottish Life and Character • Edward Bannerman Ramsay
... hangs over this story. Perhaps some German of the twenty-first century—some future Giffard, or who not—will put his wits to work to solve the riddle. In very sooth il ne vaut pas la chandelle. A quarrel did take place between George the Prince and George the Less, but of its causes no living mortal is cognizant: we can only give the received versions. ...
— The Wits and Beaux of Society - Volume 2 • Grace & Philip Wharton
... My interviewing days are over. I believe if I keep on getting better at the rate I've been going the last week, I shall be able to write a play this summer, besides doing my work for the Abstract. If I could do that, and it succeeded, the riddle would ...
— The Quality of Mercy • W. D. Howells
... trifle too little, I grant you, for a gentleman. So it is in measure with us all I never saw the horse I would not mount or the wall within reason I would not take, but I cannot put my foot in a little boat and feel it rising on the sea without a tremble at the heart. That is how I read the riddle." ...
— Graham of Claverhouse • Ian Maclaren
... answered them, that their imagination had deceived them. A feeling of extraordinary elation took the place of my anger as I sat outside the window and watched these four people—for the old lady came in, glancing suspiciously about her like a cat, trying to understand the riddle of my behaviour. ...
— The Invisible Man • H. G. Wells
... professional men, of minor officials, clerks, shopkeepers, our roads leading through the workaday world. Yet quite half our time was taken up in studies utterly useless to us. How I hated them, these youth-tormenting Shades. Homer! how I wished the fishermen had asked him that absurd riddle earlier. Horace! why could not that shipwreck have succeeded: it would have in the case of any ...
— Paul Kelver • Jerome Klapka, AKA Jerome K. Jerome
... work to exert the energies of his mind, and, when they arrived at a guess, they noted it down on paper; after which every individual member of the family made a choice of some object, and composed a riddle, which was transcribed in a large round hand, and affixed on the lantern. This done, the eunuch took his departure, and when evening drew near, he came out and delivered the commands of the imperial consort. "The conundrum," he said, "written ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book I • Cao Xueqin
... some dreamers have sought to interpret as inherited remembrances,—recollections of pre-existence.... Vainly you ask yourself:—"Whose voice?—whose face?" It is neither young nor old, the Face: it has a vapoury indefinableness that leaves it a riddle;—its diaphaneity reveals no particular tint;—perhaps you may not even be quite sure whether it has a beard. But its expression is always gracious, passionless, smiling—like the smiling of unknown friends in dreams, with infinite ...
— Masterpieces of Mystery In Four Volumes - Mystic-Humorous Stories • Various
... bedroom, and question her minutely about her ways and ideas; and she would look at her silently for a minute or two together; and then suddenly laugh and kiss her—Isabel's transparency was almost as great a riddle to her as her own obscurity to Isabel. And sometimes she would throw herself on Isabel's bed, and lie there with her arms behind her head, to the deplorable ruin of her ruff; with her buckled feet twitching and tapping; and go on and on talking like a running ...
— By What Authority? • Robert Hugh Benson
... the Princess, the Caliph appeared deep in thought. "If everything does not deceive me," he said, "there is a secret connection between our fates; but where can I find the key to this riddle?" ...
— Tales of Wonder Every Child Should Know • Various
... was organized October 12, 1868, with Mr. John M. Langston[519] as professor and dean. In December of the same year, A. G. Riddle was associated with him on the faculty and the school began actual instruction on January 6, 1869.[520] During the years of the financial difficulties of the University, however, the Law School passed through a distressing experience. ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 3, 1918 • Various
... drake A farmer went trotting, upon his gray mare A hill full, a hole full A little boy went into a barn A little cock-sparrow sat on a green tree A little old man of Derby A man went a-hunting at Reigate A riddle, a riddle, as I suppose A robin and a robin's son Around the green gravel the grass grows green As I walked by myself As I was going along, along As I was going to Derby all on a market-day As I was going to St. Ives As I was going to sell my eggs As ...
— The Real Mother Goose • (Illustrated by Blanche Fisher Wright)
... I always wished I could be like my uncle. I remember hearing mamma read a bit of one of the letters of condolence which said 'His was one of the most beautiful lives I have ever known,' and I never forgot it. It stayed in my mind like a riddle, till I gradually found out that the beauty was in the good ...
— Magnum Bonum • Charlotte M. Yonge
... Exoniensis," some of which continue to puzzle the readers of our day, are also considered by some as his: one of the riddles is said to contain a charade on his name, but there are doubts; ample discussions have taken place, and authorities disagree: "The eighty-sixth riddle, which concerns a wolf and a sheep, was related," said Dietrich, "to Cynewulf;" but Professor Morley considers that this same riddle "means the overcoming of the Devil by the hand of God." Stopford Brooke, "Early English Literature," chap. xxii. Many of those riddles ...
— A Literary History of the English People - From the Origins to the Renaissance • Jean Jules Jusserand
... judiciary (one of the effects of the resolution was entirely to change the coloring of all testimony throughout the vast Republic of Leaplow) made his report on the subject-matter of the resolution. This person was a Tangent, who had a besetting wish to become a Riddle, although the leaning of our house was decidedly Horizontal; and, as a matter of course, he took the Riddle side of this question. The report, itself, required seven hours in the reading, commencing with the subject at the epocha of the celebrated ...
— The Monikins • J. Fenimore Cooper
... filled with light, seems almost resembled be an ethereal existence. The dark-blue eyes had an expression of soul and feeling which attracted even the simple domestics at the hall. The physician assured them that her chest was sound, and that her malady was to him a riddle. A beautiful summer, he thought, would work beneficially ...
— O. T. - A Danish Romance • Hans Christian Andersen
... the fiddles this afternoon, and invite me to sup there!—Now, cannot I forbear, an I should be damned, tho' I have scap'd a scouring so lately for it. Yet I love Florimel better than both of them together; there's the riddle on't: But only for the sweet sake of variety.—[Aside.] Well, we must all sin, and we must all repent, and ...
— The Works of John Dryden, Vol. II • Edited by Walter Scott
... you are! Even though one catches nothing, it's nice. That's the best thing about every part of sport, that one has to do with nature. How exquisite this steely water is!" said Sergey Ivanovitch. "These riverside banks always remind me of the riddle—do you know it? 'The grass says to the water: ...
— Anna Karenina • Leo Tolstoy
... into a merely forensic form. Considerations of this kind may indeed enter in, but to suppose that they can be justly estimated by themselves alone is an error. And it is still more an error to suppose that the riddle of the universe, or rather that part of the riddle which to us is most important, the religious nature of man and, the objective facts and relations that correspond to it, can all be reduced to some four or five simple propositions which admit of being proved ...
— The Gospels in the Second Century - An Examination of the Critical Part of a Work - Entitled 'Supernatural Religion' • William Sanday
... cycle of wet years, but that as soon as the cycle of dry years strikes the country dry-farming will vanish as a dismal failure. Then, again, the theory is proposed that the climate is permanently changing toward wetness or dryness and the past has no meaning in reading the riddle of the future. It is doubtless true that no man may safely predict the weather for future generations; yet, so far as human knowledge goes, there is no perceptible average change in the climate from period to period within historical ...
— Dry-Farming • John A. Widtsoe
... known of his boyhood. He was supposed to have been brought to the district by Highlanders who were in the habit of bringing to Crieff cartloads of split pine from Rannoch Forest, which they sold to riddle-makers to make riddle rims. During one of those visits the child is supposed to have been left. He was called Alastair, owing to his supposed Highland descent, and Bane, because of his white hair. As he grew up to manhood he showed symptoms of a wandering disposition, ...
— Chronicles of Strathearn • Various
... had before only dimly suspected, that the poet, the moralist, the priest, the philosopher, and even the man of science, were all in reality engaged in the same task—penetrating the vast and bewildering riddle of the world. In Plato he found the philosophical method suffused by a burning poetical imagination; and he thought that Plato solved far more metaphysical riddles by a species of swift intuition than ever could ...
— Beside Still Waters • Arthur Christopher Benson
... "in my own country, far, far away, I have heard much about your power and glory, but much more about your wisdom. Men have told me that there is no riddle so cunning that you can not ...
— Fifty Famous People • James Baldwin
... brings no kind of stigma - Dance we to another tune! String the lyre and fill the cup, Lest on sorrow we should sup; Hop and skip to Fancy's fiddle, Hands across and down the middle - Life's perhaps the only riddle That ...
— Songs of a Savoyard • W. S. Gilbert
... geometrical proposition or unravelled a metaphysical crux. The sense of victory ends very soon after the sense of the difficulty overcome; the sense of illumination ends with the acquisition of a piece of information; and we pass on to some new obstacle and some new riddle. But it is different in the case of what we call Beautiful. Beautiful means satisfactory for contemplation, i.e. for reiterated perception; and the very essence of contemplative satisfaction is its desire for ...
— The Beautiful - An Introduction to Psychological Aesthetics • Vernon Lee
... pious father. His son's secret nature was an enigma to him. In vain he endeavored to pierce the meaning of the youth's eyes, but their gaze was enigmatic and veiled. Racah had ever exhibited a certain aloofness of character, and as he grew older this trait became intensified; the riddle of his life had forced itself upon him, and he vainly wrestled with it. Music drew him as iron filings to the magnet, or as the tentacles of an octopus carry to its parrot-shaped beak its victim. It was monstrous, he abhorred it, but ...
— Melomaniacs • James Huneker
... country were quite at a loss, but to-day the riddle is solved. What was happening was that the High Seas Fleet ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol 150, February 9, 1916 • Various
... soaring to the vicious affectation of poetry: their poetry is sinking below the flatness and insipidity of prose. The tragic, epic, and lyric muses, were silent and inglorious: the bards of Constantinople seldom rose above a riddle or epigram, a panegyric or tale; they forgot even the rules of prosody; and with the melody of Homer yet sounding in their ears, they confound all measure of feet and syllables in the impotent strains which have received the name of political or ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 5 • Edward Gibbon
... an hour or so and then woke up to the contemplation of Miriam's hunched back and the riddle of life, and this bright attractive idea of ending for ever and ever and ever all the things that were locking him in, this bright idea that shone like a baleful star above all the reek ...
— The History of Mr. Polly • H. G. Wells
... strong favorite wid him, that I know, for we wor talkin' about you. In the meantime I wish to goodness we had a good scud o' cash among us, an' we safe an' snug in America! Now shake hands an' good bye—an' mark me—if you dhrame of America an' a long purse any o' these nights, come to me an' I'll riddle your ...
— The Black Prophet: A Tale Of Irish Famine • William Carleton
... living thing, And all things are thy script and chart, Who rid'st upon the eagle's wing, And yearnest in the human heart; O Riddle with a single clue, Love, deathless, protean, secure, The ever old, the ever new, ...
— Alcyone • Archibald Lampman
... Woman, is perennially urged by the revealing forces that breathe through human destiny. Two days after the death of Gertrude Marvell, the immediate cause on which she and her fellows had wrought such havoc, went down in Parliament to long and bitter eclipse. But the end is not yet. And for that riddle of the Sphinx to which Gertrude and her fellows gave the answer of a futile violence, generations more patient and more wise, will yet find the ...
— Delia Blanchflower • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... should so long have announced my lord Egremont to you for a master, without his announcing himself to you.—it was no fault of mine; every thing here is a riddle or an absurdity. Instead of coming forth secretary of state, he went out of town, declaring he knew nothing of the matter. On that, it was affirmed that he had refused the seals. The truth is, they have never been offered to ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole, Volume 2 • Horace Walpole
... received in return? She loved me—that was certain. But what kind of love was this, which had no respect to persons? I knew I could claim no exclusive right to the least corner of her heart, and yet she said: "All my heart is yours. What more can you ask?" I was not able to solve the riddle of her mysterious nature, but as I heard her tuneful voice and watched her beautiful face as she talked with Antonia, the very picture of innocent happiness, I realized with great intensity that I loved ...
— Daybreak: A Romance of an Old World • James Cowan
... the Rises were peopled with prospectors, but one by one they dropped away. The chief constable was loath to leave the riddle unsolved; he had the instinct of the sleuth-hound on the scent of blood. He had been a pursuer of bad works amongst the convicts for a long time, both in Van Diemen's Land and in Victoria, and had helped to bring many men to the gallows or the chain-gang. He had once been shot in the ...
— The Book of the Bush • George Dunderdale
... to bed, it is late. She is a bit of a tease, John. Mark Rivers says she is now just one half of the riddle ...
— Westways • S. Weir Mitchell
... stranger than Another woman to another man; But parted—and you're as a ship unknown That to poor castaways at dawn is shown As strange as dawn, so strange they fear a trick Of eyes long-vexed and hope with falseness sick. Parted, and like the riddle of a dream, Dark with rich promise, does your beauty seem. I wonder at your patience, stirless peace, Your subtle pride, mute pity's quick release. Then are you strange to me and sweet as light Or dew; as strange and dark as starless night. Then let this restless parting be forgiven: ...
— Poems New and Old • John Freeman
... was ever bound to be; Since grim, eternal laws our Being bind; And both the riddle and the answer find, And both the carnage and the calm decree; Since plain within the Book of Destiny Is written all the journey of mankind Inexorably to the end; since blind And mortal puppets playing ...
— Rhymes of a Red Cross Man • Robert W. Service
... chains near the doors who was about to be taken before Nero, and was bewailing his sad fortune, went up close to him and whispered, "Pray only, good sir, that to-day may pass by, to-morrow you will owe me many thanks." He guessing the meaning of the riddle, and thinking, I take it, "he is a fool who gives up what is in his hand for a remote contingency,"[562] preferred certain to honourable safety. For he informed Nero of what the man had said, and he was immediately arrested, and torture, and fire, and ...
— Plutarch's Morals • Plutarch
... writing of my letter this morning owing to an alarm of illness seizing grandfather. He had been taken with a sudden faintness. Of course we sent for the doctor, but before he arrived the faintness had passed, so he looked wise at us, like a prize riddle which had to be guessed before his next visit, left us his autograph (a wonderful hieroglyphic), and went away. Since then grandfather has been in the hands of a less taciturn practitioner, whom he calls the 'flower of Glenfaba' (that's me), and ...
— The Christian - A Story • Hall Caine
... that I were Up yonder in the glow and whirling smoke, 235 Where the blind million rush impetuously To meet the evil ones; there might I solve Many a riddle that torments me. ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley Volume I • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... are not translatable, being little songs describing the things to be guessed, whose peculiarities the singer acts as he sings—a sort of one-man show, pantomime in miniature, with a riddle running through it. ...
— The Euahlayi Tribe - A Study of Aboriginal Life in Australia • K. Langloh Parker
... possible direction, but he can't prevent the cats from making a most intolerable row on the roofs of the houses, or the dogs from being shot in the hot weather if they run about the streets unmuzzled. Life's a riddle; a most infernally hard riddle to guess, Mr Pecksniff. My own opinions, that like that celebrated conundrum, "Why's a man in jail like a man out of jail?" there's no answer to it. Upon my soul and body, it's the queerest sort of thing altogether—but there's no ...
— Life And Adventures Of Martin Chuzzlewit • Charles Dickens
... romance of reality that was now divulged? and how could we have been so stupid as not to have read it at a glance? These contradictory exclamations, as is usual in such cases, ensued when the riddle was unfolded. It is so easy to be wise when we have learned the wisdom. Yet we cheerfully lost our wager, and would have lost a hundred such, for the sake of hearing a tale so far removed from matter-of-fact; proving also that enduring faith ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 437 - Volume 17, New Series, May 15, 1852 • Various
... material law,—this seems to us to destroy man's dearest faith and hope. This is the teaching of Lucretius, yet on this road he marches with a step so firm and buoyant, an eye so awake to all beauty and grandeur, a spirit so elate, that as we read we catch the energy and elation. The reading of the riddle is this: the religion against which Lucretius made his attack was not the soaring idealism of Plato, nor the inspiring and consolatory faith of Christianity, but an outworn mythology in which this world was ruled by capricious and unworthy despots, ...
— The Chief End of Man • George S. Merriam
... date of the establishment of the Kit-Cat club has never been decided, the consensus of opinion fixes the year somewhere about 1700. More debatable, however, is the question of its peculiar title. The most recent efforts to solve that riddle leave it where ...
— Inns and Taverns of Old London • Henry C. Shelley
... Macquarie was now, to a certain extent, cleared away, but the course and final outlet of the Darling now presented another riddle, which Sturt too ...
— The Explorers of Australia and their Life-work • Ernest Favenc
... there was total stillness, and poor Tulliver's dimly lighted soul had forever ceased to be vexed with the painful riddle ...
— The Mill on the Floss • George Eliot
... he went, but they were the miseries of strangers. He could not forget Irene and the riddle of duty that was hers. He avoided the spot where she was closeted with grief, and worked remote in the glimmer from bonfires ...
— In a Little Town • Rupert Hughes
... even weakly, and he constantly looked away at the railway line, almost as if he feared the train more than the pointed steel. Syme, on the other hand, fought fiercely but still carefully, in an intellectual fury, eager to solve the riddle of his own bloodless sword. For this purpose, he aimed less at the Marquis's body, and more at his throat and head. A minute and a half afterwards he felt his point enter the man's neck below the jaw. It came out clean. Half mad, he thrust again, and made what ...
— The Man Who Was Thursday - A Nightmare • G. K. Chesterton
... intellectual gesture, a spiritual attitude, a temperamental atmosphere. It is a thing which implies a certain definite philosophical mood in regard to the riddle of existence; though, of course, between individual egoists there may be ...
— Suspended Judgments - Essays on Books and Sensations • John Cowper Powys
... shall guess it all too soon; Failure brings no kind of stigma - Dance we to another tune! String the lyre and fill the cup, Lest on sorrow we should sup; Hop and skip to Fancy's fiddle, Hands across and down the middle - Life's perhaps the only riddle That we shrink ...
— Songs of a Savoyard • W. S. Gilbert
... moralists and philosophers did much to help me out of the dilemma; but the riddle which history presented I found solved in the pages of Shakspeare. There the crooked appeared straight; the inaccessible, easy; the incomprehensible, plain. All I sought, I found there; his characters ...
— Characteristics of Women - Moral, Poetical, and Historical • Anna Jameson
... after abandoning chemical means and turning to physics that he had met with success, he said. Cathode rays had finally proved the key to the riddle. ...
— Spawn of the Comet • Harold Thompson Rich
... strangely enough the weak inference was correct, and the well-grounded one fallacious. If you would interpret the riddle of human motives, put no confidence in logic. The principles of logic are founded on the psychology of Anyone. And Anyone is a mechanical waxwork, an intellectual abstraction, a thing without ...
— The Jervaise Comedy • J. D. Beresford
... Worse than a mule that flings and kicks; 'Mong which one cross-grain'd freak she had, As insolent as strange and mad; She could love none, but only such 335 As scorn'd and hated her as much. 'Twas a strange riddle of a lady: Not love, if any lov'd her! Hey dey! So cowards never use their might, But against such as will not fight; 340 So some diseases have been found Only to seize upon the sound. He that gets her by heart, must say her The back way, like a witch's prayer. Mean while the Knight ...
— Hudibras • Samuel Butler
... at school, he produced a comedy, called, Love's Riddle, though it was not published, till he had been some time at Cambridge. This comedy is of the pastoral kind, which requires no acquaintance with the living world, and, therefore, the time at which it was composed adds little to the wonders of ...
— Lives of the Poets, Vol. 1 • Samuel Johnson
... him of death, though the outlines reared higher than the pyramids, and towered up to hide whole groups of stars. Yes, he recognised them in their partial revelation, though he never saw the monstrous host complete. But, one of them, he realised, posing its eternal riddle to the sands, had of old been glimpsed sufficiently to seize its form in stone,—yet poorly seized, as a doll may stand for the dignity of a human being or a child's toy represent an ...
— Four Weird Tales • Algernon Blackwood
... explanation of mysterious phenomena in human relationships. For my own part, I am just as much in the dark as my mother. My father, who was a shrewd man, was always puzzled, and could not read the riddle. He used to say that he never thought George could have "made up" to any young woman, and it was quite clear that Miss Leroy did not either then or afterwards display any violent affection for him. I have heard her ...
— Mark Rutherford's Deliverance • Mark Rutherford
... will intervene ere their hopes will be fulfilled. If their troubles are short, so may be their joys; but long troubles may bring longer happiness. Choose you which you will, my masters—I will read you a riddle; let me hear if you can ...
— The Golden Grasshopper - A story of the days of Sir Thomas Gresham • W.H.G. Kingston
... sent for, and every one of them set to work to exert the energies of his mind, and, when they arrived at a guess, they noted it down on paper; after which every individual member of the family made a choice of some object, and composed a riddle, which was transcribed in a large round hand, and affixed on the lantern. This done, the eunuch took his departure, and when evening drew near, he came out and delivered the commands of the imperial consort. "The conundrum," he said, ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book I • Cao Xueqin
... saw it all; and the proof of it is, that you at once went to work in search of the real motive, the heart,—in fine, the woman at the bottom of the riddle. The proof of it is, that you went and asked everybody,—Anthony, M. de Chandore, M. Seneschal, and myself,—if M. de Boiscoran had not now, or had not had, some love-affair in the country. They all said No, being far from suspecting the truth. I alone, without giving you a ...
— Within an Inch of His Life • Emile Gaboriau
... receive my heartiest congratulations on the good state of your health. Your letter has joyfully surprised me, and, to my greatest delight, has made me feel ashamed of my intrusive anxiety about you. Your organisation is a perfect riddle to me, and I hope that you will always solve that riddle in as satisfactory a manner as this time, when I looked on with real anxiety. Heaven grant that your profession of good health may not be that of ...
— Correspondence of Wagner and Liszt, Volume 2 • Francis Hueffer (translator)
... that poor Paterfamilias looking hopelessly about him, like Quintus Curtius in the riddle, for 'a nice opening for a young man,' is totally ignorant of the opportunities, if not for fame and fortune, at least for competency and comfort, that Literature now offers to a clever lad. He looks round him; he ...
— Some Private Views • James Payn
... that is his by rights, and I'm going to turn my talents to account so as to see that he gets all that's coming to him. What relation could Aleck bear a youngster like Owen but that of grandpa, eh? Why, it promises to be about as good as a play. But I mustn't let on that I've guessed the riddle, for I don't understand why they're at daggers' points—what has Owen done—why did he skip down the river without even his gun? H'm, there's lots to unravel even here, and perhaps I'd better get Chum Owen to confide in me before I ...
— Canoe Mates in Canada - Three Boys Afloat on the Saskatchewan • St. George Rathborne
... the payment that landlords demand Was a source of continual woe, When the tenant preferred to adhere to his land, And the agent preferred him to go: When their claims to adjust and the balance to strike Was a riddle to baffle the Sphinx,— But they're reconciled now, by resolving alike That they never will ...
— Lyra Frivola • A. D. Godley
... I mean to dogmatise upon a subject concerning which all men are equally ignorant, or that I think the Gordian knot of the origin of evil can be disentangled by that or any similar assertions.... That there is a true solution of the riddle, and that in our present state that solution is unattainable by us, are propositions which may be regarded as equally certain: meanwhile, as it is the province of the poet to attach himself to those ideas which exalt and ennoble humanity, let him be permitted to ...
— Adonais • Shelley
... vision in my sleep last night, between sleeping and waking, a figure standing beside me, thin, miserable, sad, and sorrowful; the shadow of night upon his face, the tracks of the tears down his cheeks. His ribs were bending like the bottom of a riddle; his nose thin, that it would go through a cambric needle; his shoulders hard and sharp, that they would cut tobacco; his head dark and bushy like the top of a hill; and there is nothing I can liken his fingers to. His poor bones without any kind of covering; ...
— Poets and Dreamers - Studies and translations from the Irish • Lady Augusta Gregory and Others
... that the Bible is not a riddle, neither inconsistent with itself; but if you take off one leg of a pair of compasses, the ...
— Queechy, Volume II • Elizabeth Wetherell
... a scheme as any," Captain Dillingham declared. "Sometimes if you do not fuss at a riddle it solves itself. Come, sit down and talk to us while Nell gets her hair cut. It may ...
— Carl and the Cotton Gin • Sara Ware Bassett
... the mean time, have not relinquished the inquiry, and try, as they become more closely acquainted with your mode of life and thought, to guess many a riddle, to solve many a problem; indeed, with the assistance of an old liking, and a connection of many years' standing, they find a charm even in the difficulties which present themselves. Yet a little assistance here and there would not be unacceptable, and you cannot well ...
— Autobiography • Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
... company lean upon the weather-rail and peer out into the thick air with an earnestness born of terror. "Surely," says the master to his mate, "I am past the Magdalens, and still far from Anticosti, yet we have breakers; which way can we turn?" The riddle solves itself; for out of the gloom come whitened walls, beautiful but terrible ...
— Voyage of The Paper Canoe • N. H. Bishop
... than an elaborate notion of Gog and Magog: it was as free from interruption as a plan for threading the stars together. And Dorothea had so often had to check her weariness and impatience over this questionable riddle-guessing, as it revealed itself to her instead of the fellowship in high knowledge which was to make life worthier! She could understand well enough now why her husband had come to cling to her, as possibly the only hope left that his labors would ...
— Middlemarch • George Eliot
... He tears open the answer, after two sleepless nights. She simply replies that the young Lady of Lagunitas will be delivered to him on the appointed day. He cannot read this riddle. Is it a surrender in hopes of golden terms? He knows not of Pere ...
— The Little Lady of Lagunitas • Richard Henry Savage
... Lever makes them gay, Miss Lawless and Miss Barlow make them sad. No one denies that sadness is nearer the reality, but it is unreasonable to call Lever insincere. Naturally careless and lighthearted he does not trouble himself with the riddle of the painful world; the distress which touches him most nearly is a distress for debt. But if Lever is not realistic he is natural; he follows the law of his nature as an artist should; he sees life through his own medium; and if books are to be valued as companions, not many of them are ...
— Irish Books and Irish People • Stephen Gwynn
... fall I was sure it had a history; it was the one thing she never explored in her periodical overhaulings. When I grew tired of playing I liked to creep up on it and sit there, picturing out my own fancies concerning it—of which my favourite one was that some day I should solve the riddle and open the chest to find it full of gold and jewels with which I might restore the fortune of the Laurances and all the traditionary splendours ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1902 to 1903 • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... same way the Church cut off the extremities and one-sidedness in empiricism and supernaturalism, in rationalism and mysticism, in optimism and pessimism. All these systems represented the human effort to solve the riddle of our life without taking any notice of the Church and her wisdom. And all failed to become the universally accepted truth, but all of them helped the Church unconsciously to her own orientation and strength. The Church collided with any extreme philosophy. Her wisdom was broad as life, simple ...
— The Agony of the Church (1917) • Nikolaj Velimirovic
... to the invasion was that some week-end guest of the East Cliff Hotel left a copy of "The Riddle of the Sands" in the coffee-room, where von Gottlieb found it; and the fact that Ford attended the Shakespeare Ball. Had neither of these events taken place, the German flag might now be flying over Buckingham Palace. And, then ...
— The Red Cross Girl • Richard Harding Davis
... and as shrewdly as firmly, and have taken no hurt. It remains only to pluck it. For heaven's sake no over-confidence or premature elation; but there is really good hope that Sir Redvers Buller has solved the Riddle of the Tugela—at last. At last! I expect there will be some who will inquire—'Why not "at first"?' All I can answer is this: There is certainly no more capable soldier of high rank in all the army in Natal than Sir Redvers ...
— London to Ladysmith via Pretoria • Winston Spencer Churchill
... has decreed what will happen. Let me tell your worship that for a man to whip himself in cold blood is a hard thing, especially if the stripes fall upon an ill-nourished and worse-fed body. Let my lady Dulcinea have patience, and when she is least expecting it, she will see me made a riddle of with whipping, and 'until death it's all life;' I mean that I have still life in me, and the desire to make good what ...
— Don Quixote • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... plodded on, but did not reach the summit that night, nor did they find any further solution to the riddle of the lost bear skull, which latter Rob left in the trail, intending to pick it up on their return, although Skookie seemed to be averse to this performance; owing, no doubt, to some of his native superstitions. That night they ...
— The Young Alaskans • Emerson Hough
... afraid of her: also because she had glared at him critically, mercilessly, with her great eyes in dark hollows, never smiling kindly, as other people did, but seeming to search for some fault in him. Now, suddenly, he understood this gloomy riddle of ...
— A Soldier of the Legion • C. N. Williamson
... the future. He had magnified her good offices, and had warned her to beware of arousing Von Holzen's anger. Indeed, her use of Percy Roden was at an end, and yet she would not let him go. Cornish was puzzled, and so was Dorothy. Percy Roden was gratified, and read the riddle by the light of his own vanity. Mrs. Vansittart was not, perhaps, the first woman to puzzle her neighbours by refusing to relinquish that which she did not want. She was not the first, perhaps, to nurse a subtle desire to play some part in ...
— Roden's Corner • Henry Seton Merriman
... the red limousine was at the door, and, stepping into it with his two companions, he was whizzed away to Olympia and the first step toward the solution of the riddle. ...
— The Boy Scouts Book of Stories • Various
... appreciative and full, almost overfull, recognition which startled me. For she had understood me—understood me almost better than I had understood myself. It seemed to me that while I had labored to interpret, partially, a psychological riddle, she, coming after, had comprehended its bearings better than I had, though confining herself strictly to my own words and emphasis. The scene ended (and it ended rather suddenly), she dropped her eyes, and moved her hand nervously to and fro over the box she held; her gloves were old and shabby, ...
— Stories by American Authors (Volume 4) • Constance Fenimore Woolson
... "Riddle me, riddlemaree," quoth I, "Is a game that's ill to win, And the day is o'er fair such tasks to try"— Said he, "Ye shall know at the inn." With that he suited his path to mine And we travelled merrily, Till I was ware of the promised sign And the door of an ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 152, January 24, 1917 • Various
... afraid so too; for where there's a priest and a woman, there's always a mystery and a riddle. This I know, that here has been the doctor with a temptation in one hand and an absolution in the other, and Gipsy has sold herself to the devil; I saw the price paid down, my eyes shall take their ...
— The Beaux-Stratagem • George Farquhar
... have been able to discover nothing about either this Plautius or this Hirrius, but it appears that Archelaus wrote a book under the title Bugonia, of which nothing survives. It may be conjectured, however, on the analogy of Samson's riddle to the Philistines, "Out of the eater came forth meat, and out of the strong came forth sweetness," (Judges, XIV, 14), that Plautius meant to imply that some good might be the consequence of the evil Hirrius had done: and that Vaccius ...
— Roman Farm Management - The Treatises Of Cato And Varro • Marcus Porcius Cato
... to send back and bid fifty of the vassals to come up hither at once, with bows and arrows. They can so riddle those bushes that the defenders will be unable to occupy ...
— In Freedom's Cause • G. A. Henty
... of the Macquarie was now, to a certain extent, cleared up, but there still remained another riddle to solve in the course and outlet of the Darling. Sturt, the discoverer of this river, was destined to find the answer to ...
— The History of Australian Exploration from 1788 to 1888 • Ernest Favenc
... you influenced in what you say by your hope that Professor Brierly will help solve the riddle of the Tontine ...
— Death Points a Finger • Will Levinrew
... the public as a riddle which would probably be unintelligible at the time, but which might perhaps find an interpreter after many days, when the hints contained in it should be verified. Since its first appearance commentators have exercised their ingenuity ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XIII • John Lord
... head; The muse deals gently with the dead. James Devlin, where are you old man, Whose fingers o'er the catgut ran? Professor of the art to foil Both "treason, stratagem and spoil," In days which now are but a riddle, When William Murphy played the fiddle So merrily, long, long ago, To trip of "light fantastic toe." Fond were you of the rod and line When sport and profit did combine In other days, when mighty Bass And Pickerel ...
— Recollections of Bytown and Its Old Inhabitants • William Pittman Lett
... but one thought, the wish to read the riddle of her bondage. To accomplish this he was prepared to go to any extreme; if Bannon and his crew came between him and his purpose, so much the worse for them—and, incidentally, so much the better for society. What might befall himself was of ...
— The Lone Wolf - A Melodrama • Louis Joseph Vance
... glowing with her quick ride, and as Odo lifted her from the saddle her loosened hair brushed his face like a kiss. For a moment she seemed like life's answer to the dreary riddle of ...
— The Valley of Decision • Edith Wharton
... his birth! But, then, is it on account of his parents' sinning? Why, then, do the guilty go comparatively free, and the guiltless suffer? Sin, surely, is the only cause of the infliction. So the disciples of old, brought face to face with exactly this same riddle, the same mystery, ask, "Master, who did sin—this man, or his parents, that he was born blind?" "Neither." Another—higher, happier, more glorious reason, Jesus gives: "Neither hath this man sinned, nor his parents: but that ...
— Old Groans and New Songs - Being Meditations on the Book of Ecclesiastes • F. C. Jennings
... train of cars!" cried Daddy Brown, coming into the tent just in time to hear what Bunny said. "Say, is that a riddle?" ...
— Bunny Brown and His Sister Sue in the Big Woods • Laura Lee Hope
... King had competed. But,—oh, I wish I could make head or tail of any of the things that have happened, today! How do you suppose it all started, anyhow, dear?" she asked, turning to her husband for help in the riddle. ...
— Further Adventures of Lad • Albert Payson Terhune
... unfoldment, etc. What is known as "Bhakti Yoga" deals with the Love of the Absolute—God. What is known as "Gnani Yoga" deals with the scientific and intellectual knowing of the great questions regarding Life and what lies back of Life—the Riddle of the Universe. ...
— A Series of Lessons in Gnani Yoga • Yogi Ramacharaka
... strength, Fresh from his fall, and fiercer grapple joyn'd, Throttl'd at length in the Air, expir'd and fell; So after many a foil the Tempter proud, Renewing fresh assaults, amidst his pride 570 Fell whence he stood to see his Victor fall. And as that Theban Monster that propos'd Her riddle, and him, who solv'd it not, devour'd; That once found out and solv'd, for grief and spight Cast her self headlong from th' Ismenian steep, So strook with dread and anguish fell the Fiend, And to his crew, that sat consulting, brought Joyless triumphals of his hop't success, Ruin, and desperation, ...
— The Poetical Works of John Milton • John Milton
... life is like a pilgrimage Whats his life then that lives in mariage Tis Sisiphus his toyle that with a stone Doth doe what surely for ease must be done His laboures Journey's endles, tis no Riddle Since he's but halfe on's way ...
— The Works of Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher - Vol. 2 of 10: Introduction to The Elder Brother • Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher
... back to her. For the first time it struck her painfully that the son whom she idolized so much—whose life and character had been her one study and her one delight ever since the day of his birth—was nevertheless a riddle to her. That the secret of his inner self was as much hidden from her—his mother—as though she had been the merest stranger; that the life she had striven so closely to entwine with her own was ...
— Vera Nevill - Poor Wisdom's Chance • Mrs. H. Lovett Cameron
... everybody who sets himself down to think seriously about the riddle of the Universe there very soon occurs the question whether Materialism may not contain the solution of all difficulties. I think, therefore, our present investigation had better begin with an enquiry whether Materialism can possibly be true. I say 'can be true' rather than 'is true,' because, ...
— Philosophy and Religion - Six Lectures Delivered at Cambridge • Hastings Rashdall
... 1862, he was chosen to succeed Mr. Riddle as Representative of the Eighteenth Congressional District in Congress. The wisdom of the choice was almost immediately made manifest. Judge Spalding had not long occupied his seat in the House ...
— Cleveland Past and Present - Its Representative Men, etc. • Maurice Joblin
... forward—May at last dropt the hedgehog; continuing, however, to pat it with her delicate cat-like paw, cautiously and daintily applied, and caught back suddenly and rapidly after every touch, as if her poor captive had been a red-hot coal. Finding that these pats entirely failed in solving the riddle (for the hedgehog shammed dead, like the lamb the other day, and appeared entirely motionless), she gave him so spirited a nudge with her pretty black nose, that she not only turned him over, but sent him rolling some little way along the turfy path,—an ...
— Our Village • Mary Russell Mitford
... of this enterprise, some twenty-nine of the first citizens of Alexandria—among them Edmund I. Lee, William Herbert, Josiah Watson, Ludwell Lee, Elisha Cullen Dick, Joseph Riddle and Jonah Thompson—agreed with one another to contribute the sum of two hundred dollars each to be laid out and expended for the erection of a theatre upon the aforesaid piece of ground. The subscribers had free tickets of admission ...
— Seaport in Virginia - George Washington's Alexandria • Gay Montague Moore
... Counting 26 days from 1 Manik brings us to 1 Been instead of 1 Men; 26 more to 1 Cauac, a day not found in either column as given in the original. Taking the second column and counting 26 days from 1 Ymix, we reach 1 Manik, instead of 1 Been. This gives us the key to the series and solves the riddle. We must commence with 1 Ymix, then take 1 Manik, then 1 Been, and so on, going ...
— Aids to the Study of the Maya Codices • Cyrus Thomas
... "They will riddle him with their spears when he comes up; we shall have nothing to do but to avenge him. To your stations, comrades! It is our turn now, and we have no time to lose, for the other two Turks will be up in twenty minutes, and I had orders not to fight if it could ...
— A Knight of the White Cross • G.A. Henty
... during which she had helped him to earn with never an unexpected pleasure; reflected with bitterness that never, since they had cast their lives together, had he urged her to indulge in any sweet little extravagance, though he had denied himself nothing that he really wished. It was no riddle to her, as it had been to her niece earlier in the evening, why the same hard work had dealt so benignly with Martin and so uncharitably with herself. She comprehended only too well that it was not that alone which had crushed her. It was ...
— Dust • Mr. and Mrs. Haldeman-Julius
... evidently obsessed by a train of thought which I was glad to have provoked. From time to time, he uttered a sentence which showed me the thread of his reflections; and I was able to see that the riddle remained as much a mystery to him as ...
— The Confessions of Arsene Lupin • Maurice Leblanc
... clanking of metal as the Contras rode, she had no token of a fellow creature. The first of the plantations was deserted, and likewise the next. But the house doors were open. Nothing showed preparation for departure. The riddle was uncanny. At the third Jacqueline stated that she would go no farther. She hated to tramp down a man's field when the man himself was not about to express an opinion, and the ruthless swath made by her escort through the cane gave her shame. Besides, ...
— The Missourian • Eugene P. (Eugene Percy) Lyle
... can harp, and carp, and fiddle. What farther hath befallen or may befall The hero of this grand poetic riddle, I by and by may tell you, if at all: But now I choose to break off in the middle, Worn out with battering Ismail's stubborn wall, While Juan is sent off with the despatch, For which all Petersburgh is ...
— Don Juan • Lord Byron
... Unless, indeed, it be no bigger Than some wee, pigmy, dwarfish figure, Which one would head a cane withal;— And if to this the case should fall, The adventurer's honour would be small! This posting seems to me a trap, Or riddle for some greenish chap; I therefore leave the whole to you.' The doubtful reasoner onward hies. With heart resolved, in spite of eyes, The other boldly dashes through; Nor depth of flood nor force Can stop his onward course. He finds the elephant of stone; ...
— The Fables of La Fontaine - A New Edition, With Notes • Jean de La Fontaine
... the low words. Then, moved by a marvellous influence which worked upon him irresistibly, Merefleet stooped and put the slight hand to his lips. He did not understand. He was as far from reading the riddle as he had been when he entered. But his love for this woman conquered his desire. He had thought to win an empire. He left ...
— The Odds - And Other Stories • Ethel M. Dell
... it will be remembered, was formed by Brother Frink in 1840. The members were: Robert Curren, Leader, Sarah Curren, T.M. Riddle, Adeline Riddle, Gideon Wales, Polly Wales, Mark Johnson, Ann Butterfield, Margaret Underwood, Charles Curran, Frank Morgan, Mrs. Frank Morgan, and Mrs. Fellows. To these were soon added, Mr. and Mrs. Carlton, Mr. and Mrs. Raymond. This Society had ...
— Thirty Years in the Itinerancy • Wesson Gage Miller
... overcoming inclination, he merged his two frames together and continued his life. A letter from him to his friend explaining matters crossed a letter from the friend, in which he told how he also had been aware of his presence. The incident is narrated in detail in Mr. Funk's "Psychic Riddle." ...
— The Vital Message • Arthur Conan Doyle
... he then to the princess, in the midst of a profound silence, "I hardly dare guess; and yet in this riddle I plainly perceive my own happiness. I dared to think that your questions would have no difficulty for me, while you thought the contrary; you have the goodness to believe that I am not unworthy to please you, while I have hardly the boldness to think so; ...
— Our Young Folks, Vol 1, No. 1 - An Illustrated Magazine • Various
... answer;" said the priest; "but" (after a pause) "you are a strange youth: a character that resembles a riddle is at your age uncommon, and, pardon me, unamiable. Age, naturally repulsive, requires a mask; and in every wrinkle you may behold the ambush of a scheme: but the heart of youth should be open as its countenance! However, I will not weary you with homilies; let ...
— Devereux, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... which Cassim's wife perceived directly her back was turned. She grew very curious, and said to Cassim when he came home: "Cassim, your brother is richer than you. He does not count his money, he measures it." He begged her to explain this riddle, which she did by showing him the piece of money and telling him where she found it. Then Cassim grew so envious that he could not sleep, and went to his brother in the morning before sunrise. "Ali Baba," ...
— The Blue Fairy Book • Various
... lies the secret of Venetian history, the one key by which it is possible to understand the strange riddle of the Republic. For thirteen centuries Venice lay moored as it were off the coast of Western Europe, without political analogue or social parallel. Its patriciate, its people, its government were not what government or people or patriciate ...
— Stray Studies from England and Italy • John Richard Green
... history, even if it is only truth represented allegorically. This kind of truth, supported by authority, appeals directly to the essentially metaphysical temperament of man—that is, to his need of a theory concerning the riddle of existence, which thrusts itself upon him, and arises from the consciousness that behind the physical in the world there must be a metaphysical, an unchangeable something, which serves as the foundation of constant change. It also appeals to the will, fears, and hopes ...
— Essays of Schopenhauer • Arthur Schopenhauer
... bombardment of this sort was certain to reduce the panels to splinters and leave the way clear—if they didn't riddle Gray ...
— The Submarine Boys for the Flag - Deeding Their Lives to Uncle Sam • Victor G. Durham
... them the stuff he needed for philosophy and art. Withdrawing from that contemplation, he was like a spirit 'loosed out of hell to speak of horrors.' Deeper than any poet of the time, deeper than any even of the Italians, he read the riddle of the sphinx of crime. He found there something akin to his own imaginative mood, something which he alone could fully comprehend and interpret. From the superficial narratives of writers like Bandello he extracted a spiritual essence which was, if ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... Our efforts to preserve peace, our measures as to the Indians, as to slavery, as to religious freedom, were all in consonance with their professions. Yet I never expected we should get a vote from them, and in this I was neither deceived nor disappointed. There is no riddle in this, to those who do not suffer themselves to be duped by the professions of religious sectaries. The theory of American Quakerism is a very obvious one. The mother society is in England. Its members are English by birth and residence, devoted to their own country, as good citizens ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson
... coined in burlesque imitation of scholastic Latin, as "hocus-pocus" or "panjandrum"), originally a term meaning whim, fancy or ridiculous idea; later applied to a pun or play upon words, and thus, in its usual sense, to a particular form of riddle in which the answer depends on a pun. In a transferred sense the word is also used of ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 7, Slice 2 - "Constantine Pavlovich" to "Convention" • Various
... haunted by the glory of their ancestors, spellbound by the past of their city, declaring that she contains everything, that they themselves cannot know her thoroughly, that she is the sphinx who will some day explain the riddle of the universe, that she is so great and noble that all within her acquires increase of greatness and nobility, in such wise that they demand for her the idolatrous respect of the entire world, so vivacious in their ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... came the sneer of one propounding a riddle already solved—"it is not meet, is it, to thresh on the Sabbath day? Yet since you permit your followers to do so, how are we to distinguish between what is lawful ...
— Mary Magdalen • Edgar Saltus
... d'esprit[Fr],epigram; jest book; dry joke, quodlibet, cream of the jest. word-play, jeu de mots[Fr]; play of words, play upon words; pun, punning; double entente, double entendre &c. (ambiguity) 520[Fr]; quibble, verbal quibble; conundrum &c. (riddle) 533; anagram, acrostic, double acrostic, trifling, idle conceit, turlupinade|. old joke, tired joke, flat joke, Joe Miller|!. V. joke, jest, crack a joke, make a joke, jape, cut jokes; perpetrate a joke; pun, perpetrate a pun; make fun of, make merry ...
— Roget's Thesaurus • Peter Mark Roget
... them. It was more than an ordinary man was qualified to cope with, to make his observations, write his letters, and look after their transmission, without having to attend to his nag, and do an odd turn of cooking at a pinch. The riddle was how to get the horse—a sound hardy animal that would not call for elaborate grooming, or refuse a feed of barley. Horse-flesh was at a premium, but he thought I might be able to have what I wanted at Bayonne, on payment of an extravagant price. A requisition for forage and corn could ...
— Romantic Spain - A Record of Personal Experiences (Vol. II) • John Augustus O'Shea
... ladie Marie countesse of Perch, Richard earle of Chester, with his brother Otwell gouernour to duke William, and the said earle of Chester his wife the kings neece, the archdeacon of Hereford, Geffrey Riddle, Robert Manduit, William Bigot, and diuerse other, to the number of an hundreth and fourtie persons, besides fiftie mariners, tooke ship at Harflew, thinking to follow the king, and sailing foorth with a south wind, their ship thorough negligence of the mariners (who had drunke ...
— Chronicles of England, Scotland and Ireland (2 of 6): England (3 of 12) - Henrie I. • Raphael Holinshed
... enormously heavy that it is next to impossible to do any quick effective work with them, and one is reminded, on seeing a man "over sticked,"—if I may be allowed such an expression—of Lord Dundreary's riddle, "Why does a dog wag his tail? Because the dog is stronger than the tail," or of David in Saul's armour. Some time ago it was rather the fashion for very young men to affect gigantic walking-sticks—possibly with the view of intimidating would-be ...
— Broad-Sword and Single-Stick • R. G. Allanson-Winn
... apply it to actual facts, it leaves me whirling in space, with nothing to help me to interpret realities. It is magnificent in theory, but it is a mere gas-bubble in the face of existing conditions. It is majestic, but sterile. Then where is the answer to the riddle of the world? Who knows? ...
— Bramble-bees and Others • J. Henri Fabre
... entirely to change the coloring of all testimony throughout the vast Republic of Leaplow) made his report on the subject-matter of the resolution. This person was a Tangent, who had a besetting wish to become a Riddle, although the leaning of our house was decidedly Horizontal; and, as a matter of course, he took the Riddle side of this question. The report, itself, required seven hours in the reading, commencing with the subject at the epocha of the celebrated caucus ...
— The Monikins • J. Fenimore Cooper
... should have died before she had spent her money. That seemed to him a dark and pitiable mystery; and he looked from the coins in his hand to the dead woman, and back again to the coins, shaking his head over the riddle of man's life. Henry V. of England, dying at Vincennes just after he had conquered France, and this poor jade cut off by a cold draught in a great man's doorway, before she had time to spend her couple of whites—it seemed a cruel way to carry on the world. Two whites would have ...
— The Great English Short-Story Writers, Vol. 1 • Various
... Whether he thinks too little or too much: Chaos of thought and passion, all confus'd; Still by himself abus'd, or disabus'd: Created, half to rise, and half to fall; Great lord of all things, yet a prey to all: Sole judge of truth, in endless error hurl'd; The glory, jest, and riddle of the world! ...
— The Young Gentleman and Lady's Monitor, and English Teacher's Assistant • John Hamilton Moore
... spoils all the former, for these farthingales take up all the room now-a-days; 'tis not a woman, questionless. Shall I be put down with a riddle? Sirrah Heuresis, search the corners of your conceit, and ...
— A Select Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. IX • Various
... offset to my anecdotes about our being lost through inability to riddle out our name on the part of the police, I must relate an instance where the post-office displayed remarkable powers of divination. One day I received an official notification from the post-office that there was a misdirected parcel ...
— Russian Rambles • Isabel F. Hapgood
... shrike and a baby gopher—picked up in her walk. It was impossible to wrap them both in her apron without serious peril to one or the other; she could not put either down without the chance of its escaping. "It's like that dreadful riddle of the ferryman who had to take the wolf and the sheep in his boat," said Peggy to herself, "though I don't believe anybody was ever so silly as to want to take a wolf across the river." But, looking up, she beheld the approach of Sam Bedell, a six-foot tunnelman of the "Blue ...
— Openings in the Old Trail • Bret Harte
... join in the festivities, which lasted seven days. These feasts were enlivened with interesting discussions, stories and riddles. Samson propounded one, with promises of valuable gifts to those who guessed the riddle: "Out of the eater came forth meat, out of the ...
— The Woman's Bible. • Elizabeth Cady Stanton
... the head of a woman adorned with horns and a crescent, and another of brass, containing an image of Baal—a human face on the head of an ox, with the horns surrounded by stars. However, I am very ignorant of these things, and you must refer the riddle of the ring to some one more astute and learned in such matters than your humble 'yokefellow' in ...
— St. Elmo • Augusta J. Evans
... of no other way to rob an apple tree but by standing a-tip-toe, or climbing up to the apples, when they should come down to thee?" said the second boy. "Truly thy head will never save thy heels; but here's a riddle for thee: ...
— Last Words - A Final Collection of Stories • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... seeking for an answer to this riddle when the editors of "The Ladies' Home Journal" asked me to consider the preparation of a series of articles. "We have done some sharp destructive work in our criticisms of the schools," they said. "Now we are going to do some constructive writing. We are in search of ...
— The New Education - A Review of Progressive Educational Movements of the Day (1915) • Scott Nearing
... apples and pears. As the result of several hours' search, Mr. Martin found only one worm, and this one escaped only by accident, for several of the birds had been within a quarter of an inch of it. "So eager are woodpeckers in search, of codling moths that they have often been known to riddle the shingle traps and paper bands which are placed to attract the larvae about to ...
— Our Vanishing Wild Life - Its Extermination and Preservation • William T. Hornaday
... where she had left her watch, and I had peace of mind to note how thin and worn she had become, as if her baby was grown too big for her slight arms, even then I was light-hearted. Without attempting to follow her, I sauntered homeward humming a snatch of song with a great deal of fal-de-lal-de-riddle-o in it, for I can never remember words. I saw her enter another shop, baby linen shop or some nonsense of that sort, so it was plain for what she had popped her watch; but what cared I? I continued to sing most beautifully. I lunged gayly with my stick at a ...
— The Little White Bird - or Adventures In Kensington Gardens • J. M. Barrie
... Too well I can thy riddle guess; By treason as we slew, we shall be slain. Fetch me the axe, which well this hand can wield, And we will strike for death or victory, For to this ...
— Specimens of Greek Tragedy - Aeschylus and Sophocles • Goldwin Smith
... Frazer and Riddle were in General Porter's staff; their bravery was conspicuous, and no officers of their grade were ...
— The Medallic History of the United States of America 1776-1876 • J. F. Loubat
... "F.S. Martin"—Calamity (calamitas), not from calamus, as it is usually derived, but perhaps from obs. calamis, i.e. columis, from [Greek: kholo, kolhao, kolhazo] to maim, mutilate, and so for columitas. (See Riddle's Lat.-Eng. Dictionary.) ...
— Notes & Queries, No. 22., Saturday, March 30, 1850 • Various
... modern thought, there will be anything left of the mission of Jesus: whether, in short, we may not throw the gospels into the waste-paper basket, or put them away on the fiction shelf of our libraries. I venture to reply that we shall be, on the contrary, in the position of the man in Bunyan's riddle who found that "the more he threw away, the more he had. "We get rid, to begin with, of the idolatrous or iconographic worship of Christ. By this I mean literally that worship which is given to pictures and ...
— Preface to Androcles and the Lion - On the Prospects of Christianity • George Bernard Shaw
... had gone differently these past months,—no, from his birth and from hers, too,—if every circumstance of society had not conspired to put them apart, who knows! They might have solved a riddle or two together and been happy. But it was all foolish speculation now, and it was well that their differences should be emphasized at this last chance meeting; that she should be hostile to him. He summed the matter up thus, ...
— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick
... beauteous Sphinx, oh, answer me, That riddle strange unloosing! For many, many thousand years Have I ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VI. • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... practice, and excellent digestive apparatus, and, for the rest, well-meaning enough, and with small private illuminations (somewhat tallowy, it is to be feared) of his own. To him, there, "Pastor of the First Church in Jaalam," our Hosea presents himself as a quiet inexplicable Sphinx-riddle. A rich, poverty of Latin and Greek,—so far is clear enough, even to eyes peering myopic through horn-lensed editorial spectacles,—but naught farther? O purblind, well-meaning, altogether fuscous Melesigenes-Wilbur, there are things in him incommunicable ...
— The Biglow Papers • James Russell Lowell
... Mrs. Temperley with a sudden laugh. "You evidently, Dodge, are one of those who strive to read the riddle of this painful earth. Tell me what you think it ...
— The Daughters of Danaus • Mona Caird
... communicated to Father Bouvet the Jesuit who, happening at that time to be engaged in decyphering the lines of Fo-shee, caught the idea and in an extacy of joy proclaimed to the world that Leibnitz had solved the Fo-sheean riddle. ...
— Travels in China, Containing Descriptions, Observations, and Comparisons, Made and Collected in the Course of a Short Residence at the Imperial Palace of Yuen-Min-Yuen, and on a Subsequent Journey thr • John Barrow
... commerce of man with man. The secret of why some savage tribe worships monkeys or the moon is not to be found even by travelling among those savages and taking down their answers in a note-book, although the cleverest man may pursue this course. The answer to the riddle is in England; it is in London; nay, it is in his own heart. When a man has discovered why men in Bond Street wear black hats he will at the same moment have discovered why men in Timbuctoo wear red feathers. The mystery in the ...
— Heretics • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... thinking it over; puzzling again over the mystery of their suspicion of him. He tried to recall some careless act, some imprudent question, an ill-considered remark. He was giving up the riddle again when that trained memory of his flashed before him a picture that, trivial as it was in itself, yet was as enlightening as the white paper of the cigarette on the ...
— Starr, of the Desert • B. M Bower
... Riddle's work on pigeons [5,6] brings us much nearer to man, and suggests the results noted by both Goldschmidt and Lillie. As in the Free-Martin cattle, there is an apparent reversal of the sex predisposition of the fertilized egg. ...
— Taboo and Genetics • Melvin Moses Knight, Iva Lowther Peters, and Phyllis Mary Blanchard
... its theoretical side; that it goes far toward explaining both the physiological and the structural gradations and relations between the two kingdoms, and the arrangement of all their forms in groups subordinate to groups, all within a few great types; that it reads the riddle of abortive organs and of morphological conformity, of which no other theory has ever offered a scientific explanation, and supplies a ground for harmonizing the two fundamental ideas which naturalists and philosophers conceive to have ruled the organic world, though ...
— Evolution and Ethics and Other Essays • Thomas H. Huxley
... woes disperse; Aloud she laughs and sweeps his varied strings. 'Tis taught him how for touch of mournful verse Rarely the music made of two ascends, And Beauty's Queen some other way is won. Or it may solve the riddle, that she lends Herself to all, and yields herself to none, Save heavenliest: though claims by men are raised In hot assurance under shade of doubt: And numerous are the images bepraised As Beauty's Queen, should passion ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... way," Quest declared. "If we could answer your question, Laura, we could solve the whole riddle. We are up against something, ...
— The Black Box • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... make a volume of commentary on French civility. Here has this gentleman invited me to a conference, and when I send him a capable substitute, for ye're all that, Duncan, though your years are but few, he answers me with a riddle." ...
— The Last of the Mohicans • James Fenimore Cooper
... the day after, the Journal des Debats of the 13th of September, an extract from his narrative, copied almost literally: he then endeavoured to discover whence the editors could have obtained these details; it cost him but little time to solve the riddle. ...
— Narrative of a Voyage to Senegal in 1816 • J. B. Henry Savigny and Alexander Correard
... A sequel stands beyond, Invisible, as music, But positive, as sound. It beckons and it baffles; Philosophies don't know, And through a riddle, at the last, Sagacity must go. To guess it puzzles scholars; To gain it, men have shown Contempt of ...
— Poems: Three Series, Complete • Emily Dickinson
... wonder of the Soul Is the riddle of it all, And the answer, and the whole, Bright with joy that rends the pall. Brother-man, I pray you stand, Hear a minstrel; but the song If you do not understand, Pass and ...
— Thoughts, Moods and Ideals: Crimes of Leisure • W.D. Lighthall
... whom belongs the merit of having discovered and demonstrated this truth.[37] One asks oneself with astonishment how this same Bakounine could declare that private property was only a consequence of the principle of authority. The solution of the riddle lies in the fact that he did not understand the materialist conception of history; he was only ...
— Anarchism and Socialism • George Plechanoff
... You never tell your thoughts. I asked if you remembered me and you answered in a riddle. I knew you did not, for ...
— The Eye of Dread • Payne Erskine
... "That solves one riddle, here is the other," and Miss Carleton handed her lover a small note, covered with a fine, delicate chirography whose perfectly formed characters revealed a mind accustomed to the study of minute details and appreciative ...
— That Mainwaring Affair • Maynard Barbour
... ages taught by the great winds of the world to these patriarchs that seem to tell them over and over lest they forget. They tower virid and virile. They stretch wide arms over the pasture people in benediction and sheltering love, but they are not of them. The reading of the deep riddle of the universe has made them prophets and seers and they dwell alone in their dignity. I may make my home beneath their sheltering shade, caress their rugged gray trunks and fall asleep to the mystical murmur of ...
— Old Plymouth Trails • Winthrop Packard
... judgments about my uncle. After such a length of years it seemed almost uncanny to find a person who through sheer intuition and hard study could have reconstituted with this unerring accuracy the figure of one who had remained a riddle in certain things even to his best friends, and who in the pages of this extraordinary book suddenly appeared before my astonished eyes with all the splendor of that genius of his which as years go by, becomes more and ...
— Women in the Life of Balzac • Juanita Helm Floyd
... these squadrons, o'er the champaign came A numerous race of no ignoble name; Riddle and Rebus, Riddle's dearest son, And false Conundrum and insidious Pun. Fustian, who scarcely deigns to tread the ground, And Rondeau, wheeling in repeated round. On their fair standards, by the wind display'd, Eggs, altars, ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 1 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... busy with this mystery. It was fairly to be assumed that his committee did not want his autograph to distribute for a souvenir; they must want it for some vital purpose, to meet some new move of the bosses. The answer to this riddle was not slow in coming: having failed in their effort to find money on him, the bosses had framed up a letter, which they were exhibiting as having been written by the would-be check-weigh-man. His friends wanted his signature to disprove the authenticity ...
— King Coal - A Novel • Upton Sinclair
... people are at much expence to make or mend the high ways, except just about the capital cities, they are dry or wet, rough or smooth, steep or rugged, just as the weather or the soil happens to favour or befoul them.—Now, here is a riddle for your son; I know he is an adept, and will ...
— A Year's Journey through France and Part of Spain, 1777 - Volume 1 (of 2) • Philip Thicknesse
... great fear of defeat, in a sickly atmosphere of tepid skepticism, without much belief in your own right, and still less in that of your adversary. If such is the form of ultimate wisdom, then life is a greater riddle than some of us think it to be. I was within a hair's-breadth of the last opportunity for pronouncement, and I found with humiliation that probably I would have nothing to say. This is the reason why I affirm that Kurtz was a remarkable man. He had something to say. ...
— Heart of Darkness • Joseph Conrad
... Morrison hung on his words as if they thrilled her to the core; her boy was an actor in this strange little drama that was being gradually unfolded, and when the final scene was reached it would be found that Dick had had more than his share to do with the solving of the riddle as to what had become of Mr. ...
— Dick the Bank Boy - Or, A Missing Fortune • Frank V. Webster
... The crime of Pigott eventually saved Parnell and his followers. But the last word on that has not yet been spoken. Another pen than mine may, perchance before long, tell the whole truth about that tragic episode, and explain what is still an unsolved riddle in all dispassionate minds. Without challenging and exciting the strongest racial prejudices, it will be impossible to lift the veil, and I have no intention of affording even the slightest preliminary peep behind the scenes of that dramatic affair. The wheels ...
— The Reminiscences of an Irish Land Agent • S.M. Hussey
... guides in her mysteries," it was said, "who imbibed her instruction and spiritual nourishment, rest from their labors and know strife no more. Happy they who witness and comprehend these sacred ceremonies! They are made to know the meaning of the riddle of existence by observing its aim and termination as appointed by Zeus; they partake a benefit more valuable and enduring than the grain bestowed by Ceres; for they are exalted in the scale of intellectual ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike
... were greatly excited, and overwhelmed Sun Wu Kung with reproaches. Yet the latter paid no attention to them, but smiled quietly to himself, for he had understood the riddle which the Master had given him to solve. And in his heart he thought: "His striking me over the head three times meant that I was to be ready at the third watch of the night. His withdrawing to his inner chamber and closing the great door after him, meant that I was to ...
— The Chinese Fairy Book • Various
... can speak of the causes and results of Pessimism. It can touch the practical side of the riddle of life by asking certain questions, the answers to which lie within the province of human experience. Among ...
— The Philosophy of Despair • David Starr Jordan
... world. The question has, however, never been answered why this distinction was abandoned by Mr. Wilson at Versailles. Without wishing in any way either to accuse or defend him I consider the answer to this riddle to be that the President allowed himself to be convinced of the complicity of the German people by the statesmen of the Entente. He was at the time in a mood with regard to us which predisposed him to such influences. ...
— My Three Years in America • Johann Heinrich Andreas Hermann Albrecht Graf von Bernstorff
... engaged, I revolved in my mind a hundred different explanations of the riddle and rejected them every one. I really felt ashamed to take advantage of the ingenuousness or grateful feeling of the child for the purpose of gratifying my curiosity. I love these little people; and it is not a slight thing when they, who are so fresh from God, love us. As I had ...
— The Old Curiosity Shop • Charles Dickens
... the breeze that blows, by the pebble that falls, by the hour that strikes; on a certain day, man, that trembling, stumbling being, the plaything of chance and of the passing moment, rises suddenly before the riddle that is called human life, feels that there is within him something greater than this abyss,—honour! something stronger than fatality,—virtue! something more mysterious than the unknown,—faith! and alone, feeble and naked, he says to all this formidable mystery that envelopes him: "Do with ...
— Napoleon the Little • Victor Hugo
... I told myself. "I am used to fresh air, and sunshine, and the sound of voices, and I must live amongst all these as usual if I am to puzzle out this riddle. The answer, the key, if it comes at all, will arrive in a snap and a sudden, and won't be got at by tedious ...
— The Recipe for Diamonds • Charles John Cutcliffe Wright Hyne
... given to me too late for me to be at the rendezvous with Colonel Inagaki, and the refusal of the units of my command to march with me. These instructions to Captain Bath from the Japanese Headquarters explained the riddle. I gave Captain Bath instructions to move forward in my support in case of need and to watch the proceedings generally, to render aid to any Allied detachment which might be in difficulties, and otherwise ...
— With the "Die-Hards" in Siberia • John Ward
... question to my friend, Luca di Savelli," replied Rienzi. "He is a grand philosopher, and I wot well could explain a much knottier riddle, which we will ...
— Rienzi • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... formalities—and yet managed to pile triumph on triumph. There are some men of whom it may be said that, like a punter on a good day, they can't do wrong. Priam Farll was one such. In a few years he had become a legend, a standing side-dish of a riddle. No one knew him; no one saw him; no one married him. Constantly abroad, he was ever the subject of conflicting rumours. Parfitts themselves, his London agents, knew naught of him but his handwriting—on the backs of cheques in four figures. They sold an average of five large and five ...
— Buried Alive: A Tale of These Days • Arnold Bennett
... fortunately for the world, that a century and a quarter ago thirteen various and very jealous states worked out the problem of a Union, and became—after an enormous, exhausting wrangle—the United States of America. Now the way they solved their riddle was by delegating and giving over jealously specified sovereign powers and doing all that was possible to retain the residuum. They remained essentially sovereign states. New York, Virginia, Massachusetts, for example, remained legally independent. The practical fusion of these peoples ...
— In The Fourth Year - Anticipations of a World Peace (1918) • H.G. Wells
... for you my poor little riddle. Miss Mildred, you know that I have loved you ever since you waked up an awkwad, lazy, country fellow into the wish to ...
— Without a Home • E. P. Roe
... solved, the riddle made clear. I could contain my gravity no longer, but burst into a hearty fit of laughter, in which I was joined by Hannah. Our young lady was mortally offended; she tossed the decanter from hand to hand, and glared at us with her ...
— Roughing it in the Bush • Susanna Moodie
... collectively, form a name, word, or sentence. The word comes from the Greek akros, extreme, and stichos, order or line. The acrostic was formerly in vogue for valentine and love verses. When employed as a riddle it is called ...
— Enquire Within Upon Everything - The Great Victorian Domestic Standby • Anonymous
... Silver said was a riddle to him, but you would never have guessed it from his tone. As for me, I began to have an inkling. Ben Gunn's last words came back to my mind. I began to suppose that he had paid the buccaneers a visit, while they all lay drunk together ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 6 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... of victory ends very soon after the sense of the difficulty overcome; the sense of illumination ends with the acquisition of a piece of information; and we pass on to some new obstacle and some new riddle. But it is different in the case of what we call Beautiful. Beautiful means satisfactory for contemplation, i.e. for reiterated perception; and the very essence of contemplative satisfaction is its desire for such reiteration. ...
— The Beautiful - An Introduction to Psychological Aesthetics • Vernon Lee
... path it showed, and there"—and he pointed to the dead men—"is the witch-seed's flower. Now to-day we sit in Atli's hall and here we must stay this winter at Swanhild's side, and in all this there lies a riddle that ...
— Eric Brighteyes • H. Rider Haggard
... slowly, stopping near Zora's oak. Here lay the reading of the riddle: with infinite work and pain, some one had dug a canal from the lagoon to the creek, into which the former had drained by a long and crooked way, thus allowing it to empty directly. The canal went straight, a hundred yards through stubborn soil, ...
— The Quest of the Silver Fleece - A Novel • W. E. B. Du Bois
... Peer soon found another object to work for than getting the better of Ferdinand Holm. Louise's dresses hung still untouched in his room, her shoes stood under the bed; it still seemed to him that some day she must open the door and walk in. And when he lay there alone at night, the riddle was always with him: Where is she now?—why should she have died?—would he never meet her again? He saw her always as she had stood that day playing to the sick folks in the hospital ward. But now she was dressed in white. And it seemed quite natural now that she had wings. He heard ...
— The Great Hunger • Johan Bojer
... let fall I was sure it had a history; it was the one thing she never explored in her periodical overhaulings. When I grew tired of playing I liked to creep up on it and sit there, picturing out my own fancies concerning it—of which my favourite one was that some day I should solve the riddle and open the chest to find it full of gold and jewels with which I might restore the fortune of the Laurances and all the traditionary splendours of ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1902 to 1903 • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... become a danger to religion itself; nevertheless, rightly applied, there is probably no more potent instrument than this to help us in that reconstruction of belief which is admittedly the urgent business of our age. It is true, as Raymond Brucker said, that "the answer to the riddle of the universe is God—the answer to the riddle of God is Christ"; but it is also true, we hold, that the most effective key for the unlocking of the riddle is the idea ...
— Problems of Immanence - Studies Critical and Constructive • J. Warschauer
... twice over with great attention, his meaning still remained a riddle to her; nor could her invention suggest to her any means to excuse Jones. She certainly remained very angry with him, though indeed Lady Bellaston took up so much of her resentment, that her gentle mind had but little left to bestow on ...
— The History of Tom Jones, a foundling • Henry Fielding
... two," explained Thrush, "and go on so dividing them until you come down to the indivisible unit which is the answer to the riddle. Animal or Vegetable? Vegetable or Mineral? Northern or Southern Hemisphere? Ah! I thought your childhood was not so very much ...
— The Camera Fiend • E.W. Hornung
... "A bullet hit Slater, cut him down the back as he was lyin' flat. Reckon it wasn't bad. But it hurt him so thet he jumped right up an' staggered around. He made a target big as a tree. An' mebbe them Isbels didn't riddle him!" ...
— To the Last Man • Zane Grey
... as he spoke 105 Was as the lovely star when morn has broke The roof of darkness, in the golden dawn, Half-hidden, and yet beautiful. I'll pawn My hopes of Heaven-you know what they are worth — That the presumptuous pedagogues of Earth, 110 If they could tell the riddle offered here Would scorn to be, or being to appear What now they seem and are—but let them chide, They have few pleasures in the world beside; Perhaps we should be dull were we not chidden, 115 ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley Volume I • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... evolution, checked in mid career by the brilliant ambition of France and the cautious reactionary despotism of Spain, remained suspended. Students are left, face to face with the sixteenth century, to decipher an inscription that lacks its leading verb, to puzzle over a riddle whereof the solution is hidden from us by the ruin of a people. It must ever be an undecided question whether the Italians, undisturbed by foreign interference, could have passed beyond the artificial and exceptional stage of ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volume 1 (of 7) • John Addington Symonds
... vital riddle of our time. I look out upon the windy Channel and think of all those millions just over there, who seem to get busier and keener every hour. I could imagine the day of reckoning coming like ...
— An Englishman Looks at the World • H. G. Wells
... Clotho, the Labyrinth Spider and many others confront us with the same riddle: they move, yet do not eat. At any period of the nursery stage, even in the heart of winter, on the bleak days of January, I tear the pockets of the one and the tabernacle of the other, expecting to find the swarm of youngsters lying in a state of ...
— The Life of the Spider • J. Henri Fabre
... it had come about (it did not occur to him that the gossip about his family's great wealth had any thing to do with it). He could not account for it by any process of reasoning, and was simply obliged to accept the fact and give up trying to solve the riddle. He found himself dragged into society and courted, wondered at and envied very much as if he were one of those foreign barbers who flit over here now and then with a self-conferred title of nobility ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... so just and tender which, he prefixes to his son's literary remains, remarks that all his son's talk about this old desperate riddle of the origin and significance of evil, like the talk of Leibnitz about it, resolved itself into an unproved assumption of the necessity of evil. In truth there is little sign that either Arthur Hallam or Gladstone had in him the ...
— The Life of William Ewart Gladstone, Vol. 1 (of 3) - 1809-1859 • John Morley
... overlooking a moonlight garden and under these romantic circumstances, is urging his suit more persistently than before. She, however, is a little too fond of flirting to let her real sentiments be known at once. But when, as if giving up the riddle in her dancing eyes and seemingly mocking smile, he appears about to lead her back into the ballroom, there is, at least so I like to read the music, a pretty little laugh, as much as to say, "Can't you read my real feelings under my mask of banter," a tender glance indicated by a retard on a charmingly ...
— The Pianolist - A Guide for Pianola Players • Gustav Kobb
... though I know you are answering them, I don't understand what you are talking about the least in the world. I don't want to discourage you, you know. Your letters are rather enhanced in value by their riddle-like quotations. They make me wonder what on earth I can have been writing about. I do not even remember, unless you tell me, whether they were long or short; and, except for my consciousness of never having ...
— Canada for Gentlemen • James Seton Cockburn
... whole, my idea is that he was much more of an anarchist than he confessed to me or to himself; and that, the special features of his case apart, he was very much like many other anarchists. Warm heart and weak head—that is the word of the riddle; and it is a fact that the bitterest contradictions and the deadliest conflicts of the world are carried on in every individual breast capable of ...
— A Set of Six • Joseph Conrad
... a son, and his name was Sym; And his eyes were wide as the eyes of Truth; And there came to the wondering mind of him Long thoughts of the riddle that vexes youth. And, "Father," he said, "in the mart's loud din Is there aught of pleasure? Do some find joy?" But his father tilted the beardless chin, And looked in the eyes ...
— The Glugs of Gosh • C. J. Dennis
... "A riddle! Rolf made this too, I am sure," said he, clapping the boy kindly on the shoulder. "I will begin to guess it as soon as I can. Now we must sit down and enjoy these good things before us, and the pleasure ...
— Uncle Titus and His Visit to the Country • Johanna Spyri
... he said. "I've been kept away on business. Funny kind of business, too. Say, Charlie," he added, "suppose likely your sister and you would be too busy to see me for a few minutes now? I'd like to see if you've got an answer to a riddle." ...
— Shavings • Joseph C. Lincoln
... he drew his friend away from the painfully fascinating spectacle which held so difficult a riddle. And presently they were again with their horses, which were grazing unconcernedly upon the sweet blue grass which the valley yielded ...
— The Forfeit • Ridgwell Cullum
... this other universe rose, is a curious point upon which Plattner insists. During the Other-World night it is difficult to move about, on account of the vividness with which the things of this world are visible. It becomes a riddle to explain why, if this is the case, we in this world catch no glimpse of the Other-World. It is due, perhaps, to the comparatively vivid illumination of this world of ours. Plattner describes ...
— The Country of the Blind, And Other Stories • H. G. Wells
... the invasion was that some week-end guest of the East Cliff Hotel left a copy of "The Riddle of the Sands" in the coffee-room, where von Gottlieb found it; and the fact that Ford attended the Shakespeare Ball. Had neither of these events taken place, the German flag might now be flying over Buckingham Palace. And, then ...
— The Red Cross Girl • Richard Harding Davis
... hath a toil, &c.]—There is something true and pathetic about this curious blindness which prevents Hecuba from understanding "so plain a riddle." (Cf. below, p. 42.) She takes the watching of a Tomb to be some strange Greek custom, and does not seek to ...
— The Trojan women of Euripides • Euripides
... was dead, the Nazarene came and seized his seat beneath the sun, The votary of the Riddle-god, whose one is three and three ...
— The Kasidah of Haji Abdu El-Yezdi • Richard F. Burton
... man's riddle, and if he succeeds in guessing its solution he cries out that it is a sham and was not ...
— Greifenstein • F. Marion Crawford
... pleased to be facetious," returned O'Sullivan sourly. "But I would ask you to remember that you are not yet out of the woods, Mr. Montagu. My Lord seems satisfied, but here are some more of us waiting a plain answer to this riddle." ...
— A Daughter of Raasay - A Tale of the '45 • William MacLeod Raine
... seemed to dumbfound our men. They stood staring at each other like those amazed, and seeking explanation. But the key to the riddle was given, not by one of them, but by Paolo, whom I now found at my elbow, his usually placid face ...
— The Iron Pirate - A Plain Tale of Strange Happenings on the Sea • Max Pemberton
... Worship, Discipline, and Customs of the Early Church; with an Introduction, containing a Complete and Chronological Analysis of the Works of the Antenicene Fathers. Compiled from the Works of Augusti, and other sources. By the Rev. J. E. RIDDLE, M.A., Author of an English-Latin and Latin-English Dictionary, Luther and his Times, ...
— The History of the Rise, Progress and Accomplishment of the - Abolition of the African Slave-Trade, by the British Parliament (1839) • Thomas Clarkson
... against the ascetic and non-worldly attitude of Christianity might be urged with additional force against Buddhism. It is full of the strong, sweet, pathetic compassion which looks upon life with eyes full of tears, but only to turn them away from it again, as from an unsolved and insoluble riddle." And he substantiates his position by quoting Reville and Oldenberg. Reville reaches this similar conclusion: "Buddhism, born on the domain of polytheism, has fought against it, not by rising ...
— Oriental Religions and Christianity • Frank F. Ellinwood
... Here's a ridiculous riddle for you: How many o's are there in Woolloomooloo? Two for the W, two for the m, Four for the l's, and ...
— A Book for Kids • C. J. (Clarence Michael James) Dennis
... philosophical reasoning. But the investigation of Nature is an affair of genius, not of rules. No man can invent an organon for writing tragedies and epic poems. Bacon's system is, in its own terms, an idol of the theatre. It would scarcely guide a man to a solution of the riddle of AElia Laelia Crispis, or to that of the charade ...
— Pioneers of Science • Oliver Lodge
... responsibility with the forces of heredity and circumstance. From my point of view your talk would have been better rounded if you had touched on that. Still, it was striking and interesting as it was. I like to hear a clear statement of a point of view, and that your statement happens to riddle me, personally, of course does not affect the question in any way. If I regard human society and human life too much as the biologist regards his rabbit, which appears to be the gist of your criticism, I can at least cheerfully take my own turn on the operating table as occasion requires. There ...
— Queed • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... swaying on the water amid its broad leaves. But a swaying flower could not sing, and there must be something mysterious about it. He tied his horse to a stump on the bank, and sat down on the bridge to listen, hoping that his eyes or ears would give him some solution of the riddle. All was still for a while, but presently the invisible singer ...
— The Hero of Esthonia and Other Studies in the Romantic Literature of That Country • William Forsell Kirby
... is was ever bound to be; Since grim, eternal laws our Being bind; And both the riddle and the answer find, And both the carnage and the calm decree; Since plain within the Book of Destiny Is written all the journey of mankind Inexorably to the end; since blind And mortal puppets playing parts ...
— Rhymes of a Red Cross Man • Robert W. Service
... abhorred people, how came He to tower above all teachers, and to sway the world? 'With whom took He counsel? and who instructed Him, and taught Him?' The character and work of Christ, compared with the circumstances of His origin and environment, are an insoluble riddle, except on one supposition—that He was the word and ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Mark • Alexander Maclaren
... entire night reconnoitring not the German but our own defensive system. The wire so easily passed through, the noise and laughter, and the final denouement at Hessian allowed for no other conclusion. A few nights later Brown, with a small party and on a clear frosty night, solved the riddle by boldly walking up to Grandcourt Trench and finding the Germans not ...
— The Story of the 2/4th Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire Light Infantry • G. K. Rose
... Was unlocks the riddle of Time Is, That offers choice of glory and of gloom; The solver makes Time Shall Be surely his.— But hasten, Sisters! for even now the tomb Grates its slow hinge ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, Issue 49, November, 1861 • Various
... Gee ...! I almost said somethin' I oughtn't to!—[He steps back among the people.] I'll give you a riddle to guess. Shall I? Still waters run deep! 'Tis bad. You mustn't taste blood—no, no! The thirst only gets worse an' ...
— The Dramatic Works of Gerhart Hauptmann - Volume II • Gerhart Hauptmann
... the ostensible object proposed in planting the colonies, were not sufficient: if we could obtain it, we must share in their profits likewise. But this was a question which time only could solve; a riddle, which ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... you think I can get away with it," the lame man said, much pleased. "Now, you see why I want to go to Washington with Braceway. It's merely to keep my hold on this case. If you say I'm entitled to the credit for reading the riddle, I'm going to see ...
— The Winning Clue • James Hay, Jr.
... so called cataclysms "after the universe had thrice attained to freedom" (what nonsense!) are nothing but the short interregnums of freedom obtained by the poor Indian Aryans between the monarchies. They are 200 300 120. And I propose to you, master of the Vedas, the riddle, how do I know that the first republican interregnum (anarchy, to the barbarians) was 200 years long? The Indian traditions begin therefore with 7000, and that is the time of Zaradushta. I find many reasons for adopting your opinion on the ...
— Chips From A German Workshop. Vol. III. • F. Max Mueller
... explosive noise of protest. He gazed into the darkness of the landing, and presently, by the light from the bedroom, could distinguish the vague boundaries of it. The chair, invisible, was on the left. He opened the door wider to the nocturnal riddle of the house. His hand clasped the notes in his pocket. No sound! He listened for the ticking of the lobby clock and could not catch it. He listened more intently. It was impossible that he should not hear the ticking of the lobby clock. Was he dreaming? Was ...
— The Price of Love • Arnold Bennett
... a spiritual attitude, a temperamental atmosphere. It is a thing which implies a certain definite philosophical mood in regard to the riddle of existence; though, of course, between individual egoists there may be ...
— Suspended Judgments - Essays on Books and Sensations • John Cowper Powys
... late for me to be at the rendezvous with Colonel Inagaki, and the refusal of the units of my command to march with me. These instructions to Captain Bath from the Japanese Headquarters explained the riddle. I gave Captain Bath instructions to move forward in my support in case of need and to watch the proceedings generally, to render aid to any Allied detachment which might be in difficulties, and otherwise to obey General Oie's orders. ...
— With the "Die-Hards" in Siberia • John Ward
... so alert to solve the frequent riddle, To judge if Jones should have his train-fare free, Whether the band requires another fiddle, And which is senior, Robinson or me? Who shall indite such circulars as his To Officers Commanding Companies About their musketry, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 150, March 29, 1916 • Various
... "Time was, brother, when what thou sayest would have been as a riddle to me, and I would have said: Here are we merry, though we be few; and if ye lack more company, let me ride to the Tofts and come back with a half score of lads and lasses, and thus let us eke our mirth; and maybe they will tell us whitherward to ride. But now there is a change, since I have ...
— Child Christopher • William Morris
... to work to exert the energies of his mind, and, when they arrived at a guess, they noted it down on paper; after which every individual member of the family made a choice of some object, and composed a riddle, which was transcribed in a large round hand, and affixed on the lantern. This done, the eunuch took his departure, and when evening drew near, he came out and delivered the commands of the imperial consort. "The conundrum," he said, "written by Her Highness, ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book I • Cao Xueqin
... done to deserve so poor a lot? Hers was unquestionably by far the finer character of the two, as Diana frankly admitted to herself. In truth, the apparent injustices of fate made a riddle hard ...
— The Splendid Folly • Margaret Pedler
... of dark nights, it is part of my theory that light was painful to those great white eyeballs, and that it was only a pitch-black world which it could tolerate. Perhaps, indeed, it was the glare of my lantern which saved my life at that awful moment when we were face to face. So I read the riddle. I leave these facts behind me, and if you can explain them, do so; or if you choose to doubt them, do so. Neither your belief nor your incredulity can alter them, nor affect one ...
— The Last Galley Impressions and Tales - Impressions and Tales • Arthur Conan Doyle
... same light by which it was written: we are referred by it, therefore, to sources of interpretation above itself. God was hidden in the sky; the book in another sky; who shall reveal God hidden in the book? After so many ages, it has become a riddle as difficult of solution as any for which it offers solution: the last and best puzzle of the exulting old Sphinx, who will never be cheated of her jest. Our Christianity misses the highest value of the book, as it indicates ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 76, February, 1864 • Various
... Journal des Debats of the 13th of September, an extract from his narrative, copied almost literally: he then endeavoured to discover whence the editors could have obtained these details; it cost him but little time to solve the riddle. ...
— Narrative of a Voyage to Senegal in 1816 • J. B. Henry Savigny and Alexander Correard
... still held secrets for both, but they intended to solve them that day, to see which way the riddle ran, and the Wilderness itself was as dark, as calm and as somber as ever. It had been torn by cannon balls, pierced by rifle bullets and scorched by fire; but the two armies were yet buried in it and it gave no sign to ...
— Before the Dawn - A Story of the Fall of Richmond • Joseph Alexander Altsheler
... sought him every where, but he was not granted them; and I hated all places, for that they had not him; nor could they now tell me, "he is coming," as when he was alive and absent. I became a great riddle to myself, and I asked my soul, why she was so sad, and why she disquieted me sorely: but she knew not what to answer me. And if I said, Trust in God, she very rightly obeyed me not; because that most dear friend, whom ...
— The Confessions of Saint Augustine • Saint Augustine
... her laughter. "Here's a riddle," she said. "The brownie you locked into the stable that night always makes the butter. He isn't never thanked nor yet paid, but you've looked him in the ...
— White Lilac; or the Queen of the May • Amy Walton
... nothing, understand nothing, but the great peace of perfect security. She let him hold her still, with her head against his shoulder and his dear face near, so near she seemed to lose sense of her own identity. All the answer to her life's riddle lay there, behind the love that emptied her soul of need. Out of the blissful unspeakable light some ...
— Christopher Hibbault, Roadmaker • Marguerite Bryant
... head, for the riddle seemed quite unreadable, and as we had already sat up until long past midnight I begged for my candle, and proposed to defer our conversation until the morning. Jack, declaring that none of the beds in the damp old house was fit to sleep in without a week of previous airing, insisted upon giving ...
— The Jolliest School of All • Angela Brazil
... trying to appraise and appreciate the meaning of life and of the universe of which life is the most significant product. Life is not merely the most notable product of our universe; it is the most persuasive key for solving the riddle of the universe, and is the only universe product which aspires to interpret the processes by which it has ...
— College Teaching - Studies in Methods of Teaching in the College • Paul Klapper
... non Oedipus. I am a homely man, and do not understand hints, innuendoes, and riddles, like Oedipus. Oedipus was the Theban who expounded the riddle of the Sphinx, that puzzled all his countrymen. Davus was the stock name of a servant or slave in Latin comedies. The proverb is used by Terence, Andria, ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama, Vol 1 - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook • The Rev. E. Cobham Brewer, LL.D.
... Davus, not Oedipus)—Ver. 194. Alluding to the circumstance of Oedipus alone being able to solve the riddle of ...
— The Comedies of Terence - Literally Translated into English Prose, with Notes • Publius Terentius Afer, (AKA) Terence
... the house in so unorthodox a manner. There was logic running right through the piece; every little incident seemed to dovetail into the others, yet, because I did not have the key, I could not read the riddle. Why did the man on the beach fire at Bryce? I could not say. Then just for amusement's sake I got a piece of paper and a pencil and dotted down the items that wanted explaining. They ran ...
— The Lost Valley • J. M. Walsh
... the poet was moved with a deep sense of pathos that she should have died before she had spent her money. That seemed to him a dark and pitiable mystery; and he looked from the coins in his hand to the dead woman, and back again to the coins, shaking his head over the riddle of man's life. Henry V. of England, dying at Vincennes just after he had conquered France, and this poor jade cut off by a cold draught in a great man's doorway, before she had time to spend her couple of whites—it seemed a cruel way to carry on the world. Two whites would have ...
— The Great English Short-Story Writers, Vol. 1 • Various
... the two other smartest streets lived on the interest of capital, or on salaries received by officials from the public treasury; but what the other eight streets, which ran parallel for over two miles and vanished beyond the hills, lived upon, was always an insoluble riddle to me. And the way those people lived one is ashamed to describe! No garden, no theatre, no decent band; the public library and the club library were only visited by Jewish youths, so that the magazines and new books lay for months uncut; rich and well-educated people slept in close, ...
— The Chorus Girl and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... cargoes, she came quietly to sit at our table and looking at me very hard with her black, sparkling eyes asked Dominic familiarly what had happened to his Signorino. It was her name for me. I was Dominic's Signorino. She knew me by no other; and our connection has always been somewhat of a riddle to her. She said that I was somehow changed since she saw me last. In her rich voice she urged Dominic only to look at my eyes. I must have had some piece of luck come to me either in love or at cards, she bantered. But Dominic ...
— The Arrow of Gold - a story between two notes • Joseph Conrad
... the canal, ever and anon we see some empty returning boat (called "light boat" in the technical canal phrase) rounding a curve before us, It comes nearer: the horses walk the same tow-path: how are the boats to pass without confusion? Ah, the riddle is solved. Our captain (who holds the helm while the boy, his assistant, is down in the cabin preparing supper) calls out suddenly, at the last moment, "Whoa!" The well-trained horses instantly stop; ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 26, September 1880 • Various
... tempted him. Perhaps he not only desired to win the fortune offered but also wished the fun of solving the riddle the government propounded. At any rate, in 1728 he came to London prepared to present drawings of an instrument he felt certain would turn the trick and had not his friends deterred him he would have placed these ...
— Christopher and the Clockmakers • Sara Ware Bassett
... stronger influence on the development of philosophy, both by way of promotion and by way of hindrance, than in any other department of thought. If a system gives classical expression to the thought of an epoch, a nation, or a great personality; if it seeks to attack the world-riddle from a new direction, or brings us nearer its solution by important original conceptions, by a subtler or a simpler comprehension of the problem, by a wider outlook or a deeper insight; it has accomplished more than it could have done by bringing forward a number ...
— History Of Modern Philosophy - From Nicolas of Cusa to the Present Time • Richard Falckenberg
... decipher this riddle, which was rather too contemptuous for my new views of things, but which I referred to the habitual feelings of a strong-headed man in humble life, brought just close enough to higher to feel his exclusion, an officer was announced ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 54, No. 338, December 1843 • Various
... along in her silk, and seize upon Isabel in the little upstairs parlour, or her bedroom, and question her minutely about her ways and ideas; and she would look at her silently for a minute or two together; and then suddenly laugh and kiss her—Isabel's transparency was almost as great a riddle to her as her own obscurity to Isabel. And sometimes she would throw herself on Isabel's bed, and lie there with her arms behind her head, to the deplorable ruin of her ruff; with her buckled feet twitching and tapping; ...
— By What Authority? • Robert Hugh Benson
... how?" cried Finot. "I know a few things, but I cannot see a glimpse of an answer to this riddle." ...
— The Firm of Nucingen • Honore de Balzac
... the ship shun Sunk rocks? Can man fathom life's links, Past or future, unsolved by Egyptian Or Theban, unspoken by Sphynx? The riddle remains yet, unravell'd By students consuming night oil. O earth! we have toil'd, we have travailed: How long shall we ...
— Reviews • Oscar Wilde
... Unfortunately, I cannot tell you what it was. I cannot tell any one what it was. I undertook to find the answer. From France the riddle took me far away to another country—and there, after a year's work, I found half the answer. The other half is in London. And I am in London to ...
— The Crooked House • Brandon Fleming
... never entered my own mind? For this reason I wish not to vanish from the scene before I finish my comprehensive novel, which I think will clear up many misunderstandings and place me where and as I belong. However, I do not wonder that Bazaroff has remained a riddle for many persons: I cannot understand clearly how I conceived him. There was—do not laugh—something more powerful than the author himself, something independent of him. I know only this,—there was no preconceived ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, September, 1885 • Various
... and told him of her meeting with Micah Dow. It silenced him; not, however, on account of its pathos, as she thought, but because it interpreted the riddle of Rob's behavior. ...
— The Little Minister • J.M. Barrie
... was more puzzled-like—kep' on mutterin': 'Who did it? Who could have the cool darin' to shoot him dead in broad daylight, at his own door, before his servants?' She was sort of forcin' herself to think, to find out, just as if it was a riddle, an' the right answer was on the tip of her tongue. An' then, all at once, she gev a queer little laugh. 'Why, of course, it was Hilton,' ...
— The Strange Case of Mortimer Fenley • Louis Tracy
... mystery, too, about Miss Carr, which had kept the gossips busy for the last four months, and clever and prying as they were—quite models in their way—not one of them had been able to come at the solution of the riddle. ...
— Flora Lyndsay - or, Passages in an Eventful Life • Susan Moodie
... his sprig of box. "The Sphinx was a woman, and every woman is an incarnate riddle! Why don't you care ...
— Lewis Rand • Mary Johnston
... of Ios is your mother's country and it shall receive you dead; but beware of the riddle ...
— Hesiod, The Homeric Hymns, and Homerica • Homer and Hesiod
... and really very hard. So, again, with the poets; and most of all I found no interest (fancy!) in Plato and Aristotle. They were presented to me as merely school books; not as the great effort of the cultivated heathen mind to solve the riddle of man's being; and I, in those days, never thought of comparing the heathen and Christian ethics, and the great writers had no ...
— Life of John Coleridge Patteson • Charlotte M. Yonge
... half-formed question found its answer, though the answer seemed rather to ask a new riddle than to answer the old one. A door at the other end of the passage opened a little way, and a melodious voice called softly, "Papa, papa!" The cat ran towards the speaker, the door was opened wide, and for ...
— Captain Dieppe • Anthony Hope
... definition of Life, indeed, that has yet appeared can be said to be even approximately correct. Its mysterious quality evades us; and we have to be content with outward characteristics and accompaniments, leaving the thing itself an unsolved riddle. At the same time Mr. Herbert Spencer's masterly elucidation of the chief phenomena of Life has placed philosophy and science under many obligations, and in the paragraphs which follow we shall have to incur a further ...
— Natural Law in the Spiritual World • Henry Drummond
... authority of Locke and Sidney, Bacon and Tillotson, and the author of Cato's Letters, enabled him to announce, in the very spirit and all but the very words of Diderot and Rousseau, of whom he had never heard, that "the design of Christianity was not to make good riddle-solvers or good mystery-mongers, but good men, good magistrates, and good subjects." And so he renounced the ministry in favor of "that science by which mankind raise themselves from the forlorn, helpless state, in which nature leaves them, ...
— Beginnings of the American People • Carl Lotus Becker
... observations, which human knowledge now entered as if taking it by storm, was that of the radioactive processes of the mineral stratum of the earth. Many new and surprising properties of electricity were discovered there - yet the riddle of electricity itself, instead of coming nearer, ...
— Man or Matter • Ernst Lehrs
... is father to the thought. My dear, I'm sorry to riddle your little romance. Stewart did not—could not have been ...
— The Light of Western Stars • Zane Grey
... facts of life. Another side of the same characteristic appears in his glorification of eating and drinking: such things were part of the natural constitution of man, therefore let man enjoy them to the full. Who knows? Perhaps the Riddle of the Universe would be solved by the oracle ...
— Landmarks in French Literature • G. Lytton Strachey
... where the colonel sat over Mary Nellen's last classic riddle, she couldn't break it ...
— The Prisoner • Alice Brown
... This riddle is solved in the happiest manner. The openings in the wall, its solid parts, the pillars, every thing has its peculiar character, which proceeds from its particular destination: this communicates itself by degrees to the subdivisions; ...
— Autobiography • Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
... the Irish. Lever makes them gay, Miss Lawless and Miss Barlow make them sad. No one denies that sadness is nearer the reality, but it is unreasonable to call Lever insincere. Naturally careless and lighthearted he does not trouble himself with the riddle of the painful world; the distress which touches him most nearly is a distress for debt. But if Lever is not realistic he is natural; he follows the law of his nature as an artist should; he sees life through his own medium; and if ...
— Irish Books and Irish People • Stephen Gwynn
... of patience which comes to her sex like an instinct born of centuried servitude. How her husband ever fascinated so fascinatingly elusive a creature is a mystery to all who know him and a miracle to all who know her; but who has ever guessed the riddle of a woman's heart? Surely no man yet known to the world, except possibly Balzac, and he only occasionally by some sort of electric, psychological accident. The true story of Mrs. Blaine's infelicities ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 24, November, 1891 • Various
... other world a place of torture or undying bliss, death the prime object of our meditation, and lifelong abandonment of our fellow-men the highest mode of existence. Why, then, should monks, so persuaded of the riddle of the earth, have placed themselves in scenes so beautiful? Why rose the Camaldolis and Chartreuses over Europe? white convents on the brows of lofty hills, among the rustling boughs of Vallombrosas, in the grassy meadows of Engelbergs,—always ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... midnight. Sunday morning had dawned. Whatever hidden message lay in the tolling bells floated past these men unknown. Yet it was there. Veiled in the solemn music ushering the risen Saviour was a key-note to solve the darkest secrets of a world gone wrong,—even this social riddle which the brain of the grimy puddler ...
— Life in the Iron-Mills • Rebecca Harding Davis
... the products of the soil. Those who, from 1802 till 1827, had merely laughed at the little man as they saw him trotting to Saint-Thibault and attending to his business, like a merchant living on his vineyards, found the answer to the riddle when the ant-lion seized his prey, after waiting for the day when the extravagance of the Duchesse de Maufrigneuse culminated in the ...
— The Muse of the Department • Honore de Balzac
... guessed my riddle. This "wonderful coat" is your skin, which covers you from top to toe. It fits more closely than any glove, and yet is so easy and comfortable that it never rubs or binds or hurts you in ...
— The Child's Day • Woods Hutchinson
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