"Woof" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... the bed Of ocean, when a storm rolls overhead, Hear the dull booming of the world of brine Above them, and a mighty muffled roar Of winds and waters, and yet toil calmly on, And split the rock, and pile the massive ore, Or carve a niche, or shape the arched roof; So I, as calmly, weave my woof Of song, chanting the days to come, Unsilenced, though the quiet summer air Stirs with the bruit of battles, and each dawn Wakes from its starry silence to the hum Of many gathering armies. Still, ...
— War Poetry of the South • Various
... so when a man came from the upper warehouse, a room whence silk—both warp and woof—was given out to the workpeople to be wound on bobbins or spread into the web before it was fixed in the loom. After every such operation this silk was brought back to be reweighed, and only when the ...
— Miss Grantley's Girls - And the Stories She Told Them • Thomas Archer
... become an expert in reports and returns and matters of routine through many years of practice. They are the very woof and warp of his brain. He has no ideas, only reflexes. He views with acrid disfavour untried conceptions. From being constantly preoccupied with the manipulation of the machine he regards its smooth working, the ordered and harmonious regulation ...
— The Case For India • Annie Besant
... inspiration flowing from these into English literature. The most distinctive traits of this mythology are a peculiar grim humour, to be found in the religion of no other race, and a dark thread of tragedy which runs throughout the whole woof, and these characteristics, touching both extremes, are writ large over ...
— Myths of the Norsemen - From the Eddas and Sagas • H. A. Guerber
... physical pleasure—as much as his digestive organs require food and his hands work; not as the sole employment, but mixed in with, and forming the basis and the body of higher things—the strong practical woof through which the warp of golden stuff is woven into a glorious fabric—a glorious fabric of national progression. Yes, and into a wider garment still; one that will cover many an outlying Bedouin cowering in the darkness round—one that will ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 446 - Volume 18, New Series, July 17, 1852 • Various
... an e'e, that Peter was trying to put me to my mettle, and I devoutly wished that I had had James Batter at my elbow to have given him play for his money—James being the longest-headed man that ever drove a shuttle between warp and woof; but most fortunately, just as I was going to say, that "every honest man, who wished well to the good of his country, could only have one opinion on that subject,"—we came to the by-road, that leads away off ...
— The Life of Mansie Wauch - tailor in Dalkeith • D. M. Moir
... the movement for what they can get out of it. In all great aggregations of human beings it is quite possible to discover the full gamut of human failings. But loose threads sticking to a piece of cloth are no part of its warp and woof. It is the thinking Grain Grower who must be reckoned with and he is in the majority; the ...
— Deep Furrows • Hopkins Moorhouse
... turned resolutely toward the future; and that future held aloft vistas of purple and gold:—Atlanta, Queen of the cotton kingdom; Atlanta, Gateway to the Land of the Sun; Atlanta, the new Lachesis, spinner of web and woof for the world. So the city crowned her hundred hills with factories, and stored her shops with cunning handiwork, and stretched long iron ways to greet the busy Mercury in his coming. And the ...
— The Souls of Black Folk • W. E. B. Du Bois
... a little dog," replied Philip, entering agreeably into the idea, and backing up to be chained. "No, I'll be a big dog. I'll run around an' jerk my chain an' say 'Woof! Woof!' like the Hewitts' setter. And Foxy 'n I'll have bones together!" His small Velasquez face lighted rapturously at the prospect. "Here, ...
— The Wishing-Ring Man • Margaret Widdemer
... the pretty coquetry They carry on with "Domesticity." It is a suckling of the mighty Lie That, like hop-tendrils, spreads itself on high. I, madam, reverently bare my head To the ball queen; a child of beauty she— And the ideal's golden woof is spread In ball-rooms, hardly ...
— Love's Comedy • Henrik Ibsen
... There was one, now—but he would be like a prince. When at eventide the sky was piled with pale towering clouds, and she looked, as she often looked, down the river, toward the bay and the sea beyond, she always saw this prince that she had woven—warp of memory, woof of dreams—stand erect in the pearly light. There was a ...
— Audrey • Mary Johnston
... "Wow! Woof! Snickery-snee! Bur-r-r! Lemons! Vinegar! Sourgrass!" cried the bear. And his mouth was puckered up so from the sour milk— just as when you eat lemons if you have the mumps—that the bear couldn't open his jaws to take even ...
— Curly and Floppy Twistytail - The Funny Piggie Boys • Howard R. Garis
... save only that in their swords are notches, a many, gained from smiting of host on host: An heirloom of old, those blades, from the fight of Halimah's day, and many the mellay fierce that since has their temper proved; Therewith do they cleave in twain the hauberk of double woof, and kindle the rock beneath to fire, ere the stroke is done. A nature is theirs—God gives the like to no other men— a wisdom that never sleeps, a bounty that never fails. Their home is God's own land, His chosen of old; their faith is steadfast. ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 2 • Charles Dudley Warner
... original, 'Give ample room and verge enough.' In the Life of Gray (Works, vii. 486) Johnson says that the slaughtered bards 'are called upon to "Weave the warp, and weave the woof," perhaps with no great propriety; for it is by crossing the woof with the warp that men weave the web or piece; and the first line was dearly bought by the admission of its wretched correspondent, "Give ample room and verge enough." He has, however, no ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 2 • Boswell
... lip-service, no effort, however well-intentioned, will amount to anything worth while in inculcating the true American spirit in our foreign-born citizens until we are sure that the American spirit is understood by ourselves and is warp and woof of our ...
— The Americanization of Edward Bok - The Autobiography of a Dutch Boy Fifty Years After • Edward William Bok
... governing eternally continuous progress—the web and woof of matter and force interweaving by slow degrees, without a broken thread, that veil which lies between us and the Infinite—that universe which alone we know or can know; such is the picture which science draws of the ...
— Darwiniana • Thomas Henry Huxley
... and Woof So Long If I could only weep Why should we sigh A wakeful night If one should dive deep Two No comfort It does not matter The under-tone Worth living More fortunate He will not come Worn out Rondeau Trifles Courage The ...
— Yesterdays • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... rhythmic swaying, which had measured the steady strength of his step. Its rebound, exaggerated by Sissy's tense nerves, seemed sickeningly high; its fall ghastly low. Swung there from mountain to mountain, its slender supports looked frail as a spider's woof, and seemed to tremble with every gasping breath she drew. In spite of herself, her eye caught the silvery glitter of the thread of water far below in the stony bed ...
— The Madigans • Miriam Michelson
... awful rainbow once in heaven: We know her woof, her texture; she is given In the dull catalogue of common things. Philosophy will clip an angel's wings. 1433 ...
— Handy Dictionary of Poetical Quotations • Various
... through the open door, Fell bright, and reddened warp and woof, When with a cry of pain a little bird, A nestling stork, ...
— Our Boys - Entertaining Stories by Popular Authors • Various
... from some points of view the most elementary of literary forms. It is concerned directly with matters of sensation and volition. If it is to play upon our emotions, it must revive sensations and volitions, make us in some degree part of the action. Experience is at once its warp and woof, but while it gives us new experiences, it must, in connection with them, revive old ones and so become tangible and ...
— The Writing of the Short Story • Lewis Worthington Smith
... The game of hide and seek was on again. She was going to have some excitement. She was going into the night on an adventure, as children play at bears in the dark. The youth in her still rejected the fact that the woof and warp of this adventure were murder ...
— The Drums Of Jeopardy • Harold MacGrath
... ambuscade this tender lore; The constant plashing of the fountain spray Melted in easy numbers, dying away A quiet cadence, while for evermore Faded the eve in richest livery wove Of Tyrian dyes and amber woof t'allure The soft salaam of slowly ...
— Atma - A Romance • Caroline Augusta Frazer
... within, and yet developes into a Church or external kingdom; 'the house not made with hands, eternal in the heavens,' is reduced to the proportions of an earthly building. Or, to use a Platonic image, justice and the State are the warp and the woof which run through the whole texture. And when the constitution of the State is completed, the conception of justice is not dismissed, but reappears under the same or different names throughout the work, both as ...
— The Republic • Plato
... to come in, and aid the family in cutting these fragments up into narrow strips, about an eighth of an inch wide, and then sewing the strips together, and winding them up into large balls. This was used for what the weavers call the warp or the filling of the carpet. The woof was made of yarn, spun usually in the house from wool taken from the backs of their own sheep, and colored with a dye made from the roots of the barberry bushes, or the poke weed, with the aid of a little foreign indigo, or perhaps logwood. A sufficient ...
— Who Spoke Next • Eliza Lee Follen
... "Hark you, Caroline, she may refuse me if she pleases. But I am not a man to be baffled. Have her I will, by one means or another; revenge urges me to it almost as much as ambition. That girl's thread of life has been the dark line in my woof; she has robbed me of fortune, she now thwarts me in my career, she humbles me in my vanity. But, like a hound that has tasted blood, I will run her down, whatever winding ...
— Alice, or The Mysteries, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... sentiment he had added the instinct of the strictly portable early developed in the rover. He had never even possessed a photograph of his sister. Now this sudden discovery that such things might be part of the woof of another person's spiritual garment came to him ready-grown to the ...
— The Blazed Trail • Stewart Edward White
... thou hast shewn, With joy peculiar be thine own; For thee the starry belts of time, The inner laws, the heavenly chime; Thine storm and rack—the forests crack, The sea gives up her secrets hoary; And Beauty thine, on loom divine, Weaving the rainbow's woof of glory. ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume V. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... together. He works freely and is not to be supposed to have arranged every part of the dialogue before he begins to write. He fastens or weaves together the frame of his discourse loosely and imperfectly, and which is the warp and which is the woof cannot always ...
— Phaedrus • Plato
... ah, there is the child Of our souls down the Ages! to bleed for it, proof That souls we have, with our senses filed, Our shuttles at thread of the woof. May it be braver than ours, To encounter the rattle of hostile bolts, To look on the rising of Stranger Powers. May it know how the mind in expansion revolts From a nursery Past with dead letters aloof, And the piping to stupor ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... We shadowy Oceanides, Jove's warders of the island trees, The tufted pillars tall and stout, And all the bosky camp about, Maintain our lives in sounding shades Of old aeolian colonnades; But post about the neighbor land In woof of insubstantial wear: Our ways are on the water sand, Our joy is in the desert air. The very best of our delights Are by the moon of summer nights. Darkness to us is holiday: When winds and waves are up at play, When, on the thunder-beaten ...
— The International Monthly Magazine, Volume 5, No. 1, January, 1852 • Various
... were only dreams. There was nothing accurate and defined in my future course of life. I was ambitious and conceited, but my aspirations were vague and shapeless. I had crowded together the most gorgeous and even some of the most useful and durable materials for my woof, but I had no pattern, and consequently ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... blue and white woof of the spring sky. The plaint of the meadow-lark and the note of the robin sounded sweetly against the stillness of the air. A trio of crows sailed athwart the blue, their great wings beating the air to slow, solemn measure. The pine woodland added shelter and picturesqueness to the road, ...
— Peggy Owen and Liberty • Lucy Foster Madison
... gulf into the glory, Father, my soul cries out to be lifted. Dark is the woof of my dismal story, Thorough thy sun-warp stormily drifted!— Out of the gulf into the glory, Lift me, ...
— Hope of the Gospel • George MacDonald
... a suit from a rack and held it at arm's length to admire it. His fingers caressed the woof of it lovingly. He evidently could bring himself to part with it ...
— The Big-Town Round-Up • William MacLeod Raine
... became; having survived Wenzel, who was childless. Kaiser of the Holy Roman Empire, and so much else: is not Sigismund now a great man? Truly the loom he weaves upon, in this world, is very large. But the weaver was of headlong, high-pacing, flimsy nature; and both warp and woof were gone dreadfully entangled!— ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol, II. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—Of Brandenburg And The Hohenzollerns—928-1417 • Thomas Carlyle
... quality. Ladies' stockings were also knitted of all grades from stout and thick to gossamer or open-work, etc. Homespun dresses were proudly worn, and it became a matter of constant experiment and great pride to improve the quality and vary colors. Warp and woof were finely spun, and beautiful combinations of colors ventured upon, although older heads eschewed them, and in consequence complacently wore their clean, smoothly-ironed gray, "pepper-and-salt," or brown homespuns long after ...
— Memories - A Record of Personal Experience and Adventure During Four Years of War • Fannie A. (Mrs.) Beers
... revery lurked in the air, that each silent sailor seemed resolved into his own invisible self. I was the attendant or page of Queequeg, while busy at the mat. As I kept passing and repassing the filling or woof of marline between the long yarns of the warp, using my own hand for the shuttle, and as Queequeg, standing sideways, ever and anon slid his heavy oaken sword between the threads, and idly looking off upon the water, carelessly and unthinkingly drove ...
— Moby-Dick • Melville
... I do not attempt it. Were I able to paint the picture, there would be no space. My memoir is nearly ended. The threads of the woof are nearly spun out, and the loom is going to stop. Death stands ready with his shears to cut the ravelled thread, knit up the seam, and put his red label on ...
— Mohun, or, The Last Days of Lee • John Esten Cooke
... made me blush, more for him than for Henriette, they stirred my heart violently, for they appealed to the sense of chastity and delicacy which is indeed the very warp and woof of first love. ...
— The Lily of the Valley • Honore de Balzac
... mighty loom. His genius gathered and classified, his imagination spun and wove; the flying shuttle of his fancy delivered to the warp of wisdom and philosophy the shining threads spun from the fibres of human hearts and human experience; and with his wondrous woof of pictured tapestries, he clothed all thought in the bridal robes of immortality. His mind was a resistless flood that deluged the world of literature with its glory. The succeeding poets are but survivors as ...
— Gov. Bob. Taylor's Tales • Robert L. Taylor
... true value; and he played slowly, as though composing each chord as it came, or building it up from memory. It was almost as if he were thinking aloud; and Honor had just decided that she really had no business to be overhearing his thoughts, when an apprehensive "woof" from the Aberdeen brought them ...
— Captain Desmond, V.C. • Maud Diver
... was even more interesting than she had expected from tales of her father's, for the ship steamed along the coast, in blue and golden weather, turning into the Gulf of Mexico after rounding the long point of Florida. Cutting the silk woof of azure, day by day, a great longing to be happy knocked at Angela's heart, like something unjustly imprisoned, demanding to be let out. She had never felt it so strongly before. It must be, she thought, the tonic of the air, which made her conscious of youth and life, eager to have things ...
— The Port of Adventure • Charles Norris Williamson and Alice Muriel Williamson
... Sudden, as though the woof of heaven were torn, A strident shout rang from some neighbour shrubs Three Nubian soldiers ran upon her with Delighted oily faces. Screaming first Commands to her small son to make for home, She laboured to recross the current as ...
— Miscellany of Poetry - 1919 • Various
... warp and woof of every book an author weaves much that even the subtlest readers cannot suspect, far less discern. To them it is but a cross and pile of threads interlaced to form a pattern which may please or displease ...
— Janice Meredith • Paul Leicester Ford
... describe it? The Capitol, the Forum, St. Peter's, the Coliseum—what few hours' ramble ever took in places so hallowed by poetry, history and art? It was a golden leaf in my calendar of life. In thinking over it now, and drawing out the threads of recollection from the varied woof of thought I have woven to-day, I almost wonder how I dared so much at once; but within reach of them all, how was it possible to wait? Let me give a sketch of ...
— Views a-foot • J. Bayard Taylor
... Another love In its lone woof began to twine; But oh! the golden thread was wove Between my sister's heart ...
— The Redskins; or, Indian and Injin, Volume 1. - Being the Conclusion of the Littlepage Manuscripts • James Fenimore Cooper
... The blood in thy body is blended of the wandering Elking race, And one that I may not tell of, who in God-home hath his place, And who changed his shape to beget thee in the wild-wood's leafy roof. How then shall the doom of the Wolfings be woven in the woof Which the Norns for thee have shuttled? or shall one man of war Cast down the tree of the Wolfings on the roots that spread so far? O friend, thou art wise and mighty, but other men have lived Beneath the Wolfing roof-tree ...
— The House of the Wolfings - A Tale of the House of the Wolfings and All the Kindreds of the Mark Written in Prose and in Verse • William Morris
... life is one, and in its warp and woof, There runs a thread of gold that glitters fair, And sometimes in the pattern shows most sweet ...
— Bohemian Society • Lydia Leavitt
... away! For the Master's eye is on us, Never off us, still upon us, Night and day! Work away! Keep the busy fingers plying, Keep the ceaseless shuttles flying; See that never thread lie wrong; Let not clash or clatter round us, Sound of whirring wheels, confound us; Steady hand! let woof be strong And firm, that has to last so ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Vol. 3, July, 1851 • Various
... in the world has been accomplished without passion. Two elements, therefore, enter into the object of our investigation—the first the Idea, the second the complex of human passions; the one the warp, the other the woof of the vast arras-web of universal history. The concrete mean and union of the two is liberty, under the conditions of morality in a State. We have spoken of the idea of freedom as the nature of Spirit, and the absolute goal of history. ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VII. • Various
... Then with a malignant "woof!" like the hoarse, growling bark of a dog, magnified a hundred times, he slid back into the water, a great living streak of vivid green and disappeared to the cool retreat at the bottom ...
— Bones - Being Further Adventures in Mr. Commissioner Sanders' Country • Edgar Wallace
... taking it all in all, the smallest part. We have, seemingly, considered images as isolated facts, as psychic atoms; but that is a purely theoretic position. Images are not solitary in actual life; they form part of a chain, or rather of a woof or net, since, by reason of their manifold relations they may radiate in all directions, through all the senses. Dissociation, then, works also upon series, cuts them up, mangles them, breaks them, and reduces ...
— Essay on the Creative Imagination • Th. Ribot
... pick up an old thread, and behold, without rhyme or reason, we are treated to a whole piece of past experience. Stranger yet when but the background is brought back. For we were unconscious of the warp while the details were weaving in. Yet reproduce it and all the woof starts suddenly to sight. For atmosphere, like a perfume, does ghostly service to ...
— Noto, An Unexplored Corner of Japan • Percival Lowell
... Art's thunderheat, Till haply (some pre-shadow rising slow Of what his Italy would fancy meet To be called BRUTUS) straight his plastic hand Fell back before his prophet-soul, and left A fragment, a maimed Brutus,—but more grand Than this, so named at Rome, was! Let thy weft Present one woof and warp, Mazzini! Stand With no man hankering for a dagger's heft, No, not for Italy!—nor stand apart, No, not for the Republic!—from those pure Brave men who hold the level of thy heart In patriot ...
— The Poetical Works of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Volume IV • Elizabeth Barrett Browning
... had had such narrow opportunities of obtaining a knowledge of things as they really are, in distinction from the tissue of shams which constitute the warp and the woof of an Oriental Palace, should have been able to hold her own in every situation, and never be crushed by the opposing forces about her, is a phenomenon in itself only to be explained by due recognition of the influence ...
— Court Life in China • Isaac Taylor Headland
... the cursed snow was packed enough now to bear. He slipped off the web-feet, and standing gingerly, but blessedly near, made effectual attack. Hooray! One more good 'un and the thing was down. Hah! ugh! Woof-ff! The tree was down, but so was he, floundering breast high, and at every effort to get out only breaking down more of the crust and ...
— The Magnetic North • Elizabeth Robins (C. E. Raimond)
... gave no thought to the future. I did nothing but read and study ... except at those times when I was talking to people prodigiously of my trip and what I had seen and been through. And naturally and deftly I wove huge strips of imagination and sheer invention into the woof ...
— Tramping on Life - An Autobiographical Narrative • Harry Kemp
... of two kinds, one being a short, close-fitting garment made out of either undyed abak fiber with a woof of native cotton or of imported blue cloth. This garment resembles closely the ordinary bathing tights. It is the working breeches of the Manbo and makes no pretense of being ornamental. The white or undyed ...
— The Manbos of Mindano - Memoirs of the National Academy of Sciences, Volume XXIII, First Memoir • John M. Garvan
... it all day saying nothing, but it was strange indeed (thought he) if with Miss Mary within, and the sunshine and the throng and the children playing in the syver sand without, he should not find life more full and pleasant than it had been in the glen. All these thoughts made warp for the woof of his attention to the street as he stood at the window. And by-and-by there came a regret for the things lost with the death of the little old woman of Ladyfield—what they were his mind did not pause to make definite, but there was the sense of chances ...
— Gilian The Dreamer - His Fancy, His Love and Adventure • Neil Munro
... of our city,—her fast-growing figure, The warp and the woof of her brain and her hands,— But we're proudest of all that her heart has grown bigger, And warms with fresh blood ...
— The Poetical Works of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Complete • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... familiar wear; The far-fetched diamond finds its home Flashing and smouldering in her hair; For her the seas their pearls reveal; Art and strange lands her pomp supply With purple, chrome, and cochineal, Ochre, and lapis lazuli; The worm its golden woof presents; Whatever runs, flies, dives, or delves, All doff for her their ornaments, Which suit her better than themselves; And all, by this their power to give, Proving her right to take, proclaim Her beauty's clear prerogative To profit so by ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 1 (of 4) • Various
... took up the long trail toward the Northland, where in a woof of sage green and bracken gold was woven a scheme of flesh-colored Castillejia, and wine-tinted moose-weed, and purple pea-flower; where was the golden shimmer of Gaillardia and slender star-leafed ...
— The Outcasts • W. A. Fraser
... rope are passed through these U-shaped cavities, and then over the lower pole of the loom at the bottom of the extended series of warp threads. The latter can thus be tightened preparatory to the operation of filling in with the woof. The kiva looms seem to be used mainly for weaving the dark-blue and black blankets of diagonal and diamond pattern, which form a staple article of trade with the Zuni and the Rio Grande Pueblos. As an additional convenience ...
— Eighth Annual Report • Various
... entirely smooth on the outside, and indicates an unusually well finished and symmetrical vessel. Another shows the impression of basket-work, in which a wide fillet or splint has served as the warp and a small twisted cord as the woof. One interesting feature of this vessel is that from certain impressions on the raised ridges we discover that the vessel has been taken from the net mold while still in a ...
— Illustrated Catalogue of a Portion of the Collections Made During the Field Season of 1881 • William H. Holmes
... taken part. I have attended many such meetings, but do not recall any that was more interesting. The story of the private soldier is often rich in experience. It tells of what he saw in battle, and these stories of the soldiers, told to each other, form the web and woof out of which history is written. It was useless to preach to these men that Providence directly controls the history of nations. A good Presbyterian would find in our history evidence of the truth of ...
— Recollections of Forty Years in the House, Senate and Cabinet - An Autobiography. • John Sherman
... green, or blue, or crimson, or fawn, or orange, or pinky light salutes our eyes, as sleep's visionary worlds recede and relapse into airy nothing, and as we know of a certainty that these are real web-and-woof damask curtains, that flock palpable on ...
— Recreations of Christopher North, Volume 2 • John Wilson
... take up and assimilate minerals, beasts assimilate herbs, and God, in the Incarnation and its proper Sacrament, assimilates us, who, says St Augustine, 'are God's beasts.'" It is man in his blind self- seeking who separates woof from weft in the living garment of God, and loses the more as he neglects the outward and visible signs of a ...
— The Roadmender • Michael Fairless
... established by the god Washington, whose worship, with that of such dii minores as Gufferson, Jaxon and Lincon (identical probably with the Hebru Abrem) runs like a shining thread through all the warp and woof of the stuff that garmented their moral nakedness. Some stones, very curiously inscribed in many tongues, were found by the explorer Droyhors in the wilderness bordering the river Bhitt (supposed by him to be the ancient Potomac) as lately as the reign of Barukam IV. These stones ...
— The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce • Ambrose Bierce
... on so many extra waiters that you could hope to get your gin fizz now—as soon as all the other people got theirs. The hospitals were putting in extra cots for bystanders. For when little, woolly dogs loll their tongues out and say "woof, woof!" at the fleas that bite 'em, and nervous old black bombazine ladies screech "Mad dog!" and policemen begin to shoot, somebody is going to get hurt. The man from Pompton, N.J.., who always wears an overcoat ...
— The Trimmed Lamp and Others • O Henry
... stories of love from Ovid, and older poets than Ovid (for E.B. is a scholar.) There was Pyramus and Thisbe, and be sure Dido was not forgot, nor Hero and Leander, and swans more than sang in Cayster, with mottos and fanciful devices, such as beseemed,—a work in short of magic. Iris dipt the woof. This on Valentine's eve he commended to the all-swallowing indiscriminate orifice—(O ignoble trust!)—of the common post; but the humble medium did its duty, and from his watchful stand, the next morning, ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Volume 2 • Charles Lamb
... "Might have been a woof," remarked Duke, whose ideas had a knack of getting so well lodged in his brain that it was often difficult to get ...
— Hoodie • Mary Louisa Stewart Molesworth
... Venice in 1552, and it may concern those who care to note the subtle interweaving of the warp and woof of history that the birth year of this most resourceful foe that Jesuitism ever had was the death year of St. Francis Xavier, the ...
— Autobiography of Andrew Dickson White Volume II • Andrew Dickson White
... but as man Clad to meet man; over his lucid arms A military vest of purple flowed, Livelier than Meliboean, or the grain Of Sarra, worn by kings and heroes old In time of truce; Iris had dipt the woof; His starry helm unbuckled showed him prime In manhood where youth ended; by his side, As in a glistering zodiack, hung the sword, Satan's dire dread; and in his hand the spear. Adam bowed low; he, kingly, from his state Inclined not, but his coming thus ...
— Paradise Lost • John Milton
... approaches adequacy is the chapter on the imitative impulse. First Bagehot, then Tarde, then Royce and Baldwin here, have shown that invention and imitation, taken together, form, one may say, the entire warp and woof of human life, in so far as it is social. The American over-tension and jerkiness and breathlessness and intensity and agony of expression are primarily social, and only secondarily physiological, phenomena. They are bad habits, ...
— Talks To Teachers On Psychology; And To Students On Some Of Life's Ideals • William James
... to a large organization with individual freedom, it tends to disunity, separation, the splitting up of society into many independent sovereign states, or fractions of states, certain, absolutely certain to clash and war with each other, especially with slavery as their woof and warp; and thus bring back the reign of barbarism, and the ultimate subjection of these warring little sovereignties to one or more ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol III, Issue VI, June, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... her outside her narrow circle of interests. Her ravenous appetite for new novels is amazing; children are not so gluttonous of cream-tarts. To supply this demand sequestered spinsters in suburban or rustic bowens sit spinning the woof and warp of life as it never was on sea or land. Bound goes the wheel, to and fro glides the shuttle, and the long, endless pattern unwinds itself in all its wealth of imaginative device and all its glory of ...
— Without Prejudice • Israel Zangwill
... do right. Carelessness, oppression, neglect of the people's rights, a few grasping the wealth of the nation while the people suffer and starve, weave bloody colors into the warp and woof of life from Paris to New York and Washington, D. C., and so on to Jonesville. And we went through the apartments of Louis Philippe, Francis I., Louis XIII., etc., and Madam Maintenon's apartments and Diana de Poyter's, and seen her monogram decorating ...
— Around the World with Josiah Allen's Wife • Marietta Holley
... is the memory of whispered prayers, of bedtime stories, of old ideals held unfalteringly before a boy's gaze; it is half-forgotten songs, and dim visions of heroes that a mother taught her child to worship, that make the very warp and woof of the soul. ...
— Pushing to the Front • Orison Swett Marden
... who, like the human heart, sprinkle rest and kindness and heart's-ease all through their daily tasks. They weave a bright thread of thankful happiness through the web and woof of life's pattern. They are never too busy to say a kind word or to do a gentle deed. They may be compelled to sigh betimes, but amid their sighs are smiles that drive away the cares. They find sunbeams scattered in the trail of every cloud. They gather flowers where others ...
— The Girl Wanted • Nixon Waterman
... naming is a kind of speaking, and we must name according to a natural process, and with a proper instrument. We cut with a knife, we pierce with an awl, we weave with a shuttle, we name with a name. And as a shuttle separates the warp from the woof, so a name distinguishes the natures of things. The weaver will use the shuttle well,—that is, like a weaver; and the teacher will use the name well,—that is, like a teacher. The shuttle will be made by ...
— Cratylus • Plato
... diametrical stroke will answer the purpose. The glass should be mounted so as to be perfectly free to move in every direction—that is to say, perfectly unconstrained. We mount all our flats on a piece of body Brussels carpet, so that every individual part of the woof acts as a yielding spring. The flats are held in place by wooden clamps at the edges, which never touch, but allow the bits of glass or metal to move slowly around if they are circular; if they are rectangular we allow them to tumble about as they please within the ...
— On Laboratory Arts • Richard Threlfall
... beneath the crust of dogma and the froth of traditional beliefs; nor does it seem to have occurred to him that, while he stripped the rags and patches that conceal the nakedness of ordinary human nature, he might drag away the weft and woof of nobler thought. In his poet-philosopher's imagination there bloomed a wealth of truth and love and beauty so abounding, that behind the mirage he destroyed, he saw no blank, but a new Eternal City of the Spirit. He ...
— Percy Bysshe Shelley • John Addington Symonds
... dreadful trail she had, in some measure at least, got down to essentials; the ancient love of the fire, implanted deeply in the germ plasm, was wakened and recalled. It was not a love that she had to learn. The warp and woof of her being was impregnated with it; only in her years of ease she had forgotten what an ancient friend and ...
— The Snowshoe Trail • Edison Marshall
... To weave their mats, the ancient Egyptians took the coarse fibre of the papyrus and, with the help of pegs, stretched it between two poles which were fastened in the ground. Two bars were placed in between these poles, the threads of the warp serving to keep them apart. The woof thread was passed through and pressed down tightly a number of times with a bent ...
— Rugs: Oriental and Occidental, Antique & Modern - A Handbook for Ready Reference • Rosa Belle Holt
... from the deep sleep with which exhaustion of mind and body had overwhelmed her. She remembered the scenes of the banquet as the phantasms of a dream—strange and terrible; for her thoughts were slow to gather the threads and weave the woof. Only a feeling of failure, of fruitless abasement, was ever present. Hannibal had admired her, but, proof against any controlling attraction, he had put her words aside with little short of contempt. A dread, even, lest the strange acumen of this wonderful man had pierced her mask, ...
— The Lion's Brood • Duffield Osborne
... and hurried home, feeling that in the hour since she had trodden this road before, a new era had begun for her. The tissue of vague dreams must now get narrower and narrower, and all the threads of thought and emotion be gradually absorbed in the woof of her actual ...
— The Mill on the Floss • George Eliot
... to the low, to find at last that they lie close together, that the two extremes touch, and that our journey's end is but our starting-place? Allowing for great difference of stuff and texture, was the pattern of this woof repeated ...
— Dombey and Son • Charles Dickens
... scarce venturing, to 'interpose a word in behalf of Lady Eveline, for whom, despite the constitutional coolness of his temperament, he really felt much interest—"I would that your Grace but justly knew how many threads went to that woof." ...
— The Betrothed • Sir Walter Scott
... of the darnel, its likeness to the wheat in spring, and the decisive difference between them in the harvest, you have the processes of nature profusely intertwined. A parable is ordinarily woven of human action and the unconscious development of nature, as warp and woof. In the two greatest parables those twin ingredients are in a great measure separated: the sower is almost wholly composed of processes in nature, the prodigal almost wholly ...
— The Parables of Our Lord • William Arnot
... beginning of the art the warp threads were stretched between convenient objects on the ground or from horizontal supports. At first the woof or filling threads were woven back and forth between the warp threads as in darning. An improvement was the device called the "heald" or "heddle," by means of which alternate warp threads could be drawn away from the others, making an opening through ...
— Textiles and Clothing • Kate Heintz Watson
... truth in the doctrine of the economic interpretation of history but there is also truth, and a mighty truth, in the spiritual interpretation of life. The awakened human soul is indissolubly inknit with the warp and woof of things divine. It fights not alone, ...
— From the Bottom Up - The Life Story of Alexander Irvine • Alexander Irvine
... romances of the day, and it will surprise no one that they do not agree. How can they tell the same things in the same way, since the sources of each are so different? Nor, with only myths for warp and woof, is it at all surprising that we have nothing more than Homeric exaggerations when the fanciful fabric ...
— History of Rationalism Embracing a Survey of the Present State of Protestant Theology • John F. Hurst
... chameleon-hued satin, so artfully woven, with a warp of golden thread and woof of crimson silk, that, as with every change of light and shade, it glowed in ruby coals or blazed in amber flames; and as with every motion of her graceful form it flashed around her, she seemed to ...
— Cruel As The Grave • Mrs. Emma D. E. N. Southworth
... or real self, being the seat of love and the nucleus of sincerity, forms the warp and woof of all moral actions. He is an obedient son who serves his parents with sincerity and love. He is a loyal subject who serves his master with sincerity and love. A virtuous wife is she who loves her husband with her sincere heart. A trustworthy ...
— The Religion of the Samurai • Kaiten Nukariya
... soul, suffer me to add my contribution to the great woof of human wisdom. The image of the sun is reflected differently in the dewdrop and in the majestic mirror of the wide-stretching ocean. Shame to the turbid, murky swamp, which never receives and never ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... delighted fancy of the reader, how on one side was a most remarkable river,—such as was never heard of before, probably,—in fact, a web of water framed between the hills, its rushing warp-currents, as it rolled along, woven by smoking steam-shuttles with a woof of foam,—how, at the entrance of a bay, flocks of snowy sails, with black, shining beaks, and sleek, unruffled plumage, were swimming out to sea,—how another river, not quite so unique as the last, was also in sight, coiling among emerald steeps and crags and precipices ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 6, Issue 35, September, 1860 • Various
... blood-chilling "Woof! Woof!" steadily sounding louder, nearer, a streak of color shot across the orchard, from the house, toward the affrighted Brigade, while old Bildad's hoarse growl shattered the echoes with "Take 'em out o' ...
— T. Haviland Hicks Senior • J. Raymond Elderdice
... costumes for the ceremonies than at anything else, but it should be remembered that in ancient days everything depended, in Hopi belief, on propitiating the deities. Still if we would pick the threads of religion from the warp and woof of Hopi life there apparently would not be much left. It must be recorded in the interests of truth, that Hopi men will work at days labor and give satisfaction except when a ceremony is about to take place at the pueblo, and duty to their religion interferes with steady employment ...
— The Unwritten Literature of the Hopi • Hattie Greene Lockett
... grave engulf the end. To those who burn the candle to the stick, The sputtering socket yields but little light. Long life is sadder than an early death. We cannot count on ravelled threads of age Whereof to weave a fabric. We must use The warp and woof the ready present yields And toil while daylight lasts. When I bethink How brief the past, the future, still more brief Calls on to action, action! Not for me Is time for retrospection or for dreams, Not time for self-laudation ...
— Poems of Power • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... the woof of petty interests and petty conspiracies which united Blois with Orleans, and Orleans with Pairs; and which was about to bring into the last named city where she was to produce so great a revolution, the poor little La Valliere, who was far from ...
— Ten Years Later • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... beams made at the warping machine are unwound and laid upon one another, so as to form a much denser warp of perhaps 2000 threads, and wrapped on a beam in a suitable form for fitting in the loom as the warp or "woof" of the woven fabric. In addition to this, the sizing machine contains mechanism by which the threads are made to pass through a mixing of "size" or paste, ...
— The Story of the Cotton Plant • Frederick Wilkinson
... of invention, that tribute to the triumph of mind over matter, fascinating as a romance, need not be treated in detail here. The effects of invention on social and political life, multitudinous and never-ending, form the very warp and woof of American progress from the days of Andrew Jackson to the latest hour. Neither the great civil conflict—the clash of two systems—nor the problems of the modern age can be approached without an understanding of the striking ...
— History of the United States • Charles A. Beard and Mary R. Beard
... character as original and delightfully conceived as it is vividly carried through to the last. A dull coarse web her small life seems made of; but even from its taskwork, which is undertaken for childhood itself, there are glittering threads cast across its woof and warp of care. The unconscious philosophy of her tricks and manners has in it more of the subtler vein of the satire aimed at in the book, than even the voices of society which the tale begins and ends with. In her very kindliness there is the touch of malice that shows a childish playfulness ...
— The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete • John Forster
... snow-shoes, Kitty set at once to work to weave the web of strips of dried caribou skin. Jean was even more interested in this than she had been in the making of her travelling-suit, and she was never tired of watching the woman's skilful fingers as she fashioned the warp and woof upon the frames until the perfect webs were completed. What strong snow-shoes they were, and how graceful! Jean was anxious to try them, and longed for the snow ...
— The King's Arrow - A Tale of the United Empire Loyalists • H. A. Cody
... invented to parody the shortcomings of some local character. Others represent local industries. A pretty dance is "Voeve Vadmel" (cloth-weaving). In this some dancers become the bobbins, others form the warp and woof; thus they go in and out, weaving themselves into an imaginary piece of cloth. Then, rolling themselves into a bale, they stand a moment, unwind, reverse, and then disperse. This dance is accompanied by the voices of the ...
— Denmark • M. Pearson Thomson
... together, nor is the thread very fine, but the work is very neat and regular, and the needles are of their own manufacture. The bongos are very often striped, and sometimes made even in check patterns; this is done by their dyeing some of the threads of the warp, or of both warp and woof, with various simple colors; the dyes are all made of decoctions of different kinds of wood, except for black, when a kind of iron ore is used. The bongos are employed as money in this put of Africa. Although called grass-cloth by me, the ...
— History of the Negro Race in America From 1619 to 1880. Vol 1 - Negroes as Slaves, as Soldiers, and as Citizens • George W. Williams
... start up ready to jog along again. You come to a slow clear stream that winds seaward, lilting to itself in low whispered cadences. Over some broad shallow pool paven with brown stones the little trout fly hither and thither, making a weft and woof of dark streaks as they travel; the minnows poise themselves, and shiver and dart convulsively; the leisurely eel undulates along, and perhaps gives you a glint of his wicked eye; you begin to understand the angler's fascination, for the most restive of men might be lulled ...
— The Ethics of Drink and Other Social Questions - Joints In Our Social Armour • James Runciman
... highest mountain peaks stand alone in the earliest sunbeams. It is for a later time to fit such truth to all the conditions of human life, to fully assimilate it with older lessons, to weave it into the warp and woof of society. ...
— The Chief End of Man • George S. Merriam
... than the table. Surrounded each day by the family who are eager for refreshment of body and spirit, its impressions sink deep; and its influences for good or ill form no mean part of the warp and woof of our lives. Its fresh damask, bright silver, glass, and china, give beautiful lessons in neatness, order, and taste; its damask soiled, rumpled, and torn, its silver dingy, its glass cloudy, and china nicked, annoy and vex us at first, and then instill their lessons of carelessness and disorder. ...
— Science in the Kitchen. • Mrs. E. E. Kellogg
... of the whole matter. It would be impossible to abstract from their great bulk any consecutive or consistent system of thought or precept. His influence has been mainly by isolated ideas of more or less truth and value. It is impossible here to analyze his work. Such is the mixed tissue of his woof that the captive princess who was set to sort a roomful of birds' feathers had scarcely a harder task than one who should try to separate and classify his threads, some priceless and steady, some rotten, false, misleading. ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, December 1878 • Various
... sudden "Woof!" Sambo went up in the air, moved sideways, and came down on the startled Tom Reade with the ...
— The Young Engineers on the Gulf - The Dread Mystery of the Million Dollar Breakwater • H. Irving Hancock
... point of land a mile or two below. I think we were both a little nervous that night; I confess that I was, and if an unwashed black-bearded individual had poked his head out from the willows and said, "Woof!" or whatever it is that they say when they want to start up a jack-rabbit, we would both have stampeded clear across the border. In fact I felt a little as I did when I played truant from school and wondered what would happen ...
— Through the Grand Canyon from Wyoming to Mexico • E. L. Kolb
... country; is it the clean, broad streets and decorations of the capital; is it a discussion of domestic politics, or a question of foreign politics, the Emperor's hand is there. His opinion, his influence, what he has said or has not said, are inextricably interwoven with the woof and web of ...
— Germany and the Germans - From an American Point of View (1913) • Price Collier
... protagonists. Countless multitudes of such men as Jamie must there be, to hold the fabric together and make possible the daring spins of you, my lords Lovelace, and you, Launcelots and Tristrams, and Miss Vivien here; who weave your paradoxical cross-purposes of tinsel evil in the sober woof of good. ...
— Pirate Gold • Frederic Jesup Stimson
... promiscuity of instinct, and subject our roving fancy to the dominion of 'one unchanging wife?' Here, indeed, I frankly admit, Nature has her revenges; and an actual polygamy flourishes even under the aegis of our law. But the law exists; it is the warp on which, by the woof of property, we fashion that Nessus-shirt, the Family, in which, we have swathed the giant energies of mankind. But while that shirt clings close to every limb, what avails it, in the name of liberty, to snap, here and there, a button or a lace? A more heroic work is required of ...
— A Modern Symposium • G. Lowes Dickinson
... we asked at once the Custodian of the Library to give us access to this Book of Khalid, and after examining it, we hired an amanuensis to make a copy for us. Which copy we subsequently used as the warp of our material; the woof we shall speak of in the following chapter. No, there is nothing in this Work which we can call ours, except it be the Loom. But the weaving, we assure the Reader, was a mortal process; for the material is of such a mixture that here and there the ...
— The Book of Khalid • Ameen Rihani
... the ignorant rabble following {411} the bad advice of the hot-heads, MacKenzie and Papineau; but it is worth remembering that everything the rabble fought for, and hanged for, has since been incorporated in Canada's constitution as the very woof and ...
— Canada: the Empire of the North - Being the Romantic Story of the New Dominion's Growth from Colony to Kingdom • Agnes C. Laut
... wanted the old Wilkie Collins idea of a plot with a hundred threads drawn into one woof, or did he prefer modern nothingness, a shred of a story attached to unending analysis and the infinitely little commented upon with elaborate and pretentious humour. He ...
— Margot Asquith, An Autobiography: Volumes I & II • Margot Asquith
... spinner of silk weaves his sunbeams of gold, Blending sunset and dawn in its silvery fold, So she wove in the woof of her wonderful words The soft shimmer of sunshine and music of birds. With the radiance of moonlight and perfume of flowers, She lent charm to the springtime and ...
— Threads of Grey and Gold • Myrtle Reed
... to do this I have selected from the most trustworthy sources what I believe to be the most telling points of "the trade," and have woven these together into a tale, the warp of which is composed of thick cords of fact; the woof of slight lines of fiction, just sufficient to hold the fabric together. Exaggeration has easily been avoided, because—as Dr Livingstone says in regard to the slave-trade—"exaggeration ...
— Black Ivory • R.M. Ballantyne
... canticle softly and slowly, . . then flinging themselves prone, they pressed their faces to the earth, . . and again the glittering Veil waved to and fro suggestively, while Theos, his heart beating fast, watched its shining woof with straining eyes and a sense of suffocation in his throat, . . what ignorant fools, what mad barbarians, what blind blasphemers were these people, he indignantly thought, who could thus patiently hear the praise of an evil woman like ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli |
