"Trackless" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... the Cumberland. To cross great rivers there was need of pontoon-bridges; to protect the long lines of railroads it was necessary to provide block-houses; to go through a country that was often a trackless forest, and always badly provided with real high-roads, it was all-important to have maps, and to reproduce them rapidly and plentifully. Colonel Merrill's chapter is pithy, pointed and to the purpose, showing how well ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - February, 1876, Vol. XVII, No. 98. • Various
... change the scene, To trackless lands unknown, 'Twere Eden in the desert wild, Wi' him I ...
— Revised Edition of Poems • William Wright
... 1492). In August, 1492, he sailed from Palos with 100 men in three small ships, the largest of which weighed only a hundred tons. After a tiresome voyage he landed (12 October, 1492) on "San Salvador," one of the Bahama Islands. In that bold voyage across the trackless Atlantic lay the greatness of Columbus. He was not attempting to prove a theory that the earth was spherical—that was accepted generally by the well informed. Nor was he in search of a new continent. The realization that he had discovered not Asia, ...
— A Political and Social History of Modern Europe V.1. • Carlton J. H. Hayes
... rested, Robert Moffat bade adieu to Mr. and Mrs. Kitchingman, whose friendship he much valued, and with a guide and drivers for the oxen started onward. Their way led through a comparatively trackless desert, and they travelled nearly the whole night through deep sand. Those were not the days of railway trains, and travelling had to be undertaken in cumbrous, springless bullock-waggons, several spare oxen being taken to provide for losses and casualties. Towards morning the oxen were so exhausted ...
— Robert Moffat - The Missionary Hero of Kuruman • David J. Deane
... uncanny cry, the alligators would croak their guttural grunts at waking time, while, here and there in the shadowy forest, the whine of a skulking panther would strike terror to the hearts of gentler things. Ah, the trackless wilderness of dreamy Florida, where nature moves on ...
— Wings of the Wind • Credo Harris
... straw for those of his mates; was never more bent on following his own views than when all hands grumbled and opposed him; was daring by nature, decided from use and long self-reliance, and was every way a man fitted to steer his bark through the trackless ways of life, as well as those of the ocean. It was fortunate for one in his particular position, that nature had made the possessor of so much self-will and temporary authority, cool and sarcastic rather than hot-headed ...
— Homeward Bound - or, The Chase • James Fenimore Cooper
... upon the wide, open prairie, the trackless plain of sand, the frozen lake, the thin scattering woods of the North, or the treeless snow-clad "Barrens." Now we are about to enter a great forest,—a forest where the leaves never fade, where the flowers are ...
— Popular Adventure Tales • Mayne Reid
... lake, and there sate down completely tired, and hopeless as to the rest of our journey. The road ended at the shore, and no houses were to be seen on the opposite side except a few widely parted huts, and on the near side was a trackless heath. The land at the head of the lake was but a continuation of the common we had come along, and was covered with heather, intersected by a few ...
— Recollections of a Tour Made in Scotland A.D. 1803 • Dorothy Wordsworth
... Saturday evening, and we had a pleasant camp. George made a big fire of tamarack, and we lay before it on a couch of spruce boughs and ate tough boiled venison and drank the broth; and, feeling we had made some progress, we were happy, despite the fact that we were in the midst of a trackless wilderness with our way to Michikamau and the Indians as uncertain ...
— The Lure of the Labrador Wild • Dillon Wallace
... were much greater than in the case of Babylon. Assyria was a military monarchy in the fullest sense of the word. Almost as often as the spring came round the king led his invincible legions to the conquest of new subjects for Assur. He traversed deserts, crossed trackless mountain chains, and plunged into forests full of hidden dangers. He destroyed the walls and towers of hostile cities, in spite of the rain of arrows, stones, and boiling pitch that poured upon himself and his ...
— A History of Art in Chaldaea & Assyria, v. 1 • Georges Perrot
... seaport of Norlar, was full of shipping. Here were the ships which plied the trackless wastes of the Eastern Sea. Huge, red-sailed, broad-beamed, they rode at anchor in the harbor, served by small galleys from the city. Tied up at the wharves, were the smaller, yellow and white-sailed ships which crossed the channel between the mainland ...
— The Players • Everett B. Cole
... wisely, and could act as well; With quickest glance could read another's thought, His own, the while, the keenest could not tell; Warrior—with skill to lengthen, or combine, Lead on, or back, the desultory line; Hunter—he passed the trackless forest through,— Now on the mountain trod, now launch'd ...
— The Emigrant - or Reflections While Descending the Ohio • Frederick William Thomas
... trackless heath at midnight seen, No more the windows, ranged in array (Where the tall shaft and fretted nook between Thick ivy twines), the ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... dost thou fly? Where bend unseen thy trackless course? And in this strange divorce, Ah, tell where I must seek this compound I? To the vast ocean of empyreal flame From whence thy essence came Dost thou thy flight pursue, when freed From matter's base encumbering weed? Or dost thou, hid from sight, Wait, like ...
— Book of English Verse • Bulchevy
... and I and my destroyer tear out to the unknown across a great grey space. We tear into the great spaces of the future and the turbines fall to talking in unfamiliar tongues. Out to the open we go, to windy freedom and trackless ways. Light after light goes down. England and the Kingdom, Britain and the Empire, the old prides and the old devotions, glide abeam, astern, sink down upon the horizon, pass—pass. The river ...
— Tono Bungay • H. G. Wells
... my way as birds their trackless way. I shall arrive! what time, what circuit first, I ask not: but unless God send his hail Or blinding fireballs, sleet, or stifling snow, In some time, his good time, I shall arrive: He guides ...
— Leaves of Life - For Daily Inspiration • Margaret Bird Steinmetz
... could explore [x] A world of waves—a sea without a shore, Trackless and vast and wild as that reveal'd When round the Ark the birds of tempest wheel'd; When all was still in the destroying hour— No sign of man! no vestige of his power! One at the stern before the hour-glass stood, As 'twere to count the sands; one o'er ...
— Poems • Samuel Rogers
... boundaries. Sheep and goats have for ages been the greatest mountain-path and road-makers. Whether or not they have engineers, we are not sure, but they seem to select the shortest, easiest, and best route across the trackless hills, and never seem to change the way. In these localities, the sheep are almost in a primitive condition, and "not the least interesting feature of their conduct in this relapse to the wild life is that, in spite of the highly artificial condition in which ...
— The Human Side of Animals • Royal Dixon
... Toronto, in 1793, there was a solitary wigwam. That tongue of land called the peninsula, which is the protection wall of the harbour, was the resort only of wildfowl. The margin of the lake was lined with nothing else but dense and trackless forests. Two families of Massassagas had squatted somewhere in the neighbourhood of the present St. Lawrence Hall when General Simcoe removed to little York with his canvass palace, and drew around him the incipient features of a Court. The progress in material improvement in this ...
— The Rise of Canada, from Barbarism to Wealth and Civilisation - Volume 1 • Charles Roger
... this boat, and because Jimmie Time became convinced that detectives were on his track, wanting him for the embezzlement of a worn but still practicable uniform of the Western Union Telegraph Company. So it was agreed that they should take to the trackless forest, where there are ways of throwing one's pursuers off the scent; where they would travel by night, guided by the stars, and lay up by day, subsisting on spring water and a little pemmican—source undisclosed. They were not going to be ...
— Somewhere in Red Gap • Harry Leon Wilson
... leaving the interval land in deep shadow. Accustomed to scenes of solitude like the present, the old man, as he left the encampment, proceeded alone into the waste, like a bold vessel leaving its haven to enter on the trackless field of the ocean. He appeared to move for some time without object, or, indeed, without any apparent consciousness, whither his limbs were carrying him. At length, on reaching the rise of one of the undulations, he came to ...
— The Prairie • J. Fenimore Cooper
... die! It's dogged as does it!" I replied cheerfully in the words of Nelson, who also had learned what it meant to hunt an enemy over trackless wastes, although his ...
— She and Allan • H. Rider Haggard
... gave by it a terrible emphasis to the moral law; the latter imparted by it an unequalled tenderness of interest to the contemplation of the world. To the believer in it in its fullest development, the mountains piled towering to the sky and the plains stretching into trackless distance were the conscious dust of souls; the ocean, heaving in tempest or sleeping in moonlight, was a sea of spirits, every drop once a man. Each animated form that caught his attention might ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... although conscious of the peril they were in. The horse was plodding its way through the snow-drifts and it was evident that the animal would soon become exhausted. The blizzard might last all night, or it might continue for three days. On those trackless wastes in such a storm death by freezing was almost certain, unless they reached a place of shelter. The hours dragged by. He kept up an incessant talking with Annie, lest she should fall into the fatal sleep. The girl was ...
— Where Strongest Tide Winds Blew • Robert McReynolds
... trackless heath, at midnight seen, No more the windows ranged in long array (Where the tall shaft and fretted arch between Thick ivy twines) ...
— Lives of the English Poets - From Johnson to Kirke White, Designed as a Continuation of - Johnson's Lives • Henry Francis Cary
... Leech Lake and the Kabekanka River. It was therefore decided to take wagon conveyance to Leech Lake over what is known in Northern Minnesota as the Government Road. This road stretches for seventy miles through trackless pine forests and almost impenetrable underbrush, the only habitations to be seen along its line being the half-way houses erected for the accommodation of teamsters, who are engaged in hauling government supplies, ...
— Sword and Pen - Ventures and Adventures of Willard Glazier • John Algernon Owens
... side always. By day he walked near him as he piloted the column through the trackless forest. At night he slept in the same tent, stretched across the doorway. Despite the enormous fatigue, he slept the light sleep of the townsman, and often he was awakened by Durnovo talking aloud, groaning, ...
— With Edged Tools • Henry Seton Merriman
... was dotted with half a dozen Kroo hovels, now counted a couple of flourishing towns, whose inhabitants were supplied with merchandise and labor in my factory. The neighboring princes and chiefs, confident of selling their captives, struggled to the sea-shore through the trackless forest; and in a very brief period, Prince Freeman, who "no likee war" over my powder-keg, sent expedition after expedition against adjacent tribes, to redress imaginary grievances, or to settle old bills with ...
— Captain Canot - or, Twenty Years of an African Slaver • Brantz Mayer
... assured, lift you your eyes, and there it runs over the brow of the fronting hill. Where a railway crosses it, it disappears indeed — hiding Alpheus-like, from the ignominy of rubble and brick-work; but a little way on it takes up the running again with the same quiet persistence. Out on that almost trackless expanse of billowy Downs such a track is in some sort humanly companionable: it really seems to lead ...
— Pagan Papers • Kenneth Grahame
... scene; On him the sun looked more serene; To hill and cloud his face was known,— It seemed the likeness of their own; They knew by secret sympathy The public child of earth and sky. "You ask," he said, "what guide Me through trackless thickets led, Through thick-stemmed woodlands rough and wide. I found the water's bed. The watercourses were my guide; I traveled grateful by their side, Or through their channel dry; They led me through the thicket damp, Through brake and fern, the beaver's camp, ...
— Graded Poetry: Seventh Year • Various
... would not seem reasonable to one who thought his senses showed him that the earth was a flat plain of indefinite extent, and that around the inhabited regions on all sides extended, to vast distances, either desert wastes or trackless oceans. How could that same sun, which plunged into the ocean at a fabulous distance in the west, reappear the next morning at an equally great distance in the east? The old mythology asserted that after the sun had dipped in the western ocean at sunset (the Iberians, and other ancient nations, ...
— The Story of the Heavens • Robert Stawell Ball
... Those trackless deeps, where many a weary sail Has seen, above the illimitable plain, 385 Morning on night and night on morning rise, Whilst still no land to greet the wanderer spread Its shadowy mountains on the sunbright sea, Where the loud roarings of ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley Volume I • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... again reverted to the control of nature and accident. To be frank, one sometimes meets with by-roads in this old country, which are positively as bad as the very worst of our own, in the newest settlements. Last year I actually travelled post for twenty miles on one of these trackless ways. ...
— A Residence in France - With An Excursion Up The Rhine, And A Second Visit To Switzerland • J. Fenimore Cooper
... Betty's children. But he was restless in the settlement, and his sojourns grew briefer and more infrequent as time rolled on. True to his conviction that no wife existed on earth for him, he never married. His home was the trackless wilds, where he was true to his ...
— Betty Zane • Zane Grey
... Europe with indications of populous cities, and has little to do with Africa and Australia but to mark the coast lines; as year after year he has to make some variation in the features of the great American continent, which indicates the march of the human family over once trackless deserts, while the memorable places of the ancient world undergo few changes but those of name. And then, as he is finishing a globe for the cabin of some "great ammirall," may he not think that, in some frozen nook of the Arctic Sea, the friendly Esquimaux may come to gaze ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 2, July, 1850. • Various
... like that star I have often watched in the long hours of the night, which has shown me the way on many a trackless sea. I know I am as far beneath you as I am beneath that star. But though the distance is great, my love can bridge it, if you will let me try. Katharine—won't you answer me, Katharine? Is there ...
— For Love of Country - A Story of Land and Sea in the Days of the Revolution • Cyrus Townsend Brady
... part; And when, or how, or where we met I own to me's a secret yet. But this I know, when thou art fled, Where'er they lay these limbs, this head, No clod so valueless shall be, As all that then remains of me. O, whither, whither dost thou fly, Where bend unseen thy trackless course, And in this strange divorce, Ah, tell where I ...
— The World's Best Poetry, Volume 3 - Sorrow and Consolation • Various
... somnambulist, neither completely asleep nor wholly awake. The Christian bound two branches together with bark, in the form of a cross, which he held up high as they rode through the forest. The wood became thicker as they went on, and at last became a trackless wilderness. ...
— What the Moon Saw: and Other Tales • Hans Christian Andersen
... it is this great hope that forms the germ of the Messianic expectation by which they reach forth to the glories of the latter day. This attitude of Israel, in all the generations, is the one striking feature of this history. No soulless sphinx facing a trackless desert with blind eyes—no impassive Buddha ensphered in placid silence—is the genius of this people, but some strong angel poised on mighty pinion above the highest peak of Pisgah, and scanning with swift glances the beauty of ...
— Who Wrote the Bible? • Washington Gladden
... needle was a boon to mankind, and has been of inestimable service in guiding the mariner through trackless waters, and the explorer over desert wastes. In these, its legitimate uses, the needle has not a rival, but all efforts to apply it to the accurate determination of permanent boundary lines have proven very unsatisfactory, and have ...
— Scientific American Supplement No. 360, November 25, 1882 • Various
... visited the island, and returning home with the intelligence, it was taken possession of and colonised. To their astonishment, they found me; and, when I narrated my story and my wishes, allowed me a passage to their country. Once more I embarked on the trackless wave, no longer my delight; and as the shore receded, I watched the humble edifice which I had raised over the remains of my Rosina: it appeared to me as if a star had settled over the spot, and I hailed it as an harbinger of grace. When I landed, I repaired to ...
— The Pacha of Many Tales • Frederick Marryat
... crumbling Spanish crypt; where a red cross chills the lonely traveller in the virgin solitudes of Amazonian forest aisles, or the wild scarlet creepers of Australia trail over a nameless mound above the trackless stretch of sun-warmed waters—then, ...
— Wisdom, Wit, and Pathos of Ouida - Selected from the Works of Ouida • Ouida
... required to display a white light forward and aft, each visible around the entire horizon. These and many other specifications indicate how artificial light informs the mariner and makes for order in shipping. Without artificial light the waterways would be trackless and chaos ...
— Artificial Light - Its Influence upon Civilization • M. Luckiesh
... surrounding mountains, which so completely enclose us that, though we have once passed them [in the preceding September], we almost despair of ever escaping from them without the assistance of the Indians.... Our guides traverse this trackless region with a kind of instinctive sagacity; they never hesitate, they are never embarrassed; and so undeviating is their step, that wherever the snow has disappeared, for even a hundred paces, we ...
— Lewis and Clark - Meriwether Lewis and William Clark • William R. Lighton
... frozen cone in winter, is one of the chief resorts for pic-nickers in their sleighs. The trackless path over the frozen snow during the season is as full of life as Windsor park was in the old Ascot days. Bright eyes beaming from rosy cheeks, and half buried in furs, anxiously watch for the excitement of a capsize, and laugh merrily as the mixed tenants of some ...
— Lands of the Slave and the Free - Cuba, The United States, and Canada • Henry A. Murray
... mirth that do desire Hazard of trackless ways, In with content to wait their watch And ...
— The Seven Seas • Rudyard Kipling
... began taking notes. His mind was not upon his work, however, but was completely filled with thoughts of the girl at his side. The intervals between his comments became longer and longer until they were standing in silence, both staring with unseeing eyes out into the trackless void. But it was in no sense their usual companionable silence. Crane was fighting back the words he longed to say. This lovely girl was not here of her own accord—she had been torn forcibly from her home and from her friends, and he would ...
— The Skylark of Space • Edward Elmer Smith and Lee Hawkins Garby
... over the burning sands, where the brown Arab careers along upon his steed, his white burnous fluttering in the hot wind; over the broad prairies of America, where the Indian prowls with his trusty rifle, waiting for the wild beast; over the paths of the trackless deep; over the still wilder deserts and still more lonely deeps of revelry and vice;—what more than that I have come back again; that many guests are here to do honor to my return; that these are the last words which ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol 3 No 3, March 1863 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... direction, which commands a view of the great chain of mountains, called Carmarthen hills, extending from north to south farther than the eye can reach. Here we paused, surveying "the wild abyss; pondering our voyage." Before us lay the trackless immeasurable desert, in awful silence. At length, after consultation, we determined to steer west and by north, by compass, the make of the land in that quarter indicating the existence of a river. ...
— A Complete Account of the Settlement at Port Jackson • Watkin Tench
... a fine view from the pass over the trackless mountain tangle to the north, some of the peaks towering almost eighteen thousand feet into the sky, but again the clouds and mist veiled everything from sight. All the rest of the day we were making our way down ...
— A Wayfarer in China - Impressions of a trip across West China and Mongolia • Elizabeth Kendall
... The Catholic Church in Lonsdale-street was under construction, and on the western brow was Mr. Abrahams's good house, with his two pretty girl children, one of whom was in succession Mrs. Pike, Mrs. Gray, and Mrs. Williams, and is still alive, with a creditable total of family. Beyond was the trackless bush, excepting the bush tracks to Sydney, and in the Flemington and Keilor direction. But outside the town were already several suburbs, of which Collingwood was the largest, having the residences of John Hunter Patterson and ...
— Personal Recollections of Early Melbourne & Victoria • William Westgarth
... suffer'd many things—I heard foretold A dreadful doom for Pilate,—lingering woes, In far, barbarian climes, where mountains cold Built up a solitude of trackless snows, There he and grisly wolves prowl'd side by side, There he lived famish'd—there, methought, ...
— Poems • (AKA Charlotte, Emily and Anne Bronte) Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell
... part of magistrates and others in authority. And now they were the butt of unprovoked and unfounded aspersions from two heads of Episcopal Clergy, while pursuing the 'noiseless tenor of their way,' through trackless forests and bridgeless rivers and streams, to preach among the scattered inhabitants the unsearchable riches ...
— The Story of My Life - Being Reminiscences of Sixty Years' Public Service in Canada • Egerton Ryerson
... men grumbled at their feet being pierced by thorns in the trackless portions we had passed I was anxious to get a guide, but the only one we could secure would go to Molenga's only; so I submitted, though this led us east instead of north. When we arrived we were asked what we wanted, seeing we brought neither slaves nor ivory: I replied it was much against our ...
— The Last Journals of David Livingstone, in Central Africa, from 1865 to His Death, Volume I (of 2), 1866-1868 • David Livingstone
... conquered again, into whose conquest no one in this world enters, by what track can you lead him, the Awakened, the Omniscient, the trackless? ...
— Sacred Books of the East • Various
... to believe that she was merely amusing herself, but the glow in her eyes did not proceed from mirth. I followed her fixed gaze across the trackless waste ...
— Under the Andes • Rex Stout
... knew that the position he had taken up rendered the line of Beaver Dam Creek untenable by the Federals. They would never stand to fight on that line with a strong force established in their rear and menacing their communications, nor would they dare to deliver a counterstroke through the trackless woods. It might confidently be assumed, therefore, that they would fall back during the night, and that the Confederate advance would then be carried out in that concentrated formation which Lee's orders had dictated. Such, in all probability, ...
— Stonewall Jackson And The American Civil War • G. F. R. Henderson
... sagacity have calculated that Egypt—the most defensible country in the world, bounded on the south by inaccessible mountains, on the east by the Red Sea, on the west by the trackless, burning desert; able to defend the mouths of her river with a powerful navy, and to drown an invading army every year by the inundation of the Nile; which had not only maintained her independence, but extended her conquests for a ...
— Fables of Infidelity and Facts of Faith - Being an Examination of the Evidences of Infidelity • Robert Patterson
... arm of the public defence the nature of whose duties is dual in that they relate to both peace and war. In times of peace the Navy blazes the way across the trackless deep, maps out and marks the dangers which lie in the routes of commerce, in order that the peaceful argosies of trade may pursue safe routes to the distant markets of the world, there to exchange the varied ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol III, After-Dinner Speeches P-Z • Various
... emphasis on the physical more than the psychic factors, and especially on biological analogies in society. It seemed to them as if it was nature that brought men together. Mountains and ice-bound regions were inhospitable, impassable rivers and trackless forests limited the range of animals and men, violent storms and temperature changes made men afraid. Avoiding these dangers and seeking a food-supply where it was most plentiful, human beings met in the favored localities and ...
— Society - Its Origin and Development • Henry Kalloch Rowe
... obliterated; only the trees, marvellously festooned with lace-like icicles, and a few huge, fire-scarred rocks which here and there thrust their jagged points above the surface, remained of the desolate marsh and forest land. Everywhere, as far as the eye could carry, was a trackless waste of snow drift. ...
— The Easiest Way - A Story of Metropolitan Life • Eugene Walter and Arthur Hornblow
... non-combatant young Serbs they very certainly did not go out of their way to offer any shelter to these erstwhile little allies in distress, when the alternative to Greece was wild Albania. Twenty thousand Serbian children lost their lives upon those bleak and trackless mountains.[93] It was most unfortunate. And in the Cathedral of Athens, in the gorgeous presence of the clergy and the more responsible sections of the population, the King chuckled to himself as he was acclaimed with cries ...
— The Birth of Yugoslavia, Volume 1 • Henry Baerlein
... open with a cheering shout—a shout that as quickly changed to a yell of imprecation. They were on the Ridge in a blinding snow-storm! The road had already vanished under their feet, and with it the fresh trail they had so closely followed! They stood helplessly on the shore of a trackless white sea, blank and spotless of any trace ...
— Snow-Bound at Eagle's • Bret Harte
... as brave men as ever walked the footstool; that they came to Michigan and rescued the country from the invaders, the English and savages, long before some of us knew that there was such a place as Michigan. When Michigan was almost a trackless wilderness they crossed Lake Erie, landed at Malden, drove the redcoats out of the fort and started them on the double quick. They made for the Canadian woods, and the British and Indians, who held Detroit, followed suit. ...
— The Bark Covered House • William Nowlin
... to which the last six pictures of the series are devoted, as the preceding six illustrate the dawn of our history from the first landing of the white man to the settlement of the Pilgrim Fathers—preceding all of which is the mysterious and unfathomable past symbolized by the trackless "Ocean," ...
— Thirteen Chapters of American History - represented by the Edward Moran series of Thirteen - Historical Marine Paintings • Theodore Sutro
... which was at some miles' distance from the city. But here the unhappy man found that he had only escaped from one kind of misery to experience another. He wandered about all day through a vast and trackless wood, where his flesh was continually torn by thorns and brambles. He grew hungry, but could find no food in this dreary solitude. At length he was ready to die with fatigue, and lay down in despair in a large cavern which ...
— Children's Literature - A Textbook of Sources for Teachers and Teacher-Training Classes • Charles Madison Curry
... dropped the end of her paddle, and urged the canoe away from the spot, with a movement as reluctant as the feelings which controlled it. Deerslayer quietly aided the effort, however, and they were soon on the trackless line taken by ...
— The Deerslayer • James Fenimore Cooper
... great choir, And what is Nature's order but the rhyme Whereto the world keeps time, And all things move with all things from their prime? Who shall expound the mystery of the lyre? In far retreats of elemental mind Obscurely comes and goes The imperative breath of song, that as the wind Is trackless, ...
— Platform Monologues • T. G. Tucker
... in the river, The poet trembles at his own long gaze That meets him through the changing nights and days From out great Nature; all her waters quiver With his fair image facing him forever: The music that he listens to betrays His own heart to his ears: by trackless ways His wild thoughts tend to him in long endeavor. His dreams are far among the silent hills; His vague voice calls him from the darkened plain; With winds at night vague recognition thrills His lonely heart with piercing love and pain; He knows again his mirth in mountain ...
— The Poet's Poet • Elizabeth Atkins
... teachings by these objects. He made everything that was at hand perform a mission for the human soul. The lilies of the field were clothed with spiritual suggestion, and the fowls of the air, as they flew through the trackless firmament, bore a lesson of truth and consolation. As if to show that there is nothing, however small, that is insignificant, and that has not its mission, he selected the falling sparrow to be a minister of wisdom, and dignified the wayside well as a clear and ...
— The Crown of Thorns - A Token for the Sorrowing • E. H. Chapin
... liable to attack on either of its flanks, unless the nature of the country through which it is passing provides security for one or the other in the form of an impenetrable feature (such as a wide, {115} trackless marsh), or an impassable barrier (such as a neutral frontier). The outer columns of a force moving on parallel routes will have an exposed flank, while their inner flank is protected by maintaining touch ...
— Lectures on Land Warfare; A tactical Manual for the Use of Infantry Officers • Anonymous
... felt quite as comfortable standing on the topmost window ledge of the Flat Iron building, in New York. And, to Nucky, there was no trail! Only a narrow, corkscrew shelf, deep banked with snow into which the mules set their small feet gingerly. For many minutes, the boy saw only this trackless ledge, and the ...
— The Enchanted Canyon • Honore Willsie Morrow
... entirely alone (her uncle being at Whinbury), and whose long, bright, noiseless, breezeless, cloudless hours (how many they seemed since sunrise!) had been to her as desolate as if they had gone over her head in the shadowless and trackless wastes of Sahara, instead of in the blooming garden of an English home, she was sitting in the alcove—her task of work on her knee, her fingers assiduously plying the needle, her eyes following and regulating their movements, her brain working restlessly—when Fanny came ...
— Shirley • Charlotte Bronte
... going on as it was wont. The waves are hoarse with repetition of their mystery; the dust lies piled upon the shore; the sea-birds soar and hover; the winds and clouds go forth upon their trackless flight; the white arms beckon in the moonlight to the invisible country far ...
— A Week's Tramp in Dickens-Land • William R. Hughes
... warmer climate it is a rare thing to find them. Sometimes a few weary land-birds that have strayed from their homeward way, skim over the ocean, or rest upon the masts; how they maintain themselves on the wing cannot be conjectured, but certain it is, they have been seen on the trackless ocean, when no point of land ...
— Hair Breadth Escapes - Perilous incidents in the lives of sailors and travelers - in Japan, Cuba, East Indies, etc., etc. • T. S. Arthur
... intensified if the discussion were ever carried to physical contention. Of his personal history it was known only that he had emigrated from Wisconsin in 1852, that he had calmly unyoked his ox teams at Big Flume, then a trackless wilderness, and on the opening of a wagon road to the new mines had built a wayside station which eventually developed into the present hotel. He had been divorced in a Western State by his wife "Rosalie," locally known as "The Prairie Flower of Elkham Creek," for incompatibility of temper! ...
— Openings in the Old Trail • Bret Harte
... sky or moon I watched that moving zigzag of spread wings In unforgotten Autumns gone too soon, In unforgotten Springs! Creatures of desolation, far they fly Above all lands bound by the curling foam; In misty lens, wild moors and trackless sky These wild things have their home. They know the tundra of Siberian coasts. And tropic marshes by the Indian seas; They know the clouds and night and starry hosts From Crux to Pleiades. Dark flying rune against the western glow— It tells the ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 3 (of 4) • Various
... down. Reasonable men could not expect all persons under these circumstances to be models of virtue. Then the Missouri River seemed to be the western boundary of all civilization, and as these gold hunters launched out on the almost trackless prairies that lay westward of that mighty stream, many considered themselves as entering a country of peculiar freedom, and it was often said that "Law and morality never crossed the Missouri River." ...
— Death Valley in '49 • William Lewis Manly
... often a difficult matter to make their way through forests, or over wide tracts of waste land where the ground was rugged, uneven, and covered with brushwood. The vast forests which then existed in the north of England, have long since been cleared away, and wild trackless heaths have been converted into parks, meadows, and corn-fields. Maud and the two girls rode in a waggon wherein they had placed some wooden stools, several baskets of provision, and all their clothing, with such other things as they wished to take with them. ...
— The Grateful Indian - And other Stories • W.H.G. Kingston
... or more the three adventurers followed their strange guide in silence through the dense, trackless woods. He walked very rapidly, looking neither to the right nor to the left, finding his way apparently by an intuitive sense of direction. Occasionally he glanced back over his shoulder ...
— The Girl in the Golden Atom • Raymond King Cummings
... the tired team with a flick of the rawhide, he angled off across the trackless prairie. One panic-stricken look at the black, tar-papered shack, standing alone in that barren expanse, and the last spark of our dwindling enthusiasm for homesteading was snuffed out. The house, which had seemed such an extraordinary stroke ...
— Land of the Burnt Thigh • Edith Eudora Kohl
... us a Key 1809-1882 To help unlock the mystery Of Evolution's wondrous span From Protoplasm up to Man. Livingstone The traveller, great Scotch Livingstone, 1813-1873 Wandered o'er Afric's trackless Zone; Where no white man had ever trod Teaching the blacks the Word of God. Crimean War English, French and Turks unite 'Gainst Russia in Crimean fight. Indian Mutiny The Indian Mutiny now arose, 'Fat' was the cause that ...
— A Humorous History of England • C. Harrison
... alive—when Gillispie and Henderson got there, three hours later, the very balls of their eyes almost frozen into blindness. But for an instinct stronger than reason they would never have been able to have found their way across that trackless stretch. The children lying unconscious under their coverings were neither dead nor actually frozen, although the men putting their hands on their little hearts could not at first discover the beating. Stiff and suffering as these young fellows were, it was no easy matter to get the window ...
— A Mountain Woman and Others • (AKA Elia Wilkinson) Elia W. Peattie
... which long grasses cross, And one small tree embowers droopingly— Joying to see some wandering insect won To live in its few rushes, or some locust To pasture on its boughs, or some wild bird Stoop for its freshness from the trackless air: And then should find it but the fountain-head, Long lost, of some great river washing towns And towers, and seeing old woods which will live But by its banks untrod of human foot, Which, when the great sun sinks, lie quivering In light as ...
— Browning's England - A Study in English Influences in Browning • Helen Archibald Clarke
... several months before she moved again. It was then before the gold rush, and in winter Alaska was practically cut off from all communication with the south. No man would have attempted to traverse the tremendous snow-wrapped desolation of almost impassable hills and trackless forests that lay between them and the nearest of the commercial factories on the north, or the canneries on the other hand. Besides, the canneries were shut up in winter time. They were prisoners, and could only wait with what patience they ...
— Hawtrey's Deputy • Harold Bindloss
... there were no pulses or chasms in being, would be all algebra. Truth depends upon facts for its perspective, since facts select truths and decide which truths shall be mere possibilities and which shall be the eternal forms of actual things. The dialectical world would be a trackless desert if the existent world had no arbitrary constitution. Living dialectic comes to clarify existence; it turns into meanings the actual forms of things by reflecting upon them, and by making them intended subjects ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... Small wonder, however, that in their occupation and environment—living daily in an atmosphere of hope, expectation, and chance, looking forward each morning to the blind stroke of a pick that might bring fortune—they should see signs in nature and hear mystic voices in the trackless woods that surrounded them. Still less strange that they were peculiarly susceptible to the more recognized diversions of chance, and were gamblers on the turning of a card who trusted to the revelation of a shovelful of ...
— Stories in Light and Shadow • Bret Harte
... without discovering any traces either of the natives or of him. On returning however at sunset, we had the satisfaction to find that he had reached the camp about an hour before us, having during the whole day been unable to find his way back to our camp through the trackless forest. ...
— Three Expeditions into the Interior of Eastern Australia, Vol 1 (of 2) • Thomas Mitchell
... of conceiving spaces and directions as they exist in the field about him. Among savages and animals below the grade of man, this understanding of spacial relations is very clear and strong. It enables the primitive man to find his way through the trackless forest, and the carrier pigeon to recover his mate and dwelling place from the distance of hundreds of miles away. In civilized men, however, the habit of the home and street and the disuse of the ancient ...
— Outlines of the Earth's History - A Popular Study in Physiography • Nathaniel Southgate Shaler
... found quite prevalent throughout America. The broken blue line of the coast of Luzon reaches away in a dim contour to the northward for two hundred miles, until the chain of the Zambales Mountains breaks into the flying, wave-lashed islands standing out against the trackless sea. Southern Luzon, the country of Batangas, and the Camarines, extends a hundred miles south of ...
— The Great White Tribe in Filipinia • Paul T. Gilbert
... He dreamt that an evil spirit, with a face he knew but could not name, was pursuing him over trackless mountains. He fled like the wind; but the spirit was close behind him, and wherever he turned his head, he saw the familiar face grinning a devilish mockery. A precipice lay before him. He leapt wildly, and knew at once that he had leapt into fire, into hell. But ...
— Veranilda • George Gissing
... he was, had a sensitive disposition, which chafed under the rebuff with which his well-meant advice had been met. After crossing the river and leaving Fort Ontario behind them, they plunged into the apparently trackless forest, and for some time neither of them spoke a word. Boulanger strode on, eyeing his companion askance, and possibly speculating whether the fine gentleman who had treated him so superciliously would not very soon be forced to give in, and perhaps commit to him the task ...
— The King's Warrant - A Story of Old and New France • Alfred H. Engelbach
... lawless love and bloody deeds, Which fester like corrupted weeds, And smell to heaven with poison breath Involving all in certain death. For fraud and murder can't be hid Since Eve and Cain did what they did And left us naked through the world, Like meteors in midnight hurled, To darkle in this trackless sphere, Not knowing what ...
— Shakspere, Personal Recollections • John A. Joyce
... passed, deep and grave, slow and full, with the sense of afternoon, of solemn and trackless woods, unbreathed air, silence and high heaven, then the April wind swept up the gorge and brought the sound of water. Rand sat up, resting his head upon his hands, and stared down the shadowy steep. There were flowers growing close to him, ...
— Lewis Rand • Mary Johnston
... the blood of the adventurer ran slow and cold. The illusions bred of the winter dawn had been dispersed by the light of day; life was no glad enterprise—no climbing of golden heights, but the barren crossing of a trackless region where no hand proffered guidance and false signs misled the weary eyes. One weapon alone was necessary in the pursuance of the gray journey—a sure command—a sure possession ...
— Max • Katherine Cecil Thurston
... the way, the wild untenanted stretch was unbroken by any incident; yet I remember no tedium by the way; and I believe that a trip taken with Grandma and Grandpa Keeler through the most trackless desert would inevitably have been made to teem with diversion. Those blessed souls! I smile, looking back, but through tears, and with a reverence and tenderness far deeper than ...
— Cape Cod Folks • Sarah P. McLean Greene
... wastes their infant race shall die; Through dreary wilds, where never pilgrim trod Where caverns yawn, and rocky fragments nod, The hapless lover and his bride shall stray, By night unshelter'd, and forlorn by day. In vain the lover o'er the trackless plain Shall dart his eyes, and cheer his spouse in vain. Her tender limbs, and breast of mountain snow, Where, ne'er before, intruding blast might blow, Parch'd by the sun, and shrivell'd by the cold Of dewy night, ...
— National Epics • Kate Milner Rabb
... preacher, Mr. McAlpine, the man who years before had come to the Glen, and with his message from the Eternal roused the place to a better life. But he was an old man now, and retired from his labours, and how came he to be wandering in this trackless wilderness after nightfall? ...
— The Silver Maple • Marian Keith
... presumably been taken on to their destination by whoever had been showing the way; but that person's name and residence, if any of those left in New Orleans had known them, were forgotten. Only the wide and almost trackless region of Attakapas was remembered, and by people to whom every day brought a struggle for their own existence. Besides, the children's kindred were bound ...
— Strange True Stories of Louisiana • George Washington Cable
... way as birds their trackless way— I shall arrive! what time, what circuit first, I ask not: but unless God send his hail Or blinding fire-balls, sleet, or stifling snow, In some time—his good time—I shall arrive; He guides me and the bird. In His good ...
— North and South • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... and hollow, by mead and lawn, Thro' shine and shade of dingle and glade, Fast and far as I hurry on My eager seeking you still evade. But, were you shod with the errant breeze, Spirit of shadow and fire and dew, O'er trackless deserts of lands and seas Still would I follow and find ...
— The Poets and Poetry of Cecil County, Maryland • Various
... public lands as the surveys extend westward, and by future Pacific Railroad parties, will furnish means for exactly determining the routes of the two expeditions; certainly as regards that of 1863, which lay through trackless wastes, over which not even an odometer passed with this expedition. It is to be regretted that the commanding officer of the expedition, lavish as were the expenses attending it, thought fit to negative ...
— History of Company E of the Sixth Minnesota Regiment of Volunteer Infantry • Alfred J. Hill
... occasionally loosen and fall, when the dreadful storms peculiar to these regions suddenly come on, and form an insurmountable barrier, or sweep away or bury the unfortunate traveller. Should he escape these dangers, the path is now become trackless, and he wanders amid the dreary solitudes until night overtakes him; and then, when he pauses from fatigue or uncertainty with regard to the path he should pursue, his limbs are speedily benumbed. Fatal slumbers, which he cannot shake off, steal upon him, ...
— The Dog - A nineteenth-century dog-lovers' manual, - a combination of the essential and the esoteric. • William Youatt
... origin had passed over them within the hour. The comparatively small size of their alternating ridges and furrows give evidence that the waters beneath which they had formed had been of no very profound depth. In the upper part of the valley, which is bare, trackless, and solitary, with a high monotonous sandstone ridge bounding it on the one side, and a line of gloomy trap-hills rising over it on the other, the edges of the strata, where they protrude through the mingled heath and moss, exhibit the mysterious ...
— The Cruise of the Betsey • Hugh Miller
... river, which runs between the regions of Hela and the upper world. Well the guard of the bridge knew, when she heard on the bridge the noise of the horse's feet, that it was no shade who was crossing; but when Hermod told his errand, he was allowed to go on. And now his way led over trackless, slippery ice, on which scarce any other horse could have kept his footing; and surely no other horse could have leapt, as did Sleipnir, the gate to Hela's own realm. Once within, Hermod came rapidly into the presence ...
— Journeys Through Bookland V2 • Charles H. Sylvester
... of miles apart, their habitations are established; but their home is the saddle. Innumerable herds of cattle and of horses turn to account the pasturage of the rich savanna; and the true Llanero exists only as guardian or proprietor of these savage hosts. He is as much at home in this trackless expanse of rank vegetation as the mariner navigating a familiar sea. There are no roads in the Llanos; but he can gallop unerringly to any given point, be it hundreds of miles away. There are no boundaries to the huge estates; but he knows when the cattle he is ...
— Atlantic Monthly Vol. 3, No. 16, February, 1859 • Various
... bright, 'mid the desert of time, Seem the days when I wander'd with you, Like the green isles that swell in this far distant clime, On the deeps that are trackless and blue. ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volumes I-VI. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... prison-house? the insane, the idiot, the deaf and dumb for his asylum? Does the Christian, in his love to all mankind, wait for the majority of the benighted heathen to ask him for the gospel? No; unasked and unwelcomed, he crosses the trackless ocean, rolls off the mountain of superstition that oppresses the human mind, proclaims the immortality of the soul, the dignity of manhood, the right of all to ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume I • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... decided to recapture its forsaken role of the Snow King. For two days and as many nights the air had been one swirl of snow which shut out earth and sky. But on the third morning the Hill woke to a dazzling world of cloudless blue and trackless white. A resplendent bride-like day it was and fitly so for before sundown the old House on the Hill was to know another bride. Elinor Ruth Farringdon's affairs required her immediate attention in Australia ...
— Wild Wings - A Romance of Youth • Margaret Rebecca Piper
... the trackless ocean, and saw day by day the great billows rolling between them and the mysterious horizon, the sailors were again filled with dread. They lacked the courage to sail onward into the unknown distance. The compass began to vacillate, and no longer ...
— Good Stories For Great Holidays - Arranged for Story-Telling and Reading Aloud and for the - Children's Own Reading • Frances Jenkins Olcott
... good, is it heaven's will as that is. Is that a good war, which against the emperor Thou wagest with the emperor's own army? O God of heaven! what a change is this. Beseems it me to offer such persuasion To thee, who like the fixed star of the pole Wert all I gazed at on life's trackless ocean? O! what a rent thou makest in my heart! The ingrained instinct of old reverence, The holy habit of obediency, Must I pluck life asunder from thy name? Nay, do not turn thy countenance upon me— It always was as a god looking upon me! ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... safety on the happy shore? 'Tis not an earthly pilot that can steer So frail a bark through such a stormy tide. Cannot the eye of faith look up and see The clouds of sorrow part—the day-star rise Above life's trackless ocean, shedding light Upon the darkened nations? From its beams The mist of error flies, the angry waves Of passion, which so long have vexed the world, Are hushed to rest; controlled by Him who rose From tranquil sleep, and to the roaring waste Of midnight waters, mustering all their wrath, Said, ...
— Enthusiasm and Other Poems • Susanna Moodie
... for that far mysterious realm, Whence the fathomless, trackless waters flow. Shall I see a Presence dim, and know A Gracious Hand upon the helm, Nor ...
— Verses • Susan Coolidge
... maze of piercing, trackless, thrilling thoughts Involving and embracing each with each Rapid as fire, inextricably link'd, Expanding momently with every sight And sound which struck the palpitating sense, The issue of strong impulse, hurried through The riv'n rapt brain: ...
— The Suppressed Poems of Alfred Lord Tennyson • Alfred Lord Tennyson
... journey through the wilderness is clear in my mind. At that time the railroad terminated at Grand Rapids, Michigan, and we covered the remaining distance—about one hundred miles—by wagon, riding through a dense and often trackless forest. My brother James met us at Grand Rapids with what, in those days, was called a lumber-wagon, but which had a horrible resemblance to a vehicle from the health department. My sisters and I gave it one cold ...
— The Story of a Pioneer - With The Collaboration Of Elizabeth Jordan • Anna Howard Shaw
... universal prevalence of slavery and the lack of opposition to the practice by any considerable group up to the last days of its existence gave the fleeing slave few friends. However, there was a trackless wilderness to which he might flee. Especially qualified runaway slave catchers were employed ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 7, 1922 • Various
... air stirring the leaves. The unspeakable, unsolvable mystery of it all rested like a weight on the spirits of both men. It, was a disquieting thought that bands of savages, eager to discover and slay, were stealing among the shadows of those trackless plains, and that they must literally feel their uncertain way through the cordon, every sound an alarm, every advancing step a fresh peril. They crossed the swift, deep stream, and emerged dripping, chilled to the marrow by the ...
— Bob Hampton of Placer • Randall Parrish
... through open spaces is an undulating forest in all directions, being apparently both trackless and endless. The great variety of greens observed in the foliage blends in the distance into one dark shade, then changes to dark blue, which gradually fades out to a hazy uncertainty where it ...
— Cave Regions of the Ozarks and Black Hills • Luella Agnes Owen
... faithful dog was barking furiously in the prompter's box, and clearly choking himself against his collar. But it was in his greatest scene of all that his honesty got the better of him. He had to enter a dense and trackless forest, on the trail of the murderer, and there to fly at the murderer when he found him resting at the foot of a tree, with his victim bound ready for slaughter. It was a hot night, and he came into the forest from an altogether unexpected direction, in the ...
— The Bed-Book of Happiness • Harold Begbie |
