"Cobweb" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... did not even amuse her by his calf-like pursuit. All that was ruthless in her rose up and sneered at his weakness and his timid assurance, which had the same effect as one of those horrible streamers of cobweb that catch the face as one walks unwarily along a dusky lane. Only her native resoluteness enabled her to show Gaga a false patience. Only her insensitiveness made his constant caress endurable. Sally blinked sometimes ...
— Coquette • Frank Swinnerton
... down upon the steps in helpless dismay, and tears began to drop from Eliza's eyes, when Mother Mayberry appeared upon the scene of action, stiff and rustling as to black silk gown, capped with a cobweb of lace over the water-waves and ...
— The Road to Providence • Maria Thompson Daviess
... our educational evolution is perhaps worth summarizing. In the early days of colonization the Church of England spun an educational cobweb, which it has been very difficult to sweep away, and which still remains in a fragmentary state as an evidence of past good service. When the education of the first settlers was in danger of being altogether neglected, the Church put forth the greatest energy ...
— Town Life in Australia - 1883 • R. E. N. (Richard) Twopeny
... Frank was furiously busy, working the darkened stellene of his bubb from the drum, letting it spread like a long wisp of silvery cobweb against the stars, letting it inflate from the air-flasks to a firm and beautiful circle, attaching the rigging, the fine, radial spokewires—for which the blastoff drum itself now formed the hub. To the latter he now attached his full-size, sun-powered ionic motor. Then he crept through the double ...
— The Planet Strappers • Raymond Zinke Gallun
... We cannot always be going back, like a Hindoo history, to the foundations of the world. Some things may be taken for granted. How this simple axiom sweeps away, for instance, the cobweb speculations as to whether voting is a natural right, or a privilege delegated by society! No matter which. Take it which way you please. That is an abstract question; but the practical question is a very ...
— Women and the Alphabet • Thomas Wentworth Higginson
... commit an error in this mental calculation, exceeding the tenth of a second, or six hundredth of a minute. When the star has been thus watched over the seven cobweb lines (or wires), the observer jots down the hour and minute, in addition to the second, and the task is done. Stars, not very near the sun, may be seen in broad daylight, but, at night, it is requisite to direct a ray ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 2, July, 1850. • Various
... said the clown. "Only just help Cobweb to scratch. I must go to the barber's, for methinks I am marvelous hairy about ...
— The Junior Classics, V5 • Edited by William Patten
... hold of the vessel and had a long, deep draught, one which seemed to clear away the last mental cobweb from his brain. ...
— Marcus: the Young Centurion • George Manville Fenn
... goe with me, Ile giue thee Fairies to attend on thee; And they shall fetch thee Iewels from the deepe, And sing, while thou on pressed flowers dost sleepe: And I will purge thy mortall grossenesse so, That thou shalt like an airie spirit go. Enter Pease-blossome, Cobweb, ...
— The First Folio [35 Plays] • William Shakespeare
... their unspeakable atrocity, but will acknowledge the truth of these words, "Because I am God, and not man, therefore the children of men are not consumed"—just as it is because the ship rides by a cable, and not a cobweb, that, when sails are rent, and yards are gone, and breakers are foaming on the reef, she mounts the billows and survives the storm. That we are not suffering the pains of hell, that we have hopes of heaven and ever shall be ...
— The Angels' Song • Thomas Guthrie
... How large an element in a speculative talent is the command of these happy images! Coleridge, by a finer effort of the same kind, a greater delicacy of fancy, detects all sorts of slips, transitions, breaks of continuity in Hartley's glancing cobweb. Coleridge, with Kant, regards all association as effected by a power within, to which he gives a fanciful Greek name.[39] In an act of perception there is the matter which sense presents, colour, tone, feeling; but also a form or mould, such as space, unity, causation, suggested from within. In ...
— English Critical Essays - Nineteenth Century • Various
... I became a man again and staggered away terror-stricken, leaning on my sword, from the sight of my revenge, and with great bodily pain crawled back to the road. And, dear Margaret, the rimy trees were now all like pyramids of golden filagree, and lace, cobweb fine, in the red firelight. Oh! most beautiful! And a poor wretch got entangled in the burning sails, and whirled round screaming, and lost hold at the wrong time, and hurled like stone from mangonel high into the air; then a dull thump; it was his carcass striking the earth. The next moment there ...
— The Cloister and the Hearth • Charles Reade
... barking," answered Temperance, laying smooth a piece of cobweb lawn. "I think I'll bite, one of these days. Deary me, but there are widows of divers sorts! If ever there were what Paul calls 'a widow indeed,' it is my Lady Lettice; and she doesn't make a screen of ...
— It Might Have Been - The Story of the Gunpowder Plot • Emily Sarah Holt
... woman clothed in a splendid trailing gown, trimmed with exquisite lace as fine as cobweb. This was the important Sorceress known as Glinda the Good, who had been of great assistance to both Ozma and Dorothy. There was no humbug about her magic, you may be sure, and Glinda was as kind as she was powerful. She greeted Dorothy ...
— The Road to Oz • L. Frank Baum
... still as a stone, in the chair in which he had deposited himself, his hands folded on his breast, his legs stretched straight out before him and resting upon the heels, his eyes cast up to the ceiling as if he had meant to count every mesh of every cobweb with which the arched roof was canopied, wearing at the same time a face of as solemn and imperturbable gravity, as if his existence had depended on the accuracy of ...
— The Monastery • Sir Walter Scott
... commonplace courtiers; the lovers, men and women in the condition of all conditions in which fairy-powers might get a hold of them; the quarrelling king and queen of Fairyland, with their courtiers, Blossom, Cobweb, and the rest, and the court-jester, Puck; the ignorant, clownish artisans, rehearsing their play,—fairies and clowns, lovers and courtiers, are all mingled in one exquisite harmony, clothed with a night ...
— The Seaboard Parish Vol. 3 • George MacDonald
... had to be made by slow, laborious feeling, aided only by such dim reflections of the gibbous moon as glimmered through a window, cobweb-hung, or through some break ...
— Darkness and Dawn • George Allan England
... knives and forks, but neither fellows. Item, a surplice, not unmeeting, Either for table-cloth, or sheeting; There is likewise a pair of breeches, But patch'd, and fallen in the stitches, Hung up in study very little, Plaster'd with cobweb and spittle, An airy prospect all so pleasing, From my light window without glazing, A trencher and a College bottle, Piled up on Locke and Aristotle. A prayer-book, which he seldom handles A save-all and two farthing candles. A smutty ballad, musty libel, A Burgersdicius[2] ...
— Poems (Volume II.) • Jonathan Swift
... sought to entangle Le Gardeur's thoughts in an elaborate cobweb of occupations rivalling that of Arachne, which she had woven to catch every leisure hour of his, so as to leave him no time to brood over the pleasures of the Palace of the Intendant or the charms ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby
... interesting, I quote it. He says that on the 21st of September, 1741, intent upon field diversions, he rose before daybreak, but on going out he found the whole face of the country covered with a thick coat of cobweb drenched with dew, as if two or three setting-nets had been drawn one over the other. When his dogs attempted to hunt, their eyes were blinded and hoodwinked, so much that they were obliged to lie ...
— Essays in Natural History and Agriculture • Thomas Garnett
... gladness in the chirp of the birds, and content in the drone of the insects; and all the squirrels in the place seemed to be gadding on joyful errands, for one could not turn a corner that a group of them did not scatter from before his feet. So common a thing as a dewdrop caught in a cobweb became more beautiful than jewel-spangled lace. The rustling of the quail in the brush, even the glimpse of a coiled snake basking on a sunny spot of earth, was fraught with interest because it spoke of life, ...
— The Thrall of Leif the Lucky • Ottilie A. Liljencrantz
... earlier sins of Spanish America. Upon a comparatively placid presidential regime followed a series of barrack uprisings or attacks by Congress on the executive. The constitution became a farce. No longer, to be sure, an abode of Arcadian seclusion as in colonial times, or a sort of territorial cobweb from the center of which a spiderlike Francia hung motionless or darted upon his hapless prey, or even a battle ground on which fanatical warriors might fight and die at the behest of a savage Lopez, Paraguay ...
— The Hispanic Nations of the New World - Volume 50 in The Chronicles Of America Series • William R. Shepherd
... E.G. She picked them from among the great heap at her work table because of the exquisite fineness of the darning that adorned them. It wasn't merely darning. It was embroidery. It was weaving. It was cobweb tapestry. It blended in with the original fabric so intimately that it required an expert eye to mark where darning finished and cloth began. Martha regarded it with appreciation unmarred by envy, as the artisan eye regards the work ...
— Defenders of Democracy • The Militia of Mercy
... fire had been, sat the young mistress of the house half hid in a great arm-chair. Soft white folds fell all around her, and two small blue velvet slippers took their ease upon a footstool; with white laces giving their cobweb finish here, there and everywhere. A book was in her hand, and on her shoulder the grey kitten purred secure, in spite of the silky curls which now and then made puss into a pillow. Now and then. For while Miss Kennedy sometimes made believe to read, an sometimes ...
— Wych Hazel • Susan and Anna Warner
... the light was dim and the air was decidedly musty, two small boys were crouched, playing a silent game of 'stag knife.' Besides being dark and evil-smelling under there, it was damp; great clammy masses of cobweb hung from the joists and spanned the spaces between the piles. The place was haunted by strange and fearsome insects, too, and the moving of the classes above sent showers of dust down between the cracks in the worn floor. But those boys were satisfied ...
— The Gold-Stealers - A Story of Waddy • Edward Dyson
... succeeded in restoring the candle to consciousness, the light fell upon a tall, shy-looking man of about thirty-five, with long, hay-colored beard and mustache, upon which the rain-drops stood in clusters, like the night-dew on patches of cobweb in a meadow. It was an honest face, with unworldly sort of blue eyes, that looked out from under the broad visor of the infantry cap. With a deferential glance towards us, the new-comer unstrapped his knapsack, spread his blanket over it, ...
— Quite So • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... the cobweb lightly Threaded with stars, Scattering jewels on the fence And the pasture bars; As dawn leaves the dry grass bright And the tangled weeds Bearing a rainbow gem On each of their seeds; So has your love, my lover, Fresh ...
— Love Songs • Sara Teasdale
... fifty kinds, Bring me showers, and clouds, and winds, All things right and tight, All things well and proper, Trailer red and bright, Dark and wily dropper; Casts of midges bring, Made of plover hackle, With a gaudy wing, And a cobweb tackle. ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume V. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... In October 1793, we had the pleasure of seeing the plant again in blossom in the aforesaid garden, raised from seeds which ripened there the preceding year, but unfortunately from the lateness of their flowering, and the very great injury the plants had sustained from the Cobweb Mite (Acarus teliarius) vulgarly called the red Spider, there seemed little prospect that the ...
— The Botanical Magazine Vol. 8 - Or, Flower-Garden Displayed • William Curtis
... observed something like a cobweb on the sky between the central pier and the opposite bank. There was a black spot that resembled a spider moving slowly along the cobweb. It ...
— Six Months at the Cape • R.M. Ballantyne
... the theatrical gentleman; "but till I can forget the blunderbuss fired from the upsetting coach, the cobweb over the poor's-box, and the gay parson and undertaker at the harlot's funeral, I cannot allow of the comparison. Besides, I admire Hogarth for another reason: did he consider an engraver's to be an infradig. profession? ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 17, Number 489, Saturday, May 14, 1831 • Various
... sleeping heavily, this would have been disagreeable; but in Lamb, thin even to meagreness, spare and wiry as an Arab of the desert, or as Thomas Aquinas, wasted by scholastic vigils, the affection of sleep seemed rather a network of aerial gossamer than of earthly cobweb—more like a golden haze falling upon him gently from the heavens than a cloud exhaling upwards from the flesh. Motionless in his chair as a bust, breathing so gently as scarcely to seem certainly alive, he presented the image of repose ...
— Biographical Essays • Thomas de Quincey
... diffused and most important of all vapours—the aqueous vapour of our atmosphere, and we found in it a potent absorber of the purely calorific rays. The power of this substance to influence climate, and its general influence on the temperature of the earth, were then briefly dwelt upon. A cobweb spread above a blossom is sufficient to protect it from nightly chill; and thus the aqueous vapour of our air, attenuated as it is, checks the drain of terrestrial heat, and saves the surface of our planet from the ...
— Fragments of science, V. 1-2 • John Tyndall
... only with practice but by the use of expedients a fairly accurate contoured map can be made. In contouring an area the stream lines and ravines form a framework or skeleton on which the contours are hung more or less like a cobweb. These lines are accurately mapped and their slopes determined and the contours are then ...
— Manual of Military Training - Second, Revised Edition • James A. Moss
... her desire to present him in all his dignity, and she moved, conscious of the graceful turn of a pretty ankle, which, encircled with a string of pearls, and clothed in flesh-coloured silk, of the most cobweb texture, rose above the crimson sandal. Her jewelled tiara, too, gave dignity to the frown with which the offended King of Shadows greeted his consort, as each entered upon the scene at the head of their ...
— St. Ronan's Well • Sir Walter Scott
... resistance, appetite, and organs of reproduction that take hold on eternity,—all find room to consist in the small creature. So do we put our life into every act. The true doctrine of omnipresence is that God reappears with all his parts in every moss and cobweb. The value of the universe contrives to throw itself into every point. If the good is there, so is the evil; if the affinity, so the repulsion; if ...
— Essays, First Series • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... hit the Jesuits hard. They had put the poor cobweb-spinners in mind of the humiliating fact, which they have had thrust on them daily from that time till now, and yet have never learnt the lesson, that all their scholastic cunning, plotting, intriguing, bulls, pardons, indulgences, and the rest of it, are, on this side the Channel, a mere enchanter's ...
— Westward Ho! • Charles Kingsley
... they discovered a lot of new and wonderful things that the pirates must have stolen from other ships: Kashmir shawls as thin as a cobweb, embroidered with flowers of gold; jars of fine tobacco from Jamaica; carved ivory boxes full of Russian tea; an old violin with a string broken and a picture on the back; a set of big chess-men, carved out of coral and amber; a walking-stick ...
— The Story of Doctor Dolittle • Hugh Lofting
... made man, young Hermes, who, as all Olympus knew, was for ever at some piece of mischief, insisted on meddling with his father's work, and got leave to fashion the human ear out of a shell that he chanced to have by him, across which he stretched a fine cobweb that he stole from Arachne. But he hollowed and twisted the shell in such a fashion that it would turn back all sounds except very loud blasts that Falsehood should blow on a brazen horn, whilst the impenetrable web would keep out all such whispers as Truth could send up from ...
— Wisdom, Wit, and Pathos of Ouida - Selected from the Works of Ouida • Ouida
... area. She halted and stared at it—and suddenly her heart sank with a miserable sense of impotence and dismay. Yes, this was the place beyond question. Through the picket fence she could make out the looming shadows of many buildings, and spidery iron structures that seemed to cobweb the darkness, and—and—Her face mirrored her misery. She had thought of a single building. Where, inside there, amongst all those rambling structures, with little time, perhaps none at all, to search, was she to ...
— The White Moll • Frank L. Packard
... wandering," said the student, turning to the mother. "He could not comprehend anything I might read or say now. He needs medical treatment. You should apply to the public charities." And he went away, brushing the sleeve of his coat which had caught a cobweb. ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 22, September, 1891 • Various
... so intent that she passed over the compliment with a gesture like that of brushing away a cobweb. Her eyes were like deep, clear wells of ...
— The Last Shot • Frederick Palmer
... freed her foot from the meshes, only to find her neck entwined; she clutched at the threads about her throat, only to find her hands entangled; she tore at the cobweb, she bent her body, she slipped away; she beat with her fists, she raged, and only enmeshed herself the more tightly in the horrible skein; finally she lay fast bound. During this last phase of the dance, her artist audience stood ...
— Atlantis • Gerhart Hauptmann
... much Pleasure you used to read those which I formerly receivd from him, and because I think the Spirit with which he writes and the intelligence containd in his Letter, will afford Satisfaction to you and the Circle of our Friends. "It is certain, says he, that the Peace of Europe hangs upon a Cobweb. It is certain that, Portugal & Russia excepted, all Europe wishes us Success. The Ports of France, Spain and the Mediterranean are open to us on the Terms of Neutrality. We have already receivd a Benevolence in this Country, which Will enable us to Expedite and augment the Stores necessary ...
— The Writings of Samuel Adams, vol. III. • Samuel Adams
... of it—God bless him!—it is a subject for perpetual merriment to think of such a man's being taken for a true Huguenot and enmeshed, even for a while, in the nasty cobweb of Geneva. But in the last thing I shall quote, when he is Bacchic for the vine, you ...
— Avril - Being Essays on the Poetry of the French Renaissance • H. Belloc
... been from the dawn, All chequer'd was the sky, Thin clouds like scarfs of cobweb lawn Veil'd heaven's most glorious eye. The wind had no more strength than this, That leisurely it blew, To make one leaf the next to kiss That ...
— The Children's Garland from the Best Poets • Various
... he spoke she had no means of knowing; probably, at most, two or three minutes. But to the woman gazing out blindly through the cobweb-covered window into the night, it might well have been hours. For some illogical reason, which she could not have explained to herself, she had the feeling that the victory in the coming struggle would lie with the one who kept silent the longer. To break the nerve-wrecking spell would ...
— The Land of Promise • D. Torbett
... insisted, and blew all Mohunsleigh's objections away one by one, as if they had been threads of cobweb; still, my cousin wouldn't give a definite answer, perhaps not understanding American hospitality, or perhaps having other ideas which he preferred. At all events, we went to the bathing machines (which weren't bathing machines at all, but dear little ...
— Lady Betty Across the Water • Charles Norris Williamson and Alice Muriel Williamson
... hearken unto the saying of Gonsalvo, the great and famous commander, that was wont to say a gentleman's honor should be de tela crassiore, of a good strong warp or web, that every little thing should not catch in it; when as now it seems they are but of cobweb-lawn or such light stuff, which certainly is weakness, and not true greatness of mind, but like a sick man's body, that is so tender that it feels everything. And so much in maintenance and demonstration of the wisdom and justice of the law ...
— The World's Best Orations, Vol. 1 (of 10) • Various
... forests when they first poured down over the Alps and beheld the jewels and marbles and round, smooth, soft women of Italy's ancient civilization. But at the same time he had the unmistakable, the terrifying feeling of dare-devil sacrilege. What were his coarse hands doing, dabbling in silks and cobweb laces and embroideries? Silk fascinated him; but, while he did not like calico so well, he felt at home with it. Yes, he had seized her, had crushed her madly in the embrace of his plowman arms. But that seemed now a freak of courage, ...
— The Fashionable Adventures of Joshua Craig • David Graham Phillips
... her old ribs have come all crashing through, If a whisk of Fate's broom snap your cobweb asunder; But her rivets were clinched by a wiser than you, And our sins cannot push the Lord's right hand from under. Better one honest man who can wait for God's mind, In our poor shifting scene here, though heroes were plenty! Better one bite, at forty, of truth's bitter rind ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 12, No. 73, November, 1863 • Various
... much the case with the chapel of Monte Beni. One rainy day, however, in his wanderings through the great, intricate house, Kenyon had unexpectedly found his way into it, and been impressed by its solemn aspect. The arched windows, high upward in the wall, and darkened with dust and cobweb, threw down a dim light that showed the altar, with a picture of a martyrdom above, and some tall tapers ranged before it. They had apparently been lighted, and burned an hour or two, and been extinguished perhaps ...
— The Marble Faun, Volume II. - The Romance of Monte Beni • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... laws by which you are there to be tried. If you could justify yourself to the world, or to the women of whose folly you take advantage, by the fallacious arguments which you have so ready for that purpose, such cobweb sophistry cannot weaken the ...
— A Description of Millenium Hall • Sarah Scott
... who had unmasked—because she would not be known!—Very pretty, indeed!—Oh! these slight cobweb airs of modesty! so easily seen through. Hence such advantages against us are taken by the men. She had looked out of her window, and seen no arms quartered with his own; for you know, my lady, I would never ...
— Pamela (Vol. II.) • Samuel Richardson
... first attempt to draw on his new trousers, to the astonishment of all his messmates, who had now gathered round him, found them separated in the middle of each of his legs. He might as well have attempted to clothe himself with cobweb continuations; they came to pieces almost with a shake. The waistcoat and coat were in the same predicament; they had not the principle of continuity in them. Everybody was lost in amazement, except Mr Pigtop, whose amazement, quite as great as ours, was ...
— Rattlin the Reefer • Edward Howard
... boy in the county's got a cabinet—an' most of 'em have carpentered 'em theirselves, though I taught 'em how to do that after the pattern Sonny got me to make his by—an' you'll find all sorts o' specimens of what they designate ez "summer an' winter resorts" in pieces of bark an' cobweb an' ol' twisted tree-leaves in ...
— Sonny, A Christmas Guest • Ruth McEnery Stuart
... himself to you, every other way; but he cannot in his work: there, be sure, you have him to the inmost. All that he likes, all that he sees,—all that he can do,—his imagination, his affections, his perseverance, his impatience, his clumsiness, cleverness, everything is there. If the work is a cobweb, you know it was made by a spider; if a honeycomb, by a bee; a worm-cast is thrown up by a worm, and a nest wreathed by a bird; and a house built by a man, worthily, if he is worthy, and ignobly, ...
— Selections From the Works of John Ruskin • John Ruskin
... says I, back to him, 'I'll giye up the succession;' says I, 'and what is more, I'll grant that you have been called by the Lord, and that I have not; but the Lord that called you,' says I, 'was Lord Foxhunter.' Man, you'd tie his Lordship wid a cobweb, he ...
— The Poor Scholar - Traits And Stories Of The Irish Peasantry, The Works of - William Carleton, Volume Three • William Carleton
... of lichen green, They creep from the mullen's velvet screen; Some on the backs of beetles fly From the silver tops of moon-touched trees, Where they swung in their cobweb hammocks high, And rocked about in the evening breeze; Some from the hum-bird's downy nest— They had driven him out by elfin power, And, pillowed on plumes of his rainbow breast, Had slumbered there ...
— Selections From American Poetry • Various
... the signed name, it was a cobweb in her memory she would have gladly brushed away altogether. How she would have liked to tell the whole to Ruth, when—as once or twice happened—she walked over from Chorlton to get a report of progress, leaving old Mrs. ...
— When Ghost Meets Ghost • William Frend De Morgan
... under that cobweb spread like a tent over the white clovers. A fairy would be very likely to creep in ...
— Aunt Jo's Scrap-Bag VI - An Old-Fashioned Thanksgiving, Etc. • Louisa M. Alcott
... a peculiar, unfeminine sound. I went away. My accursed Petersburg mood came back, and all my dreams were crushed and crumpled up like leaves by the heat. I felt I was alone again and there was no nearness between us. I was no more to her than that cobweb to that palm-tree, which hangs on it by chance and which will be torn off and carried away by the wind. I walked about the square where the band was playing, went into the Casino; there I looked at overdressed ...
— The Lady with the Dog and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... and yellow creation ten feet square, soft as cobweb, smelling of rose sandalwood. Carved black lacquer tubs held fruit; two dozen wines, liquors, syrups, essences flowed at a touch from as many ...
— Sjambak • John Holbrook Vance
... got the key of the house from Paul, explored it thoroughly, and was satisfied that no improper visitor had recently entered the drawing-room at least, as the windows were strongly bolted on the inside, and a large cobweb, heavy with dust, hung across the doorway. This did no great credit to Paul's stewardship, but was, perhaps, a slight relief to me. Nor could I see a trace of anything uncanny outside the house. When Severance went with me, next day, ...
— Oldport Days • Thomas Wentworth Higginson
... lumber, mostly dating from the times of the surgeon who was Jekyll's predecessor; but even as they opened the door, they were advertised of the uselessness of further search, by the fall of a perfect mat of cobweb which had for years sealed up the entrance. Nowhere was there any trace of ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 5 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... your departure, so that she can make out your bill—a very arduous, formidable undertaking. The bill is of prodigious dimensions, about the size of a sheet of foolscap paper, lined and cross-lined for a multitude of entries. When the account finally reaches you, it closely resembles a design for a cobweb factory. Any attempt to decipher the various hieroglyphics is useless—it can't be done. The only thing that can be done is to read the total at the foot of ...
— Composition-Rhetoric • Stratton D. Brooks
... but it is likewise essential to our taste for another class of pleasures. Artists, who like Hogarth would please by humour, wit, and ridicule, must depend upon the imagination of the spectators to supply all the intermediate ideas which they would suggest. The cobweb over the poor box, one of the happiest strokes of satire that Hogarth ever invented, would probably say nothing to the inattentive eye, or the dull imagination. A young person must acquire the language, before he can understand ...
— Practical Education, Volume II • Maria Edgeworth
... cobweb Micrometer (Ramsden's micrometer) eyepiece (Fig. 58) consists of an ocular having a fine "fixed" wire stretching horizontally across the field (Fig. 59), a vertical reference wire—fixed—adjusted at right ...
— The Elements of Bacteriological Technique • John William Henry Eyre
... sunlight through the casement falls On cupids painted on the walls At play with doves. Precisely set Awaits the slender legged spinet Expectant of its happy lot, The while the player stays to twist The cobweb ruffle from his wrist. A pause, and then—(Ah, whisper not) Monseigneur plays ...
— The Dreamers - And Other Poems • Theodosia Garrison
... November 3: while the troops were moving in and out on the Van Keenen's road the shells traced an aerial cobweb all over us. After that was a lull till the 7th, which was another clattering day. November 8 brought a tumultuous morning and a still afternoon. The 9th brought a very tumultuous morning indeed; the 10th was calm; the 11th patchy; the ...
— From Capetown to Ladysmith - An Unfinished Record of the South African War • G. W. Steevens
... book," said Rosemary, with a forced laugh. She was endeavouring to brush her mood away as though it were an annoying cobweb. "I've grown foolish ...
— Master of the Vineyard • Myrtle Reed
... because he saw an owl abroad, and owls are ever grewsome neighbors to poor little songsters," replied Priscilla dryly, and, pressing the treadle swiftly she drew out her cobweb thread with such earnest care that she could not look up at the tall and comely guest who awkwardly stood awaiting some more hospitable greeting. Receiving none, he presently subsided upon a stool hard by the spinning-wheel, and after watching ...
— Standish of Standish - A story of the Pilgrims • Jane G. Austin
... fast if you fancy I am about to record a fruitless passion of my own. Though of "easy wax," I am not stamped, except by will of the imprintress; and my only cobweb thread of personal remembrance is a horseback excursion to Camaldoli, in which I played the propriety-third to the best of my discretion. It is necessary to define thus much, to redeem my estimate of the ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII No. 1 January 1848 • Various
... poems are steeped in moonlight. In Drayton all is clear day, or the most unromantic of nights; though everything is charming, there is no attempt at idealization, little of the higher faculty of imagination; but great realism, and much play of fancy. Herrick's verses were written by Cobweb and Moth together, Drayton's by Puck. Granting, however, the initial deficiency in subtlety of charm, the whole poem is inimitably graceful and piquant. The gay humour, the demure horror of the witchcraft, the terrible seriousness of the battle, ...
— Minor Poems of Michael Drayton • Michael Drayton
... and stay with us you shall not want for ease; We'll swing you on a cobweb between the forest trees; And twenty little singing-birds upon a flowering thorn Shall hush you every evening and wake ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, Nov. 14, 1917 • Various
... Do you think that, left to yourself, you would ever have any inclination to break them? Certainly, left to yourselves, you will never have the power. These long indulged appetites of ours grow with indulgence; and that which first was light as a cobweb, and soft as a silken bracelet, becomes heavier and solider until it is an iron fetter upon the limb, which no man can break. There is nothing more awful in life than the influence of habit, so unthinkingly acquired, so inexorably ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Isaiah and Jeremiah • Alexander Maclaren
... marked by a trail of coal-siftings from the stove to a closet-door from which the fire was replenished. The door to the closet was gone, and in its recess a pair of trousers hung limply, while Henrietta's scant wardrobe was ranged along the black-painted wall outside. The long, cobweb-hung windows, bare of blind or curtain, showed a black-mirrored surface against the ...
— The Long Day - The Story of a New York Working Girl As Told by Herself • Dorothy Richardson
... continually play. The graceful appearance of these exquisite creatures is increased by two long, fringed tentacles streaming behind, drifting at full length or contracting into numerous coils. The fringe on these streamers is a series of living hairs—an aquatic cobweb, each active with life, and doing its share in ensnaring minute atoms of food for its owner. When dozens of these ctenophores (or comb-bearers) as they are called, glide slowly to and fro through a pool, the sight is not soon forgotten. To try to photograph them is ...
— The Log of the Sun - A Chronicle of Nature's Year • William Beebe
... vehicles in the street are few in number, and are merely passing through; the stores are shrunken into shops; you see here and there, like a patch of bright mould, the stall of that significant fungus, the Chinaman. Many great doors are shut and clamped and grown gray with cobweb; many street windows are nailed up; half the balconies are begrimed and rust-eaten, and many of the humid arches and alleys which characterize the older Franco-Spanish piles of stuccoed brick betray a ...
— Madame Delphine • George W. Cable
... do spiders make of their webs? (Trapping prey, supporting egg cases, protection, and means of moving, as in the case of cobweb spiders.) ...
— Ontario Teachers' Manuals: Nature Study • Ontario Ministry of Education
... she had imposed upon her soul fell away at that like bonds of cobweb. She laid her hand upon his wrists, tears stood in her eyes; ...
— Mistress Wilding • Rafael Sabatini
... a shining mist, against which the insect world rushing in its millions out of the forest on the bank was baffled mysteriously in its assault. Rigidly enclosed by transparent walls, like captives of an enchanted cobweb, they moved about, sat, gesticulated, conversed publicly during the day; and at night when all the lanterns but one were extinguished, their slumbering shapes covered all over by white cotton sheets on the camp bedsteads, which were brought in every evening, conveyed the gruesome ...
— The Rescue • Joseph Conrad
... feel, old man?" asked the surgeon, stooping easily to his task. The princess of silks and satins wiped a red drop or two from Raggles's brow with a fragrant cobweb. ...
— The Trimmed Lamp and Others • O Henry
... shortening itself, and retreating towards the window by which it had entered. Wondering how far it would have moved before the sermon was over, and whether it would have shone so very bright if God had made no covenant with Abraham, she was earnestly watching it pass from spot to spot, and from cobweb to cobweb, as if already it fled before the coming darkness of the long winter night, when she caught a glimpse of a very peculiar countenance turned in the same direction—that is, not towards the minister, but towards this travelling ...
— Alec Forbes of Howglen • George MacDonald
... had found him anywhere else I should have taken him for Cupid; but, being in an oratory, I presume him to have some religious signification. In the servants' room a crucifix hung on one side of the bed, and a little vase for holy water, now overgrown with a cobweb, on the other; and, no doubt, all the other sleeping-apartments would have been equally well provided, only that their occupants were ...
— Passages From the French and Italian Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... thought of his young wife. It was unlike Cardo. If his life had been devoid of any special interest or excitement, it had at least been free from care. Not even his lonely childhood, or his dull, old home had dimmed the brightness and elasticity of his spirits. He had never had a cobweb in his brain, and this haunting shadow which followed every sweet memory of his wife was beginning to rouse his resentment, and while the storm raged around him, and the ship ploughed her way through the seething ...
— By Berwen Banks • Allen Raine
... all prompt replies are cold, And stately prudence snaps her cobweb hold. Had the good widow tried, or wish'd to speak, This was a bond she could not, dared not break; Their hearts (you never saw their likeness, never) Were join'd, indissolubly join'd for ever. Why need I tell how soon our tears were dried. How Jennet blush'd, how Alfred ...
— May Day With The Muses • Robert Bloomfield
... a person to death?" he inquired severely, appearing at the end of the porch, a cobweb upon his brow. And, continuing, he put into practice a newly acquired phrase, "You better learn to be more considerick of ...
— Penrod • Booth Tarkington
... asks George Eliot, in 'Middlemarch,' 'ever pinched into its pilulous smallness the cobweb of pre-matrimonial acquaintance?' And, to press the metaphor, the cobweb, as far as Mark and Mabel were concerned, brilliantly as it shone in all its silken iridescence, would have rolled up into a particularly small pill. Mark was ...
— The Giant's Robe • F. Anstey
... Much resembling a Cobweb, or a confus'd lock of these Cylinders, is a certain white substance which, after a fogg, may be observ'd to fly up and down the Air; catching several of these, and examining them with my Microscope, I ...
— Micrographia • Robert Hooke
... into one continuous fretwork of heavy scrolls and leafage, and through the crevices of this textile carving shone the robe she carried beneath: it was tawny yellow, for she wore under her outward dress a complete robe of ancient lace, whose cobweb softness was more than half sacrificed—only perceived as the slashes of her velvets made it evident. It was such dressing as queens alone should indulge in perhaps, but Mary Ashburleigh chose for once to do justice to her ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science Vol. XV., No. 85. January, 1875. • Various
... shame thus rank and patent, I struck, bare, At foe from head to foot in magic mail, And off it withered, cobweb armoury Against the lightning! 'Twas truth singed ...
— Browning as a Philosophical and Religious Teacher • Henry Jones
... web and tangle of fog. It was not one of the regular yellow devils who come and eat up London, first this part, and then that, then disgorge a little, choking it all up only to snap at it and swallow it down all bewildered a quarter of an hour after. This was a cobweb fog spun, as it might be, by some malignant central spider hidden darkly in his lair. The vapouring-like filmy threads twisted and twined their way all over London, and for four days and nights the town was a city of ghosts. Buildings loomed dimly behind their ...
— The Captives • Hugh Walpole
... with all the grandees of his court, came to the weavers; and the rogues raised their arms, as if in the act of holding something up, saying, "Here are your Majesty's trousers! Here is the scarf! Here is the mantle! The whole suit is as light as a cobweb; one might fancy one has nothing at all on, when dressed in it; that, however, is the great ...
— Andersen's Fairy Tales • Hans Christian Andersen
... and missed. Then he caught it and held on. He was holding firmly now with both hands. But how his arms ached! With his feet he began kicking for the ladder, which, swinging and bagging in the wind, seemed as elusive as a cobweb. At last, when strength was leaving him, he doubled up his knees and struck out with both feet. They fell upon something and stuck there. They had found a round of the ladder. Hugging the ropes, he panted for breath, then slowly worked ...
— Panther Eye • Roy J. Snell
... was invited to an early wedding, She'd dress her head o'ernight, sponge up herself, And give her neck three lathers. Gaar. Ne'er a halter.") Laugh and lye downe Launcepresado Law, the spider's cobweb Legerity Letters of mart Leveret Limbo Line of life Linstock Long haire, treatise against (An allusion to William Prynne's tract The Unlovelinesse of Love-Lockes.) Loves Changelings Changed, MS. play founded on Sidney's Arcadia ...
— A Collection Of Old English Plays, Vol. IV. • Editor: A.H. Bullen
... acknowledged it only by a very slight bend of the head, and still without looking up. At this moment de Sigognac entered the green-room; he was masked and in full costume, just buckling around his waist the belt of the big sword he had inherited from Matamore, with the cobweb dangling from the scabbard. He also marched straight up to Isabelle, and was ...
— Captain Fracasse • Theophile Gautier
... in Lucian, impatient of this cobweb spinning. "I don't believe a word of Ferruci's story. If Vrain lived in Jersey Street as Wrent, why should Mrs. Clear ...
— The Silent House • Fergus Hume
... a Montreal lumber room The Discobolus standeth and turneth his face to the wall; Dusty, cobweb-covered, maimed and set at naught, Beauty crieth in an attic and no man regardeth: ...
— The Note-Books of Samuel Butler • Samuel Butler
... many country places I could tell you of. When one walks on those grey roads at evening by the scented elder-bushes of the white cottages, watching the faint mountains gathering the clouds upon their heads, one all too readily discovers, beyond the thin cobweb veil of the senses, those creatures, the goblins, hurrying from the white square stone door to the north, or from the Heart Lake ...
— The Celtic Twilight • W. B. Yeats
... school, were shouting at their rough play—snow-balling, sledding, skating and tobogganning on that portion of the pond which had been cleared of snow. The great derricks on the ledges creaked and groaned as the remaining men made all fast for the night; like a gigantic cobweb their supporting wires stretched thick, enmeshed, and finely dark over the white expanse of the quarries. From the power-house a column of steam rose straight and steady into the ...
— Flamsted quarries • Mary E. Waller
... looked into the rose-pink room and saw Liane Delorme, in a negligee like a cobweb over a nightdress even more sheer, kneeling and clawing at her throat, round which a heavy silk handkerchief was slowly tightening; her face already purple with strangulation, her eyes bulging from their sockets, her tongue protruding between ...
— Alias The Lone Wolf • Louis Joseph Vance
... back of her the mother felt there was animation; the people began to whisper to one another about something and stirred, sighing as if freeing themselves from the cobweb spun about them by the gray words of the ...
— Mother • Maxim Gorky
... song ye may learn the nest," Said Yniol; "enter quickly." Entering then, Right o'er a mount of newly-fallen stones, The dusky-rafter'd many-cobweb'd hall, He found an ancient dame in dim brocade; And near her, like a blossom vermeil-white,[2] That lightly breaks a faded flower-sheath, Moved the fair Enid, all in faded silk, Her daughter. In a moment thought Geraint, "Here ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 5 • Charles Sylvester
... blue miles between us and the city, Over the edge of eternity we look On all the lights, A thousand times more numerous than the stars; Oh lines and loops of light in unwound chains That mark for miles and miles The vast black mazy cobweb of the streets; Near us clusters and splashes of living gold That change far off to bluish steel Where the fragile lights on the Jersey shore Tremble like drops of wind-stirred dew. The strident noises ...
— Rivers to the Sea • Sara Teasdale
... doctor's four guests heard him talk of his proposed experiment, they anticipated nothing more wonderful than the murder of a mouse in an air-pump or the examination of a cobweb by the microscope, or some similar nonsense with which he was constantly in the habit of pestering his intimates. But without waiting for a reply Dr. Heidegger hobbled across the chamber and returned with the same ponderous folio bound in ...
— Twice Told Tales • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... Simple, Quickly, Overdone, Elbow, Froth, Dogberry, Puck, Peablossom, Taurus, Bottom, Bushy, Hotspur, Scroop, Wall, Flute, Snout, Starveling, Moonshine, Mouldy, Shallow, Wart, Bullcalf, Feeble, Quince, Snag, Dull, Mustardseed, Fang, Snare, Rumor, Tearsheet, Cobweb, Costard and Moth; but in names as well as in plot "the father of Pickwick" has distanced the Master. In fact, to give all the odd and whimsical names invented by Dickens would be to publish a book, for he compiled an indexed volume of names from which he drew at will. He used, however, ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 1 of 14 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Good Men and Great • Elbert Hubbard
... solid crash of released waters leaping upon the wheel more furiously than ever, a grinding of cogs, a hum like the hum of a hornet, and then the unvisited darkness of the old mill was scattered by intolerable white light. It threw up every cobweb, every burl and knot in the beams and the floor; till the shadows behind the flakes of rough plaster on the wall lay clear-cut as shadows of ...
— Traffics and Discoveries • Rudyard Kipling
... this unhappy attachment to the sound advice, or even to the over-anxious suspicions, of so many faithful subjects. I saw no entanglement in such a difficulty which on either side might not have been broken through like a cobweb.' ...
— Redgauntlet • Sir Walter Scott
... is like a tree. It first roots in the soil of earth, and then lifts its branches to the heavens. Unless it does so lift its branches it is stunted and deformed, and is not a tree. Unless it roots in earth it is not a tree, but an air-plant or a cobweb. ...
— A Woman of the World - Her Counsel to Other People's Sons and Daughters • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... a ball and a chair-leg for a bat. A mood of wild exhilaration caught them. The inevitable psychological reaction had set in. Their morbid horror of Nature vanished in its vitalizing flood like a cobweb in a flame. Never had sea or sky or earth seemed more lovely, more lusciously, voluptuously lovely. The sparkle of the salt wind tingled through their bodies like an electric current. The warmth in the air lapped them like a hot bath. Joy-in-life flared up in them to ...
— Angel Island • Inez Haynes Gillmore
... Chief Justice, and seven judges at law. It was a pageant of colour, in the midst of which the woman on trial, in her careful toilette, consisting of a black stammel gown, a cypress chaperon or black crepe hood in the French fashion, relieved by touches of white in the cuffs and ruff of cobweb lawn, struck a funereal note. Preceded by the headsman carrying his axe with its edge turned away from her, she was conducted to the bar by the Lieutenant of the Tower. The indictment was read to her, and at its end came the question: "Frances Howard, ...
— She Stands Accused • Victor MacClure
... string of pearls; diamond hoops for the ears; a large pin painted with a head of Guadalupe, the patron saint of California; and several fragile fans. Quite apart, on a little table, was the crown and pride of the donas,—six white cobweb-like smocks, embroidered, hemistitched, and deshaladoed. Did any Californian bridegroom forget that dainty item he would be ...
— The Doomswoman - An Historical Romance of Old California • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... the advancing troops to preserve some kind of alignment. At this the wary prick up their ears. Surprise stares on every face. Immediately follows a crash of musketry as Rodes sweeps away our skirmish line as it were a cobweb. Then comes the long and heavy roll of veteran infantry fire, as he falls ...
— The Campaign of Chancellorsville • Theodore A. Dodge
... paper slips down from the walls and crumples to a heap on the floor. The paint and varnish drop from the woodwork like so much sand. Every cobweb and speck of dust rolls off and falls in ...
— Common Science • Carleton W. Washburne
... work in a small room, we came upon our glass blower and the coveted copy of that lovely table-garden. This man had made four, and one was still in his possession. We brought it back to America, a gleaming jewelled cobweb, and what happened was that the very ethereal quality of its beauty made the average taste ignore it! However, a few years have made a vast difference in table, as well as all other decorations, and to-day the same Venetian gardens have their faithful ...
— The Art of Interior Decoration • Grace Wood
... finger, also, the finest and whitest and most graceful of all possible little splint baskets, only just big enough to carry a bit of such work as was in it now,—a strip of sheer, delicate grass-linen, which needle and thread, with her deft guidance, were turning into a cobweb border, by a weaving of lace-lines, strong, yet light, where the woof of the original material had been drawn out. It was "done for odd-minute work, and was better than anything she could buy." Prettier ...
— A Summer in Leslie Goldthwaite's Life. • Mrs. A. D. T. Whitney
... they said," answered the Farmer's wife, knitting calmly on. "Like a dwarf, you know, with a largish head for his body. Not taller than—why, my Bill, or your eldest boy, perhaps. And he was dressed in rags, with an old cloak on, and stamping with passion at a cobweb he couldn't get at with his broom. They've very uncertain tempers, they say. Tears one ...
— The Brownies and Other Tales • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... late afternoon sunshine struck red. The crests of the chestnut trees in the rue Soleil d'Or had turned rosy; and a delicate mauve sky, so characteristic of Paris in early autumn, already stretched above the city like a frail tent of silk from which fragile cobweb clouds hung, tinted with saffron and ...
— The Dark Star • Robert W. Chambers
... Mamma Meadow-Lark again, and told her of his nice warm cozy little nest beneath the mushroom. "It is always nice and dry there," he said, "for the rain runs right off the mushroom and does not touch my little cobweb home!" ...
— Friendly Fairies • Johnny Gruelle
... take the whole party for a moonlight drive down the river!" called Frederic Forester. "Go take off those cobweb frocks and put on something substantial. I'll give you ten minutes. I've the prettiest sight to show you ...
— The Second Violin • Grace S. Richmond
... apprehension of Young Islay had worn to a thin gossamer, and he was as ardent a lover as any one could be with what still was no more than a young lady of the imagination. And diligently he sought a meeting. It used to be the wonder of Mr. Spencer of the Inns, beholding this cobweb-headed youth continually coming through the Arches and hanging expectant about the town-head, often the only figure there in these hot silent days to give life to the empty scene. There is a stone at Old Islay's ...
— Gilian The Dreamer - His Fancy, His Love and Adventure • Neil Munro
... every church in Prague; and then he made the strange announcement that all the rebels, as they were called, would be freely pardoned, and invited the leading Protestant nobles to appear before him at Prague. They walked into the trap like flies into a cobweb. If the nobles had only cared to do so, they might all have escaped after the battle of the White Hill; for Tilly, the victorious general, had purposely given them time to do so. But for some reason they nearly ...
— History of the Moravian Church • J. E. Hutton
... Northwest.[9] They were standing on the threshold of the Great Beyond. They saw before them not the Sea of China, as speculators had dreamed, not kingdoms for conquest, which the princes of Europe coveted; not a short road to Asia, of which savants had spun a cobweb of theories. They saw what every Westerner sees to-day,—illimitable reaches of prairie and ravine, forested hills sloping to mighty rivers, and open meadow-lands watered by streams looped like a ribbon. They ...
— Pathfinders of the West • A. C. Laut
... minute North-country flies. In Yorkshire they are said to kill the large chalk trout of Driffield as well as the small limestone and grit fish of Craven; if so, the gentlemen of the Driffield Club, who are said to think nothing of killing three-pound fish on midge flies and cobweb tackle, must be (as canny Yorkshiremen are likely enough to be) the ...
— Prose Idylls • Charles Kingsley
... an abandoned chickenhouse which must have reminded her constantly of her lost kitchen. She looked almost jaunty as she greeted me, a cobweb from the roof of the decaying shed caught in her hair. "I have no profitable secrets to market, Weener—youre wasting your ...
— Greener Than You Think • Ward Moore
... stone seems, by the cunning labour of the chisel, to have been robbed of its weight and density and suspended aloft as if by magic, while the fretted roof is achieved with the wonderful minuteness and airy security of a cobweb. Similar roofs appear in Bath Abbey (the architect of which was Dr. Oliver King, a member of King's), in St. George's Chapel, Windsor, in Henry VII's Chapel at Westminster, in Sherborne Minster, and in the ambulatory of the choir of Peterborough; but the earliest example of this kind of vaulting ...
— A Short Account of King's College Chapel • Walter Poole Littlechild
... pressed another button. A thousand tiny pipes, concealed in the ribs of the stone roof, gave forth a shower of fine spray, filling the long fernery with a hazy mist of cobweb fineness. Very soon millions of globules of moisture gathered on leaf, stock, frond, plume and tiny tip of every leaflet, reflecting each ray of light with diamond-like brilliancy. Pressing another button to shut off the ...
— Solaris Farm - A Story of the Twentieth Century • Milan C. Edson
... we are at all times sustaining a load of between seventy and one hundred tons of it on our persons—yet we do not feel it! Softer than the finest down, more impalpable than the lightest gossamer, it leaves the cobweb undisturbed, and, at times, scarcely stirs the most delicate flower that feeds on the dew it supplies; yet it bears the fleets of nations on its wings round the world, and crushes the most refractory substances with its weight. It bends the rays of the sun ...
— The Ocean and its Wonders • R.M. Ballantyne
... a dark night! It is massed, away down there, almost right under us, you know, and stretches off toward the valley. Its curved and interlacing streets are a cobweb, beaded thick with lights—a wonderful thing to see; then the rows of lights on the arched bridges, and their glinting reflections in the water; and away at the far end, the Eisenbahnhof, with its twenty solid acres of glittering gas-jets, a huge garden, ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... and further saw a quiet purpose in his face. She was sure he had fixed upon the time, if not the day. She felt those cobweb bands all around her. Here she was, almost in bridal attire, at his side already. She made ...
— The Old Helmet, Volume I • Susan Warner
... fine cobweb Stingy spun it was Greenie's business to fold and put away carefully in the centre of a buttercup. He would get it and be back before it was time for Stingy to dance. He measured his way quickly over to the buttercup, his little back fairly popped into ...
— The Cheerful Cricket and Others • Jeannette Marks
... it professed to be a storehouse of old knowledge, and except in the way of dialectic cobweb-spinning, its professors had nothing to do with novelties. Of the historical and physical (natural) sciences, of criticism and laboratory practice, it knew nothing. Oral teaching was of supreme importance on account of the cost and rarity ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 3 • Leonard Huxley
... the foolish clown, "kill me the red humblebee on the top of that thistle yonder; and, good Mr. Cobweb, bring me the honey-bag. Do not fret yourself too much in the action, Mr. Cobweb, and take care the honey-bag break not; I should be sorry to have you overflown with ...
— Young Folks Treasury, Volume 3 (of 12) - Classic Tales And Old-Fashioned Stories • Various
... Mateo interrupted my meditations and destroyed in an instant the cobweb tissue of my fancy. With his usual zeal he had gathered facts concerning the scene, which put my fictions all to flight. The heroine of my romance was neither young nor handsome; she had no lover; she had ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... length, Upon the tremulous bridge, that from beneath Seemed with a cobweb firmament to link The earthquake-shattered chasm, hung with shrubs, We passed with tears of rapture. All the West, And even unto the middle South, was ribb'd And barr'd with bloom on bloom. The sun beneath, Held for a space 'twixt ...
— The Suppressed Poems of Alfred Lord Tennyson • Alfred Lord Tennyson
... and colours thrown from different angles across a darkened garden-scene where impossible tropical flowers expand giant petals, and a spangled waterfall tumbles over the edge of a blue precipice in sparkling foam. The nucleus of a cobweb of quivering rays, crossing and intersecting, is a dazzling human butterfly, circling, spinning, waving white arms like quivering antennae, flashing back the coloured lights from the diamonds that are in her hair and on her bosom, are clasped about her rounded ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves
... rather bold in entering the cobweb of the French spiders," said Gentz. "Still, it is not so dangerous as you believe, and you may be perfectly at ease so far as I am concerned. I am here with a charming lady friend, the Princess Bagration. I figured on her passport as her private secretary, and have a regular Russian one ...
— Napoleon and the Queen of Prussia • L. Muhlbach
... continually, as if it were keeping time to an inaudible tune, as she sat there stiffly erect. Her skin was pale and withered; and her cheeks were wrinkled in fine lines, like the crossings of a cobweb. Her eyes might once have been blue; but they had become nearly colourless, and, looking at her, one might easily imagine that she was blind. She had a singularly sweet smile, and a musical voice, which though sad, had no trace of whining. If it had ...
— An Arrow in a Sunbeam - and Other Tales • Various
... would have discovered, on peeping through the key-hole of his door, that he was engaged in one of the oddest of occupations for such a man,—sweeping down from the ceiling, by means of a walking-cane, a long cobweb which lingered on high in the corner. Keeping it stretched upon the cane he gently opened the door, and set the candle in such a position on the mat that the light shone down the corridor. Thus guided ...
— Two on a Tower • Thomas Hardy
... without any display, if you wish to please me,' she said; and with a wave of her cobweb handkerchief she signified that the ...
— Tracy Park • Mary Jane Holmes
... weaveth at the web of all the human future; even your naught is a cobweb, and a spider that liveth on the blood of ...
— Thus Spake Zarathustra - A Book for All and None • Friedrich Nietzsche
... they in discourse Of tires, and fashions, how they must take place, Where they may kiss, and whom, when to sit down, And with what grace to rise; if they salute, What court'sy they must use; such cobweb stuff As would enforce the common'st sense abhor ...
— Cynthia's Revels • Ben Jonson
... the vault, the yellow bills hanging from a cobweb of strings; why should they terrify her; what did they threaten? Dully, and from a distance, Monica heard ...
— The Lost Road • Richard Harding Davis
... sleeps soundly. This advantage I do not possess. It is not in my power to pass the sponge over my poor brain even as I pass it over the blackboard. The network of ideas remains and forms as it were a moving cobweb in which repose wriggles and tosses, incapable of finding a stable equilibrium. When sleep does come at last, it is often but a state of somnolence which, far from suspending the activity of the mind, actually maintains and quickens it more than ...
— The Life of the Fly - With Which are Interspersed Some Chapters of Autobiography • J. Henri Fabre
... Taking a stump of cedar pencil from his pocket, one end of it much gnawn, he added a few scrawls to the inscriptions, and then stood on the seat to look out of the round window, which was darkened by an old cobweb. ...
— Wood Magic - A Fable • Richard Jefferies
... states-men for their generall end In politique justice make poore men offend) Enforceth my offence to make it just. 65 What shall weak dames doe, when th' whole work of Nature Hath a strong finger in each one of us? Needs must that sweep away the silly cobweb Of our still-undone labours, that layes still Our powers to it, as to the line, the stone, 70 Not to the stone, the line should be oppos'd. We cannot keepe our constant course in vertue: What is alike at all parts? every day Differs from other, every houre and minute; ...
— Bussy D'Ambois and The Revenge of Bussy D'Ambois • George Chapman
... stood upon a little bridge spanning a chasm like a cobweb. A low parapet divided it from the awful gulf. On the other side the mountain lifted its jagged face, clammy with icicles, and far over all towered the sterile peaks, above the reach of clouds or lightnings, forever in the ...
— Bohemian Days - Three American Tales • Geo. Alfred Townsend
... and put his hand over his eyes. Mary feigned not to notice his profound emotion, and, taking up a paper parcel on the table, opened it, and unrolled a long piece of wonderful old lace, yellow with age, and fine as a cobweb. ...
— The Treasure of Heaven - A Romance of Riches • Marie Corelli
... a kiss the Princess, And broke enchantment's chain, The sleepy old castle wondered, In its cobweb-cumbered brain, At the tide of life and pleasure That poured through ...
— Point Lace and Diamonds • George A. Baker, Jr.
... for their convenience. They know that without hands or feet, without horses, without steam, so far as they can see, they are transported from place to place, and that there is nothing to account for it except the witch-broomstick and the iron or copper cobweb which they see stretched above them. What do they know or care about this last revelation of the omnipresent spirit of the material universe? We ought to go down on our knees when one of these mighty caravans, car after car, spins by us, under the mystic impulse ...
— Over the Teacups • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. |
