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Grapple   Listen
verb
Grapple  v. i.  To use a grapple; to contend in close fight; to attach one's self as if by a grapple, as in wrestling; to close; to seize one another.
To grapple with, to enter into contest with, resolutely and courageously. "And in my standard bear the arms of York, To grapple with the house of Lancaster."






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Grapple" Quotes from Famous Books



... much more congenial to his feelings than to remain under the ceremonial and puritanic restraints of the seat of Government, and involved in perplexities with which he had no ability, and probably no taste, to grapple. He was glad to take himself out of the way; and as his impetuous and impulsive nature rendered those under him liable to find him troublesome, they were not sorry to have ...
— Salem Witchcraft and Cotton Mather - A Reply • Charles W. Upham

... They knocked several fouls, and one man actually went out through Juggins in far right, managing to sprint fast enough to grapple with a soaring fly that came his way across the foul line. The rest struck out, being almost like babies in the ...
— The Chums of Scranton High Out for the Pennant • Donald Ferguson

... himself into an easy-chair. It was late, but he had not troubled to light a lamp. He sat for hours looking out into the shadows. A new responsibility, indeed, had come into life. He was powerless to grapple with it. The grotesqueness of the situation appalled him. How could he plan or dream like other men when the measure of the child's existence, as of his own, could be counted by weeks? For the first time since his emancipation he looked back into the past without ...
— The Double Life Of Mr. Alfred Burton • E. Phillips Oppenheim

... leave shortly after that; and Monsieur Duchemin settled down in the chair which his guest had quitted to grapple with his problem: ...
— Alias The Lone Wolf • Louis Joseph Vance

... to cry. She was a mighty pretty, innocent, plump little thing, and we'd rather have had most anything than that she should stand there cryin'. But we were all hung by the feet and wandering in our minds. The simple life of the cow-puncher doesn't fit him to grapple with ...
— Mr. Scraggs • Henry Wallace Phillips

... vicar was accounted very lucky by the neighbouring clergy for having such a man, and not being exposed to all the vagaries of a young schoolmaster, or, perhaps, still worse, schoolmistress, with all the latest musical fancies of the training colleges. Neither had he to grapple with the tyranny of the leading bass nor the conceit and touchiness that seems inseparable from the tenor voice, since Mr Robins kept a firm and sensible hand on the reins, and drove that generally unmanageable team, a village choir, with ...
— Zoe • Evelyn Whitaker

... that does not belong to the order of the inorganic, automatic forces. In the living animal how the psychic stands related to the physical or physiological and arises out of it, science cannot tell us, but the relation must be real; only philosophy can grapple with that question. To resolve the psychic and the vital into the mechanical and chemical and refuse to see any other factors at work is ...
— The Breath of Life • John Burroughs

... rivers, and trackless plains,—that is to my mind wonderfully striking and sublime. He is formed for the wilderness, as the Arab is for the desert. His nature is stern, simple, and enduring; fitted to grapple with difficulties and to support privations. There seems but little soil in his heart for the support of the kindly virtues; and yet, if we would but take the trouble to penetrate through that proud stoicism ...
— Types of Children's Literature • Edited by Walter Barnes

... which is more important, that each individual form is a self-fertilising hermaphrodite, so that each hair-breadth variation is not lost by intercrossing. Your manner of putting the case would be even more striking than it is if the mind could grapple with such numbers—it is grappling with eternity—think of each of a thousand seeds bringing forth its plant, and then each a thousand. A globe stretching to the furthest fixed star would very soon be covered. I cannot even grapple with the idea, even with races of dogs, cattle, pigeons, ...
— More Letters of Charles Darwin - Volume I (of II) • Charles Darwin

... you how you mid see her, Mr. Yeobright," said Sam. "We are going to grapple for the bucket at six o'clock tonight at her house, and you could lend a hand. There's five or six coming, but the well is deep, and another might be useful, if you don't mind appearing in that shape. She's sure to ...
— The Return of the Native • Thomas Hardy

... day they were very active, pottering about with hammers and nails and red calico, to put up curtains, make their house habitable and pretty; resolved to settle down comfortably to their new life. For them an impossible task. To grapple effectually with even purely material problems requires more serenity of mind and more lofty courage than people generally imagine. No two beings could have been more unfitted for such a struggle. Society, not from any tenderness, ...
— Tales of Unrest • Joseph Conrad

... picture to himself the invisible messenger that took the word across the boundary. He could not fathom the mystery, he could not picture to himself the missing link in the chain. As was always the case with him, his mind began at once to grapple with its problem—in this instance the riddle of the missing link. He actually forgot ...
— The Secret Wireless - or, The Spy Hunt of the Camp Brady Patrol • Lewis E. Theiss

... humiliation and despair. All he thought of was the injustice of Jane's sufferings. Added to this was an overpowering desire to reach her side before her misery should continue another moment; to fold her in his arms, stand between her and the world; help her to grapple with the horror which was slowly crushing out her life. That it was past her hour for retiring, and that there might be no one to answer his summons, made no difference to him. He must see her at all hazards ...
— The Tides of Barnegat • F. Hopkinson Smith

... light, and when Captain Van der Laen, continuing his conversation, cried enthusiastically: "The Beggars of the Sea will yet sink the Spanish power. The sea, gentlemen. the sea! To base one's cause on nothing, is the best way! To exult, leap and grapple in the storm! To fight and struggle man to man and breast to breast on the deck of the enemy's ship! To fight and conquer, ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers

... like the Romans, hand to hand: not to indulge in cowardly stratagems, intrigues, and lawyers' quibbles, fighting like the barbarians, cowardly and afar off, hurling stones, and shooting clouds of arrows, but to grapple with their enemies, looking them boldly in the face, as honest men should do, trying their strength against them fairly, and striking them to the heart. But with what? With that sword which, if it wound, heals likewise,— if ...
— Discipline and Other Sermons • Charles Kingsley

... am inclined to favour the Baffin's Bay route. I confess I should like to go over the ground traversed so painfully by former explorers, and see for myself the nature of the obstacles with which they have had to grapple. And I should also like to look with my bodily eyes upon the spots where they sought refuge during the rigours of the Arctic winter, and those other spots where, the forces of nature finally proving too great for them, they were reluctantly compelled to abandon further effort, and, confessing ...
— The Log of the Flying Fish - A Story of Aerial and Submarine Peril and Adventure • Harry Collingwood

... childhood with the use of arms. Reflecting that artificial weapons are of little use without a body capable of wielding them, he so trained himself for all possible emergencies that he was both able to run swiftly and also to grapple with his foe so strongly that few could escape from him. Those who entered into any contest with him, when beaten, used to ascribe their defeat to his immense bodily strength, which no exertions could ...
— Plutarch's Lives, Volume I (of 4) • Plutarch

... the future President is busying himself with no profounder problem of state than what the mischief has become of his hair so early; and in a mighty array of other cradles there are now some 60,000 future office-seekers, getting ready to furnish him occasion to grapple with that same old problem a second time. And in still one more cradle, somewhere under the flag, the future illustrious commander-in-chief of the American armies is so little burdened with his approaching grandeurs and responsibilities ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain

... have happened in the intervening thirty-one years. The Bampton lecturer of 1859 had to grapple only with the infant Hercules of historical criticism; and he is now a full-grown athlete, bearing on his shoulders the spoils of all the lions that have stood in his path. Surely a martyr's courage, as well as a martyr's faith, is needed by any one who, at this time, ...
— The Lights of the Church and the Light of Science - Essay #6 from "Science and Hebrew Tradition" • Thomas Henry Huxley

... into defeat. The American Ambassador is leaving Berlin, hundreds of neutral vessels hug havens of safety all over the world, but the women in Grimsby and Hull still wave farewell to the little trawlers that slip down the Humber to grapple with death. Freighters, mine-sweepers, trawlers, and the rest of the unsung tollers of the sea continue their silent, all-important task. They know that for them Germany has declared the law off, that they will be slaughtered at sight. They know also that ...
— The Land of Deepening Shadow - Germany-at-War • D. Thomas Curtin

... the crutch menacingly, but as he was not steady on his feet he was at the disadvantage his adversary had calculated upon. Belllounds ran around the cowboy, and suddenly plunged in to grapple with him. The crutch descended, but to little purpose. Belllounds's heavy onslaught threw Moore to the ground. Before he could rise Belllounds ...
— The Mysterious Rider • Zane Grey

... alone, into the trackless woods. Tormented with his thoughts, he saw all round Once more the battling image of his mind, Where there was nought of man, only the vast Unending silent struggle of Titan trees, Large internecine twistings of the world, The hushed death-grapple and the still intense Locked anguish of Laocoons that gripped Death by the throat for thrice three hundred years, Once, like a subtle mockery overhead, Some black-armed chattering ape swung swiftly by, But he strode ...
— Collected Poems - Volume One (of 2) • Alfred Noyes

... queer pedantism of a man who had read, thought, lived, pen in hand, there is the sincerity of the attempt to grapple by the same means with another profounder knowledge. After some passages which have been already made use of in the building up of this narrative, or add nothing new to the psychological side of ...
— Under Western Eyes • Joseph Conrad

... are due to Mr Isaac Jarman, the coxswain, and Mr Fish, the bowman, of the Ramsgate Lifeboat-men who may be said to carry their lives continually in their hands, and whose profession it is to go out at the call of duty and systematically grapple with Death and rob him of his prey. To the Harbour Master, and Deputy Harbour Master at Ramsgate, I am also indebted for information and assistance, and to Mr Reading, the master of the Aid steam-tug, which attends upon, and shares the ...
— The Floating Light of the Goodwin Sands • R.M. Ballantyne

... up in a thick wood, and had mortally wounded it with his gun; it had then closed with him, knocking the gun out of his hand, so that he was forced to use his knife. It charged him on all fours, but in the grapple, when it had failed to throw him down, it raised itself on its hind legs, clasping him across the shoulders with its fore-paws. Apparently it had no intention of hugging, but merely sought to draw him within reach of his jaws. He fought desperately against this, using the knife freely, and striving ...
— Hunting the Grisly and Other Sketches • Theodore Roosevelt

... catalogue of characters who figured during that long period, would occupy our allotted time, and we should have all text and no sermon. England has to undergo the revolt of the American colonies; to submit to defeat and separation; to shake under the volcano of the French Revolution; to grapple and fight for the life with her gigantic enemy Napoleon; to gasp and rally after that tremendous struggle. The old society, with its courtly splendours, has to pass away; generations of statesmen to rise and disappear; Pitt to follow Chatham to the tomb; ...
— Henry Esmond; The English Humourists; The Four Georges • William Makepeace Thackeray

... there he would have gone about it in a business-like way, for he was quick to grapple with a problem, and solve it in short order. As it was a case of too many cooks spoiling the broth, one boy suggested a certain plan, only to have a second advanced as a better method of getting Noodles out ...
— Boy Scouts on a Long Hike - Or, To the Rescue in the Black Water Swamps • Archibald Lee Fletcher

... domestic slavery was one of the first with which the Company had to grapple, the Royal Charter having ordained that "the Company shall to the best of its power discourage and, as far as may be practicable, abolish by degrees, any system of domestic servitude existing among the tribes of the ...
— British Borneo - Sketches of Brunai, Sarawak, Labuan, and North Borneo • W. H. Treacher

... to grow unmolested, and are provided with such tenacity of life, and such methods of propagation, that the gardener must maintain a continual struggle or they will hopelessly overwhelm him? What hidden virtue is in these things, that it is granted them to sow themselves with the wind, and to grapple the earth with this immitigable stubbornness, and to flourish in spite of obstacles, and never to suffer blight beneath any sun or shade, but always to mock their enemies with the same wicked luxuriance? ...
— Passages From The American Notebooks, Volume 2. • Nathaniel Hawthorne

... and terrible, when brother fought against brother for what each sincerely deemed to be the right. In a contest so grim the strong men who alone can carry it through are rarely able to do justice to the deep convictions of those with whom they grapple in mortal strife. At such times men see through a glass darkly; to only the rarest and loftiest spirits is vouchsafed that clear vision which gradually comes to all, even the lesser, as the struggle fades into distance, and wounds are ...
— Modern American Prose Selections • Various

... had vibrated like a harp of which all the strings had been wrenched away except one. That threat of a fiery inexorable vengeance—of a future into which the hated sinner might be pursued and held by the avenger in an eternal grapple, had come to him like the promise of an unquenchable fountain to unquenchable thirst. The doctrines of the sages, the old contempt for priestly Superstitions, had fallen away from his soul like a ...
— Romola • George Eliot

... he is out of date. Mr. Mozley's book belongs to that class of writings of which Butler may be taken as the type. It is strong, genuine argument about difficult matters, fairly facing what is difficult, fairly trying to grapple, not with what appears the gist and strong point of a question, but with what really and at bottom is the knot of it. It is a book the reasoning of which may not satisfy every one; but it is a book in which there is nothing plausible, nothing ...
— Occasional Papers - Selected from The Guardian, The Times, and The Saturday Review, - 1846-1890 • R.W. Church

... thrust his feet deeper in the sand, leaned, buried both hands in the mane of the stallion. It was a far fiercer tug-of-war this time, for the ample body of the horse gave the water a greater surface to grapple on, yet the strength of the man sufficed. His back bowed; his shoulders ached with the strain; and then the forefeet of Satan pawed the sand, and all three staggered up the shelving bank, reeled among the trees, ...
— The Seventh Man • Max Brand

... screamed he, and, at the same time, gave me a lash across the face with the cane, which had the anticipated effect of producing a struggle. I dashed forward to grapple with him, the two sergeants flung themselves on me, I was thrown to the ground and stunned again; being hit on my former wound in the head. It was bleeding severely when I came to myself, my laced coat was already torn off my ...
— Barry Lyndon • William Makepeace Thackeray

... Scornfully the tank slid over into the wide trench and landed with a crash in the bottom. For a moment she lay there without moving. The Germans thought she was stuck. They came running along thinking to grapple with her. But they never reached her, for at once the guns from both sides opened fire and ...
— Life in a Tank • Richard Haigh

... ventured, fellow-graduates, to throw out these hints of University Reform, well aware of the opposition such views must encounter in deep-rooted prejudice and fixed routine; aware also of the rashness of attempting, within the limits of such an occasion, to grapple with such a theme; but strong in my conviction of the pressing need of a more emancipated scheme of instruction and discipline, based on the facts of the present and the real wants of American life. It is time that the oldest college in the ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 107, September, 1866 • Various

... by no means vulgar. The friends thou hast, and their adoption tried Grapple them to thy soul with ...
— Familiar Quotations • Various

... to grapple with him, there was a sharp report, a lurid gleam of flame in the darkness, and Mohammed Beyd rolled over and over upon the floor to come to a final rest beside the bed of the woman he ...
— Tarzan and the Jewels of Opar • Edgar Rice Burroughs

... easy to understand either what was done, or what was meant to be done, during that early sail era; but two things appear quite certainly. There is still shown the vehemence and determination of action which characterized galley fighting, visible constantly in the fierce effort to grapple the enemy, to break his ranks, to confuse and crush him; and further there is clear indication of tactical plan on the grand scale, broad in outline and combination, involving different—but not independent—action by the various great divisions of the fleet, each ...
— Types of Naval Officers - Drawn from the History of the British Navy • A. T. Mahan

... of satisfaction and then he gasped, for the old man rose from his cot and tried to grapple with the younger man, who gave him a brutal push, throwing him back onto ...
— The Ranger Boys and the Border Smugglers • Claude A. Labelle

... rope and hangs to it, and we drop like an arrow. With a slash of a knife the cord which retains the anchor is cut, and we drag this grapple behind us, through a field of beets. ...
— Maupassant Original Short Stories (180), Complete • Guy de Maupassant

... this which gives us courage to grapple with centuries of wrong and to undertake the slow reduction of these evils. When Christianity came, the era of conscience came, and in His gospel is the power of intelligence and moral determination that shall not be overcome of evil, but shall ...
— American Missionary, Volume 43, No. 12, December, 1889 • Various

... their unbought love, Ready to stand—to fight—to die with thee, Be that thy pride, be that thy noblest boast! Knit to thy heart the ties of kindred—home— Cling to the land, the dear land of thy sires, Grapple to that with thy whole heart and soul! Thy power is rooted deep and strongly here, But in yon stranger world thou'lt stand alone, A trembling reed beat down by every blast. Oh come! 'tis long since we ...
— Wilhelm Tell - Title: William Tell • Johann Christoph Friedrich von Schiller

... who are wise, For if we give up and concede Immortality, There's nothing to check its wide Universality. The toad-stool and thistle, the donkey and bear Must live on forever,—the Lord knows where. I tell you, dear sir, that Science must wake up And grapple these spooks to crush them, and break up This world of delusion of Phil. D's and D.D's, Who are all in the dark, as dear Huxley agrees, Proud Huxley's "The Prince of Agnostics," you see, And Huxley and ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, June 1887 - Volume 1, Number 5 • Various

... and his murderer,' he added, pointing to the man who stood quietly by with Constable McNaught's firm grip upon his shoulder, 'still stooping over the body of his victim. I was too late, I fear, to save the latter, but just in time to grapple ...
— The Old Man in the Corner • Baroness Orczy

... I've had no hot-house usage in the world; the sun and rain hardly fell on me unpaid. I've earned every inch of this flesh and muscle, worked for it as it grew; the knowledge that I have, scanty enough, but whatever thought I do have of God or life, I've had to grapple and struggle for. Other men grow, inhale their being, like yonder tree God planted and watered. I think sometimes He forgot me,"—with a curious woman's tremor in his voice, gone in an instant. "I scrambled up like that scraggy parasite, without a root. Do you know now why I am sharp, wary, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 11, Issue 67, May, 1863 • Various

... any reason in the man's head, and Frank saw that he must subdue the fellow some way. Miller was determined to grapple with the boy, and Frank felt that he would find the mountaineer had the strength of an ox, for which reason he must keep clear ...
— Frank Merriwell Down South • Burt L. Standish

... Margery upon the gridiron of matrimony." The novice changing colour at this denunciation, "I do understand your signals, brother," said he, "and if it be set down in the log-book of fate that we must grapple, why then 'ware timbers. But as I know how the land lies, d'ye see, and the current of my inclination sets me off, I shall haul up close to the wind, and mayhap we shall clear Cape Margery. But howsomever, we shall leave that reef in the fore top-sail.—I was bound upon another voyage, ...
— The Adventures of Sir Launcelot Greaves • Tobias Smollett

... Lodorian who, having lost his tube, was about to grapple with him. He saw Steinholt send another one of ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, March 1930 • Various

... Democracy, and Roosevelt Republicanism all found their greatest strength in the Mississippi Valley. They were Mississippi Valley ideals in action. Its people were learning by experiment and experience how to grapple with the fundamental problem of creating a just social order that shall sustain the free, progressive, individual in a real democracy. The Mississippi Valley is asking, "What shall it profit a man if he gain the whole world and lose ...
— The Frontier in American History • Frederick Jackson Turner

... conscious of a dreadful inclination that stole upon me, as it thundered and lightened, to grapple with this man, or demon, and plunge him over the side. But, I constrained myself - I know not how - to speak to him, and in a pause of the storm, I crossed the ...
— Reprinted Pieces • Charles Dickens

... alcalde, "'tis a duty I would rather avoid: I am a poor sinful man, ill fitted to grapple with the powers of darkness; whereas holy men, like my lord bishop and the good friar, can have ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction. - Volume 20, No. 567, Saturday, September 22, 1832. • Various

... that he had the power, and that it would be disastrous to the country for him to hesitate. Writing from Edinburgh, Lord John Russell announced his conversion to total and immediate repeal of the corn laws. Sir Robert Peel hesitated no longer, but, feeling that the crisis had arrived, determined to grapple with it. It was duty to country before and above fancied loyalty to party to be considered. It is strange what remedies some men deem sensible, suggested to ...
— The Grand Old Man • Richard B. Cook

... more, Raby, and pass two of the muskets forward," he exclaimed. "As they hook on, we will all fire together, two on each side; then, with our pistols, shoot those who are attempting to grapple the boat, and trust to our cutlasses for the rest. The moment we can free ourselves we will again take to our oars; and I hope we may give them such a taste of our quality, that the rest may ...
— The Pirate of the Mediterranean - A Tale of the Sea • W.H.G. Kingston

... the Northeast, Northwest, Southwest, Manhattan firemen, the Yankee swap, southern plantation life, Slavery—the murderous, treacherous conspiracy to raise it upon the ruins of all the rest, On and on to the grapple with it—Assassin! then your life or ours be the stake, and respite ...
— Leaves of Grass • Walt Whitman

... window, breathing heavy draughts of the fresh morning air. The man would not die, he thought. Grey would never be free. No. Yet, since he was a child, before he began to grapple his way through the world, he had never known such a cheerful quiet as that which filled his eyes with tears now; for, if the fight had been hard, Paul Blecker ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XII. July, 1863, No. LXIX. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various

... behind him, but that he might meet other people who, seeing the pursuit, would take him for a fugitive from justice, and endeavor to stop him. One or two did indeed make feeble attempts to do so, but did not care to grapple in earnest with a powerful young man, evidently desperate, and of whose ...
— The Cat of Bubastes - A Tale of Ancient Egypt • G. A. Henty

... perhaps have passed beyond the latter, but he has confined himself far within the bounds of the former, in designating these critics, as "too petulant to be passive to a genuine poet, and too feeble to grapple with him;——men of palsied imaginations, in whose minds all healthy action is languid;——who, therefore, feed as the many direct them, or with the many are ...
— Biographia Literaria • Samuel Taylor Coleridge

... said Sam. "I was awfully ill, I know that, but it all came from my mind. I think I told you that. My heart was breaking because I couldn't be a perfect soldier. I had to face the question and grapple with it. It was an awful experience; I can't bear to speak of it or even think of it. But I won. I'm a perfect soldier now! I can do anything with my men here, and I will obey any order I receive, I don't care what ...
— Captain Jinks, Hero • Ernest Crosby

... Stanfield, with dozens of other painters: every writer of the day, almost without exception, late or early. With these, such as Anthony Trollope, he was on the friendliest terms, though he did not "grapple them to him with hooks of steel." With the Bar it was the same: he was intimate with the brilliant and agreeable Cockburn; with Lord Coleridge (then plain Mr. Coleridge), who found a knife and a fork laid for him any day that he chose to drop in, which ...
— John Forster • Percy Hethrington Fitzgerald

... hear! Hark to the word I bring! Toilers upon the sea, list to the Bell-buoy's ring! List, as I clash and clang! list, as I toss and toll! Under me yawns the grave, under me lies the shoal Where the whirling eddies wait to grapple the drowning crew, And the hungry quicksand hides the bones of the ship it slew. Swift on the outward tack! quick, to the seaward bear! Toilers upon the sea, here ...
— Cape Cod Ballads, and Other Verse • Joseph C. Lincoln

... gladiators. He was there considered something better than the common. And this, though a life depended on it, was but a wrestling-match. It was but a struggle to see which should get the other in his power, and blows count but little in a death-grapple. ...
— A Man and a Woman • Stanley Waterloo

... by the Great Plague, the burials in the large common pits and public burial grounds, and the opposition of the Quakers to inspection and registration. All these causes contributed to the issuing of unreliable returns. The company did their best to grapple with all these difficulties. They did not escape censure, and were blamed on account of the faults of individual clerks. The contest went on for years, and was only finally settled in 1859, when the last bills of ...
— The Parish Clerk (1907) • Peter Hampson Ditchfield

... as constitutional historians afterwards. John, in one of his diplomatic doublings, had put England into the papal care, as an estate is put in Chancery. And unluckily the Pope, whose counsels had generally been mild and liberal, was then in his death-grapple with the Germanic Emperor and wanted every penny he could get to win. His winning was a blessing to Europe, but a curse to England, for he used the island as a mere treasury for this foreign war. In this and other matters the baronial ...
— A Short History of England • G. K. Chesterton

... Child Hygiene Association (October, 1920): "The nation as a whole," he added, "has the obligation of such measures toward its children... as will yield to them an equal opportunity at their start in life. If we could grapple with the whole child situation for one generation, our public health, our economic efficiency, the moral character, sanity and stability of our people would advance ...
— The Pivot of Civilization • Margaret Sanger

... Jurgis, as he listened, found his soul filled with hatred. What did he know about sin and suffering—with his smooth, black coat and his neatly starched collar, his body warm, and his belly full, and money in his pocket—and lecturing men who were struggling for their lives, men at the death grapple with the demon powers of hunger and cold!—This, of course, was unfair; but Jurgis felt that these men were out of touch with the life they discussed, that they were unfitted to solve its problems; nay, they themselves were part of the problem—they were part of the order established ...
— The Jungle • Upton Sinclair

... show such prodigious movements; the pile of rocks on the one or other side having been smoothly swept away. The consideration of these facts impresses my mind almost in the same manner as does the vain endeavour to grapple with ...
— On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection • Charles Darwin

... on the Illinois, a letter arrived from Tonty telling him of the mutiny of the garrison and the wilful destruction of Fort Crevecoeur with all it held. The calamitous news would have killed the spirit of any one less courageous than La Salle; but the bold explorer, whose whole life was a long grapple with adversity, prepared with all haste to return to the rescue of Tonty, who, he hoped forlornly, had survived the mutinous treachery. By the 10th of August he was ready, and with a new outfit and twenty-five men he set out once more for ...
— Old Quebec - The Fortress of New France • Sir Gilbert Parker and Claude Glennon Bryan

... that its chief result is a wholesome quickening of the better nature of this poor man—that its chief accomplishment is to send him back to his home kinder, truer, and stronger, thru either the relaxation or the instruction, to grapple with the difficulties of life. I greatly fear that, as usually conducted, its influence upon the adult is at best but the temporary slaking of an unhealthy and never-satisfied thirst, and that upon the child and the adolescent it is a distinct blunting ...
— On the Firing Line in Education • Adoniram Judson Ladd

... should send for him, and his inability to deal with her perplexities deepened his realization of the ignorance and superficiality he had so long masked even from himself beneath the tricks and pretensions of a gay scepticism. He went away fully resolved to grapple with the entire Hostel question, and he put the patched and tortured manuscript of the new novel aside with a certain satisfaction to ...
— The Wife of Sir Isaac Harman • H. G. (Herbert George) Wells

... believe. I do not believe that it is showing real respect to our parents to believe something simply because they did. Every good father and every good mother wish their children to find out more than they knew every good father wants his son to overcome some obstacle that he could not grapple with and if you wish to reflect credit on your father and mother, do it by accomplishing more than they did, because you live in a better time. Every nation has had what you call a sacred record, and the older the more sacred, the more contradictory and ...
— Lectures of Col. R. G. Ingersoll, Volume I • Robert Green Ingersoll

... several times; but the fight was maintained for forty minutes, after which she withdrew, having been hulled eleven times, her spars and rigging seriously injured, and having lost two men killed and four wounded. The force was too small to grapple successfully with the work, so Lieutenant-Commander Hart gave the ...
— The Gulf and Inland Waters - The Navy in the Civil War. Volume 3. • A. T. Mahan

... this followed a fiercer grapple,—his third great legislative attack on slavery. In his revision of the Virginia laws he reported "a bill to emancipate all slaves born after the passing of the act." Attached to this was a plan for the instruction of the young ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 09, No. 51, January, 1862 • Various

... this message she was, unluckily, caught by Dr Pughson, who, after dealing her one of his butcherly gibes, bade her to the blackboard, to grapple with ...
— The Getting of Wisdom • Henry Handel Richardson

... its close allowed Beowulf, at his request, to remain alone in the hall with his men. Aware that no weapon could pierce the armed hide of the uncanny monster, Beowulf—who had the strength of thirty men—laid aside his armor and prepared to grapple with Grendel by ...
— The Book of the Epic • Helene A. Guerber

... thrown away. Within five seconds, he was at the side of Hercules, prepared and expecting to grapple with his enemy, who, to his exasperation, continued invisible. Vose did not require to have the matter explained to him, for he understood it. Upon being hailed, the intruder instead of throwing ...
— A Waif of the Mountains • Edward S. Ellis

... Robert, "by what access the barbarian, if he is one, can enter my dungeon without passing through yours; but no matter, I will retire into the inner or outer room, whichever it happens to be, and be thou then well aware that the warder will have some one to grapple with ere he leaves his prison-work to-day. Meanwhile, think thyself dumb as thou art blind, and be assured that the offer of freedom itself would not induce me to desert the cause of a ...
— Waverley Volume XII • Sir Walter Scott

... armchair, and still continued to talk about his affairs, while I thought of something else. When we are not able to defend ourselves from a great misfortune, there is one safety-valve,—we may be able to grapple with some of its details. I was now mainly busy with the thought whether Kromitzki would go with us to Gastein or not. Therefore after some time ...
— Without Dogma • Henryk Sienkiewicz

... Satan smitten with amazement fell As when Earths Son Antaeus (to compare Small things with greatest) in Irassa strove With Joves Alcides and oft foil'd still rose, Receiving from his mother Earth new strength, Fresh from his fall, and fiercer grapple joyn'd, Throttl'd at length in the Air, expir'd and fell; So after many a foil the Tempter proud, Renewing fresh assaults, amidst his pride 570 Fell whence he stood to see his Victor fall. And as that Theban Monster ...
— The Poetical Works of John Milton • John Milton

... Government to increase the rates, and it could not well dismiss doctors and close dispensaries and schools when the people were clamouring for more. So at least the defenders of the Zemstvo maintain, and they go so far as to contend that it did well not to grapple with the impoverishment of the peasantry at an earlier period, when the real conditions of the problem and the means of solving it were only very imperfectly known: if it had begun at that time it would have made great blunders and spent much money ...
— Russia • Donald Mackenzie Wallace

... been raised to the permanent place that belongs to them. Each of the three types has its own peculiar conditions of success, and there are circumstances in which some one of the three is more able to grapple with the obstacles to order than either of the other two. It soon became very clear that the intellectual quality was not the element likely to quell the tempest that ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 2 of 3) - Essay 3: Condorcet • John Morley

... They swayed, then separated as though they had been torn apart. But the instant of contact had told Andy a hundred things. He was much smaller than the other, but he knew that he was far and away stronger after that grapple. It cleared his brain, ...
— Way of the Lawless • Max Brand

... not a very small one. At length they fought close up to the mouth of the dark entry, where the fellow in black stood all this while concealed, and then the combatant in tartans closed with his antagonist, or pretended to do so; but, the moment they began to grapple, he wheeled about, turning Colwan's back towards the entry, and then cried out, 'Ah, hell has it! ...
— The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner • James Hogg

... this the castle or square tower was strongly built of beams joined together by bars of iron and large nails, carried up to the height of a lance or spear, and so large that it was able to contain forty men with several pieces of ordnance. It was proposed that this castle should be brought Up to grapple with the caravels, by which the Portuguese might be attacked on equal terms. On seeing this machine, the zamorin liberally rewarded Cogeal for his ingenuity, and gave orders to have other seven constructed of the same kind. By means of his spies, Pacheco ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. II • Robert Kerr

... which is spoken in quantity and quality alike; ideas thus figured and personified, change hands, as we may say, like coin; and the speakers imply without effort the most obscure and intricate thoughts. Strangers who have a large common ground of reading will, for this reason, come the sooner to the grapple of genuine converse. If they know Othello and Napoleon, Consuelo and Clarissa Harlowe, Vautrin and Steenie Steenson,[9] they can leave generalities and begin at once to ...
— Essays of Robert Louis Stevenson • Robert Louis Stevenson

... endeavors to cope with this formidable and widespread organization under different names, Kiaking's government found itself placed at a serious disadvantage. Without an exact knowledge of the intentions or resources of its secret enemies, it failed to grapple with them, and, as its sole remedy, it could only decree that proof of membership carried with it the ...
— China • Demetrius Charles Boulger

... have I fought in my youth," he said, "and now once more will I, the guardian of my people, seek the combat. I would not bear any sword or other weapon against the dragon if I thought that I could grapple with him as I did with the monster Grendel. But I fear that I shall not be able to approach so close to this foe, for he will send forth hot, raging fire and venomous breath. Yet am I resolute in mood, fearless and resolved ...
— Myths and Legends of All Nations • Various

... parts and wedded to nature with an unerring fidelity. But the range of nature was circumscribed, save only in the one exception of a work throbbing with the sufferings and sorrows of a shadowed side of modern life. To this lyric, however, there came as basis a fundamental conception that made aim to grapple with the pro-foundest problems compassed by the mysteries of life and death, and a temper to yield only where human perception fails. Abstract indeed in theme the lyric is, but few are the products of thought ...
— Recollections of Dante Gabriel Rossetti - 1883 • T. Hall Caine

... again revealed to us the miseries endured by certain portions of our working population. They have described the people employed in factories, workshops, mines, and brickfields, as well as in the pursuits of country life. We have tried to grapple with the evils of their condition by legislation, but it seems to mock us. Those who sink into poverty are fed, but they remain paupers. Those who feed them, feel no compassion; and those who are fed, ...
— Thrift • Samuel Smiles

... Compromise, and a triumphant slave-power. Its instant effect was to accelerate in the South the action of the disunion working forces there, to hurry the inevitable moment when the two sections would rush together in a death-grapple within or ...
— William Lloyd Garrison - The Abolitionist • Archibald H. Grimke

... Napoleonic order. He was uneducated, but he possessed that exact knowledge of mankind that makes leaders; and his shrewdness was the result of caution and suspicion. But like all men of his breed, he hated with peculiar venom the well-born; he loved to grapple with them, to wrest their idleness from them, to compel them to work for a living, to humiliate them. The fiber in McQuade was coarse; he possessed neither generosity nor magnanimity; the very men who feared him ...
— Half a Rogue • Harold MacGrath

... remarked Mrs. Gaylord, whom Bartley had led to her chair and placed on her cushion, "'t he had a headache when he first came in," and she appealed to him for corroboration, while she vainly endeavored to gather force to grapple again with the larger fact that he and Marcia were just ...
— A Modern Instance • William Dean Howells

... tried— So you have known The bitter-sweetness of Attempt, The quick determination and the dread despair That grapple and possess you as ...
— Once Aboard The Lugger • Arthur Stuart-Menteth Hutchinson

... was waning and August was at hand this unseen soldier, who had only shared her thoughts before, took complete and utter control. Why tell the old, old story in its every stage? It was with a new, wild fear at heart she heard of Stonewall Jackson's leap for the Rapidan, of the grapple at Cedar Mountain where the Massachusetts men fought sternly and met with cruel loss. Her father raged with anxiety when the news came of the withdrawal from the Peninsula, the triumphant rush of Lee and Longstreet on Jackson's trail, of the ill-starred ...
— A War-Time Wooing - A Story • Charles King

... telling quaint stories, and up to a thousand raw tricks; now tumbling and adventuring into manhood with yet the oil and fire and force of youth too strong for reason's sober guidance; and now—well and now—finding the checks of time have begun to grapple him, he looks back upon the past and tells his curious stories o'er again. Verily, as Shakespeare declares in All's Well, "the web of his life is of a mingled yarn, good and ill together;" and through it all there is a kind of ...
— Adventures and Recollections • Bill o'th' Hoylus End

... or standing up sternly to grapple with it in their capacity as custodians and champions of established law? Inquiry voiced from Ministerial side, where Members are growing increasingly impatient with benevolent neutrality. Premier's reply brief ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, May 6, 1914 • Various

... various ways to secure all that seemed most attractive about the project, or which filled my soul with longing. My intercourse with Lehrs had, on the whole, given a decided spur to my former tendency to grapple seriously with my subjects, a tendency which had been counteracted by closer contact with the theatre. This desire now furnished a basis for closer study of philosophical questions. I had been astonished at times to hear even the grave and virtuous Lehrs, ...
— My Life, Volume I • Richard Wagner

... moments I felt paralysed, expecting each instant that I should have to grapple with an enemy; but, save for the whisperings and the distant roar of water, all ...
— The Golden Magnet • George Manville Fenn

... GRAHAM's tongue, Rot blent with rudeness gentlest nymph can't pardon. Why e'en the G.O.M. his grey head hung, And wished he were at Hawarden. Like vine unpruned, SEXTON's exuberant speech Sprawled o'er the question with the which he'd grapple; PICTON prosed on,—the style in which men preach In a dissenting chapel. Prince ARTHUR twined one lank leg t'other round, Drooping a long chin like BURNE-JONES's ladies; And HARCOURT, sickening of the strident sound, Wished CONYBEARE ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 102, May 21, 1892 • Various

... dreams over the unique position which Pascal has come to occupy, the more one realises how few writers there are whose imagination is large enough to grapple with the sublime horror of being born of the human race into this ...
— Suspended Judgments - Essays on Books and Sensations • John Cowper Powys

... for a man like him to make such a mistake, because being what he is he can't grapple with it as a stronger or a coarser ...
— The Dust Flower • Basil King

... had thrown the secretary earlier in the day. And since they seemed also to be consistent with the warning conveyed to me, they should have corroborated my suspicions. But a sense of something unreal and fantastic, with which I could not grapple, continued to puzzle me in the presence of this angry woman; and it was with no great assurance that I said, "Do I understand then, madame, that M. du Hallot is in ...
— In Kings' Byways • Stanley J. Weyman

... his Rangers would be back, when the ice would be firm and hard, and they could renew their wild winter warfare, whilst during the earlier months of the winter there was no certainty of carrying on any successful operations. Heavy rain and soft snow were too much even for the hardy Rangers to grapple with. They were practically useless now till the frost came and fastened its firm grip upon ...
— French and English - A Story of the Struggle in America • Evelyn Everett-Green

... birth's invidious bar And grasp the skirts of happy chance, And breast the blows of circumstance, And grapple with his ...
— The Conservation of Races - The American Negro Academy. Occasional Papers No. 2 • W. E. Burghardt Du Bois

... hopeless, and beyond the reach or even conception of any but a Minister conscious of occupying an impregnable position in the confidence of the country: we allude to his reconstruction of our entire commercial system, as represented by his new Tariff. What courage was requisite to grapple with this giant difficulty! What practical skill; what patience and resolution; what exact yet extensive acquaintance with mercantile affairs; what a comprehensive discernment of consequences; what firm impartiality in deciding between vast conflicting interests, were here ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. 327 - Vol. 53, January, 1843 • Various

... us as they pass! The Cow-pox, Tractors, Galvanism, and Gas, [19] In turns appear, to make the vulgar stare, Till the swoln bubble bursts—and all is air! Nor less new schools of Poetry arise, Where dull pretenders grapple for the prize: O'er Taste awhile these Pseudo-bards prevail; [xii] Each country Book-club bows the knee to Baal, And, hurling lawful Genius from the throne, Erects a shrine and idol of its own; [xiii] 140 Some ...
— Byron's Poetical Works, Vol. 1 • Byron

... inscription, "It is forbidden to walk over the growing grain." As we passed through the rolling land of Belgium under the brow of "The Scherpenberg," with Mount Kemmel over to the right honeycombed with dugouts, it was difficult to believe that, locked in a death grapple, not three miles away, were thousands of soldiers living underground like moles, and that at any moment the air might be filled with ...
— On the Fringe of the Great Fight • George G. Nasmith

... face was demoniacal. He snatched up the deadly tube that contained the violet fire and turned it upon Jim. Again Jim felt that repulsive force pushing him back. He gasped for breath, and tensed his whole body in supreme resistance, while he tried to grapple with Tode ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, May, 1930 • Various

... by illness, the voyager, of course, has a ravenous appetite; such being the case, what can be more exasperating than having to grapple with a sort of dioramic dinner, where the dishes represent a series of dissolving views—mutton and beef of mature age, leaping about with a playfulness only becoming living lambs and calves—while the proverb of "cup and lip" becomes a truism from perpetual illustration? Neither ...
— Border and Bastille • George A. Lawrence

... been about this time that it rained, having shone long enough for English weather, and it hardly held up before I was overtaken by a friendly youth on a bicycle, whom I stayed with the question uppermost in my mind. He promptly got off his wheel to grapple with the problem. He was a comely young fellow, an artisan of some sort from a neighboring town, and he knew the country well, but he did not know where my lost battle-field was. He was sure that it was near by: but he was ...
— Seven English Cities • W. D. Howells

... a room where life and death grapple for mastery, invites and aids that calm, inexorable introspection, which Gotama Buddha prescribes as an almost unerring path to the attainment of peace; and, in the solemn silence of his last and memorable ...
— Vashti - or, Until Death Us Do Part • Augusta J. Evans Wilson

... dragging the hero with him, a wide wound opens on his shoulder; the sinews snap, and with a mighty wrench Beowulf tears off the whole limb. While Grendel rushes howling across the fens, Beowulf hangs the grisly arm with its iron claws, "the whole grapple of Grendel," over the door where ...
— Outlines of English and American Literature • William J. Long

... only seemed to languish. While delaying to grapple with the strange problem it presented, his desire for her continued to grow. In his gambling simile, his conclusion was that Luck had dealt him the most remarkable card in the deck, and that for years he had overlooked it. Love was the card, and it beat them ...
— Burning Daylight • Jack London

... been scarcely aware. So that, almost immediately—since there was no glamour of passion on his side—he began to resent her small tyrannies, to draw in, and draw back. A few quarrels—not ordinary lovers' quarrels, but representing a true grapple of personalities—sprang up behind a screen of trifles. Daphne was once more rude and provoking, Roger cool and apparently indifferent. This was the stage when Mrs. Verrier had become an admiring observer of what she supposed to be his "tactics." ...
— Marriage a la mode • Mrs. Humphry Ward

... himself, who bestrode it triumphantly, and hurled anathemas against the wretches whom he saw struggling with the billows of eternal death. In his view of the matter, it was a most abominable crime—as, indeed, it is a great folly—for men to trust to their own strength, or even to grapple to any other fragment of the wreck, save this narrow plank, which, moreover, he took special care to keep out of their reach. In other words, as his creed was like no man's else, and being well pleased that Providence had intrusted him alone, of mortals, with ...
— The Man of Adamant - (From: "The Snow Image and Other Twice-Told Tales") • Nathaniel Hawthorne

... tale," he said, "if true,—dreadful to me, so nearly allied to that family. But as yet I grapple with shadows." ...
— Eugene Aram, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton

... felt the hot touch of it on my scalp like a breath of flame. Another time a mountaineer leaped the rock barrier to beat me down with the butt of his rifle—and in the very act Tybee rose up and throttled him. I saw the grapple, sprang to my feet and ...
— The Master of Appleby • Francis Lynde

... front. The boys followed as rapidly as possible in its wake. Presently they came to a small hill. Climbing to the top, they found they could command a good view of the advancing German columns, which they could see in the distance, and which were even now almost close enough to grapple hand-to-hand with the ...
— The boy Allies at Liege • Clair W. Hayes

... still appeared strangely, astonishingly calm;—Hodder, with all his faculties acute, apprehended that he was dangerously calm. The man who had formerly been his friend was now completely obliterated, and he had the feeling almost of being about to grapple, in mortal combat, with some unknown monster whose tactics and resources were infinite, whose victims had never escaped. The monster was in Eldon Parr—that is how it came to him. The waxy, relentless demon was aroused. It behooved him, Hodder, to ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill

... held the entrance door open. They were doing it from one of the crevices in the ceiling. They had evidently made no preparations for lifting the hook. I suppose they never thought that anyone would make use of it, and so they had to improvise a grapple. The wire was too fine to be seen by the amount of light we had in the hall; but the flashlight 'picked it out.' Do ...
— Carnacki, The Ghost Finder • William Hope Hodgson

... mountain still the beasts are spied Plenteous as grasses in the summer tide; As at three points the fierce attack I ply, Seeing what numbers still remain to die, Captains, pick'd captains I with speed despatch, Who by the tail the spotted leopard catch, Crash to the brain the furious tiger's head, Grapple the bear so powerful and dread, The ancient sow, the desert's haunter, slay— Whilst with applause their prowess ...
— Targum • George Borrow

... her breath, after that crazy outbreak, she rushed up to her own room, bolted the door, fell on her knees at her bedside, and told herself in frantic gasps, that she would fight Edith Houghton! Grapple with her! Beat her away from Maurice! "I must ...
— The Vehement Flame • Margaret Wade Campbell Deland

... cold, to fight an enemy attacking in the dark, and then have them all run the same way,—forward,—is true of the firemen as well, and, like the Rough Riders, they never failed when the test came. The firemen going to the front at the tap of the bell, no less surely to grapple with lurking death than the men who faced Mauser bullets, but with none of the incidents of glorious war, the flag, the hurrah, and all the things that fire a soldier's heart, to urge them on,—clinging, half naked, with numb fingers to the ladders as best they can while trying to put on ...
— Children of the Tenements • Jacob A. Riis

... those in command that presently there would be a powerful attack by infantry, for which the cannonade was supposed to have paved the way with death and disorder, and it was necessary that the pieces should be kept cool in order to be in efficient condition to grapple with and suppress this attack. Sometimes a regiment, stung to a frenzy of courage by bullets and the death of comrades, will rise from its trench without the volition of its officers, and go frantically forward against overwhelming odds. A different ...
— Aladdin O'Brien • Gouverneur Morris

... crowded to the bank, shouting and screaming with delight and defiance. There they stood, with eyes fixed on the advancing boats, when suddenly Hanno's men came up and attacked them from behind. They turned to grapple with this unexpected enemy, thus giving Hannibal time to land his first division and charge them in the rear. Unable to stand the twofold onslaught, the Gauls wavered, and in a few minutes disappeared in ...
— The Red Book of Heroes • Leonora Blanche Lang

... than human in their strength, That my deft lariat at length Might safely noose this splendid thing That so defies all conquering! Ho! but to see it whirl and reel— The sands spurt forward—and to feel The quivering tension of the thong That throned me high, with shriek and song! To grapple tufts of tossing mane— To spurn it to its feet again, And then, sans saddle, rein or bit, To lash the mad ...
— Green Fields and Running Brooks, and Other Poems • James Whitcomb Riley

... at the head of the stairs. A courier had come from the battlefield with an important dispatch. Grant and Lee were locked in their death grapple in the Wilderness. He would try even in this solemn hour to do ...
— The Victim - A romance of the Real Jefferson Davis • Thomas Dixon

... the planking close beside my hand, hurling a splinter of wood against my face. The boat gave a sudden tremor, and, with a quick, sharp cry of pain, the negro next me leaped into the air, and went plunging overboard. I flung forth a hand in vain effort to grapple his body, yet never touched it, and everything ...
— Prisoners of Chance - The Story of What Befell Geoffrey Benteen, Borderman, - through His Love for a Lady of France • Randall Parrish

... Haven road, and it seemed evident that the same practice would be introduced there Barnum therefore enlisted as many as he could in a strong effort to strangle the outrage before it became too strong to grapple with. Several lawyers in the Assembly promised their aid, but before the final struggle came, all but one, in the whole body, had enlisted in ...
— A Unique Story of a Marvellous Career. Life of Hon. Phineas T. • Joel Benton

... to be said of him that his patients never died until his back was turned. It was not strictly true, but it conveyed something of the magnetism with which he wrought upon them. He knew the crucial moment by instinct, when to grapple and when to slacken his hold, and he ...
— The Rocks of Valpre • Ethel May Dell

... du Temple, the friends agreed to meet at the office between four and five o'clock. Hector Merlin would doubtless be there. Lousteau was right. The infatuation of desire was upon Lucien; for the courtesan who loves knows how to grapple her lover to her by every weakness in his nature, fashioning herself with incredible flexibility to his every wish, encouraging the soft, effeminate habits which strengthen her hold. Lucien was thirsting already for enjoyment; he was in love with the easy, luxurious, and ...
— A Distinguished Provincial at Paris • Honore de Balzac

... features when he told of the army's recoil from the shock, and of the wild joy that ran through the ranks when they took up their march to the left, and realized that this time they were not going back.—So they came to the twelve days' grapple of the Spottsylvania Campaign. ...
— The Metropolis • Upton Sinclair

... up to the trenches, and some even leaping over the redoubt, to grapple hand to hand with those who so desperately ...
— The Big Five Motorcycle Boys on the Battle Line - Or, With the Allies in France • Ralph Marlow

... ponder his next move. At midnight eight fire hulks, "spurting flames and their ordnance exploding," were borne by wind and tide full upon the crowded Spanish fleet. Fearful of maquinas de minas such as had wrought destruction a year before at the siege of Antwerp, the Spanish made no effort to grapple the peril but slipped or cut cables and in complete confusion ...
— A History of Sea Power • William Oliver Stevens and Allan Westcott

... is that they did not crush him altogether. He never acquired the sufficient public influence nor received the recognition his merit deserved. He was by nature a thinker—a seeker after truth. There was no problem,—social, political or philosophical,—which he was not ready to grapple with. He could plunge into these subjects like a pearl-diver who means to touch bottom, and would never come out till his last breath was spent. This mental habit and his continual suffering made him only too serious, too much in ...
— Sketches from Concord and Appledore • Frank Preston Stearns

... preferable to another of those long, driving blows. He clung until his head cleared. Then he shook himself loose and dropped, as if dazed, to one knee. McTee's bellow of triumph filled his ears. The captain bore down on him with outstretched hands to grapple at his throat, but at the right instant Harrigan rose and lurched out with stiff arm. The punch drove home to the face with a shock that jarred Harrigan to his feet and jerked McTee back as if drawn by a hand. Before he recovered his balance, Harrigan planted half a dozen punches, but though ...
— Harrigan • Max Brand

... and—we—know that it demands from him the best that he was given, from the grimmest toil of his body to the keenest effort of his brain. Marriage is a detail—an incident; we're here to fight, to grapple with the wilderness, and to break it in, and that burden wasn't laid upon us only for the good of ourselves. When we've flung our trestles over the rivers, and blown room for the steel track out of the canyon's side, the oat-fields ...
— The Greater Power • Harold Bindloss

... week after he bursts into the house on a snowy December night, and there is a great stamping in the hall, and a little grandchild of the house pipes from the half-opened door, "It's Uncle Phil!" and there is a loud smack upon the cheek of Rose, who runs to give him welcome, and a hearty, honest grapple with the hand of the old Squire, and then another kiss upon the cheek of the old mother, who meets him before he is fairly in the room,—a kiss upon her cheek, and another, and another, Phil loves the old lady with an honest warmth that kindles the ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 101, March, 1866 • Various

... refuted over and over again," would refer us to some of the best chapters in the writers who have refuted him. My own reading has led me to become moderately well acquainted with the literature of evolution, but I have never come across a single attempt fairly to grapple with Lamarck, and it is plain that neither Isidore Geoffroy nor M. Martins knows of such an attempt any more than I do. When Professor Ray Lankester puts his finger on Lamarck's weak places, then, but not till then, may he complain of those who ...
— Luck or Cunning? • Samuel Butler

... denied me repentance. His Word gives me no encouragement to believe; yea, Himself hath shut me up in this iron cage; nor can all the men in the world let me out. O eternity! eternity! how shall I grapple with the misery that I ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan

... emancipates the spirit? gives wings to thought? and that the more one becomes a musician the more one is also a philosopher? The grey sky of abstraction seems thrilled by flashes of lightning; the light is strong enough to reveal all the details of things; to enable one to grapple with problems; and the world is surveyed as if from a mountain top—With this I have defined philosophical pathos—And unexpectedly answers drop into my lap, a small hailstorm of ice and wisdom, of problems solved. Where am I? Bizet makes me productive. ...
— The Case Of Wagner, Nietzsche Contra Wagner, and Selected Aphorisms. • Friedrich Nietzsche.

... would catch the child on the first symptoms of waywardness, the Industrial School would arrest him standing on the verge of crime, the Reformatory School would dual with actual offenders against the law, and the Penal Reformatory would grapple with habitual offenders under the ...
— Crime and Its Causes • William Douglas Morrison

... brought again to a broadside encounter, when Jones, feeling the superior force of the Serapis, and her better sailing, was fully prepared to take advantage of the next position as the ships fell foul of one another, to grapple with his opponent. He himself assisted in lashing the jib-stay of the Serapis to the mizzenmast ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 2 of 8 • Various

... following morning Tom and Sam arrived, as anxious as Dick had been to learn the particulars of what had occurred. They listened to their father's story with interest, as he told of how he had heard a noise and gone below to grapple with the midnight intruder who was ransacking the library desk, and of how Randolph Rover had come to his assistance and been seriously wounded, and how all were now certain that the unwelcome visitor had been Arnold Baxter—that ...
— The Rover Boys out West • Arthur M. Winfield

... took him and killed him, and Thorliek claimed as his and his father's own all the money the freedman had made. Hrut heard this, and he and his sons liked it very ill. They were most of them grown up, and the band of kinsmen was deemed a most forbidding one to grapple with. Hrut fell back on the law as to how this ought to turn out, and when the matter was searched into by lawyers, Hrut and his son stood at but little advantage, for it was held a matter of great weight that Hrut had set the freedman down ...
— Laxdaela Saga - Translated from the Icelandic • Anonymous

... in a frame of mind that baffles description. He was a modest man; he had never conceived an overweening notion of his own powers; he knew himself unfit to write a book, turn a table napkin-ring, entertain a Christmas party with legerdemain—grapple (in short) any of those conspicuous accomplishments that are usually classed under the head of genius. He knew—he admitted—his parts to be pedestrian, but he had considered them (until quite lately) fully equal to the demands of life. And to-day he owned ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 7 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson

... seems the great Avenger; history's pages but record One death-grapple in the darkness 'twixt old systems and the Word; Truth forever on the scaffold, Wrong forever on the throne,— Yet that scaffold sways the future, and, behind the dim unknown, Standeth God within the shadow, keeping ...
— Elementary Guide to Literary Criticism • F. V. N. Painter

... Champion home to dinner between the afternoon and evening sittings. At the latter he was to move the second reading of his "Municipal Co-ordination Bill," a measure which was intended to grapple with the chaos arising from the multitude of opposing or overlapping interests that controlled the domestic arrangements of the Londoner. An effort was to be made to bring all the Gas, Electricity, Water, Paving, and other corporations into some sort of line, and ...
— The Right Stuff - Some Episodes in the Career of a North Briton • Ian Hay

... and inferior, writers it is most fortunate that our design has taken so wide a scope. These can go on with their perennial wrangle over the petty question of penal and educational flagellation, while we grapple with the higher problem, and unfold the broader philosophy of an universal walloping. Reflections upon the Beneficent Influence ...
— The Fiend's Delight • Dod Grile

... put into place. Foreign investors remain attracted by the country's political stability and high education levels, and tourism continues to bring in foreign exchange. Low prices for coffee and bananas have hurt the agricultural sector. The government continues to grapple with its large deficit and massive internal debt. The reduction of inflation remains a difficult problem because of rises in the price of imports, labor market rigidities, and fiscal deficits. The country also needs to ...
— The 2005 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency

... leaves you, change your tack, Follow him close and fetch him back; When you've hauled him in at last, Grapple his flipper and hold ...
— The Poetical Works of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Complete • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.

... the metaphysician, according to Hegel, sees, from any one piece of reality, what the whole of reality must be—at least in its large outlines. Every apparently separate piece of reality has, as it were, hooks which grapple it to the next piece; the next piece, in turn, has fresh hooks, and so on, until the whole universe is reconstructed. This essential incompleteness appears, according to Hegel, equally in the world of ...
— The Problems of Philosophy • Bertrand Russell



Words linked to "Grapple" :   grappling hook, deal, grapnel, grip, contend, scratch along, squeeze by, crampoon, wrestle, get by, hand-to-hand struggle, fend, seize, move, meet, cope with, dredging bucket, clutch, manage, hook, act, match, grappling, grappling iron, wrestling, prehend, grappler, struggle, crampon, cope, clamshell, extemporize, improvise, scrape along



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