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More "Frail" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... an' sit fair in the middle of the shkiff," said Mr. McGrath as I got into his frail craft at five o'clock in the morning on the bank of the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal near Point of Rocks. "It's onconvanient to be outside of the boat whin we're going through them locks. There were a gintleman done that last year, an' ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, October, 1877, Vol. XX. No. 118 • Various
... it, darkness having fallen. Then she opened the door, and saw, in the gloom, a short, thin woman standing on the step, a woman of advanced middle-age, dressed with a kind of shabby neatness. It seemed impossible that so frail and unimportant a creature could have made such ...
— Buried Alive: A Tale of These Days • Arnold Bennett
... long in certainty as to his abode at Clifton: alas, where could he long be so? Hardly six months were gone when his old enemy again overtook him; again admonished him how frail his hopes of permanency were. Each winter, it turned out, he had to fly; and after the second of these, he quitted the place altogether. Here, meanwhile, in a Letter to myself, and in Excerpts from others, are some glimpses of his advent ...
— The Life of John Sterling • Thomas Carlyle
... away in the old rocking-chair in a corner, safely out of the way of the line of march of her wild brothers. She was a frail, small mortal, with long, smooth, yellow hair and anxious blue eyes, just the apple of everybody's eye ...
— A Big Temptation • L. T. Meade
... know just what Pa could do if he were home, he seems so frail, But every time the skies grow black I notice Ma gets rather pale. An' when she's called us children in, an' locked the windows an' the doors, She jumps at every lightnin' flash an' trembles when the thunder roars. An' when the baby starts to ...
— A Heap o' Livin' • Edgar A. Guest
... in supreme despair. Confession was on her lips a dozen times, but courage failed her. When she heard his footsteps in the hallway she was ready to cry out the truth to him and end the suspense. As he opened the door to enter, the spirit of fairness turned frail and fled before the appeal of procrastination. Wait! Wait! Wait! cried the powerful weakness in her heart, and it conquered. She could not tell him then. To-morrow—the next day, yes, but not then. It was too much to ...
— Jane Cable • George Barr McCutcheon
... that or not was not evident, but they certainly came within a few inches of smashing the frail canoe. Only John's skill prevented it. As the rowboat swept past one of the oars fairly snatched the paddle from ...
— Jack Ranger's Western Trip - From Boarding School to Ranch and Range • Clarence Young
... turn to the Devon of to-day, realizing with thankfulness that the traditions of Drake and Frobisher, of Grenville and Hawkins, still hold; that the heirs of the men who put out in their frail ships for the New World, now buffet round our wild coasts in minesweeper or trawler, destroyer or old cargo tubs, on a far more grim adventure. Without the hope of gain, without the spur of glory, from every port and harbour, from every creek and bay and inlet of our coasts comes ...
— Lynton and Lynmouth - A Pageant of Cliff & Moorland • John Presland
... attempt, although the sun had already set. In about two hours they were so near the shore that they could see the lights distinctly, and they could not have been more than a mile from the mouth of the port. All were extremely happy, expecting to anchor within an hour. "How frail are human joys," exclaims Mr Montefiore; "most suddenly the wind had changed again to the west, and commenced blowing in a terrific manner. Thus, in an instant, were our hopes gone, and we were blown off the land, a tremendous sea obliging us to take to our ...
— Diaries of Sir Moses and Lady Montefiore, Volume I • Sir Moses Montefiore
... seems impossible to admit, as has been suggested, that these frail objects should have been saved from the plunder and burning of the villas and preserved by the Anglo-Saxons as curiosities. Glasses with knobs, "a larmes," abound in the Anglo-Saxon tombs, and similar ones have been found in the Roman tombs of an earlier epoch, notably at Lepine, in the department ...
— A Literary History of the English People - From the Origins to the Renaissance • Jean Jules Jusserand
... as the author of 'London Lyrics,' that he will be best remembered, devoted his attention almost exclusively to English literature, although of late years he had devoted as much attention as his frail health would allow to the formation of a section of rare books in French literature. It would be impossible to describe in this place all the many book rarities at Rowfant; we must be content, therefore, with indicating a few of ...
— The Book-Hunter in London - Historical and Other Studies of Collectors and Collecting • William Roberts
... seat, and fastening the boat to a large stone, the guide, followed by the brothers, shouted to the inmates of the cottage, and violently kicked at its frail door. ...
— A Love Story • A Bushman
... And thus reveal'd—"Hear, prince! and understand Thou ow'st thy guidance to no mortal hand: Hermes I am, descended from above, The king of arts, the messenger of Jove, Farewell: to shun Achilles' sight I fly; Uncommon are such favours of the sky, Nor stand confess'd to frail mortality. Now fearless enter, and prefer thy prayers; Adjure him by his father's silver hairs, His son, his mother! urge him to bestow Whatever pity that stern heart ...
— The Iliad of Homer • Homer
... The secret was out. That was the explanation of this fantastic journey. George Fox, after gathering a 'great people' up in the North, was now himself kept a close prisoner in Carlisle Gaol: yet he was the magnet attracting this lad, frail of body but determined of will, to travel right across England for the hope of speaking with him in his ...
— A Book of Quaker Saints • Lucy Violet Hodgkin
... single paddle, the frail boat sped onward with great celerity, and its prow, in a few moments, grated lightly against the shingle at the feet of the hunters, and ...
— The Riflemen of the Miami • Edward S. Ellis
... Shelley was incapable of learning, that love can never permanently be a fountain. A living poet, in an article {6} which you almost fear to breathe upon lest you should flutter some of the frail pastel-like bloom, has said the thing: "Love itself has tidal moments, lapses and flows due to the metrical rule of the interior heart." Elementary reason should proclaim this true. Love is an affection, its display ...
— Shelley - An Essay • Francis Thompson
... to appeal to the law of environment for a man, it does not do very much. The very trees and stones do better for him, and the little birds in their nests. No possible amount of environment crowded on their frail souls would ever make it possible for most men to catch up—to overtake enough truth before they die to make their seventy years worth while. The majority of men (one hardly dares to deny) can be seen, sooner or later, drifting down to death either bitterly or indifferently. The shadows ...
— The Lost Art of Reading • Gerald Stanley Lee
... years, thy babes Should o'er this frail memorial bend, (For first affection rarely fades!) And boast that I ...
— Poems (1828) • Thomas Gent
... heart too! from his lips Have dashed joy's last poor lingering drop, and shown him, His only prop was frail as all the former! Could I but think he felt like common parents, That when he found my fault, affection died, Then I were blest! then I alone should suffer, And when his hatred broke my heart, could seek Some lone sad place, and lay me down and die! Alas! alas! I know I was his darling! ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor, Vol. I, No. 5, May 1810 • Various
... (and, in fact, we ought to read, and must read) 'out of,' or 'without' my flesh. It is but to write out the verses, omitting the conjectural additions, and making that one small but vital correction, to see how frail a support is there for so large a conclusion: 'I know that my Redeemer liveth, and shall stand at the latter upon the earth; and after my skin destroy this ; yet without my flesh I shall see God.' If there is any doctrine of a resurrection here, it is a ...
— Short Studies on Great Subjects • James Anthony Froude
... Dionysius, if distracting fears Alarm this throbbing bosom, you will pardon A frail and tender sex. Should ruthless war Roam through our streets, and riot here in blood, Where shall the lost Euphrasia find a shelter? In vain she'll kneel, and clasp the sacred altar. O let me then, in mercy let me seek The gloomy mansion, where my father dwells; ...
— The Grecian Daughter • Arthur Murphy
... a summons to supper, for the ladies, to show their power, had by this time brought us tamely to go to bed with our bellies full, tho we both at first declared positively against it. So very pliable a thing is frail man, when women have the ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. IX (of X) - America - I • Various
... its summit. Before the thought of this Sovereign Being, by whose Will are all things, and who is without cause and without beginning, our soul is overwhelmed. We are so feeble! the thought of absolute power crushes us. Creatures of a day, how should we understand the Eternal? Frail as we are, and evil, we tremble at the idea of holiness. But milder accents, as you know, have been heard upon the earth: This Sovereign God—He loves us. In proportion as this idea gains possession of our understanding, in the ...
— The Heavenly Father - Lectures on Modern Atheism • Ernest Naville
... there was hardly a personality of mark or position that hasn't been talked about in the Pavilion before me. Of him I had only heard that he was a very austere and pious person, always at Mass, and that sort of thing. I saw a frail little man with a long, yellow face and sunken fanatical eyes, an Inquisitor, an unfrocked monk. One missed a rosary from his thin fingers. He gazed at me terribly and I couldn't imagine what he might want. I waited for him to pull out ...
— The Arrow of Gold - a story between two notes • Joseph Conrad
... soft young fellow with a literary turn, or a genius for playing the flute, according to the laws of contrast and nature provided in those cases; and who has not heard how great, strong men have an affinity for frail, tender little women; how tender little women are attracted by great, honest, strong men; and how your burly heroes and champions of war are constantly henpecked? If Mr. Harry Warrington falls in love with a woman who is like Miss Lambert ...
— The Virginians • William Makepeace Thackeray
... Mountains of surf dash on the rocky coast, seeking to tear the frail craft to pieces. In the perspective behold the sea of many years, studded with the crafts of those friends of my former good ship Prosperity. How many I see that owe to me, some only a pennant, many a sail or two, and others the stanch ...
— The Romance and Tragedy • William Ingraham Russell
... the face,—these things were of a perfection quite evident to the critical sense of Edward Manisty. It was the perfection that was characteristic. So too was the faded fairness of hair and skin, the frail distinguished look. So, above all, was the contrast between the minute care for personal adornment implied in the finish of the dress, and the melancholy shrinking of ...
— Eleanor • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... damp scow, where he had been lying, and listened with all his senses wide open, and once again the cry was wafted upon the river zephyrs, and before it died away the sailor's paddle was in the water, and his frail, awkward vessel was darting across ...
— The Entailed Hat - Or, Patty Cannon's Times • George Alfred Townsend
... May it please God that our hopes may not also have expired with him who was but a few short hours ago the glory and the greatness of his kingdom! The sturdy tree has fallen, and the saplings are still weak and frail. The mission of the great Henry is accomplished, and the weight of sovereignty is transferred to your own brow. And you also, my beloved ones," she continued, glancing towards her younger sons, "come nearer to me, and let us kneel together beside the body ...
— The Life of Marie de Medicis, Vol. 2 (of 3) • Julia Pardoe
... an earth floor, with a layer of reeds and grass thrown down on one side. It was frail, and hinted at changing times and poverty, for the original skin cover had been patched and eked out with the products of civilization in the shape of cotton flour-bags and old sacking. In the later repairs sewing twine had been used instead of sinews. A wooden case ...
— The Intriguers • Harold Bindloss
... of a spirit of contradiction, but out of a desire to learn, Christ is so far from thrusting him away, that he rather condescendeth the more, out of love and tenderness, to instruct him better, and clear the way more fully. And that, because, 1. He knoweth our mould and fashion, how feckless and frail we are, and that if he should deal with us according to our folly, we should quickly be destroyed. 2. He is not as a man, hasty, rash, proud; but gentle, loving, tender, and full of compassion. 3. It is his office and proper work to be an instructor to the ignorant, and ...
— Christ The Way, The Truth, and The Life • John Brown (of Wamphray)
... than we do. They understand each other, and they seem to have a practical way of accepting human nature as it is which we never learn to apply to our fellowmen. They never bluster as we do, nor expect impossibilities from the frail. ...
— With Edged Tools • Henry Seton Merriman
... trying to save you!" he repeated, his temper breaking its frail leash. "Your ideas are ...
— Counsel for the Defense • Leroy Scott
... an old cloak of the hermit, and, disguised as a beggar, gained admittance to the gate of the Women's Palace, where were gathered together on their knees many others, poor, frail, infirm. ...
— English Fairy Tales • Flora Annie Steel
... triumph of absolute monarchy through the personal movement of Charlemagne, or at the speedy fall of the fabric on the disappearance of the moving spirit, understands neither what can be done by a great man, when, without him, society sees itself given over to deadly peril, nor how unsubstantial and frail is absolute power when the great man is no longer by, or when society has no longer need ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 4 • Various
... interesting countenance, were all dripping wet; the cold had given a livid appearance to her thin, white hands; it was only in the fire of her blue eyes, generally so soft and timid, that one perceived the extraordinary energy which this frail and fearful creature had gathered from the emergency of ...
— The Wandering Jew, Complete • Eugene Sue
... him, and had uttered a curse on him. The spot where the three had met was in a lonely pass. At the utterance of the curse he had cut the poor old hag down, with one fierce slash of his heavy riding whip. She had howled for mercy, and for reply he flogged the poor frail old prostrate form until life had fled, then, with a lifting spurn of his foot, he had hurled the body over the edge of that mountain pass, into the unknown depths of the ravine beyond. And all the time his eyes had smiled, as they smiled now—and Judith shuddered, for the smile was ...
— The Mark of the Beast • Sidney Watson
... deem the land crying loud to him— Frail though and spent, and an hungered for restfulness Once more responds he, dead fervours to energize Aims to concentre, slack efforts to bind. THOMAS HARDY, The Dynasts, ...
— William Pitt and the Great War • John Holland Rose
... a true portraiture of Knox in the days of his vigour; if we are to speak of vigour in the case of a man with a small and frail body (one of his early biographers speaks of him as a mere corpuscle), and a man throughout his whole public life struggling with disease. In the last year of his prematurely 'decrepit age,' we have another description of him; and this time it is taken in St Andrews. Edinburgh and Leith ...
— John Knox • A. Taylor Innes
... A singing stream in a silent vale, A fairy prince in a prosy tale, Ah! there's nothing in life so finely frail As rose-white youth." ...
— The Green Carnation • Robert Smythe Hichens
... denizens of this Sea Cliff are only half as earnest in their souls' salvation as they are in replenishing poor, frail human nature, there will be a glorious harvest of regeneration this holy season. The way they poured out of the tents, the houses, the long stoops, and through the bushes was fluttering and noisy as the flight of ten thousand ...
— Phemie Frost's Experiences • Ann S. Stephens
... of a grave-digger, whence the nick-name. Born in 1807. Frail, nervous, independent, retiring at first, she tried hiring out, but then fell into vagrant habits. Reared in a village on the outskirts of Grenoble, where Dr. Benassis came to live during the Restoration, she became an object of special attention on the part of the ...
— Repertory Of The Comedie Humaine, Complete, A — Z • Anatole Cerfberr and Jules Franois Christophe
... 'He that seeketh shall find it.' The enjoyment of the present life, though in seeming it give delight and sweetness, is well thrust from us. At the very moment of its being it ceaseth to be, and for our joy repayeth us with sorrow sevenfold. Its happiness and its sorrow are more frail than a shadow, and, like the traces of a ship passing over the sea, or of a bird flying through the air, quickly disappear. But the hope of the life to come which the Christians preach is certain, and as surety sure; howbeit in this world it ...
— Barlaam and Ioasaph • St. John of Damascus
... in a moment Dr. Franchi, small and frail and charming, came forward with a sweet smile and hand outstretched, through a throng of ...
— Mystery at Geneva - An Improbable Tale of Singular Happenings • Rose Macaulay
... the first. Their losses had been heavy, but they had taught their adversaries that they were no longer the unmanageable levies of Bull Run, scattered by the first touch of disaster to the four winds. It was no frail barrier which stood now between the South and her independence, but a great army of trained soldiers, seasoned by experience, bound together by discipline, and capable of withstanding a long series of reverses. And when it became clear that McClellan, backed by the fleet, had no intention ...
— Stonewall Jackson And The American Civil War • G. F. R. Henderson
... dismay were painted on the faces of all. The ship might be insecure, but to launch out upon the great ocean in a frail boat seemed to ...
— Facing the World • Horatio Alger
... prisoner had undergone a woful change during his confinement. Had his own wife seen him at that moment it is doubtful whether she would have recognized her lord. Could it be possible that that frail, tottering, wasted form, and that blanched, sunken-eyed, imbecile-looking countenance were all that were left of the once formidable Robert Gourlay? The sight was one which might have moved his bitterest enemy ...
— The Story of the Upper Canada Rebellion, Volume 1 • John Charles Dent
... anecdote of Fleeman, Jamie, the Laird of Udny's fool, life of, published 'Floorish o' the surface,' to describe a preacher Forbes, Mrs., of Medwyn, fond of tea Forbes's banking-house, anecdotes of 'Formerly robbers, now thieves' Frail, curious use of word Fraser, Jamie, address to minister in kirk Fraser, Jamie, idiot of Lunan Free Church, road of, 'tolls unco high' 'Freet's dear! sin' I sauld freet in streets o' Aberdeen' French people, a clause in their ...
— Reminiscences of Scottish Life and Character • Edward Bannerman Ramsay
... and with a backhander I sent Don Marcasse, who was endeavouring the play the cure's part of peacemaker, head over heels into the middle of the ashes. I did not mean him any harm, but my movements were somewhat rough, and the poor man was so frail that to my hand he was but as a weasel would have been to his own. Patience was standing before me with his arms crossed, in the attitude of a stoic philosopher, but the fire was flashing in his eyes. Conscious of his position as my host, he was ...
— Mauprat • George Sand
... The frail supports of the bridge, brittle with age and weather, already straining hard against the furious water, needed only the battering of the first heavy logs from the ...
— Crowded Out o' Crofield - or, The Boy who made his Way • William O. Stoddard
... So termed from the risk in such frail craft. They were very long, very narrow, and as thin as the skiffs of our rivers. During the war of 1800-14 they carried gold between Dover and Calais, and defied ...
— The Sailor's Word-Book • William Henry Smyth
... Frail man—his days are as grass; As a flower of the field he flourishes, For the wind passes over it, and it is gone, And its place ...
— The Children's Bible • Henry A. Sherman
... Leon's case. Seven members at least were present: Francisco de Menchaca, Andres de Alava, Luis Tello Maldonado, and Francisco de Albornoz voted that Luis de Leon should be put to the torture—a moderate amount of torture in view of his frail health—and, when this was done, the court should sit again and determine accordingly. Dr. Guijano de Mercado and Dr. Frechilla took a more lenient view, recommending that, in consideration of the more exculpatory reports recently given by ...
— Fray Luis de Leon - A Biographical Fragment • James Fitzmaurice-Kelly
... said, the dolorous Jack Tar Turns to view the watery Vast, When he mourns his frail charac-tar, ...
— Rhymes of the East and Re-collected Verses • John Kendall (AKA Dum-Dum)
... round in his chair at Kate's bland voice. He probably imagined he was in his revolving-chair at home, but he was not, and the frail article beneath him, unused to gyration upon one leg, gave way instantly and all but precipitated him at ...
— In the Mist of the Mountains • Ethel Turner
... seams in the old boat's walls, they would snuggle close together under the same coverlet. Some nights they would be wakened by the uproar from the drunken sailors in the tavern, and hear the angry words of their mother, or the slaps she would rain on impudent cheeks. More than once the frail partition of their bedroom had threatened to give way as some staggering body fell against it. But then they would go to sleep again, with the carefree innocence of children, with no ...
— Mayflower (Flor de mayo) • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... that a 'Mokihi' is constructed of Koradies, Anglice, the flowering stalks of the flax,—three faggots of which lashed firmly in a point at the small ends, and expanded by a piece of wood at the stern, constitute the sides and bottom of the frail craft, which, propelled by a paddle, furnishes sufficient means of transport for ...
— A Dictionary of Austral English • Edward Morris
... nor took her flight— Beneath the vessel's verge concealed from light; Issued the rest, in quick dispersion buried, And woes innumerous roamed the breathing world: With ills the land is full, with ills the sea; Diseases haunt our frail humanity; Self-wandering through the noon, at night they glide Voiceless—a voice the power all-wise denied: Know, then, this awful truth: it is not given To elude the wisdom of omniscient Heaven. —Trans. ...
— Mosaics of Grecian History • Marcius Willson and Robert Pierpont Willson
... preachers and the poor. Yet still, ye humbler friends, enjoy your hour, This is your portion, yet unclaim'd of power; This is Heaven's gift to weary men oppress'd, And seems the type of their expected rest: But yours, alas! are joys that soon decay; Frail joys, begun and ended with the day; Or yet, while day permits those joys to reign, The village vices drive them from the plain. See the stout churl, in drunken fury great, Strike the bare bosom of his teeming mate! His naked vices, ...
— The Village and The Newspaper • George Crabbe
... to be met with—have one mental picture, and one only, of the flight of an aeroplane. They imagine a man in the air—and this mere idea of altitude makes them shudder; and they picture this man in a frail apparatus of wood and wire, capable of breaking to pieces at any moment; or even if it does not break, needing an incessant movement of levers to maintain it in a safe equilibrium; while they reckon also that, should the engine of the machine suffer any breakdown, the ...
— Learning to Fly - A Practical Manual for Beginners • Claude Grahame-White
... anxiously whether he would find Mrs. Dangerfield on the bank of the stream that evening watching her children fish. His night's rest had trebled his interest in her and his desire to see more, a great deal more, of her. The appeal to him of her frail and delicate ...
— The Terrible Twins • Edgar Jepson
... which grows on a particular shrub. There are vast numbers of these barks all through the archipelago, which they manage very dexterously both with sails and oars, and the natives often venture as far as Conception in these frail vessels. They are much addicted to fishing, and procure vast quantities and many kinds of excellent fish on the sea around their shores. Of these they dry large quantities, which they export to Chili and Peru, and ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 5 • Robert Kerr
... men are seldom more serious than they have to be. But they all were helplessly, hopelessly caught in the magic, gossamer web of Athalie's beauty and personal charm; and some merely kicked and buzzed and some tried to rend the frail rainbow fabric, and some struggled silently against they knew not what—themselves probably. And some, like Dane, hung motionless, enmeshed, knowing that to struggle was futile. And some, like Clive, were still lying under ...
— Athalie • Robert W. Chambers
... deepest slumber, Evil thoughts may come in dreams; And the senses list the murmur, Though the frail form sleeping seems. ...
— Sidonia The Sorceress V2 • William Mienhold
... to the difficulties of the Church in an ancient city. We seem to see the men and women who composed it—their eagerness for religious novelties, their debased surroundings, their anarchic divisions, their frail sense of moral responsibility. And a modern reader will probably lay the letter down with a conviction that our great modern cities have much to learn from the words written by St. Paul to Corinth, ...
— The Books of the New Testament • Leighton Pullan
... past, Christ has come; one in the future, Christ will come. For memory, the coming by the cradle and the Cross; for hope, the coming on His throne in glory; and between these two moments, like the solid piers of a suspension bridge, the frail structure of the Present hangs swinging. In this day men have lost their expectation of the one, and to a large extent their faith in the other. But we shall not understand Scripture unless we seek to make as prominent in ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: Romans Corinthians (To II Corinthians, Chap. V) • Alexander Maclaren
... bird sang for the joy of spring, so piercing sweet and frail; And blinding bright the land was dight in gay and glittering mail; And with a wondrous black fox skin a ...
— Ballads of a Cheechako • Robert W. Service
... art thou from the grave Only by a plank most frail; Tossed upon the restless wave, Sport of ...
— Mary Barton • Elizabeth Gaskell
... French. The ambassador was to make no formal demand, but was to ask for some expression of general intentions and feelings. Alexander was in the provinces, and did not return until the middle of December. Meantime Caulaincourt, after careful inquiry, had learned that the young princess was frail in health and not yet of marriageable age. The letter to his master conveying this information was crossed by one of Napoleon's making a formal demand. The difference in confessional adherence was of no account, he said, and an immediate answer was desired. "Take as your standpoint that ...
— The Life of Napoleon Bonaparte - Vol. III. (of IV.) • William Milligan Sloane
... thither, casting to him kind glances and smiles, while her admirers were fawning upon her, and they all, like serpents, were cleverly gliding by the various little tables, chairs, screens, flower-stands—a storehouse full of beautiful and frail things, scattered about the room with a carelessness equally dangerous to them and to Foma. But when he walked there, the rugs did not drown his footsteps, and all these things caught at his coat, trembled and fell. Beside the ...
— Foma Gordyeff - (The Man Who Was Afraid) • Maxim Gorky
... in, topped and brailed up out of the way, with great facility. The system was tried at Portsmouth last year with considerable success upon the Dido, but as it was thought that some of the fittings were somewhat frail and might collapse beneath the shock of a live torpedo, it was resolved to submit them to a practical test under service conditions upon the Resistance. The ship was consequently fitted with three of the steel booms on the port side. They were 32 ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 601, July 9, 1887 • Various
... them; though you admitted—I'll give you credit for that—you did admit that she was a beautiful, good little thing, and worthy to belong to the best in the land. And when I said that Providence never would have sent such a frail being as that into the world as a beggar's brat, you told me, on the contrary, that HE might have cast the lot of that child, frail, feeble, sickly as she was, amid the very outcasts of the earth for wise purposes, which we never could fathom; and that I had no right ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, April 1844 - Volume 23, Number 4 • Various
... refinements of drawing gave peculiar character to all his work. Attention has frequently been called to the beauty of his roses.[186] Every curl in their frail petals is rendered with as much care as though they were the hands or feet of Graces. Nor is it, perhaps, a mere fancy to imagine that the corolla of an open rose suggested to Botticelli's mind the composition of his best-known ...
— Renaissance in Italy Vol. 3 - The Fine Arts • John Addington Symonds
... Assembly of Professors September 10, 1822. This volume was dictated to and written out by one of his daughters, Mlle. Cornelie De Lamarck. On her the aged savant leaned during the last ten years of his life—those years of failing strength and of blindness finally becoming total. The frail woman accompanied him in his hours of exercise, and when he was confined to his house she never left him. It is stated by Cuvier, in his eulogy, that at her first walk out of doors after the end came she was nearly overcome by the fresh air, to which she had become so unaccustomed. She, ...
— Lamarck, the Founder of Evolution - His Life and Work • Alpheus Spring Packard
... did think you half-mad—a poor, ill-used creature, a visionary, a moral woman living immorally; yet, in spite of all, a woman to be loved and pitied. But now I'm beginning to think you're only frail—wanton. Oh, you're not so mad as not to know you're wicked! [Tapping the book forcibly.] And so ...
— The Notorious Mrs. Ebbsmith • Arthur Wing Pinero
... birds, frail insects, perceive the subtle influence of the season, and shall not coarse-fibred man rejoice, though there be little or nothing to which he may point as special evidence of inspiration? He may feel the indefinable ...
— Tropic Days • E. J. Banfield
... frightened him. He had no alpenstock, nothing. But having come safely to rest, he began to walk on, in the illuminated darkness. It was as cold as sleep. He was between two ridges, in a hollow. So he swerved. Should he climb the other ridge, or wander along the hollow? How frail the thread of his being was stretched! He would perhaps climb the ridge. The snow was firm and simple. He went along. There was something standing out of the snow. He approached, with ...
— Women in Love • D. H. Lawrence
... "uniques:" a female-impersonator, a green-eyed boy who wagged his hips like the very devil and took off the girls; Poland, a Warsaw Jewess, a redheaded, overscented beauty, who did the "Parisienne," and ever and ever so many others. And Lily, so slender and frail, was the pet of them all. They called her their pretty baby, their petit cheri, and, with their painted mugs, kissed ...
— The Bill-Toppers • Andre Castaigne
... moment to share the fate which had already overtaken so many of their companions in misery, the poop was discovered to give way; another wave rolled on with impetuous fury, and the hinder part of the luckless vessel, with all who sought safety in its frail support, was burst away from its shattered counterpart, and about forty wretched beings hurried through the foaming ...
— Thrilling Narratives of Mutiny, Murder and Piracy • Anonymous
... the family; indeed, the results of Bohemia's excellent cuisine are much in evidence. It must be admitted that the same cuisine tends to develop a certain redundancy among those no longer in their first youth. Perhaps the sight of exuberant ladies, scantily clad and bulging over the gunwale of a frail craft, provoked the English Princess to a shocked utterance, the account of which, purposely garbled by the Jesuits, spread abroad like wildfire, and caused much unfavourable comment. The lady herself was subject to remark by the Pragers on account ...
— From a Terrace in Prague • Lieut.-Col. B. Granville Baker
... sand, Each shell a little perfect thing, So frail, yet potent to withstand The mountain-waves' wild buffeting. Through storms no ship could dare to brave The little shells float lightly, save All that they might have lost of fine Shape and soft ...
— Many Voices • E. Nesbit
... most appealing dignity. "How can you talk so horribly?" The horrible talk, however, evidently possessed a potent magic for my friend; and his imagination, checked a while by the influence of his kinsman, began again to lead him a dance. From this moment he ceased to steer his frail bark, to care what he said or how he said it, so long as he expressed his passionate appreciation of the scene around him. As he kept up this strain I ceased even secretly to wish he wouldn't. I have wondered since that I shouldn't have been annoyed by the way he reverted constantly to himself. ...
— A Passionate Pilgrim • Henry James
... some of its arguments; and for the lamentable circumstance that it exhibited a far greater debt in mental culture to Mr. John Stuart Mill than to the whole range of Christian divines. In a sentence, Ward 'had launched on the great deep of human controversy as frail a bark as ever carried sail,' and his reviewer undoubtedly let loose upon it as shrewd a blast as ever blew from the AEolian wallet. The article was meant for the Quarterly Review, and it is easy to imagine the dire perplexities of Lockhart's editorial mind in times so fervid and ...
— The Life of William Ewart Gladstone, Vol. 1 (of 3) - 1809-1859 • John Morley
... sweet service and the sermon was on hidden sins. Lilian wondered if hers was undue pride, the desire to rise above her station? She glanced at her mother. The tears were coursing silently down her sunken cheeks. Was she missing the love a daughter ought to give? She looked so frail and delicate that the girl's heart went out to her ...
— The Girls at Mount Morris • Amanda Minnie Douglas
... Space Viking simply didn't make sense. He then screened the Royal Palace at Malverton, on the planet; first he was icily polite to somebody several echelons below him in the peerage, and then respectfully polite to somebody he addressed as Prince Vandarvant. Finally, after some minutes' wait, a frail, white-haired man in a little black cap-of-maintenance appeared in the screen. Prince Bentrik instantly sprang to his feet. So did all the other Mardukans ...
— Space Viking • Henry Beam Piper
... compact, we embarked to change our situation, having consumed all the fuel within our reach. The wind came off the land just as the canoes had started, and we determined on attempting to force a passage along the shore; in which we happily succeeded, after seven hours' labour and much hazard to our frail vessels. The ice lay so close that the crews disembarked on it, and effected a passage by bearing against the pieces with their poles; but in conducting the canoes through the narrow channels thus formed, the greatest care was ...
— Narrative of a Journey to the Shores of the Polar Sea, in the years 1819-20-21-22, Volume 2 • John Franklin
... are doomed men and must surely die, though we know not by whose hand we perish. Now, therefore, I beseech you to think not of this death which we must suffer in our mortal bodies, but to open your eyes to the things which are not mortal and which perish not eternally. For man is but a frail and changing creature as regards his mortality, seeing that his life is not longer than the lives of other created things, and he is delicate and sickly and exposed to manifold dangers from his birth. But ...
— Marzio's Crucifix and Zoroaster • F. Marion Crawford
... many of which have handles cut in the wood at the ends, by the help of which they could easily be dragged along overland. Sir W. Wilde adds that the Irish also used CURRAGHS, or CORACLES, which were mere wicker frames covered with the skins of oxen. These frail barks introduce us to a new mode of navigation; they are met with not only in tire different countries of Europe, but also in America, and were in use there in pre-Columbian times. Even more interesting examples have ...
— Manners and Monuments of Prehistoric Peoples • The Marquis de Nadaillac
... aid, he pushed out into the pond, making for the islet in the centre by means of a long pole which he had thinned off from a piece of fencing, sticking it into the mud at the bottom and pushing against it with all his might. Meanwhile, the frail structure on which he sat trembled and wobbled about in the most unseaworthy fashion, causing him almost to repent of his undertaking almost as soon as he had started, although he had the incense ...
— Teddy - The Story of a Little Pickle • J. C. Hutcheson
... that frail and faded woman threw into the one word fairly startled Gwendoline. She opened her eyes and stared aghast at her mother. And well she might, for the effect was electrical. Mrs. Gildersleeve was sitting ...
— What's Bred In the Bone • Grant Allen
... finished and launched; and, trusting their lives on board these frail vessels, they descended the Mississippi, running the gantlet between hostile tribes, who fiercely attacked them. Reaching the Gulf, though not without the loss of eleven of their number, they made sail for the Spanish settlement on the river Panuco, where they arrived safely, ...
— Pioneers Of France In The New World • Francis Parkman, Jr.
... passing away and the inevitable reaction was setting in. Oh, if he were only a year older so that he could have communicated to us by speech his feelings and his wants! His little body, which stood the long sickness with such fortitude, got frail. His bright eyes, high forehead and round cheeks remained, however, to defy the waste of the disease. The parson came and uttered words of encouragement. "Symptoms of death," he said, pointing to ...
— Native Life in South Africa, Before and Since • Solomon Tshekisho Plaatje
... malice are self-deceivers, and pretend to discover what no one else can perceive. On this frail foundation the King raised an altar of hatred, on which he swore never to cease till he had accomplished my brother's ruin and mine. He had never forgiven me for the attachment I had discovered for my brother's interest during the time he ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... Charles Parkhill looked the part to which, from his birth, he had been assigned by his over-cultured parents. His slender body, with its narrow shoulders and sunken chest, frail as it was, seemed almost too heavy for his feeble legs. His thin face, bloodless and sallow, with a sparse, daintily trimmed beard and weak watery eyes, was characterized by a solemn and portentous gravity, as though, realizing fully the profound importance of his mission in life, ...
— When A Man's A Man • Harold Bell Wright
... say, that frail, delicate man began to recover his strength, work came back to his shop, and everything grew brighter around him. And, as an additional reward from Heaven, he was animated by a new zeal for the Holy Souls, for he not only paid his own little contribution regularly, ...
— Purgatory • Mary Anne Madden Sadlier
... vicious and criminal, do they gain their end, and is that end as salutary as they would wish? We dare not pronounce judgment. They may answer that they terrify the unjust rich man by pointing out to him the yawning pit that lies beneath the frail covering of wealth; just as in the time of the Dance of Death, they showed him his gaping grave, and Death standing ready to fold him in an impure embrace. Now, they show him the thief breaking open his ...
— The Devil's Pool • George Sand
... Catherine, in an open coffin, who is said to have been a very beautiful Princess; but whose shrivelled skin, much resembling discoloured parchment, may now serve as a powerful antidote to that vanity with which frail beauty is apt to ...
— A Museum for Young Gentlemen and Ladies - A Private Tutor for Little Masters and Misses • Unknown
... things for which all mills must be prepared—the wear and tear of Time on the machinery—the wear and tear of Death on the frail things who yearly work ...
— The Bishop of Cottontown - A Story of the Southern Cotton Mills • John Trotwood Moore
... Among the older hands who have begun work early there is not a straight pair of shoulders. Much of the bottle washing and filling is done by children from twelve to fourteen years of age. On their slight, frail bodies toil weighs heavily; the delicate child form gives way to the iron hand of labour pressed too soon upon it. Backs bend earthward, chests recede, never ...
— The Woman Who Toils - Being the Experiences of Two Gentlewomen as Factory Girls • Mrs. John Van Vorst and Marie Van Vorst
... stews quickly become the main article of diet. Each succeeding year the little mothers have grown paler, and more frail. The children have lost their fat, rosy cheeks. But let even a local success crown our arms, let the communique bring a little bit of real news, tell of fresh laurels won, let even the faintest ray of hope for the great final triumph pierce this veil of anxiety—and every heart beat quickens, ...
— With Those Who Wait • Frances Wilson Huard
... we have been sufficiently enterprising to obtain, and are strong or clever enough to keep—a constant competition, a daily steeplechase, favorable to daring spirits and personal initiative but with the defect of keeping frail humanity ...
— Worldly Ways and Byways • Eliot Gregory
... she drew near of Lady Geraldine's postponed wedding. It would have been better that the marriage should have taken place; better that the story should have ended to-day and that the frail link between herself and George Fairfax should have been broken. That accident of Lord Calderwood's death had made everything more or less uncertain. Would the marriage ever take place? Would George Fairfax, with ample leisure for deliberation, hold himself bound ...
— The Lovels of Arden • M. E. Braddon
... publisher. The book sold, sold every copy of the small first edition, and in due time the publisher's statement came. I did not think my half of the profits was very great, but it seemed a fair division after every imaginable cost had been charged up against my poor book, and that frail venture had been made to pay the expenses of composition, corrections, paper, printing, binding, advertising, and editorial copies. The wonder ought to have been that there was anything at all coming ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... this, around those jutting rocks shot a small out-rigger canoe, frail and hardly large enough to hold the body of a slender Marquesan boy who paddled it. About his middle he wore a red and yellow pareu, and his naked body was like a small and perfect statue as he handled his tiny craft. When he ...
— White Shadows in the South Seas • Frederick O'Brien
... the sport of every movement of the horse? If the lady be not mistress of her seat, and be unable to maintain a proper position of her limbs and body, so soon as her horse starts into a trot, she runs the risk of being tossed about on the saddle, like the Halcyon of the poets in her frail nest,— ...
— The Young Lady's Equestrian Manual • Anonymous
... sympathize with you in this disappointment. I hope the consolations of religion will now be yours. Your notes, the lock of your hair, etc., I return with this now. I will not reproach you for the pain you have cost me; I know it is not your fault that your health has become so frail. I ...
— Stepping Heavenward • Mrs. E. Prentiss
... arrival of the major had at first interested him, but, seeing that he remained unnoticed, he had been unable to struggle against his sleepiness. His grandmother turned toward the table to slap his frail little hands, whitening in the lamplight, when ...
— Nana, The Miller's Daughter, Captain Burle, Death of Olivier Becaille • Emile Zola
... their nests to the stones of the nave; they are never disturbed. When it rains, they all gather in the church, but as soon as the sun pierces the clouds and the rain-spouts dry up, they repair to the trees again. So that during the storm two frail creatures often enter the blessed house of God together; man to pray and allay his fears, and the bird to wait until the rain stops and to warm the naked bodies ...
— Over Strand and Field • Gustave Flaubert
... rope, small and frail as it seemed, might be of use, flashed on the brain of the girl; and in a moment she was at the staff. Time and again, when liquor incapacitated her father to perform his duty, had Mildred bent-on, and hoisted the signals for him; and thus, happily, she was expert in the ...
— The Two Admirals • J. Fenimore Cooper
... grounds are surrounded by a frail board fence, and are strictly guarded by Confederate soldiers, and no prisoner except the paroled attendants is allowed to leave the grounds except by a special permit from the Commandant of the Interior ...
— Andersonville, complete • John McElroy
... is eternally happy cannot be burdened with any labor itself, nor can it impose any labor on another; nor can it be influenced by resentment or favor: because things which are liable to such feelings must be weak and frail." We have said enough to prove that we should worship the Gods with piety, and without superstition, if ...
— Cicero's Tusculan Disputations - Also, Treatises On The Nature Of The Gods, And On The Commonwealth • Marcus Tullius Cicero
... so modest, at once arrested Thackeray's attention, and he forbore to place him in his extemporaneous catalogue. I remember a pallid, sharp-faced girl fluttering past, and how Thackeray exulted in the history of this "frail little bit of porcelain," as he called her. There was something in her manner that made him hate her, and he insisted she had murdered somebody on her way to the hall. Altogether this marvellous prelude to the concert made a deep impression on Thackeray's one listener, into whose ear he whispered ...
— Yesterdays with Authors • James T. Fields
... which happened to fall on the eve of Easter, he resolved to proceed to Tara on that occasion, and to confront the Druids in the midst of all the princes and magnates of the Island. With this view he returned on his former course, and landed from his frail barque at the mouth of the Boyne. Taking leave of the boatmen, he desired them to wait for him a certain number of days, when, if they did not hear from him, they might conclude him dead, and provide for their own safety. So saying he set out, accompanied by the few disciples he had made, or ...
— A Popular History of Ireland - From the earliest period to the emancipation of the Catholics • Thomas D'Arcy McGee
... beginning he launched out into well balanced, well phrased excuses, of admirable logic, by means of which he proved the imperative necessity of finding other anchorage for this stray and apparently very frail bark. Of necessity these letters were vague, since he did not know what particular form of frailty he had to contend with. Of one thing, however, he was sure—the Colony offered opportunities for the indulgence of every form known to man, ...
— Civilization - Tales of the Orient • Ellen Newbold La Motte
... sense, my dear sir," rejoined Campana; "but we are all frail, erring creatures, and he was hardly dealt by. He is now gone to his heavy, heavy account, and I may as well tell you the poor boy's sad story at once. Had you but seen him in his prattling infancy, in ...
— Tom Cringle's Log • Michael Scott
... it were "Brother Doubtful," one who hesitates between false religion and pagan religion, Duessa and Fraelissa (Morley). Fraelissa is fair but frail, and will not ...
— Spenser's The Faerie Queene, Book I • Edmund Spenser
... glibness of his oratory, and the popularity of his topics, gain him ample credence for all the excellent qualities to which he lays claim. 'Tis true, when he has gained the ascendancy he aims at, his behaviour generally shews him to be not only frail and faulty, but a worse knave than any he has exposed; but before he thus discovers himself, he has gained a hold either of the affections or the fears of the multitude, which, added to their reluctance ...
— The Loyalists, Vol. 1-3 - An Historical Novel • Jane West
... pain in Anne's voice. Who does not know the heartache with which it is seen that the mind of a loved one is wandering from us? And yet she was puzzled. She dreaded one of those scenes in which her young strength was barely sufficient to control and soothe the frail form before her. But they did not begin as a rule in this fashion; here, though the mind wandered, was an absence of the wildness to which she had become inured. Here—and yet as she listened, as she looked, now at her mother, now into the dimly lighted ...
— The Long Night • Stanley Weyman
... worked this change? Where is the forest-covered country and its savage race, its skin-clad warriors and their frail coracles? ...
— Eight Years' Wandering in Ceylon • Samuel White Baker
... insight as she had perceived Robert Browning's poetic greatness, Elizabeth Barrett discerned his personal worth. He was essentially manly in all respects: so manly, that many frail souls of either sex philandered about his over-robustness. From the twilight gloom of an aeesthetic clique came a small voice belittling the great man as "quite too 'loud,' painfully excessive." Browning was manly enough to laugh at all ghoulish cries of any kind whatsoever. ...
— Life of Robert Browning • William Sharp
... on the little island around me still no evidence of man. But men were here. The American Indian, still bearing evidence of the Mongols, plied these waters in his frail canoes. His wigwams of skins, the smoke of his signal fires—these were not enduring enough for ...
— Astounding Stories, May, 1931 • Various
... this? Or of your own, what guilt has drawn it on you? You find me kind, and think me kind to all; The weak, ungen'rous error of your sex. What could inspire the thought? We oft'nest judge From our own hearts; and is yours then so frail, It prompts you to conceive thus ill of me? He that can stoop to harbour such a thought, Deserves to find ...
— The Revenge - A Tragedy • Edward Young
... think; its vital energies are extinct, and all the powers of life have ceased their operations; and such, my brethren, is the state to which we are all hastening; let us, therefore, gratefully improve the remaining space of life, that when our weak and frail bodies, like this memento, shall become cold and inanimate and mouldering in sepulchral dust and ruins, our disembodied spirits may soar aloft to the blessed regions, where dwell light and ...
— The Mysteries of Free Masonry - Containing All the Degrees of the Order Conferred in a Master's Lodge • William Morgan
... royal place, A gentle lady, and the hand That sways the sceptre of this land, How frail and weak Soft is the voice and fair the face; She breathes amen to prayer and hymn No wonder that her eyes are dim, And ...
— Life of Her Most Gracious Majesty the Queen, (Victoria) Vol II • Sarah Tytler
... knew from him what had happened, and Rua Manu, with his big eyes filled with a wondering pity as he looked at the frail body and white face of Doris lying on the skylight, wore the schooner's head round to the south-west at a ...
— By Reef and Palm • Louis Becke
... heart of the mountains; but all these are works done obviously in defiance of Nature, and if Europe relapsed into a state of barbarism, the eternal snow and the eternal silence would soon reassert their supremacy over the frail handiwork of man. Quite different from this is the aspect of the mountains on the north-eastern border of Italy. The countries which we now call Venetia and Istria are parted from their northern neighbours by ranges (chiefly that known as the Julian Alps) ...
— Theodoric the Goth - Barbarian Champion of Civilisation • Thomas Hodgkin
... The day had not yet broke, but I could see that we were on the brink of a deep and broad river, which we were preparing to cross, but how, I could not discover, for I could see no bridge, but only something like a raft moored by the margin of the stream. On this frail craft we embarked, horses, diligence, passengers, and all; and, launching out upon the impetuous current, we reached, after a short navigation, the opposite shore. The river we had crossed was the Po, and the craft which had carried ...
— Pilgrimage from the Alps to the Tiber - Or The Influence of Romanism on Trade, Justice, and Knowledge • James Aitken Wylie
... frail, in that they are products of the human mind, in which everything is essentially reactive, spontaneous, and volatile: but as in passion and in language, so in philosophy, there are certain comparatively steady and hereditary principles, forming a sort of orthodox reason, which is or which ...
— Some Turns of Thought in Modern Philosophy - Five Essays • George Santayana
... advancing up the road, carrying a half-filled pail of milk. He was a child of perhaps ten years, exceedingly frail and thin, with a drawn, waxen face, and sick, colorless lips and ears. On his head he wore a thick plush cap, and coarse, heavy shoes upon his feet. A faded coat, too long in the arms, drooped from his shoulders, and long, loose overalls of gray jeans broke and wrinkled ...
— Composition-Rhetoric • Stratton D. Brooks
... Chinagos the virtues and excellences of French law. There was nothing like setting an example once in a while; and, besides, of what use was New Caledonia except to send men to live out their days in misery and pain in payment of the penalty for being frail and human? ...
— When God Laughs and Other Stories • Jack London
... and many things On trust; feeling our landscapes satisfied Her love for scenes. When from a visit she Returned, no lovelier picture ever blessed My sight than when she swam into his arms, And stood in beauty, frail, against his strength Supporting her, and kissed his lips and cheeks And brow. He then, as if his daughter yet Were but a child, would press the upturned head Between his hands, where peered the innocent face Rosy with smile and blush, like a sweet flower Bursting its tawny sheath: whereon ...
— My Beautiful Lady. Nelly Dale • Thomas Woolner
... but they have hidden passages and winding galleries under the snow, which undoubtedly are their main avenues of communication. Here and there these passages rise so near the surface as to be covered by only a frail arch of snow, and a slight ridge betrays their course to the eye. I know him well. He is known to the farmer as the deer-mouse, to the naturalist as the Hesperomys leucopus,—a very beautiful creature, nocturnal in his habits, with large ears, and large, fine eyes, full of ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 101, March, 1866 • Various
... what they'd think," she returned feverishly, her frail fingers plucking nervously at the arms of her chair. "I must go—I ...
— The Miracle Man • Frank L. Packard
... the ground and rolled down the hill dead, having succumbed to a blow that a woodchuck or a coon would hardly have regarded at all. Thus does the easy, passive mode of defense of the porcupine not only dull his wits, but it makes frail and brittle the thread of his life. He has had no struggles or battles ...
— The Wit of a Duck and Other Papers • John Burroughs
... bleak and icy regions of Siberia. These manners are admirably adapted to diffuse, among the wandering tribes, the spirit of emigration and conquest. The connection between the people and their territory is of so frail a texture, that it may be broken by the slightest accident. The camp, and not the soil, is the native country of the genuine Tartar. Within the precincts of that camp, his family, his companions, his property, are always included; and, in the most ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 2 • Edward Gibbon
... had that within him to which a preacher might appeal. Thus they became Dogmatists; that is, men who assert a truth so fiercely, as to forget that a truth is meant to be used, and not merely asserted—if, indeed, the fierce assertion of a truth in frail man is not generally a sign of some secret doubt of it, and in inverse proportion to his practical living faith in it: just as he who is always telling you that he is a man, is not the most likely to behave like a man. And why did this befall ...
— Alexandria and her Schools • Charles Kingsley
... called out of the room. It was the servant from Devonshire-terrace to tell me his child Dora was suddenly dead. She had not been strong from her birth; but there was just at this time no cause for special fear, when unexpected convulsions came, and the frail little life passed away. My decision had to be formed at once; and I satisfied myself that it would be best to permit his part of the proceedings to close before the truth was told to him. But as he went on, after the sentences I have quoted, to speak of actors having to come from ...
— The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete • John Forster
... 3 So frail is the youth and the beauty of men, Though they bloom and look gay like the rose: But all our fond care to preserve them is vain; Time kills them as ...
— Specimens with Memoirs of the Less-known British Poets, Complete • George Gilfillan
... reached the lands of those kings who were still hostile, they went on invincibly through the midst of their rebellious country, laying waste with fire and sword, and plundering everything. And after their frail houses were destroyed by fire, and a vast number of men had been slain, and the army, having nothing to face but corpses and suppliants, had arrived in the region called Capellatum, or Palas, where there are boundary stones ...
— The Roman History of Ammianus Marcellinus • Ammianus Marcellinus
... dangerous state, wandering, delirious, comatose. Yet the mortality has been small. Only seven have died; some few are still very ill, yet the character of the fever is less severe now. We had some sharp hospital work for a few days and nights, all the accompaniments of the decay of our frail bodies. Now we have a respite. Codrington, Palmer, and I take the nursing; better that the younger ones, always more liable to take fever, should be kept out of contagion; to no one but I have gone among the sick in town, or to town at all. ...
— Life of John Coleridge Patteson • Charlotte M. Yonge
... a frail, insignificant looking creature, not at all the sort of person one would associate with threats of the kind that Ruth Morton had been receiving. She appeared to be greatly ashamed of her sudden collapse, and kept insisting, in spite of her evident weakness, that she was quite all right again, ...
— The Film of Fear • Arnold Fredericks
... eternal sorrow. His best lyrics use words that fall into their places with the "dying fall" of an actual fit of sobbing. And they are so naturally chosen, his images and metaphors! Even when they seem most remote, they are such as frail young hearts cannot help happening upon, as they soothe their ...
— Visions and Revisions - A Book of Literary Devotions • John Cowper Powys
... having known The faces of each other for as long As they had listened there to an old song, Sung thinly in a wastrel monotone By some unhappy night-bird, who had flown Too many times and with a wing too strong To save himself, and so done heavy wrong To more frail elements than his alone. ...
— The Three Taverns • Edwin Arlington Robinson
... everything in the world seemed to hang on the frail thread of those two words. And what ...
— Far to Seek - A Romance of England and India • Maud Diver
... ladies can take a very effective hand, and numbers have done so; for there is no doubt that a woman's taste and lightness of touch enables her in some branches of taxidermy to far exceed the average man. Especially in the manipulation of frail skins and delicate feathers, in bird taxidermy, is ...
— Home Taxidermy for Pleasure and Profit • Albert B. Farnham
... vision of humanity, also in harmony with the purpose of the poem. It takes the form of some frail and suffering woman, and is addressed by the author with a tenderness in which we recognize one of his constant ideals of love: the impulse not to worship or to enjoy, but to comfort and to protect. He next considers the problem of human sorrow ...
— A Handbook to the Works of Browning (6th ed.) • Mrs. Sutherland Orr
... declare in many places—'And as here the world acquired by work perishes, so there the world acquired by merit perishes' (Ch. Up. VIII, 1,6); 'That work of his has an end' (Bri. Up. III, 8, 10); 'By non-permanent works the Permanent is not obtained' (Ka. Up. I, 2, 10); 'Frail indeed are those boats, the sacrifices' (Mu. Up. I, 2, 7); 'Let a Brhmana, after he has examined all these worlds that are gained by works, acquire freedom from all desires. What is not made cannot be gained by what is made. To understand this, let the pupil, with fuel in his hand, go to ...
— The Vedanta-Sutras with the Commentary by Ramanuja - Sacred Books of the East, Volume 48 • Trans. George Thibaut
... housekeeper would have furnished, if she had dared; but the Judge looked sternly at her, and unwilling to incur his resentment, yet unable to contain her anger, she threw herself out of the room with a toss of the body that nearly separated her frail ...
— The Pioneers • James Fenimore Cooper
... immediately beached the frail bark, and as they did so the water all ran away. "What an extraordinary thing," we thought, and when they pulled her right on to shore we saw the last ...
— Through Finland in Carts • Ethel Brilliana Alec-Tweedie
... naked and slightly-armed people. The accounts of this transaction have something in them bordering on the ludicrous, and give it the air of absurd rhodomontade. Bobadilla assailed the portal with great impetuosity, the frail bolts and locks of which gave way at the first shock, and allowed him easy admission. In the meantime, however, his zealous myrmidons applied ladders to the walls, as if about to carry the place by assault, ...
— The Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus (Vol. II) • Washington Irving
... to see by what they could be caused; but when he found that they were occasioned only by the rise or fall of a house of cards which she was building, he internally said, "Pshaw!" and afterwards kept his eyes fixed upon his book. Sir James continued to serve the fair architect with the frail materials for her building—her Folly, as she called it—and for his services he received much encouragement of smiles, and many marked commendations. Mrs. Hungerford called upon Mr. Barclay to read ...
— Tales and Novels, Vol. VII - Patronage • Maria Edgeworth
... seas comes back! I had not expected mine, and was surprised one morning, when eastward-bound in the Mediterranean, to see a pallid mass of rock two miles to port, when I had imagined I knew the charts of that sea well enough. It was a frail ghost of land on that hard blue plain, and had a light of its own; but it looked arid and forbidding, a place of seamen's bones. Turning quickly to the mate I asked for its name. "Alboran," he said, very quietly, without looking at ...
— Waiting for Daylight • Henry Major Tomlinson
... approach, that were matter of laughter as we looked back upon them, for any anxiety to rest upon our interests. The mail was not built, I felt assured, nor bespoke, that could betray me who trusted to its protection. But any carriage that we could meet would be frail and light in comparison of ourselves. And I remarked this ominous accident of our situation. We were on the wrong side of the road. But then the other party, if other there was, might also be on the wrong ...
— Miscellaneous Essays • Thomas de Quincey
... rebuke his disbelief in the presence of salmon in that river, a big fish leaped clear of the water and tore away with Pud's line. In a moment, Pud was busy. He got so excited when he saw the wonderful fish make another flying leap that he forgot that he was on a frail canoe and over he went. Bob hurried to his rescue and Pud was soon in his boat again. Pud had held on to the rod and when he got in the boat, he started to reel in but he was due for a rude awakening, as he was nearly ...
— Bob Hunt in Canada • George W. Orton
... clear glass, and the long fingers of the lute-player rest idly upon the chords. It is twilight always for the dancing nymphs whom Corot set free among the silver poplars of France. In eternal twilight they move, those frail diaphanous figures, whose tremulous white feet seem not to touch the dew-drenched grass they tread on. But those who walk in epos, drama, or romance, see through the labouring months the young moons wax and ...
— Selected Prose of Oscar Wilde - with a Preface by Robert Ross • Oscar Wilde
... cheerful and natural since our conversation. He no longer seemed so worried; and once or twice I had caught in him a look of great gentleness and loving-kindness, almost of pity, as towards some young and very frail thing, as he sat ...
— Hauntings • Vernon Lee
... courts," she replied with fervor, and the tears, real tears came into her eyes; then, at sight of Aladdin's palace as firm as ever on its frail foundations, the tears rolled down ...
— The Art of Disappearing • John Talbot Smith
... veld; from planning and scheming while others slept; from an inherent physical weakness due to the fact that he was one of twin sons, to his brother being given great physical strength, to himself a powerful brain for finance and a frail if ample body. Wallstein knew little and cared less about politics; yet he saw the use of politics in finance, and he did not stick his head into the sand as some of his colleagues did when political activities hampered their operations. In Johannesburg ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... a moment she's hid from our vision, As darkness, and thick gloom enshroud her frail form; A flash! and we see that the life-saving mission, Still skims o'er the waves like a Bird ...
— Cleveland Past and Present - Its Representative Men, etc. • Maurice Joblin
... point they had now reached the Mississippi poured swiftly downward, its waters swollen, and bearing upon them great sheets of ice, the contribution of the distant north. It was no safe channel for their frail birch-bark canoes, and they were obliged to wait a week till the vast freightage of ice had run past. Then, on the 13th of February, 1682, they launched their canoes on the great stream, and began their famous voyage ...
— Historical Tales, Vol. 2 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris
... parted company. The former was steered for the open sea; the latter drifted and tossed helplessly to and fro, growing hourly weaker and more and more benumbed, but always hanging on with convulsive tenacity to the friendly timber that buoyed him up, and was his last frail ...
— The Thin Red Line; and Blue Blood • Arthur Griffiths
... let us think of the Holy Father!—he who, after long years of patient and sublime credulity, is now, for all we know, bracing himself to take the inevitable plunge into the dark waters of Eternity! Poor frail old man! Who would not pity him! His earthly home has been so small and cosy and restricted,—he has been taken such tender care of— the faithful have fallen at his feet in such adoring thousands,—and now—away from all this ...
— Temporal Power • Marie Corelli
... marked case is a wonderful illustration of the self-feeding power of the brain to meet an emergency, and a revelation, also, of the possible limitations of the starvation period. This was the case of a frail, spare boy of four years, whose stomach was so disorganized by a drink of solution of caustic potash that not even a swallow of water could be retained. He died on the seventy-fifth day of his fast, with the mind clear to the last hour, and with apparently nothing ...
— The No Breakfast Plan and the Fasting-Cure • Edward Hooker Dewey
... purposes and as pack-ponies, "for light articles only," like the racks in our railway carriages, but when heavy loads are to be conveyed from one place to another, especially over long distances, the frail pony is discarded and replaced by the sturdy ox. These horned carriers are pretty much of a size, and fashioned, so far as I could see, after the style of our oxen, except that they are apparently leaner by nature, and almost always black or very dark ...
— Corea or Cho-sen • A (Arnold) Henry Savage-Landor
... beyond there, and I searched anxiously in the papers for the names of those executed, always fearing to find yours. There were rumours current of horrible tortures inflicted on those taken to make them confess the truth, and I thought of you, so frail, so delicate, and I feared that some day you would be found dead in a dungeon. And I suffered even more from my anxiety that no one here should know of your situation; you a Luna! a son of Senor Esteban, the old gardener of the Primate, with whom all the ...
— The Shadow of the Cathedral • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... white and gold, still bloomed. She was planning all sorts of things for her garden, a row of double-cherry-trees to stand at the edges of the woods and be symbols of paradise in spring, with their deep upon deep of miraculous white. Little almond-trees, too, frail sprays of pink on a spring sky, and quince-trees that would show in autumn among ample foliage the pale gold of their softly-furred fruit. She wanted spring flowers to run back far into the woods, the climbing roses and honeysuckle ...
— A Fountain Sealed • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... through both at the sight. Wan, frail, the beautiful anguished evil face of a girl could be seen through the long tangled hair framing it. Slender to the emaciation of great suffering she knelt before the pile of plates she was counting—"One, ...
— Bakemono Yashiki (The Haunted House) - Tales of the Tokugawa, Volume 2 (of 2) • James S. De Benneville
... condition of the crew. His nephew lay in his blood, perfectly lifeless,—the horses had been all killed or mortally wounded. Some had fallen overboard—others were struggling violently, and causing their frail bark to dip water so as to excite ...
— Forest & Frontiers • G. A. Henty
... I hope it may; but you may rest assured, that whatever happens, the lesson you have taught me, will, aided by divine support, sustain my soul, so long as the frail tenement in which it is lodged may last. ...
— Jane Sinclair; Or, The Fawn Of Springvale - The Works of William Carleton, Volume Two • William Carleton
... surprise of the family, no sounds of crying or sobbing came from the kitchen, and when Zeb's mother—a little, frail woman, who had never had her own way since she had been married to Zeke, opened the door an hour later and ...
— The Hero of Ticonderoga - or Ethan Allen and his Green Mountain Boys • John de Morgan
... hands, while, so malicious was fate's decree once more to Royson, that he was then hastening through malodorous lanes and crowded slums in order to save from threatened peril the very man whose downfall offered the only visible means by which he could bend his own frail fortunes in the direction that looked ...
— The Wheel O' Fortune • Louis Tracy
... pyramid of these ladies beginning to mount slowly in the centre. Thus it goes on, the lights streaming on full in every colour and from every quarter in the richest effulgence. In some of the more daring efforts the femmes suspendues seem to float in the air or rest on the frail support of sprays or branches of trees. While, finally, at the back of all the most glorious paradise of all will open, revealing the pure empyrean itself, and some fair spirit aloft in a cloud among the stars; the apex ...
— A History of Pantomime • R. J. Broadbent
... Balzac probably met through his intimacy with their husbands. Among these were Madame de Bernard, whose name was Clementine, but whom he called "Mentine" and "La Fosseuse," this character being the frail nervous young girl in Le Medecin de Campagne. In August, 1831, M. Charles de Bernard wrote a very favorable article about La Peau de Chagrin in the Gazette de Franche-Comte, which he was editing ...
— Women in the Life of Balzac • Juanita Helm Floyd
... of the Dutch ladies skated beautifully, and the younger ones performed dances on the ice with their cavaliers, but all was done more quietly than usual on account of the mourning, the Prince of Orange being not yet buried, and his child frail and sickly. The Baptism did not take place till January, and then we were especially invited to be present. Though of course my brother could not go, Annora and I did so. The poor child had three sets of States-General ...
— Stray Pearls • Charlotte M. Yonge
... did need a travelling companion, of course, having failed to get my dear old lady to undertake the voyage, so I thought it could do no harm. I went to see her, and found her pretty and frail and sad. She made a piteous appeal to me, and though I was not greatly taken with her, I decided she would do as well as any one ...
— The Mystery of Mary • Grace Livingston Hill
... ballad is in alternate fragments of verse and prose, and relates how the Count of Valence made desperate war against the Count of Biaucaire, a very old and frail man, who saw that his castle was in imminent danger of being taken and sacked. In his distress, this old lord besought his son Aucassin, who so far had taken no interest in the war, to go forth and fight. The youth, however, refused to do so, saying his heart was wrapped up in ...
— The Book of the Epic • Helene A. Guerber
... heron toiled sullenly from a hollow among the rocks she went to the place. She was still now, with a frozen sorrow. She knew what she was going to find. But she did not guess till she lifted that little frail child she had left upon the shore seven years back, that the secret people of the sea or those who call across running water could have the hardness and coldness to give her again the unsmiling dumb thing she had mothered with ...
— Short Stories and Selections for Use in the Secondary Schools • Emilie Kip Baker
... he began, "I yielded just now to thy generous proposal; but I think it will not do. For myself I can be rash, but not for thee. Thou art too frail and lovely, my little one, to get mixed up with the grim realities of such a ...
— We Two • Edna Lyall
... skin. We once experimented on a larva which had just completed its cocoon, to learn how much silk it could produce. On removing its cocoon it made another of the same thickness; but on destroying this second one it spun a third but frail web, scarcely concealing its form. A minute Ichneumon parasite, allied to Platygaster, lays its eggs within those of this moth, as we once detected one under a bunch of eggs, and afterwards reared a few from the same lot of eggs. A still more minute egg-parasite (Fig. ...
— Our Common Insects - A Popular Account of the Insects of Our Fields, Forests, - Gardens and Houses • Alpheus Spring Packard
... independent.[*] They undoubtedly foresaw that France, if subdued, would in the end prove the seat of government; and they deemed this previous protestation necessary, in order to prevent their becoming a province to that monarchy: a frail security if the event ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part B. - From Henry III. to Richard III. • David Hume
... her eyes flashed angrily. "Do you mean to intimate that my strength and power are broken, and that I can never recover my realm? Do you mean that the Barbarina, whom the king so shamefully deserted, so cruelly humiliated, is a frail butterfly? That the purple hue of beauty has been brushed from my wings? that I can no longer charm and ravish the beholder because a ...
— Berlin and Sans-Souci • Louise Muhlbach
... eyes that might have belonged to a child and the expression of his face, a face threaded with a thousand wrinkles, was sweet and calm. People who saw him but had no intimate knowledge of his powers, marvelled that this frail, kindly, stooping old man, with his look of innocence that was almost sublime, could in reality be a giant in the world of money. Such was the case. Mr. Hilbert Torrington had his fingers on the financial ...
— Men of Affairs • Roland Pertwee
... New World at the time of its discovery, by mistake called Indians, were barbarians, lived in rude, frail houses, and used weapons and implements inferior ...
— A School History of the United States • John Bach McMaster
... to say, that frail, delicate man began to recover his strength, work came back to his shop, and everything grew brighter around him. And, as an additional reward from Heaven, he was animated by a new zeal for the Holy Souls, for he ...
— Purgatory • Mary Anne Madden Sadlier
... whose projecting paws were long since buried in the desert sands, and following the tradition that an altar once stood before that mighty embodiment of power, he graphically pictures the transient generations of men, in all the sin and weakness of their frail humanity, coming up with their offerings and their prayers "between the paws of deity." It is a grim spectacle, but it emphasizes the sense of human guilt. Only the Revealed Word of God affords a complete and satisfactory ...
— Oriental Religions and Christianity • Frank F. Ellinwood
... glance was on the frail, almost transparent hands which held the roll of paper flat on ...
— Rainbow Hill • Josephine Lawrence
... the alarming fact, quite apart from that intolerable thought. Some accident had happened. Hetty had, by some strange chance, got into a wrong vehicle from Oakbourne: she had been taken ill, and did not want to frighten them by letting them know. But this frail fence of vague improbabilities was soon hurled down by a rush of distinct agonizing fears. Hetty had been deceiving herself in thinking that she could love and marry him: she had been loving Arthur all the while; ...
— Adam Bede • George Eliot
... of it. What was it as she came here for but you? Mr Wentworth, I've always had a great respect for you," said Elsworthy. "I've respected you as my clergyman, sir, as well as for other things; but you're a young man, and human nature is frail. I say again as you needn't have no fear of me. I aint one as likes to make a talk, and no more is Hayles. Give up the girl, and give me your promise, and there aint a man living as will be the ...
— The Perpetual Curate • Mrs [Margaret] Oliphant
... down-trodden moiety of society; on the contrary, their position is comparatively high. The marriage connection is not "one of master and slave," a link between freedom and serfdom; the "weaker vessel" does not suffer from collision with the pot de fer; generally the fair but frail ones appear to be, as amongst the Israelites generally, the better halves. Despite the Okosunguu or cow-hide "peacemaker," they have conquered a considerable latitude of conducting their own affairs. When poor and slaveless and, naturally, when no longer young, they must work ...
— Two Trips to Gorilla Land and the Cataracts of the Congo Volume 1 • Richard F. Burton
... for as long As they had listened there to an old song, Sung thinly in a wastrel monotone By some unhappy night-bird, who had flown Too many times and with a wing too strong To save himself, and so done heavy wrong To more frail elements ...
— The Three Taverns • Edwin Arlington Robinson
... higher, then higher still; and now, oh sight strange and glorious—as this helmeted hero, with lips clenched and great eyes that stared unflinchingly at the surging flames, and gleamed supernaturally with inward and outward fire, swang to and fro on his frail support still making for the window— the heads of all the hoping, fearing, admiring, panting crowd went surging and waving to and fro beneath; so did not their hearts only but their agitated bodies follow the course of his body, ...
— Hard Cash • Charles Reade
... joyous love of the earlier days, but a yearning, clinging passion, that made me sad to see, for I could not look upon the strained, anxious tenderness in her young face without bethinking me of my poor sister, as she knelt praying by her babe's cot for God to spare its frail life. ...
— A Set of Rogues • Frank Barrett
... Spike breathed his last. A few hours later his body was interred in the sands of the shore. It may be well to say in this place, that the hurricane of 1846, which is known to have occurred only a few months later, swept off the frail covering and that the body was washed away to leave its bones among the wrecks and relics ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII. No. 3. March 1848 • Various
... But they cannot change the fact that Professor Blackie has retired, and that Professor Kelland is dead. No man's education is complete or truly liberal who knew not Kelland. There were unutterable lessons in the mere sight of that frail old clerical gentleman, lively as a boy, kind like a fairy godfather, and keeping perfect order in his class by the spell of that very kindness. I have heard him drift into reminiscences in class time, though ...
— Memories and Portraits • Robert Louis Stevenson
... the warm-hearted wife, the indulgent mother, the hospitable mistress of the mansion. It is true that the smile on the lip had something of earthly pride blended with womanly sweetness,—the pride of one who has as yet known only prosperity and success, to whom no mischance has yet shown the frail basis on which human hopes are built. Her foot had as yet trod only the high places of life, but she walked there with a natural grace and nobleness that made every one feel that she was made for them ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I, No. 1, Nov. 1857 • Various
... that same night by Kennon, also an ex-officer of the United States Navy; but the other ram commanders did not draw from their antecedent training and habits of thought the constancy and pride, which could carry their frail vessels into the midst of ships that had thus victoriously broken their way through the bulwarks of the Mississippi. The River-Defense Fleet, as it was called, was a separate organization, which owned no allegiance and would receive no orders ...
— Admiral Farragut • A. T. Mahan
... "there." And he slowly unclosed a fat little fist, and in it Paul saw, with a revulsion of feeling that turned him dizzy and faint, the priceless talisman itself, the identical Garuda Stone, with part of the frail gilt ring ...
— Vice Versa - or A Lesson to Fathers • F. Anstey
... best was never very safe for navigation, and this evening it was in its element, as with every storm it presented one boiling, seething mass of foam. The inhabitants of the island saw the frail small boat from the ship securely inside the bar, and prophesied some dire calamity should the captain and the two sailors venture to return to the ship that night. But the captain and his companions, having secured sufficient provisions, ...
— True Irish Ghost Stories • St John D Seymour
... with arms wide before him, he strides through the frail papers of the wall without knowing it, and continues seeking for the wall ...
— Aria da Capo • Edna St. Vincent Millay
... the existence of a supreme being which is now not discredited. Socrates relied on the now outmoded argument from design; and only in a greatly modified form are the arguments of Plato and Aristotle accepted by modern theists. Holding such heretical views in an age when history was a frail fabric of legends, and the scientific explanation of nature in its extreme infancy, what would their ...
— The Necessity of Atheism • Dr. D.M. Brooks
... them. The sharp edge of a steep corn-field ran near, and, stripped of blade and tassel, the stalks and hooded ears looked in the coming dusk a little like monks at prayer. In the sunlight across the river the corn stood thin and frail. Over there a drought was on it; and when drifting thistle-plumes marked the noontide of the year, each yellow stalk had withered blades and an empty sheath. Everywhere a look of vague trouble lay upon the face of the mountains, and when the wind blew, the silver of the leaves ...
— A Cumberland Vendetta • John Fox, Jr.
... occasion, tho' they had long quitted it, to render the benefit more advantageous: The part of Valentine was performed by Mr. Betterton, Angelica by Mrs. Bracegirdle, and Mrs. Barry performed that of Frail. The epilogue was written by Mr. Rowe. Mrs. Bracegirdle, Mrs. Barry, and Mr. Betterton, appeared on the stage together, and the ladies taking hold of him, represented his infirmities of age, and pleaded his ancient merit, in a very natural and moving manner: This epilogue is exquisite ...
— The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (1753) - Vol. III • Theophilus Cibber
... Heroes, Saints,——we're Sinners too! Tho' some quite faultless in their Lives appear, Yet chain'd to this infectious Dungeon here, Men small of Earth, like Pris'ners of their Jail, And tainted from the Womb, the best are Frail! ...
— A Dialogue Between Dean Swift and Tho. Prior, Esq. • Anonymous
... memories, and feel for some means of putting him in possession of the truth. As the tension of her mind grew less, she became aware this would have been no easy thing to do. Then, as she sat holding the old hand, and wondering that anything so frail could still keep in bond a spirit weary of its prison, drowsiness crept over her once more, all the sooner for the monotonous rhythm of the heavy breath. Consciousness gave place to a state of mysterious discomfort, complicated with intersecting strings and a grave sense ...
— Somehow Good • William de Morgan
... between the cells of the convicts, instead of being of thick oak, as is usual in convict-ships, were quite thin and frail. The man next to me, upon the aft side, was one whom I had particularly noticed when we were led down the quay. He was a young man with a clear, hairless face, a long, thin nose, and rather nut-cracker jaws. He carried his head very jauntily in the air, ...
— Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes • Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
... sorr, an' sit fair in the middle of the shkiff," said Mr. McGrath as I got into his frail craft at five o'clock in the morning on the bank of the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal near Point of Rocks. "It's onconvanient to be outside of the boat whin we're going through them locks. There were a gintleman done that last year, an' he ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, October, 1877, Vol. XX. No. 118 • Various
... form but little idea of the wild and dangerous highways of the Andes. Even the passes of the Alps or Carpathians are safe in comparison. On the Peruvian road the lives of men and animals are often sacrificed. Mules slide from the narrow ledges, or break through the frail "soga" bridges, carrying their riders along with them, whirling through empty air to be plunged into foaming waters or ...
— Popular Adventure Tales • Mayne Reid
... the beautiful shape, like an eagle enfolded by a serpent and feeling the poison in his breast. His limbs grow lean, his hair thin and pale. Does death contain the secret of his happiness? At last he pauses "on the lone Chorasmian shore," and sees a frail shallop in which he trusts himself to the waves. Day and night the boat flies before the storm to the base of the cliffs of Caucasus, where it is engulfed in a cavern. Following the twists of the cavern, after a narrow ...
— Shelley • Sydney Waterlow
... woman returned to her task meekly. Her small, slim hands and her frail body did not look at all suited to heavy toil, yet no one in the village worked harder than the little lilac lady. For when her own house was set in order, and brushed and swept and scrubbed, exactly as Susan demanded, ...
— Treasure Valley • Marian Keith
... spread out in ceaseless rotation, forming floating, fiery rings. His wrath had set his nerves on edge; the final thrust made sleep impossible. He felt restless, wide-awake after this cruel shock to his pride. He thought that in his bed, close to him, he had his worst enemy. He hated that frail form that he could touch with the slightest movement, as if it contained the rancor of all the adversaries he ...
— Woman Triumphant - (La Maja Desnuda) • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... vain in three ways. First, on the part of the thing for which one seeks glory: as when a man seeks glory for that which is unworthy of glory, for instance when he seeks it for something frail and perishable: secondly, on the part of him from whom he seeks glory, for instance a man whose judgment is uncertain: thirdly, on the part of the man himself who seeks glory, for that he does not refer the desire of his own glory to a due ...
— Summa Theologica, Part II-II (Secunda Secundae) • Thomas Aquinas
... isolated spots just under the equator, surpass them all in the art of catching jackshark. It was the fortunate experience of the writer to live among these people for many years, and to be inducted into the native method of shark-catching. In frail canoes, made of short pieces of wood, sewn together with coco-nut fibre, the Ocean Islanders will venture out with rude but ingeniously contrived wooden hooks, and capture sharks of a girth (not length) that no untrained European would dare to attempt to kill from a well-appointed ...
— Amona; The Child; And The Beast; And Others - From "The Strange Adventure Of James Shervinton and Other - Stories" - 1902 • Louis Becke
... slightest indication of its dreadful secret,—no, not even so much as to draw suspicion toward herself after the discovery of the crime! There was no time or opportunity for preparation, of which little was indeed necessary; for human life is a frail thing, and a determined hand is always strong. She had already undergone the most effectual preparation for such a task,—that of the soul; and when that is once thoroughly accomplished, not much more is needed: a fact which seems ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, No. 48, October, 1861 • Various
... thrill of wretchedness to see that she wore by chance the very dress she had worn the day he had made the sketch—a pale, pure-looking gray, with a scarf of white lace loosely fastened at her throat. Next, he saw that there was a painful change in her, that she looked frail and worn, as if she had been ill. His first words he scarcely heard and never remembered. He had not come to make a defense, but a naked, bitter confession. As he made it low and monotonously, in brief, harsh words, holding no sparing for himself, ...
— Lodusky • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... was incapable of learning, that love can never permanently be a fountain. A living poet, in an article {6} which you almost fear to breathe upon lest you should flutter some of the frail pastel-like bloom, has said the thing: "Love itself has tidal moments, lapses and flows due to the metrical rule of the interior heart." Elementary reason should proclaim this true. Love is an affection, its display an emotion: ...
— Shelley - An Essay • Francis Thompson
... succeeded this disaster It appeared as if the elements themselves were appeased by their work, and something like a momentary lull in the awful rushing of the winds might have been fancied. Wilder sprang to the side of the vessel, and distinctly beheld the victims, who still clung to their frail support. He even saw Earing waving his hand, in adieu, with a seaman's heart, and like a man who not only felt how desperate was his situation, but one who knew how to meet his fate with resignation. Then ...
— The Red Rover • James Fenimore Cooper
... Great imperfections are in some of greatest skill, That colours can discern [not], white from black, good from ill. O blind affects of men, how are you led awry, To leave assured good, to like frail Vanity! If some of Virtue's train, for prince and country's good, To show their faithful hearts, shall hazard life and blood, And guerdonless depart, without their due reward, Small is th'encouragement, the example ...
— A Select Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. VIII (4th edition) • Various
... a pale, frail, little figure in her simple gown of pale pink ninon, cut slightly open at the neck and girdled narrow with turquoise blue. Her skirt was narrow, as was the mode, and her long white arms were bare to ...
— The Sign of Silence • William Le Queux
... about him for his sword, not knowing that it was lying under my own frail body. I could neither move nor give it to him, nor could I speak for the fear that the men would turn round and ...
— The Thirsty Sword • Robert Leighton
... had been, already the frail walls were settling to embers. There was nothing to do; and standing there the three men looked understandingly into each other's faces. The same thought stood clear on all; for all alike knew every detail ...
— Where the Trail Divides • Will Lillibridge
... were found to be the case—or, on the other hand, of their producing only a haphazard series of unrelated sounds, if such were the fact—would bring to the decision of the question the overwhelming force of indirect evidence. But such an assortment the author has not been able to find. Bamboo is a frail and perishable material. Of the two specimens of kaekeeke tubes found by him in the Bernice Pauahi Bishop Museum one was cracked and voiceless; and so the testimony of its surviving partner was of ...
— Unwritten Literature of Hawaii - The Sacred Songs of the Hula • Nathaniel Bright Emerson
... that to falsify a prophecy inspired by Divine Wisdom would be a most atrocious crime. It is, therefore, a happy circumstance for our frail species, that it is a crime which no man can possibly commit. If we admit the Jews to seats in Parliament, we shall, by so doing, prove that the prophecies in question, whatever they may mean, do not mean that the Jews shall ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 2 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... roughly constructed, three and a half inches in inside diameter, made of string, rags, newspaper, cotton wadding, bark, Spanish moss, and feathers, lined with fine root fibre, I think. The feathers were not inside for lining, but outside on the upper edge. It was, like the foundation, so frail that, though carefully managed, it could only be kept in shape by a string around it, even after the mass of twigs had been removed. I have a last year's nest, made of exactly the same materials, ...
— In Nesting Time • Olive Thorne Miller
... see and interpret Charley's action, and their guns were quickly turned upon his frail craft. As he drew nearer the drifting dugout and came within range, a perfect hail of bullets splashed the water into foam around him. He did not falter or hesitate, but with long clean strokes of the paddle, sent his light little craft flying towards his goal. Perhaps it was this very ...
— The Boy Chums in the Forest - or Hunting for Plume Birds in the Florida Everglades • Wilmer M. Ely
... entitled the "Queen of the Sea," that element bringing to it the tribute of all nations. She boasted of having first invented navigation and taught mankind the art of braving the winds and waves by the assistance of a frail bark. The happy situation of Tyre, at the upper end of the Mediterranean; the conveniency of its ports, which were both safe and capacious; and the character of its inhabitants, who were industrious, laborious, patient, and extremely courteous to strangers, invited thither merchants ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 2 • Various
... and vale. Ask mine eyes whether slumber hath lit on their lids since the hour of your loss Or if aye on a lover they've looked. Nay, an ye believe not their tale, My heart, since the leave-taking day afflicted, will tell of my case, And my body, for love and desire grown wasted and feeble and frail. Could they who reproach me but see my sufferings, their hearts would relent; They'd marvel, indeed, at my case and the loss of my loved ones bewail. Yea, they'd join me in pouring forth tears and help me my woes to lament, And like unto me ...
— Tales from the Arabic Volumes 1-3 • John Payne
... The walls of the frail teepee, flapping in the breeze, appeared hardly larger than a kerchief caught upon a bush, and the disheartened collie seemed nervously apprehensive of its being utterly swept away. The great peaks were now hid by the rain, and little could be seen but wet rocks, twisted ...
— Cavanaugh: Forest Ranger - A Romance of the Mountain West • Hamlin Garland
... grave we erected a post, and nailed upon it a square piece of board, on which was inscribed the name of the deceased, his age, and the day of his death. This they promised not to remove; and we have no doubt but that it will be suffered to remain as long as the frail materials of which ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 16 • Robert Kerr
... is no such thing as compulsion! The heart that loves, loves freely, spontaneously, unreasonably; and, where love is dead, there neither entreaties nor prayers, nor yet a whole ocean of tears can serve to re-awaken the frail blossom into life. ...
— Vera Nevill - Poor Wisdom's Chance • Mrs. H. Lovett Cameron
... launch my small dory from the deck, and ran out a kedge-anchor and warp; but it was too late to kedge the sloop off, for the tide was falling and she had already sewed a foot. Then I went about "laying out" the larger anchor, which was no easy matter, for my only life-boat, the frail dory, when the anchor and cable were in it, was swamped at once in the surf, the load being too great for her. Then I cut the cable and made two loads of it instead of one. The anchor, with forty fathoms bent and already buoyed, ...
— Sailing Alone Around The World • Joshua Slocum
... of those who had perished, conciliated the people, and turned even the evil presage to good. Again, during a severe frost, her munificence to the suffering poor excited such gratitude, that the people erected to her honour a vast pyramid of snow—Frail memorial!—"These marks of respect were almost as transitory as the ...
— Tales & Novels, Vol. IX - [Contents: Harrington; Thoughts on Bores; Ormond] • Maria Edgeworth
... the dog, who went to him immediately to be fondled. "I should never have been much encouraged in my researches, had he not been at hand. I feared to experimentalize much on my sister, she being young at the time—and women are always frail of construction—but Leo was willing and ready to be a victim to science, if necessary. Instead of a martyr he is a living triumph—are you not, old boy?" he continued, stroking the silky coat of the animal, who responded with a short ...
— A Romance of Two Worlds • Marie Corelli
... as his eyes light upon his foes, his spirit dies. Poor old ladies, so stupefied, so stricken! are they not already conquered? Looking at the frail front they present, he feels his weapons must be blunted in this fight, ...
— Rossmoyne • Unknown
... thy high command, Make choice of those who, free from sin, In thy eternal mansions stand; Send forth thy flaming cherubim! Immortal ones, thy law they keep, They do not feel, they do not weep! Choose not a tender woman's aid, Not the frail soul of shepherd maid! ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... trailed off. Lee's heart was pounding, seeming to thump in his throat as Aura led him silently forward. It was a draped, cave-like little room. Breathless, Lee stared at a couch—a thin old figure lying there—a frail man with white hair that framed his wrinkled face. It was a face that was smiling, its sunken, burning eyes glowing with a new intensity. The lips moved; a faint old ...
— The World Beyond • Raymond King Cummings
... notoriety, or sensation at any price. Such people—still to be met with—have one mental picture, and one only, of the flight of an aeroplane. They imagine a man in the air—and this mere idea of altitude makes them shudder; and they picture this man in a frail apparatus of wood and wire, capable of breaking to pieces at any moment; or even if it does not break, needing an incessant movement of levers to maintain it in a safe equilibrium; while they reckon also ...
— Learning to Fly - A Practical Manual for Beginners • Claude Grahame-White
... all be from a boat. It must not be supposed that the frail craft in Norway are to be compared with those models of boats for casting which you have on Tweed or Tay. The Norwegian boats have to be used upon water that is often both shallow and swift, and must be ...
— Lines in Pleasant Places - Being the Aftermath of an Old Angler • William Senior
... Shall be forgiv'n, and he shall be acquitted. Confess your faults each one unto his brother, And put up supplications for each other, That so you may be heal'd; the fervency Of just men's prayers prevails effectually. Elias was a man as frail as we are, And he was earnest with the Lord in pray'r, That there might be no rain, and for the space Of three years and six months no rain there was: And afterward, when he again made suit, The heav'n gave rain, the earth brought forth her fruit. ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... slipped his arm about the girl's waist, and for a moment she leaned against him like a frail, ...
— From the Valley of the Missing • Grace Miller White
... was a splendid sunset, but we were too sick and cold to enjoy it. That night all slept badly and had some headache. A high wind swept around the mountain and threatened to carry away both of our tents. As we lay awake, wondering at what moment we should find ourselves deserted by the frail canvas shelters, we could not help thinking that Coropuna was giving us a fair warning of what might happen ...
— Inca Land - Explorations in the Highlands of Peru • Hiram Bingham
... sign of yielding to his iron will. An indomitable soul had risen in her frail body and defied him. ...
— The Foolish Virgin • Thomas Dixon
... panic-stricken throngs of wounded and stragglers, women and camp-followers, writhed and fought their way until the frail planks were piled high with living and dead. To add to the horrors, one bridge gave way under the weight of the cannon. The rush for the one remaining bridge became yet more frantic and the day closed amidst scenes ...
— The Life of Napoleon I (Volumes, 1 and 2) • John Holland Rose
... the dusky places the hyacinths, broken but not yet faded, made a purple carpet, solemn as a pall. Woodruff shone whitely by the path and besieged her with scent. Early wild-roses stood here and there, weighed down with their own beauty, set with rare carmine and tints of shells and snow, too frail to face the thunderstorm that even now advanced with unhurrying pomp far away beyond the horizon. She hurried along, leaving the beaten track, creeping under the broad skirts of the beeches and over the white prostrate larch-boles where the resin ran slowly like the dark blood ...
— Gone to Earth • Mary Webb
... continued the imperturbable stranger. "Sir Cecil is no more. Lady Trafford, supposed to be childless, broken in health and spirits, frail both in mind and body, is not likely to make another marriage. The estates must, ere long, revert ...
— Jack Sheppard - A Romance • William Harrison Ainsworth
... all His love remember, And oh! Remember too How prompt I am to purpose, How slow and frail to do. Yet scorn not my petitions, But patiently give ear, And help me, O my Mother, Most ...
— The St. Gregory Hymnal and Catholic Choir Book • Various
... Where the sea-flowers blow, Down deep in the ocean's bed? Where the shy plants hide 'Neath the swelling tide, And the Anemone lifts its head? Where the Nautilus frail, To set his sail, Creeps forth from the silver sand? Then come with me, And you will see ...
— How Sammy Went to Coral-Land • Emily Paret Atwater
... expressed in a flow of words so right and sentences so perfectly balanced that they would have seemed pedantic had they not been clearly as spontaneous as the wordless notes of a bird in song. The frail, sweet voice rose and fell, lingered, quickened, in all manner of trills and roulades. That he himself could not hear it, seemed to me the greatest loss his deafness inflicted on him. One would have expected this disability to mar the music; but it didn't; save that now and again a note ...
— And Even Now - Essays • Max Beerbohm
... another word in the valentine. Sealing it up, she hurried out with it and dropped it in the post office. No merchant, sending all his fortune to sea in one frail bark, ever watched the departure and trembled for the result of venture as she did. Spain did not pray half so fervently when the invincible armada sailed. It was an unuttered prayer—an unutterable prayer. For heart and hope were the lading of the little picture boat that sailed out that ...
— Duffels • Edward Eggleston
... Despair" is evidently a satire on the beautiful Lady Hamilton, who is however represented in this print as enormously fat.[10] Gillray has evidently no sympathy or mercy for the frail and famous beauty; for here she is tumbling out of bed in nightcap and nightdress, from which a huge foot protrudes, while she waves her fat arms in despair. A flask of Maraschino is on the dressing-table near the rouge pot; on the floor lie broken ...
— The Eighteenth Century in English Caricature • Selwyn Brinton
... night. The rain cascaded upon the canvas in torrents, with the dull, drum-like sound familiar to dwellers in tents. As the whooping blasts charged upon it the frail structure shook and swayed and strained at its confining ...
— The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce, Vol. II: In the Midst of Life: Tales of Soldiers and Civilians • Ambrose Bierce
... now is overpast, And my frail bark, through troubled seas and rude, Draws nigh that common haven where at last, Of every action, be it evil or good, Must due account be rendered. Well I know How vain will then appear that favored art, Sole idol long, and monarch of my heart; For all is vain ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II, No. 8, June 1858 • Various
... tumbling mountain stream, wind-swept upland meadows, and shady places by the roadside may hold bright bunches of these hardy bells, swaying with exquisite grace on tremulous, hair-like stems that are fitted to withstand the fiercest mountain blasts, however frail they appear. How dainty, slender, tempting these little flowers are! One gladly risks a watery grave or broken bones to bring down a bunch from ...
— Wild Flowers Worth Knowing • Neltje Blanchan et al
... in God's hands. There is some power, no doubt, that makes you strong in spirit, but frail in body; while I am strong to live but weak of heart. But how ...
— Marion Fay • Anthony Trollope
... the days of persecution. I wish every man in Scotland knew what it contains, for there would be more of the right stuff among us. I was just reading, for the hundredth time, I suppose, the trial of Marion Harvie, and how he who was afterwards James King of England consented to send her, a poor frail woman, to the gallows'. From the Covenanters he passed to politics. He was a weaver and did not like the government, telling me, seeing where I came from, I must grow up to be a Glasgow radical. Seeing I was homeless, ...
— The Narrative of Gordon Sellar Who Emigrated to Canada in 1825 • Gordon Sellar
... it is slow to get him up again. Babies are such frail little things; a breath can send them up or down. Of course, I am ...
— The Brentons • Anna Chapin Ray
... and would not if I could, that the vineyard still wants labourers, that 'the kingdoms of this world are not yet become the kingdoms of our Lord and of his Christ,' and that till they are become such, till the frail race of Adam is restored to the knowledge and the likeness of his Maker, till universally and throughout the wide world the will of God is become our delight, and its accomplishment our first and ...
— The Life of William Ewart Gladstone, Vol. 1 (of 3) - 1809-1859 • John Morley
... around a seven-teen-year-old girl of the present day, and sort of closes in on the belt, he expects to hear something break. Many a humane man lets go before he has got a girl half hugged because the girl looks so frail that he is afraid he will break ...
— Peck's Sunshine - Being a Collection of Articles Written for Peck's Sun, - Milwaukee, Wis. - 1882 • George W. Peck
... proved destructive to the public interest; with no power to restrain their issues except that imposed by their charters and the honesty of their officers—a frail security for the public, as experience had attested. The example of Washington was pleaded by the advocates of the bank. At the very outset it had been opposed for want of constitutionality. Washington had doubted it, and submitted the question to two of his Cabinet—Mr. ...
— The Memories of Fifty Years • William H. Sparks
... differ widely in their talents and possessions, but children of the same parents are often strangely unlike, physically and mentally. One is radiantly beautiful, and another has no charm in appearance or in manners. One is physically vigorous, and another is frail as a hothouse flower. One is so quick that lessons are no trouble at all, and another wearily plods over them till ready to give up in despair. Evidences of this unevenness of distribution meet us everywhere. One man will make a fortune where another would not suspect a chance. One remains a third-rate ...
— Men of the Bible; Some Lesser-Known Characters • George Milligan, J. G. Greenhough, Alfred Rowland, Walter F.
... entered college. He was going to work his way. Of course, we couldn't send him. But he was too frail. He couldn't stand the double task, and he broke down completely. We sent him into the country to recuperate, and there he met Hattie Snow, fell head over heels in love with her blue eyes and golden hair, and married her on the spot. Of course, there was nothing to do ...
— Oh, Money! Money! • Eleanor Hodgman Porter
... actresses of the day, and with all the frequenters of Will's, Cromwell was familiar. He had done more than take a pinch out of Dryden's snuff-box, which was a point of high ambition and honor at Will's; he had quarrelled with him about a frail poetess, Mrs. Elizabeth Thomas, whom Dryden had christened Corinna, and who was also known as Sappho. Gay characterized this literary and ...
— All About Coffee • William H. Ukers
... Earthen vessels, frail and slight, Yet the golden Lamp we bear; Master, break us, that the light So may fire the murky air; Skill and wisdom none we claim, Only seek to lift ...
— To My Younger Brethren - Chapters on Pastoral Life and Work • Handley C. G. Moule
... Pauline, despite her surprise, could scarcely refrain from laughter, for Otto's words were fulfilled almost to the letter. Amid a strife of elements that caused their frail erections to tremble, the little door burst open, and Dominick, stooping low to save his head, entered. He was followed by the gaunt, dark form of Malines, who, in rough garments and long fishermen's boots, with pistols in belt, and cutlass by his side, was a particularly good ...
— The Island Queen • R.M. Ballantyne
... forty-two, and that what was sport to her was toil to a mind unaccustomed to constant attention. Change of labour is not rest, unless it be through gratification of the will. Her very best pupil she had killed. Finding a very sharp sword, in a very frail scabbard, she had whetted the one and worn down the other, by every stimulus in her power, till a jury of physicians might have found her guilty of manslaughter; but perfectly unconscious of her own agency in causing the atrophy, her dear Anna Webster lived foremost in her ...
— Hopes and Fears - scenes from the life of a spinster • Charlotte M. Yonge
... you have here an instance how people rejoice when such men are properly estimated. Be my own dear precious son, and imitate my virtues, but not my faults; still, though man is frail, do not at least have ...
— Beethoven's Letters 1790-1826 Vol. 2 • Lady Wallace
... early balm and island spices there, And wilt anon in thy loose-rein'd career At Tagus, Po, Seine, Thames, and Danow dine, And see at night this western world of mine: Yet hast thou not more nations seen than she, Who before thee one day began to be, And, thy frail light being quench'd, shall long, long ...
— Biographia Literaria • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... However, I will not attempt to complete my argument; for if you do not understand me from what I have already said, the further you follow the wider you will wander. The truth, in short, is this: I practically believe in the doctrine of heredity; and as my body is frail and my brain morbidly active, I think my impulse towards a man strong in body and untroubled in mind a trustworthy one. You can understand that; it is a plain proposition in eugenics. But if I tell ...
— Cashel Byron's Profession • George Bernard Shaw
... moved south again under a new commander, Rashid Pasha of Yannina, and laid final siege on April 27 to Mesolonghi, just a year after Byron had died of fever within its walls. The Greeks were magnificent in their defence of these frail mud-bastions, and they more than held their own in the amphibious warfare of the lagoons. The struggle was chequered by the continual coming and going of the Greek and Ottoman fleets. They were indeed the decisive factor; for ...
— The Balkans - A History Of Bulgaria—Serbia—Greece—Rumania—Turkey • Nevill Forbes, Arnold J. Toynbee, D. Mitrany, D.G. Hogarth
... well may we say in the Lord's Prayer, 'Lead us not into temptation,' for we are all too frail to withstand it." ...
— The Mission; or Scenes in Africa • Captain Frederick Marryat
... angel flown away just like a dove, By the royal infant, that frail and tender reed, Pardon yet once more! Pardon in the name of the tomb! Pardon in the name ...
— The Paris Sketch Book Of Mr. M. A. Titmarsh • William Makepeace Thackeray
... colonial times many a wife presented herself as a burnt offering to her lord and master, the goodman of the house. The pots and kettles that ornamented the kitchen walls were implements for pre-historic giants rather than for frail women. The brass or copper kettles often holding fifteen gallons, and the huge iron pots weighing forty pounds, were lugged hither and thither by women whose every ounce of strength was needed for ...
— Woman's Life in Colonial Days • Carl Holliday
... why did not Heaven these members frail With lively force and vigour strengthen, so That ...
— The Virginians • William Makepeace Thackeray
... lower conditions, and now craving blindly but the sunlight of the day, she would have sought the deadly caress of life even though at that moment it had sealed her doom. Foolish or wise, she was as she was; since, under our frail society, life is as ...
— The Mississippi Bubble • Emerson Hough
... 'fragile' and 'frail,' 'intension' and 'intention,' 'providential' and 'prudential,' and many ...
— Introduction to the History of Religions - Handbooks on the History of Religions, Volume IV • Crawford Howell Toy
... hills, eagle and falcon, the merlin, the bald-headed vulture, the kestrel, the golden sparrow-hawk, find inaccessible retreats, whence they descend upon the plains like so many pillaging and well-armed barons. A thousand little chattering birds come at eventide to perch in flocks upon the frail boughs ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 1 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... posies! You that scorn the May, Won't you greet a friend from home Half the world away? Green against the draggled drift, Faint and frail and first — Buy my Northern blood-root And I'll know where you were nursed: Robin down the logging-road whistles, "Come to me!" Spring has found the maple-grove, the sap is running free; All the winds of Canada call the ploughing-rain. Take the flower ...
— Verses 1889-1896 • Rudyard Kipling
... not learned to put out his left hand—he only made a sharp nod, as James, with tender and humble respect, approached, feeling that, how his grandmother was gone, this frail old man, his father's brother, was the last who claimed by right his filial love and gratitude. How different from the rancour and animosity with which he had ...
— Dynevor Terrace (Vol. II) • Charlotte M. Yonge
... within and the laughing crowds had dispersed, Bob's mother came to Jeremy, put her hands on his shoulders and looked long into his face. She was a frail slip of a woman, dark like her son, with a sensitive mouth and big, black eyes full of courage. Jeremy flushed a slow scarlet under her gaze, but his eyes never flinched as ...
— The Black Buccaneer • Stephen W. Meader
... that is to say, by destroying the plant reproduce the heat and light which fostered it. The energy which can be set free by this process cannot be greater than that derived originally from the sun, and which, acting through the frail mechanism of green leaves, tore asunder the strong bonds of chemical affinity wherein the carbon and oxygen were hound, converting the former into the ligneous portions of the plants and setting the latter free for other uses. The power thus silently exerted is enormous; for every ton of carbon separated ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 441, June 14, 1884. • Various
... earnestly watching for the coming of the uncle, feeling quite uncertain whether to expect a frail old broken man, or to find themselves absolutely deluded, and made ...
— The Armourer's Prentices • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... looked at the frail skiff, the turbulent river, and the great woods beyond, already growing mysterious beneath ...
— The Law of the Land • Emerson Hough
... figures that sprawled over the huge cabinet must have delighted certain modern artists, whose rickety fingers can only portray in line a fanciful corruption totally devoid of relation to humanity, but such frail spectres would have shrunk with horror from certain robust works of art, over which the most healthy of the beefy brigade might have smacked large lips for hours. The room was in fact one quarrel between the ...
— Flames • Robert Smythe Hichens
... know the heartache with which it is seen that the mind of a loved one is wandering from us? And yet she was puzzled. She dreaded one of those scenes in which her young strength was barely sufficient to control and soothe the frail form before her. But they did not begin as a rule in this fashion; here, though the mind wandered, was an absence of the wildness to which she had become inured. Here—and yet as she listened, as she looked, now at her ...
— The Long Night • Stanley Weyman
... only Samson and Peter the Great, but Gibbs the Pirate, Black Hawk, and Joe Manton, who had died the previous year in a fit of delirium-tremens, prophesied, strode, swore, and smashed things in turn, by means of her frail little body. As Cribb, a noted pugilist of the last century, she floored an incautious spectator, giving him a black eye which he wore for a fortnight afterwards. Singularly enough, my visitors were of the opposite cast. ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 6, No. 38, December, 1860 • Various
... first," she returned, with a smile. "You'll find me better company than that crowd upstairs. Tell me about yourself.... Oh, I know soldiers hate to talk about themselves and the war. Never mind the war. Are you well? Did you get hurt? You look so—so frail, Daren." ...
— The Day of the Beast • Zane Grey
... capitalism makes unfair divisions of the profits of industry, giving the workers a share that keeps them in a man-rotting environment, and we're going to break up the system—the whole infernal profit system—the blight of capitalism upon the world." Grant brought down his hand on Morty's frail shoulder in a kind of frenzy. "Oh, it's coming—the Democracy of Labor is coming in the earth, bringing peace and hope—hope that is the 'last gift of the gods to men'—Oh, it's coming! it's coming." His eyes were blazing and his voice high pitched. ...
— In the Heart of a Fool • William Allen White
... grace witnessed, but in offences? There were no divinity but by reason of compassion; for revenges are brutish and mortal. All those times past—the loves, the sighs, the sorrows, the desires—can they not weigh down one frail misfortune? Cannot one drop of gall be hidden in so great heaps of sweetness? I may then conclude, Spes et fortuna, valete. She is gone in whom I trusted, and of me hath not one thought of mercy, nor any respect of that that was. Do with me now, therefore, what you ...
— Sir Walter Ralegh - A Biography • William Stebbing
... as it were "Brother Doubtful," one who hesitates between false religion and pagan religion, Duessa and Fraelissa (Morley). Fraelissa is fair but frail, and will not do ...
— Spenser's The Faerie Queene, Book I • Edmund Spenser
... was standing in the half-open door. The dormer window of the garret, through which the light fell, was precisely opposite the door, and illuminated the figure with a wan light. She was a frail, emaciated, slender creature; there was nothing but a chemise and a petticoat upon that chilled and shivering nakedness. Her girdle was a string, her head ribbon a string, her pointed shoulders emerged from her chemise, ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... but children of the same parents are often strangely unlike, physically and mentally. One is radiantly beautiful, and another has no charm in appearance or in manners. One is physically vigorous, and another is frail as a hothouse flower. One is so quick that lessons are no trouble at all, and another wearily plods over them till ready to give up in despair. Evidences of this unevenness of distribution meet us everywhere. One man will make a fortune where another ...
— Men of the Bible; Some Lesser-Known Characters • George Milligan, J. G. Greenhough, Alfred Rowland, Walter F.
... dollars, he said, 'I need not dream of paying it. I never could manage it.' But he stuck to it. He was at my house a good deal at first. We gave him a room there and he came and went as he chose. The worry told upon him. He became frail during those weeks, almost ethereal, yet it was strange how brilliant he was, ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... a tiny pink rose, no larger than the nail of my little finger. Stalk and leaves were there, and golden pollen lay in its delicate heart. Each fairy-petal blushed with June fire; the frail leaves were exquisitely green. Withal it was as hard and unbendable ...
— Tales of Chinatown • Sax Rohmer
... care not, to be built into a wall by workmen who lived and died a century before I was even thought of, I realize the childishness of the illusion, which I indulge in spite of myself, that it can extend any sort of spiritual protection to me; I comprehend only too well what a frail and unstable base has that that symbolizes for me the ...
— The Story of a Child • Pierre Loti
... twisted branches, roofs torn off, destroyed RANCHOS, planks of sheds stolen by the deluge from ESTANCIAS, carcasses of drowned animals, blood-stained skins, and on a shaky tree a complete family of jaguars, howling and clutching hold of their frail raft. Still farther away, a black spot almost invisible, already caught Wilson's eye. It was Thalcave ...
— In Search of the Castaways • Jules Verne
... mountains, amid snow-clad steeps and rock-bound fastnesses, one finds, perchance, a shell. It is so small a thing that it can be held in the hollow of the hand; so frail that a slight pressure of the finger will crush it to atoms, yet, held to the ear, it brings the surge and sweep of that vast, primeval ocean which, in the inconceivably remote past, covered the peak. And so, to the eye of the mind, the small brown book, with its hundred printed pages, brings ...
— At the Sign of the Jack O'Lantern • Myrtle Reed
... English woman, A. Mary F. Robinson. Attracted by her lovely verse, the intellectual companionship ripened into love, and for his half-dozen final years he enjoyed her wifely aid and sympathy in what seems to have been an ideal union. The end, when it came, was quick and painless. Always of a frail constitution, stunted in body from childhood, he died in harness, October 19th, 1894, his head falling forward on his desk as he wrote. The tributes that followed make plain the enthusiastic admiration James Darmesteter awakened in ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern — Volume 11 • Various
... But now I know my unassisted wit Is all too weak to make me soar so high; For pardon, lady, for this fault I cry, And wiser still I grow remembering it. Yea, well I see what folly 'twere to think That largess dropped from thee like dews from heaven Could e'er be paid by work so frail as mine! To nothingness my art and talent sink; He fails who from his mortal stores hath given A thousandfold to ...
— Sonnets • Michael Angelo Buonarroti & Tommaso Campanella
... and in her exhausted state of wavering consciousness, alive only through her fond affections; gleams of perception, and momentary flashes of life, called forth only by her husband, or by the moanings of the little frail babe, which seemed to have as feeble and precarious a hold of life as herself. The doctors told John that they were haunted through the day by the remembrance of her face, so sweet, even in insensibility, ...
— Heartsease - or Brother's Wife • Charlotte M. Yonge
... dangers dire, Since Colin is gone? Who'll fearlessly brave the maniac wave, Thoughtless of self, human life to save, Unmoved by the storm-fiend's ire? Who, Shadrach-like, will walk through fire, Since Colin is gone? Or hang his life on so frail a breath That there's but a step 'twixt life and death? For Courage is not the heritage Of the nobly born; and many a sage Has climbed to the temple of fame, And written his deathless name In letters of golden flame, Who, on ...
— Hesperus - and Other Poems and Lyrics • Charles Sangster
... false. All's false. You have conspired. I am disgraced. But you will learn you have judged erroneously. I am not the frail creature you conceive. Between your vision of life's aim, and theirs Who presently will question me, I cling To theirs as light: and yours I deem a den Where ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... If his body was frail his spirit was strong and his power of imagination so great that he cheered himself through many a weary day by playing he was "captain of a tidy little ship," a soldier, a fierce pirate, an Indian chief, or an explorer in foreign lands. Miles he ...
— The Life of Robert Louis Stevenson for Boys and Girls • Jacqueline M. Overton
... bump hurt him, for he cheerfully shouted "Down go my horses!" We gagged him after that and got him safely in, but the poor fellow only lived a couple of days, for blood-poisoning had got too strong a hold of his frail body for medical skill to avail. His name I have forgotten, and the hospital records would only state: "Private So-and-so received [a certain date]; died [such a date]. ...
— "Over There" with the Australians • R. Hugh Knyvett
... the frail cab, and the latter vehicle was crushed as though made of paper. The driver went out on his head. Screams of fear issued from the interior of the cab as it went over in a heap of wreckage ...
— Nan Sherwood's Winter Holidays • Annie Roe Carr
... Dear, tho Flesh and Blood be frail, yet the dear Hopes of thee has made me hold out with a Herculean Courage— Stay, where shall I carry her? not to my own Apartment; Ariadne may surprize me: I'll to the Mountebank here i'th' Piazza, he has a Cure for all things, ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn, Vol. I (of 6) • Aphra Behn
... progress in romantic feeling and power of expression as we pass from Thomson to his disciple, the frail lyric poet, William Collins. Collins, born at Chichester, was an undergraduate at Oxford when he published 'Persian Eclogues' in rimed couplets to which the warm feeling and free metrical treatment give much ...
— A History of English Literature • Robert Huntington Fletcher
... year ago, The chill weight of the winter snow For months upon her grave has lain; And now, when summer south winds blow And brier and harebell bloom again, I tread the pleasant paths we trod, I see the violet-sprinkled sod Whereon she leaned, too frail and weak The hillside flowers she loved to seek, Yet following me where'er she went With dark eyes full of love's content. The birds are glad; the brier-rose fills The air with sweetness; all the ...
— Home Life of Great Authors • Hattie Tyng Griswold
... charm in stalking game in this manner, although I was, in a sense, but a passenger in my natives' hands. But it was fascinating to watch their keenness and skill as they guided the frail craft round the sharp turns, the noiseless use of the paddles, the light in their eye as they constantly stood up in the canoe to keep a hidden gaze upon the game ahead, watching its every movement as well as the local eddies and currents in ...
— American Big Game in Its Haunts • Various
... glad of it. The extraordinary, almost unnatural, tension of the nerves which upheld Hippolyte up to this point, had now arrived at this final stage. This poor feeble boy of eighteen—exhausted by disease—looked for all the world as weak and frail as a leaflet torn from its parent tree and trembling in the breeze; but no sooner had his eye swept over his audience, for the first time during the whole of the last hour, than the most contemptuous, the most haughty expression ...
— The Idiot • (AKA Feodor Dostoevsky) Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... fingers curling about his big thumb like those of a child. "Poor li'l bird!" The woodsman's brow puckered, a moisture gathered in his eyes. "Dis is hell, for sure. Come, den, ma petite, I fin' a nes' for you." He raised her to her feet; then, removing his heavy woolen coat, he placed it about her frail shoulders. When she was snugly buttoned inside of it he led her out into the dim gray dawn; ...
— The Winds of Chance • Rex Beach
... something fit for her place. Queen Charlotte was a violent partisan of Hastings, had received presents from him, and had so far departed from the severity of her virtue as to lend her countenance to his wife, whose conduct had certainly been as reprehensible as that of any of the frail beauties who were then rigidly excluded from the English Court. The king, it was well known, took the same side. To the king and queen, all the members of the household looked submissively for guidance. The ...
— The Diary and Letters of Madame D'Arblay Volume 1 • Madame D'Arblay
... rejoicings at Tara, on a day which happened to fall on the eve of Easter, he resolved to proceed to Tara on that occasion, and to confront the Druids in the midst of all the princes and magnates of the Island. With this view he returned on his former course, and landed from his frail barque at the mouth of the Boyne. Taking leave of the boatmen, he desired them to wait for him a certain number of days, when, if they did not hear from him, they might conclude him dead, and provide ...
— A Popular History of Ireland - From the earliest period to the emancipation of the Catholics • Thomas D'Arcy McGee
... formed like the crater at the upper end of Bear River valley. So long as we could touch the bottom with our paddles, we were very gay; but gradually, as the water deepened, we became more still in our frail batteau of gum cloth distended with air, and with pasted seams. Although the day was very calm, there was a considerable swell on the lake; and there were white patches of foam on the surface, which were slowly moving to the southward, indicating the set of a current in that direction, and ...
— The Life and Adventures of Kit Carson, the Nestor of the Rocky Mountains, from Facts Narrated by Himself • De Witt C. Peters
... beliefs must be expelled to make room for 346:30 spiritual understanding. We cannot serve both God and mammon at the same time; but is not this what frail mortals are trying to do? Paul says: 347:1 "The flesh lusteth against the Spirit, and the Spirit against the flesh." Who ...
— Science and Health With Key to the Scriptures • Mary Baker Eddy
... not in judgment, Lord!" The pious mother prays; Impute not guilt to thy frail child! She knows not what ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 7 • Various
... only book which God has ever sent, and the only one he ever will send into the world. All other books are frail and transient as time, since they are only the registers of time; but the Bible is as durable as eternity, for its pages contain the records of eternity. All other books are weak and imperfect, like their author, man; but the Bible ...
— The American Union Speaker • John D. Philbrick
... increase of desperate measures on the part of the Court. Went in the morning to Gibson's; in the evening to the Orti Sallustiani, one of the many objects here not worth seeing, though they show two great holes in a wall, which they call the Campo Scelerato, and they say it is the place where the frail vestals were buried. Coming back we met the Pope taking a drive—two coaches-and-four, with guards and outriders. We got out of the carriage and took off our hats, and our laquais de place dropped on his knees. The Pope ...
— The Greville Memoirs - A Journal of the Reigns of King George IV and King William - IV, Volume 1 (of 3) • Charles C. F. Greville
... acquaintance. They found him a charming little fellow, full of quaint fancies and a delicate humour. His chatter amused them immensely, yet there was an element of pathos through it all; he looked so frail and delicate, like a fairy changeling, or some being of another world. They wondered if he would ever be able to run about ...
— A Patriotic Schoolgirl • Angela Brazil
... it is to be poor. She was dependent, frail, sensitive, conscientious. She was in the power of a hard, grasping, thin-blooded, tough-fibred, trading educator, who neither knew nor cared for a tender woman's sensibilities, but who paid her and meant to have ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... mentioned preliminarily to the knowledge of Brahman for the mere purpose of glorifying the latter; as appears from the passages in which it (the lower knowledge) is spoken of slightingly, such as (I, 2, 7), 'But frail indeed are those boats, the sacrifices, the eighteen in which this lower ceremonial has been told. Fools who praise this as the highest good are subject again and again to old age and death.' After these slighting remarks the text ...
— The Vedanta-Sutras with the Commentary by Sankaracarya - Sacred Books of the East, Volume 1 • George Thibaut
... all these little, kinky hairs, Which, though so frail, can prove such snares, And furnish some one a chance to say: 'Your comb and brush ...
— Caps and Capers - A Story of Boarding-School Life • Gabrielle E. Jackson
... behind his desk, examining another little crystal vase somewhat like the one he had shown Ralph a few weeks earlier. As his visitor entered, he held it up against the light, revealing on its dewy sides an incised design as frail as the shadow of ...
— The Custom of the Country • Edith Wharton
... his heart stand still, for discovery now would mean the utter ruin of his project, to say nothing of the death of all of them; for a shot from one of those enormous 20-inch guns would send the frail Janequeo to the bottom like a stone, if it chanced to hit her. And evidently the Peruvians in that particular battery had taken alarm at something; for a tiny point of light appeared on the ramparts, and ...
— Under the Chilian Flag - A Tale of War between Chili and Peru • Harry Collingwood
... does not disdain the sympathy and kindness of the loving, and the expressions of hopefulness that come from the good and pure. True, you may say that the learned professions are for the man who is about to die but frail supports on which to lean. The wise man as well as the ignorant man, when he fears that death is near, reaches out for help or at least some knowledge of his future. He sends for his physician, who cannot promise him anything—cannot number the days or hours of his remaining ...
— A Strange Discovery • Charles Romyn Dake
... proved no slight task. He was burly and heavy, while the bundles were frail and loosely stacked and failed to yield to his feet that amount of support which, of all men, the stouter ones are supposed most to require. This being so, it was not surprising to find that ere he reached it he stumbled and fell several times, until ...
— Heiress of Haddon • William E. Doubleday
... book from. Five compeers in flank Stood left and right of it as tempting more— A dog's-eared Spicilegium, the fond tale O' the frail one of the Flower, by young Dumas, Vulgarised Horace for the use of schools, The Life, Death, Miracles of Saint Somebody, Saint Somebody Else, ...
— The Cook's Decameron: A Study in Taste: - Containing Over Two Hundred Recipes For Italian Dishes • Mrs. W. G. Waters
... she said, addressing me, "is an old frail man, little used to the company of strangers; but in former days he has had kindness from members of your house, and it would be a satisfaction to him, I think, to have the privilege ...
— The Moon Endureth—Tales and Fancies • John Buchan
... trip either way without as many as could be accommodated, and many ladies among them. My observation of the conduct of the fair sex, under trying and novel circumstances, has convinced me that they face inevitable dangers more bravely and with more composure than men. I have frequently seen a frail, delicate woman standing erect and unflinching upon the deck, as the shells were whistling and bursting over us, while her lawful protector would be cowering "under the lee" of a cotton bale. I pay this humble tribute of admiration to the sex, but a cynical old bachelor, to whom ...
— The Narrative of a Blockade-Runner • John Wilkinson
... these uncoffined bodies of the brave, and hurried them under the burning sun to the trenches outside the city. They piled them in long heaps to await the slow work of the tired grave-diggers. The frail board coffins in which they were placed at last would often burst from the swelling corpse. The air was filled with ...
— The Victim - A romance of the Real Jefferson Davis • Thomas Dixon
... as James on a time had been wont to take him; a son of his own begetting, who could understand him because he was the same flesh and blood—understand, and comfort him, and become more rich and cultured than himself because he would start even better off. To get old—like that thin, grey wiry-frail figure sitting there—and be quite alone with possessions heaping up around him; to take no interest in anything because it had no future and must pass away from him to hands and mouths and eyes for whom he cared no ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... most powerful manifestations one observes the frailest and most delicate types of creation. Here along the beach were shells, exquisitely tinted like a sunset sky, cast on shore by the cruel waves. Tender mosses and fragile sea-weed lay upon the sand revealing the infinite tenderness of these frail children of the boundless deep. Looking upon the seething, surging mass of water that rolled on the troubled sea only last night, who would have thought it the home of such delicate beauty? "Truly," we said, as we gazed in admiration and wonder at the fair scene before ...
— See America First • Orville O. Hiestand
... great numbers of negroes on the road, loaded with every kind of commodity for the town market. The head is the beast of burthen among the negroes throughout the West Indies. Whatever the load, whether it be trifling or valuable, strong or frail, it is consigned to the head, both for safe keeping and for transportation. While the head is thus taxed, the hands hang useless by the side, or are busied in gesticulating, as the people chat together along the way. The negroes we passed were all decently clad. They uniformly stopped as ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society
... nominated among the Jaroslavl delegates to All-Russian Conference which was in preparation. Larin, whose work keeps him continually traveling, has his own car, specially arranged so that his uninterrupted labor shall have as little effect as possible on his dangerously frail body. Radek and I traveled in one of the special cars of the Central Executive Committee, of ...
— The Crisis in Russia - 1920 • Arthur Ransome
... blew thy welcome; cold on thee Looked the cold earth, my snowdrop frail and fair. Again that day; but wintry though it be, Come to thy Mother's heart: no frost is there. What sparkles in thy dark and guileless eye? Life's joyous dawn alone undimmed by care! Thou gift of God, canst thou then wholly die? Oh no, a soul immortal flashes ...
— Lady John Russell • Desmond MacCarthy and Agatha Russell
... watchers rather than to the passing soul itself that the wonder seems to draw most close. To stand before the veil, to know that very soon it must be lifted for the loved one to pass beyond, to wait for the glimpse of that spirit-world from which only the frail wall of mortality divides even the least spiritual, to watch as it were for the Gate of Death to open and the great Revelation to flash for one blinding moment upon the dazzled eyes that may not grasp the ...
— Greatheart • Ethel M. Dell
... had borne The trackless trade winds. Tui Tua Kau, "King of the Reefs," had ventured over far From Tonga's shore. Caught by a wanton gale, His idle racing, lengthened in a whim To cheat his laughing mates, grew a wild flight. The frail canoe seemed, on the angry sea, A sweet rose petal blown across the night. Yet wisely now the winds had mind to crown Their joyous undertaking, and upon The shores of Fiji's isles they drew their prize. The maidens on the shore had seen afar The stranger's ...
— The Rose of Dawn - A Tale of the South Sea • Helen Hay
... apostasy shook down the frail edifice of the Protestant constitution, to be raised again in suffering, as the first foundations of it had been laid, by purer hands and nobler spirits.[98] In his better years Northumberland had been a faithful subject and ...
— The Reign of Mary Tudor • James Anthony Froude
... life. He had come, then—the Reverend Lewis Penzance—a poor and unhealthy scholar, to be vicar of the parish of Dunstan. Only a poor and book-absorbed man would have accepted the position. What this man wanted was no more than quiet, pure country air to fill frail lungs, a roof over his head, and a place to pore over books and manuscripts. He was a born monk and celibate—in by-gone centuries he would have lived peacefully in some monastery, spending his years in the reading and writing ...
— The Shuttle • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... and of secondary importance. In no case can people receive from his mind more than a reflection, and then only when he joins with them in the attempt to get his thought into their heads; where, however, it is never anything but an exotic plant, stunted and frail. ...
— The Art of Literature • Arthur Schopenhauer
... they have no flour, and the populace who murmur when they have no bread, besides the merchants and shopkeepers who prefer coin to assignats, are notoriously pensioned by him: and even a part of the Representatives, and all the frail beauties, are said to be enlisted in his service.—These multifarious charges will be found on the journals of the Assembly, and we must of course infer, that Mr. Pitt is the ablest statesman, or the French the ...
— A Residence in France During the Years 1792, 1793, 1794 and 1795, • An English Lady
... force the blade through the work. The blade is a frail instrument, and when too great a pressure is exerted it bends, and as a result a breakage follows. To enable it to do the work properly, it must be made of the hardest steel. It is, ...
— Practical Mechanics for Boys • J. S. Zerbe
... lady be not mistress of her seat, and be unable to maintain a proper position of her limbs and body, so soon as her horse starts into a trot, she runs the risk of being tossed about on the saddle, like the Halcyon of the poets in her frail nest,— ...
— The Young Lady's Equestrian Manual • Anonymous
... potent in one man against another, this nervous and fluid force, eminently mobile and transmittable, is itself subject to the changing condition of our organization, and there are many circumstances which make this frail organism of ours to vary. At this point, our metaphysical observation shall stop and we will enter into an analysis of the circumstances which develop the will of man and impart to it a grater degree ...
— The Physiology of Marriage, Part II. • Honore de Balzac
... is often as great. At some houses, everything is of good quality, well cooked, and in consequence, of easy digestion; while at others, sour or heavy bread, greasy cooking, and like kitchen abominations, if I must so call them, disorder instead of giving sustenance to a frail body like mine. The seamstress who should attempt a change of these things for her own special benefit, would soon find herself in hot water. Think a moment. Suppose, in going into a family for one or two days, or a week, I should begin by a request to have my meals ...
— All's for the Best • T. S. Arthur
... examination of the latter revealed no mortal injuries and after a brief rest he asserted that he felt fit to attempt the return voyage. He would have to pilot his own craft, however, as these frail vessels are not intended to ...
— A Princess of Mars • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... saw a very frail old minister who shook as he walked, as if his feet were striking against stones. He was to depart on the morrow to the place of his birth, but he came to the manse to wish his successor God-speed. Strangers were so formidable to Margaret that ...
— The Little Minister • J.M. Barrie
... copies of the frail little vessels in which Columbus braved the unknown horrors of the Sea of Darkness, as well as models of the ocean going leviathans ...
— This Country Of Ours • H. E. Marshall Author: Henrietta Elizabeth Marshall
... was uninhabited. As we were nearing it, however, a number of natives came off in large canoes loaded with cocoanuts and fruits, so that they or their fathers must have made a long voyage to reach it in their frail-looking vessels. ...
— Peter Trawl - The Adventures of a Whaler • W. H. G. Kingston
... we know the cursed waste Of life in the beneficence divine Of starlight and of sunlight and soul-shine That we have squandered in sin's frail distress, Till we have drunk, and trembled at the taste, The mead ...
— The Children of the Night • Edwin Arlington Robinson
... song surpassing thine, Richer, more sweet, more poignant. And the poet Who felt this burning beauty, and whose heart Was full of loveliest things, sang all he knew A little while, and then he died; too frail To bear this untamed, ...
— A Dome of Many-Coloured Glass • Amy Lowell
... (in anticipation of Beaumarchais) "as it was d—mned at the Theatre-Royal in Drury-Lane;" and a few detached scenes in which, under the title of Eurydice Hiss'd; or, a Word to the Wise, its untoward fate was attributed to the "frail Promise of uncertain Friends." But even in these careless and half-considered productions there are happy strokes; and one scarcely looks to find such nervous and sensible lines in a mere a propos as these from ...
— Fielding - (English Men of Letters Series) • Austin Dobson
... against churchmen high in authority, and without doubt the charges were often true, because a robe and a rope girdle, or the reversal of haberdashery, do not change the nature of a man. Down under the robe, you'll sometimes find a man frail of ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 11 (of 14) - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Businessmen • Elbert Hubbard
... a stormy night. The rain cascaded upon the canvas in torrents, with the dull, drum-like sound familiar to dwellers in tents. As the whooping blasts charged upon it the frail structure shook and swayed and strained at its confining ...
— The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce, Vol. II: In the Midst of Life: Tales of Soldiers and Civilians • Ambrose Bierce
... about his thin mouth, "This camp mattress, Doctor," he slowly replied, "I find a little thin. The slats beneath chafe my poor bones. I've a frail body—though in my youth and young manhood, while soldiering in the West, I have done some rough camping and campaigning. There was flesh then to cover my nerves ...
— The Victim - A romance of the Real Jefferson Davis • Thomas Dixon
... muffled. The stream was with them. It was a swift and silent progress. For all his knowledge and experience Kars had difficulty in recognizing their course. Then there were possible submerged boulders and other "snags" and their danger to the frail craft. But these things were quite undisturbing to the scout. His sight seemed to possess something of feline powers. His sense of locality, and of danger, were something almost uncanny on the water. He had made their present journey once before, and his sureness ...
— The Triumph of John Kars - A Story of the Yukon • Ridgwell Cullum
... the gas mask! That frail piece of rubber alone stood between us and death. The slightest rent or leakage would be fatal, as injury to the suit of the deep sea diver. These masks had been issued in sizes 3, 4 and 5. Some fitted better than others; others ...
— The Greater Love • George T. McCarthy
... with the faint star in the Gap quite gone now, and all around us the hissing waste of waters upon which our frail shell of a boat was tossed! It was so black now that we could hardly see each other's faces, and in a doleful silence we toiled on till all at once there was a sobbing cry from Bob Chowne, who fell forward over his oar. Then ...
— Devon Boys - A Tale of the North Shore • George Manville Fenn
... body was taken up, and placed in a chest, near her first husband's tomb. "There," says Dart, "it hath ever since continued to be seen, the bones being firmly united, and thinly clothed with flesh, like scrapings of tanned leather." This awful spectacle of frail mortality was at length removed from the public gaze into St. Nicholas's Chapel, and finally deposited under the monument of Sir George Villiers, when the vault was made for the remains of Elizabeth Percy, Duchess of ...
— Diary of Samuel Pepys, Complete • Samuel Pepys
... she could disturb the sleep of the just, and especially that of a prophet so important as Samuel; and are we to suppose that he, upon whom the Spirit of the Lord was wont to descend, even while he was clothed with frail mortality, should be subject to be disquieted in his grave at the voice of a vile witch, and the command of an apostate prince? Did the true Deity refuse Saul the response of his prophets, and could a witch compel the actual spirit of ...
— Letters On Demonology And Witchcraft • Sir Walter Scott
... eagerness with which they pushed forward to record their votes of condemnation; and when a mob of hired ruffians, who thronged the hall, were cheering every vote for death, and holding daggers to the throat of every one from whom they apprehended a contrary judgment; one noble of frail body, but of a spirit worthy of his birth and rank, the Marquis de Villette, laughed in the faces of his threateners, looked the assassins in the face, and told them that he would not obey their orders, and that they ...
— The Life of Marie Antoinette, Queen of France • Charles Duke Yonge
... going abroad, in that coach, which had made Dulcie Locke look longingly after it, and ponder what it would be for one of her frail children to have "a ride" on the box as far as Kensington. They were bound for the house of one of the lordly patrons of arts and letters. They were bound for my Lord Burlington's, or the Earl of Mulgrave's, ...
— Girlhood and Womanhood - The Story of some Fortunes and Misfortunes • Sarah Tytler
... their volumes of water. The principal arm of the river is divided at the point of decline into two equal falls by a little island of rock. A long narrow suspension-bridge leads to this island, and hangs over the fall; but it is such a weak, frail construction, that one person only can cross it at a time. The owner of this dangerous path keeps it private, and imposes a toll of ...
— Visit to Iceland - and the Scandinavian North • Ida Pfeiffer
... might be lifted easily with one hand, and when at length we launched her she bounded upon the water like an india-rubber ball. Fritz was unanimously voted her rightful owner, but before his mother would hear of his entering the frail-looking skiff she declared she must contrive a swimming dress, that "should his boat receive a puncture from a sharp rock or the dorsal fin of a fish and collapse, he might yet have a chance ...
— Journeys Through Bookland V3 • Charles H. Sylvester
... loved one better than the other it was perhaps his father, because of the pitiful weakness, because of the fragility which seemed to call for a protective gentleness. The old man had altered little in the five years. James could not remember him other than thin and bent and frail, with long wisps of silvery hair brushed over the crown to conceal his baldness, with the cheeks hollow and wrinkled, and a white moustache ineffectually concealing the weak, good-natured mouth. Ever since ...
— The Hero • William Somerset Maugham
... goin' on t' Falmouth, I reckon—stan' by t' put a line in my boat!" A dinghy put off from the cutter; a frail cockle-shell, lurching and diving in the short Channel sea, and soon our pilot was astride the rail, greeting us, as one ...
— The Brassbounder - A Tale of the Sea • David W. Bone
... Life's foam-fretted feet between; Unto thine eyes the glass where that is seen Which had Life's form and Love's, but by my spell Is now a shaken shadow intolerable, Of ultimate things unuttered the frail screen. ...
— The World's Best Poetry, Volume 3 - Sorrow and Consolation • Various
... Holly," she called, "the support of the moving stone hath lessened somewhat, so that I am not certain if it will bear our weight or no. Therefore will I cross the first, because no harm will come unto me," and, without further ado, she trod lightly but firmly across the frail bridge, and in another second was standing safe upon ...
— She • H. Rider Haggard
... out laughing. The whole thing, although hideous and startling, was rendered ludicrous by the accelerated movements of Alec when the grinning jaws snapped right in his face. To save himself from falling into the hole beneath, he clutched the frail form round the body, causing its rags and bones to fall in tatters and pieces on to something below, which gave ...
— Jethou - or Crusoe Life in the Channel Isles • E. R. Suffling
... jasper walls of heaven shut it out from harm forever, like coral reefs encircling a lagoon in the Pacific seas. Only by remembering the years that had been before, and the years that should follow after, could the reluctant mind convince itself that this seeming eternity was frail; that whoso lingered too long among the splendors of September would be surely overtaken by treacherous frost, and biting winter winds; that there was but one way to escape the revolting decline from this pinnacle of life—to die. That ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 2 • Various
... reduce in strength, reduce the strength of; mettre de l'eau dans son vin [Fr.]. Adj. weak, feeble, debile^; impotent &c 158; relaxed, unnerved, &c v.; sapless, strengthless^, powerless; weakly, unstrung, flaccid, adynamic^, asthenic^; nervous. soft, effeminate, feminate^, womanly. frail, fragile, shattery^; flimsy, unsubstantial, insubstantial, gimcrack, gingerbread; rickety, creaky, creaking, cranky; craichy^; drooping, tottering &c v.. broken, lame, withered, shattered, shaken, crazy, shaky; palsied &c 158; decrepit. languid, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... the channel is called between Herm and Jethou, the tide at times runs with great speed, and meeting with the resistance of the Ferriers and other huge rocks, whirls, and turns, and foams in all directions, so that a frail craft like a canoe would be a death-trap to anyone foolhardy enough to venture out in it. That being the case, I could only follow my canoeing hobby when the sea was calm, but even then did ...
— Jethou - or Crusoe Life in the Channel Isles • E. R. Suffling
... is a valuable work of reference. Mr. Locker, for it is by this name, and as the author of 'London Lyrics,' that he will be best remembered, devoted his attention almost exclusively to English literature, although of late years he had devoted as much attention as his frail health would allow to the formation of a section of rare books in French literature. It would be impossible to describe in this place all the many book rarities at Rowfant; we must be content, therefore, with indicating a ...
— The Book-Hunter in London - Historical and Other Studies of Collectors and Collecting • William Roberts
... And a real sound smothered the phantom. Johnson the purser was sitting here alone in the dimness. He was smoking. I noticed that his cigar held a long frail ash. It could not have been him I was chasing. He was sitting there quite calmly. A thick-necked, heavy fellow, easily out of breath. But he was ...
— Brigands of the Moon • Ray Cummings
... cry the girl caught the frail little lady in her arms as the letter slipped unheeded from her lap to the floor. Mrs. Sherwood's eyes were closed. She ...
— Nan Sherwood at Pine Camp - or, The Old Lumberman's Secret • Annie Roe Carr
... and paled afterwards, but he went along with his father silently; and his heart beat as he came and stood before the litter whereas the Bride lay, clad all in white and propped up on fair cushions of red silk. She was frail to look on, and worn and pale yet; but he deemed ...
— The Roots of the Mountains • William Morris
... stood fixed or permanent, and which swept the finest and most beautiful things away the soonest. The garland that blooms at night withers by morning; and the strength of man and the beauty of women are no longer-lived than the frail anemone, the lily and violet that flower and fall.[2] Sweetness is changed to bitterness; where the rose has spread her cup, one goes by and the brief beauty passes; returning, the seeker finds no rose, but a thorn. Swifter ...
— Select Epigrams from the Greek Anthology • J. W. Mackail
... both hands of the Indian, without the throw-stick, exceeds that of the Eskimo and Aleut darts and harpoons, with the additional velocity imparted by the throwing-stick. It must not be forgotten, also, that the kyak is a very frail, unsteady thing, and therefore not much of the momentum of the body can be utilized, as it is by the Northwest Indians in making a lunge with a heavy shaft. The throwing-stick is also said by some ...
— Throwing-sticks in the National Museum • Otis T. Mason
... Gaul—the most cruel, the most debauched of men!" exclaimed Meroe. "You do not know that this frail bark, which at this moment you are following in the distance with your eyes, bears two of your most desperate enemies. You do not know that they have beforehand given over their lives to Hesus in the hope of making to Teutates, god of journeys by land and by sea, ...
— The Brass Bell - or, The Chariot of Death • Eugene Sue
... no window through which they could get Miller out, and there was no knowing how long the frail hut could resist the weight ...
— Romance of California Life • John Habberton
... letters are very tender and beautiful. One to Louisa at the age of eleven, enclosed a picture of a frail mother cared for by a faithful daughter, and says, "I have always liked it very much, for I imagined that you might be just such an industrious daughter and I such a feeble and loving mother, looking to your labor for my daily bread." There was prophecy in this ...
— Daughters of the Puritans - A Group of Brief Biographies • Seth Curtis Beach
... dust, and feeble as frail, In thee do we trust, nor find thee to fail; Thy mercies, how tender! how firm to the end, Our Maker, ...
— The Otterbein Hymnal - For Use in Public and Social Worship • Edmund S. Lorenz
... news whenever (as she said) I "had behaved myself." At last she treated me to what she called an indulgence, and I thought rather more of a banter. She was certainly a strong, almost a violent, friend to all she liked, chief among whom was a certain frail old gentlewoman, very blind and very witty, who dwelt in the top of a tall land on a strait close, with a nest of linnets in a cage, and thronged all day with visitors. Miss Grant was very fond to carry me there and put me to entertain her friend with the narrative of my ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 11 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... and cognac and cigarettes, surrounded by his tasteful belongings, shut in by the heavy damask hangings, under the graceful wreaths of smoke, they formed a very pretty picture. He, robust, dark, manly; she, frail, delicate, blonde, and ...
— Mlle. Fouchette - A Novel of French Life • Charles Theodore Murray
... empty, Mrs. Vaughn took her knitting to the fire, and before she began to ply the needles, looked thoughtfully at her hands. They had been soft and shapely before the days of toil. A frail but comely woman she was, with pale face, and dark eyes, ...
— Darrel of the Blessed Isles • Irving Bacheller
... When Andy and his followers had removed this cover, to substitute the frail one of slender sticks, quilted with dead leaves and a scattering of soil to deceive the eye, they could not have taken ...
— The Outdoor Chums - The First Tour of the Rod, Gun and Camera Club • Captain Quincy Allen
... inside them, one after the other, but finds each and all unoccupied—neither man, woman, nor child within; nor without, either in the alleys between, or on the large open space around which the frail tenements are set, that has served as a loitering-place for the older members of the tribe, and a play-ground for ...
— Gaspar the Gaucho - A Story of the Gran Chaco • Mayne Reid
... make rapid progress, and before midnight the Milky Way is behind them and out of sight. But, though they breathe more freely, they are by no means out of danger—alone in a frail skiff on the still turbulent ocean, and groping in thick darkness, with neither moon nor star to guide them. They have no compass, that having been forgotten in their scramble out of the sinking ship. But even if they had one it would be of little assistance to them at present, as, for ...
— The Land of Fire - A Tale of Adventure • Mayne Reid
... wonderful things, but still they can not live salvation, or, at least, they do not. There is no power so great in this world as the simple power of a holy, quiet life. The sister mentioned can never hope to do great things as other people might count them. She is in frail health; she is isolated from other saints and can not attend meetings as can many others; she has not the ability to preach or to do anything very great, as greatness is usually reckoned; but she has learned the great fact that she is not shut ...
— Heart Talks • Charles Wesley Naylor
... charms, He wanted beauty trembling with alarms: His was no more a youthful dream of joy, The wretch desired to ruin and destroy; He bought indulgence with a boundless price, Most pleased when decency bow'd down to vice, When a fair dame her husband's honour sold, And a frail countess play'd for Blaney's gold. "But did not conscience in her anger rise?" Yes! and he learn'd her terrors to despise; When stung by thought, to soothing books he fled, And grew composed and harden'd as he read; Tales of Voltaire, and ...
— The Borough • George Crabbe
... feel that we are going on—passing from the things which surround us—advancing into the undefined future, into the unknown land. And I think that sometimes we all have vivid flashes of such a conviction. I dare say, my friend, you have seen an old man, frail, soured, and shabby, and you have thought, with a start, Perhaps there ...
— The Recreations of A Country Parson • A. K. H. Boyd
... Sam Meecham you'd never have dreamed he was a man of decision and potential explorer of the unknown. In fact, there were times when Sam wouldn't either. He was a pink, frail-looking person with a weak chin and shoulders used to stooping, and stereotyped thinking immediately relegated him to the ranks of the meek and mannerly. These, oddly enough, happened to be his characteristics—but that was ...
— The Odyssey of Sam Meecham • Charles E. Fritch
... at the rich folds of her black silk gown made heavy with crape, and at the frail gossamer she carried on her head, and which, as she came on, let its long appendages float out like pennons in her wake. Emily had such a high, almost fantastic notion of feminine dignity (fantastic because it left too much out of view that woman also is a human creature), that till this ...
— Fated to Be Free • Jean Ingelow
... grandeur and security: an event which naturally attends the policy of amassing treasures. By means of this money, the usurper ensured the compliance, though not the attachment, of the principal clergy and nobility; but not trusting to this frail security, he invited over from the continent, particularly from Britany and Flanders, great numbers of these bravoes or disorderly soldiers, with whom every country in Europe, by reason of the general ill police and ...
— The History of England, Volume I • David Hume
... seeming it give delight and sweetness, is well thrust from us. At the very moment of its being it ceaseth to be, and for our joy repayeth us with sorrow sevenfold. Its happiness and its sorrow are more frail than a shadow, and, like the traces of a ship passing over the sea, or of a bird flying through the air, quickly disappear. But the hope of the life to come which the Christians preach is certain, and ...
— Barlaam and Ioasaph • St. John of Damascus
... the Flesh Market, the public mart, to which the frail sisterhood came in droves to sell their beauty. The sirens of Manhattan, lineal descendants of the legendary sisters who, with their songs, lured the ancient mariners to their doom, were there by the hundred, decked out in all the expensive finery that individual taste could suggest and their ...
— The Easiest Way - A Story of Metropolitan Life • Eugene Walter and Arthur Hornblow
... there is a further lesson beyond this. It is one which God takes great pains to teach us, and which we, alas! are very slow to learn. "Tarry thou the Lord's leisure." In the dim eyes of frail children of earth, God's steps are often very slow. We are too apt to forget that they are very sure. But He will not be hurried: He has eternity to work in, "If we ask anything according to His will, He heareth us." How many of us, who fancied their prayers unheard because ...
— Joyce Morrell's Harvest - The Annals of Selwick Hall • Emily Sarah Holt
... maturity, and age Scarce fill the circle of one summer day, Shall the poor gnat, with discontent and rage, Exclaim that Nature hastens to decay, If but a cloud obstruct the solar ray, If but a momentary shower descend? Or shall frail man Heaven's dread decree gainsay, Which bade the series of events extend Wide through unnumber'd worlds, ...
— The Poetical Works of Beattie, Blair, and Falconer - With Lives, Critical Dissertations, and Explanatory Notes • Rev. George Gilfillan [Ed.]
... all about his swagger mess-kit and the "style" of his regiment, and shows himself as the good fellow he is; even the Brigadier forgets the scarlet on his khaki collar, and remembers that he too is a frail mortal. And always, when other interest failed, one could fall back on that of one's own sometimes troublesome affairs. On the afternoon of the Dreifontein march our advance cart with the luncheon had not outspanned ...
— The Relief of Mafeking • Filson Young
... important canal, which led in a northerly direction. Innumerable movable bridges, traversing the lesser waterways which flowed into the big canal, had to be crossed. This procedure was more alarming than one might suppose, as the frail bridges shook at the slightest touch, and also advertised my crossing to the inmates of the usual adjoining lodge by magnifying every little sound. Most of the way, moored at the water's edge, were ...
— 'Brother Bosch', an Airman's Escape from Germany • Gerald Featherstone Knight
... the soldiers exhausted itself, the violence of the tempest increased. The floods of rain and the blasts of the hurricane at last terminated the affray. The Spaniards, fairly conquered, were compelled to a retreat, lest the rapidly rising river should sweep away the frail and trembling bridge, over which they had passed to their unsuccessful assault. The English and Netherlanders remained masters of the field. The rising flood, too, which was fast converting the meadows ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... the Inquisition, and not allowed either to set foot outside his own door, or to receive visits from non-Catholics. In the spring of 1639, however, he was allowed to go back to his villa at Gioiello, near Arcetri, and Milton obtained admission to him, old, frail, and blind, but in full possession of his mental faculty. There is observable in Milton, as Mr. Masson suggests, a prophetic fascination of the fancy on the subject of blindness. And the deep impression left by this sight of "the Tuscan artist" is evidenced by the feeling with which ...
— Milton • Mark Pattison
... thus kindly treated by the family with whom nominally a governess, I was on the terms of a friend with Signor Ludovico Cicogna, an Italian of noble birth. He was the only man I ever cared for. I loved him with frail human passion. I could not tell him, my true history. I could not tell him that I had a child; such intelligence would have made him renounce me at once. He had a daughter, still but an infant, by a former marriage, then brought up in France. He wished ...
— The Parisians, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... alas! they took no heed How frail she was, my little one, But brought her here with cruel speed ...
— India's Love Lyrics • Adela Florence Cory Nicolson (AKA Laurence Hope), et al.
... father was still Duc d'Orleans, before he became King of France as "Louis Philippe." Apparently the son continued "Chartres" to his intimate friends.] and deservedly, for he was so noble and good. All our anxiety now is to hear how poor dear frail Helene (the Duchesse d'Orleans) has borne this too dreadful loss. She loved him so, and he ...
— Life of Her Most Gracious Majesty the Queen V.1. • Sarah Tytler
... them very comfortable—especially the king, who was much embarrassed the day after his arrival at Bayonne, when, having been invited to dine with the Emperor, it was necessary to enter a modern carriage with two steps. He did not dare to put his foot on the frail things, which he feared would break under his weight; and the oscillating movement of the body of the carriage made him terribly afraid ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton
... appeared in Rose's place to assist her to dress, why her companion and friend was debarred attendance. The nun observed on that score an obstinate silence, but threw out many hints on the importance attached to the vain ornaments of a frail child of clay, and on the hardship that even a spouse of Heaven was compelled to divert her thoughts from her higher duties, and condescend to fasten clasps ...
— The Betrothed • Sir Walter Scott
... vessels-of-war. The tremendous recoil of a rifled cannon fired from one of those airy decks, meant to stand no ruder shock than the vibration caused by dancing pleasure-parties, would shake the whole frail structure to pieces. Yet the ingenuity born of necessity, and the energy awakened by the immediate prospect of war, led the Confederate engineers to convert some of these pleasure-palaces into the most terrible engines ...
— The Naval History of the United States - Volume 2 (of 2) • Willis J. Abbot
... to the love-master's wife. She screamed with fright as he seized her dress in his teeth and dragged on it till the frail fabric tore away. By this time he had become the centre ...
— White Fang • Jack London
... that man doth cherish so, Is wondrous frail and quick to go, Nor will it stay. Yet where's the man that will not give All that he hath so ...
— The Geste of Duke Jocelyn • Jeffery Farnol
... few are these laws and so simple that they could not be plainer were they emblazoned upon the sky as an ever-present scroll. There is the law of reverence. Conscious of vastness and sublimity, in the presence of mountains, man, frail, ignorant, passing swiftly to his grave, is asked to bow his head in the presence ...
— The Investment of Influence - A Study of Social Sympathy and Service • Newell Dwight Hillis
... neighborly kindness, seemed now to be indelibly impressed on every memory, and we felt that a mutual regard and friendship had bound us closer to each other, in the endearing bonds of Christian brotherhood— bonds not to be broken by the adverse scenes incident to frail ...
— Twenty-Two Years a Slave, and Forty Years a Freeman • Austin Steward
... suggested by the reflection that an all-powerful God will not leave unpunished the transgressors of his commands; or the same word might signify the sense of reverence and unbounded veneration, with which the frail creature must feel almost overwhelmed when thinking of its exalted Creator, who knows all, sees all, and governs all. The former originates in the intellect, the latter in the heart. It is obvious that ...
— A Guide for the Religious Instruction of Jewish Youth • Isaac Samuele Reggio
... assistance of two men who were struggling in the water. A hippopotamus had wantonly charged the canoe, and seizing it in his mouth, together with the poor old blind sheik who could not avoid the danger, crunched the frail boat to pieces, and so crushed and lacerated the old man that, although he was rescued by his comrades, he died during ...
— Ismailia • Samuel W. Baker
... small fingers trembling as they held the cards; he saw the delicate little shoulders and the poor frail neck and chest bedizened with tawdry mock jewelry and spangles; he saw the innocent young face, whose pure beauty no soil of stage paint could disfigure, with the smile still on the parted lips, but with a patient forlornness in the sad blue eyes, as if the seeing-sense ...
— Hide and Seek • Wilkie Collins
... word like a man, she and Ursula entered the frail craft, and pushed gently off. The two men stood watching them. Gudrun was paddling. She knew the men were watching her, and it made her slow and rather clumsy. The colour flew in ...
— Women in Love • D. H. Lawrence
... leaning on his hand. A deadly cold perspiration trickled down his brow. His heart swelled and beat as if it would burst. What should he do? His whole prospects were in an instant blighted. "Oh God! do not desert a frail and unhappy being: give me strength to face this new and terrible misfortune," was a prayer he internally uttered. A little revived, he started to his feet, and addressing himself to the landlord, he said, "Take me to a magistrate instantly, and let us have this diabolical plot unraveled. ...
— The Experiences of a Barrister, and Confessions of an Attorney • Samuel Warren
... occasioned by various hindrances, I sit down to answer your inestimable favour by the late dear Mr. White, who I hope is rejoicing, far above the troubles and trials of this frail sinful state. All the books mentioned in your truly condescending and affectionate letter, came safe, and were distributed according to your humane directions. You can scarcely conceive, much less than I describe, the gratitude excited by so seasonably and precious a supply of the means ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Vol. I. Jan. 1916 • Various
... it any better than the real thing—a story recorded by James Madison from the final moments of the Constitutional Convention, September 17th, 1787. As the last few members signed the document, Benjamin Franklin—the oldest delegate at 81 years and in frail health—looked over toward the chair where George Washington daily presided. At the back of the chair was painted the picture of a Sun on the horizon. And turning to those sitting next to him, Franklin observed that artists found it difficult ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... delightful, and the birds chirped and twittered so merrily in the bare branches, and, more wonderful than all, the great field was brown no longer, but was covered with millions of little, fresh green blades, which trembled and bent their frail bodies before the ...
— Little Saint Elizabeth and Other Stories • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... dim Atlantic line, The only hostile smoke Creeps like a harmless mist above the brine, From some frail, floating oak. ...
— War Poetry of the South • Various
... replied the laird; 'my wife, to be sure, is a frail woman, but she's no the gear ...
— The Proverbs of Scotland • Alexander Hislop
... yet they talk of frail femininity. Ah, Eileen! as difficult to understand as, as ...
— The Spoilers of the Valley • Robert Watson
... of success, Phoebe proceeded to initiate me into the first process of my job, which consisted in pasting slippery, sticky strips of muslin over the corners of the rough brown boxes that were piled high about us in frail, tottering towers reaching to the ceiling, which was trellised over with a network of electric wires and steam-pipes. Two hundred and fifty of these boxes remained to be finished on the particular order upon which Phoebe was working. Each must be given eight ...
— The Long Day - The Story of a New York Working Girl As Told by Herself • Dorothy Richardson
... timber, and the bloated carcasses of cattle choked the stream. All the ruin worked by the flood seemed to be compressed in this disastrous current. Once or twice he narrowly escaped collision with a heavy beam or the bed of some farmer's wagon. Once he was swamped by a tree, and righted his frail boat while ...
— Openings in the Old Trail • Bret Harte
... door was set into the rock portal, and not a wisp of light came through the brush that, covered the crevice. Pauline, after a brief hopeless test of her frail strength against the weight of the granite mass, moved slowly along the wall to the ...
— The Perils of Pauline • Charles Goddard
... spoke, Pauline, despite her surprise, could scarcely refrain from laughter, for Otto's words were fulfilled almost to the letter. Amid a strife of elements that caused their frail erections to tremble, the little door burst open, and Dominick, stooping low to save his head, entered. He was followed by the gaunt, dark form of Malines, who, in rough garments and long fishermen's boots, with pistols in belt, and cutlass by his side, was a particularly good ...
— The Island Queen • R.M. Ballantyne
... in haste to celebrate a victory, Porthos," interposed D'Artagnan; "never have we incurred a greater danger than we are now encountering. Men may subdue men—they cannot overcome the elements. We are now on the sea, at night, without any pilot, in a frail bark; should a blast of wind upset the ...
— Twenty Years After • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... not any weed That blooms its little life in forest shade, And dies when it hath cast its ripened seed, Forget the human creatures He has made, Frail as they are, and full ...
— The Coming of the Princess and Other Poems • Kate Seymour Maclean
... the star-shaped bloodroot, with its ten or a dozen petals of waxen white set with jewel-like precision about a centre of dead gold. There was the less formal phlox of a pinkish purple; deer's-tongue, white and yellow; frail anemones, both pink and white; small but stately violets, and the wake-robin with its wine-red centre among long green leaves. There was a dogwood in the act of unfolding its little green tents that would presently be snow-white, and a plum tree ...
— The Boss of Little Arcady • Harry Leon Wilson
... out such horrors of the fight as none but Spanish women born and bred dare trust themselves to see. My place was distant and far below; yet my eyes were keen, and it seemed to me that she looked thin and frail, though very beautiful. If for an instant, since Dick broke the news to me, I had doubted the loyalty of her heart, the sight of her sad young face would have driven doubt away. I was more than ever certain that in promising to marry Carmona ...
— The Car of Destiny • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... notions which would reverse all our best experience, and persuade us to discontinue a useful institution from the influence of vague and unfounded declamation against its danger to the public liberties. Our liberties, indeed, must stand upon very frail foundations, if the government cannot, without endangering them, avail itself of those common facilities, in the collection of its revenues and the management of its finances, which all other governments, in commercial countries, ...
— The Great Speeches and Orations of Daniel Webster • Daniel Webster
... "Pshaw!" said Cary; "too frail for use! I'm off to bed, Fair. That bill comes up to-morrow, and it means a bitter fight. Good-night,—and I say, Fair, hold your tongue about ...
— Lewis Rand • Mary Johnston
... picture of Mr. Bateson—in the attitude of Juliet and the attire of a local preacher—leaning over a balcony, which was overgrown with a semi-tropical luxuriance of artificial ivy, and which was obviously too frail to support him. But the masterpiece in Mrs. Bateson's art-gallery was a soul-stirring illustration of the death of the revered John Wesley. This picture was divided into two compartments: the first represented the room at Wesley's house in City Road, with the assembled survivors of ...
— The Farringdons • Ellen Thorneycroft Fowler
... time to die, seemed almost more human than the withered, dried-up old woman. He had been a riotous, roystering puppy, mad with the joy of life, when she was already a tottering, hobbling dame; now he was just a blind, breathing carcase, nothing more, and she still worked with frail energy, still swept and baked and washed, fetched and carried. If there were something in these wise old dogs that did not perish utterly with death, Emma used to think to herself, what generations of ghost-dogs ...
— Beasts and Super-Beasts • Saki
... Englishman had visited Jel[vs]a, in the time of the other commandant, some of the people were interned; the young captain assured us that he would do no such thing. And one could see that he would never imitate the brutality of his predecessor, who had caused a frail old man of sixty-six, Professor Zari['c], to be pulled out of his bed in the middle of a winter's night and taken across the hills on a donkey to Starigrad, afterwards on a destroyer to Split, from where—but for ...
— The Birth of Yugoslavia, Volume 2 • Henry Baerlein
... threat does not greatly trouble me, senor. I am no frail reed fearing a puff of air. I merely seek that duty which seems most fair to all concerned. Pray tell me then what it is you would ask at my hands. Nay, wait; before we go into this business be seated here, so we may more easily ...
— Prisoners of Chance - The Story of What Befell Geoffrey Benteen, Borderman, - through His Love for a Lady of France • Randall Parrish
... to appear. He wiggled one hand, and smiled sheepishly, as he caught sight of us. But he kept "eyes front" and refused to give any further sign as he marched bravely on behind that brave music. He is learning the law of the pack. For some first frail ideas of service are beginning to incubate in that egoistic little bean of his. And he's suffering, I suppose, the old contest between the ancestral lust to kill and the new-born inclination to succor and preserve. That means he may some day be "a gentleman." And I've ...
— The Prairie Child • Arthur Stringer
... acorn, chance-directed, Fell on the spot, and then a sapling sprung, From driving winds and beating storms protected By that kind Heaven which guards the frail and young. ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII. No. 5. May 1848 • Various
... down on the empty cot. In a few moments Mary came into the ward, supporting Isabel with her frail strength. The child wept no longer, but the trembling of her little form was painfully visible as she tottered forward. Not a word passed between the children—not a look was exchanged, but when Isabel bent over her mother, and saw the blossom shadows trembling around her head, her lips began ...
— The Old Homestead • Ann S. Stephens
... "I was a brute who wished to buy kisses in such a fashion. I forgot myself; your beauty is to blame, and your sweetness and everything that is yours. I pray," he added humbly, "that you will not think the worse of me, since we men are frail at times. And now, because you ask me, though I have no right, I grant your prayer. Mayhap those witnesses lied; at least, the man's sin, if sin there be, can be excused. He has naught to ...
— Pearl-Maiden • H. Rider Haggard
... branches, roofs torn off, destroyed RANCHOS, planks of sheds stolen by the deluge from ESTANCIAS, carcasses of drowned animals, blood-stained skins, and on a shaky tree a complete family of jaguars, howling and clutching hold of their frail raft. Still farther away, a black spot almost invisible, already caught Wilson's eye. It was ...
— In Search of the Castaways • Jules Verne
... that proud vessel, now a moral wreck—And view'd their Captain's fate with piteous eyes; While others scoff'd his augur'd miseries, Sneer'd at the prospect of his pigmy sail, And the slight bark so laden and so frail. ...
— The Eventful History Of The Mutiny And Piratical Seizure - Of H.M.S. Bounty: Its Cause And Consequences • Sir John Barrow
... it where my parents may hear of it, for they are old and feeble, and such a seemingly wanton breach of the hallowed conventionalities of our Christian civilization might all too rudely sunder the frail bridge which hangs darkling between the pale and evanescent present and the solemn great deeps of the eternities. May I trouble you ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... surrounded the little town pressed so closely upon it, that by sheer weight they seemed likely to crush its frail houses into matchwood. On one side mountains, some bare and rugged, some clothed with forest, rose behind the foot-hills, and behind them more mountains, which seemed to rise like the great green billows of an angry sea. On one side stretched ...
— The Tale of Timber Town • Alfred Grace
... opening which she called Indian Cove. To do this required some skill in the management of the canoe, which was rather over-loaded for so light a vessel; and the trees grew so close and thick that they had some difficulty in pushing their way through them without injuring its frail sides. These trees or bushes were chiefly black elder, high-bush cranberries, dogwood, willows, and, as they proceeded further, and there was ground of a more solid nature, cedar, poplar, swamp oak, and soft maple, with silver birch and wild cherries. ...
— Canadian Crusoes - A Tale of The Rice Lake Plains • Catharine Parr Traill
... not conscientiously leave the St. Florent side of the river, while so many thousands were looking to him for directions; and, consequently, as soon as de Lescure and the two ladies had, with much labour and delay, been placed in the boat, he swung himself out of the water into the bow, and the frail bark with its precious load was pushed ...
— La Vendee • Anthony Trollope
... was a great shock to the windmiller, who was himself in frail health; and Jan gave as much time as he could to ...
— Jan of the Windmill • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... of the convicts, instead of being of thick oak, as is usual in convict-ships, were quite thin and frail. The man next to me, upon the aft side, was one whom I had particularly noticed when we were led down the quay. He was a young man with a clear, hairless face, a long, thin nose, and rather nut-cracker jaws. He carried his head very jauntily in the air, ...
— Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes • Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
... student, native of the place, now returning up the Rossano road from Naples, where he had distinguished himself prominently in some examination. I joined the crowd, and presently we were met by a small carriage whence there emerged a pallid and frail adolescent with burning eyes, who was borne aloft in triumph and cheered with that vociferous, masculine heartiness which we Englishmen reserve for our popular prize-fighters. And this in the classic land of ...
— Old Calabria • Norman Douglas
... punishment with devotion, then extended himself on the St. Andrew's cross, asking with a resigned smile that they would make his sufferings as short as possible. As soon as his head was covered, the executioner gave the signal. One would have thought a very few blows would have finished so frail a being, but he seemed as hard to kill as the venomous reptiles which must be crushed and cut to pieces before life is extinct, and the coup de grace was found necessary. The executioner uncovered his head and showed the confessor ...
— CELEBRATED CRIMES, COMPLETE - DERUES • ALEXANDRE DUMAS, PERE
... you will ask him to preach the funeral sermon; but if he be too frail, then you will ask Mr. Trail, under whom I sat in Glasgow. The illustrated 'Pilgrim's Progress' on the drawers in my bedroom belongs to Mr. Trail, and you will return it to him ...
— The Little Minister • J.M. Barrie
... work of reference. Mr. Locker, for it is by this name, and as the author of 'London Lyrics,' that he will be best remembered, devoted his attention almost exclusively to English literature, although of late years he had devoted as much attention as his frail health would allow to the formation of a section of rare books in French literature. It would be impossible to describe in this place all the many book rarities at Rowfant; we must be content, therefore, with indicating a few of the more ...
— The Book-Hunter in London - Historical and Other Studies of Collectors and Collecting • William Roberts
... have taken the necessary precaution to prevent all the delays attendant upon travels of adventure, and would they have entrusted their lives to so frail a skiff, if they ...
— Common Sense - - Subtitle: How To Exercise It • Yoritomo-Tashi
... The former was the tomahawk in its passage; the latter the arm that Magua darted forward to divert its aim. The quick and ready motion of the chief was not entirely too late. The keen weapon cut the war plume from the scalping tuft of Uncas, and passed through the frail wall of the lodge as though it were ...
— The Last of the Mohicans • James Fenimore Cooper
... captain thought that the precious shells might be found; here we anchored, and the divers quickly got to work. I ought to have mentioned that we carried a large whale-boat, and about half-a-dozen frail little "shell" boats for the use of ...
— The Adventures of Louis de Rougemont - as told by Himself • Louis de Rougemont
... and frail, and her voice very gentle; she was the most trustful, uncomplaining woman ...
— Fighting the Whales • R. M. Ballantyne
... at the door thyself, if thou art afraid my breath will wither thy frail flower," Ahmara sneered. "Tell her to escape quickly into the shadows of the oasis, for the master will not care to lose his dignity in hunting her. As for thee, thou canst run to guard her from harm, as thou hast done before when she wandered, and I will carry word ...
— A Soldier of the Legion • C. N. Williamson
... 1576, a vote was taken on Luis de Leon's case. Seven members at least were present: Francisco de Menchaca, Andres de Alava, Luis Tello Maldonado, and Francisco de Albornoz voted that Luis de Leon should be put to the torture—a moderate amount of torture in view of his frail health—and, when this was done, the court should sit again and determine accordingly. Dr. Guijano de Mercado and Dr. Frechilla took a more lenient view, recommending that, in consideration of the more exculpatory ...
— Fray Luis de Leon - A Biographical Fragment • James Fitzmaurice-Kelly
... down with such a crash on the frail table that it cracked right across, and Clara was sickeningly alarmed when she saw his huge hands grip the table on either side and rend it asunder. There was something terrible and almost miraculous in his enormous physical vitality, ...
— Mummery - A Tale of Three Idealists • Gilbert Cannan
... luck!" Wutzler doffed his coolie hat, slid out of his jacket, tossed both down among the oil-jars, and stooping over the dead man, began to untwist the scarlet turban. In the dim light his lean arms and frail body, coated with black hair, gave him the look of a puny ape robbing a sleeper. He wriggled into the dead man's jacket, wound the blood-red cloth about his own temples, and caught up musket, ramrod, powder-horn, and bag of bullets.—"Now ...
— Dragon's blood • Henry Milner Rideout
... Hillton Academy. The elder and larger of the two was a rather coarse-looking youth of seventeen. His name was Bartlett Cloud, shortened by his acquaintances to "Bart" for the sake of that brevity beloved of the schoolboy. His companion, Wallace Clausen, was a handsome though rather frail-looking boy, a year his junior. The ...
— The Half-Back • Ralph Henry Barbour
... the boat alongside the Lighter, and dropped to the bottom. On the shore by the water's edge, was a rough tent, made of fragments of wreck, where other divers and workmen sheltered themselves, and where they had kept Christmas-day with rum and roast beef, to the destruction of their frail chimney. Cast up among the stones and boulders of the beach, were great spars of the lost vessel, and masses of iron twisted by the fury of the sea into the strangest forms. The timber was already bleached and iron rusted, and even these objects did no violence to the prevailing ...
— The Uncommercial Traveller • Charles Dickens
... appear in the world at long intervals, selected by God to be the leaders of multitudes, to be performers of miracles, achieving what is impossible for the common man. They live a life of constant inspiration, as if they were not guided by their own frail judgment, but, like Moses, by the smoke and the flame of God through a desert, through suffering and success, through happiness and misfortune, until they might see before them the Promised Land of Victory, some destined to enjoy ...
— Simon Bolivar, the Liberator • Guillermo A. Sherwell
... and criminal, do they gain their end, and is that end as salutary as they would wish? We dare not pronounce judgment. They may answer that they terrify the unjust rich man by pointing out to him the yawning pit that lies beneath the frail covering of wealth; just as in the time of the Dance of Death, they showed him his gaping grave, and Death standing ready to fold him in an impure embrace. Now, they show him the thief breaking open his doors, and the murderer stealthily ...
— The Devil's Pool • George Sand
... said the old woman. "He's thin and frail, nothing but bones. No mother and no one to care for ...
— The Witch and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... Fitzgeorge-street. Mr. Sheldon may, perhaps, have pitched his tent under the impression that wherever there was mankind there was likely to be toothache, and that the healer of an ill so common to frail humanity could scarcely fail to earn his bread, let him establish his abode of horror where he might. For some time after his arrival people watched him and wondered about him, and regarded him a little suspiciously, in spite of the substantial clumsiness ...
— Birds of Prey • M. E. Braddon
... due proportion of strength between the fastenings (joints) and the pieces fastened: i. e., the construction should neither be frail on the one hand, because the pieces of wood are weakened by too much cutting, nor clumsy, on the other hand, because then the fastenings would be inordinately strong. In other words, the different parts should be ...
— Handwork in Wood • William Noyes
... was thick with red-purple blossom. Patches of dusky heather were frosted with dainty pink. Spikes of genista and beds of needle-furze showed sharply yellow, vividly green, and a fringe of blue campanula, with frail, quivering bells, outlined all open spaces. The face of the land had been washed by the rain. It shone with an inimitable cleanliness, as though consciously happy in relief from all soil of dust. ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet
... in the afternoon of the seventh day since they had embarked on board their frail vessel, and nearly a month since they had been deserted on the mountains by the treacherous Tongusees, they found themselves in a fine wide channel, with a moderate current, and on a beach not far below descried a man and two boys mending a canoe. The effect the sight of human beings had ...
— The American Quarterly Review, No. 17, March 1831 • Various
... canoe by which to direct our course. The native boatmen, however, continued steering on, trusting to the wind, which had remained steadily blowing from one quarter. Still, as the waves rose, and our frail canoe pitched and tossed about, it seemed to me that she would be ...
— Mary Liddiard - The Missionary's Daughter • W.H.G. Kingston
... gravestone, to-night? Hast thou gone with me through my long pilgrimage of time? If I have kept thy counsels, and walked by their wisdom, hast thou approved, my mother? My mother, all that is good and pure in me has come of thee! If the allurements of vice have tempted, and frail nature has threatened to yield, the morning's admonition, the evening's counsel in our long walks, would strengthen me to forbearance. These bright memories have lived and remained with me a guide and salvation; and now they are the morning's memory, the evening's ...
— The Memories of Fifty Years • William H. Sparks
... In this frail craft sat the giant Ziffak, propelling it across the furious swirl with such prodigious power that though the spume dashed over it, the boat was driven by the sheer power of his mighty arms under, ...
— The Land of Mystery • Edward S. Ellis
... phenomenon, the birth Most richly wrought, the favorite child of earth; But frail at first his frame, with nerves ill strung, Unform'd his footsteps, long untoned his tongue, Unhappy, unassociate, unrefined, Unfledged the pinions of his lofty mind, He wander'd wild, to every beast a prey, ...
— The Columbiad • Joel Barlow
... amazed in meeting a mere child in such lonely wilds, and upon hearing his story, his kind heart was touched. David was a frail little fellow, whose weight would be no burden for a horse, and the good man directed him to mount the animal which he led. The boy had begun to be very tired. He was just approaching a turbid stream, whose icy waters, reaching almost ...
— David Crockett: His Life and Adventures • John S. C. Abbott
... as startled as if he had, for standing by him and looking inquiringly into his face was a being that, with her brilliant eyes and exquisitely clear and delicate complexion, seemed as beautiful, and at the same time as frail and ready to ...
— From Jest to Earnest • E. P. Roe
... his head leaning on his hand. A deadly cold perspiration trickled down his brow. His heart swelled and beat as if it would burst. What should he do? His whole prospects were in an instant blighted. "Oh God! do not desert a frail and unhappy being: give me strength to face this new and terrible misfortune," was a prayer he internally uttered. A little revived, he started to his feet, and addressing himself to the landlord, he said, "Take me to a magistrate ...
— The Experiences of a Barrister, and Confessions of an Attorney • Samuel Warren
... female unadorn'd and plain, Secure to please while youth confirms her reign, Slights every borrow'd charm that dress supplies, Nor shares with art the triumph of her eyes: 290 But when those charms are pass'd, for charms are frail, When time advances, and when lovers fail, She then shines forth, solicitous to bless, In all the glaring impotence of dress. Thus fares the land, by luxury betray'd, 295 In nature's simplest charms at first array'd; But verging to decline, its splendours ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Oliver Goldsmith • Oliver Goldsmith
... from the hills of credulous hope, they may so swell the gentle stream, as to make it difficult, if not impossible, to be retained betwixt its usual bounds. What then will be the consequence?—Why, the trees of resolution, and the shrubs of cautious fear, which grew upon the frail mound, and whose intertwining roots had contributed to support it, being loosened from their hold, they, and all that would swim of the bank itself, will be seen floating on the surface of ...
— Pamela (Vol. II.) • Samuel Richardson
... Bhagat's brothers joined them. He heard, though he could not see, the langurs pressing about him, and behind them the uhh! uhh! of Sona. The rain matted his long white hair into ropes; the water splashed beneath his bare feet, and his yellow robe clung to his frail old body, but he stepped down steadily, leaning against the barasingh. He was no longer a holy man, but Sir Purun Dass, K.C.I.E., Prime Minister of no small State, a man accustomed to command, going out to save life. Down the steep, plashy path they poured all ...
— The Second Jungle Book • Rudyard Kipling
... could poor old Abbot Hugo do? A frail old man, and the Philistines were upon him,—that is to say, the Hebrews. He had nothing for it but to shrink away from them; get back into his warm flannels, into his warm delusions again. Happily, before it was quite too late, he bethought him of pilgriming to St. Thomas ...
— Past and Present - Thomas Carlyle's Collected Works, Vol. XIII. • Thomas Carlyle
... a word that wipes away All thoughts revengeful: in that sacred name, The King, there lies a terror: what frail man Dares lift his hand against it? let the Gods Speak to him when they please; Till then let us ...
— The Maids Tragedy • Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher
... frame and osier work lined with leather, after the model of those used in the Channel among the Britons and subsequently by the Saxons, to be prepared in the camp and transported in waggons to the point where the bridges had stood. On these frail barks the other bank was reached and, as it was found unoccupied, the bridge was re-established without much difficulty; the road in connection with it was thereupon quickly cleared, and the eagerly-expected supplies ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... replied Reilly, "I would be too heavy for your frail chair. I will take one of those stout stools, which ...
— Willy Reilly - The Works of William Carleton, Volume One • William Carleton
... drag away a corpse, and that they will scarcely care to present to Ithobal. See, I have hidden poison in my breast, and here at my girdle hangs a dagger; are not the two of them enough to make an end of one frail life? Should they dare to touch me, I shall tell them through the bars that most certainly I shall drink the bane, or use the knife; and when they know it, they will leave me unharmed, hoping to starve me out, or trusting to chance ...
— Elissa • H. Rider Haggard
... Serbia! Thy clear-sighted spirit was to have but a glimpse of one of the most essential necessities of the Serbian people. Thy frail and fragile body has not permitted thee to enjoy the pleasure to which thou hast devoted so much love. For the well-being of this dear people thou hast given thyself entirely, even thy noble life. What a misfortune indeed ...
— Elsie Inglis - The Woman with the Torch • Eva Shaw McLaren
... your puir auld mother will have neither house nor hame. I'm crying to you for't, Kaytherine; hearken and you'll hear my cry across the cauldriff sea." It was a call from the heart which transported Katherine to Thrums in a second of time, she seemed to see her mother again, grown frail since last they met—and so all was well for Meggy. Tommy did not put all this to himself but he felt it, and after that he could not have written the letter differently. Happy Tommy! To be an artist is a great thing, ...
— Sentimental Tommy - The Story of His Boyhood • J. M. Barrie
... and warm with surrounding blankets. The room itself could not be so quickly warmed, but Granny knew no discomfort nor realized that her niece, with all her exertions, was still shaking now and then with chill and excitement. She had small notion of the anxiety Charlotte was suffering concerning her frail self. ...
— Mrs. Red Pepper • Grace S. Richmond
... deeds; and if we have turned our eyes for a moment to the Bloody Carnival of Perth, it is for the sake of the king, who was too upright for his bloodthirsty subjects, and, above all, for that of the noble-hearted lady whose frail arm was the guardian of her sovereign's life in the ...
— The Junior Classics • Various
... lips, for a black frown gathered on Robert's face, and his strong hands closed with an ugly sort of grip. But he did not touch the poor soul gasping there before him, and seemed content to let the slow suffocation of that stifling room end his frail life. ...
— A Modern Cinderella - or The Little Old Show and Other Stories • Louisa May Alcott
... his box at Turnham Green, To pick up health and shells with Amphitrite, Pleasure's frail daughters trip along the Steyne, Led by the dame the ...
— Highways & Byways in Sussex • E.V. Lucas
... the things of this life," said the divine, speaking in a hollow, sepulchral voice. "Thrice have I this day held forth in my Master's service, and fainted not; still it is prudent to help this frail tenement of clay, for, surely, 'the laborer is worthy of ...
— The Spy • James Fenimore Cooper
... that the story is going to be quite simple, in fact too frail to stand alone. So here and there I am going to plait something in with the thread of the narrative, just as the Chinaman does with his pigtail when it is too thin. He has no Eau de Lob or oil from Macassar—but I admit ...
— Walter Pieterse - A Story of Holland • Multatuli
... pleasantly diverting themselves, scarcely deserve mention in comparison with our New England champions, who, trusting not to carnal sword and lance, in a contest with principalities and powers, "spirits that live throughout, Vital in every part, not as frail man,"— encountered their enemies with weapons forged by the stern spiritual armorer of Geneva. The life of Cotton Mather is as full of romance as the legends of Ariosto or the tales of Beltenebros and Florisando in Amadis de Gaul. All about him was enchanted ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... occupy themselves, not with what is convenient, but with what is just. Let us lay hands boldly upon the temporal power, but let us not touch the doctrine of the Church. The one is as distinct from the other as the immortal soul from the frail and mortal body. To believe that the Church is attacked in taking away its earthly possessions is a real heresy to ...
— Modern Italian Poets • W. D. Howells
... Coan" and "Father Lyman," the former pastor of a large native congregation, which, though much shrunken, is not only self-sustaining, but contributes $1200 a year to foreign missions, and the latter, though very old and frail, the indefatigable head of an industrial school for native young men. Their houses combine the trimness of New England, with the luxuriance of the tropics; they are cool retreats, embowered among breadfruit, tamarind, and bamboo, through whose graceful leafage the blue ...
— The Hawaiian Archipelago • Isabella L. Bird
... begin with trouble here, Our life is but a span, And cruel death is always near, So frail ...
— Familiar Quotations • John Bartlett
... born a slave of the Goodman family, near Birmingham, Alabama. His master moved to Smith County, Texas, when Andrew was three years old. Andrew is a frail, kindly old man, who lives in his memories. He lives at 2607 ...
— Slave Narratives: a Folk History of Slavery in the United States From Interviews with Former Slaves. - Texas Narratives, Part 2 • Works Projects Administration
... Interim] so changed as to mean that man is renewed by the Holy Spirit, and can fulfil righteousness with his works, and that God will, for His Son's sake accept in believers this weak beginning of obedience in this miserable, frail nature." (Conf. Prin., 596.) ...
— Historical Introductions to the Symbolical Books of the Evangelical Lutheran Church • Friedrich Bente
... which challenged his right to live. But in that tense moment when he thought that it was all over, the lithe form of Thalma reached his side and in a frenzy of terror pulled him away. But even then the sloping belly of the onrushing beast tore him from her frail hands and dashed ...
— Omega, the Man • Lowell Howard Morrow
... along a narrow way rough with rocks and now slippery with rain. One of the canoes was lost here by being driven out into the strong current, where the force of the water was so great that it could not be held by the men; the frail skiff drifted down the rapids and disappeared. They now had two canoes and two periogues left, and the loads were divided among these craft. This increased the difficulties of navigation, and Captain Lewis ...
— First Across the Continent • Noah Brooks
... did look as though she needed rest. She seemed very frail, and the color had entirely left her face. But her curling hair was as golden as ever, and her figure as girlish and graceful. She kissed me tenderly, and kept my hand in hers as she wandered over the house and took ...
— Shapes that Haunt the Dusk • Various
... the doctor's throat when he turned away, and he was glad to smile at Father Orin's housekeeping. The priest certainly had left nothing in his power undone, to keep life in the frail little bodies. On the hearth was such food as he had been able to prepare, carefully covered to keep it warm. As the young man's gaze thus wandered sadly about the cabin, his eyes encountered the old man's. The laughter with which he was fighting emotion died on his lips, ...
— Round Anvil Rock - A Romance • Nancy Huston Banks
... he thought of his harshness, and Arthur's words, "make not her coming alone harder by one word or look," his grief became so violent and excessive that Charles was quite nonplussed, and went to consult Ada as to what should be done. In accordance with their plan, Ada took the frail little piece of humanity, and, approaching Lord Barrington, as he bent in sorrow over the corpse, said softly, "You have lost Arthur, and Arthur's wife, but you still have Arthur's child," and she laid the babe in ...
— Isabel Leicester - A Romance • Clotilda Jennings
... instinctively his mother's air of contentment was assumed. Then Baron Zeuill, with Brigit on his arm, followed. The Baron looked grave—too grave for the happy circumstances. Brigit seemed as pale as the lilies on the altar; she was less beautiful but more ethereal than usual. There was something frail, transparent, unsubstantial about her that day which Robert had never noticed before. Had the many emotional strains of the last year tried her delicate youth beyond endurance? She seemed very childish, too, and immature. ...
— Robert Orange - Being a Continuation of the History of Robert Orange • John Oliver Hobbes
... most charming surprise. William mastered his timidity and began to sing. His voice was a little faint and frail, like the family daguerreotypes, but it was a tenor voice, and perfectly true and sweet. I have never heard Home, Sweet Home sung as touchingly and seriously as he sang it; he seemed to make it quite new; and when he paused for a moment at the end of the first line and began the next, the ...
— The Country of the Pointed Firs • Sarah Orne Jewett
... her toils from your cooking-stove to her own. Young women are eagerly rushing into every other employment, till female trades and callings are all overstocked. We are continually harrowed with tales of the sufferings of distressed needle-women, of the exactions and extortions practised on the frail sex in the many branches of labor and trade at which they try their hands; and yet women will encounter all these chances of ruin and starvation rather than make up their minds to permanent domestic service. Now what is the matter with domestic service? ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 84, October, 1864 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... and turn your troubles, which are without remedy, into material for spiritual progress. Often turn to our Lord, who is watching you, poor frail little being as you are, amid your labors and distractions. He sends you help, and blesses your affliction. This thought should enable you to bear your troubles patiently and gently, for love of ...
— Daily Strength for Daily Needs • Mary W. Tileston
... (and hospitality) through her unassuming pluck. To my mind she is the ideal adventuress of a new, unknown, and therefore deadly type; but for once I rejoiced at sight of the pallid, fragile woman, so cheerful in spite of frail health, so frank about her twenty-eight years. She had news to tell of a nature so exciting that, after a whisper or two, Cleopatra forgot Anthony in her desire to know the latest ...
— It Happened in Egypt • C. N. Williamson & A. M. Williamson
... perfect as the most powerful of men were it not for one little spot on the bright sun of his fame. They did not like his domestic habits. The daughter who stood by his side on the watch tower was a young girl of charm, a fair, frail maiden, a slender lily under the towering shadow of her dark father. The citizens did not, perhaps, understand his instincts of paternity; and, indeed, if they understood them they would not have given them the sanction of their approval. The people only saw ...
— Waysiders • Seumas O'Kelly
... wrists—a typical old lady of the ancient type. Yet as she stood beside the bed there was a curious likeness to be observed between her face and the one on the pillow; and Sylvia recognised as much, and felt a thrill of dismay at the thought that some day she, too, would be frail and bent, and wear a cap and mittens, and have rheumatic joints, and attacks of bronchitis if by chance she was so imprudent as to go out without putting on goloshes, a woollen "crossover," and a big silk muffler beneath her mantle. To one- and-twenty it seemed an appalling prospect, ...
— More about Pixie • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... its thunder, Though still the rock primeval disappears And nations change their bounds—the theme of wonder Shall Sam go down the cataract of long years: And if there be sublimity in tears, Those shall be precious which the adventurer shed When his frail star gave way, and waked his fears, Lest, by the ungenerous crowd it might be said, That he was all a hoax, or ...
— Masterpieces Of American Wit And Humor • Thomas L. Masson (Editor)
... successes in the Shenandoah Valley; and there was a great battle imminent on Northern soil. Stephens was directed to proceed by the Valley to join Lee, and from his headquarters try to reach Washington. Heavy rains and bad roads deterred the frail Vice- President. At length the Secretary of the Confederate Navy sent him in a small steamer (the Torpedo) under a flag of truce, accompanied by Commissioner Robert Ould as his secretary, to Fortress ...
— Slavery and Four Years of War, Vol. 1-2 • Joseph Warren Keifer
... interval followed. Leo XIII had at last lowered his eyes. With frail, ivory hand he took up the glass beside him, again stirred the syrup with the long spoon, and then drank a little of it. And all this he did gently and slowly, with a prudent, judicious air, as was his wont no doubt in everything. "I have read your book, ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... rougher work, and the weeds and brambles so running riot. There were high hedges and winding paths overgrown and run wild; the stronger rose-bushes grew in tangled masses, flinging forth their rich blooms among the weeds; such as were more delicate, struggling to live among them, became more frail and scant-blossoming season by season; a careless foot would have trodden them beneath it as their branches grew long and trailed in the grass; but for many months no foot had trodden there at all, and it was ...
— A Lady of Quality • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... are a strong duck, and so it has not hurt you yet. But you see that your frail little ones are all gone. It is all through your careless habit of letting them dabble in the mud all day and ...
— Dick and His Cat and Other Tales • Various
... of her pale misery she did not look more—drew her dark shawl more closely round herself and the child with a little, despairing shudder, glancing over her shoulder. Rainham let his eyes rest on the frail figure pityingly, and a thought of the river behind her struck him with a ...
— A Comedy of Masks - A Novel • Ernest Dowson and Arthur Moore
... Mary Alice something of the stars as the sailors' friends; and she had one of the most memorable evenings of her life when he explained to her something of the science of navigation and made her see how their great greyhound of the ocean, just like the first frail barks of the Tyrians, picked its way across trackless wastes of sea by the infallible guidance of "the friendly stars." All this particularly interested Mary Alice because of Some One who lived much in the open and spent many ...
— Everybody's Lonesome - A True Fairy Story • Clara E. Laughlin
... considered better that he should remain, Lady Coke being old and very frail in spite of her activity and energy of character. Miss Leigh was to take the children home, and explain all that had occurred to Mrs. De Bohun, who was ...
— Chatterbox, 1906 • Various
... light and heat of political nature; and when some 'Caesarism' exhibits as it sometimes will an originality of mind, it is only because it has managed to make its own the products of past free times or neighbouring free countries; and even that originality is only brief and frail, and after a little while, when tested by a generation or two, in time of need ...
— Physics and Politics, or, Thoughts on the application of the principles of "natural selection" and "inheritance" to political society • Walter Bagehot
... Brandram telling of his arrival in Madrid, "begging pardon for all errors of commission and omission," and confessing himself "a frail and foolish vessel," that had "accomplished but a slight portion of what I proposed in my vanity," Borrow proceeded to disprove his own assertion. He found the affairs of the Bible Society in a far from flourishing ...
— The Life of George Borrow • Herbert Jenkins
... not Hoodwinked with rustic marvels, I do think There are more things in the grove, the air, the flood, Yea, and the charnelled earth, than what wise man, Who walks so proud as if his form alone Filled the wide temple of the universe, Will let a frail mind say. I'd write i' the creed O' the sagest head alive, that fearful forms, Holy or reprobate, do page men's heels; That shapes, too horrid for our gaze, stand o'er The murderer's dust, and for revenge glare up, Even till the stars weep ...
— Folk-Lore and Legends - Scotland • Anonymous
... free from the stem and rounded behind (near the stem). The stem is white, nearly cylindrical, or it tapers a little toward the lower end. The flesh is solid, though the central core is less firm. The veil is thin, white, silky, and very frail. It is stretched as the cap expands and finally torn so that it clings either as an annulus around the stem, or fragments cling around the margin of the cap. Since the annulus is so frail it shrivels as the plant ages and becomes quite inconspicuous or disappears ...
— Studies of American Fungi. Mushrooms, Edible, Poisonous, etc. • George Francis Atkinson
... wondering very anxiously whether he would find Mrs. Dangerfield on the bank of the stream that evening watching her children fish. His night's rest had trebled his interest in her and his desire to see more, a great deal more, of her. The appeal to him of her frail and delicate beauty was ...
— The Terrible Twins • Edgar Jepson
... softness of the pure metal, and the chinking curb-patterned silver anklets hanging low over the rosy ankle-bone. She was dressed in jade-green muslin as befitted a daughter of the Faith, and from shoulder to elbow and elbow to wrist ran bracelets of silver tied with floss silk, frail glass bangles slipped over the wrist in proof of the slenderness of the hand, and certain heavy gold bracelets that had no part in her country's ornaments but, since they were Holden's gift and fastened with a cunning European snap, delighted ...
— Life's Handicap • Rudyard Kipling
... courteous ladies were, Who worshipt virtue, and not worldly gear. Women in this degenerate age are rare, To whom aught else but sordid gain is dear; But they who real goodness make their care, Nor with the avaricious many steer, In this frail life are worthy to be blest, — Held glorious and immortal when ...
— Orlando Furioso • Lodovico Ariosto
... Lee's heart was pounding, seeming to thump in his throat as Aura led him silently forward. It was a draped, cave-like little room. Breathless, Lee stared at a couch—a thin old figure lying there—a frail man with white hair that framed his wrinkled face. It was a face that was smiling, its sunken, burning eyes glowing with a new intensity. The lips moved; a faint old ...
— The World Beyond • Raymond King Cummings
... for Belle. She cried, then she laughed, then she fell on her knees and thanked God, and she told me she added that, for pity's sake, He must set His angels to guard Mary, for she was a poor, frail child, who had got lost in coming this time, and many persecuted her because she was pretty, and might find a resting place and get a little of what rightfully ...
— The Making of Mary • Jean Forsyth
... was a long building of a brownish granite, under Merchant's Point, at the northern extremity of Old Grimsey Harbour. Mr. Lovyes was sitting over his walnuts in the cheerless solitude of his dining-room—a frail old gentleman, older than his years, which I took to be sixty or thereabouts, and with the air of a man in a decline. I unfolded my business forthwith, but I had not got ...
— Ensign Knightley and Other Stories • A. E. W. Mason
... Till the deaf world's ear be made to hear The cry of the wordless weak. From street, from cage, and from kennel, From jungle and stall, the wail Of my tortured kin proclaims the sin Of the mighty against the frail. ...
— Poems of Experience • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... would not be my death? Go dig The white-grape vineyard where the oil-press stood, Drop water gently till the surface sink, And if ye find ... Ah God, I know not, I!... Bedded in store of rotten fig-leaves soft, And corded up in a tight olive-frail, Some lump, ah God, of lapis lazuli, Big as a Jew's head cut off at the nape, Blue as a vein o'er the Madonna's breast.... Sons, all have I bequeathed you, villas, all, That brave Frascati-villa with its bath, So, let the blue lump poise between my knees, Like God the Father's globe on both ...
— An Introduction to the Study of Browning • Arthur Symons
... sentence, by the interest it displayed in its object, seemed to establish the truth of a suspicion which she at first only uttered from the vague workings of her revenge. Triumphing in the belief that he bad found another as frail as herself, and yet maddened that another should have been preferred before her, her jealous pride blazed into ...
— The Scottish Chiefs • Miss Jane Porter
... which they had returned from Seal Bay was changed. The dogs were fresh, and the long sled was laden with a canoe that was securely lashed to it. The blankets and stores were loaded in the frail body of the ...
— The Heart of Unaga • Ridgwell Cullum
... thee we bow; How frail are we, how glorious thou! No more the sons of earth shall dare With ...
— Hymns and Spiritual Songs • Isaac Watts
... upright, unless I bend his legs." A fifth said—"He will not be able to think, unless I press his brain." "Stop!" said the traveller. "Whatever God does, is well done; do not pretend to know more than He; and as He has given organs to this frail creature, allow those organs to develop themselves, to strengthen themselves by ...
— Essays on Political Economy • Frederic Bastiat
... without getting into trouble, and they crossed the city to where a row of squalid frame shacks stood on its outskirts. In the one they entered, a gaunt man with grizzled hair lay upon a rickety bed. A glance showed Vane that the man was very frail, and the harsh cough that he broke into as the colder air from outside flowed in made the fact clearer. Drayton, hastily shutting the door and explaining the cause of the visit, ...
— Vane of the Timberlands • Harold Bindloss
... illustration, picture-written history—written with a chisel and brush, written large that all might read. There was no other safe way of preserving record. There were no books; the papyrus sheet, used extensively, was frail, and the Egyptians evidently wished their buildings, carvings, and paintings to last into eternity. So they wrought in and upon stone. The same hieroglyphic character of their papyrus writings appeared ...
— A Text-Book of the History of Painting • John C. Van Dyke
... noting the extended arms, and thinking the other would lay violent hands upon him, Fawkes sprang forward and seized the frail form about the shoulders; small time to note the softness of the flesh and the clinging woman's garments, or the low cry which answers the grasp of his iron hand. The blackness of the place hides their faces, and his business is to carry ...
— The Fifth of November - A Romance of the Stuarts • Charles S. Bentley
... and successfully annoy, has always been held as an amusement among frail humanity. And what can more successfully annoy than the ridiculing of that which ...
— Debts of Honor • Maurus Jokai
... death—no! even in the grave all is not lost. Else there is no immortality for man. Arousing from the most profound of slumbers, we break the gossamer web of some dream. Yet in a second afterward, (so frail may that web have been) we remember not that we have dreamed. In the return to life from the swoon there are two stages; first, that of the sense of mental or spiritual; secondly, that of the sense of physical, existence. It seems ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 2 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... the winter months picked up a meager education at the district school. He has said that it was the rude and imperfect mills of his father that first turned his attention to machinery. He was not fitted for hard work, however, as he was frail in constitution and incapable of bearing much fatigue. Moreover, he inherited a species of lameness which proved a great obstacle to any undertaking on his part, and gave him no little trouble all through life. At the age of eleven he went to live out on the farm of ...
— Great Fortunes, and How They Were Made • James D. McCabe, Jr.
... fear and grief Wouldst, on a sick-bed laid, recall, In youth and health eschew them all, Remembering life is frail and brief. ...
— Book of Wise Sayings - Selected Largely from Eastern Sources • W. A. Clouston
... four clay pots filled with dry earth. There was a railed porch on the east side of the house, with vines climbing on strings about it, and here the old woman, clean with the wonderful, cool-fingered cleanness of frail yet energetic seventy-five, would sit reading in the afternoon shade that fell from the great shoulders of ...
— The Heart of Rachael • Kathleen Norris
... Gallery of Fine Arts. He walked slowly, with a stoop, his hands behind him. Now and then he paused to enjoy the last tints of pink and purple and dusky saffron mirrored in the reaches of the river or to watch the swing of some college crew and the swan-like movement of their long, frail shell. ...
— The Street Called Straight • Basil King
... revolting paroxysms Spike breathed his last. A few hours later his body was interred in the sands of the shore. It may be well to say in this place, that the hurricane of 1846, which is known to have occurred only a few months later, swept off the frail covering and that the body was washed away to leave its bones among the wrecks and ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII. No. 3. March 1848 • Various
... his glance was on the frail, almost transparent hands which held the roll of paper flat ...
— Rainbow Hill • Josephine Lawrence
... moment later. He was a little, frail man, walking with the aid of a stick. He had snow-white hair, rather thick and long, pale cheeks and eyes of a bright china-blue. He had that quality, given to only a few in this world of happy mediocrities, of filling, at once, any room into which he entered with the strength ...
— The Cathedral • Hugh Walpole
... trunks. A stream led from it into the distance that appeared greener and still more cheerful. Overhead, in the gnarled branches and leafy boughs were scores of snowy birds, egrets that had chosen the place for a nesting site. Some of them squatted on frail stick platforms; others sat motionless on the tips of the branches. Steady streams were coming and going constantly, resembling giant snowflakes that glistened and twinkled as the white ...
— The Black Phantom • Leo Edward Miller
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