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Fabric   Listen
verb
Fabric  v. t.  (past & past part. fabricked; pres. part. fabricking)  To frame; to build; to construct. (Obs.) "Fabric their mansions."






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Fabric" Quotes from Famous Books



... in 1860, that the coming decade would witness the completion of one and the beginning of another iron road across the continent. Ah! those brief years brought revolution in many things. The social fabric of half the Union was not less overturned in this brief period than were the accustomed avenues along which ran the ...
— Minnesota; Its Character and Climate • Ledyard Bill

... town, some distance removed from the business street and the pier. On two sides were the tents of the fruit peddlers and the vegetable hucksters, negroes who came in from the country with their produce. The other sides were taken up by the fabric and gewgaw venders, while in the centre stood the platforms from which the auctioneers offered treasures from the Occident. Through a break in the foothills, the chateau was plainly discernible, the sea being obscured from view by the dense forest ...
— The Man From Brodney's • George Barr McCutcheon

... passage, nor due to a hasty and mistaken scribe, for if the Bible had ever put forth a different doctrine it would have had to change the whole of its teaching, for this is the corner-stone of religion, without which the whole fabric would fall headlong to the ground. (63) The Bible would not be the work we have been examining, but something ...
— A Theologico-Political Treatise [Part III] • Benedict de Spinoza

... he greatly resembled the fairer families of the Aryan breed, the Swede or German. The yellow hair, unshaven beard, whiskers, and moustache were all close and short. The dress consisted of a sort of blouse and short pantaloons, of some soft woven fabric, and of a vermilion colour. The head was protected from the rays of an equatorial sun by a species of light turban, from which hung down a short shade or veil sheltering the neck and forehead. His bare feet were guarded by sandals of some flexible material just covering the toes ...
— Across the Zodiac • Percy Greg

... sudden swoop of hand, sharp vibrating police decrees, an unsleeping paternal government darts down the fabric of our hopes, sends off the nearly captured prey, loud neighing and with heels kicked high in air, but safe, to his ancestral Lombard pastures, and whirls away the too dangerous ...
— A Siren • Thomas Adolphus Trollope

... (De Verb. Dom., Serm. [*S. 10, C. 1]): "Are you thinking of raising the great fabric of spirituality? Attend first of all to the foundation of humility." Now this would seem to imply that humility is the foundation of all virtue. Therefore apparently it is ...
— Summa Theologica, Part II-II (Secunda Secundae) • Thomas Aquinas

... thron'd in his high-borne ark, Secure and fearless, while a world was lost! In vain, contending storms thy head enzone, Thy bosom shrinks not from the bolt that falls: The dreadful shaft plays harmless, nor appals Thy steadfast eye, fixt on Jehovah's throne! E'en tho' thou saw'st the mighty fabric nod, Of system'd worlds, thou bears't a sacred charm, Grav'd on thy heart, to shelter thee from harm: And thus it speaks:—"Thou art my trust, O GOD! And thou canst bid the jarring powers be still, Each ponderous orb, like me, subservient to ...
— Poetic Sketches • Thomas Gent

... her fingers tighten on the gleaming fabric so temptingly upheld, and she was about to take it when, "If ye please, sir, would ye kindly tell me where I'd be finding the flannel place?" said a voice behind her, and, glancing up, she saw a meek little Irishwoman looking quite ...
— Rose in Bloom - A Sequel to "Eight Cousins" • Louisa May Alcott

... Berkeley speaks of the cause of these impressions, Hume points out that we have no right to speak of anything like cause and effect, and that the idea of causality, of necessary sequence, on which the whole fabric of our reasoning rests, is an assumption; inevitable, it may be, yet an assumption. Thus English philosophy, which seemed to be so settled and positive in Bacon, ended in the most unsettled and negative skepticism in Hume; and it was only through Kant that, ...
— Chips From A German Workshop. Vol. III. • F. Max Mueller

... in mid ocean? Still the sail swells to the voiceful breeze; the high mast bends with hideous creak, and every separate rib in the huge fabric quivers. Yet the ship on the unmoved waters motionless struggles, as one, who in a feverish dream nervelessly fleeing o'er a haunted waste, strives horribly to shun some fiendish shape, with straining sinews, ...
— The International Magazine, Volume 2, No. 2, January, 1851 • Various

... society, a totally different organization and culture; and in the interval no one could say how many generations, concerning which, and their conditions and developments, there was nothing but blank ignorance. So that it seemed as though the marvellous fabric of Greek civilization as we know it were indeed something unexampled, rising almost at once out of nothing to its height of splendour, as the walls of Ilium were fabled to have risen beneath the hands of their divine builders. ...
— The Sea-Kings of Crete • James Baikie

... obeyed her. They glided between river and sky across the delicate fabric of a bridge which but a moment before she had seen in the distance. Running through the little village on the farther bank, they ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill

... its tyranny and all its faults and shortcomings, was based on the requirements of mutual help and service, and was maintained by the obligations of honour and fealty. Regular subordination, mutual obligation, social unity, were the pillars of the fabric. The whole state was one: the king represented the unity of the nation. The great barons held their estates from him, the minor nobles of the great barons, the gentry of these vassals, the poorer freemen of the gentry, the serfs themselves were not without rights ...
— The War and Unity - Being Lectures Delivered At The Local Lectures Summer - Meeting Of The University Of Cambridge, 1918 • Various

... there in the Prayer Book suggestions of forgotten customs, reminders of famous persons and events, that there is in detecting in the masonry of an old castle or minster tell-tale stones which betray the different ages, the "sundry times and divers manners" which the fabric represents. Who, for instance, that has traced the history of that apostolic ordinance, "the kiss of peace," down through the liturgical changes and revolutions of eighteen hundred years, can fail to be ...
— A Short History of the Book of Common Prayer • William Reed Huntington

... envelope of linen, lightly stitched together. A knife blade quickly separated the stitches, and the linen was carefully unfolded. It displayed a beautifully trimmed evening dress of pale blue satin, with a dressing-gown of some exquisite white fabric armed with lace. The men gazed at it in silence, and then the one single ...
— Openings in the Old Trail • Bret Harte

... 'Mark his majestic fabric! He's a temple Sacred by birth, and built by hands divine; His soul's the deity that lodges there; Nor is the ...
— The Life of George Washington, Volume I • Washington Irving

... that little conventional speech," he cried with a sneer. "A man builds all his hopes of happiness on one woman, and she coolly shatters the fabric of his life, and then tells him to go and build elsewhere. I daresay there are women in the world who would condescend to marry me if I asked them, but it is my misfortune to care only for one woman. I can't transfer my affection, as a man transfers ...
— Milly Darrell and Other Tales • M. E. Braddon

... been through her work and had gone on, it came to her that the fabric of this life of hers was doomed to almost immediate collapse; that in a little while these studies would cease, and perhaps she would never set eyes on him again. ...
— Ann Veronica • H. G. Wells

... domination," like the "baseless fabric of a vision," has as little foundation. The problem to be solved is not what is or shall be the status of the colored man born beneath the flag, but whether the forces of Christian civilization, the genius and spirit of our Government, impartiality in ...
— Shadow and Light - An Autobiography with Reminiscences of the Last and Present Century • Mifflin Wistar Gibbs

... with its lawns and walks and waterfowl, harbours still its associations with a bygone order of men and women, whose happiness and sadness are woven into its history, dim and grey as they were once bright and glowing, like the faded pattern worked into the fabric of an old tapestry. It was here that Francesca had made her way when the intolerable inaction of waiting had driven her forth from her home. She was waiting for that worst news of all, the news which does not kill hope, ...
— The Unbearable Bassington • Saki

... baptized rendered much more easy their amalgamation with the English; but it was not so in Ireland, where the Round Towers still stand to show (as some authorities hold) how the terrified native Irish sheltered from the Danish fury which nearly destroyed the whole fabric of Irish Christianity. The legends of Ireland, too, are full of the terror of the men of "Lochlann," which is generally taken to mean Norway; and the great coast cities of Ireland—Dublin, Cork, Waterford, Wexford, and others—were so entirely Danish that ...
— Hero-Myths & Legends of the British Race • Maud Isabel Ebbutt

... nobleman's inhumanity however, he sent his officers next morning to break every glass in the house: A curious chastisement enough, and worthy of a nation who, being powerful to erect, populous to fill, and elegantly-skilful to adorn such a fabric as this Coliseum which I have just been contemplating, were yet contented and even happy to view from its well-arranged seats, exhibitions capable of giving nothing but disgust and horror;—lions rending unarmed wretches in pieces; or, to the still deeper ...
— Observations and Reflections Made in the Course of a Journey through France, Italy, and Germany, Vol. I • Hester Lynch Piozzi

... are, and how much depends upon every one of them, be it in the warp or the woof of a scheme! We have seen that in this case, one of them gave way under the rough handling of Sir Philip Hastings, and the whole fabric was in imminent danger of running down and becoming nothing but a raveled skein. Mrs. Hazleton was resolved that it should not be so, and now she was busily engaged in the attempt to knot together the broken thread, and to lay all the others ...
— The International Magazine, Volume 2, No. 3, February, 1851 • Various

... Dimensions seems almost as visionary as the Land of One or None; nay, when even this hard wall that bars me from my freedom, these very tablets on which I am writing, and all the substantial realities of Flatland itself, appear no better than the offspring of a diseased imagination, or the baseless fabric of a dream. ...
— Flatland • Edwin A. Abbott

... we are assuming that the woman in question works in the studio. If she does not, our whole fabric falls to pieces." Duvall took the torn piece of card from his ...
— The Film of Fear • Arnold Fredericks

... it speak of them from their own experience, with rapture or delight? It would be impossible, therefore, in the opinion of the Quakers, in so mixed a family, to keep up that discipline, which they consider as the corner-stone of their constitutional fabric, and which may be said to have been an instrument in obtaining for them the character of ...
— A Portraiture of Quakerism, Volume II (of 3) • Thomas Clarkson

... toward Haddon Hall, whose turrets could be seen through the leafless boughs of the trees. The sun was sinking perilously low, thought John, and with each moment his heart also sank, while his good resolutions showed the flimsy fibre of their fabric and were rent asunder by the fear that she might not come. As the moments dragged on and she did not come, a hundred alarms tormented him. First among these was a dread that she might have made resolves such as had sprung up so plenteously in him, and that she might have ...
— Dorothy Vernon of Haddon Hall • Charles Major

... bought myself some decent clothes, created quite a sensation among the people I met. During my long stay in my mountain home, I had been obliged to mend and darn my garments with the fibers of plants until there was scarcely a vestige of the original fabric remaining; and I looked like a ...
— St. Nicholas, Vol. 5, No. 4, February 1878 • Various

... learned about the wealth, charities, happiness, and splendid palace of Prince Aladdin. Directly he saw the wonderful fabric, he knew that none but the genies, the slaves of the lamp, could have performed such wonders, and, piqued to the quick at Aladdin's high estate, he returned ...
— The Arabian Nights Entertainments • Anonymous

... about money. She liked it, as a trait, for to her as to all the young and the unthinking carelessness about money seems a sure, perhaps the surest, sign of generosity—when in fact the two qualities are in no way related. Character is not a collection of ignorant impulses but a solidly woven fabric of deliberate purposes. Carelessness about anything most often indicates a tendency to carelessness about everything. She admired his openhanded way of scattering; she wouldn't have admired it in herself, would have thought it dishonest and ...
— Susan Lenox: Her Fall and Rise • David Graham Phillips

... stone, and carried on a continuous level, across valleys, which still remain. There are also, in various parts of the country, excavations, rock-hewn halls, and caverns, generally dome-shaped, the centre apartment lighted through an aperture in the vault. They somewhat resemble the cyclopean fabric near Argos, called the Treasury of Atreus. Not only the buildings, but the hieroglyphics, of the Aztecs, so closely resemble those of the Egyptians, that there appears every reason to suppose they were derived from the ...
— The Western World - Picturesque Sketches of Nature and Natural History in North - and South America • W.H.G. Kingston

... constitution;—seeing that where the greatest changes have taken place the most dreadful consequences have ensued, and which have not been confined to the country where they originated, but have spread their malignant influence to almost every part of the globe, shaking the fabric of every government;—seeing that in this general shock the constitution of Great Britain has alone remained pure and untouched in its vital principles;—I say, when I consider all these circumstances, I should be ashamed of myself ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan

... threads such as these that I weave the fabric of my daily happiness,—a happiness that my friends never seem able to comprehend; the blindest of them pity me, indeed, but I consider myself like Mary of old, ...
— Marm Lisa • Kate Douglas Wiggin

... mark a real advance upon previously accepted rules. Still less acceptable is his advice to "sweep away juridical niceties" in the conduct of hostilities. Did he intend thus to describe the whole fabric of the rules by which international law has endeavoured, with considerable success, to ...
— Letters To "The Times" Upon War And Neutrality (1881-1920) • Thomas Erskine Holland

... which the needlework is done. In weaving (even tapestry weaving) the pattern is got by the inter-threading of warp and weft. In lace, too, it is got out of the threads which make the stuff. In embroidery it is got by threads worked on a fabric first of all woven on the loom, or, ...
— Art in Needlework - A Book about Embroidery • Lewis F. Day

... many of the English manufactures, being found slight and unserviceable, grew into discredit abroad; thus the art of producing them more perfect may in time be totally lost at home. The cloths now made in England are inferior in texture and fabric to those which were manufactured in the beginning of the century; and the same judgment may be pronounced upon almost every article of hardware. The razors, knives, scissors, hatchets, swords, and other edge-utensils, prepared for exportation, are generally ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.II. - From William and Mary to George II. • Tobias Smollett

... unaccountable extent, had, as a necessary consequence, invaded the region of the skirt to a degree which reduced that appendage to the most absurd and infinitesimal proportions. This wonderful garment was 314 composed of a fabric which Freddy Coleman, when he made its acquaintance some few days later, denominated the Mac Omnibus plaid, a gaudy repertoire of colours, embracing all the tints of the rainbow, and a few more besides, and was further embellished by a plentiful supply of gent.'s sporting ...
— Frank Fairlegh - Scenes From The Life Of A Private Pupil • Frank E. Smedley

... can not prosper. Our whole social fabric, our boasted civilization rests on the foundations of a lie, a most gigantic lie—the religious, political and economic lie, a triune lie, from whose fertile womb has issued a world of corruption, evils, shams and unnameable crimes. There, ...
— Mother Earth, Vol. 1 No. 4, June 1906 - Monthly Magazine Devoted to Social Science and Literature • Various

... began as I did the others, with a single motive; the shadow of a man passed before me, and I built a visionary fabric round him. I have never tried to girdle the earth; my limits are narrow; the modern novel, as Andrew Lang lately calls it,—with its love-making, disquisition, description, history, theology, ethics,—I have no sprinkling of. My last novel, ...
— The Morgesons • Elizabeth Stoddard

... Sunshine and butterflies drifted in and out among the trees. The hum of the bees and the whisper of the stream were a drifting of sound. And the drifting sound and drifting color seemed to weave together in the making of a delicate and intangible fabric which was the spirit of the place. It was a spirit of peace that was not of death, but of smooth-pulsing life, of quietude that was not silence, of movement that was not action, of repose that was quick with existence without being violent with struggle and travail. The spirit of the place ...
— Moon-Face and Other Stories • Jack London

... Paradoxical fellows who deserve drowning tell one that they are at our very doors. Well, that is true of the eager mind, but the mind is no longer eager when it is in need of a holiday. And you can get at the new things that are also the old by way of drugs, but drugs are a poor sort of holiday fabric. If you have stored up your memory well with much experience you can get these things from your memory—but only in a ...
— First and Last • H. Belloc

... it would be if the social fabric could keep and guard all its weak ones, surround them by influences that could prevent them from falling into evil ways, and bear them up until the end comes ...
— Brook Farm • John Thomas Codman

... returned in her array—her big black hat, so little superstitiously in the fashion, her fine black garments throughout, the swathing of her throat, which Densher vaguely took for an infinite number of yards of priceless lace, and which, its folded fabric kept in place by heavy rows of pearls, hung down to her feet like the stole of a priestess. He spoke to her at once of their friend's visit and flight. "She hadn't known she'd find me," he said—and said at present without difficulty. He had so rounded his corner that it wasn't a question ...
— The Wings of the Dove, Volume II • Henry James

... work; he is also discerning in his assertion that the narrative contained in his volume is conceived more in the vein of Fielding and Richardson. The Sterne elements are rather embroidered on to the other fabric, or, as he himself says, using another figure, "only fried in ...
— Laurence Sterne in Germany • Harvey Waterman Thayer

... roots, some stakes fixed in the earth, which, with the trees, were interwoven with ropes, made of heath and birch twigs, up to the top of the Cage, it being of a round or rather oval shape; and the whole thatched and covered over with fog. The whole fabric hung, as it were, by a large tree, which reclined from the one end, all along the roof, to the other, and which gave it the name of the Cage; and by chance there happened to be two stones at a small distance from one another, in the side next the precipice, ...
— The Lady of the Lake • Sir Walter Scott

... is the time to guard against moths and beetles. Many of these fabric-destroying insects are brought into the ...
— The Eugenic Marriage, Volume IV. (of IV.) - A Personal Guide to the New Science of Better Living and Better Babies • Grant Hague

... them. Their devotion, courage, tenacity, and technical ability are beyond question or praise. I would only fear that in the hard struggle they experience to carry each day's work to its end, to perfect their own particular jobs, all so important and so difficult, vision of the whole fabric they are helping to raise must often be obscured. And I would venture to say: "Only by looking upon each separate disabled soldier as the complete fabric can you possibly keep that vision before your eyes. Only by revivifying in each separate disabled soldier the ...
— Another Sheaf • John Galsworthy

... that the seventeenth century laid stress upon the principle of utility, gave great impulse to science, called attention to the care of the body, decreased the influence of classic studies, brushed away the fabric which superstition and conservatism had woven, produced some of the greatest educators that have ever lived, and laid the foundations on which modern education ...
— History of Education • Levi Seeley

... Nikolaevna asked Sanin to put on her shawl and did not stir, while he wrapped the soft fabric round her really queenly shoulders. Then she took his arm, went out into the corridor, and almost cried out aloud. At the very door of the box Doenhof sprang up like some apparition; while behind his back she got a glimpse of the figure of the Wiesbaden critic. The 'literary ...
— The Torrents of Spring • Ivan Turgenev

... dressed as I had somewhere seen her before and could not recall it, though the memory puzzled me. Neither do I know what she wore, beyond that the fabric's color was of the ruddy gold one sees among the stems of ripening grain, while wheat ears nestled between her neck and shoulder, and rustled like barley rippling to the breeze, as with the music embodied in each movement of her form she whirled by us on Ormond's arm. He ...
— Lorimer of the Northwest • Harold Bindloss

... swift autumnal twilight brought out in the darkness the bright windows of the simple homes scattered about, the wind freshened, and Cecile insisted on fastening around Jack's throat the scarf she had brought, the warmth and softness of the fabric, the consciousness of being cared for, was like ...
— Jack - 1877 • Alphonse Daudet

... Peter's reign was one of misfortune for his country both at home and abroad. In 931 the Serbs broke loose under their leader [)C]aslav, whom Simeon had captured but who effected his escape, and asserted their independence. In 963 a formidable revolt under one Shishman undermined the whole state fabric. He managed to subtract Macedonia and all western Bulgaria, including Sofia and Vidin, from Peter's rule, and proclaimed himself independent tsar (tsar or caesar was a title often accorded by Byzantium to relatives of the emperor or to distinguished men of Greek or other nationality, and ...
— The Balkans - A History Of Bulgaria—Serbia—Greece—Rumania—Turkey • Nevill Forbes, Arnold J. Toynbee, D. Mitrany, D.G. Hogarth

... words which might at a stroke pull down the whole fabric of his life, past, present and ...
— The Mystery of the Hasty Arrow • Anna Katharine Green

... through so many centuries, in spite of frequent revolutions and often recurring invasions; as well as of the causes which led to its ultimate disappearance, when intestine decay had wasted the organisation on which the fabric of society rested. ...
— Ceylon; an Account of the Island Physical, Historical, and • James Emerson Tennent

... conditions of 1914. But there is a danger that we may throw the masses of the population throughout Europe into the arms of the extremists, whose only idea for regenerating mankind is to destroy utterly the whole existing fabric of society. These men have triumphed in Russia. They have done so at a terrible price. Hundreds and thousands of the population have perished. The railways, the roads, the towns, the whole structural organization of Russia has been almost destroyed, but somehow or ...
— Peaceless Europe • Francesco Saverio Nitti

... the "Liberator" opened its batteries, the controversy now working itself out by trial of battle was foreseen and predicted. Washington warned his countrymen of the danger of sectional divisions, well knowing the line of cleavage that ran through the seemingly solid fabric. Jefferson foreshadowed the judgment to fall upon the land for its sins against a just God. Andrew Jackson announced a quarter of a century beforehand that the next pretext of revolution would be slavery. De Tocqueville recognized with that penetrating ...
— Pages From an Old Volume of Life - A Collection Of Essays • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.

... heavy fabric, hung from brass or plush mounted poles, may be gracefully draped to the sides, while the inner lace ones should be hung straight and be fastened in the center with some ornament or bow of ribbon corresponding in shade to the general tone of the room. The straight ...
— The Ladies Book of Useful Information - Compiled from many sources • Anonymous

... tools, forging-pressing machines, electric motors, tires, knitted wear, hosiery, shoes, silk fabric, chemicals, trucks, instruments, microelectronics, jewelry manufacturing, software ...
— The 2005 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency

... the entire fabric as the work of Bishop de Blois, with the exception of the front and upper story of the west end, which are of a later date, and seem to have been altered to their present form about the time of Wykeham. The vaulting of this part was evidently made by the second founder, ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 20, - Issue 570, October 13, 1832 • Various

... with bad language, a size brush and some fabric remnants patching the plane, whilst I read his treasure by my pocket lamp. Then he ...
— The Sequel - What the Great War will mean to Australia • George A. Taylor

... hypothesis. I can hear and imagine tones far beyond the range of my own voice. In listening to an orchestral performance with all the parts, or in having an hallucination of such a performance, it is impossible for me to think that my understanding of this broad and complicated sound-fabric has been effected by my one larynx, which is, moreover, no very practised singer. I consider the sensations which in listening to singing are doubtless occasionally noticed in the larynx a matter of subsidiary importance, like the pictures of the keys touched ...
— The Brain and the Voice in Speech and Song • F. W. Mott

... linen, fine and white, They glitter as the stars of darksome night. They have Saint Peter's keys, and Aaron's rod; They ope and shut, they bind and loose for God. The chief of these are watchmen, they have power To mount on high and to ascend the tower Of this brave fabric, and from thence to see Who keeps their ground, and who the stragglers be. These have their trumpet, when they do it sound The mountains echo, yea it shakes the ground. With it they also sound out an alarm, When they perceive the least mischief or harm Is coming, ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan

... the negroes. It introduced them into the midst of all relations, human and divine. It was the first formal acknowledgment that they were MEN—personally interested in the operations of law, and the requirements of God. It laid the corner-stone in the fabric of their ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society

... news to tell, and no serious question to ask: he has only to communicate his own emotions of joy, or of sorrow, and these he relates and discusses with singular elegance as well as ease, twining, at the same time, into the fabric of his composition, agreeable allusions to the taste and affections of his correspondent. He seems to have rated the intellect of Sillar as the highest among his rustic friends: he pays him more deference, and addresses ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham

... above the sheet tacked across the lower part of the west window lighted up a scene of cheerful disorder, pervading which was a pleasant odor of newness. With her back toward him, the lady began to measure off lengths of some green fabric, standing ...
— The Pleasant Street Partnership - A Neighborhood Story • Mary F. Leonard

... all the agitation consequent upon it, settled back into the past, she had plenty of leisure and plenty of temptation to revert to her old hopes and schemes. Half consciously she had allowed herself to build up a charming fabric of possibilities. Possibly Maurice might write and say, "It is Lucia I love, Lucia I want to marry. It matters nothing to me what her father is or was." (Quixotic and not-to-be-counted-upon piece of ...
— A Canadian Heroine - A Novel, Volume 3 (of 3) • Mrs. Harry Coghill

... thread was required to be fine and regular. When the thread was finished, the old woman hid it away under lock and key in a secret chamber, where her daughters were never allowed to set foot. The spinners knew not how the golden flax came into the house, nor for what fabric the thread was used, for the mother never replied to any questions on these subjects. The old woman went off on a journey two or three times every summer, and sometimes stayed away more than a week, but her daughters never knew where she went or ...
— The Hero of Esthonia and Other Studies in the Romantic Literature of That Country • William Forsell Kirby

... mausoleum, which was known as one of the seven wonders of the world, and which became the generic name for all superb sepulchres. She employed the most renowned rhetors of the age to immortalize the glory of her husband, by writing and reciting his praises. At the consecration of the wondrous fabric which she had reared in his honor, she offered a prize for the most eloquent eulogy on Mausolus. All the orators of Greece were invited to the contest. Theopompus bore off the prize. It is said, that, during the two years by which she survived her royal spouse, she daily mixed some ...
— The Friendships of Women • William Rounseville Alger

... absurd reviews ever written by a critic of recognized ability. Hazlitt followed the method of outlining the story by quotation with interspersed sarcasm and ironical criticism. As a coarse boor might crumple a delicate and beautifully wrought fabric to prove that it has not the wearing qualities of a blacksmith's apron, Hazlitt seized upon the ethereal story of Christabel, with its wealth of mediaeval and romantic imagery, and held up to ridicule the incidents that did not conform ...
— Early Reviews of English Poets • John Louis Haney

... undermined or weakened by this interstitial alteration just as a building is, and yet for a time keep upright by dead habit. But a new perception, a sudden emotional shock, or an occasion which lays bare the organic alteration, will make the whole fabric fall together; and then the centre of gravity sinks into an attitude more stable, for the new ideas that reach the centre in the rearrangement seem now to be locked there, and the new ...
— The Varieties of Religious Experience • William James

... "with great power gave the Apostles witness of the resurrection of the Lord Jesus." The historical fact not only rests upon the most irresistible evidence; it is the very corner-stone of the whole fabric of Gospel teaching. ...
— Exposition of the Apostles Creed • James Dodds

... is all that ought to be expected from any system of paper credit. This seems as likely to rise into a fabric equal to the weight, as any I have yet seen or thought of; and I submit whether it may not be necessary and proper, that Congress should make immediate application to the several States, to invest them with the powers ...
— The Diplomatic Correspondence of the American Revolution, Vol. XI • Various

... carried on by wholesale, especially in the cereals, by an instrument of the most singular and elaborate construction. This machine is drawn by sixteen or eighteen horses, attached to it laterally, so as to work clear of the standing grain, and who move the whole fabric on a moderate but steady walk. A path is first cut with the cradle on one side of the field, when the machine is dragged into the open place. Here it enters the standing grain, cutting off its heads with the utmost accuracy as it moves. Forks ...
— Oak Openings • James Fenimore Cooper

... poetry are the links binding the children of the world to come to the grandsires of the world that was. War will smash, pulverise, sweep into the dustbins of eternity the whole fabric of the old world: therefore, the firstborn in intellect must die. Is that the ...
— Gallipoli Diary, Volume I • Ian Hamilton

... upon the international plane, amid a congress of Powers, and let my eye travel once more over the Alliances of Europe. I looked, Doctor, and truly I saw, then, surprising shifts and changes in the political and diplomatic fabric which I had helped to frame. Time, and kingdoms had passed. I saw, at home and abroad, the rise of new parties into power, strange coalitions, defections, alliances; old balances destroyed, new balances set up in their place. I saw frontiers annulled, treaties violated, world-problems ...
— Angels & Ministers • Laurence Housman

... little transparent nonsense. But they are all so charged with bright invention, keen criticism, quaint paradox, they are so entirely unlike anything else in our recent literature, and they pierce, in a Voltairean way, so deeply to the roots of our social and political fabric, that they may long continue to be read. In the various prefaces, and especially in the general preface to Lothair (of October 1870), Disraeli has fully explained the origin and aim of these and his other works. It is written, as usual, with his tongue in his cheek, in ...
— Studies in Early Victorian Literature • Frederic Harrison

... of domestic manufacture. A fabric called linsey-woolsey was most frequently in use and made the most substantial and warmest clothing. It was made of flax and wool, the former the warp, the latter the filling. Every cabin almost had its rude loom, and every ...
— Daniel Boone - The Pioneer of Kentucky • John S. C. Abbott

... sort of muff, a couple of inches high. Bands of silk, supplied by the spinnerets, unite the pieces, so that the whole resembles a coarse fabric. Without being absolutely faultless, for there are always awkward pieces on the outside, which the worker could not handle, the gaudy building is not devoid of merit. The bird lining its nest would do no better. Whoso sees the curious, many-coloured productions in my pans takes them ...
— The Wonders of Instinct • J. H. Fabre

... in Agra fort, the Taj has always suffered mutilation. The Mahrattas looted it of everything movable and systematically wrenched precious stones from their places in the design ornamenting the fabric of the interior. After the Mutiny came the red-coated soldier, who relieved the tedium of garrison duty by appropriating any attractive piece of inlay overlooked by the Mahrattas—these pretty bits made interesting souvenirs of ...
— East of Suez - Ceylon, India, China and Japan • Frederic Courtland Penfield

... who think of his whole achievement altogether—the whole amazing world of his creation—La Comedie Humaine? By the same sort of rule Scott may be judged, and the whole of his work, his vast industry, and all that made the fabric of his life, be allowed to tell on the mind ...
— Sir Walter Scott - A Lecture at the Sorbonne • William Paton Ker

... centuries; Genius built it long and vast, And o'er it social knowledge pass'd. Far in the glad transmitted flame, Shinar, knit to Britain, came; Their state by thee our fathers free, O Genius, founded deep and wide, Majestic towers the fabric ours, And awes the world ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volumes I-VI. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various

... to receive Senator Stone, he sent him a letter in which the cardinal points of his position were underlined. "Once accept a single abatement of right," he insisted, "and many other humiliations would certainly follow, and the whole fine fabric of international law might crumble under our hands piece by piece. What we are now contending for in this matter is the very essence of the things that have made America a sovereign nation. She cannot yield them without ...
— Woodrow Wilson and the World War - A Chronicle of Our Own Times. • Charles Seymour

... the spring ... Dreaming of his return, of Francois, the handsome sunburnt face turned to hers, Maria forgets all else, and looks long with unseeing eyes at the snow-covered ground which the moonlight has turned into a glittering fabric of ivory and mother-of-pearl-at the black pattern of the fences outlined upon it, and the menacing ranks of the ...
— Maria Chapdelaine - A Tale of the Lake St. John Country • Louis Hemon

... In a fabric soiled and threadbare, one may sometimes trace the tarnished design that erstwhile ran in gold through a rich pattern. Lescott could not but think of some fine old growth gone to seed and decay, but still bearing ...
— The Call of the Cumberlands • Charles Neville Buck

... colour,—the theatre. Of the pure tints of sky and field and watery waste and fruit and flower, she knew nothing. But what of that! had she not secured this bit of rosy radiance, and might it not in time be added to, until it should incarnadine the whole fabric of her life? ...
— Stage Confidences • Clara Morris

... recalls Thucydides. In effect it charms at first by its accuracy and vividness: but with continuous perusal it begins to weigh upon the reader, who feels the strain, the unsparing effort that this glittering fabric must have cost the builder, and at length ceases to sympathize with the story and begins to sympathize with the author. Kinglake started by disclaiming "composition." "My narrative," he says, in the famous preface to Eothen, "conveys not those impressions which ought to have ...
— Adventures in Criticism • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch

... glided away as her mother was interrupted by the leave-taking of some of their visitors. The forms, the courtesies of life had no claims upon her now—she was enduring her first sorrow; the foundation of youth's slight fabric of happiness was yielding beneath her touch. The dread "nevermore," that Edgar Poe could not drive from his heart and sight, was oppressing her. She sought him before whom her young heart had bowed, not the less devotedly and humbly that it was silently and secretly. It was to be a ...
— Aunt Phillis's Cabin - Or, Southern Life As It Is • Mary H. Eastman

... cases the Cypress is not the name of the plant, but is the fabric which we now call crape, the "sable stole of ...
— The plant-lore & garden-craft of Shakespeare • Henry Nicholson Ellacombe

... the world was well constructed, but that the particular people disgraced the elegance and beauty of the general fabric." In the same manner I was relating once to him how Dr. Collier observed that the love one bore to children was from the anticipation one's mind made while one contemplated them. "We hope," says he, "that they will sometime make wise men or amiable women; and we suffer 'em to ...
— Anecdotes of the late Samuel Johnson, LL.D. - during the last twenty years of his life • Hester Lynch Piozzi

... Dean's Verger, for much valuable local information; to Mr. Henry Williams, Canons' Verger, for expert advice on points of masonry; and to both, as well as to the Sexton, for that general assistance which they so willingly rendered him throughout his investigation of the Fabric. ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: The Cathedral Church of Ripon - A Short History of the Church and a Description of Its Fabric • Cecil Walter Charles Hallett

... themselves. First they dig a foundation of greater or less capacity, in proportion to the number of their society. They then form the walls of earth and stones, mixed with billets of wood crossing each other, and thus tying the fabric together just in the same way as you sometimes see masons do in building human dwellings. Their huts are generally of a circular form, something like the figure of a haycock, and they have usually ...
— Stories about the Instinct of Animals, Their Characters, and Habits • Thomas Bingley

... has increased about 11 per cent. in the past ten years, must needs fill the mind of a lover of his kind with dismay and alarm. Although invested and thickly hedged about by ideas of false modesty and pseudo-propriety, in reality the whole fabric of national and individual prosperity, health, vigor and enjoyment, as well as the very important perpetuation of our species, depend upon perfectly strong, healthy and vigorous procreative powers. As an oak cannot grow from a flower seed, neither ...
— Manhood Perfectly Restored • Unknown

... the ship's entire fabric. And their purpose, when it became clear, was startling. The Plumie ship had no rocket tubes. It had no beam-projectors except small-sized objects which were—which must be—their projectors of tractor and pressor beams. They were elaborately grounded to the ship's substance. ...
— The Aliens • Murray Leinster

... it was entirely strange, was yet so absurdly familiar. She was some very high-born lady, there could be no doubt of that, for the delicate fabric of her trailing kirtle was flowered with gold, and gold and coral were twined in the dusky softness of her hair and hung around her neck in a costly chain, which the King was fingering idly as he talked with her. Now she looked up to answer the jesting ...
— The Ward of King Canute • Ottilie A. Liljencrantz

... all a mystery until this day—the nature of the crown, I mean—and will remain a mystery to the end of time. We can never know whether a real crown descended upon the King's head, or only a symbol, the mystic fabric of ...
— Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc Volume 2 • Mark Twain

... the shrivel'd rin'd; Then climbs the branches with increasing strength, Spreads as they spread, and lengthens with their length; —Thus the slight wound ingraved on glass unneal'd 520 Runs in white lines along the lucid field; Crack follows crack, to laws elastic just, And the frail fabric shivers into dust. ...
— The Botanic Garden - A Poem in Two Parts. Part 1: The Economy of Vegetation • Erasmus Darwin

... the fabric of habit which they had so laboriously built for themselves, mankind was to remain no longer. And now it is all gone—like an unsubstantial pageant, faded; and between us and the old English there lies ...
— The Glory of English Prose - Letters to My Grandson • Stephen Coleridge

... covered fabric on top and bottom, tightened at the rear of the planes by lacing. A single lever controlled the elevator and side flaps and there were radical bearings to take both side and ...
— Dave Dashaway and his Hydroplane • Roy Rockwood

... advanced plant. The organic compounds required to extend the fabric, are formed by the plant, instead of being supplied from without. The tissues of the green surface of the stem and leaves have the peculiar power, when acted on by light, of generating, at the expense of carbonic acid, water and ammonia, with various ternary and quarternary organic ...
— The Christian Foundation, Or, Scientific and Religious Journal, Volume 1, January, 1880 • Various

... luxurious citizens of Syracuse and Alexandria, who were delighted with the poems of Theocritus, were less cold, cruel, and sensual than the remnant of their tribe. But corruption must utterly have destroyed the fabric of human society before poetry can ever cease. The sacred links of that chain have never been entirely disjoined, which descending through the minds of many men is attached to those great minds, whence ...
— A Defence of Poetry and Other Essays • Percy Bysshe Shelley

... the Fahy Committee hearings, for instance, an exasperated Charles Fahy asked Omar Bradley, "General, are you running an Army or a dance?"[16-45] Yet social life on military bases at swimming pools, dances, bridge parties, and service clubs formed so great a part of the fabric of military life that the Air Force staff could hardly ignore the possibility of racial troubles in the countless social exchanges that characterized the day-to-day life in any large American institution. The social situation had been seriously considered before the new racial policy was approved. ...
— Integration of the Armed Forces, 1940-1965 • Morris J. MacGregor Jr.

... descriptions he weaves a series of dialogues with an abbe, a tutor of the children of the house, upon art and landscape and the processes of the universe. Nothing can be more excellent and lifelike: it is not until the end that he lets the secret slip that the whole fabric has been a flight of fancy, inspired by no real landscape, but by the sea-pieces sent to ...
— Diderot and the Encyclopaedists - Volume II. • John Morley

... forever. It is a commission which begins, but does not end, in time. It is a commission which makes him the agent and builder of an immense moral work on the earth. Under its instructions he shall add improvement to improvement in that social fabric which is already his shelter and habitation. He has found it of brick,—he shall leave it of marble. He shall seek out every contrivance, and perfect every plan, and exhaust every scheme, which will bring a greater prosperity and a nobler happiness to mankind. He shall quarry out ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 55, May, 1862 • Various

... On the contrary, it rendered it all the more necessary to remain with the others, and share the chances of safety offered by the great raft. Slight as these might be, they were still better than those that might await them, exposed on such a frail fabric as that they now occupied. It is true, that upon this they had left the burning vessel separate from the others; but immediately after they had rowed up alongside the larger structure, ...
— The Ocean Waifs - A Story of Adventure on Land and Sea • Mayne Reid

... figure of the etcher's art or of the process of the mint that we can fully represent Bergson's resources of style. These suggest staccato effects, hard outlines, and that does not at all represent the prose of this writer. It is a fine, delicately interwoven, tissue-like fabric, pliant and supple. If one were in the secret of M. Bergson's private thoughts, it might be discovered that he does not admire his style so much as others do, for his whole manner of thought must, one suspects, ...
— Bergson and His Philosophy • J. Alexander Gunn

... thereby a certain individuality, a certain character. It may realise itself, moreover, becoming conscious of its own mental and spiritual existence; and it then begins to explore the Mind which, like its own, it conceives must underlie the material fabric—half displayed, half concealed, by the environment, and intelligible only to a kindred spirit. Thus the scheme of law and order dimly dawns upon the nascent soul, and it begins to form clear conceptions of truth, goodness, ...
— Life and Matter - A Criticism of Professor Haeckel's 'Riddle of the Universe' • Oliver Lodge

... to his favourite constructor, who refused to build him a balloon of that material, "I'll build it myself." In the face of this threat the builder capitulated. The balloon was built, and the silk proved to be the best fabric available at that time for the purpose. A keel made of strips of pine banded together with aluminum wire formed the backbone of the Santos-Dumont craft, and from it depended the car about one quarter of the length of the balloon and hung squarely amidships. ...
— Aircraft and Submarines - The Story of the Invention, Development, and Present-Day - Uses of War's Newest Weapons • Willis J. Abbot

... years he was pushing forward and carrying through with unceasing and unspeakable vigour the great military dream of his life, the foundation of a National Militia and the extinction of Mercenary Companies. But the fabric he had fancied and thought to have built proved unsubstantial. The spoilt half-mutinous levies whom he had spent years in odious and unwilling training failed him at the crowning moment in strength and spirit: and the fall of the Republic implied the fall of Machiavelli and the close of his official ...
— Machiavelli, Volume I - The Art of War; and The Prince • Niccolo Machiavelli

... green embroidery was worn low-necked; but a tulle fichu, carefully drawn down by hidden strings, covered her neck and shoulders, though it opened a little in front, where its folds were caught together with a sevigne. Beneath this delicate fabric Bathilde's beauties seemed all the more enticing and coquettish. She took off her velvet bonnet and her shawl on arriving, and showed her pretty ears adorned with what were then called "ear-drops" ...
— Pierrette • Honore de Balzac

... completely changed our destiny; for had these two parted with fair words, we should probably have seen no more of Dario, and Don Sanchez's prognostic had been realised. Such trifles as these do influence our career as greatly as more serious accidents, our lives being a fabric of events that hang ...
— A Set of Rogues • Frank Barrett



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