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More "Impregnable" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... hard and wiry, with those lines in his face that time neither obliterates nor deepens; the parallels of hunger. He had been through the first Carlist war nearly thirty years earlier. He had starved in Pampeluna, the hungry, the impregnable. ...
— The Velvet Glove • Henry Seton Merriman
... Paris, and General de Castelnau, who also commanded at the battle of the Marne, and is now chief of staff of General Joffre, has just visited him here. General de Castelnau was sent to "go, look, see." He reports that the position now held by the Allies is impregnable. ...
— With the French in France and Salonika • Richard Harding Davis
... walked on to the bridge. In the brilliant sunshine spires were glistening against the pearly background of the hills; the town had a clean, joyous air. Swithin glanced at the Citadel and thought, 'Looks a strong place! Shouldn't wonder if it were impregnable!' And this for some occult reason gave him pleasure. It occurred to him suddenly to go and look ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... she feared, given her reputation; and, as she had a wonderful presence of mind, she conceived the person of the unfortunate beau to be luckily thrown in her way to restore her lady's opinion of her impregnable chastity. At that instant, therefore, when he offered to leap from the bed, she caught fast hold of his shirt, at the same time roaring out, "O thou villain! who hast attacked my chastity, and, I believe, ruined me in my sleep; I will ...
— Joseph Andrews, Vol. 2 • Henry Fielding
... she had sustained at the hands of the Visigothic leader. But the Huns, unskilful in siege work, were long detained before the walls of Aquileia, that great and flourishing frontier city, hitherto deemed impregnable, which gathered in the wealth of the Venetian province, and guarded the north-eastern approaches to Italy. At length by a sudden assault they made themselves masters of the city, which they destroyed with utter destruction, putting all the inhabitants ...
— Theodoric the Goth - Barbarian Champion of Civilisation • Thomas Hodgkin
... pretensions of naturalists, the question comes up again whole and entire? When by dint of confusions and sophisms such theorists imagine that they have extinguished the intelligence which radiates from nature, that intelligence again confronts them in man, and there, as in an impregnable fortress, sets all attacks at defiance. Mark then where lies the real problem. Whether the eternal God formed the body of the first man directly from the dust of the earth; or whether, in the slow series of ages, He formed the body of the ...
— The Heavenly Father - Lectures on Modern Atheism • Ernest Naville
... the old Romans, and now he was applying it with gusto to the wild scene lost in the vast green wilderness. But he was sure that the Indians would not return to a headlong charge. The little fortress in stone was practically impregnable to frontal attack and they would resort ...
— The Keepers of the Trail - A Story of the Great Woods • Joseph A. Altsheler
... must always, however far they may go in reducing so-called "matter" to so-called "spirit," remain outside the real problem. No attenuation of "matter" into movement or energy or magnetic radio-activity can reach the impregnable citadel of life. For the citadel of life is to be found in nothing less than the complex of personality—whether such personality be that of a planet or a plant or an animal or a man or a god—must always be recognized as inherent in an actual living soul-monad, ...
— The Complex Vision • John Cowper Powys
... her first lover, was also her instructor in this philosophy, and the principles he instilled into her mind were such as tended to seduce her. Finding her cold and impregnable on the side of her passions, and firmly attached to her husband and her duty, he attacked her by sophisms, endeavoring to prove that the list of duties she thought so sacred, was but a sort of catechism, fit only for children. That the kind of infidelity she thought so terrible, ...
— The Confessions of J. J. Rousseau, Complete • Jean Jacques Rousseau
... escort of dragoons, to the fortress of Nantes. From this place he almost miraculously escaped to his own territory of Retz, where he was regarded as sovereign, and where he was surrounded by retainers who, in impregnable castles, would fight to the death for their lord. These scenes took place early in ...
— Louis XIV., Makers of History Series • John S. C. Abbott
... was made by the prisoners upon the portals opening into Bank Buildings and Sweeting's Kents; but the former having been shattered sometime since on a similar occasion, and subsequently very strongly repaired, it was found impregnable, at least to any immediate exertion of force, and being neither furnished with a park of artillery, nor with the battering ram of the ancients, the little army faced to the right about, enfiladed the area, and took up a new position, in due order of assault, against ...
— Real Life In London, Volumes I. and II. • Pierce Egan
... the work and make plans for fortifications that should be impregnable. He looked the ground over thoroughly, traveling on horseback, and his two servants followed him up in a cart drawn by a bull, which Leonardo calmly explains ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 6 - Subtitle: Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Artists • Elbert Hubbard
... impregnated Russia with a strong anti-British feeling, and it was said that her activity in running up earthworks and apparently impregnable fortifications was in anticipation of Disraeli declaring war and ordering the fleet to bombard the Crimean ports; hence, too, in addition to the strong fortifications, torpedo mines were laid for miles along the seaboard, and every possible means and opportunity were taken to make ...
— Looking Seaward Again • Walter Runciman
... afterwards the crusaders began the storming of Acre, the impregnable fortress of the Saracens. Ronald was fighting by Henry's side. A Saracen dashed his falchion at the king's head, but Ronald with a mighty blow clove the infidel's skull in two. In the evening of the same day Henry called all his warriors together, ...
— Legends of the Rhine • Wilhelm Ruland
... finding all his efforts to carry that fort fruitless, and the British army receiving fresh acquisitions of strength, all seemed to conspire to render the case of General Brown hopeless; who, now perceiving the situation in which he was placed—the forts in his front to him completely impregnable, and an army in his rear in full flow of spirits, and every day gathering new strength (though by no means equal to his as regarded numbers), a Canadian Militia, and unexpectedly to him, fervent beyond ...
— The Loyalists of America and Their Times, Vol. 2 of 2 - From 1620-1816 • Edgerton Ryerson
... the ancient and impregnable theory that all brides are beautiful, was there ever a woman who looked her best in the uniform of approaching servitude? In any case, Ellaphine's best was not good, and she was at her worst in her ill-fitting white gown, with the veil askew. Her graceless carriage ...
— In a Little Town • Rupert Hughes
... ascribes reality and eternal validity to the combinations of ideas formed independently of perception, which are employed by mathematics and ethics, and completely abandons the individualistic position in his naive faith in the impregnable validity of the relations of ideas, which is evident to all who turn their attention to them. The ground for the universal validity of the relations among ideas as well as of our knowledge of them, naturally lies not in their empirical origin (for my ...
— History Of Modern Philosophy - From Nicolas of Cusa to the Present Time • Richard Falckenberg
... love-locks on his skull after he had so long done with love. There seems to be a fatality that disturbs people in their sepulchres, when they have been over-careful to render them magnificent and impregnable,—as witness the builders of the Pyramids, and Hadrian, Augustus, and the Scipios, and most other personages whose mausoleums have been conspicuous enough to attract the violator; and as for dead men's hair, I have seen a lock of King Edward the Fourth's, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 62, December, 1862 • Various
... had come and gone in secret and by night, yet some suspicion of these Spanish visits had got abroad. The Dean men were proud of their magnificent sweep of forest-clad hills and dales, and prouder still of the oaks that gave their beloved England her impregnable "wooden walls." They were wild with anger and indignation when the first rumours of King Philip's plot came to their ears. Now they were inclined to treat the daring project with quiet contempt, but Windybank knew that scant mercy would be shown a forest ...
— Sea-Dogs All! - A Tale of Forest and Sea • Tom Bevan
... she had understood him; that she understood he had been living in the past as if in an impregnable fortress, surrounded by shadows that were not to be dispelled or disturbed by the presumption of any living human being. She remarked that she had neither intention nor desire to encroach upon his peace of mind, that she was merely concerned ...
— The Goose Man • Jacob Wassermann
... overcome in one, of whom he hath more hold; by whom he hath hold of more. But the proud he hath more hold of, through their nobility; and by them, of more through their authority. By how much the more welcome then the heart of Victorinus was esteemed, which the devil had held as an impregnable possession, the tongue of Victorinus, with which mighty and keen weapon he had slain many; so much the more abundantly ought Thy sons to rejoice, for that our King hath bound the strong man, and they saw his vessels taken from him and cleansed, and made meet for ...
— The Confessions of Saint Augustine • Saint Augustine
... previously said, part company with the parent tree most readily, float away on the stream, and easily establish themselves on banks and bars, where their tough, interlacing roots soon form an almost impregnable barrier to the onslaught of the flood. Only a stone's throw away there stood a great old black willow, with a sturdy trunk of ebon hue, crowned with a mass of soft green leafage, lighter where the breeze lifted up the under side to the ...
— Getting Acquainted with the Trees • J. Horace McFarland
... her all his love, all his passion, all his essential energy. But it could not be. He must find other things than her, other centres of living. She sat close and impregnable with the child. And he was jealous ...
— The Rainbow • D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
... corner, and almost impregnable; it is for this very reason also almost unescapable, as he learns to his cost later on. However, he comes to anchor here, and ...
— Rossmoyne • Unknown
... no wall so impregnable or so vulgar, but a summer's grass will attempt it. It will try to persuade the yellow brick, to win the purple slate, to reconcile stucco. Outside the authority of the suburbs it has put a luminous touch everywhere. The thatch of cottages has given it an opportunity. ...
— The Colour of Life • Alice Meynell
... possession of the Geraldines. Vast labour had been recently expended on its fortifications, for which the king's subjects had been forced to pay. It was defended by the ordnance from Dublin, and held by a small but adequate garrison. It was thought to be impregnable, and in the earlier stages of the science of gunnery it might possibly have defied the ordinary methods of attack. Nay, with a retrospective confidence in the strength of its defences, the Irish historians ...
— History of England from the Fall of Wolsey to the Death of Elizabeth. Vol. II. • James Anthony Froude
... before. He also conquered the province of the Canaris, and those who resisted were totally destroyed. The Canaris submitted from fear, and he took their Sinchis, named Pisar Ccapac, Canar Ccapac and Chica Ccapac, and built an impregnable fortress there ...
— History of the Incas • Pedro Sarmiento de Gamboa
... thing could be, half suspecting it might be his daughter. "What is it, my lord?" said he. And Cyrus answered, "I will tell you. A man may hate injustice and impiety and lies, but if no one offers him vast wealth or unbridled power or impregnable fortresses or lovely children, he dies before he can show what manner of man he is. [10] But you have placed everything in my hands to-day, this mighty fortress, treasures of every kind, your own power, and a daughter most worthy ...
— Cyropaedia - The Education Of Cyrus • Xenophon
... in well-chosen positions in France, which might be impregnable against even forces as superior as three to one; the Austrian army was safely established in front of the Russians. Both the French and the Russians were short of munitions, and particularly of guns of heavier caliber, and of high-explosive ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume I (of 8) - Introductions; Special Articles; Causes of War; Diplomatic and State Papers • Various
... get every one interested. So they draw for partners. The class which is about to effervesce socially holds a meeting. At this meeting the names of all the men are put in one hat and the names of all the girls in another. Then two judges of impregnable honesty draw out a name from each hat simultaneously and read ...
— At Good Old Siwash • George Fitch
... habit, which emphasised itself as he grew older, was to treat the staring crowd in front of his booth like a family of nephews and nieces. The device was quite useless, for the public's stolidity was impregnable. It touched the heroic. No more granitic and crass stolidity could have been discovered in England. The crowd stood; it exercised no other function of existence. It just stood, and there it would stand until convinced that the gratis part of ...
— Clayhanger • Arnold Bennett
... which passed with many others to the unfortunate Gilles de Bretagne, by his marriage with the heiress Francoise de Dinan. The castle is approached by a steep winding path, leading to the plateau upon which it stands. Before the use of firearms, its position rendered it impregnable. Of its seven towers, two ...
— Brittany & Its Byways • Fanny Bury Palliser
... meanwhile sat proud in his hole, with all his badger kin around him, and laughed his well-known badger laugh at his disconsolate foes. Such a brock had not for years been seen in the country-side; so cool, so resolute, so knowing in his badger ways, so impregnable in his badger hole, and so good-humoured withal. He could bite full sore with those old teeth of his, and yet he never condescended to show them. A badger indeed of whom the ...
— The Three Clerks • Anthony Trollope
... or two he stood in the great marble rotunda looking around him. In that club familiar figures were lacking—men whose social and financial position only a few months before seemed impregnable, men who had gone down in ruin, one or two who had perished by their own hand, several whose physical and financial stamina had been shattered at the same terrible moment. Some were ill, some dead, some had resigned, ...
— The Danger Mark • Robert W. Chambers
... still too uncertain for quietude. Yet he could not but catch a solace from his splendid craft. Said he to himself: 'Am I not the most accomplished slip-string the world has known? The broken wall of every round house in town attests my bravery. Light-limbed though I be, have I not forced the impregnable Castle itself? And my enemies—are they not to-day writhing in distress ? The head of Blueskin, that pitiful thief, quivers in the noose; and Jonathan Wild bleeds at the throat from the dregs of a coward's courage. What a triumph ...
— A Book of Scoundrels • Charles Whibley
... busy and irreverent Street, soon came the slings and arrows which pierced even Mr. Gunterson's almost impregnable self-esteem. Only a few days after his return he overheard a conversation between Mr. Cuyler and a placer, in the Guardian's own office, which showed how the ...
— White Ashes • Sidney R. Kennedy and Alden C. Noble
... for the democracies of to-morrow; for he had not been able to probe things, and only carried a first impression away with him. But how keen it was, and how ill it boded for his dreams! A gate of bronze! Yes, a hard, impregnable gate, so completely shutting the Vatican off from the rest of the world that nothing new had entered the palace for three hundred years. Behind that portal the old centuries, as far as the sixteenth, remained immutable. Time seemed to have stayed its course there ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... to move out of its orbit. Very slowly at first, but faster and faster. They continued to blast, with all their prodigious might and in carefully-computed order, until the desired orbit was attained—an orbit which terminated in a vertical line through the center of the Stretts' supposedly impregnable retreat. ...
— Masters of Space • Edward Elmer Smith
... a short period before the commencement of our narrative that Eleanor Byron was really in love, and for the first time; for though her cousin Oliver, as she usually called him, had stormed, and perchance carried the outworks, yet the citadel was impregnable and unapproached. But she knew not that it was love. A soft and pleasing impression stole insensibly upon her, then dejection and melancholy. Her heart was vacant, and she sighed for an object, and for its possession. It was a silly wish, but so ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 2 (of 2) • John Roby
... Arabs from all parts of Africa, and in the train of all this great host such munitions and engines of war, and so many pioneers that with their hands they might have covered the Goletta and the fort with handfuls of earth. The first to fall was the Goletta, until then reckoned impregnable, and it fell, not by any fault of its defenders, who did all that they could and should have done, but because experiment proved how easily entrenchments could be made in the desert sand there; for ...
— Don Quixote • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... surrounded upon all sides by cliffs, which serve it as ramparts and render it very difficult of access. Having arrived within three gun-shots of Lussan, Cavalier sent Ravanel to demand provisions from the inhabitants; but they, proud of their natural ramparts, and believing their town impregnable, not only refused to comply with the requisition, but fired several shots on the envoy, one of which wounded in the arm a Camisard of the name of La Grandeur, who had accompanied Ravanel. Ravanel withdrew, supporting his wounded comrade, followed by ...
— Massacres Of The South (1551-1815) - Celebrated Crimes • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... but I did not do so. Where the original deed may be, I don't know even now. It may be among some of my father's papers, which are stored in New York. But the record of the transfers I found in Ostable; and that is sufficient. My claim may not be quite as impregnable as I gave my late client to understand, but it will be hard to upset. I am the only possible claimant and I have transferred my claim to Mrs. Barnes. The land belongs to her now; ...
— Thankful's Inheritance • Joseph C. Lincoln
... would be able to command a majority remained to be seen. There were men among the doubtful who would be disposed to favor Thatcher because he had driven a wedge into the old Bassett stone wall. No one else had ever succeeded in imperiling the security of that impregnable stronghold. The thought of this made Harwood uncomfortable. It was unfortunate from every standpoint that the legislature should be called upon to choose a Senator without the usual time for preparation. Dan had already been struck by the general air ...
— A Hoosier Chronicle • Meredith Nicholson
... the American Consul we obtained a special permit to visit the fortifications, particularly of that portion which forms the lofty and impregnable citadel. It is difficult to decide in this most remarkable fortress whether nature or art has done the most to render it what it seems absolutely to be, impregnable,—the strongest citadel in the world. The improvements in modern gunnery have lately caused important additions ...
— Due West - or Round the World in Ten Months • Maturin Murray Ballou
... Alwa, should he see fit. He has men and horses, and a fort that is impregnable. The Miss-sahib would be safe ...
— Rung Ho! • Talbot Mundy
... Te-gat-ha. Strong in its beauty as in its battles—it yet retained a sensuous atmosphere that was as the mingling of rose bloom and wild plum blossom, of crushed mint grown in the shadows of the moist places, and clinging feathery clematis, binding by its tendrils green thickets into walls impregnable. ...
— The Flute of the Gods • Marah Ellis Ryan
... joints in the present instance seemed unnecessary. For I was not prepared to see Father Mapple after gaining the height, slowly turn round, and stooping over the pulpit, deliberately drag up the ladder step by step, till the whole was deposited within, leaving him impregnable in ...
— Moby Dick; or The Whale • Herman Melville
... his credit as president, which will be monuments in history, are extraordinary in number and importance. To mention only a few: He placed the Monroe Doctrine before European governments upon an impregnable basis by his defiance to the German Kaiser, when he refused to accept arbitration and was determined to make war on Venezuela. The president cabled: "Admiral Dewey with the Atlantic Fleet sails to-morrow." And the Kaiser accepted ...
— My Memories of Eighty Years • Chauncey M. Depew
... careful examination of the rocks on the hill proves must mostly have been quarried from granite about twelve miles distant. And all this in spite of the fact that Nature alone had made the hill already impregnable, it being inaccessible on three sides and very difficult of ascent on the fourth. It is one of Rhodesia's mysteries, and one also of its fascinations; those mysteries and fascinations which so far have effectually baffled all efforts to find the clue and read the closed book. Who was it came ...
— The Rhodesian • Gertrude Page
... besought his hearers not to trust too implicitly to that hitherto unconquerable valour and resource which had so far rendered Britain impregnable to her enemies. These were not the days of personal valour. They were the days of warfare by machinery, of wholesale destruction by means which men had never before been called upon to face, and which ...
— The Angel of the Revolution - A Tale of the Coming Terror • George Griffith
... right and wrong, or they surrender the chief advantage of their position. What Spinoza says of laws is equally true of party platforms,—that those are strong which appeal to reason, but those are impregnable which compel the assent both of reason and the common ...
— The Writings of James Russell Lowell in Prose and Poetry, Volume V - Political Essays • James Russell Lowell
... not so much the loss of the fortress itself,—as costly as it was to the impoverished colonies, that could have been borne,—but the people had been led to believe, and did believe, it was next to impregnable; nor could they understand why those who had been intrusted with its defence should have fled without striking a blow, or calling for assistance ...
— Burgoyne's Invasion of 1777 - With an outline sketch of the American Invasion of Canada, 1775-76. • Samuel Adams Drake
... quickly. "That's what I expected as a first question. No, I carried very little insurance. You see, I thought the safe, one of those new chrome steel affairs, was about impregnable. I never lost a moment's sleep over it; didn't think it possible for anyone to get into it. For, as you see, it is completely wired by the Hale Electric Protection—that wooden framework about it. No one could touch that when it was set without ...
— The War Terror • Arthur B. Reeve
... darkness, where several of his confederates met him, as had been preconcerted; and in a few minutes after Egbert had left her side, Bettina, all unconscious, was being carried fair away to the almost impregnable stronghold of the robbers. ...
— The Duke's Prize - A Story of Art and Heart in Florence • Maturin Murray
... ravaged the Roman Empire of the East almost without opposition. Only the impregnable walls of Constantinople resisted the destruction. A few years later the savage horde appeared upon the Rhine, and in enormous numbers penetrated Gaul. No people had yet understood them, none had even checked their career. The white races seemed helpless against ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 4 • Various
... Unfortunately, the people who need them aren't up on them. Try it. Plant yourself, penniless, in the middle of State Street on a busy day, dive into the howling, scrambling, pushing maelstrom that hurls itself against the mountainous and impregnable form of the crossing policeman, and see what you'll get out of it, provided ...
— Buttered Side Down • Edna Ferber
... Armiger; which, observe, is the newest, oldest, most classic mode of saying that one is privileged to bear arms in a sense intelligible only to the Herald's College. This Armiger, this undeniable Squire, was doubly distinguished: first, by his iron constitution and impregnable health; which were of such quality, and like the sword of Michael, the warrior-angel ("Paradise Lost," B. vi.), had "from the armory of God been given him tempered so," that no insurance office, trafficking in life-annuities, would have ventured to look him in the face. ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey
... between them upon a colestaff. When they had seen the country and considered by the space of forty days they returned and told the commodities of the land, but some said that the people were strong, and many kings and giants, in such wise that they said it was impregnable and that the people were much stronger than they were. Wherefore the people anon were afeard, and murmured against Moses and would return again into Egypt. Then Joshua and Caleb, which were two of them that had considered the land, said to the people: Why grudge ye and ...
— Bible Stories and Religious Classics • Philip P. Wells
... it, on the theory that it would be better to let a poor naval base fall into the hands of the enemy than a good one. To this reasoning, the answer is usually made that no base can be made absolutely impregnable, and that sufficient defense will be provided if it makes the task and cost of capturing the base greater than the base is worth. This means simply that the more valuable the base is, the more money should be ...
— The Navy as a Fighting Machine • Bradley A. Fiske
... Bollandist Suysken is vitiated by an analogous fault; fixed in his principle that the oldest documents are always the best,[2] he takes his stand upon the first Life of Thomas of Celano as upon an impregnable rock, and judges all other legends ...
— Life of St. Francis of Assisi • Paul Sabatier
... aroma of his cigar and the fine edge of his reason had been dulled by so much when he matched his boy's wit against hers. His mind had not sought out the hidden motive that lay behind what she had said; he had followed where she led and, finding her logic impregnable, had yielded like a child, in a pique. Yes, yielded out of spite without ever once thinking that she worked, day by day, ...
— Rimrock Jones • Dane Coolidge
... loved one was being mysteriously eased. He was finding pleasure in a world that had been dark and drear a few short months before. He was dimly conscious of a feeling that the companionship of Tennys Huntingford was beginning to wreak disaster to a supposedly impregnable constancy. ...
— Nedra • George Barr McCutcheon
... tremendous lines of fortifications, and then fell back to communicate with Lee. That night a council of war was held, and it was agreed that an attack upon the front of the enemy's position was absolutely impossible. Hooker himself was so positive that his position was impregnable that he issued a general order of congratulation to his troops, saying that "the enemy must now ingloriously fly or give us battle on our own ground, where certain ...
— With Lee in Virginia - A Story of the American Civil War • G. A. Henty
... distant from the splendid court, frequented the lonely mountains, and the unambitious fields; nor went but rarely among the throngs of Ilium. Yet, not having a breast either churlish, or impregnable to love, he espies Hesperie, the daughter of Cebrenus,[61] on the banks of her sire, who has been often sought by him throughout all the woods, drying her locks, thrown over her shoulders, in the sun. The Nymph, {thus} seen, takes to ...
— The Metamorphoses of Ovid - Literally Translated into English Prose, with Copious Notes - and Explanations • Publius Ovidius Naso
... fire when it first begins to seeth. The sobrietie of the circumstance is, that after he had courted me and all, and giuen me the earnest pennie of impietie, some sixe crownes at the least for an antipast to iniquitie, I fained an impregnable excuse to be gone, and neuer came at him after. Yet left I not here, but committed a little more scutcherie. A companie of coystrell clarkes (who were in band with sathan, and not of anie souldiers collar nor his hatband) pincht a number of good mindes to Godward of theyr prouant. ...
— The Vnfortunate Traveller, or The Life Of Jack Wilton - With An Essay On The Life And Writings Of Thomas Nash By Edmund Gosse • Thomas Nash
... the Afghan nation, and, I understand, Asia generally have looked upon it as impregnable; but it is in reality a place of great strength, both by nature and art, far more so than I had reason to suppose from any description that I had received of it, although some are from others in our own service who had seen ...
— Campaign of the Indus • T.W.E. Holdsworth
... by ordinary means from the prison was quite hopeless. There was no guard to overpower, the walls were exceedingly thick, and the door impregnable. ...
— Kid Wolf of Texas - A Western Story • Ward M. Stevens
... only encourage the foe, and the troopers with their firearms might clear the heights, and most, if not all, of their party might escape. But the rajah did not follow his advice. Then the mountaineers, instead of wisely remaining in an impregnable position, were seen descending the heights, believing from their previous success that they might destroy the rajah and his whole force. A few only remained on the summit of the precipice. Down came from either side a thick stream of savage warriors, throwing themselves ...
— The Young Rajah • W.H.G. Kingston
... the various industries of the nation, since in these industries are both power and wealth. Commerce was encouraged, and she girt her island around with those "wooden walls" which have proved England's impregnable defence against every subsequent combination of tyrants and conquerors. The East India Company was formed, and the fisheries of Newfoundland established. It was under Elizabeth's auspices that Frobisher penetrated to the Polar Sea, that Sir ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume VIII • John Lord
... vengeance by the faithful allies and retainers of the house, who espoused the cause of the lawful heir, he was compelled to retreat, with a few followers whom he had involved in his crime, to this impregnable tower called the Kaim of Derucleugh, where he defended himself until nearly reduced by famine, when, setting fire to the place, he and the small remaining garrison desperately perished by their own swords, rather ...
— Guy Mannering, or The Astrologer, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... countless fights he was never once wounded by any adversary nor did he ever deliver a second stroke, thrust or lunge against any: his defence was always impregnable, his attack always unerring; when he lunged his lunge never missed and was always fatal, unless he purposely spared a ...
— Andivius Hedulio • Edward Lucas White
... fortress was, probably, almost impregnable in the days of its strength and glory. The outer part of it was built on a precipitous projection of cliff, three hundred feet high, which must have been wrenched away from the mainland by some tremendous ...
— Rambles Beyond Railways; - or, Notes in Cornwall taken A-foot • Wilkie Collins
... with spears eighteen feet long, the squadrons of Burgundy rode in vain. Their lines were impregnable. Their enemies fell in numbers. In the end the whole Burgundian army, seized with panic, broke and fled, "like ...
— Historical Tales, Vol. 6 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality. French. • Charles Morris
... Mansoul, that the walls could never be broken down nor hurt by the most mighty adverse potentate unless the townsmen gave their consent thereto.' Now, what would the military engineers of Chatham and Paris and Berlin, who are now at their wits' end, not give for a secret like that! A wall impregnable and insurmountable and not to be sapped or mined from the outside: a wall that could only suffer hurt from the inside! And then that wonderful wall was pierced from within with five magnificently answerable gates. That is to say, the gates could neither be burst in nor any ...
— Bunyan Characters - Third Series - The Holy War • Alexander Whyte
... him strong; Medea's charm had made his shield impregnable. The rush of the bulls did not overthrow him. His comrades shouted to see him standing firmly there, and in wonder the Colchians gazed upon him. All round him, as from a furnace, ...
— The Golden Fleece and the Heroes who Lived Before Achilles • Padraic Colum
... combatants. Constantius had declared his intention of deciding the quarrel in the fields of Cibalis, a name that would animate his troops by the remembrance of the victory, which, on the same auspicious ground, had been obtained by the arms of his father Constantine. Yet by the impregnable fortifications with which the emperor encompassed his camp, he appeared to decline, rather than to invite, a general engagement. It was the object of Magnentius to tempt or to compel his adversary to relinquish this advantageous position; and he employed, with that view, the various marches, evolutions, ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 2 • Edward Gibbon
... advantage from it. Lee rallied his troops; formed a new line; and repulsed every assault made on it, throughout the entire day. When night fell, Grant had not advanced further; Lee's position was stronger than before, and plainly impregnable. ...
— Mohun, or, The Last Days of Lee • John Esten Cooke
... disheartened the Indians. Henceforth they regarded Boonesborough as a Gibraltar; impregnable to any force which they could bring against it. They never assailed it again. Though Boonesborough is now but a small village in Kentucky, it has a history which will render it forever memorable in ...
— Daniel Boone - The Pioneer of Kentucky • John S. C. Abbott
... attributed by the people to King Ardishir, and is one of the three mentioned by Mukaddasi in the tenth century, who, in describing the city of Bardasir, unmistakably identified with the present Kerman, speaks of the three famous impregnable castles—the Hisn defended by a ditch, evidently the one above described, directly outside the city gate, and the old castle, the Kala-i-Kuh, on the crest of the hill. It has been assumed that the third castle mentioned by Mukaddasi, was where ...
— Across Coveted Lands - or a Journey from Flushing (Holland) to Calcutta Overland • Arnold Henry Savage Landor
... kid," he answered, in a tone that implied Robin could have little weight against the impregnable House of Forsyth. ...
— Red-Robin • Jane Abbott
... slipped. Misfortune may whirl our material treasures from us; sorrow or sickness may canker them, turn them to ashes in the mouth. They are not ours; we hold them upon sufferance. But the treasures of the intellect, the gift of being upon nodding terms with truth, these are treasures that are our impregnable own. Nothing can filch them, nothing canker them: they are our own—imperishable, inexhaustible; never wanting when called upon; balm to heal the blows of adversity, specific against all things malign. Cultivate the perception ...
— Once Aboard The Lugger • Arthur Stuart-Menteth Hutchinson
... but scheming priests. You may make it gross to sense that the Creator has never held direct communication with the creature, and you have but stripped religion of its tattered vestments—have not laid the weight of your hand upon the impregnable citadel, the universal Fatherhood of God and Brotherhood of Man. You have never yet talked to the real question. You reject religion because Moses and Mahomet, Luther and Calvin entertained crude ideas of the plans and attributes of the Creator. You pose as an agnostic—a ...
— Volume 1 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... swept every dog past him and rendered his position secure. The whole pack was there with the exception of Tiptoe; we looked for him among the baying hounds in vain. For about twenty minutes the buck kept his impregnable position, when in a foolish moment he forsook it, and dashing along the torrent, he took to deep water. The whole pack was after him; once Merriman got a hold, but was immediately beaten off. Valiant, ...
— The Rifle and The Hound in Ceylon • Samuel White Baker
... no comment on that. He had brought up the disagreeable topic—one which would have been heart-breaking to any other mother he had ever known—in the hope of arousing some real feeling in her. And he had failed. Her self-control was impregnable. There was about her an atmosphere that was, in a sense, terrifying, something out ...
— No Clue - A Mystery Story • James Hay
... impregnable. He knew it. But the subtle Jews, the indignant gods, the alienated priests to whom the Persian was a redeemer, of these he did not think. Daniel had indeed warned him and, vaguely, he had promised something which he ...
— The Lords of the Ghostland - A History of the Ideal • Edgar Saltus
... fruit of the tree, if the tree itself is left to stand. The tree—the prolific cause of so many and so great evils in Utah, the greatest curse of the territory, the strength of Mormonism, and its impregnable wall of defence against Christianity and civilization, is that arbitrary, despotic, and absolute hierarchy known as ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume I • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... of some railway collision, that the leading car "was thrown into a state of great disorder, which reacted unfavorably upon, and delayed the progress of, those which followed." Yet it is hardly less absurd to say it of the leading battalion in a night attack on a fortress almost impregnable. The leading car takes the brunt of the shock precisely because it is in that position, and so does the leading regiment. How well the Fifty-Fourth Massachusetts bore the test is recognized by its being apparently included in the final admission, that "the behavior ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 91, May, 1865 • Various
... at Gakdul was naturally strong, and with the aid of art was made perfectly impregnable, forming a place to fall back upon in case of need. The camels, it has been explained, utterly declined all friendly advances, but the affections of the company Kavanagh belonged to were not on that account destined to grow utterly rusty for want of use, since a dog had attached ...
— For Fortune and Glory - A Story of the Soudan War • Lewis Hough
... wife, of Philip Egalite, and Madame du Barre (sic). Decree to apply the palace of Versailles to national uses. Assignats burned to this month amount to 2,623,680,000 livres. 7. The fortress of Luxemburg, almost impregnable, surrenders to the French from want of provisions. 8. Louis Charles, the descendant of 60 Kings, the son of Louis XVI. whom the royalists acknowledged as King since the 21st of Jan. 1793, under ...
— Historical Epochs of the French Revolution • H. Goudemetz
... obstinate struggle, Admiral Byng, afraid of losing his fleet, fell back on Gibraltar. The garrison of Fort St. Philip waited in vain for the return of the squadron; left to its own devices, it nevertheless held out; the fortifications seemed to be impregnable; the siege-works proceeded slowly; the soldiers were disgusted, and began to indulge to excess in the wine of Spain. "No one who gets drunk shall have the honor of mounting the breach," said Richelieu's general order. Before long he ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume VI. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... suite of rooms lay along to the south of the castle, the windows of the end room looking out both west and south. On the latter side, as well as to the former, there was a great precipice. The castle was built on the corner of a great rock, so that on three sides it was quite impregnable, and great windows were placed here where sling, or bow, or culverin could not reach, and consequently light and comfort, impossible to a position which had to be guarded, were secured. To the west was a great valley, and then, rising far away, great jagged mountain fastnesses, rising peak on peak, ...
— Dracula • Bram Stoker
... with his big stick. He looked about him. The examination was satisfactory. The trapdoor appeared to be the only means of access to the roof, and between this roof and that of the next building there was a broad gulf. The position was practically impregnable. Only one thing could undo him, and that was, if the enemy should mount to the next roof and shoot from there. And even then he would have cover in the shape of the chimney. It was a pity that the trap opened downward, for he had no means of securing it and was obliged ...
— The Prince and Betty - (American edition) • P. G. Wodehouse
... could be called a comely woman might have furnished matter for male discussion; the prevailing voice of her own sex would have denied her charm of feature. At first view the countenance seemed masculine, its expression somewhat aggressive—eyes shrewdly observant and lips consciously impregnable. But the connoisseur delayed his verdict. It was a face that invited, that compelled, study. Self-confidence, intellectual keenness, a bright humour, frank courage, were traits legible enough; and when the lips parted to show their ...
— The Odd Women • George Gissing
... disappeared the shielding wall began to give way. It did not cave in abruptly, but softened locally, sagging into a peculiar grouping of valleys and ridges—contesting stubbornly every inch of position lost. And gray Roger knew that the planetoid was doomed. His supposedly impregnable screen was failing in spite of its utmost measure of energy, and, that defense down, the citadel would not last a minute. Therefore he summoned a chosen few of his motley crew of renegade scientists and issued ...
— Triplanetary • Edward Elmer Smith
... an extensive fortification; though, as the travellers approached it, they perceived that, in many instances, art had only availed itself of the natural advantages of the position, and that the towers and turrets were carved out of the living rock which formed the impregnable bulwarks and escarpments. ...
— Tancred - Or, The New Crusade • Benjamin Disraeli
... Willis call me, and I didn't make him call twice. The ravine, as the light became greater, showed itself almost impregnable against an equal force of skirmishers. Just where an angle in the western edge presented a flank of wall toward the north, Willis and his gang had cut away the earth into a shelf some three feet beneath the top. Ten sand-bags filled with earth surmounted the summit, with open spaces between, ...
— Who Goes There? • Blackwood Ketcham Benson
... allies have by that time some of the big guns that will drop shells vertically and destroy these works the way the German 42's destroyed their predecessors. It was very interesting to see and hard to realise that up to three months ago this sort of thing was considered practically impregnable. ...
— A Journal From Our Legation in Belgium • Hugh Gibson
... ancestral village Nimbalik. The Ghorpade family are an offshoot of the Bhonslas, and obtained their present name from the exploit of one of their ancestors, who scaled a fort in the Konkan, previously deemed impregnable, by passing a cord round the body of a ghorpad or iguana. [214] A noticeable trait of these Maratha houses is the fondness with which they clung to the small estates or villages in the Deccan in which they ...
— The Tribes and Castes of the Central Provinces of India - Volume IV of IV - Kumhar-Yemkala • R.V. Russell
... twenty-four days. Saint Louis and Philip the Bold, in the thirteenth century, multiplied the defenses of Carcassonne, which was one of the bulwarks of their kingdom on the Spanish quarter; and from this time forth, being regarded as impregnable, the place had nothing to fear. It was not even attacked; and when, in 1355, Edward the Black Prince marched into it, the inhabitants had opened the gates to the conqueror before whom all Languedoc was prostrate. I ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume 4 (of 10) • Various
... exceeded its legitimate powers, Dr. Manning is in ecstasies. The "very exalted person" becomes "a righteous judge, a learned judge, a Daniel come to judgment—yea, a Daniel." These shouts of joy ought to be enough to show men where the real danger lies. Our present position is impregnable. But if we abandon it for the new one proposed to us by the Rationalist party, how shall we be able to stand? How could a national religious Establishment which should seek to rest its foundations—not on God's Word; on the ancient Creeds; on a true Apostolic ministry; on valid Sacraments; on ...
— Famous Reviews • Editor: R. Brimley Johnson
... heard Doloria give several quick gasps of excitement as I knocked up the ash dust close to them, and although, their number was not reduced we gained a feeling of greater security to find the fort more impregnable than ...
— Wings of the Wind • Credo Harris
... it gratifying, in our treatment of this topic, to be able to adduce such high, classical authority concerning the sacred and inviolable character of all private correspondence. In our humble view, not only is the seal of a letter a lock more impregnable to the hand of honor than the strongest bank safe which the expert Mr. Hobbs might vainly have tried to open; but even when that seal has already been rightfully broken and the contents of the letter exposed, those contents are to the eye of delicacy as unreadable as if written ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol IV, Issue VI, December 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various
... of Truth, is the supreme aim of a court of justice, and to its faithful ministers the defence of innocence is even more imperative than the conviction of guilt. The law is a Gibraltar, fortified and armed by the consummate wisdom of successive civilizations, as an impregnable refuge for innocence; and here, within its protecting bulwarks, as in the house of a friend, you are called on to plead your defence. You have heard the charges of the prosecution; listened to the testimony of the witnesses; and having ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... war-like bow kill a Cock-sparrow? Bring out the Lady, she can quel this mutiny: And with her powerfull looks strike awe into them: She can destroy, and build again the City, Your Goddesses have mighty gifts: shew 'em her fair brests, The impregnable Bulworks of proud Love, and let 'em Begin their battery there: she will laugh at 'em; They are not above a hundred thousand, Sir. A mist, a mist, that when her Eyes break out, Her powerfull radiant eyes, and shake their flashes, Will ...
— The False One • Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher
... had yet seen, that Army of city clerks, Midland farm-lads, Lancashire mill-hands, Scottish miners, and Irish corner-boys, side by side with their great-hearted brethren from Overseas, stormed positions which had been held impregnable for two years, captured seventy thousand prisoners, reclaimed several hundred square miles of the sacred soil of France, and smashed once and for all the German-fostered fable of the invincibility of the German Army. It was good to ...
— All In It K(1) Carries On - A Continuation of the First Hundred Thousand • John Hay Beith (AKA: Ian Hay)
... would have been for the two to destroy each other. But if he had any preference, it was for the black mammalian beast, the lizard monster appearing to him the more alien, the more incomprehensible and the more impregnable to any strategy ...
— In the Morning of Time • Charles G. D. Roberts
... but suspicion, that originated with a monstrous charge. Report represented that he was aspiring to kingly power, because he had not substituted a colleague in the room of Brutus, and was building on the top of Mount Velia:[6] that an impregnable stronghold was being erected there in an elevated and well-fortified position. These reports, widely circulated and believed, disquieted the consul's mind at the unworthiness of the charge; and, having ...
— Roman History, Books I-III • Titus Livius
... this is the most suitable place to mention another series of visions (apropos of the building of the tabernacle, L. G. B., I, pp. 24 ff.): "It [the holy ark] is an impregnable fortress and tower, so go thou not out [so says Wisdom], but bind thyself and ally thyself here as a disciple, to hold out to the end, then thou wilt be learned in the lofty spiritual art of the everlasting mystery, and be instructed how this incomparable composition or medicine of ...
— Hidden Symbolism of Alchemy and the Occult Arts • Herbert Silberer
... lofty rock is so strongly grounded, bounded, and founded, that by force of man it can never be confounded; the foundation and walls are unpenetrable, the rampiers impregnable, the bulwarks invincible, no way but one it is or can be possible to be made passable. In a word, I have seen many straits and fortresses, in Germany, the Netherlands, Spain and England, but ...
— The Pennyles Pilgrimage - Or The Money-lesse Perambulation of John Taylor • John Taylor
... of the king gave the English time to make Paris almost impregnable, and to frighten the people, who, had Charles marched straight from Reims, would have yielded as ...
— The Red True Story Book • Various
... large agricultural district, as well as Swindon, the headquarters of the Great Western Railway. For many years it had returned two Conservative members, Messrs. Nield and Goddard. It was looked upon as an impregnable Tory stronghold, and the fight was little ...
— Tracks of a Rolling Stone • Henry J. Coke
... a preceding letter about "Gladstone, Gore, and Co." turned out to be prophetic as well as retrospective. Mr. Gladstone published this autumn in "Good Words" his "Impregnable Rock of Holy Scripture," containing an attack upon Huxley's position as taken up in their previous ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 3 • Leonard Huxley
... the next morning we were steaming slowly towards what looked like a quite impregnable face of rock, with bare cliffs standing straight out of the water, which, luckily for us, was comparatively smooth. As we coasted to try and find a landing-place the sun was rising behind the island, which reaches to a height of two thousand feet, and the jagged ...
— The Worst Journey in the World, Volumes 1 and 2 - Antarctic 1910-1913 • Apsley Cherry-Garrard
... assuaged; but it intermitted its wrath only to increase its strength; soon the sounding squadrons of the air returned to their attack, and renewed their ravages with redoubled fury; and the stately dome rocked amidst the wheeling clouds. The impregnable clouds tottered on its basis, and threatened to overwhelm those whom it was intended to protect, the vessel was almost rent in pieces, and scarcely secure; where then was a place of safety? Sleep affrighted flew, diversion was turned into horror; all was ...
— Narrative of a Voyage to India; of a Shipwreck on board the Lady Castlereagh; and a Description of New South Wales • W. B. Cramp
... two years the Union Jack floated in triumph from the fort-crowned heights of Capri, much to the annoyance of the monarch on the mainland, who finally determined at all costs to recapture the stronghold facing his capital. Fancying himself perfectly secure in his "Little Gibraltar," now deemed impregnable by a combination of art and nature against any hostile descent, Lowe made light of any possible expedition from Naples, and when Neapolitan warships actually appeared as though making to land troops at the Marinas on either side of the ...
— The Naples Riviera • Herbert M. Vaughan
... indeed practically impregnable against assault, although exposed to artillery fire, and to distant musketry. It was for this reason that the defenders of the stairs had not taken to it at once. They felt confident in their ability to defend the stair all day, and to inflict heavy loss upon ...
— In Times of Peril • G. A. Henty
... they cannot be transported by land, may be right easily brought by sea near to the place where they are to be put in action. Neither is a castle, however secure in its situation, to be accounted altogether invincible, or, as they say, impregnable; for I protest t'ye, Sir Duncan, that I have known twenty-five men, by the mere surprise and audacity of the attack, win, at point of pike, as strong a hold as this of Ardenvohr, and put to the sword, captivate, or hold to the ransom, the defenders, being ...
— A Legend of Montrose • Sir Walter Scott
... border presented by our enemy, the masses of strength which we hold on different points of it, the facility this gave us of attacking him, on the same day, on all his points, from the extremity of the lakes to the neighborhood of Quebec, and the perfect indifference with which this last place, impregnable as it is, might be left in the hands of the enemy to fall of itself; whether, I say, he could see and prepare vigorously for all this, or merely wrapped himself in the cloak of cold defence, I am ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson
... one's way through a perpendicular jungle or crawling over jagged and sunbaked rock, the only way to ascend the hill is from the south-western side, from the upper portion of which still frown the outworks and bastioned walls which once rendered the fortress impregnable. The road from the town of Junnar is in tolerable repair and leads you across a stream, past the ruined mud walls of an old fortified enclosure, and past the camping-ground of the Twelve Wells, ...
— By-Ways of Bombay • S. M. Edwardes, C.V.O.
... hills. Being cut by this river, it divides, and in Scythia is named Taurus also. Such then is the great range, 55 almost the mightiest of mountain chains, rearing aloft its summits and by its natural conformation supplying men with impregnable strongholds. Here and there it divides where the ridge breaks apart and leaves a deep gap, thus forming now the Caspian Gates, and again the Armenian or the Cilician, or of whatever name the place may be. Yet they are barely passable for a wagon, for both ...
— The Origin and Deeds of the Goths • Jordanes
... and then looked at each other in silence. Then they made another reading and again looked at each other. Then they packed the transit into its rubber bag, sat down on the rock heap and gazed at the marching, impregnable line ...
— Still Jim • Honore Willsie Morrow
... down more heavily during the period of erosion than at any other place. Looking up, the boys could see that it afforded a steep but accessible avenue by means of which an agile person could ascend the otherwise impregnable height towering ...
— The Chums of Scranton High on the Cinder Path • Donald Ferguson
... a cursory view of the impregnable fortress of Brunetta, the greatest part of which is cut out of the solid rock, and ...
— The History of Sir Charles Grandison, Volume 4 (of 7) • Samuel Richardson
... perfect uproar. Nobody knew what was going to happen next. All the loyalistcivilians were under arms. The large mill of the Kaffrarian Steam Flour Company had been converted into a fort which was, in case of necessity, impregnable to rifle-fire. The rebels in the field had declared the New Republic practically established, with temporary capital at Reitz. Just before we saddled up to track them the news came of De Wet's capture on the Malopi River, near Mafeking. The news put everyone ...
— With Botha in the Field • Eric Moore Ritchie
... was of no consequence to the sons of St. Francis. The brothers had no doubt that the outrage was committed by the Balchenburg Baron, the ally of the ecorcheurs and routiers, the terrors of the country, in his impregnable castle. No doubt, they said, he meant to demand a heavy ransom from the good King and Dauphin. For the honour of Scotland, Ringan, though convinced that Hall had his share in the treason, withheld that ...
— Two Penniless Princesses • Charlotte M. Yonge
... an impressive spectacle, and to a citizen of a threatened country a disquieting one. Nine high-sided battle-ships of ten-gun type—nine floating forts, each one, unopposed, able to reduce to smoking ruin a city out of sight of its gunners; each one impregnable to the shell fire of any fortification in the world, and to the impact of the heaviest torpedo yet constructed—they came silently along in line-ahead formation, like Indians on a trail. There were no compromises ...
— The Wreck of the Titan - or, Futility • Morgan Robertson
... escape from his pursuers. But the venomous population of Rattlesnake Ledge had a Gibraltar for their fortress that might have defied the siege-train dragged to the walls of Sebastopol. In its deep embrasures and its impregnable casemates they reared their families, they met in love or wrath, they twined together in family knots, they hissed defiance in hostile clans, they fed, slept, hybernated, and in due time died in peace. Many a foray had the town's-people made, and many a stuffed ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 5, No. 28, February, 1860 • Various
... therns of Barsoom, that ancient cult which for countless ages has been credited with holding the secret of life and death in their impregnable fastnesses upon the hither slopes of the Mountains of Otz, are as ignorant as we. I have proved it, though I near lost my life in the doing of it; but you shall read it all in the notes I have been making during the last three months that I ...
— The Gods of Mars • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... of an angel who knows his life is not of earth, and on the fourth day there came the awful battle, the struggle for a position that had been held by the enemy for four years, and that had been declared impregnable from the side ...
— The Search • Grace Livingston Hill
... scrawled, and stuck against the wall with all the ardour of a first achievement. It owed its preservation to an unlucky, but effectual, contrivance of mine for securing its perpetuity: a paste-brush, purloined from the kitchen, had made all fast; and the piece, alike impregnable to assaults or siege, withstood every effort for its removal. In fact, this could not be accomplished without at the same time tearing off a portion from the dingy papering of the room, and leaving a disagreeable void, instead of my sprawling performance. With the ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 1 (of 2) • John Roby
... own. She stood in it, knowing it to be an impregnable fortress, knowing that from it she could now look abroad fearlessly and understandingly, knowing that from it she could look at things and men and the world and see what was there. From it she could, as if for the first time, look at Vincent Marsh when next she saw him; she would look to see what ...
— The Brimming Cup • Dorothy Canfield Fisher
... there had been anything in his behavior that could be challenged or defied, least of all by his daughter Alice. To himself in his study Mr. Cartaret appeared as the image of righteousness established in an impregnable place. Whereas his daughter Alice was not at all in a ...
— The Three Sisters • May Sinclair
... Assyria in north Syria and Cappadocia. King Sharduris was unable to protect his frontier or hamper the progress of the advancing army, which penetrated to his capital. Dhuspas was soon captured, but Sharduris took refuge in his rocky citadel which he and his predecessors had laboured to render impregnable. There he was able to defy the might of Assyria, for the fortress could be approached on the western side alone by a narrow path between high walls and towers, so that only a small force could find room to operate against the ...
— Myths of Babylonia and Assyria • Donald A. Mackenzie
... cloths and cloakings, and limited quantities of dress stuffs composed of mixed materials, showing that almost invariably it was the price which caused these goods to sell in British markets. Viewed from this standpoint, there is an impregnable argument in favour of our industrial pursuits; for in all classes of fancy fabrics of a high quality, whether in woollen, worsted, cotton, linen, or jute materials, the manufacturers of the United Kingdom have scarcely felt the ...
— Are we Ruined by the Germans? • Harold Cox
... ruffled by spiteful gusts. Wycherley could find no color anywhere save in this glowing, tiny and exquisite woman; and everywhere was a gigantic peace, vexed only when high overhead a sea-fowl jeered at these modish persons, as he flapped toward an impregnable nest. ...
— The Certain Hour • James Branch Cabell
... his grave, for the improvisation called into play every pipe on the whole instrument. However, I could see that this constant pelting at the hands of an unkind fate through the medium of his most cherished possession was having its effect upon Carson's hitherto impregnable philosophy. When he spoke of the organ it was with a tone of suppressed irritation which boded ill, and finally I was not surprised to hear that he had offered ...
— The Booming of Acre Hill - And Other Reminiscences of Urban and Suburban Life • John Kendrick Bangs
... fact, though we venture to question if even the strongest supporters of the special creation hypothesis had not, now and then, an uneasy consciousness that all was not right, their position seemed more impregnable than ever, if not by its own inherent strength, at any rate by the obvious failure of all the attempts which had been made to carry it. On the other hand, however much the few, who thought deeply on the question of species, ...
— Lay Sermons, Addresses and Reviews • Thomas Henry Huxley
... of carrying the city by assault, though often debated in the council of the king, had been always rejected. In the first place, La Rochelle appeared impregnable. Then the cardinal, whatever he said, very well knew that the horror of bloodshed in this encounter, in which Frenchman would combat against Frenchman, was a retrograde movement of sixty years impressed upon his policy; and the ...
— The Three Musketeers • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... unavailing. The cardinal was soon after removed, under an escort of dragoons, to the fortress of Nantes. From this place he almost miraculously escaped to his own territory of Retz, where he was regarded as sovereign, and where he was surrounded by retainers who, in impregnable castles, would fight to the death for their lord. These scenes took place early in the summer ...
— Louis XIV., Makers of History Series • John S. C. Abbott
... difficulty. Mr. Williams had two very strong prejudices, one in favor of Hawes personally, the other in favor of the system pursued this two years in that jail. Egotism was here, too, and rendered these prejudices almost impregnable. Williams had turned out O'Connor and his milder system, and put in Hawes and his more rigorous one. Hawes was "my ...
— It Is Never Too Late to Mend • Charles Reade
... when the ignorance of men rendered so many women intractable, but, in these times when the audacity of our assailants leaves us so few resources, in these times, I say, when, since the invention of powder, there are few impregnable places, why undertake a prolonged formal siege, when it is certain that after much labor and many disasters it will be necessary ...
— Life, Letters, and Epicurean Philosophy of Ninon de L'Enclos, - the Celebrated Beauty of the Seventeenth Century • Robinson [and] Overton, ed. and translation.
... her. But she has intuitive flashes that might be dangerous.... She must be got out of the way.... I can do nothing with the American. He suspects and dislikes me. But he cannot know. I fancy my armour is impregnable.... Sometimes I fear I have underestimated the other boy. He is not clever, but it is hard to blind his ...
— The Secret Adversary • Agatha Christie
... the commander of the general defenses, vetoed most of his suggestions. The vast sums of money which the Russian central government appropriated for the fortification of Port Arthur, honestly used, would have made the place completely impregnable. It is not too much to say—and this will be borne out by any trained observer and student of the conditions then existing in and around Port Arthur—that sixty per cent. of the money ...
— The Secrets of the German War Office • Dr. Armgaard Karl Graves
... that really had endangered the church with a mob and the organ with demolishment, was the cause of the first despatch. Colonel Von Gelhorn, who had routed General Edgar and driven him and his forces at the point of the bayonet from an "impregnable position," was in the ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 77, March, 1864 • Various
... nothing profitable, and may turn out to our disadvantage. For who knows but that your enemy the giant hath learned by spies or other secret means how I intend to come and destroy him, and he may by now have fortified himself in some impregnable castle or fortress, against the strength of which even the force of mine invincible arm will be of little use. Therefore, dear lady, let us by our diligence hinder his plans, and let us depart to the place ...
— The Junior Classics, V4 • Willam Patten (Editor)
... brick-fields contrived to take on a gorgeous, glittering colour in the afternoon sun. Stony Point, a high rocky promontory just above, is the place where "Mad Anthony Wayne" stormed the fortress thought to be impregnable. The British called it "Little Gibraltar." Jack had been looking out for that and the ruins of the old fort, because daredevil Wayne is quite one of his heroes. The whole peninsula here is a public park, so no wonder everything ...
— The Lightning Conductor Discovers America • C. N. (Charles Norris) Williamson and A. M. (Alice Muriel)
... rank and file, anyhow, in economic and governmental development? Such were interesting questions, and following the bomb—which acted as a great stone cast in the water—these ripple-rings of thought were still widening and emanating until they took in such supposedly remote and impregnable quarters as editorial offices, banks and financial institutions generally, and the haunts of political ...
— The Titan • Theodore Dreiser
... walls of El-Kerak at about midafternoon, and rode up to the place through a savage gorge that must have been impregnable in the old days of bows and arrows. It would take a determined army today to force itself through the wadys and winding water-courses that guard that old citadel of Romans ...
— Jimgrim and Allah's Peace • Talbot Mundy
... elegant and gentle arches and curves and brute practicality, for while the ceilings were high and open, and the walls wide, they were rendered homely by their plain surfaces and the absence of small triflings, conditions that were necessitated because of its identity: an impregnable fortress containing a highly organized and self-sufficient governmental society, each citizen having a particular duty for the common good, and each kept from an unfarcical personal identity by the means of a ...
— The Revolutions of Time • Jonathan Dunn
... impossible for them to take it, prince; but we must not be too confident. We know that many towns which believed themselves impregnable have been captured by the Egyptians, and must be prepared for the most daring enterprises. The gates have been already fastened, and so great a thickness of rocks piled against them that they are now the strongest part of the wall; those parts of the roads leading ...
— The Cat of Bubastes - A Tale of Ancient Egypt • G. A. Henty
... Sarlat during the long years that they were fighting intermittently for their lives and property with the lawless bands of so-called English, who had turned so many rocks into fastnesses, and who issued from their fortified caverns, that they made almost impregnable, to prey upon the unfortunate people who strove to live by husbandry. These hardened ruffians and freebooters had no respect for treaties, and inasmuch as peace never lasted long, and the English kings of that epoch always liked to feel that they ...
— Two Summers in Guyenne • Edward Harrison Barker
... Old-World learning which delights me. He was born before the days of historic doubt. He tells a true story. To allege an authority is with him to prove a fact, and to cite all writers who repeat the original source is to render truth impregnable. Rarely does he show any symptom of the modern malady of incredulity. Scripta littera is reason enough, unless the fair fame of his city chances to be at stake. He was really learned, and I do wrong to ...
— Heart of Man • George Edward Woodberry
... properly so many Rocks jutting out into the Sea, with large Harbours between them. That called Valetta, in honour of the Grand Master who so gallantly defended the place against the Turks, is extremely well Fortified, and also defended by a Castle, held to be impregnable. The City contains about Two Thousand Houses, well built with white Stone, and Flat-roofed, surrounded by Rails and Balusters. On t'other side of the Harbour is another City, formerly called Il Borgo, or the Borough, but now ...
— The Strange Adventures of Captain Dangerous, Vol. 3 of 3 • George Augustus Sala
... warm her constitution; yet all these machinations, ingenious as they were, failed, not only in fulfilling their aim, but even in shaking the foundations of her virtue or pride, which stood their assaults unmoved, like a strong tower built upon a rock, impregnable to all ...
— The Adventures of Ferdinand Count Fathom, Complete • Tobias Smollett
... very palpably not a prohibitionist, was arrested in Arizona recently, charged with selling liquor in violation of the Prohibition law. But Pat had an impregnable defense. His counsel, in addressing the ...
— Best Short Stories • Various
... there dawned on Rupert of Hentzau the knowledge that he could not break down his enemy's guard. Surprise, chagrin, amusement, or something like it, seemed blended in his look. He could not make out how he was caught and checked in every effort, meeting, it seemed, a barrier of iron impregnable in rest. His quick brain grasped the lesson in an instant. If his skill were not the greater, the victory would not be his, for his endurance was the less. He was younger, and his frame was not so closely knit; pleasure ...
— Rupert of Hentzau - From The Memoirs of Fritz Von Tarlenheim: The Sequel to - The Prisoner of Zenda • Anthony Hope
... this, if it be one; for it is plain they have been ably counselled. Whilst they retain the castle their position may be reckoned as impregnable. It is a powerful support, on which they have placed the lever ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 2 (of 2) • John Roby
... York by the post-road to Philipsburgh, and then embark at the little landing, to proceed up the Hudson, on the way to be scalped by the red allies of the French or mowed down by Montcalm's gunners before impregnable Ticonderoga. Many were the comings and goings of the scarlet coat and green. The Indian, too, was still sufficiently plentiful to contribute much to the environing picturesqueness. But, most of all, in those days, the mansion got its character from the festivities devised by its own inmates ...
— The Continental Dragoon - A Love Story of Philipse Manor-House in 1778 • Robert Neilson Stephens
... whom had accompanied Tarzan from Ja-don's camp to Ja-lur, looked questioningly at the ape-man while Om-at's Waz-don looked for trees, since the gryf was the one creature of Pal-ul-don which might not be safely encountered even by a great multitude of warriors. Its tough, armored hide was impregnable to their knife thrusts while their thrown clubs rattled from it as futilely as if hurled at the rocky shoulder ...
— Tarzan the Terrible • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... hearts are great," and so he assailed the third city and place of arms which Spain then possessed in the West Indies. The entrance of the harbour was protected by two strong castles, judged as "almost impregnable," while Morgan had no artillery of any avail against fortresses. Morgan had the luck to capture a Spanish soldier, whom he compelled to parley with the garrison of the castle. This he stormed and ...
— Essays in Little • Andrew Lang
... not asperse the deities of any nation. It is unlucky. None the less, your desires outpace your reason. Grant that I had not more than fifty men to defend the garrison, yet Nacumera is impregnable except by starvation. We can sit snug a month. Meanwhile our main force is at Calonak, undoubtedly. Yet my infatuated father had already recalled these troops, in order that they might escort you into Messire de la Foret's camp. Now I shall use these knaves quite otherwise. They will ...
— Domnei • James Branch Cabell et al
... elucidation of Truth, is the supreme aim of a court of justice, and to its faithful ministers the defence of innocence is even more imperative than the conviction of guilt. The law is a Gibraltar, fortified and armed by the consummate wisdom of successive civilizations, as an impregnable refuge for innocence; and here, within its protecting bulwarks, as in the house of a friend, you are called on to plead your defence. You have heard the charges of the prosecution; listened to the testimony of the witnesses; and having taken your cause into your ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... is a tableland and never-failing supply of springs. The whole site is cut off from access, and precipitous.' But when he proceeds to say, 'many groves and lakes surround it and luxuriant flowers through all the year,' we cannot follow him. The only quality which Enna has not lost is the impregnable nature of its cliffs. A few poplars and thorns are all that remain of its forests. Did we not know that the myth of Demeter and Persephone was a poem of seed-time and harvest, we might be tempted, while sitting on the crags of Castro Giovanni and looking toward the ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... the province of Costa Rica, 10 deg. north latitude, fourteen leagues from the gulf of Darien, and eight westwards from the port called Nombre de Dios. It is judged the strongest place the king of Spain possesses in all the West Indies, except Havanna and Carthagena. Here are two castles almost impregnable, that defend the city, situate at the entry of the port, so that no ship or boat can pass without permission. The garrison consists of three hundred soldiers, and the town is inhabited by about four hundred ...
— The Pirates of Panama • A. O. (Alexandre Olivier) Exquemelin
... invites me—the fact that some who have told us that we were in danger from the aggressions of that Empire, at the same time told us that that Empire was powerless for aggression, and also that it was impregnable to attack. By some means, however, the public have been alarmed as if that aggressive power were unbounded, and they have been induced to undertake an expedition, as if the invasion of an impregnable country were a matter of holiday-making rather ...
— Speeches on Questions of Public Policy, Volume 1 • John Bright
... in the ice. Make them safe against the spring break-up. But first transfer all their cargoes to one big cache. You can defend it better, and make the cache impregnable. Send a messenger down to Fort Burr, asking Mr. Carter for three of his men. He doesn't need them. Nothing much is doing at Circle City. Stop in on the way down and take half of Mr. Burdwell's men. You'll need them. There'll be gun-fighters ...
— A Daughter of the Snows • Jack London
... God no longer possesses any means of saving us, and we are tempted to provide for our own affairs as if nothing more were to be expected from Him. On the contrary, His providence, as He unfolds it, ought to be regarded by us as an impregnable fortress. Let us labor, then, to learn the full import of the expression, that our bodies are in the hands of Him who created them. For this reason He has sometimes delivered His people in a miraculous manner, and beyond all human expectation, as ...
— The World's Great Sermons, Volume I - Basil to Calvin • Various
... meantime the Japanese, irresistible as fate, were breaking down one after another of the supposed impregnable defences about Port Arthur; climbing over hills of their own dead, fathers, sons, and brothers, in order to do it. Within the beleaguered fort the supply of ammunition was running low, only one-quarter of ...
— A Short History of Russia • Mary Platt Parmele
... with rage in their hearts, each being an impregnable barrier to the happiness of the other, loving the same woman in the same way, resolved to contend for her, to their last breath;—these two men left the saloon, with smiles on their lips, like friends about ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 2, No. 4, March, 1851 • Various
... window that way, I think, but I presume they mean well. Dear me," she added, as, having untied the bundle, she held one of the open papers up before her, "how interesting! All the latest Paris fashions. Humph! Look at those sleeves, Elizabeth. What an impregnable fortress you would have been with those sleeves ...
— The Pursuit of the House-Boat • John Kendrick Bangs
... reasons why he was of vastly more importance on the farm than on the field of battle. She had had certain ways of expression that told him that her statements on the subject came from a deep conviction. Moreover, on her side, was his belief that her ethical motive in the argument was impregnable. ...
— The Red Badge of Courage - An Episode of the American Civil War • Stephen Crane
... coast. The Royal Company now saw itself master of West Africa. Pepys declared that the news from Holmes would certainly make the Dutch quite "mad."[121] It did indeed create a very great impression in Holland, where many had believed that Cape Corse was impregnable. Downing, of course, rejoiced exceedingly. Oftentimes in the past he had supported the Danish and Swedish claims to Cape Corse, but now he found no difficulty in showing Carisius and Appleborne, the Danish and Swedish representatives at The Hague, that their claims were as before, against the ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 4, 1919 • Various
... was established in well-chosen positions in France, which might be impregnable against even forces as superior as three to one; the Austrian army was safely established in front of the Russians. Both the French and the Russians were short of munitions, and particularly of guns of heavier caliber, and of high-explosive shells, which had become most essential ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume I (of 8) - Introductions; Special Articles; Causes of War; Diplomatic and State Papers • Various
... persons, without political weight enough to carry the election of a parish constable; and their cardinal principle was disunion, because they were convinced that within the Union the position of slavery was impregnable. In spite of the proverb, great effects do not follow from small causes,—that is, disproportionately small,—but from adequate causes acting under certain required conditions. To contrast the size of the oak with that of the parent acorn, as if the poor seed had paid all ...
— Harvard Classics Volume 28 - Essays English and American • Various
... young, frank, handsome soldier, who had leapt into the very middle of many a lady's heart—red coat, sword, epaulette-belt, cocked hat, feathers, and all. But he was not destined to leap into Emily's. She had enclosed it within too strong a line of circumvallation. After a three months' siege, it was impregnable. So Henry, who really loved his cousin, thinking it folly to endanger his peace and waste his time any longer, called for his horse one morning, shook Emily warmly by the hand, mounted, "and ...
— Fifty-Two Stories For Girls • Various
... Assaults have been made upon the Comick Poets in Fashion, and many Batteries have been rais'd against the Theatre, yet hitherto they have prov'd unsuccessful; the Stage is become Impregnable, where loose Poets, supported by Numbers, Power, and Interest, in Defiance of all Rules of Decency and Vertue, still provide new Snares and Temptations to seduce the People, and corrupt their Manners. Notwithstanding the earnest Cries of this great City, that importune ...
— Essay upon Wit • Sir Richard Blackmore
... to regard woman as chaste in mind as well as in body, to surround her with conceptions of purity and impregnable virtue; but the conclusion is irresistible that those who can gloat over others' lapses from virtue, and find delight in such questionable entertainments as the most recent case of seduction, or the newest ...
— Plain Facts for Old and Young • John Harvey Kellogg
... the question whether they were not still to be divided! Stefanello Colonna, the grandson of the old Stephen, and (by the death of his sire and brother) the youthful head of that powerful House, had already raised his standard against the Senator. Fortifying himself in the almost impregnable fastness of Palestrina, he had assembled around him all the retainers of his family, and his lawless soldiery now ravaged the ...
— Rienzi • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... can do little or nothing against coast fortifications equipped with 14-inch guns. Experience at Gallipoli emphasizes this fact. And yet"—here the secretary became cryptic—"there is more than one way to kill a cat. No place is impregnable. ...
— Our Navy in the War • Lawrence Perry
... nine letters—namely, Oh lord, sir. I, for my part, satisfied that the existing form of Heu taceo was mere indictable and punishable nonsense, but yet that this nonsense must enter as chief element into the stinging sense of Lamia, gazed for I cannot tell how many weeks at these impregnable letters, viewing them sometimes as a fortress that I was called upon to escalade, sometimes as an anagram that I was called upon to re-organise into the life which it had lost through some dislocation of arrangement. Finally the result ...
— The Uncollected Writings of Thomas de Quincey, Vol. 2 - With a Preface and Annotations by James Hogg • Thomas de Quincey
... several days shut up in its impregnable position. Caesar judged that an assault would cost too many lives; an investment alone seemed to him opportune, but it would require a greater number ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 2 • Various
... post McCorquodale and Svenson to watch for further demonstrations from the enemy. There was no sign of any intention on the part of Red McIvor's men to assault the impregnable position. The whole gang seemed to have drawn off, for the present at least, and it would be impossible for any of them to creep up the hill without giving ample warning of their approach. So, cautioning both to keep their ears open and to call him at the first sign ...
— Every Man for Himself • Hopkins Moorhouse
... on in front, for there goes Jimboden's Cavalry to the rear! Sure sign! I'll be hanged if we ain't gettin' licked again!" We had heard the cannonading in the distance, but paid little attention to it. The Richmond papers, announcing that Fisher's Hill was impregnable to the whole Yankee army, were said to have been received about an hour before the heights were actually carried by storm. Again Early's army was not captured, but ...
— Lights and Shadows in Confederate Prisons - A Personal Experience, 1864-5 • Homer B. Sprague
... Mrs. Harrington gave way to a momentary panic in respect to Cipriani de Lloseta—when she was not feeling very well, perhaps. Her situation seemed to be somewhat that of a commander holding an impregnable position against a cunning foe. For every position of such a nature is impenetrable only so long as it can meet and defy each new engine of warfare that is brought against it. And one day the ...
— The Grey Lady • Henry Seton Merriman
... smoking-room of his club, warming himself at a fine, old, huge, wasteful grate, in which burned such a coal fire as could not have been seen in France, Italy, Germany, Austria, Russia, nor anywhere on the continent of Europe. The war had as yet changed nothing in the impregnable club, unless it was that ordinary matches had recently been substituted for the giant matches on which the club had hitherto prided itself. The hour lay neglected midway between tea and dinner, and there were only two ...
— The Pretty Lady • Arnold E. Bennett
... hope of a successful resistance. With a courage which in view of the facts seems to be almost foolhardy, they determined to stick to their ships, and fight to the death. The feelings of the inhabitants of the town were hardly less gloomy. So thoroughly impregnable had they considered the forts at Roanoke Island, that they had made absolutely no preparations for defence; and now they found their homes upon the eve of capture. The victorious army had not yet had an opportunity to show the merciful way in which the inhabitants of captured cities ...
— The Naval History of the United States - Volume 2 (of 2) • Willis J. Abbot
... from his infant nephew, and that, being pursued for vengeance by the faithful allies and retainers of the house, who espoused the cause of the lawful heir, he was compelled to retreat, with a few followers whom he had involved in his crime, to this impregnable tower called the Kaim of Derucleugh, where he defended himself until nearly reduced by famine, when, setting fire to the place, he and the small remaining garrison desperately perished by their own swords, rather than fall into the hands of their exasperated ...
— Guy Mannering, or The Astrologer, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... campaign. On the south, however, a great blow was struck. An English fleet, under Sir George Rooke, having on board several regiments commanded by the Prince of Hesse Darmstadt, appeared before the rock of Gibraltar. That celebrated stronghold, which nature has made all but impregnable, and against which all the resources of the military art have been employed in vain, was taken as easily as if it had been an open village in a plain. The garrison went to say their prayers instead of standing ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 2 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... followed him slowly. LeNoir opened with a swift and savage reach for Macdonald's neck, but failed to break the guard and danced out again, Macdonald still pressing on him. Again and again LeNoir rushed, but the guard was impregnable, and steadily Macdonald advanced. That steady, relentless advance began to tell on the Frenchman's nerves. The sweat gathered in big drops on his forehead and ran down his face. He prepared for a supreme effort. Swiftly retreating, he lured ...
— The Man From Glengarry - A Tale Of The Ottawa • Ralph Connor
... day quiet was resumed, but the affair had another victim—Italy. You cannot change horses when you are crossing a stream. Prince Eugene was in Mantua with a fine army, practically intact, though it had suffered some slight reverses; the fortress was believed to be impregnable; by merely waiting, Eugene might, if nothing else, have exacted favourable terms. But the news of Prina's murder, and the blow dealt at his own authority in Milan, caused him to give over the fortress and the army to the Austrians without more ado; an act which looked like ...
— The Liberation of Italy • Countess Evelyn Martinengo-Cesaresco
... there was but little when I began," he said, as if to himself. "Tell me, are you free? Has some more fortunate fellow than myself touched that impregnable heart of yours? I know I have no right to ask ...
— A Crooked Path - A Novel • Mrs. Alexander
... uninjured. She had scarcely started a plank. Then the animal trapper set us all to work rebuilding his camp, animal cages, and stockade. We were three solid months repairing the damage done by the savages; but then Tugg had a camp that would be impregnable to the wild men from ...
— Swept Out to Sea - Clint Webb Among the Whalers • W. Bertram Foster
... decimated their numbers. Convents were forced, altars stripped, tombs profaned, the library of the Vatican sacked, and works of art torn down as monuments of idolatry. Pope Clement VII (1523-1534), a nephew of the other Medici pope, Leo X, had taken refuge in the impregnable castle of St. Angelo and was now obliged to ...
— A Political and Social History of Modern Europe V.1. • Carlton J. H. Hayes
... antiquity so grand as a modern railroad, or the Great Eastern steamship, or the Erie Canal. Nebuchadnezzar's palace would not compare with St. Peter's Church or Versailles, nor his hanging gardens with the Croton reservoirs. Gibraltar or Ehrenbreitstein is more impregnable than the walls of Babylon, which Cyrus despaired to scale or batter down. Every succeeding generation inherits the riches and learning of the past, even if Rome and Carthage are sacked, and the library of Alexandria is burned. The barbarians destroyed the monuments ...
— The Old Roman World • John Lord
... as president, which will be monuments in history, are extraordinary in number and importance. To mention only a few: He placed the Monroe Doctrine before European governments upon an impregnable basis by his defiance to the German Kaiser, when he refused to accept arbitration and was determined to make war on Venezuela. The president cabled: "Admiral Dewey with the Atlantic Fleet sails to-morrow." And the Kaiser ...
— My Memories of Eighty Years • Chauncey M. Depew
... visit was to Brest, the chief naval arsenal of France. It combines a dockyard, arsenal, and fortress of the first class. Everything has been done to make the place impregnable. The harbour is situated on the north side of one of the finest havens in the world, and is almost land-locked. Around the harbour run quays of great extent, alongside of which the largest ships can lie—five artificial basins being excavated out of the solid rock. The whole of the harbour ...
— James Nasmyth's Autobiography • James Nasmyth
... box-shaped houses that bulged out as if trying to see what was going on beneath. The massive timbers used in the construction of this fort, the square, compact form, and the small, dark holes cut into the walls, gave the structure a threatening, impregnable aspect. ...
— The Spirit of the Border - A Romance of the Early Settlers in the Ohio Valley • Zane Grey
... were remarkably strong. A good deal of killing was done, and some destruction of property accomplished, but that did not effect the conquest of the great northern Savage. Neither did it prove either party to be right or wrong! Grabantak retired to impregnable fastnesses, and Amalatok returned to Poloeland "covered with glory,"—some of his followers also covered with wounds, a few of which had fallen to his own share. The success, however, was not decided. On the whole, the result was rather disappointing, but Amalatok was brave ...
— The Giant of the North - Pokings Round the Pole • R.M. Ballantyne
... said, rose the impregnable mountain home of the Abati, but all the vast plain included in the loop of the river which he called Ebur, was the home of the savage Fung race, whose warriors could be counted by the ten thousand, and whose principal ...
— Queen Sheba's Ring • H. Rider Haggard
... river with no less than three hundred men, with directions to construct houses and fortifications. The settlers, working with new life and vigor in the more wholesome air of the upper James, soon rendered the place almost impregnable to attack from the Indians. They cut a ditch across the narrow neck of the peninsula, and fortified it with high palisades. To prevent a sudden raid by the savages in canoes from the other shore, five strong block houses were built at intervals along the river bank. ...
— Virginia under the Stuarts 1607-1688 • Thomas J. Wertenbaker
... Mr. Froude in his 'Nemesis.' It is not very easy, indeed, to say what Mr. Foxton positively believes; having, like his German prototypes, a greater facility of telling what he does believe, and of wrapping up what he does believe in a most impregnable mysticism. He certainly rejects, however, all that which, when rejected a century ago, left, in the estimate of every one, an infidel in puris naturalibus. Like his German acquaintances, he accepts the infidel paradoxes—only, like them, he will still be a Christian. ...
— Reason and Faith; Their Claims and Conflicts • Henry Rogers
... why I ask, in the name of my country, the great and beneficial support of the United States to check and prevent Russian interference in Hungary, so that we may have time to erect it into an insurmountable barrier and impregnable fortress against the despotism of the Czar. This, I say, is the reason why I claim aid from the United States, and ask it to assume its rightful executive in the police of nations. That is the only glory which is wanting to the lustre of your glorious stars. The ...
— Select Speeches of Kossuth • Kossuth
... Gerenian Nestor thus replied: "Such are indeed our prospects; Jove on high Could to our fortunes give no diff'rent turn. The wall is raz'd, wherein our trust we plac'd To guard, impregnable, ourselves and ships; And now around the ships their war they wage, Unceasing, unabated; none might tell By closest scrutiny, which way are driv'n The routed Greeks, so intermix'd they fall Promiscuous; and the cry ascends to Heav'n. But come, discuss ...
— The Iliad • Homer
... Governor's instructions, and he built the house on an island in the Bay of Islands on a site selected by Mr. Symons, who afterwards stated that the island was a very small one, but he believed that the house would be impregnable, and able to withstand the attacks of any force that the country at that time could bring against it.* (* This house was one of the first, if not the very first house, to be built in New Zealand. We do not hear even ...
— The Logbooks of the Lady Nelson - With The Journal Of Her First Commander Lieutenant James Grant, R.N • Ida Lee
... Harding, "here we are in an impregnable position. The enemy cannot discover the mouth of the outlet, now that it is hidden under reeds and grass, and consequently it would be impossible for them to penetrate ...
— The Secret of the Island • W.H.G. Kingston (translation from Jules Verne)
... one occasion I remember, the enemy's artillery having made a gap in the square, the lancers were evidently waiting to avail themselves of it, to rush among us, when Colonel Staples at once observing their intention, with the utmost promptness filled up the gap, and thus again completed our impregnable steel wall; but in this act he fell mortally wounded. The cavalry seeing this, made no attempt to carry out their original intentions, and observing that we had entirely regained our square, confined ...
— Reminiscences of Captain Gronow • Rees Howell Gronow
... long since disappeared—those "impregnable walls of stone" which once defended the town from the assaults of Philip the Second. I found with some difficulty a few grass-grown mounds where they had been, and only the gray, grim tower of the Templars, ...
— Vanished towers and chimes of Flanders • George Wharton Edwards
... when her dependencies were overcome, she could hold her own against forces far superior. Armies could reach her only by three routes,—the Lower St. Lawrence on the east, the Upper St. Lawrence on the west, and Lake Champlain on the south. The first access was guarded by a fortress almost impregnable by nature, and the second by a long chain of dangerous rapids; while the third offered a series of points easy to defend. During this same war, Frederic of Prussia held his ground triumphantly against greater odds, though his kingdom was open ...
— Montcalm and Wolfe • Francis Parkman
... was a circle of detached forts, already approved by German engineers as best securing a city within from bombardment. With regard to Liege and Namur particularly, Brialmont held that his plan would make passages of the Meuse at those places impregnable to an enemy. ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume III (of 12) - The War Begins, Invasion of Belgium, Battle of the Marne • Francis J. Reynolds, Allen L. Churchill, and Francis Trevelyan
... I entertain a strong opinion that if Great Britain continues to maintain her present policy of Free Trade—as I trust will be the case—her means of defence should, within the limits of human foresight, be such as to render her empire impregnable; and, further, that should that policy unfortunately be reversed, it will be a wise precaution that those means of defence should, if possible, be still further strengthened. But I also entertain an equally strong opinion that an imperial nation should seek to fortify ...
— Political and Literary essays, 1908-1913 • Evelyn Baring
... screwdriver and patience, untombed from its dusty resting-place at the top of the Hall staircase. It had been dressed in some flashy Scotch tweeds well known as belonging to the junior tutor, and perched astride of the weather-cock. Again the position was impregnable, and again the trophy drew delighted crowds ...
— The Recipe for Diamonds • Charles John Cutcliffe Wright Hyne
... In the black recesses of Belleau Wood the Germans had established nest after nest of machine guns. There in the jungle of matted underbrush, of vines, of heavy foliage, they had placed themselves in positions they believed impregnable. And this meant that unless they could be routed, unless they could be thrown back, the breaking of the attack of June 2 would mean nothing. There would come another drive and another. The battle of Chateau-Thierry was therefore not won and could ...
— Winning a Cause - World War Stories • John Gilbert Thompson and Inez Bigwood
... following week she gave a dinner and insisted upon his attendance. She had given others to that increasing throng that had been young with her in the eighties and to others who had stormed and conquered that once impregnable citadel, but, she informed him, it was now time to entertain some of the younger women, and ...
— Black Oxen • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... just as night closed in—a great dark mountain with memories as sad and gloomy as its appearance. The Boer guards pointed out to us where they had mounted their big cannons to defend Laing's Nek, and remarked that the pass was now impregnable. I could not resist saying, 'This is not the only road into the Transvaal.' 'Ah, but you English always come where we ...
— London to Ladysmith via Pretoria • Winston Spencer Churchill
... cause of it here setting up a cry, Susan escaped under pretext of putting Humfrey to bed in the next room, and carried off both the little ones. The conversation then fell upon the voyage, and the captain described the impregnable aspect of the castle of Dumbarton, which was held for Queen Mary by her faithful partisan, Lord Flemyng. On this, Cuthbert Langston asked whether he had heard any tidings of the imprisoned Queen, and he answered that it was reported ...
— Unknown to History - A Story of the Captivity of Mary of Scotland • Charlotte M. Yonge
... din of the fighting was any guide, mine was a narrowing kingdom. Every hour it seemed to grow fiercer and more near, and it was clear that some of the gates in the passage up the cleft in the cliff, impregnable though all men had thought them, had yielded to the vehemence of Phorenice's attack. And, indeed, it was scarcely to be marvelled at. With all her genius spurred on to fury by the blow that had been struck at her by wrecking so fair a part of ...
— The Lost Continent • C. J. Cutcliffe Hyne
... strong was this position: he shall see two islands lying just off the west coast at that point, controlled by La Rochelle, yet affording to any foreign allies whom the Huguenots might admit there facilities for stinging France during centuries. The position of the Huguenots seemed impregnable. The city was well fortressed,—garrisoned by the bravest of men,—mistress of a noble harbor open at all times to supplies from foreign ports,—and in that harbor rode a fleet, belonging to the city, greater ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 55, May, 1862 • Various
... so loud without, as to threaten the tearing down of the walls, the earl was carried into the garden. He was followed by Sir William Wallace, to whose arm his wife yet fondly clung. At every cry of the enemy, at every shock they gave to his yet impregnable gates, she breathed the shorter, and was clasped by the lord of her heart still more closely to ...
— The Scottish Chiefs • Miss Jane Porter
... uncertainty, rage, shame, helplessness, and stupefying disappointment. The worst is not only imminent, but already here. In a few hours—perhaps before the next meal—the secesh generals, with their victorious hordes, will be upon us. The dream of humanity, the vaunted Union we thought so strong, so impregnable—lo! it seems already smash'd like a china plate. One bitter, bitter hour—perhaps proud America will never again know such an hour. She must pack and fly—no time to spare. Those white palaces—the dome-crown'd capitol there on ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman
... she said. Her voice was indulgent, friendly, commonplace; it made me powerless. I had it on my lips to cry out, 'He is in there alone, working himself up to the point of suicide!' But I could not utter it. I could no more say it than I could have smitten her in the face. She was impregnable behind; that barrier of manners which she upheld so skillfully. She continued to look at me for some seconds and to smile—so gently, so mildly. I think ...
— The Second Class Passenger • Perceval Gibbon
... promptly taken and so stoutly maintained, kept the enemy within the territory they had purchased with the blood of their best soldiers, and they never advanced any farther into the country they coveted. The lines of investment around Boston were drawn closer and made more nearly impregnable, yet weeks and months went by without any material change in the relative positions of British and Provincials, save that Putnam still kept on digging, and creeping nearer and nearer to the foe. By fortifying Cobble Hill, an elevation that more completely commanded the ...
— "Old Put" The Patriot • Frederick A. Ober
... two belligerent tails. Those who exchanged compliments at Corinth and Cold Harbor; those who received informal calls from Kilpatrick's cavalry, who we are told "rode like centaurs and fought like devils"; those who saw Grant's intrepid Westerners hurl themselves against Vicksburg's impregnable heights; those who were slammed up against Jackson's "Stone wall" or picnicked with Johnston's cartridge-biters on grapeshot pie and deviled minnie balls, now treat each other with the studied respect which the Kansas farmer ...
— Volume 12 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... Chancellorsville commenced, the Army of the Potomac was posted on the left bank of the Rappahannock, opposite Fredericksburg, among the Stafford hills, in a position which was considered almost impregnable. It rested upon the Potomac River, and as all of its supplies came by water, they were not subject to delay or interruption of any kind; nor were they endangered by the movements of ...
— Chancellorsville and Gettysburg - Campaigns of the Civil War - VI • Abner Doubleday
... whom circumstances keep honest to think himself honourable beyond the chance of temptation. But misery has the virtue of Ithuriel's spear, with a difference. As the one touched the beast and transformed him to the seeming of a high intelligence, so will the other touch a seemingly impregnable armour of bright honour, and turn it into tinder, leaving the poor beast revealed and unprotected from his own base natural longings. The poor Bommaney was maddened to think he had not done what the other's thoughts charged him with, even though he passionately ...
— Young Mr. Barter's Repentance - From "Schwartz" by David Christie Murray • David Christie Murray
... a Fence against the King of Jerebi, and the Kam of Vosaie. The River Nhir is its Barrier against the formidable Power of the Emperor of the Maregins. And, lastly, many Cities of almost impregnable Strength, seem to defy the Attacks of the Junes Provinces, and the Bapasis. Such is the Situation and Quality of the Kingdom of the Kofirans, being also blessed with a temperate ...
— The Amours of Zeokinizul, King of the Kofirans - Translated from the Arabic of the famous Traveller Krinelbol • Claude Prosper Jolyot de Crbillon
... not embrace the occasion of telling him how many I had made myself. It is my principle that an officer must never be wrong. I have seen two divisions beating their brains out for a fortnight against a worthless and quite impregnable castle in a pass: I knew we were only doing it for discipline, because the General had said so at first, and had not yet found any way out of his own words; and I highly admired his force of character, and throughout these operations thought my life exposed in a very good cause. With fools ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 20 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... pump on the handle vigorously. The almost impregnable door seemed slowly to bulge. Still there was no sign of life from within. Had the ...
— The Dream Doctor • Arthur B. Reeve
... be stated, was a pile of rocks about one hundred feet in diameter, with half that height. On one side a narrow path led upward at an angle of forty-five degrees, and, as it permitted only one to pass at a time, the place, with a few defenders, was impregnable against almost any force. This path upward was filled with loose, rattling stones, which sometimes made one's foothold treacherous, and it also made several curious turns, so that, after ascending a rod or so, one was shut out from the view of ...
— Through Apache Lands • R. H. Jayne
... lulling repose would be more reasonably expected, especially after so stormy a career as that of Louis. The change from restless and capricious Paris to dewy shades and luxurious halls in the heart of changeless and impregnable England ought, on common principles, to have promoted the content and prolonged the life of the old king. Possibly it did, but if so, the French had not many months' escape from a second Orleans regency, for the exile's experience of Claremont was brief. We may wander over ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 17, - No. 97, January, 1876 • Various
... months on the island, Robert's heart often sank. They seemed to make no progress with the siege of Quebec. Just so far had they gone and they could go no farther. The fortress of France in the New World appeared impregnable. There it was, cut clear against the sky, the light shining on its stone buildings, proud and defiant, saying with every new day to those who attacked it that it could not be taken, while Montcalm, ...
— The Sun Of Quebec - A Story of a Great Crisis • Joseph A. Altsheler
... be backed with God and with the seas, Which He hath given for fence impregnable, And with their helps, only, defend ourselves: In them, and in ourselves, our safety lies." —Shakespeare. King Henry VI, Part III, Act ...
— Flag and Fleet - How the British Navy Won the Freedom of the Seas • William Wood
... us to make this climb, if we stumbled as we walked, what had it been for them? Our breath came hard and fast—how had it been with them? Yet they had done it! They had stormed the ridge the Huns had proudly called impregnable. They had taken, in a swift rush, that nothing could stay, a position the Kaiser's generals had assured him would never be lost—could never be reached by ...
— A Minstrel In France • Harry Lauder
... heights up there to the north, from Saint-Menges to Fleigneux, with your army looking down on and commanding Sedan, able at any time to move on Vrigne-aux-Bois, mistress of Saint-Albert's pass—and there we are; our positions are impregnable, the Mezieres road is under ...
— The Downfall • Emile Zola
... ventured to reply. "I should think that governments, the more they are threatened, would be all the more careful to seek bases that are impregnable. The basis of prestige for colonial governments is the weakest of all, since it does not depend upon themselves but upon the consent of the governed, while the latter are willing to recognize it. The basis of justice or reason would seem to be ...
— The Reign of Greed - Complete English Version of 'El Filibusterismo' • Jose Rizal
... cliff loomed black and huge against the spangled blue-black velvet of the sky. On its summit a dark mass soared higher. We thought it a tree, but surely a gigantic one. Approaching it, the soaring mass became a medieval castle sitting haughtily with frowning crenellations upon an impregnable rock; and the Missouri became for the moment a larger Rhine. At last, rowing up under the sheer cliff, the castle resolved itself into a huge grain elevator, its base a hundred feet ...
— The River and I • John G. Neihardt
... being intended as a strong box rather than a traveling receptacle. It was ribbed by four heavy bands of copper, and the corners and edges were reinforced with the same metal. The lock itself seemed to be impregnable to one without a key. Conniston's name was heavily engraved on a copper tablet just above ...
— The River's End • James Oliver Curwood
... of the destruction of the Temple, one of the prominent figures was Baruch, the faithful attendant (65) of Jeremiah. God commanded him to leave the city one day before the enemy was to enter it, in order that his presence might not render it impregnable. On the following day, he and all other pious men having abandoned Jerusalem, he saw from a distance how the angels descended, set fire to the city walls, and concealed the sacred vessels of the Temple. At ...
— THE LEGENDS OF THE JEWS VOLUME IV BIBLE TIMES AND CHARACTERS - FROM THE EXODUS TO THE DEATH OF MOSES • BY LOUIS GINZBERG
... relatively to the stars, though that movement was so slow that twenty five thousand years would necessarily elapse before a complete circuit of the heavens was accomplished. Hipparchus traced out this phenomenon, and established it on an impregnable basis, so that all astronomers have ever since recognised the precession of the equinoxes as one of the fundamental facts of astronomy. Not until nearly two thousand years after Hipparchus had made this splendid discovery ...
— Great Astronomers • R. S. Ball
... very powerful, and was only attended on by great numbers of young damsels, who used to carry him about the castle in a small light chariot. Confiding in the strength of this castle, which he believed impregnable, Dor rebelled against Umcan, to whom he was tributary. But seven of his courtiers or attendants, in whom he placed confidence, made him prisoner one day while hunting, and delivered him to Umcan, ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 1 • Robert Kerr
... reference to "our age," left her, and next attacked Celeste Fishblate, having long ago discovered Nattie to be impregnable to the process known as "pumping," a fact that had augmented her ever-increasing dislike ...
— Wired Love - A Romance of Dots and Dashes • Ella Cheever Thayer
... manifest loss to your kingdom. Wherefore, take possession of the said towns, since opportunity offers, which will be about forty leagues of country gained without the loss of a single man, and an impregnable rampart for Champagne and Picardy; and, besides, a fine and perfectly open road into the heart of the duchy of Luxembourg and the districts below it as ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume IV. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... town, although useless against cannon, are considered by the Arabs as impregnable. The walls are of solid mud and sun-baked bricks, carefully loopholed for musketry, while a deep fosse, by which it is surrounded, is a safeguard ...
— The Nile Tributaries of Abyssinia • Samuel W. Baker
... third word would start her mother off into one of her long and hysterical tirades. It was very wearing, and there seemed to be nothing gained from day to day. Her child had disobeyed her. And as a climax, she had assumed the impregnable position of a complete prostration, wherein she demanded the minute care of an invalid in the crisis of a disorder. She could bear no faintest ray of illumination, no lightest footfall. In a hushed twilight she ...
— The Riverman • Stewart Edward White
... to be all joined together by a paling, intended to enclose the whole settlement; meanwhile, the Martello tower was to be carried on with all possible speed; and it was hoped that this, when completed, would almost supersede the necessity of the rest, and form an impregnable barrier to the efforts of any native force; while the tangled brushwood, and newly-felled trees, were to form a formidable and ...
— A Voyage Round the World, Vol. I (of ?) • James Holman
... centuries and centuries ago, by strong barons who knew exactly what they wanted, and grabbed it. He'd have been a castle, an early Tudor castle, battlemented and surrounded by a moat, fortified, of course, and impregnable to the enemy, unless they treacherously blew him up. He would have had several secret rooms, but they would contain chests ...
— Set in Silver • Charles Norris Williamson and Alice Muriel Williamson
... is that it is Christ as the Emancipator, Christ as the Deliverer, Christ as He who brings us out of the prison of bondage of the tyranny of sin, who is the great Joy-Giver. For there is no real, deep, fundamental and impregnable gladness possible to a man until his relations to God have been rectified, and until, with these rectified relations, with the consciousness of forgiveness and the divine love nestling warm at his heart, he has turned himself away from his dread and his sin, and ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Isaiah and Jeremiah • Alexander Maclaren
... to it—something that was in league with it, and kept telling her that things were not all right with her; that she ought not to be afraid, yet had good reason for being afraid; that she knew of no essential safety. There must be some refuge, some impregnable hiding-place, for the thing was a necessity, and she ought to know of it! There must be a human condition of never being afraid, of knowing nothing to be afraid of! She wondered whether, if she were quite good, went ...
— What's Mine's Mine • George MacDonald
... the night's fray. Bayard was to attack on the main road in front, but not until Kilpatrick had commenced operations on their right flank by a detour through a neglected and narrow wood-path. As the Heights were considered well nigh impregnable, it was necessary to resort to some stratagem, for which ...
— Three Years in the Federal Cavalry • Willard Glazier
... kings the rattlesnake and viper. Nor naked Indian nor mailed white man might traverse that thicket, where wall on wall was met a spiked and iron growth. One opening there was, through which ran the road to the town, but a battery deemed impregnable commanded this approach, forming an effectual clasp for that strong cestus which the fecund, supple, and heated land made possible to all Spanish fortifications. Beyond the tunal the naked hillside fell steeply to a narrow plain, all patched with golden ...
— Sir Mortimer • Mary Johnston
... the cities, and distant from the splendid court, frequented the lonely mountains, and the unambitious fields; nor went but rarely among the throngs of Ilium. Yet, not having a breast either churlish, or impregnable to love, he espies Hesperie, the daughter of Cebrenus,[61] on the banks of her sire, who has been often sought by him throughout all the woods, drying her locks, thrown over her shoulders, in the sun. The Nymph, {thus} seen, takes to flight, just as the frightened ...
— The Metamorphoses of Ovid - Literally Translated into English Prose, with Copious Notes - and Explanations • Publius Ovidius Naso
... fellow-townsmen, Gaditanians, Isturitz and Alcala Galiano; both of them had been egregious liberals in their day, and indeed principal members of those cortes which, on the Angouleme invasion, had hurried Ferdinand from Madrid to Cadiz, and kept him prisoner there until that impregnable town thought proper to surrender, and both of them had been subsequently refugees in England, where they had spent ...
— The Bible in Spain • George Borrow
... sides to it; they must go deeper, to the radical question of Right and Wrong, or they surrender the chief advantage of their position. What Spinoza says of laws is equally true of party-platforms,—that those are strong which appeal to reason, but those are impregnable which compel the assent both of reason and the common ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. VI.,October, 1860.—No. XXXVI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... that nothing but flight remained him; and that very night he left Urbino hurriedly, taking with him the boy Francesco Maria, and intending at first to seek shelter in his Castle of S. Leo—a fortress that was practically impregnable. But already it was too late. The passes leading thither were by now in the hands of the enemy, as Guidobaldo discovered at dawn. Thereupon, changing his plans, he sent the boy and his few attendants to Bagno, and, himself, disguised as a peasant, ...
— The Life of Cesare Borgia • Raphael Sabatini
... Russia with a strong anti-British feeling, and it was said that her activity in running up earthworks and apparently impregnable fortifications was in anticipation of Disraeli declaring war and ordering the fleet to bombard the Crimean ports; hence, too, in addition to the strong fortifications, torpedo mines were laid for miles along the seaboard, and every possible means and opportunity were taken ...
— Looking Seaward Again • Walter Runciman
... with an overjoyed gasp found herself in her mother's arms. She pressed closer while the three laughed, and when the other two ceased she still mirthfully clung in that impregnable sanctuary. Suddenly she hearkened, tossed her curls, and stood very straight. Two male voices were coming down ...
— Gideon's Band - A Tale of the Mississippi • George W. Cable
... by time, by wrecking All that we seek and find. Its relentless waves of years Break even the impregnable wall of memory That thought builds On the ...
— Sandhya - Songs of Twilight • Dhan Gopal Mukerji
... the famous pine forest has grown up between the third haven and the now distant Hadriatic. Out of all this grew the momentary greatness of Ravenna. The city, girded with the three fold zone of marshes, causeways, and strong walls, became the impregnable shelter of the later Emperors; and the earliest Teutonic Kings naturally fixt their royal seat in the city of their Imperial predecessors. When this immediate need had passed away, the city naturally fell into insignificance, ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Vol VIII - Italy and Greece, Part Two • Various
... solidity of the masonry. Each tower is about 200 feet high, and the walls which enclose them are double, and enormously thick, being constructed of immense blocks of stone; but since the invention of gunpowder they are no longer considered impregnable. This edifice, after being first used as a barrack for the janissaries, was converted into a prison, in which, contrary to the law of nations and every principle of justice, the minister of any power against whom the Sultan ...
— Journal of a Visit to Constantinople and Some of the Greek Islands in the Spring and Summer of 1833 • John Auldjo
... Jolo, found it unprepared, and burned the town, the king's houses, the ships, and whatever they found. Had they followed the people, they would have found them in confusion and hiding in the grass; for on account of the long peace, the Joloans had not provisioned their stronghold, which was impregnable. The soldiers contented themselves with this, and let slip the best opportunity that could have ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898, Volume XXIV, 1630-34 • Various
... reluctance, as far as the confines of Italy; but as they dreaded the length of the way and the savage fierceness of the Germans, they resolved, by the instigation of one of their tribunes, to halt at Aquileia, and to erect the banners of Constantius on the walls of that impregnable city. The vigilance of Julian perceived at once the extent of the mischief, and the necessity of applying an immediate remedy. By his order, Jovinus led back a part of the army into Italy; and the siege of Aquileia was formed with diligence and prosecuted ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 03 • Various
... which the Lady Imogene was imprisoned sprang out of a steep so precipitous that the position was considered impregnable. She was therefore permitted to open her lattice, which was not even barred. The landscape before her, which was picturesque and richly wooded, consisted of the en-closed chase of Charolois; but her jailers ...
— Sketches • Benjamin Disraeli
... Gentleman; and Credit, which must be supported by every Tradesman. These Possessions in Fame are dearer than Life to these Characters of Men, or rather are the Life of those Characters. Glory, while the Hero pursues great and noble Enterprizes, is impregnable; and all the Assailants of his Renown do but shew their Pain and Impatience of its Brightness, without throwing the least Shade upon it. If the Foundation of an high Name be Virtue and Service, all that is offered against it is but Rumour, which is too ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... on a tiny sofa in the corner, a curiously impregnable intrenchment, as I noted—for my impulse was to carry her by storm. I was astonished at my own audacity; I was wondering where my fear of her had gone, my awe of her superior fineness and breeding. "Mama will be down in a few minutes," ...
— The Deluge • David Graham Phillips
... illuminated hall, which was dotted with fashionable figures. He knew not whither he was going, until by chance he saw a golden grille with the word "Reception" shining over it in letters of gold. Behind this grille, and still further protected by an impregnable mahogany counter, stood three young dandies in attitudes of graceful ease. He approached them. The fearful moment was upon him. He had never in his life been so genuinely frightened. Abject disgrace might be his portion within ...
— The Regent • E. Arnold Bennett
... sentiment or law against this one fruit of the tree, if the tree itself is left to stand. The tree—the prolific cause of so many and so great evils in Utah, the greatest curse of the territory, the strength of Mormonism, and its impregnable wall of defence against Christianity and civilization, is that arbitrary, despotic, and absolute hierarchy known ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume I • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... spacious, not to say grandiose. A line of strong French posts, ranging from Duquesne, on the Ohio, to Ticonderoga, on Lake Champlain, held the English settlements on the coast girdled, as in an iron band, from all extension westward; while Quebec, perched in almost impregnable strength on the frowning cliffs which look down on the St. Lawrence, was the centre of the French power in Canada. Pitt's plan was that Amherst, with 12,000 men, should capture Ticonderoga; Prideaux, with ...
— Deeds that Won the Empire - Historic Battle Scenes • W. H. Fitchett
... Shaw, 309 U.S. 495 (1940). Here it was said that the reasons for sovereign immunity "partake somewhat of dignity and decorum, somewhat of practical administration, somewhat of the political desirability of an impregnable legal citadel where government, as distinct from its functionaries may operate undisturbed by the demands of litigants," ibid. 500-501. The Court went on to hold that when the United States took possession of the ...
— The Constitution of the United States of America: Analysis and Interpretation • Edward Corwin
... on this errand. Cathbarr's tower was an old ruin at the end of a long and narrow headland—indeed, at high tide most of the headland would be covered, for it was low and yet beyond shot of the cliffs. Except from the water, it was almost impregnable; cannon might have reached it from shore, but two axmen could have held the ...
— Nuala O'Malley • H. Bedford-Jones
... home the count began to put it to her; offered her all he had, and promised mountains in futuro; but all in vain— the maid's honesty was impregnable. She said, "She would not break her trust for the whole world; no, not if she could gain a hundred pound by it." Upon which Wild stepping up and telling her "She need not fear losing her place, for ...
— The History of the Life of the Late Mr. Jonathan Wild the Great • Henry Fielding
... British batteries were practically intact, nor had men enough been disabled to prevent any gun in the fleet from being fought. Could but a single working day be gained in taking up an anchorage, a defensive order could be assumed, practically impregnable to the enemy, covering Cornwallis, and not impossibly intercepting the French ships left in the Bay. In the case of many men such comment might be dismissed as the idle talk of the captious fault-finder, always to the fore in life; but in the case of Hood it must be received with ...
— The Major Operations of the Navies in the War of American Independence • A. T. Mahan
... the gate, as we said, was impregnable, unless with stronger implements, they had sent to a smith's forge in the neighborhood, from whence they obtained two or three sledge-hammers. By the aid of these they soon shivered the gate to pieces, ...
— The Tithe-Proctor - The Works of William Carleton, Volume Two • William Carleton
... three hundred men, who by this time were out in search of the Indians. Black Hawk, too maddened to think of the difference of numbers, attacked the whites. To his surprise the enemy turned, and fled in a wild riot. Nor did they stop at their camp, which from its position was almost impregnable; they fled in complete panic, sauve qui peut, through their camp, across prairie and rivers and swamps, to Dixon, twelve miles away, where by midnight they began to arrive. The first arrival reported that two thousand savages had swept ...
— McClure's Magazine, January, 1896, Vol. VI. No. 2 • Various
... gratifying, in our treatment of this topic, to be able to adduce such high, classical authority concerning the sacred and inviolable character of all private correspondence. In our humble view, not only is the seal of a letter a lock more impregnable to the hand of honor than the strongest bank safe which the expert Mr. Hobbs might vainly have tried to open; but even when that seal has already been rightfully broken and the contents of the letter exposed, those contents are to the eye of delicacy as unreadable as if ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol IV, Issue VI, December 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various
... Norwegians;—I speak of the agricultural population. If that country could be brought to maintain a million more of inhabitants, Norway might defy the world; it would be [Greek: autarhkas] and impregnable; but it is ...
— Specimens of the Table Talk of S.T.Coleridge • Coleridge
... and mysterious therns of Barsoom, that ancient cult which for countless ages has been credited with holding the secret of life and death in their impregnable fastnesses upon the hither slopes of the Mountains of Otz, are as ignorant as we. I have proved it, though I near lost my life in the doing of it; but you shall read it all in the notes I have been making during the last three months that I ...
— The Gods of Mars • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... to the window, to watch him down the drive. His back looked poor and mean. It emphasized the pettiness of her victory. Even at that moment, she realized that it was the poorer part of her which had resented attack on a citadel which should be impregnable as time itself. Just then Enoch stepped into the kitchen behind her, and his voice ...
— Tiverton Tales • Alice Brown
... to me," exclaimed Daniels. "Alaska to me has always stood for blizzards, snow, glaciers, impregnable mountains, bleak and barren plains like the steppes of Russia, and privation, ...
— The Rim of the Desert • Ada Woodruff Anderson
... expecting?" Joel demanded one evening, his sex not proving an impregnable armor against the ...
— Other People's Business - The Romantic Career of the Practical Miss Dale • Harriet L. Smith
... fellows, with the Gordons, were ordered to occupy the surrounding heights. All night long, and well on into the day, we held them until we learned that the enemy had decided not to attack us. Had they done so they would have paid bitterly for their rashness, for the place is practically impregnable. A thousand resolute and skilful men, who knew how to use both rifle and bayonet, could hold the place against 20,000 of the finest troops in the world, providing the defenders were not hopelessly crushed by ...
— Campaign Pictures of the War in South Africa (1899-1900) - Letters from the Front • A. G. Hales
... coming to obscure those small checks which are incidental to a war carried out over immense distances against a mobile and enterprising enemy. Cronje had suddenly become aware of the net which was closing round him. To the dark fierce man who had striven so hard to make his line of kopjes impregnable it must have been a bitter thing to abandon his trenches and his rifle pits. But he was crafty as well as tenacious, and he had the Boer horror of being cut off—an hereditary instinct from fathers who had fought on horseback against enemies ...
— The Great Boer War • Arthur Conan Doyle
... succeeded in thoroughly mastering the diocesan details. Then the proffered assistance of Mr. Slope was a great thing for him, a most unexpected and invaluable aid. Hitherto he had looked on the two as allied forces and had considered that, as allies, they were impregnable. He had begun to believe that his only chance of escape would be by the advancement of Mr. Slope to some distant and rich preferment. But now it seemed that one of his enemies, certainly the least potent of them, but nevertheless one very important, was ...
— Barchester Towers • Anthony Trollope
... filled with archers and Greek fire; the rapid evolutions of his cavalry completed the dismay and disorder; the Syrian crowds fell back on each other; many thousands were stifled or slaughtered in the entrance of the great street; the Mongols entered with the fugitives; and after a short defence the impregnable citadel of Aleppo was surrendered by cowardice or treachery. Among the suppliants and captives, Timur distinguished the doctors of the law, whom he invited to the dangerous honor of a personal conference. The Mongol ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... French hurled themselves against the German trenches; and in great masses they were hurled back again—those of them who did not lie upon the ground. Time after time the French charged what appeared to be impregnable trenches. Then, on their fifth effort, they reached their goal and ...
— The Boy Allies At Verdun • Clair W. Hayes
... Berkeley's position an impregnable citadel of skepticism. He accepted Berkeley's conclusion that we know nothing of matter, and then attempted to show that inferences based on ideas might be equally illusory. Hume attacked the validity of the reasoning process itself. ...
— Halleck's New English Literature • Reuben P. Halleck
... case desperate, reminding them that even in Asia, which originally belonged to the Persian monarch, places were to be found—such as the little state of Temnos, or Aegae, and others, capable of administering their affairs, unsubjected to the king of Persia. "But," he added, "if you want a strong impregnable position, I cannot conceive what better you can find than Sestos. Why, it would need a combined naval and military force to invest that port." By these and such like arguments he rescued them from the lethargy ...
— Hellenica • Xenophon
... interrupting me, 'and I wish we could get a glimpse at Japan. Other nations have supposed it impregnable; but Jonathan has found his way to the very gates of the Emperor's palace, which he now knocks at with might and main. How fantastically he is dressed! Coal-basket in one hand, and Bible in the other, he is cutting what may be properly termed figure ...
— The Adventures of My Cousin Smooth • Timothy Templeton
... children cheered our khaki uniforms as we passed. Everywhere there were signs of a new activity and of a new hope. The trenches and wire entanglements around the town, already very extensive, were being perfected, and to our eyes they looked impregnable. We did not then realize how useless it is to attempt to defend a town, and, unfortunately, our ignorance was not limited to civilians. It is a curious freak of modern war that a ploughed field should be stronger than any citadel. But, as I say, ...
— A Surgeon in Belgium • Henry Sessions Souttar
... situation in thoughtful silence. He allowed no emotion to find expression in his face, but I knew that the significance of my remarks had sunk in. I could almost follow his mind as he tested my position point by point and found it impregnable. ...
— The Little Nugget • P.G. Wodehouse
... Joseph was in the nature of a strong fort. Its walls were of stone and cement, fourteen feet high and loopholed. At each corner there was a protecting bastion, and the entire structure was surrounded by a deep moat. It was practically impregnable against Indian attack, for it could not be undermined, set on fire, or taken by assault. A handful of men could hold it ...
— The Jesuit Missions: - A Chronicle of the Cross in the Wilderness • Thomas Guthrie Marquis
... the long years that they were fighting intermittently for their lives and property with the lawless bands of so-called English, who had turned so many rocks into fastnesses, and who issued from their fortified caverns, that they made almost impregnable, to prey upon the unfortunate people who strove to live by husbandry. These hardened ruffians and freebooters had no respect for treaties, and inasmuch as peace never lasted long, and the English kings of that epoch always liked to feel that they were ready for anything ...
— Two Summers in Guyenne • Edward Harrison Barker
... nearly in the centre of the island, in the heart of the elevated plateau described in the preceding chapter, and surrounded by lofty mountains, the passes of which admit of being easily defended, with a bold insulated rock for the base of its almost impregnable fortress, the houses of the town clustering round it, and, beneath, a valley of exuberant fertility, watered by two rivers, having their confluence just above, it seems formed to be the capital of an island-kingdom, of a nation of mountaineers. ...
— Rambles in the Islands of Corsica and Sardinia - with Notices of their History, Antiquities, and Present Condition. • Thomas Forester
... last year was, of course, the successful breach on June 6, 1944, of the German "impregnable" seawall of Europe and the victorious sweep of the Allied forces through France and Belgium and Luxembourg—almost to ...
— State of the Union Addresses of Franklin D. Roosevelt • Franklin D. Roosevelt
... his reason, but finding that impregnable, he pulled out his scanty purse to guarantee his sincerity with an offer of pledgemoney. The waggoner waved it aside. He ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... Raleigh is the flag-ship; I saw also some other vessels of the Royal Navy at anchor in the bay. The fortifications which are now in progress for the protection of this important point in our chain of defences will, when completed, render the place practically impregnable from sea attack. ...
— A Winter Tour in South Africa • Frederick Young
... letter about "Gladstone, Gore, and Co." turned out to be prophetic as well as retrospective. Mr. Gladstone published this autumn in "Good Words" his "Impregnable Rock of Holy Scripture," containing an attack upon Huxley's position as taken up in their previous controversy ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 3 • Leonard Huxley
... the King got there first and intrenched himself so strongly that there was no ousting him. Wallenstein followed suit and for eleven weeks the enemies eyed one another from their "lagers," neither willing to risk an attack. In the end Gustav Adolf tried, but even his Finns could not take the impregnable heights the enemy held. At last he went away with colors flying and bands playing, right under the enemy's walls, in the hope of tempting him ...
— Hero Tales of the Far North • Jacob A. Riis
... Zbabblo were expected. Their delay caused us not a little discomfort, because, though we had taken the four English ships, we knew that Sir Byam Martin's iron-cased squadron, with the "Warrior," the "Impregnable," the "Sanconiathon," and the "Berosus," were cruising in the neighborhood, and might prove too much ...
— Roundabout Papers • William Makepeace Thackeray
... passed along the eastern border of the campus and glanced up at St. George's Hall, it no longer appeared the impregnable fortress of privilege he had once thought it. Yet, in reality, the towers of the college had never looked more formidable. Rising magnificently at the crest of a bleak expanse of snow, the embrasured battlements, silhouetted against the sunset sky, might well have suggested to a beholder ...
— The Mayor of Warwick • Herbert M. Hopkins
... of each day's march Anderssen saw to the erection of a comfortable shelter for Jane and the child. Her tent was always pitched in the most favourable location. The thorn boma round it was the strongest and most impregnable ...
— The Beasts of Tarzan • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... of the war, we could have rendered this position impregnable in one night, but at this time we did not do it, and it may be it is well we did not. From about the 1st of April we were conscious that the rebel cavalry in our front was getting bolder and more saucy; and on Friday, the 4th of April, it dashed down and carried off ...
— The Memoirs of General W. T. Sherman, Complete • William T. Sherman
... the Fourth Division of the Sixteenth Corps had gained the Gap. The enemy appeared the next morning. This opened the way through Snake Creek Gap, planting us in the rear of Johnston's Army, and forcing him to abandon his impregnable position at Dalton. ...
— The Battle of Atlanta - and Other Campaigns, Addresses, Etc. • Grenville M. Dodge
... memories; they avoided Rasgrad, Schumla, and the Black Sea fortresses; Sophia, Philippopolis, and Adrianople made no resistance. The earthworks of Plevna, vicious as they were in many characteristics, they found impregnable. I think Suvaroff would have carried them; I am sure Skobeleff would if he ...
— Camps, Quarters, and Casual Places • Archibald Forbes
... Divine Revelation, his volume is an absolute blank. Bampton Lecturers and distinguished apologetic writers have frankly admitted that the Christian argument must be reconstructed. They have felt the positions, formerly considered to be impregnable, crumbling away under their feet, but nothing could more forcibly expose the feebleness of the apologetic case than this volume of Dr Lightfoot's Essays. The substantial correctness of the main conclusions of Supernatural Religion is ...
— A Reply to Dr. Lightfoot's Essays • Walter R. Cassels
... by the Marechal de la Meilleraie, began to batter a breach, but slowly, because the artillerymen felt that they had been directed to attack two impregnable points; and because, with their experience, and above all with the common sense and quick perception of French soldiers, any one of them could at once have indicated the point against which the attack should have been ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... to rush over her like a flood, and sent her flying along the street to her one haven. As she ran she had felt a touching faith in the security of her room, if she could reach it. Out there, in the open street, it had seemed impregnable, ...
— The Moon Rock • Arthur J. Rees
... towards atheism (by toleration) Peace seemed only a process for arriving at war Peace founded on the only secure basis, equality of strength Peace was unattainable, war was impossible, truce was inevitable Philip of Macedon, who considered no city impregnable Prisoners were immediately hanged Privileged to beg, because ashamed to work Proclaiming the virginity of the Virgin's mother Readiness at any moment to defend dearly won liberties Religious persecution ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... Queen of Heaven glorified by the nine Choirs of Angels, the Mother of Predilection, the Treasure of the Lord. All the vivid imagery of her cult unrolled itself before him comparing to her an earthly paradise of virgin soil, with beds of flowering virtues, green meadows of hope, impregnable towers of strength, and smiling dwellings of confidence. Again she was a fountain sealed by the Holy Ghost, a shrine and dwelling-place of the Holy Trinity, the Throne of God, the City of God, the Altar of God, the Temple of God, ...
— Abbe Mouret's Transgression - La Faute De L'abbe Mouret • Emile Zola
... occasional assaults which, being made with less spirit than the earlier ones, were easily repulsed. The blockade was not more successful. Haco had provided ample stores for the small garrison which he had considered sufficient to protect the promontory of Lihou, naturally almost impregnable; and the force defending the Vale, camped chiefly on Lancresse Common, was only nominally blockaded. The sallies, made from time to time, were ordered more with a view of keeping up the martial spirit of the men than with ...
— The Forest of Vazon - A Guernsey Legend Of The Eighth Century • Anonymous
... assaulted with success. These were when the position had been but recently occupied and the fortifications were very slight. After several days' occupation, as at the points attacked by Thomas and McPherson, the lines became impregnable. Frequent efforts were made, and by none more earnestly than by General Sherman, to press the troops to a vigorous assault of the enemy's position under the favorable circumstances above referred to. But the general feeling of the army, including not only privates, but officers of nearly all grades, ...
— Forty-Six Years in the Army • John M. Schofield
... the reasoning of Mayor Morse is perfectly sound, and that the position taken by him is absolutely impregnable. The prevention of the publication of suicides in the newspapers of a State would require a special legislative act, but it would probably do more to lessen the suicidal tendency than any other single measure that could be taken. In the winter of 1902, Representative Jenkins introduced in the ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol 31, No 2, June 1908 • Various
... be wrecked by a single ill-considered treaty, dated from St James's or the Court of France. He thought that the islands should be seized as a general rendezvous for folk of that way of life. With a little trouble the harbour could be made impregnable. The land was good, and suited for the growing of maize or tobacco—the two products most in demand among them. The islands were near the Main, being only thirty-five leagues from the Chagres River, the stream from which the golden harvest floated from the cities of the south. They were close to ...
— On the Spanish Main - Or, Some English forays on the Isthmus of Darien. • John Masefield
... hundred years ago it was bombarded by the British fleet and taken. It was then supposed to be impregnable. It lies at the head of a loch some fifteen miles long, and in some parts but a few hundred yards wide, in a trough between mountains. From Cattaro, at the head of the loch, a zig-zag road leads up the mountain side over the ...
— My Adventures as a Spy • Robert Baden-Powell
... containing within its walls an immense cistern as a water supply, besides armories, storehouses, foundry, and every appliance of a large citadel. A considerable portion of the far-reaching walls is still extant. Under good generalship, and properly manned, the place must have been nearly impregnable to attack with such arms as were in use at the period. For a long time after the expulsion of the Moors, the Castilian monarchs made it their royal residence, and revelled within its splendid walls; but they finally deserted it. The place was next infested by a lawless community of smugglers ...
— Foot-prints of Travel - or, Journeyings in Many Lands • Maturin M. Ballou
... wild with rage, but the door was shut and the great castle was dark and impregnable. Then the icy teeth of the blast bit into him, and he turned and went away ...
— The Jungle • Upton Sinclair
... and his friends. The exile till then had only thought of pleasure, of wine, women, and song, the "sweet meat which cost him the sour sauce ye have heard," on the approach of danger, had fled on board the ships he had prepared to "certain impregnable isles in the ocean," and if these impregnable islands may be identified with Zipangu or Japan, the conquerors pursued him even here. There is nothing more interesting in Polo's book than his story of the Mongol failure in the Eastern islands, fifteen hundred miles from ...
— Prince Henry the Navigator, the Hero of Portugal and of Modern Discovery, 1394-1460 A.D. • C. Raymond Beazley
... Sharduris was unable to protect his frontier or hamper the progress of the advancing army, which penetrated to his capital. Dhuspas was soon captured, but Sharduris took refuge in his rocky citadel which he and his predecessors had laboured to render impregnable. There he was able to defy the might of Assyria, for the fortress could be approached on the western side alone by a narrow path between high walls and towers, so that only a small force could find room to ...
— Myths of Babylonia and Assyria • Donald A. Mackenzie
... his strongest and most experienced soldiers. This was the narrowest part of the formation, and Olaf knew that if he could but break through the wall of shields at this point the whole mass of men, now so compact and impregnable, would ...
— Olaf the Glorious - A Story of the Viking Age • Robert Leighton
... provinces upon the south and east coast, which had been under Carthaginian and now acknowledged Roman dominion. Beyond these the Keltiberian tribes in the center formed a sort of confederation, and consented to certain alliances with the Romans; while beyond them, intrenched in their own impregnable mountain fastnesses, were brave, warlike, independent tribes, which had never known anything but freedom, whose names even, Rome had not yet heard. The stern virtue and nobility of Scipio proved a delusive promise. Rome had not an easy task, and other and brutal methods were ...
— A Short History of Spain • Mary Platt Parmele
... questions, and following the bomb—which acted as a great stone cast in the water—these ripple-rings of thought were still widening and emanating until they took in such supposedly remote and impregnable quarters as editorial offices, banks and financial institutions generally, and the haunts of political dignitaries and ...
— The Titan • Theodore Dreiser
... decided to make its stand at a spot called by the Indians Tohopeka, by the whites Horseshoe Bend, on the Tallapoosa. Here a thousand warriors, with many women and children, took refuge behind breastworks which they believed impregnable, and here, in late March, Jackson attacked with a force of three thousand men. No quarter was asked and none given, on either side, and the battle quickly became a butchery. Driven by fire from a thicket of dry brush in which they took refuge, the Creek warriors ...
— The Reign of Andrew Jackson • Frederic Austin Ogg
... reasons that have been given, the safest, though not the most effective, disposition of an inferior "fleet in being" is to lock it up in an impregnable port or ports, imposing upon the enemy the intense and continuous strain of watchfulness against escape. This it was that Torrington, the author of the phrase, proposed for the time to do. Thus it was that Napoleon, to some extent before Trafalgar, ...
— Lessons of the war with Spain and other articles • Alfred T. Mahan
... proof of the vast solidity of the masonry. Each tower is about 200 feet high, and the walls which enclose them are double, and enormously thick, being constructed of immense blocks of stone; but since the invention of gunpowder they are no longer considered impregnable. This edifice, after being first used as a barrack for the janissaries, was converted into a prison, in which, contrary to the law of nations and every principle of justice, the minister of any power against whom the Sultan happened to declare war, ...
— Journal of a Visit to Constantinople and Some of the Greek Islands in the Spring and Summer of 1833 • John Auldjo
... an overjoyed gasp found herself in her mother's arms. She pressed closer while the three laughed, and when the other two ceased she still mirthfully clung in that impregnable sanctuary. Suddenly she hearkened, tossed her curls, and stood very straight. Two male voices were ...
— Gideon's Band - A Tale of the Mississippi • George W. Cable
... regarding the site as impregnable and therefore highly desirable, resolved to raise a castle upon the lofty eminence, But the more he considered the plan the more numerous appeared the difficulties in the way ...
— Hero Tales and Legends of the Rhine • Lewis Spence
... interest or an enemy is entrenched in a position rendered impregnable against an expected mode of attack, there is but one remedy, to shift the ground and follow lines against which no preparation has been made. Fortunately for us, the special interests, with a blindness which naturally follows from their wholly commercialized point ...
— The Fight For Conservation • Gifford Pinchot
... came our fellows, with the Gordons, were ordered to occupy the surrounding heights. All night long, and well on into the day, we held them until we learned that the enemy had decided not to attack us. Had they done so they would have paid bitterly for their rashness, for the place is practically impregnable. A thousand resolute and skilful men, who knew how to use both rifle and bayonet, could hold the place against 20,000 of the finest troops in the world, providing the defenders were not hopelessly crushed by ...
— Campaign Pictures of the War in South Africa (1899-1900) - Letters from the Front • A. G. Hales
... to enter in, a ready access for poor shipwrecked and broken men, who have no other refuge. This is our rock, on which the church is builded, Jesus Christ, 1 Cor. x. 4.; Matt. xvi. 18. Were God inaccessible in himself, an impregnable rock, how would sinners overcome him, and enter in to him to be saved from wrath? Nay but Jesus Christ hath made a plain way and path, out of the waves of sin and misery, into this rock higher than we; and so the poor soul that is lost in its own eyes, and sees no refuge, ...
— The Works of the Rev. Hugh Binning • Hugh Binning
... really had endangered the church with a mob and the organ with demolishment, was the cause of the first despatch. Colonel Von Gelhorn, who had routed General Edgar and driven him and his forces at the point of the bayonet from an "impregnable position," was in the secret ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 77, March, 1864 • Various
... A despatch rider arrived from the Transvaal; the situation there urgently demanded the encouragement of Steyn's presence. To leave this impregnable stronghold and venture across the open plains below needed all the boldness of De Wet, all the steadfast courage of Steyn. These leaders had never been known to falter; they did not falter now. Everything was arranged in the utmost ...
— With Steyn and De Wet • Philip Pienaar
... Kafirs had been hunted by our troops into the most impregnable of their woody fortresses, and fairly brought to bay, that the chiefs sent messengers to solicit peace. It was granted. A treaty of peace was entered into, by which the Kafirs gave up all right to the country ...
— The Settler and the Savage • R.M. Ballantyne
... and long before the German Revolution and the conclusion of the Peace, England was secure in the possession of that permanent organization of home defence which, humanly speaking, has made these shores positively impregnable, by converting Great Britain, the metropolis and centre of the Empire, into a nation in arms. There is no need for me to enlarge now upon the other benefits, the mental, moral, and physical advancement ...
— The Message • Alec John Dawson
... hold their advanced position before Plevna, but to give material assistance elsewhere in turning the siege into an investment. On November 21 they captured Rahova, on the Danube, which greatly facilitated operations against the doomed fortress and aided to make the works of the allies impregnable. In the closing incidents of the investment of Plevna the Roumanians took little or no part in consequence of the position which they occupied. On the morning of December 10, Osman Pasha made his brave but unsuccessful attempt to break through ...
— Roumania Past and Present • James Samuelson
... bookkeeping of Z. Snow and Company, he had seen, not the ruled page of the day book, but the parental countenance of the Honorable Fletcher Fosdick. And, to his mind's eye, that countenance was as rugged and stern as the rock-bound coast upon which the Pilgrims landed, and about as unyielding and impregnable as the door of the office safe. So, when his grandfather called him, he descended from the tall desk stool and crossed the threshold of the inner room, a trifle pale, a little shaky at the knees, but with the set chin and erect head of one who, facing almost hopeless odds, intends fighting ...
— The Portygee • Joseph Crosby Lincoln
... opinion that the French proposed to make their stand before this impregnable fortress, and fight there desperately for victory. But, finding less resistance than he expected, he concluded, on the 15th, that Bazaine, in fear of being cooped up within the fortress, meant to march towards Verdun, there to join his forces with those of MacMahon and give ...
— A History of The Nations and Empires Involved and a Study - of the Events Culminating in The Great Conflict • Logan Marshall
... men from this vantage could have rendered either street or barricade untenable, or as support to a barricade in the Place du Pantheon have made such a barricade impregnable to exposed troops. ...
— Mlle. Fouchette - A Novel of French Life • Charles Theodore Murray
... are my nobles who have at all times distinguished themselves by their valor and great bravery. Let us banish gloom, and let our hearts overflow with mirth! We may well congratulate ourselves on the perfect safety of Babylon. Our walls are impregnable and our possessions are abundant. We laugh to scorn the silly movements of the Persians that parade before the city. Dark predictions there are, I know, in regard to the future of Chaldea, but these Hebrew delusions have well-nigh ...
— The Young Captives - A Story of Judah and Babylon • Erasmus W. Jones
... British successes had been in the vicinity of Vimy Ridge, which position, believed by the Germans to be impregnable, had been carried by Canadian troops in a single attack. German counter-assaults in this sector had failed to dislodge them, and there ...
— The Boy Allies with Haig in Flanders • Clair W. Hayes
... only excepted which joins it to the city) a frightful and inaccessible precipice. The castle is situated on a high rock, and strongly fortified with a great number of towers, so that it is looked upon as impregnable. In the great church they have a set of bells, which are not rung out as in England, (for that way of ringing is not now known in this country,) but are played on by the hand with keys, like a harpsichord, the person playing having great leather covers for his fists, which enables him ...
— The Surprising Adventures of Bampfylde Moore Carew • Unknown
... escape the necessity of concerning itself with personality and particular circumstances in questions of truth and error, Intellectualism appeals to Logic, which it conceives as a purely formal science and its impregnable citadel. This appeal, however, rests on a number of questionable assumptions, and most ...
— Pragmatism • D.L. Murray
... she said, 'you want a throne; this is a rude one, yet accept it. You require warriors, the Ansarey are invincible. My castle is not like those palaces of Antioch of which we have often talked, and which were worthy of you, but Gindarics is impregnable, and will serve you for your headquarters until you conquer that world which you are ...
— Tancred - Or, The New Crusade • Benjamin Disraeli
... the necessary military fortifications for the protection of the islands, but I can not too strongly emphasize the need of appropriations for these purposes of such an amount as will within the shortest possible time make those islands practically impregnable. It is useless to develop the industrial conditions of the islands and establish there bases of supply for our naval and merchant fleets unless we insure, as far as human ingenuity can, their safety ...
— State of the Union Addresses of Theodore Roosevelt • Theodore Roosevelt
... front the Italian commander, General Cadorna, launched a great offensive while the British were active in Flanders and by August 23 had broken through the whole Austrian line, capturing the town of Selo, which was the pivot of the Austrian defense, and considered impregnable, and inflicting upon the enemy, in this eleventh battle of the Isonzo, the greatest losses he had sustained since the capture of Goritz. More than 13,000 Austro-Hungarian prisoners were captured during the ...
— America's War for Humanity • Thomas Herbert Russell
... the force under Lord Howe, cowed and demoralized, refuse to again advance into the jaws of death. The idea is gaining ground that the rebel position is impregnable, and that a wise policy demands that no more blood shall be shed in a vain endeavor to reduce it. The impetuous Sir Henry Clinton refuses to take this view of the situation, and his counsels are heeded. Every military resource at the command of General Gage is now brought into requisition. ...
— Ten Great Events in History • James Johonnot
... Cherisy was impregnable. In view of the fact that the place has since been captured by the British it is felt that Sir DOUGLAS HAIG could not have read the ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 152, June 13, 1917 • Various
... could starve his people into submission, or lay waste the land in time of foreign invasion. I have seen in an impregnable position the traces of an ancient fort, evidently erected to defend the pass to the main water-course from ...
— Eight Years' Wandering in Ceylon • Samuel White Baker
... of the Seven Days' Battle around Richmond. Day after day he fell back through swamp and forest, battling with Lee's victorious troops. But there was no further disaster. Under the most adverse and dispiriting circumstances the Army of the Potomac fairly held their own until {15} they reached the impregnable position of Malvern Hill. There McClellan turned at bay and repulsed with heavy slaughter the disjointed attacks of the Army of Northern Virginia. He had withdrawn his army intact and had effected a change of base, unknown to the Confederate General Staff, from the York River to the ...
— Lectures on Land Warfare; A tactical Manual for the Use of Infantry Officers • Anonymous
... machine pure and simple which would make him the most complicated of mechanisms, a marvel of intricate parts, but would deprive him of his essence as self-conscious unique in the universe. Man, thinking man, at any rate, dreads to lose the cherished impregnable conviction that he is something apart, inherently, and therefore infinitely different from every other phenomenon in ...
— The Glands Regulating Personality • Louis Berman, M.D.
... indifference. The student of human nature can always discover some hobby, some accessible weakness and sensitive spot in their heart. Chaboisseau might have entrenched himself in antiquity as in an impregnable camp. ...
— A Distinguished Provincial at Paris • Honore de Balzac
... made a desperate effort to throw off the yoke of the Trusts. They had failed and been made to feel the lash of their victors. Eight years have passed, during which the Trusts have become impregnable, ...
— The Transgressors - Story of a Great Sin • Francis A. Adams
... us lies an adventure unprecedented in modern war. Together with our comrades of the fleet we are about to force a landing upon an open beach in face of positions which have been vaunted by our enemies as impregnable. The landing will be made good, by the help of God and the Navy, the positions will be stormed, and the war brought one step nearer to a ...
— The Incomparable 29th and the "River Clyde" • George Davidson
... not yet advanced a step with our Princess Natalie," said Stephano, shrugging his shoulders; "that, it seems, is an impregnable fortress!" ...
— The Daughter of an Empress • Louise Muhlbach
... Drake's strength was coming out from Spain to attack him in the rear. Nor was this all, for Baskerville and his soldiers, who had landed at Nombre de Dios and started overland, were in full retreat along the road from Panama, having found an impregnable Spanish position on the way. It was a sad beginning for 1596, the centennial year of England's ...
— Elizabethan Sea Dogs • William Wood
... credited with power as a leader, and it was certainly little less than marvellous that he could maintain his leadership after his business failure in Ohio, and the utter break-down of his revealed promises concerning a Zion in Missouri. The explanation of this success is to be found in the logically impregnable position of his character as a prophet, so long as the church itself retained its organization, and in the kind of people who were gathered into his fold. If it was not true that HE received the golden plates from an angel; if it was not true that HE translated them ...
— The Story of the Mormons: • William Alexander Linn
... one mile off the shore of Vera Cruz, stands the grim old fortress of San Juan d'Ulloa, a most conspicuous object with its blackened and crumbling walls. It has often been declared to be impregnable, and yet, curious to say, it has never been attacked by a foe without being compelled to surrender. Here Cortez landed on Mexican soil, April 21, 1519. He disembarked on a Friday, a day which the Romish church has set apart for the adoration of the cross; he therefore called the ...
— Aztec Land • Maturin M. Ballou
... observer. Although we counter-attacked vigorously, taking 142 prisoners, the enemy held the summit. General Van Kuderzen, in a report dated July 3, said that after a careful inspection of the German works and trenches he finally believed that the hill had been transformed into an impregnable fortress, and that its capture ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 5, August, 1915 • Various
... beholding her delight, threw himself in an ecstasy on the mound and clasped it in his arms. I can hardly doubt that he regarded it as representing his own grave, to which in his happier moods he certainly looked forward as a place of final and impregnable refuge. ...
— Malcolm • George MacDonald
... ourselves could not discover, has been proved by our enemies not to be impassable to men, and it would be disgraceful for us after having begun so well to leave our enterprise incomplete, and to give up the place as impregnable after the enemy themselves have shown us how it may be taken. Where it is easy for one man to climb, it cannot be hard for many to climb one by one, as their numbers will give them confidence and mutual ...
— Plutarch's Lives, Volume I (of 4) • Plutarch
... were outside the castle, of course. It was against etiquette to bring them inside, especially when the Duke was present. But there were plenty of them. Possibly he should fight his way out of here now. Once in his hilltop castle, he would be impregnable. And his raiding parties could keep the barony in supplies. Or possibly it ...
— Millennium • Everett B. Cole
... fought out. After all, foreign powers had no connection with the States, and knew only the Union with which and with which alone they made treaties, and the reality of sovereignty in each province was as ridiculous as in theory it was impregnable. But Barneveld, under the modest title of Advocate of one province, had been in reality president and prime minister of the whole commonwealth. He had himself been the union and the sovereignty. It was not wonderful that so imperious a nature objected to ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... the firm did not have an impregnable fortune to throw into the breach, even though it carried on such a far-reaching business and although its transactions were enormous. And who had even heard of such a crazily hazardous speculation as Tidemand's fatal plunge in rye! Everybody could see that now, and everybody pitied or ...
— Shallow Soil • Knut Hamsun
... after nightfall. The next movement was a turning one, taking the position of Theriso on the flank, by Lakus, a strong position, but at which no defenses had been prepared. The insurgents moved their depot and hospital across the valley to Zurba, a village high on the mountain-side and impregnable to direct attack, but which Mustapha proceeded to bombard with mountain guns for two days. I could hear every gun-fire, Zurba being only nine miles in a direct line from my house, and I counted fifteen shots a minute during a part of ...
— The Autobiography of a Journalist, Volume II • William James Stillman
... was said on all sides that Nidderdale was doing very well for himself. The absolute money was not perhaps so great as had been at first asked; but then, at that time, Melmotte was not the strong rock, the impregnable tower of commerce, the very navel of the commercial enterprise of the world,—as all men now regarded him. Nidderdale's father, and Nidderdale himself, were, in the present condition of things, content with a very much less stringent bargain than that which ...
— The Way We Live Now • Anthony Trollope
... wanted. Our Captain said twelve good ones were all he wanted; these were immediately furnished him and we started. On our way down we built breastworks of cordwood along the bulwarks of the boat. These were impregnable to rifle bullets. When within six miles of Fort Erie two volunteers were called for to go ashore without arms and proceed cautiously down the lake and gather what information they could. All offered, but young Murdy and Edie were the chosen ones, ...
— Troublous Times in Canada - A History of the Fenian Raids of 1866 and 1870 • John A. Macdonald
... she left him than it was when he opened his office door to her. She now knew, said Pratt, with what a strong and resourceful man she had to deal: she would respect him, and have a better idea of him, now that she was aware of his impregnable position. ...
— The Talleyrand Maxim • J. S. Fletcher
... morning I noticed British flags waving beside French flags on several balconies and shops. England's declaration of war against Germany arouses tremendous enthusiasm. The heroic defense made by the Belgians against three German army corps advancing on the almost impregnable fortress of Lige—a second Port Arthur—is a magnificent encouragement for the French. At some of the houses in Paris one now sees occasionally assembled the flags of France, Russia, Great ...
— Paris War Days - Diary of an American • Charles Inman Barnard
... hundred and fifty in width. Surrounded by a stockade fence twelve feet high, with a yard wide walk running around the inside, and with bastions at each corner large enough to contain six defenders, the fort presented an almost impregnable defense. The blockhouse was two stories in height, the second story projecting out several feet over the first. The thick white oak walls bristled with portholes. Besides the blockhouse, there were a number of cabins located within the stockade. Wells had been sunk inside the inclosure, so ...
— Betty Zane • Zane Grey
... "The place is impregnable—sheer cliffs upon all sides—the causeway two hundred meters long. I could pick them off one by one from the top of the keep. With the drawbridge up, we are as safe as though we were ...
— The Secret Witness • George Gibbs
... Impregnable I held myself, secure Against intrusion. Who can measure Man? How should I guess his mortal will outran Defeat so far that danger could allure For its own sake? — that he would all endure, All sacrifice, all suffer, rather than Forego the ...
— The Little Book of Modern Verse • Jessie B. Rittenhouse
... a lofty rock is so strongly grounded, bounded, and founded, that by force of man it can never be confounded; the foundation and walls are unpenetrable, the rampiers impregnable, the bulwarks invincible, no way but one it is or can be possible to be made passable. In a word, I have seen many straits and fortresses, in Germany, the Netherlands, Spain and England, but they must all give place to this unconquered Castle, both for ...
— The Pennyles Pilgrimage - Or The Money-lesse Perambulation of John Taylor • John Taylor
... confess, Sir, that in one respect some impression has been made on my opinions lately. Mr. Madison's publication has put the power in a very strong light. He has placed it, I must acknowledge, upon grounds of construction and argument which seem impregnable. But even if the power were doubtful, on the face of the Constitution itself, it had been assumed and asserted in the first revenue law ever passed under that same Constitution and on this ground, as a matter ...
— The Great Speeches and Orations of Daniel Webster • Daniel Webster
... a vault-like door, leading to the subterranean steel chambers where Herzog eventually counted on storing some hundreds of thousands of tons of liquid oxygen—the reserve-chambers, impregnable to lightning, fire, frost or storm, to man's attacks or nature's—the chambers blasted from the living rock, deep as the Falls themselves, vacuum-lined, wondrous achievement of the highest engineering skill ...
— The Air Trust • George Allan England
... threw himself against the ancient door. But here he stopped. The mighty bars upon the other side were proof even against such muscles as his. It needed but a moment's effort to convince him of the futility of endeavoring to force that impregnable barrier. There was but one other way, and that led back through the long tunnels to the bowlder a mile beyond the city's walls, and then back across the open as he had come to the ...
— The Return of Tarzan • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... one of the most famous and interesting episodes in Irish history. The castle was deemed almost impregnable from its situation; and every argument was used with Sir George Carew to induce him to desist from attacking it. It ...
— An Illustrated History of Ireland from AD 400 to 1800 • Mary Frances Cusack
... young noblemen of the first families of Rome, to vie with one another in their addresses, who should gain her in marriage.[3] Agnes answered them all, that she had consecrated her virginity to a heavenly spouse, who could not be beheld by mortal eyes. Her suitors finding her resolution impregnable to all their arts and importunities, accused her to the governor as a Christian; not doubting but threats and torments would overcome her tender mind, on which allurements could make no impression. The judge at first employed the mildest expressions and most inviting promises; to which Agnes ...
— The Lives of the Fathers, Martyrs, and Principal Saints - January, February, March • Alban Butler
... before taking a final vote on its adoption their proceedings were suddenly brought to a stand by the alarming news, loudly proclaimed by a herald, who appeared on his foam-covered horse before their open door, that Ticonderoga, the supposed impregnable barrier of frontier defence, had fallen, and our scattered troops were flying in every direction before a formidable British army, that was sweeping, unopposed, along the western border of the state, ...
— The Rangers - [Subtitle: The Tory's Daughter] • D. P. Thompson
... of the Big Rock had its good points and its defects. Impregnable to assault, two men could hold it against ten thousand. Also, it guarded the passage to open sea. The two schooners, Raoul Van Asveld, and his cutthroat following were bottled up. Grief, with the ton of dynamite, which he had removed higher up the ...
— A Son Of The Sun • Jack London
... together with some caves underneath it, known by the name of the Paradise of Thieves. It is my principal stronghold on these hills; for (as you have doubtless noticed) the eyrie is invisible both from the road above and from the valley below. It is something better than impregnable; it is unnoticeable. Here I mostly live, and here I shall certainly die, if the gendarmes ever track me here. I am not the kind of criminal that 'reserves his defence,' but the better kind that reserves his ...
— The Wisdom of Father Brown • G. K. Chesterton
... Jimmy's campaign broke down. He was at a loss to know what to do next. He ebbed away from the Duke's front door like an army that has made an unsuccessful frontal attack on an impregnable fortress. He could hardly force his way in and ...
— Piccadilly Jim • Pelham Grenville Wodehouse
... so obscured the top of Lookout all day as to hide whatever was going on from the view of those below, settled down and made it so dark where Hooker was as to stop operations for the time. At four o'clock Hooker reported his position as impregnable. By a little after five direct communication was established, and a brigade of troops was sent from Chattanooga to reinforce him. These troops had to cross Chattanooga Creek and met with some opposition, but soon overcame it, and by night the commander, General Carlin, reported to Hooker and was ...
— Memoirs of Three Civil War Generals, Complete • U. S. Grant, W. T. Sherman, P. H. Sheridan
... Ambrose E. Burnside, who had won some successes early in the war, but who had protested his unfitness for a great command, and who was soon to prove it. He led the army after Lee, found him entrenched on the heights back of Fredericksburg, and hurled division after division against an impregnable position, until twelve thousand men lay dead and wounded on the field. Burnside, half-crazed with anguish at his fatal mistake, offered his resignation, which was at ...
— American Men of Action • Burton E. Stevenson
... so much truth in what L'Isle said, that Cranfield was obliged to yield up his impregnable fortress as a very fine thing in itself, but ...
— The Actress in High Life - An Episode in Winter Quarters • Sue Petigru Bowen
... and so kept still. But to-day such a warm well-spring of joy rises in my heart when I think that to-morrow the house will be bright again, and that in place of the empty wall opposite me at table I shall see your kindly and forbearing face, I know that the heart I had thought impregnable has begun to yield, and that daily gentleness, and a boundless consideration from one who had excuse for bitter thoughts and recrimination, are doing what all of us thought impossible a ...
— Agatha Webb • Anna Katharine Green
... inorganic matter. Some such silicate construction was to be found in the sponge, of Earth. Could this be a gigantic relative of that lowly creature? He did not know, and couldn't guess. He wasn't a zoologist. All he knew was that the thing appeared to be formed of living, impregnable stone. He knew, also, that this fabulous creature ...
— The Planetoid of Peril • Paul Ernst
... all the sentiment or law against this one fruit of the tree, if the tree itself is left to stand. The tree—the prolific cause of so many and so great evils in Utah, the greatest curse of the territory, the strength of Mormonism, and its impregnable wall of defence against Christianity and civilization, is that arbitrary, despotic, and absolute hierarchy known ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume I • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... some miles above its mouth. The waters were high so that the bottoms were generally overflowed, leaving only narrow causeways of dry land between points of debarkation and the high bluffs. These were fortified and defended at all points. The rebel position was impregnable against any force that could be brought against its front. Sherman could not use one-fourth of his force. His efforts to capture the city, or the high ground north of it, ...
— Personal Memoirs of U. S. Grant, Complete • Ulysses S. Grant
... "If our number is small," he said, "our hearts are great," and so he assailed the third city and place of arms which Spain then possessed in the West Indies. The entrance of the harbour was protected by two strong castles, judged as "almost impregnable," while Morgan had no artillery of any avail against fortresses. Morgan had the luck to capture a Spanish soldier, whom he compelled to parley with the garrison of the castle. This he stormed and blew ...
— Essays in Little • Andrew Lang
... powers, Dr. Manning is in ecstasies. The "very exalted person" becomes "a righteous judge, a learned judge, a Daniel come to judgment—yea, a Daniel." These shouts of joy ought to be enough to show men where the real danger lies. Our present position is impregnable. But if we abandon it for the new one proposed to us by the Rationalist party, how shall we be able to stand? How could a national religious Establishment which should seek to rest its foundations—not on God's Word; on the ancient Creeds; ...
— Famous Reviews • Editor: R. Brimley Johnson
... city were defended in the same way. Antwerp could never have been taken by assault, but with modern artillery it would have been quite easy to destroy it over the heads of its defenders. The Germans have probably by now rendered it impregnable, for though in modern war it is impossible to defend one's own cities, the same does not apply to the enemy. In future, forts will presumably be placed at points of strategic importance only, and as far as ...
— A Surgeon in Belgium • Henry Sessions Souttar
... make acquaintance with a young lady in Paradise Row. But now, when he came to look at it, he found that Marion Fay was environed with fortifications and a chevaux-de-frise of difficulties which were apparently impregnable. He could not call at No. 17, and simply ask for Miss Fay. To do so he must be a proficient in that impudence, the lack of which created so many difficulties for him. He thought of finding out the Quaker chapel in the City, and there sitting out the whole proceeding,—unless ...
— Marion Fay • Anthony Trollope
... seized it before; for the great castle Marisco, built upon the extreme verge of the cliffs, commanding the bay and the landing-place, and overlooking in a wide sweep all the southern coast of the island, was already built in the eleventh century. From this impregnable fortress, with its massive walls nine feet in thickness, its squat, strong Norman turrets, its encircling fosse, and the perpendicular cliffs by which its seaward wall was made unscalable, Sir Jordan de Marisco used to sally with his retainers, making war on all alike, levying toll—blackmail, ...
— Lynton and Lynmouth - A Pageant of Cliff & Moorland • John Presland
... of trundling a wheel-barrow. Mr. Evelyn probably alludes to this in the following passage, wherein he asks, "Is there, under the heavens, a more glorious and refreshing object, of the kind, than an impregnable hedge, of about four hundred feet in length, nine feet high, and five in diameter, which I can still show in my ruined garden at Saye's Court (thanks to the Tzar of Muscovy), at any time of the year, ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 574 - Vol. XX, No. 574. Saturday, November 3, 1832 • Various
... my most interesting excursions, however, was that to Fantaua and the Diadem. The former is a spot which the Indians considered impregnable; but where, nevertheless, they were well beaten by the French during the last war. Monsieur Bruat, the governor, was kind enough to lend me his horses, and to allow me the escort of a non- commissioned officer, who could point out to me each position of ...
— A Woman's Journey Round the World • Ida Pfeiffer
... high in influence and station, civil and military, are renouncing their allegiance to the flag they have sworn to support, it is an inexpressible source of consolation and pride to us to know that the general in chief of the army remains like an impregnable fortress at the post of duty and glory, and that he will continue to the last to uphold that flag, and defend it, if necessary, with his sword, even if his native ...
— General Scott • General Marcus J. Wright
... fortress. The vast pile, reared of stone, was situated thirty-six miles from Moscow, and was encompassed with deep ditches, and massive ramparts bristling with cannon. The monks were in possession of the whole country for a space of twelve miles around this almost impregnable citadel. From this safe retreat Sophia opened communications with the rebel chief. She succeeded in alluring him to come half way to meet her in conference. A powerful band of soldiers, placed in ambush, seized him. He was immediately beheaded, ...
— The Empire of Russia • John S. C. Abbott
... entered the inclosure made by the Major, they were surprised at the state of defence in which he had put it. His hedge of thorns upon rocks piled up was impregnable, and the waggons were in the centre, drawn up in a square; the entrance would only admit one person at a time, and was protected by ...
— The Mission; or Scenes in Africa • Captain Frederick Marryat
... was soon after removed, under an escort of dragoons, to the fortress of Nantes. From this place he almost miraculously escaped to his own territory of Retz, where he was regarded as sovereign, and where he was surrounded by retainers who, in impregnable castles, would fight to the death for their lord. These scenes took place early in the summer ...
— Louis XIV., Makers of History Series • John S. C. Abbott
... gross to sense that the Creator has never held direct communication with the creature, and you have but stripped religion of its tattered vestments—have not laid the weight of your hand upon the impregnable citadel, the universal Fatherhood of God and Brotherhood of Man. You have never yet talked to the real question. You reject religion because Moses and Mahomet, Luther and Calvin entertained crude ideas of the plans and attributes ...
— Volume 1 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... Energy returned. The energy of breeding fever merely, yet to him it appeared that of refreshment, of renewed and abounding health. He was conscious, too, of a will outside himself, acting upon his will—a will self-secure, impregnable, working with triumphant daring towards a single end. It certainly was unmaimed—in its present manifestation in any case. It told, and with assurance, of completion, of attainment. Yielding himself ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet
... the river with no less than three hundred men, with directions to construct houses and fortifications. The settlers, working with new life and vigor in the more wholesome air of the upper James, soon rendered the place almost impregnable to attack from the Indians. They cut a ditch across the narrow neck of the peninsula, and fortified it with high palisades. To prevent a sudden raid by the savages in canoes from the other shore, five strong block houses were built at ...
— Virginia under the Stuarts 1607-1688 • Thomas J. Wertenbaker
... couldn't have lived in the tumult long and kept my wits; but we heard of an employe who, when some tooth or nail in the enormous monster smote him, could not bear to stop away long enough to complete his cure, because he was unable to bear the "awful stillness" of the hospital. Persons of impregnable nerve-power let us deeper and deeper into the bowels of the earth, showing us the dragon's brood, and his terrible wife whose business it is not only to print the newspaper, but to cut its sheets, and eventually to lay them like eggs, at the rate ...
— The Heather-Moon • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... somewhat retarded by the individualistic influence of the English Common Law. When the Socialistic autocracy is once completely in power, with its professed policy of taking away human ambition and initiative, its position will be almost impregnable and become more and more secure as the average citizen becomes more and more servile, lazy and unambitious. Socialism is politically decadent and contains within itself the germ of self-destruction. ...
— Socialism and American ideals • William Starr Myers
... in a tolerably direct line to the capital, ten miles distant. But near sunset the wind increased again, and compelled us to take refuge in a sheltered nook within a mile or two of Srenuggur, the fort standing above us on the summit of a hill—imposing from its apparently impregnable position—and there ...
— Three Months of My Life • J. F. Foster
... attack the fort of Vellore, which was regarded as impregnable. The town lay at the foot of some very steep and rugged hills, which were surmounted by three detached forts. The rajah, encouraged by the French, had renounced his allegiance to Muhammud Ali, and had declared himself independent. ...
— With Clive in India - Or, The Beginnings of an Empire • G. A. Henty
... those starving peasants may well have stood before the high impregnable walls in the broad daylight of despair. Even their nightmares during the night, of unearthly necromancers looking down at them from the battlements and with signs and spells paralysing all their potential toils, may well have ...
— The New Jerusalem • G. K. Chesterton
... my pet superstition about the place. Having resolved it into its constituent elements I arranged them in convenient troops and squadrons, and collecting all the forces of my logic bore down upon them from impregnable premises with the thunder of irresistible conclusions and a great noise of chariots and general intellectual shouting. Then, when my big mental guns had overturned all opposition, and were growling almost inaudibly away on the horizon of ...
— Can Such Things Be? • Ambrose Bierce
... consultation with Joyce, and then he set seriously about the preparations necessary for a light defence. By a little management, and some persona, risk, the bullet-proof shutters of the north wing of the Hut were all closed, rendering the rear of the buildings virtually impregnable. When this was done, and the gates of the area were surely shut, the place was like a ship in a gale, under short canvass and hove-to. The enemy within the palisades were powerless, to all appearance, the walls of stone preventing anything like an application ...
— Wyandotte • James Fenimore Cooper
... A wood, like that enchanted grove In which with fiends Rinaldo strove, Where every silent tree possessed A spirit prisoned in its breast, Which the first stroke of coming strife Would startle into hideous life; So dense, so still, the Austrians stood, A living wall, a human wood! Impregnable their front appears, All horrent with projected spears, Whose polished points before them shine, From flank to flank, one brilliant line, Bright as the breakers' splendors run Along the ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 7 • Charles H. Sylvester
... his Majesty, after receiving the homage of the Venetian authorities, repaired to the arsenal. This is an immense building, fortified so carefully that it was practically impregnable. The appearance of the interior is singular on account of several small islands which it incloses, joined together by bridges. The magazines and numerous buildings of the fortress thus appear to be floating on the surface ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton
... not some very near about the King, who, favouring the party of Maud, had credit enough to prevail with him not to venture time and reputation against an impregnable fortress, but rather, by withdrawing his forces, permit her to retire to some less fortified place, where she might more easily fall into his hands. This advice the King took against his own opinion; the Empress fled out of Arundel by night; and, after frequent shifting her stages through ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, Vol. X. • Jonathan Swift
... the election of Mr. Lincoln in November, 1860, the sole issue between the North and the South, between Republicans on the one hand and Democrats and Compromisers on the other, had related to slavery. Logically, the position of the Republicans was impregnable. Their platforms and their leaders agreed that the party intended strictly to respect the Constitution, and not to interfere at all with slavery in the States within which it now lawfully existed. ...
— Abraham Lincoln, Vol. I. • John T. Morse
... widely dispersed than those of any other nation, I entertain a strong opinion that if Great Britain continues to maintain her present policy of Free Trade—as I trust will be the case—her means of defence should, within the limits of human foresight, be such as to render her empire impregnable; and, further, that should that policy unfortunately be reversed, it will be a wise precaution that those means of defence should, if possible, be still further strengthened. But I also entertain an equally strong opinion that an imperial nation should seek to fortify its position ...
— Political and Literary essays, 1908-1913 • Evelyn Baring
... drew to a close the building was far advanced, and the bulwarks were sufficiently high and massive to render this residence impregnable. In short, when it wanted but three days to summer the only part that remained to be finished was the gateway. Then sat the gods on their seats of justice and entered into consultation, inquiring of one another who ...
— The Elder Eddas of Saemund Sigfusson; and the Younger Eddas of Snorre Sturleson • Saemund Sigfusson and Snorre Sturleson
... amid a thousand doubts? It seemed to have found, and filled to overflowing, the soul of one amiable little child who had a kind of genius for tranquillity, and on his first coming hither had led Gaston to what he held to be the [43] choicest, pleasantest places, as being impregnable by noise. In his small stock of knowledge, he knew, like all around him, that he was going to die, and took kindly to the thought of a small grave in the little green close, as to a natural sleeping-place, in which he would be at home beforehand. ...
— Gaston de Latour: an unfinished romance • Walter Horatio Pater
... of the 17th, there being nothing further to detain us in Hamoaze, steam was got up, and ere long we were leaving, for a few years, the old and familiar "Cambridge" and "Impregnable," the one-time homes of so many amongst us; and bidding king "Billy" and his royal consort a long good bye! until Devil's Point hides from us a picture many of us were ...
— In Eastern Seas - The Commission of H.M.S. 'Iron Duke,' flag-ship in China, 1878-83 • J. J. Smith
... besiegers. In regard to the enemy he found that Gibbet Hill was still occupied by Sir John Norris, "the best soldier, in his opinion, that they had," who had entrenched himself very strongly, and was supposed to have thirty-five hundred men under his command. His position seemed quite impregnable. The rest of the English were on the other side of the river, and Alexander observed, with satisfaction, that they had abandoned a small redoubt, near the leper-house, outside the Loor-Gate, through which the reinforcements must enter the city. The Prince ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... well as with hypnotism, telepathy and suggestion, his aim being to organise and direct a crusade against medicine as practised by the faculty. He gathered together materials for a declaration of war against the medicos, attacking them in their, apparently, most impregnable positions, and showing up, often through their own observations, the fatal inanity—in his eyes—of their therapeutics. At the same time he managed to acquire experience of commerce, finance and administration, and, ...
— Modern Saints and Seers • Jean Finot
... hairbreadth escape to another with the calmness of an angel who knows his life is not of earth, and on the fourth day there came the awful battle, the struggle for a position that had been held by the enemy for four years, and that had been declared impregnable from the ...
— The Search • Grace Livingston Hill
... contrast, the Arena, one of the best-preserved specimens of Roman work, rises seemingly from amongst the houses. Pola is full of Roman remains. All is so green and peaceful, in spite of the countless fortifications which render the harbour well-nigh, if not quite, impregnable, that Nature and War seem for ...
— The Land of the Black Mountain - The Adventures of Two Englishmen in Montenegro • Reginald Wyon
... and d'Alenon rode from St. Denis to the gates of Paris, to observe the best places for an attack. And still Charles dallied and delayed, still the main army did not come up. Thus the delay of the king gave the English time to make Paris almost impregnable and to frighten the people who, had Charles marched straight from Reims, would have yielded as Reims did. D'Alenon kept going to Senlis urging Charles to come up with the main army. He went on September 1—the king promised to start next day. D'Alenon returned to the Maid, the king still ...
— The Junior Classics • Various
... predilection for pushing one's way through a perpendicular jungle or crawling over jagged and sunbaked rock, the only way to ascend the hill is from the south-western side, from the upper portion of which still frown the outworks and bastioned walls which once rendered the fortress impregnable. The road from the town of Junnar is in tolerable repair and leads you across a stream, past the ruined mud walls of an old fortified enclosure, and past the camping-ground of the Twelve Wells, until you reach a group of trees overshadowing the ruined tombs of ...
— By-Ways of Bombay • S. M. Edwardes, C.V.O.
... the usual. One had been blackmailed by an actress after an affair and railroaded her off the Earth. Another had a habit of taking bribes to advance favorite sons in civil and military service. And so on. The Republic could not suffer at their hands; the Republic and the dynasty were impregnable. You simply spied on everybody—including the spies—and ordered summary executions often enough to show that you meant it, and kept the public ignorant: deaf-dumb-blind ignorant. The spy system was simplicity itself; you had only to let things get as tangled and confused as possible ...
— The Adventurer • Cyril M. Kornbluth
... held by the 6th and 7th Manchesters of the 42nd Division. These Eski Lines were first held about the 7th or 8th May and have since been worked up, mainly by the energy of de Lisle, into fortifications, humanly speaking, impregnable. General Douglas, Commander of the Division, came round with me. He reminds me greatly of his brother, the late Chief of the Imperial General Staff; excellent at detail; a conscientious, very hard worker. When I had seen my Manchester friends I passed on into ...
— Gallipoli Diary, Volume 2 • Ian Hamilton
... the first conquest, it should also be guarded by one of the most trusty barons which the King has, bearing the title of deputy, with a force of five hundred of the best soldiers, besides a troop of fifty horsemen. It is considered by everyone as an impregnable fortress, on account of the inundation with which it may be surrounded, although there are persons skilled in the art of fortification who doubt that it would prove so if put to the test. For the same reason Guines is also reckoned impregnable, ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 1-20 • Various
... as strong as a wall, for the root which is more then halfe cut in sunder, putting forth new branches which runne and entangle themselves amongst the old stockes, doe so thicken and fortifie the Hedge that it is against the force of beasts impregnable" (ed. 1635, pp. 68-9). ...
— A Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. III • Various
... first floor. The massive stone walls here were unadorned with ivy, nor were there any of those elaborate decorations in stonework which might have afforded a hold for the foot of the climber. The bare stone wall frowned down upon Thomas Milsom, impregnable as the walls ...
— Run to Earth - A Novel • M. E. Braddon
... she might be impregnable, but the old fellow affirmed that no woman was this; that no fortress was too strong to be carried; that it all depended on the assailant and the vehemence of the assault; and if one did not succeed, another would. The young man brightened. ...
— "George Washington's" Last Duel - 1891 • Thomas Nelson Page
... for a week after you have seen it. Nowhere in all Europe did I see a place which impressed its wonder and its history of horror upon me as did the cathedral dungeon of Mont St. Michel. Its situation was so impregnable, its capacity so vast, its silence and isolation from the ...
— As Seen By Me • Lilian Bell
... compute the expense of every company of soldiers and squadron of ships; it is only necessary to assert, what will, I hope, not be very readily denied, even by those whom daily practice of absurd apologies has rendered impregnable by the force of truth, that such expenses as have neither contributed to our own defence, nor to the disadvantage of the Spaniards, have ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, Vol. 10. - Parlimentary Debates I. • Samuel Johnson
... 10 deg. north latitude, fourteen leagues from the gulf of Darien, and eight westwards from the port called Nombre de Dios. It is judged the strongest place the king of Spain possesses in all the West Indies, except Havanna and Carthagena. Here are two castles almost impregnable, that defend the city, situate at the entry of the port, so that no ship or boat can pass without permission. The garrison consists of three hundred soldiers, and the town is inhabited by four hundred families. ...
— Great Pirate Stories • Various
... those who heard tell of these doings but of the prisoners themselves. And whenever he brought over a city to his side, he set the citizens free from the harsher service of a bondsman to his lord, imposing the gentler obedience of a freeman to his ruler. Indeed, there were fortresses impregnable to assault which he brought under his power by the subtler force ...
— Agesilaus • Xenophon
... seems to us that God no longer possesses any means of saving us, and we are tempted to provide for our own affairs as if nothing more were to be expected from Him. On the contrary, His providence, as He unfolds it, ought to be regarded by us as an impregnable fortress. Let us labor, then, to learn the full import of the expression, that our bodies are in the hands of Him who created them. For this reason He has sometimes delivered His people in a miraculous manner, and beyond all human expectation, ...
— The World's Great Sermons, Volume I - Basil to Calvin • Various
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