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Fastness   Listen
noun
Fastness  n.  
1.
The state of being fast and firm; firmness; fixedness; security; faithfulness. "All... places of fastness (are) laid open."
2.
A fast place; a stronghold; a fortress or fort; a secure retreat; a castle; as, the enemy retired to their fastnesses in the mountains.
3.
Conciseness of style. (Obs.)
4.
The state of being fast or swift.






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Fastness" Quotes from Famous Books



... his hospitality with alliterative odes very difficult to compose, and which at the present day only a few book-worms understand. There he dwelt for many years, the virtual if not the nominal king of North Wales, occasionally no doubt looking down with self-complaisance from the top of his fastness on the parks and fish-ponds of which he had several; his mill, his pigeon tower, his ploughed lands, and the cottages of a thousand retainers, huddled round the lower part of the hill, or strewn about the valley; and there he might have lived and died had not events caused him to draw the ...
— Wild Wales - Its People, Language and Scenery • George Borrow

... tired, wrapped in reflection and their towels. Ghostie provided a perpetual jest by wearing a smart Paris hat with a high cerise crown. She said it had once belonged to the fastest woman in South Africa, who had given it to her as a joke, but she did not mention the lady's name, nor say in what her "fastness" consisted. This was characteristic of visitors at Ho-la-le-la: they sometimes stated facts, but never talked scandal. When April asked them to call her by her own name, instead of "Diana," they did so without comment, accepting her as one of themselves, and asking no questions about ...
— Blue Aloes - Stories of South Africa • Cynthia Stockley

... He could fell a tree with the swift surety of an executioner, and in revenge for his many arboral murders the woodland had taken captive his mind, captured and chained it as Prospero did Ariel. The resounding footsteps of Progress driven on so mercilessly in this mad age could not reach his fastness. It did not concern him that men were thinking, investigating, inventing. His senses responded only to the sonorous music of the woods; a steadfast wind ringing metallic melody from the pine-tops contented ...
— A Mountain Woman and Others • (AKA Elia Wilkinson) Elia W. Peattie

... QB4"), and set about removing her child to a place of safety. She invokes the aid of Roqueblanc, an independent chieftain, who, spurred on by love for her, throws all his forces on to her side, offering at the same time his well-guarded fastness as a sanctuary for her boy. ("Castles.") Then the queen musters all her own troops and leads them into battle by the side ...
— If I May • A. A. Milne

... Captain of Horse. I expected rapid events in this country, and quick promotion for those who came out of the struggle with their lives. Instead, we have an expedition against some brigands' fastness, which is deserted when we arrive, or a troop to quell a petty riot which has fizzled out when we get there, ...
— Princess Maritza • Percy Brebner

... fumble in his pockets, and drawing out a brownish rag, possibly a handkerchief, knotted in several places, proceeded to untie one of the knots. The doctor watched him without speaking. Ultimately, from some fastness in the rag a half-sovereign was extracted, and was laid upon the table by Sweeny. The clerk, a well-dressed young gentleman, whose attitude had throughout been one of the extremest aloofness, made an entry in his book ...
— All on the Irish Shore - Irish Sketches • E. Somerville and Martin Ross

... granted him a castle, situated in a romantic position on the eastern coast of Scotland. It was called the Castle of Dunbar. It was on a stormy promontory, overlooking the German Ocean: a very appropriate retreat and fastness for such a man of iron ...
— Mary Queen of Scots, Makers of History • Jacob Abbott

... the victors, for Greek civilization, even of the type introduced by Alexander into Asia, was ill replaced by Tatar coarseness and barbarism; but we cannot refuse our admiration to the spectacle of a handful of gallant men determinedly resisting in the fastness of their native land a host of aliens, and triumphing over their ...
— The Seven Great Monarchies Of The Ancient Eastern World, Vol 6. (of 7): Parthia • George Rawlinson

... rich republic of Amain, who built this tower as an exploratory gazeeboo from which they could watch the motions of the Saracens who were wont to annoy them with plundering excursions; but after this fastness [was built] the people of Amalfi usually defeated and chastised them. The ride over the opposite side of the mountain was described as so uncommonly pleasant as made me long to ride it with assistance of a pony. ...
— The Journal of Sir Walter Scott - From the Original Manuscript at Abbotsford • Walter Scott

... changed swiftly to black night that rushed past the two clinging figures and enveloped them in a wall of silence. Then out of the mysterious fastness came the dull glow of what looked like a distant planet. It grew and enlarged till it reached the size of a silver dollar. Little pin-points of light soon began to appear on all sides of it, very much ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, October, 1930 • Various

... thus: "Nay, thou shalt not only be in safety, but thou shalt be a king; and that more firmly than thou wast before; for thou art worthy to reign over a great many subjects, by reason of the fastness of thy friendship; and do thou endeavor to be equally constant in thy friendship to me, upon my good success, which is what I depend upon from the generosity of thy disposition. However, Antony hath done well in preferring ...
— The Wars of the Jews or History of the Destruction of Jerusalem • Flavius Josephus

... Miss Margaret said "she was a giddy creature." Miss Sibyl wrote a poem on her, entitled, "Warning to a young Lady against the Pleasures of the World." They all called her Sally; the other two sisters had no diminutive synonyms. Sally is a name indicative of fastness. But this Sally would not have been thought fast in another household, and she was now little likely to sally out of the one she belonged to. These sisters, who were all many years older than Sir Peter, lived in a handsome, old-fashioned, red-brick house, ...
— Kenelm Chillingly, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton

... with hot blood; the man of peace vanishes, transfigured into a choleric and formidable man of war. Still, she does not come out of her absorption to look at him: her eyes are steadfast with a mechanical reflection of Richard's stead-fastness.) ...
— The Devil's Disciple • George Bernard Shaw

... trail seemed a broad road, blazoned through the wild canons and up the rocky fastness and through the thick brakes. She led on and on and up and down, never at fault, with familiar landmarks near and far. Cleve hung close to her, and now his call to her or to the pack-horse took on a keener note. Every rough and wild mile behind ...
— The Border Legion • Zane Grey

... he sat within the icy domes Of yon far Schreckhorn—ay, or higher, where, Veil'd since eternity, the Jungfrau soars, Still to the tyrant would I make my way; With twenty comrades minded like myself, I'd lay his fastness level with the earth! And if none follow me, and if you all, In terror for your homesteads and your herds, Bow in submission to the tyrant's yoke, Round me I'll call the herdsmen on the hills, And there beneath heaven's ...
— Wilhelm Tell - Title: William Tell • Johann Christoph Friedrich von Schiller

... hint of danger. And the time will come when it can hear with equanimity that the fortress has gone to ruin, and that fighting is no longer in fashion. The mountain tribe will have learned to love the fatness of the valley, while thinking of those mother ribs of its mountain fastness which are ever waiting to prop up its life. Just so put a wooden sword into the hand of the Hohenstieler, and let him brag of war, learning ...
— A Handbook to the Works of Browning (6th ed.) • Mrs. Sutherland Orr

... fought together upon the water. The Saxons withdrew before the Britons, so that from beyond the Humber even to Kent they were deceived in their hope. The heathen fled in their galleys to an islet called Thanet. The Britons assailed them in this fastness, and so long as it was day, harassed them with arrows and quarrels, with ships and with barges. They rejoiced loudly, for the pagans were caught in a corner, and those not slain by the sword were fain to die of hunger. For this reason, the Britons raised a mighty tumult and ...
— Arthurian Chronicles: Roman de Brut • Wace

... of freedom that enthralls me Is still the fastness of a secret king Who treads the dark like snow, of old king Sleep. He works with night, he has stolen death's tool frost That makes the breaking ...
— The Atlantic Book of Modern Plays • Various

... a fastness of rock were concealed, Oft we lay there for a year unrevealed, Though hidden from Fionn by the stream as it leapt, Where it wet not the head of my love as ...
— Memories of Canada and Scotland - Speeches and Verses • John Douglas Sutherland Campbell

... the hut—a hopeless, uncharted, trackless sea of white lying below the rocky shores to which the castaways still clung. Through the marvellously clear air the smoke of the pastoral village of Poker Flat rose miles away. Mother Shipton saw it, and from a remote pinnacle of her rocky fastness hurled in that direction a final malediction. It was her last vituperative attempt, and perhaps for that reason was invested with a certain degree of sublimity. It did her good, she privately informed the Duchess. "Just you ...
— The Great English Short-Story Writers, Vol. 1 • Various

... tranquil brows. In form he was symmetrical, straight and pliant as a young fir tree when the sweet spring sap fills its veins. So he came to that assembly, in the glory of youth, beauty, strength, valour, and beautiful shame- fastness, yet proud in his humility and glittering like the morning star. Choice youths, his comrades, attended him. The kings held their breaths when he drew nigh, moving white knee after white knee over the green and sparkling grass. When the other rites ...
— The Coming of Cuculain • Standish O'Grady

... broken fine, and after stopping long enough to make a sketch of the house where I had passed the night, destined like all others in the open country to be burned in the course of the day, I pushed on to the fastness of Shawnik. The advance of the Turks was practically unopposed, for there was only a battalion of Montenegrins against thousands of irregulars and a strong division of regulars, and the Prince, never much ...
— The Autobiography of a Journalist, Volume II • William James Stillman

... more necessary for him to babble when alone. True, in the early days his confidences are innocent enough. Pepys began to write in cipher some time before there was any purpose in it save the common prudence of a secretive man. Having built, however, this secret and solitary fastness, he gradually became more daring. He had discovered a room to the walls of which he dared speak aloud. Here we see the respectable man liberated. He no longer needs to be on his official behaviour, but may play the part of a small Nero, if he wishes, behind ...
— The Art of Letters • Robert Lynd

... which she would silently retreat when the torture became too intense for the repression of society, and there alone, with closed doors, she wrestled with her agony. The stubborn independence of her nature took refuge in this final fastness; and she prayed only that she might go down to death with the full ability to steady herself all the way, needing the help of ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 104, June, 1866 • Various

... the rear the forts at the harbour's mouth. He would have planted his guns on the Giant's Grave. We know little of the history of that giant, except that he carried off the wife of another giant who lived on the Great Island opposite, and held her here in his fastness amid the pine trees against all efforts to wrest her from him. A huge rock that he hurled back in one of these fights is still to be seen on the shore of ...
— Impressions of a War Correspondent • George Lynch

... had made sure that she had returned to the pasture, he dragged the calf far up the mountainside into his fastness and gorged upon it as ...
— Black Bruin - The Biography of a Bear • Clarence Hawkes

... One reason for planting it there was the inaccessibility of the place and its consequent freedom from distraction. More than twenty young men from other villages cheerfully submitted to the long confinement in this ice-bound fastness, and the people of Dourmillouse were glad to make room in their huts for the new-comers, and to add to the supplies brought by them their own ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - Vol. XVII, No. 102. June, 1876. • Various

... by assault. Early on the morning of the 26th captain M'Cune reached the fort in safety. In the afternoon of that day, the enemy practised a well devised stratagem for the purpose of drawing general Clay and his troops from their fastness. On the Sandusky road, just before night, a heavy firing of rifles and muskets was heard: the Indian yell broke upon the ear, and the savages were seen attacking with great impetuosity a column of men, who were soon thrown ...
— Life of Tecumseh, and of His Brother the Prophet - With a Historical Sketch of the Shawanoe Indians • Benjamin Drake

... place to land upon the banks to make fire, espied four canoas coming down the river; and with no small joy caused his men to try the uttermost of their strengths, and after a while two of the four gave over and ran themselves ashore, every man betaking himself to the fastness of the woods. The two other lesser got away, while he landed to lay hold on these; and so turned into some by-creek, we knew not whither. Those canoas that were taken were loaded with bread, and were bound for Margarita in the West Indies, which ...
— The Discovery of Guiana • Sir Walter Raleigh

... their gang. If Jimmie the Monk is mixed up in it that is the connecting link between these fellows and the East Side. And it's back to the East Side that the trail nearly always leads, for over in the East Side of New York is the feudal fastness of the politician who tells the public to be damned, and is rewarded with a fortune for his pains. The politician protects the gangster; the gangster protects the procurer, and both of them vote early and ...
— Traffic in Souls - A Novel of Crime and Its Cure • Eustace Hale Ball

... groves of Trivia and the roof of gold. Daedalus, as the story runs, when in flight from Minos' realm he dared to spread his fleet wings to the sky, glided on his unwonted way towards the icy northern star, and at length lit gently on the Chalcidian fastness. Here, on the first land he retrod, he dedicated his winged oarage to thee, O Phoebus, in the vast temple he built. On the doors is Androgeus' death; thereby the children of Cecrops, bidden, ah me! to pay for yearly ransom seven souls of their sons; the ...
— The Aeneid of Virgil • Virgil

... uninterruptedly, like Cuzco and Ollantaytambo, Machu Picchu would have retained its ancient name, but during the centuries when it was abandoned, its name was lost. Examination showed that it was essentially a fortified place, a remote fastness protected by natural bulwarks, of which man took advantage to create the most impregnable stronghold in the Andes. Our subsequent excavations and the clearing made in 1912, to be described in a subsequent volume, has shown that this was the ...
— Inca Land - Explorations in the Highlands of Peru • Hiram Bingham

... so long undisturbed in their mountain fastness that they had ceased to take even the most ordinary precautions against surprise. So far as could be discovered they had posted no guards over the aeroplanes and their deadly cargo, nor at either of the two doors to the main building. Nevertheless Fleck, as he ...
— The Apartment Next Door • William Andrew Johnston

... regarded as the possessor of the Chaldean Urim and Thummin, the tablets of destiny with which he cast the fates of men. In the mythology of Babylonia these tablets were stolen by the god of storms, who kept them in his thunder fastness. Among the forked flames of the lightning there they were recovered by Bel, who revealed the ...
— The Lords of the Ghostland - A History of the Ideal • Edgar Saltus

... original Dragon; there retired To his last fastness; overthrown by few. Him a laborious thrust of roadway slew. Then man to ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith

... their own exertions). As regards others (his open enemies), they will come to thee with their auxiliaries if they behold thee put forth thy prowess. Uniting with them, seek refuge now in mountain fastness, waiting for that season when calamity will overtake the foe, as it must, for he is not free from disease and death. By name thou art Sanjaya (the victorious). I do not, however, behold any such indication in thee. Be true to thy name. Be my son. Oh, do not make ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 2 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli

... powerful and prosperous tribe of thousands this nation has dwindled down to less than two hundred wretched weaklings. Driven to this canyon fastness from their former dwelling-place by more warlike tribes, they have no coherent account of their wanderings or their ancestors. About all they can tell is that they once lived in cliff dwellings; that other Indians drove them away; and that then Spaniards ...
— I Married a Ranger • Dama Margaret Smith

... misfortunes of this most extraordinary campaign that every blow Washington had struck left his army exhausted. After each success it was necessary to recuperate. It was now being reorganized in the shelter of its mountain fastness, strengthened by a simultaneous uprising of the people, who now took the redress of their wrongs into their own hands. No foraging party could show itself without being attacked; no supplies be had except ...
— The Campaign of Trenton 1776-77 • Samuel Adams Drake

... The villains, Maule and Phillips, had descended upon the camp the instant that we had been enticed into the trap, murdered the keeper, loaded up a small cart with the booty, and got safe away to some wild fastness among the mountains, where they were joined ...
— The Captain of the Pole-Star and Other Tales • Arthur Conan Doyle

... crude flattery; the principal reason why the flirtation had stood the test of so many years was the fact that it only flared into active existence at convenient intervals. In an age when the telephone has undermined almost every fastness of human privacy, and the sanctity of one's seclusion depends often on the ability for tactful falsehood shown by a club pageboy, Youghal was duly appreciative of the circumstance that his lady fair spent a large part of the year pursuing foxes, ...
— The Unbearable Bassington • Saki

... "Hamadryad." The Dryads and Hamadryads lived, according to old legend, within the trunks of trees and perished with their homes. So it was an impious act to destroy a tree without cause. This nymph of the woods has emerged from the tree-trunk home or from some rocky fastness and taken the urn of a naiad, a sister nymph of brook and fountain, to give drink to the gentle, confident fawn that is her charge. The little animal is lapping the stream that flows from the overturned vase. This study in white ...
— The Sculpture and Mural Decorations of the Exposition • Stella G. S. Perry

... other Levitical figures. She had a cageful of tame canary-birds which answered to their names and fed from her plate at meal-times. Of these I remember only Roger, a gorgeous fellow with a beautiful voice and strong will of his own, who would occasionally defy his mistress from the secure fastness of a high picture-frame, but always surrendered at last, and came to listen to ...
— The Grey Brethren and Other Fragments in Prose and Verse • Michael Fairless

... lovely of you, Myrtilla! But what courage! How did you ever dare venture into this wild and savage spot,—this mountain-fastness ...
— Young Lives • Richard Le Gallienne

... ween That I wrought this lay with lying speech, With hated word-craft! Hear ye the wisdom Of the hymns of Job! With heart of joy 550 And spirit brave, he boldly spoke; With wondrous sanctity that word he said: "I feel it a fact in the fastness of my soul That one day in my nest death I shall know, And weary of heart woefully go hence, 555 Compassed with clay, on my closing journey, Mournful of mind, in the moldy earth. And through the gift of God I shall gain once more Like the Phoenix fowl, a fair ...
— Old English Poems - Translated into the Original Meter Together with Short Selections from Old English Prose • Various

... congeners, were but the 'half-gods' who must needs yield place when 'the Gods' themselves arrive—it yet lingered on; openly, in Folk practice, in Fast and Feast, whereby the well-being of the land might be assured; secretly, in cave or mountain-fastness, or island isolation, where those who craved for a more sensible (not necessarily sensuous) contact with the unseen Spiritual forces of Life than the orthodox development of Christianity afforded, might, and did, ...
— From Ritual to Romance • Jessie L. Weston

... beyond infections and noise and any distractions, surgery had made for itself a house of research and a healing fastness. The building itself would have seemed very wonderful to eyes accustomed to the flimsy architecture of an age when power was precious. It was made of granite, already a little roughened on the outside by frost, but polished within and of a tremendous ...
— The World Set Free • Herbert George Wells

... emigrant's leather box, brought with him some of that pigment that was to dye the locality for generations a deep blue. I refer, of course, to his Presbyterianism. And in order the better to ensure to his progeny the fastness of this dye, he married the granddaughter of a famous divine, celebrated in the annals of New England,—no doubt with some injustice,—as a staunch advocate on the doctrine of infant damnation. My cousin Robert ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill

... the billowy archduke would have no little difficulty in recovering her from this fastness; and since she was assured that this green wood life was the very thing the princess needed, she was resolved to give him no help herself. She was pleased to learn that she was in no way responsible for ...
— The Terrible Twins • Edgar Jepson

... sauntered down to the water-front. The Chinamen were already busy in their shops. The sky had still the pallor of dawn, and there was a ghostly silence on the lagoon. Ten miles away the island of Murea, like some high fastness of the Holy Grail, guarded ...
— The Moon and Sixpence • W. Somerset Maugham

... of Gurgum. Kui maintained its uneventful existence amid the pastures of Cilicia, near the marshes at the mouth of the Pyramos. To the south of the Sajur, Bit-Agusi** barred the way to the Orontes; and from their lofty fastness of Arpad, its chiefs kept watch over the caravan road, and closed or opened it ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 7 (of 12) • G. Maspero

... the center from which they carried on their enterprises in all directions about the island, and the refuge to which they could always retreat when defeated and pursued. In the possession of such a fastness, they, of course, became more formidable than ever. King Ethelred determined to dislodge them. He raised, accordingly, as large a force as his kingdom would furnish, and, taking his brother Alfred as his second ...
— King Alfred of England - Makers of History • Jacob Abbott

... to the gate Del Cambron. Above them towered the city of Toledo—silent and dreamlike. Concepcion had ceased singing now, and the hard breathing of the horses alone broke the silence. The Tagus, emerging here from rocky fastness, flowed noiselessly away to the west—a gleaming ribbon laid across the breast of the night. In the summer it is no uncommon thing for travellers to take the road by night in Spain, and although many ...
— In Kedar's Tents • Henry Seton Merriman

... a relief," he said, waving a graceful hand in a neatly limited gesture, which everybody's eyes followed, his own included. "It is a relief and a retreat. The windows open, the blinds closed—that is as it should be. It is a retreat, a fastness, a bastion against the heat's assault. For me, a quiet room—a quiet room and a book, a volume in the hand, held lightly between the fingers. A volume of poems, lines metrical and cadenced; something by a sound Victorian. We ...
— Penrod • Booth Tarkington

... Flint and his companions had left their mountain fastness, as before described, they had appeared in different parts of the country and committed various depredations; some of their robberies having been accompanied with bloodshed and violence of a nature which so exasperated the people ...
— Charlie to the Rescue • R.M. Ballantyne

... a dim romantic laboratory may light upon a placid formula and, like Aladdin, roll back the portals of the enchanted fastness with a tranquil ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 159, December 8, 1920 • Various

... American Fur Company. These were the fearless and intrepid pioneers who so far from fleeing danger seemed rather to court it. Accounts of their adventures—now a struggle with a wounded bear, again the threatened perils of starvation when lost in some mountain-fastness—have long simultaneously terrified and fascinated both young and old. We all have pictured their dress—the coat or cloak, often an odd combination of several varieties of skins pieced together, with ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XXVI., December, 1880. • Various

... not know how nearly interested were his employers in any matter touching that gang which is known as the Three Points. Pugsy said: "Dere's trouble down where I live. Dude Dawson's mad at Spider Reilly, an' now de Table Hills are layin' for de T'ree Points. Sure." He had then retired to his outer fastness, yielding further details jerkily and with the distrait air of one whose mind ...
— Psmith, Journalist • Pelham Grenville Wodehouse

... and more copiously than usual, since thou hast foolishly mistaken the road to thy convent. Depart! This is not a place in which vagabond kalandars are harboured. This is the palace of the superintendent of the police. and if the symurgh looks with incivility from the fastness of the west of Mount Kaf at this place, the wings of its impertinence will at once become singed." The superintendent said, "What nonsense art thou speaking? Go out of my way, for I do not relish thy ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 2 • Richard F. Burton

... you had known Lady Louisa," assented Isabella. But she said nothing of a girl who had crouched behind the gatepost, shivering with cold and excitement, to watch the success of the plot which had been hatched by two playmates in the fragrant fastness of the hayloft, which had been always their favourite hiding-place. To this day the scent of hay gave Isabella a delicious tremor, a thrill of the old joyful dread of discovery, which had been the charm of the innocent conspiracies of those ...
— East of the Shadows • Mrs. Hubert Barclay

... diffused itself through the atmosphere. The air seemed lurid with the impending storm, for the situation was one of peculiar horror. The wealthiest city in Christendom lay at the mercy of the strongest fastness in the world; a castle which had been built to curb, not to protect, the town. It was now inhabited by a band of brigands, outlawed by government, strong in discipline, furious from penury, reckless by habit, desperate in circumstance—a crew which ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley

... aim, To build his country's Hope and Fame, And win for her a seat divine Beneath bright Freedom's hallowed shrine; And few, though rashly brave, would dare, To start the Swamp Fox[2] from his lair. Or in his fastness wild and dun, ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII No. 6 June 1848 • Various

... civilization reigns, and claiming to suffice all; they are emigrating, they know not whither, if it be only towards the heights; there they are descending from their high, narrow, clerical, shut-in fastness. ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern — Volume 11 • Various

... manifest; Light to the zenith, light from pole to pole; Light from the East that waxeth to the West, And with its puissant goings-forth Encroaches on the South and on the North; And with its great approaches does prevail Upon the sullen fastness of the height, And summoning its levied power Crescent and confident through the crescent hour, Goes down with laughters on the subject vale. Light flagrant, manifest; Light to the sentient closeness of the breast, Light to the secret chambers ...
— New Poems • Francis Thompson

... now. Seeks cedar-berries blue, his autumn cheer; The chipmunk, on the shingly shag-bark's bough Now saws, now lists with downward eye and ear, Then drops his nut, and, cheeping, with a bound 40 Whisks to his winding fastness underground; The clouds like swans drift ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell

... included by him. Karl the Great lies in the Unterberg, near Salzburg, and also in the Odenberg, where Woden himself, according to other legends, is said to be. Siegfried, the hero of the Nibelungen Lied, dwells in the mountain fastness of Geroldseck. Diedrich rests in the mountains of Alsace, his hand upon his sword, waiting till the Turk shall water his horses on the banks of the Rhine. On the Gruetli, where once they met to swear ...
— The Science of Fairy Tales - An Inquiry into Fairy Mythology • Edwin Sidney Hartland

... which the persecutors never ventured to scale, to the hamlet of Dormilhouse, seated on a few ledges of rock on a lofty mountain-side, five thousand feet above the level of the sea; and this place, which was for centuries a mountain fastness of the persecuted, remains a Vaudois settlement to ...
— The Huguenots in France • Samuel Smiles

... is not. The soul! the soul! the soul! the wronged and fettered soul! the freed and royal soul! It alone is king. Lift up your heads, O ye gates, and be ye lift up, ye everlasting doors, and the King of Glory shall come in! Tremble, O Tyrant, in your mountain-fastness! Tremble, Deceiver, in your cavern under the sea! Your victim is your accuser. Your sin has found you out. Your crime cries to Heaven. You have condemned and killed the just. You have murdered the innocent in secret places, ...
— Gala-days • Gail Hamilton

... emanate from a southern sky, and he preferred to combat hypocrisy with the lighter weapons of pleasantry. But whichsoever arm he wielded, he always pursued the enemy remorselessly, following into every fastness, of which none knew better than himself each winding and each resource. For hypocrisy had been the bane of his life; it had rendered useless for happiness that combination he possessed of Heaven's choicest ...
— My Recollections of Lord Byron • Teresa Guiccioli

... less than no consequence to me, except for the sake of Cedar Lodge, how a certain gentleman spends his time. But Peachie's interests must be protected. With an establishment such as ours a good name is everything. 'You cannot be too particular; for any talk of fastness, and the place must go down,' as she says ...
— The Far Horizon • Lucas Malet

... region where the city of Thebes afterwards came into being, yet, in the play itself, Thebes is never mentioned. The scene of action is the Cadmea, or Citadel of Cadmus, and we know that, in Aeschylus' lifetime, that citadel was no longer a mere fastness, but had so grown outwards and enlarged itself that a new name, Thebes, was applied to the collective city. (All this has been made abundantly clear by Dr. Verrall in his Introduction to the Seven against Thebes, to which every reader of the play itself ...
— Suppliant Maidens and Other Plays • AEschylus

... fastness of Protestantism was a place of more importance. Eighty years before, during the troubles caused by the last struggle of the houses of O'Neil and O'Donnel against the authority of James the First, the ancient city of Derry had been surprised by one of the native chiefs: ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 3 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay

... the soft lapse of the waves and singing? Yes, there are girls down by the landing with a banjo, and young men singing the songs of love, the modern songs of love dashed with college slang. The banjo suggests a little fastness; and this new generation carries off its sentiment with some bravado and a mocking tone. Presently the tug Pinafore glides up to the landing, the engineer flings open the furnace door, and the glowing ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner

... sacred lair and fastness of the president, whose massive portrait I had already seen on several walls. Spaciousness and magnificence increased. Ceilings rose in height, marble was softened by the thick pile of carpets. Mahogany and gold shone more luxuriously. I was introduced ...
— Your United States - Impressions of a first visit • Arnold Bennett

... in dress leads to something in manner and feeling, not quite so pronounced, perhaps, but far too like to be honorable to herself or satisfactory to her friends. It leads to slang, bold talk, and fastness; to the love of pleasure and indifference to duty; to the desire of money before either love or happiness; to uselessness at home, dissatisfaction with the monotony of ordinary life, and horror of all useful work; in a word, to the worst forms of luxury and selfishness, to the most fatal effects ...
— Modern Women and What is Said of Them - A Reprint of A Series of Articles in the Saturday Review (1868) • Anonymous

... flew to her fastness in Frank's attic, while Julius repaired to Raymond's room, and found him as usual lying tranquil, with his mother's chair so near that she could hand him the cool fruit or drink, or ring to summon other help. Their time together seemed to both a rest, and Julius always liked to look at their ...
— The Three Brides • Charlotte M. Yonge

... an appearance soon after that. Hitherto Brimfield had travelled to Westplains to meet her rival, and this was the first time that the Blue had invaded the Maroon-and-Grey fastness. Hoskins did a rushing business that day, for Claflin had sent nearly her entire population with the team, and many of the visitors were forced to walk from the station. There was an insouciant, self-confident air about the ...
— Left End Edwards • Ralph Henry Barbour

... and strange, over the northern hills. These were not the clouds of summer rains. They were the first banners of an enemy—a grim and dreadful foe who had his ramparts in the wilds, and his ambush laid for such feeble creatures as would dare to brave his fastness. ...
— The Snowshoe Trail • Edison Marshall

... St. Helena, that he believed himself to be bolder than any general that ever lived, but he would never have dared to hold the position that Dumouriez took up. He was outnumbered, three to one. He had been outmanoeuvred, and driven from his fastness by the most enterprising of the allied generals; and his recruits refused to face the enemy. He never for a moment lost confidence in himself, for the time wasted at Verdun had given him the measure of his opponents. He summoned Kellermann, with the army of Metz, and Beurnonville, with ...
— Lectures on the French Revolution • John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton

... broken men from Europe, talking together in a mixed dialect, mostly oaths, gambling, drinking, quarrelling, and murdering like wolves; how the plumed hereditary lord of all America heard, in this last fastness, the scream of the "bad medicine waggon" charioting his foes; and then when I go on to remember that all this epical turmoil was conducted by gentlemen in frock-coats, and with a view to nothing more extraordinary than a fortune and a subsequent visit to ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 2 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson

... beside the river Parushni. Many are the names of the devils and demons that have fallen before him; but most glorious of all his deeds is the conquest of Vritra, the dragon dwelling in a mountain fastness amidst the waters, where Indra, accompanied by the troop of Maruts, or storm-gods, slew the monster with his bolt and set free the waters, or recovered the hidden kine. Our poets sing endless variations on this theme, and sometimes speak ...
— Hindu Gods And Heroes - Studies in the History of the Religion of India • Lionel D. Barnett

... merriment, and Fleetword felt his limbs tremble beneath him when he reflected on the desperate character of the man with whom he had to deal. "The Lord can make a way for safety even from this den," he muttered, "yea, even from this fastness, which, of a truth, is most curiously fashioned, and of evil intention, doubtless." The little light that was admitted into the cell came through an aperture in the cliff at so great a height from the floor that it could hardly be observed, even if it had been left ...
— The Buccaneer - A Tale • Mrs. S. C. Hall

... before them, on opposite sides of the little stream, the branches of which crept through the alder and gum thickets between them, and contributed to make the district almost as impenetrable to the uninitiated as a mountain fastness. The long log-cabin of the Cove-Millses, where room had been added to room in a straight line, until it looked like the side of a log fort, peeped from its pines across at the clearing where the hardly ...
— The Burial of the Guns • Thomas Nelson Page

... quenchless flame, For which no dungeon fastness can be built . . . You have but made the convict half divine, Crowned Truth with martyrdom, yourselves with shame; Not he, but you are branded deep with guilt; His cell is holier ...
— Bars and Shadows • Ralph Chaplin

... before our era. It is a bright burst; for then, down by yonder green-foaming rock, the young Greek mariners leaped on the strand. This was their first land-fall in Sicily; that rock, their Plymouth; and here, doubtless, the alarmed mountaineers stood in their fastness and watched the bearers of the world's torch, and knew them not, bringing daybreak to the dark island for evermore, but fought, as barbarism will, against the light, and were at last made friends with it—a chance that does not ...
— Heart of Man • George Edward Woodberry

... singing, the door of the outer room was slowly opened, and Agostino Sarelli entered. He had just returned from Florence, having ridden day and night to meet her whom he expected to find within the walls of his fastness. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IX., March, 1862., No. LIII. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics, • Various

... band of brigands in their mountain fastness, on the watch for plunder and rapine. The scenery in the background should resemble ragged rocks, made by fastening brown paper in a rumpled manner to a frame of wood, and shaded with light and dark-brown paints. This must extend ...
— Home Pastimes; or Tableaux Vivants • James H. Head

... he generally made it up right, which was unprecedented. Experts in many outlandish vernaculars had to be found from the start, and he always managed to produce the article required at the shortest notice. As a matter of fact, he had laid hands upon a tame professor, whom he kept immured in a fastness somewhere in the attics, and who was always prepared to vouch for the proficiency of anybody in any language when required to ...
— Experiences of a Dug-out, 1914-1918 • Charles Edward Callwell

... Up-stream the river opened widely to the west, but the Votaress bore northward across the foot of the reach, and soon it was plain that she was about to enter a "chute," whose vividly green, low, wooded shore on her larboard bow was a large island: an island of swamp and jungle, ancient fastness of an Indian prophet, hiddenly swarming with all the ravening and venomous brute, reptile, and insect life possible to the region. Prophet's Island, it was, yet no senator, bishop, general, judge, or squire was ...
— Gideon's Band - A Tale of the Mississippi • George W. Cable

... slightest wrong from their foreign tyrants. This resolution, they added, must be presumed to have been executed with success; because we find that, in the lapse of five or six years, these original occupants of the fastness were joined by thirty other families. Somewhere about that time it was that they began to awaken the jealousy of the Turks; and a certain Turk, named Suli, went in high scorn and defiance, with many other ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey

... bridge and were driving out among the parks and estates that cover the small islands, set like jewels among the white fastness of the river Neva. Here and there the river was solid ice, in other places the thin ice was decorated with ...
— The Red Cross Girls with the Russian Army • Margaret Vandercook

... the night schools after business hours, and thus prepare for the great life struggle which is before them. Such boys are apt to do well in the world. Many, however, after being released from the stores, imitate the ways of the clerks and salesmen. They affect a fastness which is painful to see in boys so young. They sport an abundance of flashy jewelry, patronize the cheap places of amusement, and are seen in the low concert saloons, and other vile dens of the city. It is not difficult to predict the ...
— Lights and Shadows of New York Life - or, the Sights and Sensations of the Great City • James D. McCabe

... through a sharp fire from the pom-pom near the northern end of Talana, but, like their predecessors, were neglected as soon as they moved out of sight around the spur swelling up from the Sand Spruit to the right flank of the Boer fastness. Shortly afterwards, in response to a message from the General, who thought that the enemy's guns, now suddenly silent, were being withdrawn, and that a general retreat would shortly follow, Colonel Moeller himself ...
— History of the War in South Africa 1899-1902 v. 1 (of 4) - Compiled by Direction of His Majesty's Government • Frederick Maurice

... to her feet and started to the door. The old crone threw an epithet after her; but she flashed through the lighted doorway and was gone, followed by the oath and shouts from the approaching men. In the hut night fled with wild song and revel, and day dawned again. Out from some fastness of the wood crept Zora. She stopped and bathed in a pool, and combed her close-clung hair, then entered silently ...
— The Quest of the Silver Fleece - A Novel • W. E. B. Du Bois

... hateful work"; it is also a poor work, badly constructed, and for the most part carelessly written. In essence it is a mere tract against Puritanism, and in form a sort of Arabian Nights' Entertainment in which the hero plays the part of Haroun-al-Raschid.] whose anger has no stead-fastness; but the gentle forgivingness of disposition that is so marked in Vincentio is a trait we found emphasized in Romeo, and again in Hamlet and again in Macbeth. It is, indeed, one of the most permanent characteristics of Shakespeare. From the beginning to the end of the ...
— The Man Shakespeare • Frank Harris

... one of them but will cross himself and say his prayers when he hears in his mountain fastness the matin or the ave maria bells sounding from the valleys. They will often confess themselves to the village priests, to obtain absolution; and occasionally visit the village churches to pray at some favorite shrine. I recollect an instance in point: I was ...
— Tales of a Traveller • Washington Irving

... and Washington improved the time to fall back to Northcastle, five miles, where, in the rocky fastness, he could defy the whole British army. To add to his advantages, the day on which the British commander decided upon an attack, after the arrival of reinforcements, a violent rain set in, and continued through the day, rendering an attack impossible, so that the Americans had still more time ...
— From Farm House to the White House • William M. Thayer

... arrows was the only response to this, and presently the movement of the bushes showed that the Indians were retreating to a deeper fastness, and Standish deeply disgusted marched his own men back to the village, the only casualty on either side being the broken arm of the powah or priest, who with Wituwamat and Pecksuot were really the heart of the conspiracy; ...
— Standish of Standish - A story of the Pilgrims • Jane G. Austin

... earl to go on a sailing voyage, assumed the dress of one who means to amuse himself with angling. Then, mounted upon a Manx pony, he rode briskly over the country, and halted at one of the mountain streams, and followed along the bank until he reached a house where once a fastness had stood, called the ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol VII • Various

... Surinam, in the "Annual Register" for Sept. 5, 1772. Fortunately for the safety of the planters, Baron presumed too much upon his numbers, and injudiciously built a camp too near the seacoast, in a marshy fastness, from which he was finally ejected by twelve hundred Dutch troops, though the chief work was done, Stedman thinks, by the "black rangers" or liberated slaves. Checked by this defeat, he again drew back into the forests, resuming his guerrilla warfare ...
— Black Rebellion - Five Slave Revolts • Thomas Wentworth Higginson

... had confessed that he had betrayed them to the preventives; then they had gagged him, hustled him downstairs to a waiting closed carriage, and then they had quietly driven him on, undisturbed, to their fastness in the cliff. It was sad to see a man fallen so low, a man who had been at the University, and master of a school. It was sad to see him, his flabby face all fallen in and white from excess of fear, and to see his eyes lolling about from one to another ...
— Jim Davis • John Masefield

... completely to a church which was all her own. On the same principle on which she joined it, she attempted to drive all her people within its pale by persecution. She supported it by severe penal laws, not because she thought conformity to its discipline necessary to salvation; but because it was the fastness which arbitrary power was making strong for itself, because she expected a more profound obedience from those who saw in her both their civil and their ecclesiastical chief than from those who, like the Papists, ascribed spiritual authority to the Pope, or from those who, like some of the Puritans, ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 1 • Thomas Babington Macaulay

... the forest has been of use to Jacques, not only warming him with fallen wood, but giving him shelter in days of sore trouble, when my lord of the chateau, with all his troopers and trumpets, had been beaten from field after field into some ultimate fastness, or lay overseas in an English prison. In these dark days, when the watch on the church steeple saw the smoke of burning villages on the sky-line, or a clump of spears and fluttering pennon drawing nigh across the plain, these good folk gat them up, with all their household gods, into the wood, ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. XXII (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson

... more than two thousand combats, great and small, within three years, it has exhibited unvarying courage and resolution. Utilizing the lessons of the Indian wars it has relentlessly followed the guerrilla bands to their fastness in mountain and jungle, and crushed them. It has put an end to the vast system of intimidation and secret assassination, by which the peaceful natives were prevented from taking a genuine part in government under American authority. It has captured or forced to surrender substantially ...
— Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents - Section 2 (of 2) of Supplemental Volume: Theodore Roosevelt, Supplement • Theodore Roosevelt

... De Launay or mademoiselle, the high gods must have laughed in irony as old Jim Banker raved and flung his hands toward their Olympian fastness. ...
— Louisiana Lou • William West Winter

... slope of the Palatine, chosen as the safest meeting-place, and near Cicero's house. 17-18. castra ... collocata, the camp of Manlius (one of the veteran centurions of Sulla) was planted at Faesulae (Fiesole), arocky fastness three miles N.E. of Florence. 19. imperatorem: ironical, as though Catiline were the legally ...
— Helps to Latin Translation at Sight • Edmund Luce

... ships had swung to their anchors I saw a boat put off, bearing a flag of truce, to summon the pirates to yield up their fastness. But this proposal evidently miscarried, for the boat returned shortly, without any motions being made towards a surrender. At the same time I saw the gate on the landward side of the fortress opened and a chieftain wearing a rich dress ...
— Athelstane Ford • Allen Upward

... serpent worship we believe the real explanation of these stories is to be found. There is no doubt that human victims, and even young maidens, were offered to these snake-gods; even the sunny mythology of Greece retains horrible traces of such customs, which lingered in Arcadia, the mountain fastness of the old and conquered race. Similar cruelties existed among the Mexicans; and there are but too many traces of it ...
— Literary and General Lectures and Essays • Charles Kingsley

... singular although imperfect legends, which I hope soon to lay before the public in another place. Of Ahupu, except in snatches of song, little memory appears to linger. She dwelt at least about Tepari,—"the sea-cliffs,"—the eastern fastness of the isle; walked by paths known only to herself upon the mountains; was courted by dangerous suitors who came swimming from adjacent islands, and defended and rescued (as I gather) by the loyalty of native fish. My anxiety to learn more of "Ahupu Vehine" became (during my stay ...
— Ballads • Robert Louis Stevenson

... days, the Mount of St. Michael in Cornwall was the fastness of a hugeous giant whose name ...
— English Fairy Tales • Flora Annie Steel

... calling their special attention to some products of the coal-tar industry which are free from these defects of aniline dyestuffs, and for which it is claimed that they far surpass logwood, fustic, cudbear, etc., as to fastness against light, and excellently stand fulling. We allude to the alizarine dyestuffs, which have long since been introduced and are largely employed in cotton ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 530, February 27, 1886 • Various

... is not going about with any revolver. Not if I know it!" He was playful but determined. He startled her, for the altercation lasted two hours. On the other hand he had never said a word about the photograph of Jules Defourcambault, and had never seen it. Somewhere, in some mysterious fastness, the mysterious ...
— The Roll-Call • Arnold Bennett

... the mother and daughter. The former had long since given up all hope of ever hearing of Clotilde again, and had devoted her life to vengeance on the Romans. From her fastness in the mountain she had from time to time led her followers down, and carried fire and sword over the fields and plantations of the Roman colonists, retiring rapidly before the garrisons could sally from the towns and fall upon her. She was rejoiced ...
— The Young Carthaginian - A Story of The Times of Hannibal • G.A. Henty

... their knees bent, conversed in undertones. A sort of subterranean depression, peculiar to this fastness of Burlington House, brooded over the china and ...
— The Dweller on the Threshold • Robert Smythe Hichens

... torn from the mass, which, mutilated and defaced on the one side, still spread on the other its ample and undiminished boughs. [Footnote: A pair of chestnut trees, destroyed, the one entirely and the other in part, by such a mischievous and wanton act of revenge, grew at Invergarry Castle, the fastness ...
— Waverley, Or 'Tis Sixty Years Hence, Complete • Sir Walter Scott

... pulled the pricking vines loose from her dress, and came out. "How do you do, Lot?" she said, again. Still Lot did not answer, and after a minute she turned with impatient dignity as if to enter her fastness again; but ...
— Madelon - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman

... it would seem that there are fewer caribou, but the marked increase in the number of moose may be one cause of this. Before the days of the Park the moose were almost exterminated throughout this region; but a few must have escaped slaughter in some inaccessible fastness, and under a careful and intelligent system of protection they have multiplied exceedingly. Man may not shoot them, and probably only unprotected calves have anything to dread from ...
— Supplement to Animal Sanctuaries in Labrador • William Wood

... by Telford a moderate sum compared with what it must have cost if executed after the ordinary manner. The aqueduct was formally opened for traffic in 1805. "And thus," said Telford, "has been added a striking feature to the beautiful vale of Llangollen, where formerly was the fastness of Owen Glendower, but which, now cleared of its entangled woods, contains a useful line of intercourse between England and Ireland; and the water drawn from the once sacred Devon furnishes the means ...
— The Life of Thomas Telford by Smiles • Samuel Smiles

... void and the darkness that is peopled by Mimir's brood, from the ultimate silent fastness of the desolate deep-sea gloom, and the peace of that ageless gloom, blind Oriander came, from Mimir, to be at war with the sea and to jeer at the sea's desire. When tempests are seething and roaring from the Aesir's inverted bowl all seamen have heard his ...
— Figures of Earth • James Branch Cabell

... be supposed that this prosperity was uninterrupted throughout Mr. Crittenden's business life. There were dark storms which threatened disastrous wreck, and nothing but stead-fastness of purpose and force of character brought him through. In 1836 the financial tornado swept over the land and stripped nearly every business man bare. When the storm was at its height Mr. Crittenden found himself with fifty thousand dollars of New York debts past due, and ...
— Cleveland Past and Present - Its Representative Men, etc. • Maurice Joblin

... thought always of these snow-pent places as quite devoid of any life at the winter season, and he was amazed to find how many human beings burrowed in and hibernated during the storm-bound months. Elsewhere, the skulking traveler received a chary welcome, but in the silent fastness of the hills latchstring and hearthstone and tobacco store were for genial sharing. In almost any one of these log shelters that he chanced upon he might have settled himself in content and found an indefinite welcome, but the urge to be up and ...
— Broken to the Plow • Charles Caldwell Dobie

... his foes pursued him actively from fastness to fastness, determined to run him down, and at length, on September 6, 1859, surprised him on the plateau of Gounib. Here the devoted band made a desperate resistance, not yielding until of the original four hundred ...
— Historic Tales, Vol. 8 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris

... class of men both on sea and land during the last two years, and the more important I think the "mission" of every quiet, refined, self-respecting woman—the more mistaken I think those who would forfeit it by noisy self-assertion, masculinity, or fastness. In all this wild West the influence of woman is second only in its benefits to the influence of religion, and where the last unhappily does not exist the first continually exerts its restraining ...
— A Lady's Life in the Rocky Mountains • Isabella L. Bird

... carrying on the work in this neighbourhood was over, Livingstone turned his eyes northward, and commenced that series of explorations which absorbed the remainder of his life. Sechele retired to a mountain fastness, named Lithubaruba, away ...
— Robert Moffat - The Missionary Hero of Kuruman • David J. Deane

... higher level, made a barrier on one side of them, and on the other side the cliff rose, a sheer wall of rock. Between the wall of water and the wall of rock there was a cave extending into the solid rock for a distance of about twenty feet. There was absolutely no way of reaching this fastness except through the hidden stair, and one might wander for years through the forest and never see ...
— The Scotch Twins • Lucy Fitch Perkins

... river[6] down almost to the present times. The Britons had made the best of the situation; but the Romans plunged into the water, tore away the stakes and palisadoes, and obtained a complete victory. The capital, or rather chief fastness, of Cassibelan was then taken, with a number of cattle, the wealth of this barbarous city. After these misfortunes the Britons were no longer in a condition to act with effect. Their ill-success in the field soon dissolved the ill-cemented union of their councils. They split into factions, and ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. VII. (of 12) • Edmund Burke

... to be untenable. Then, again, the chemical composition and constitution of the dyes of this group are so varied that an explanation which would hold good for one might not do so for another. The relative fastness of the dyes against washing and soaping precludes the idea of a merely mechanical absorption of the dye by the fibre; on the other hand the great difference in the fastness to soaping and light between the same dyes on cotton and wool would show that there ...
— The Dyeing of Cotton Fabrics - A Practical Handbook for the Dyer and Student • Franklin Beech

... ranchos up in Durango, where the elopers will be quite safe in a mountain fastness, and they will arrive there by craft, not buying through ...
— Jane Journeys On • Ruth Comfort Mitchell

... canister," have been struck down on the instant: not one being left to look to the bodies of the slain—neither to bury nor remove them. Like the battle-field, too, it becomes the haunt of wolves and other wild beasts; who find among the fallen trunks, if not food, a fastness securing them from the pursuit both of hound and hunter. Here in hollow log the black she-bear gives birth to her loutish cubs, training them to climb over the decaying trunks; here the lynx and red couguar choose their cunning convert; here the racoon ...
— The Wild Huntress - Love in the Wilderness • Mayne Reid

... through those parted and relaxed lips with the perfect efficiency of a healthy natural function. And yet he was not asleep. His obstinate and tremendous spirit was now withdrawn somewhere, into some fastness more recondite than sleep; not far off; not detached, not dethroned; but undiscoverably hidden, and beyond any summons. Edwin gazed and gazed, until his heart could hold no more of the emotion which this ...
— Clayhanger • Arnold Bennett

... orchards, whilst in harmony with the little town, and adding a still greater look of old- worldness, are the arched walls of the old chateau-fort. As evening closes in, the fascination of the scene deepens; spire and roofs, shadowy hill and stern mountain fastness, are all outlined in pale, silvery tones against a pure pink and opaline sky, the greenery of near vine and peach-tree all standing out in bold relief, blotches of greenish gold upon a dark ground. I must describe our inn, the most rustic we had as yet met with, nevertheless ...
— The Roof of France • Matilda Betham-Edwards

... Bjoernson's "Yes, we Love our Native Country," and "I will Guard Thee, my Land!" There is the brassy blare of challenging trumpets in the former; they defy all creation, and make a vast deal of impotent and unprofitable noise about "The roaring northern main," "The ancient Norway's rocky fastness," "Liberty's temple in Norroway's valleys," and "Norway's lion, whose axe doth threaten him who ...
— Essays on Scandinavian Literature • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen

... the wreck, to rebuild on the foundation of one hope, which all the legions in hell cannot shake. Between you and me the battle has only begun, and nothing but your death or my victory will end it. You have your revenge; I intend to enjoy mine. Though he burrow as a mole, or skulk in some fastness of Alaska, I will track and seize that cowardly miscreant, and when the law receives its guilty victim, you shall be freed from suspicion, freed from prison, and most precious of all boons, you shall be freed ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson

... able to move; howbeit I crawled where she crouched somewhat sheltered by a rock, and clasping her within my arm lay there nor dared to stir until the mad fury of the wind abated somewhat. Then, side by side, on hands and knees, we gained our rocky fastness, and closing the door, which was screened from the direct force of the tempest, I barred it with the beam I had made for the purpose, and stood staring at my companion and she on me, while all the world about us roared and clamoured loud ...
— Black Bartlemy's Treasure • Jeffrey Farnol

... In this crowded land there is no fastness, no shelter. What place is there for us among these multitudes? They who are little can hide from one another, but where are we to hide? There is no place where we could eat, no place where we could sleep. If we fled—night and day ...
— The Food of the Gods and How It Came to Earth • H.G. Wells

... gulped by a part of the press, and never contradicted, but rather nursed, at headquarters, Manassas was a terrible, unknown, mysterious something; a bugbear, between a fortress made by art and a natural fastness, whose approaches were defended for miles by numberless masked batteries, and which was filled by countless thousands of the most ferocious warriors. Such was Manassas in public opinion when McDowell undertook to attack this formidable American Torres Vedras, and this with the scanty ...
— Diary from March 4, 1861, to November 12, 1862 • Adam Gurowski

... defiles and valleys we threaded our way into the open country, past the huge flat-topped mountains of Ombokoro, the fastness of the Berg Damaras, thence following the dry river-bed of the Om- Mafako north-east to the confines of the Omaheke desert that great north-western outlier of the true Kalahari not far, indeed, from this ...
— A Rip Van Winkle Of The Kalahari - Seven Tales of South-West Africa • Frederick Cornell

... harmony with the natural ones. It has always been a land of conflict. In 1540—339 years ago —De Soto, in that energetic but fruitless search for gold which occupied his later years, penetrated to this region, and found it the fastness of the Xualans, a bold, aggressive race, continually warring with its neighbors. When next the white man reached the country—a century and a half later—he found the Xualans had been swept away by the ...
— Andersonville, complete • John McElroy

... dim shapes passed to the left there came again the sight of the expanse across which the disarmed men in red had been marching. And then the black ruins, and then again the beleaguered white fastness of the Council. It appeared no longer a ghostly pile, but glowing amber in the sunlight, for a cloud shadow had passed. About it the pigmy struggle still hung in suspense, but now the red defenders were ...
— The Sleeper Awakes - A Revised Edition of When the Sleeper Wakes • H.G. Wells

... in a state of rebellion, gave for some time considerable disquiet, if not alarm, to the English government. But his resources of every kind gradually falling off, he was hunted about through bogs and forests, from one fastness or lurking-place to another, enduring every kind of privation and hardship, and often foiling his pursuers by hair-breadth scapes. It is even related that he and his countess on one occasion being roused from their bed in the middle ...
— Memoirs of the Court of Queen Elizabeth • Lucy Aikin

... and whisky in it; he felt exactly as though Mr. Zanti (looking very like an ogre in the mysterious yellow light with his bowler on the back of his head and mopping his face with a huge crimson handkerchief) were decoying him away to some terrible fastness where it was always ...
— Fortitude • Hugh Walpole

... took the part of Edgar Atheling—whom he regarded as the rightful heir after Harold was killed—against William the Conqueror. He gave every support to the many who gathered together in the isle as to a fastness, and encouraged the plans of Hereward. When the cause of the English seemed hopeless, the monks endeavoured to persuade the soldiers to surrender; not being successful, they sent messengers to the king assuring him of their sorrow at having ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: The Cathedral Church of Ely • W. D. Sweeting

... Blue Wolf, all fitted into a special pattern. But what a pattern! Scythian art, the ornament that the warriors of Genghis Khan bore so proudly. Tatars, Mongols—the barbarians who had swept from the fastness of the steppes to change the course of history, not only in Asia but across the plains of middle Europe. The men of the Emperor Khans who had ridden behind the yak-tailed standards of Genghis Khan, Kublai ...
— The Defiant Agents • Andre Alice Norton

... This fastness was called La Roque de Tayac, because the village of Tayac faces it on the other side of the river. Although only a few fragments of the masonry that was formerly attached to the rock remain, the chambers cut in the solid limestone are strange ...
— Two Summers in Guyenne • Edward Harrison Barker

... was doubtful, his phraseology could glide into Presbyterian cant, but we know that he indifferently lent the shelter of his fastness to the Protestant firebrand, wild Frank Stewart, Earl of Bothwell (who, like Carey writing from Berwick to Cecil, reckons Logan among Catholics), or to George Ker, the Catholic intriguer with Spain. Logan loved a plot for its own sake, as well as for chances of booty ...
— James VI and the Gowrie Mystery • Andrew Lang

... 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

... himself listening to her as one would to a child, and then, a moment later, she would bring out some cynical scrap of wisdom, evidently the fruit of bitter experience, which sounded strange coming from her lips. Yet, despite the utter unconventionality, there was no hint of fastness about her, and even when she touched by implication on her way of life, she did so with a kind of frank simplicity, hiding nothing and ...
— People of Position • Stanley Portal Hyatt

... noisy torrent which had cut itself a wider and deeper bed since the cloudburst on the heights. Small trees, brush, and rocks had been uprooted by the force of the stream, but its current was now receding. One might walk along the edge of the brook into this hillside fastness. ...
— Ruth Fielding Down East - Or, The Hermit of Beach Plum Point • Alice B. Emerson

... fastness in Frank's attic, while Julius repaired to Raymond's room, and found him as usual lying tranquil, with his mother's chair so near that she could hand him the cool fruit or drink, or ring to summon other help. Their time together seemed to both a rest, and Julius always liked to look ...
— The Three Brides • Charlotte M. Yonge

... broiled chicken and fried bananas, fresh from the parilla. The fire was built against a great rock that rose abruptly from the dell, forming one side of it, and towering so high that the smoke disappeared before it reached the top. Thick woods framed the other sides of the natural fastness, and here the Cuban riders could lie hidden for days and weeks, unsuspected, unseen, save by the wandering birds that now and then circled above their heads. No tents or huts here; the horses were tethered to trees; the commander's hammock was swung in a shady thicket ...
— Rita • Laura E. Richards

... suck. I lost my thoughts before the giant Stones ... And when anew the earth assembled round me I swung out on the heath and woke a hare And speared it at a cast and shouldered it, Startled another drinking at a tarn And speared it ere it leapt; so steady and clear Had the god in his fastness made my mind. Then, as I took those dead things in my hands, I felt shame light my face from deep within, And loathing and contempt shake in my bowels, That such unclean coarse blows from me had issued To crush delicate things to bloody mash ...
— Georgian Poetry 1913-15 • Edited by E. M. (Sir Edward Howard Marsh)

... Filion, from Black Brian's castle in the hills, was told with primitive force and passion. But the most wonderful part of the story described how a strange dwarfed Little Man came out of the hills in the East, across the land, to the Western fastness of Black Brian, and there slew that evil man, because of an ancient feud—slew him in a situation of great indignity, and left him lying on the sands for the tide to wash him out to the deep and ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker

... surveyed us, not unpleasantly, but wholly without interest, nodded again, partly to himself and partly to us, as if our appearance had confirmed some dark surmise of his own, took the water from Katrina's hand, grunted an acknowledgment, and retreated to his fastness in the study. He had not spoken one articulate word. Even Katrina, smiling her untroubled smile, seemed to feel that something in the situation demanded a word ...
— Many Kingdoms • Elizabeth Jordan

... soul, from its lone fastness high, Upon our life a ruling effluence send. And when it fails, fight as we will, we die; And while it lasts, we cannot ...
— Poetical Works of Matthew Arnold • Matthew Arnold



Words linked to "Fastness" :   lodgement, swiftness, lodgment, defensive structure, defence, rate, gradualness, fixity, fast, fixture, hold, secureness, precipitation, stronghold, bastion, graduality, slow, looseness, hurry, immovability



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