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Barrier   Listen
noun
Barrier  n.  
1.
(Fort.) A carpentry obstruction, stockade, or other obstacle made in a passage in order to stop an enemy.
2.
A fortress or fortified town, on the frontier of a country, commanding an avenue of approach.
3.
pl. A fence or railing to mark the limits of a place, or to keep back a crowd. "No sooner were the barriers opened, than he paced into the lists."
4.
Any obstruction; anything which hinders approach or attack. "Constitutional barriers."
5.
Any limit or boundary; a line of separation. "'Twixt that (instinct) and reason, what a nice barrier!"
Barrier gate, a heavy gate to close the opening through a barrier.
Barrier reef, a form of coral reef which runs in the general direction of the shore, and incloses a lagoon channel more or less extensive.
To fight at barriers, to fight with a barrier between, as a martial exercise. (Obs.)






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Barrier" Quotes from Famous Books



... the intervening square of sand, which, however, being one-half his heritage, stretched an impregnable barrier between them, and sank ...
— The Hawk of Egypt • Joan Conquest

... German, Russian, French, Spanish, Italian, or Portuguese, but the 150,000,000 who thus preserve the "mother-tongue" of the early American settlers have to come into intimate contact with those of far different lingual background. This difference in language, which is found so often a barrier to unity between the respective parents of the young people who choose each other in marriage, is but a sign and symbol of deep-seated and ineradicable divergence in family tradition, in fashion of customary ways ...
— The Family and it's Members • Anna Garlin Spencer

... again, and felt his way cautiously to the right, for the stones rose like a bank or barrier in his way, and he went many yards without ...
— Cutlass and Cudgel • George Manville Fenn

... word is Hizam girdle, sash, waist-belt, which Galland turns into nappes. The object of the cloths edged with gems and gums was to form a barrier excluding hostile Jinns: the European magician ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 3 • Richard F. Burton

... that morrow came, and the time to say farewell actually arrived, the girl was spared the knowledge that this parting was more than the shadow of that last good-bye which so soon would have to be said for ever. Still, the sudden change in Jerrem's face pierced her afresh and broke down that last barrier of control over a grief she could subdue no longer. In vain the turnkeys warned them that time was up and Joan must go. Reuben entreated too that they should say good-bye: the two but clung together in more desperate necessity, until Reuben, seeing ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XXVI., December, 1880. • Various

... elliptical basin, seven miles in its transverse axis, half filled with smooth water of the deepest caerulean hue, and half with a solid sheet of glittering snow-white salt, the offspring of evaporation." "If," says Mr. Hugh Miller, "we suppose, instead of a barrier of lava, that sand-bars were raised by the surf on a flat arenaceous coast during a slow and equable sinking of the surface, the waters of the outer gulf might occasionally topple over the bar, and supply fresh brine when ...
— The Student's Elements of Geology • Sir Charles Lyell

... speak. How often do we not long to break through the veils which divide us from some one, but custom, convention, or a fear of being misunderstood prevent us, and so the moment departs whose heat might have burned through every barrier. Out with it— out with it, the hidden heart, the love that is voiceless, the secret tender germ of an infinite forgiveness. That speaks to the heart. That pierces through many a vesture of the Soul. Our companion struggles ...
— AE in the Irish Theosophist • George William Russell

... communication in this life are made easier. It seems absurd that, whereas we may actually speak and hear the voice in reply of those who answer us while we are hundreds of miles apart, there yet should be an insuperable barrier between ourselves and those who, for aught we know, may be quite near us. It seems almost as though we must be under a spell which prevents the communication which we long for, and as though almost any day we may wake up to find how unreal the separation is, Kitty ...
— Peter and Jane - or The Missing Heir • S. (Sarah) Macnaughtan

... went on to the north-west, and in lat. 63 deg. fell in with a barrier of ice, which he coasted for thirteen days without finding an opening. The very sight of an iceberg was new to all his crew; and the ropes and shrouds, though it was ...
— Short Studies on Great Subjects • James Anthony Froude

... awaiting my greeting. So dignified was his manner, so reserved his expression, that I experienced an involuntary recoil, until I turned to him and saw his eyes suddenly brighten as I offered my hand; a barrier seemed to melt between us, and I felt that we were no ...
— Stories of Authors, British and American • Edwin Watts Chubb

... the snow next the palisades was piled up against the palings like a wall, as high as they could reach or throw it, by which means they got rid of the snow about the house, and at the same time formed a barrier against the freezing winds which they had to expect. All worked hard; Percival and John were of great use, and even Mrs Campbell and the girls assisted collecting the remainder of the snow, and clearing it off the window-sills and other parts. By noon ...
— The Settlers in Canada • Frederick Marryat

... the boundary of British responsibilities. We made formal treaties with the two Dutch States, binding ourselves to interfere no more between them and the Natives, and to leave them either to establish themselves as a barrier between ourselves and the interior of Africa, or to sink, as was considered most likely, in an unequal struggle with warlike tribes, by ...
— A Century of Wrong • F. W. Reitz

... obstruction, barrier, impediment, obstacle, barricade, hindrance; shoal, sandbar, bank; ingot; lever, pole, rod; ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming

... William Rae in the meantime, whose prevailing claim I would never place my own in opposition to, even were it possible by a tour de force, such as L. points at, to set it aside. Meantime, I am building a barrier betwixt me and promotion. Any prospect of the kind is very distant and very uncertain. Come time, come, rath, ...
— The Journal of Sir Walter Scott - From the Original Manuscript at Abbotsford • Walter Scott

... a barrier that never failed to present itself to every prospect of hope and joy which the image of Constance coloured and called forth. Even for the object of his first love, could he desert one who had forsaken all for him, whose life was wrapt up in his affection? ...
— Godolphin, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton

... conglomerate, always a picturesque deposit, terminates some four or five miles higher up the valley, in a range of rough precipices, as bold and abrupt, though they front the interior of the country, as if they formed the terminal barrier of some exposed sea-coast. A few straggling pines crest their summits; and the noble woods of Brahan Castle, the ancient seat of the Earls of Seaforth, sweep downwards from their base to the margin ...
— My Schools and Schoolmasters - or The Story of my Education. • Hugh Miller

... myself to feel incensed against her for the unkind note she had written to me, I endeavoured to find excuses for her, and to palliate her fault all that I could. What troubled me most, was the almost insurmountable barrier that she had thrown between us. 'Do not attempt to answer this; do not attempt to see me;' were strong positions; and my pride rose up, and forbade me to break through them. But pride could not stand before the awakening of better feelings. 'I must see her. I will see her!' ...
— Words for the Wise • T. S. Arthur

... all the strength that remained to him, Dick dragged the unconscious man to the door. There was a bar to be flung aside and then Dick threw the barrier wide open. It was none too soon, for now the fire was swirling in all directions. Staggering beneath his burden the youth hurried into the open and then fell flat, ...
— The Rover Boys in Camp - or, The Rivals of Pine Island • Edward Stratemeyer

... he try to reduce inequalities of fortune, but allowed wealth to increase unchecked, and disregarded the influx of poor men into the city and the increase of poverty there, whereas he ought at the very outset, like Lykurgus, while men's fortunes were still tolerably equal, to have raised some barrier against the encroachments of wealth, and to have restrained the terrible evils which take their rise and origin in it. As for the division of the land among the citizens, in my opinion, Lykurgus ...
— Plutarch's Lives, Volume I (of 4) • Plutarch

... of this story is that semi-arid region east of the upper Columbia. It is cut off from the moisture laden winds of the Pacific by the lofty summits of the Cascade Mountains which form its western rim, and for many miles the great river crowds the barrier, winding, breaking in rapids, seeking a way through. To one approaching this rim from the dense forests of the westward slopes, the sage grown levels seem to stretch limitless into the far horizon, but ...
— The Rim of the Desert • Ada Woodruff Anderson

... evening for the season—an early day in the May of 1832—a man covered with dust, and who appeared to be borne down with fatigue, entered Paris through the Barrier d'Italie. Still, he traversed the Boulevard de l'Hopital with a firm step, being a fine well-made man, apparently about forty-eight years old. On arriving at the bridge of Austerlitz, he crossed to the toll-bar at the further extremity, and was ...
— Tales for Young and Old • Various

... this. Perhaps he merely felt that Keggs was a faithful old servant and, as such, entitled to thrust himself into the family affairs. Whatever his reasons, he now definitely lowered the barrier. ...
— A Damsel in Distress • Pelham Grenville Wodehouse

... the boy made his way slowly forward. More than once he paused to wait for the dog, time after time lifting him over a dangerous crevice or assisting him in climbing a particularly difficult barrier. ...
— The Blue Envelope • Roy J. Snell

... might "become a populous and powerful dominion, and a great accession of power either to England or France." Having this scheme much at heart, he drew up a sort of prospectus "for settling two western colonies in North America;" "barrier colonies" they were called by Governor Pownall, who was warm in the same idea, and sent a plan of his own, together with Franklin's, to the ...
— Benjamin Franklin • John Torrey Morse, Jr.

... She could have thrown herself from the balcony on to the spikes of the area railings, she could have dashed herself against yonder big plate-glass window looking towards the Green Park, like a bird which shatters his little life against the glass barrier which he mistakes for the open sky. She could have flung herself down on the floor and grovelled, and torn her hair—she could have done anything mad, wicked, desperate, in the ...
— Phantom Fortune, A Novel • M. E. Braddon

... down at her, touched, moved, his eyes very tender, but sad as though with a divination of the barrier his fortune ...
— The Bent Twig • Dorothy Canfield

... island just within the barrier reef, she was laid to rest, with the never-ending cry of ...
— John Corwell, Sailor And Miner; and, Poisonous Fish - 1901 • Louis Becke

... felt in early childhood. Not until it is old enough to understand the thoughtless remarks of well-meaning people, to catch the pitying tone, to feel the compassionate touch, does it realize that this lack of eyesight is to prove an almost insurmountable barrier to its ...
— Five Lectures on Blindness • Kate M. Foley

... formed a vast barrier between them and the United States, and their stern and awful defiles, their rugged valleys, and the great western plains watered by their rivers, remained almost a terra incognita to the American trapper. The difficulties experienced in 1808, by Mr. Henry of the Missouri Company, the first ...
— The Adventures of Captain Bonneville - Digested From His Journal • Washington Irving

... count the days which yet remained to him of happy obscurity; and as Time moves with inexorable footsteps, no matter how earnestly we would hurry or delay him, so at length there remained but a week's slender barrier between Everett and the fatal date. For while he would not acknowledge it even yet to himself, all sense of pleasurable anticipation had gradually given place to the most unmitigated ...
— The Argosy - Vol. 51, No. 3, March, 1891 • Various

... The trees of the boulevard, in four straight lines, lifted their frail skeletons in the fog. They heard, through the wide silence, the diminishing rattle of their cab, on its way back to the barrier, and the trotting of a horse ...
— A Mummer's Tale • Anatole France

... degree, and by a far surer sort of property, than to purchase a farm of many acres. You had perhaps two thousand a year before the transaction; perhaps you have two thousand five hundred after it. That represents your gain in the one case. But in the other, you have thrown down a barrier which concealed significance and beauty. The blind man has learned to see. The prisoner has opened up a window in his cell and beholds enchanting prospects; he will never again be a prisoner as he was; he can watch clouds and changing seasons, ships on the ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 16 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson

... Shall this quick blaze of empire sink to a glimmering and a twilight sway over some petty province, the decent patriarch of a pastoral horde? Is the Lord of Hosts so slight a God, that we must place a barrier to His sovereignty, and fix the boundaries of Omnipotence between the Jordan and the Lebanon? It is not thus written; and were it so, I'll pit my inspiration against the prescience of my ancestors. I also am a prophet, and Bagdad ...
— Alroy - The Prince Of The Captivity • Benjamin Disraeli

... zoologist had to work to keep up with his science. It was a singular fact that no sooner did some one raise an objection to the theories of derivative science, than some discovery was made which swept down the barrier. It was safe enough for an intelligent man, no matter what he knew of science, to accept as true what science put forth, and to set down as false whatever the church offered in opposition. Every theory and declaration of science had been opposed by the church. The ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, October 1887 - Volume 1, Number 9 • Various

... stripping off the hard and often acrid rind that guards and preserves them. They lay themselves out for dispersion by monkeys, toucans, and other relatively large and powerful fruit-eaters; and the rind is put there as a barrier against small thieves who would rob the sweet pulp, but be absolutely incapable of carrying away and dispersing the large and richly-stored seeds ...
— Science in Arcady • Grant Allen

... out these orders they could from this point have battered the bridge, and destroyed this barrier over the river. But the delay caused by the attack on the Fort St. Anthony was fatal, for at night Parma sent a strong body of soldiers and sappers in boats from Kalloo to the broken end of the dyke, and these before morning ...
— By Pike and Dyke: A Tale of the Rise of the Dutch Republic • G.A. Henty

... incline towards the winning post.... The King's horse seemed to be leading, another few seconds would have brought it or one of its rivals past the winning post, when ... a slender figure, a woman, darted with equal swiftness from the barrier to the middle of the course, leapt to the neck of the King's horse, and in an instant, the horse was down, kneeling on a crumpled woman, and the jockey was flying through the air to descend on hands and knees practically unhurt. The other ...
— Mrs. Warren's Daughter - A Story of the Woman's Movement • Sir Harry Johnston

... at one period to love of natural science, it was he who finally made that great treaty or compromise which for ages subjected science entirely to theology. He it was who reared the most enduring barrier against those who in that age and in succeeding ages laboured to open for science the path by its own methods toward ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White

... fault or his own that there was that barrier so strangely defined between them even now? He could feel it there in the room with them now. He wondered whether Robin felt ...
— The Wooden Horse • Hugh Walpole

... real lover!" cried she: "none but the shadow of a man can hope to approach the visionary maid. In vain has Marraton forced his way through the bushes and briars, in vain has he braved the apparition of the lion; there is yet a phantom barrier apparently impassable between him and his Yaratilda, for he is in the world of shadows. Now, mark me, Marraton: hurry not this delicate spirit, or perchance you frighten and lose her for ever; but have patience, and gradually and gracefully she ...
— Tales and Novels, Vol. III - Belinda • Maria Edgeworth

... form of censorship, propaganda in the strict sense of the word is impossible. In order to conduct a propaganda there must be some barrier between the public and the event. Access to the real environment must be limited, before anyone can create a pseudo-environment that he thinks wise or desirable. For while people who have direct access can misconceive what they ...
— Public Opinion • Walter Lippmann

... The impalpable adobe dust of the arena was being whirled into the air by the strong onset of the afternoon trade winds, which happily, however, helped also to dissipate a reek of garlic, and the acrid fumes of cheap tobacco rolled in cornhusk cigarettes. I was leaning over the second barrier, waiting for the meager and circuslike procession to enter with the keys of the bull pen, when my attention was attracted to a movement in the reserved gallery. A lady and gentleman of a quality that was evidently ...
— Selected Stories • Bret Harte

... hitherto formed the extreme outwork of the Syrian states; they were the only remaining barrier which separated the empires of Egypt and Assyria, and it was to the interest of the Pharaoh to purchase their alliance and increase their strength by every means in his power. Negotiations must have been ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 8 (of 12) • G. Maspero

... head to adorn the bald pate of my childhood's days with a red wig parted in the middle—now looked to me so strange and ridiculous that I wondered how I could ever have failed to observe the fact before. Even between the girls and ourselves there seemed to have sprung up an invisible barrier. They, too, began to have secrets among themselves, as well as to evince a desire to show off their ever-lengthening skirts even as we boys did our trousers and ankle-straps. As for Mimi, she appeared at luncheon, the first Sunday, in such a gorgeous dress and with ...
— Boyhood • Leo Tolstoy

... of the teachers of the colonies.[1] In 1773 Jonathan Boucher said that two thirds of the teachers of Maryland belonged to this class.[2] The contact of Negroes with these servants is significant. In the absence of rigid caste distinctions they associated with the slaves and the barrier between them was so inconsiderable that laws had to be passed to prevent the miscegenation of the races. The blacks acquired much useful knowledge from servant teachers and sometimes ...
— The Education Of The Negro Prior To 1861 • Carter Godwin Woodson

... the Carracks, which are three points of rock lying just within the main barrier of Menawhidden, where it breaks up towards its western end into a maze of islets. While I pulled, the Vicar knelt on the bottom-boards and made fast the stone to ...
— Old Fires and Profitable Ghosts • A. T. Quiller-Couch

... rear, rarely more than half a day's march behind—the lack of fresh horses kept him from getting nearer. Judah was on his flank, and had many of his men patrolling the Ohio. The governors had called for troops, and the country was rising on all sides. The Ohio was now the barrier between him and safety, and Morgan rode thither at top speed, striking the river on the 19th at Buffington Ford, above Pomeroy, in Ohio. For the past week, as Cunningham says, "every hill-side contained an enemy ...
— Historical Tales, Vol. 2 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris

... be asked whether the ordinary playgoer exactly appreciates the position of the last rows of the stalls. Probably he believes that there is a gulf fixed between the stalls and the pit, and does not know that there is merely a barrier. Now a barrier can be removed easily—a gulf cannot. When paying his half-guinea the simple visitor imagines that the difference between the price of his seat and that of a place in the pit is to a great extent ...
— Our Stage and Its Critics • "E.F.S." of "The Westminster Gazette"

... gradually weakens the power and breaks the yoke of profligacy and sin. No villain regards the Sabbath. No vicious family regards the Sabbath. No immoral community regards the Sabbath. The holy rest of this ever-memorable day is a barrier which is always broken down before men become giants in sin. Blackstone, in his Commentaries on the Laws of England, remarks that "a corruption of morals usually follows a profanation of the Sabbath." It is an observation of Lord Chief Justice Hale, that "of all ...
— McGuffey's Sixth Eclectic Reader • William Holmes McGuffey

... distance the hoof-beats of the servant's horse, approaching from the direction of Chippenham, broke the stillness of the moonlit country; but round the three men who sat motionless in their saddles, glaring at one another and awaiting the word for action, was a kind of barrier, a breathlessness born of expectation. At ...
— The Castle Inn • Stanley John Weyman

... position—would not take it despite his mother's desperate attempts to board the train of his ideas and by it be carried to scenes of her son's adventures. A dozen times she presented her ticket; as often Bob turned her back at the barrier. ...
— Once Aboard The Lugger • Arthur Stuart-Menteth Hutchinson

... was peace and room for reflection was something. It is all very well for cultivated persons with libraries to scoff at religious services. To the poor the cathedral or the church might be an immense benefit, if only for the reason that they present a barrier to worldly noise, and are a distinct invitation by architecture and symbolic decoration to meditation on something beyond the business which presses on them during the week. Poor people frequently cannot read for want of a place in which to read. Moreover, they ...
— Mark Rutherford's Deliverance • Mark Rutherford

... sprang up around the castle, which, as the years passed on, grew and grew until it formed an impenetrable barrier around the sleeping Palace. The old people of the country died, and their children grew up and died also, and their children, and their children, and the story of the sleeping Princess became a legend, handed ...
— Favorite Fairy Tales • Logan Marshall

... and Catholic, named Pamartin. Immediately on learning my arrival from the guides sent along with me by the king, he appointed me a lodging, which was sufficiently small, considering the size of the city. He here visited me, and sent me a sufficient supply of provisions. This city serves as a barrier or frontier garrison against the Tartars, and is celebrated for a great fair, to which the merchants bring rich furs, and other goods from Upper Russia. From hence the merchants travel in a large caravan to Caffa or Theodosia in the Crimea; but are often surprised and very ill ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. II • Robert Kerr

... pushing against a fierce wind, that appeared like an invisible iron barrier to intercept their way. Every now and then, Agatha could not help shivering and creeping closer to her husband; whenever she did so, he always turned round and wrapped her up with ...
— Agatha's Husband - A Novel • Dinah Maria Craik (AKA: Dinah Maria Mulock)

... of the room, by the door that opened upon the corridor, the flames were eating their way up through from the floor below. There was a red barrier there that shut off any hope of retreat by ...
— The Submarine Boys and the Spies - Dodging the Sharks of the Deep • Victor G. Durham

... to which Bunyan here alludes, were attended with atrocities at which nature shudders. In France, under a Bourbon and a Guise, the murder of hundreds of thousands of pious men and women, with helpless infants, threw down every barrier to the spread of infidelity, and a frightful reaction took place at the Revolution. In Ireland, under a Stuart and a Bourbon, still more frightful atrocities were perpetrated, and which were severely ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan

... Reyburn's visit the last barrier between Betty and Ma seemed to be broken down. As soon as she had closed the door she flew into the other room and flung her arms around Ma's neck, bursting into soft weeping on her motherly shoulder. Ma had done a rapid turning act when she heard her coming, for in truth she had been peeping ...
— Exit Betty • Grace Livingston Hill

... in the world to go to astray, but always difficult to return, Martin Green was astray, but how was he to get into the right path again? A barrier that seemed impassable was now lying across the way over which he had passed, a little while before, with lightest footsteps. Alone and unaided, he could not safely get back. The evil spirits that lure a man from ...
— After a Shadow, and Other Stories • T. S. Arthur

... work of these monsters, the toudaks. Whoever was wounded by them inevitably perished. The number of the victims became larger and larger. The prince ordered the men to make a rampart of their legs, but in their boundings the toudaks succeeded in passing this barrier. They came like the rain, and the slaughter was terrible. While this was happening a young ...
— Malayan Literature • Various Authors

... not a strong bond of spiritual communion between us? Nay, may not the intercourse we thus have with him be better and truer than any which we could have from actual contact,—from local acquaintance? Then, some icy barrier of etiquette might separate us,—some coldness of temperament upon his part,—some spleen or disease; we might be shocked by some temporary deformity; some little imperfection might betray itself. But here, in his book, which ...
— The Crown of Thorns - A Token for the Sorrowing • E. H. Chapin

... the spot, after his departure, because many trees had been spared at his intercession. His own grounds, or rather his ornamental garden, is separated from Mr. Ball's only by a wire fence, or some such barrier, and the gates have no fastening, so that the whole appears like one possession, and doubtless was so as regarded the poet's walks and enjoyments. We approached by paths so winding, that I hardly know how the house stands in relation ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 117, July, 1867. • Various

... illiterate, but I soon observed that a common ignorance does not prevent, but rather tends to establish artificial distinctions. Inferiority by a single degree in the social scale becomes not only a barrier to intercourse, but a sufficient reason for contempt. The squire and his lady spent their days in vain attempts to secure invitations to my Lord's at the Abbey and revenged themselves by patronising the captain, who in his turn nodded to the surveyor but would on no account permit intimacy. ...
— More Pages from a Journal • Mark Rutherford

... Samuel Marlowe had sat in the lane plotting with Webster, the valet. At almost the exact moment when Sam, sidling through the windows of the drawing-room, slid into the cupboard behind the piano, Mrs. Hignett was standing at the Customs barrier telling the officials that she ...
— Three Men and a Maid • P. G. Wodehouse

... armed with the latest beam weapons patrol the skies of Omega day and night. These ships are designed to obliterate anything that rises more than five hundred feet above the surface of the planet—an invincible barrier through which no prisoner can ever pass. Accommodate yourselves to these facts. They constitute the rules which must govern your lives. Think about what I've said. And now stand by ...
— The Status Civilization • Robert Sheckley

... the old proverb, "Pride goeth before destruction," in almost too severe a manner, but the tale is said to have a legendary foundation; and "The Minister's Black Veil" is an equally awful symbolism for that barrier between man and man, which we construct through suspicion and our lack of frankness in our dealings with one another. We all hide ourselves behind veils, and, as Emerson says, "Man crouches and blushes, absconds ...
— The Life and Genius of Nathaniel Hawthorne • Frank Preston Stearns

... cohorts sent forward by Caecina[249] having already arrived. One of the Pannonian cohorts had been captured at Cremona: a hundred cavalry and a thousand marines had been cut off between Placentia and Ticinum.[250] After this success the river and its steep banks were no barrier to the Vitellian troops: indeed the Batavians and other Germans found the Po a positive temptation. Crossing suddenly opposite Placentia, they captured a handful of scouts and created such a panic that the others in terror spread the false report that ...
— Tacitus: The Histories, Volumes I and II • Caius Cornelius Tacitus

... was evidently destined to reach. An armed band of youths was sent into Roman territory and all the territories between the city and the Fidenae was ravaged. Then, turning to the left, because on the right the Tiber was a barrier against them, they continued to ravage the country, to the great consternation of the peasantry: the sudden alarm, reaching the city from the country, was the first announcement of the invasion. Romulus aroused by this—for a war so near home could not brook delay—led ...
— Roman History, Books I-III • Titus Livius

... limitations is clear. No matter how finely organized he may be, how sympathetic, how tender, how loving, there is yet a barrier, never to be passed, that separates him from the most precious part of the woman's kingdom. All the wondrous world of motherhood, with its unspeakable delights, its holy of holies, remains forever unknown by him; he may gaze, but never enter. That halo ...
— Women and the Alphabet • Thomas Wentworth Higginson

... yet doleful at every lull; at last I made out it must be some dog howling at a distance. I was glad when it ceased. On sleeping, I continued in dreams the idea of a dark and gusty night. I continued also the wish to be with you, and experienced a strange, regretful consciousness of some barrier dividing us. During all my first sleep, I was following the windings of an unknown road; total obscurity environed me; rain pelted me; I was burdened with the charge of a little child: a very small creature, too young and feeble to walk, and which shivered in my cold arms, and wailed ...
— Jane Eyre - an Autobiography • Charlotte Bronte

... eons, its only answer was a basic command reaffirmed. Again it made contact, strove to carry out that order fruitlessly. Where it should have found easy passage, a clear channel to carry influence to the sleeper's brain, it found a jumble of impressions, interwoven until they made a protective barrier. ...
— Star Hunter • Andre Alice Norton

... gentle sun, the gentle shade, and the sweet air, which might have had less dust in it, breathing over grass as green in late January as in early June. I did not care so much for a mounted corporal who was jumping his horse over a two-foot barrier in the circular path rounding between the Villa Borghese and the Pincian Hill, though his admirers hung in rows on the rail beside it so thickly that I could hardly have got a place to see him if I had tried. But there was room enough to the fathers and mothers ...
— Roman Holidays and Others • W. D. Howells

... overawed the Moselle, and Strasburg which domineered over the Upper Rhine; what should be done with the places which he had recently won in open war, Philipsburg, Mons and Namur, Huy and Charleroy; what barrier should be given to the States General; on what terms Lorraine should be restored to its hereditary Dukes; these were assuredly not unimportant questions. But the all important question was whether England was to be, as she ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 4 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay

... March (1893) number of the 'Austral Light' is a pen picture by Mr. George Dunderdale of the famous Ninety-Mile Beach, the vast stretch of white and lonely sea-sands, which forms the sea-barrier of Gippsland."—'Review ...
— The Book of the Bush • George Dunderdale

... entreated, I urged her to accept vows that were no longer insincere, her pride became her punishment, as well as my own. In a moment of bitter and desperate feeling; she accepted the offers of another, and made the marriage bond a fatal and irrevocable barrier ...
— The Disowned, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton

... she was a creature of another world and of another age. No doubt his childishness made the illusion easy to him. With her there must surely have been moments of emotion when she realised that the barrier was artificial. It is impossible to say how soon the first of these ...
— The Tragic Bride • Francis Brett Young

... examinations, and taken his degree—couldn't have done so if the examiners had not been "jolly good" to him—he had heard that Lieut. . . .—was going down to the great ice barrier that bounds the South Pole, to investigate the sources of winds and tides, so he had offered himself as doctor to ...
— The Woman Thou Gavest Me - Being the Story of Mary O'Neill • Hall Caine

... station and Maitland Manor. For five minutes more he strode wearily over the side-path by the box hedge which set aside his ancestral acres from the public highway. At length, with an exclamation, he paused at the first opening in the living barrier: a wide entrance from which a blue-stone carriage drive wound away to the house, invisible in the waning light, situate in the shelter of the grove of trees ...
— The Brass Bowl • Louis Joseph Vance

... latitudes 19 deg. and 18 deg. south; and as Gama had the corrected chart of Covilham on board, in which Sofala was marked as the limit of his progress, and Sofala was two degrees to the south of where he then was, he must have known that he had now passed the barrier, and that the discovery was ascertained, his circumnavigation being now connected with the route of Covilham. This point of Gama's progress is also interesting and important in another respect, for we are here approaching a junction with the discoveries of the Arabians, the Egyptians, ...
— Robert Kerr's General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 18 • William Stevenson

... military combinations enabled William the Silent to overcome the most powerful and unscrupulous monarch of his age. The same hereditary audacity and fertility of genius placed the destiny of Europe in the hands of William's great-grandson, and enabled him to mould into an impregnable barrier the various elements of opposition to the overshadowing monarchy of Louis XIV. As the schemes of the Inquisition and the unparalleled tyranny of Philip, in one century, led to the establishment of the Republic of the United Provinces, so, ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley

... him. He looked at him frankly between the eyes—there was no hesitation or disguise; there had been no barrier or division; and Harry ...
— The Wooden Horse • Hugh Walpole

... there would be the most natural chance in the world for him to tell this woman what she was to him; at the next turn in the shore, by that rock, surely the moment would come. What is this airy nothing by which women protect themselves in such emergencies, by a question, by a tone, an invisible strong barrier that the most impetuous ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner

... ago, on the floor of the United States congress, decried as absurd settlement beyond the Missouri, ridiculed buying half a continent of worthless Northwest wilderness, thanked God for the Rocky mountain barrier to man's presumption, scouted at a possible wagon road, not to say railway, across the continent, lamented the unprofitable theft of California, and cursed the Alaska purchase as money worse than ...
— Some Cities and San Francisco and Resurgam • Hubert Howe Bancroft

... Baron help her to dismount. It was a look of receiving an idea both new, comical, and flattering, but by no means the look of a father who would resent the indignity of attentions to his daughter from a man whose rank formed an insuperable barrier to marriage. ...
— The Dove in the Eagle's Nest • Charlotte M. Yonge

... arrived, beyond which, if it were delayed a single minute, it would be too late! The voices of the Indians could now be heard, and the sounds of the tomahawks had ceased. They were evidently on the eve of breaking through the icy barrier, and rushing upon their victims. Boone, with a composed but livid brow, placed his hand upon the ponderous door, for the purpose of retreating within, and barring out the ruthless assailants. The rest instinctively imitated his motions, but at the same time their eyes ...
— Wild Western Scenes • John Beauchamp Jones

... Penguinity, and to fancy a genius so great that he does not at times yearn for the common walks and the common talks of his humbler fellow creatures. He may not always know how to achieve them, his own greatness may be a barrier he cannot cross, or his temperament and circumstances may hinder; but be sure that he feels the loss, though he may not himself, for all his genius, be quite aware of it. That Ruskin lived in moody isolation, while Shakespeare caroused in an alehouse, does not prove Ruskin the greater man or the ...
— Penguin Persons & Peppermints • Walter Prichard Eaton

... friendliness, partly due to his good looks, that caused his eyes to flash with new hope. Perhaps Grace cared a little after all. He had rarely seen her so kind since their carefree days of boy and girl friendship, when there had been no barrier of unrequited love ...
— Grace Harlowe's Problem • Jessie Graham Flower

... is here used to denote the Tarim basin, without rigidly excluding neighbouring countries such as the Oxus region and Badakshan. This basin is a depression surrounded on three sides by high mountains: only on the east is the barrier dividing it from China relatively low. The water of the whole area discharges through the many branched Tarim river into Lake Lobnor. This so-called lake is now merely a flooded morass and the basin is a desert with occasional ...
— Hinduism and Buddhism, An Historical Sketch, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Charles Eliot

... well-known organic product urea in his laboratory at Sacrow. The "exception which proves the rule" is something never heard of in the domain of logical science. Natural law knows no exceptions. So the synthesis of a single organic compound sufficed at a blow to break down the chemical barrier which the imagination of the fathers of the science had erected between animate and inanimate nature. Thenceforth the philosophical chemist would regard the plant and animal organisms as chemical laboratories in which conditions are peculiarly favorable ...
— A History of Science, Volume 4(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams

... observed that the timbers had been stripped of their bark and the knots smoothed down so as to afford no coigne of vantage to even a naked foot. Add, again, that the poles had been charred and sharpened at the top, and it will be understood that the barrier was a formidable one against any assault short ...
— The Doomsman • Van Tassel Sutphen

... followed the porter to the ticket entrance, surrendered their coupons, and passed into the customs. The porter had to go round another way. After a short skirmish they located their belongings, which unfortunately were far down toward the end of the barrier. They would have to be patient. Hillard held in his hands his return coupons to Genoa. Sometimes this helps at the frontier; and if one has a steamer ticket, better still. Inspectors then understand that one is to ...
— The Lure of the Mask • Harold MacGrath

... confidence. Yesterday he had found a woman almost in rags. Yesterday she was in trouble, and it had seemed the simplest thing in the world for him to take her in his arms and carry her to the home he knew to be hers. Now—now, all that confidence was gone. Now an indefinable barrier, but none the less real, had been raised between them. It was a barrier he felt powerless to break down. This beautiful girl, with her deep violet eyes and wonderful red-gold hair, clad in her trim costume of lawn and serge, seemed to him like a creature from an undreamed-of ...
— The Golden Woman - A Story of the Montana Hills • Ridgwell Cullum

... that for a long time before the barrier was high and strong, the tidal currents occasionally broke over the delta and supplied the lake with water. As the river meandered here and there over the flat delta, its channels must have undergone many changes at every ...
— The Western United States - A Geographical Reader • Harold Wellman Fairbanks

... grown more and more hopeful. He told her that he finished his work every day with a pleasant consciousness of having removed one more stone from the barrier which divided them. Then he drew images of what a fine figure they two would cut some day. People would turn their heads and say, 'What a prize he has won!' She was not to be sad about that wild runaway attempt of theirs (Elfride had repeatedly ...
— A Pair of Blue Eyes • Thomas Hardy

... his hair rise. Something in her look, something in her manner of making evident the indefinable barrier between them even while expressing her desire to accompany him, made such a disturbance in his brain that for the moment he no longer knew himself, nor her, nor the condition of things about him. If she saw the effect she produced, she gave no evidence of it. ...
— The Chief Legatee • Anna Katharine Green

... hardened baronet with any tendency to superstition. That he felt its influence, however, was a fact; for it may have been observed that there is a class of minds which, whilst they reject all moral control when any legitimate barrier stands between them and the gratification of their evil passions or designs, are yet susceptible of the effects which are said to proceed from such slight and trivial incidents as are supposed to be invested with a mysterious and significant influence upon the actions of individuals. ...
— The Black Baronet; or, The Chronicles Of Ballytrain - The Works of William Carleton, Volume One • William Carleton

... and gloom of night went the false Count, never to return; and with him went Madame Carthame's fond hope that her daughter would be a countess, which also was the last barrier in the way of Jaune d'Antimoine's love. Perceiving that the force of fate inexorably was pressing upon her, Madame Carthame—still in her night-cap—bestowed upon Rose and Jaune the maternal blessing in a manner that, even allowing for the nightcap, ...
— Short Story Classics (American) Vol. 2 • Various

... wide. The second posta on the road to Buenos Ayres stands on its banks, a little above there is a ford for horses, where the water does not reach to the horses' belly; but from that point, in its course to the sea, it is quite impassable, and hence makes a most useful barrier against ...
— The Voyage of the Beagle • Charles Darwin

... the invention, or at least prior to the general introduction, of the ligature and the tourniquet, the great barrier to all improvement in operating was the impossibility of checking haemorrhage during an operation, and after its conclusion. Many surgeons would not amputate at all, others only through gangrenous parts; others more bold, only at the confines of parts in which ...
— A Manual of the Operations of Surgery - For the Use of Senior Students, House Surgeons, and Junior Practitioners • Joseph Bell

... glance, while the first grew tender with olden memories, and the last had the smile of friendship; in the closeness of the remembrances that seemed to draw and bind them together; in the swift sense that in an instant, by the utterance of a name, the ex-barrier of caste which had been between them had fallen ...
— Under Two Flags • Ouida [Louise de la Ramee]

... lately been the fashion to regard the language of the Priestly Code as an insuperable barrier to the destructive efforts of tendency criticism. But it is unfortunate that this veto of language is left as destitute of detailed proof, by Delitzsch, Riehm, and Dillmann, as the veto of critical analysis by Schrader; and we cannot be called upon to show proof ...
— Prolegomena to the History of Israel • Julius Wellhausen

... something that filled her companion with a curious kind of awe. He held her closely and comfortingly, but for some reason he could not speak to her, could not even attempt to seek the cause of her trouble. As his sister had done before him, though almost unconsciously, he sensed a barrier ...
— Charles Rex • Ethel M. Dell

... ship. The reader is aware that he had never been a pledged abstainer at any time. Even when most overwhelmed with shame, and most anxious to regain the place he had lost in Mary Oliphant's esteem and affection, he would not take the one step which might have interposed a barrier between himself and those temptations which he had not power to resist, when they drew upon him with a severe or sudden strain. He thought that he was only asserting a manly independence when he refused to be pledged, whereas he was simply just allowing Satan to cheat him ...
— Frank Oldfield - Lost and Found • T.P. Wilson

... and pushing forward the stragglers at the same time that they were opposing the advance of the enemy. The troopers had obstructed the street with a barricade of carts and furniture. Standing behind this crude barrier, they were watching the white strip of roadway which ran between the two hills covered with trees. Occasionally there sounded stray shots like the snapping of cords. "Ours," said the troopers. These were the last detachments of sharpshooters ...
— The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse • Vicente Blasco Ibanez

... being made, Joe the hunter climbed the mountain wall on the east side of the fiord in pursuit of wild goats, while Mr. Young and I went to the glacier. We found that it is separated from the waters of the inlet by a tide-washed moraine, and extends, an abrupt barrier, all the way across from wall to wall of the inlet, a distance of about three miles. But our most interesting discovery was that it had recently advanced, though again slightly receding. A portion of the terminal ...
— Stickeen • John Muir

... much lower level than the surface of the lakes. These lakes, containing an area of some seventy-three thousand square miles, are therefore an immense reservoir held high over the level of the great Mississippi valley, from which they are separated by a barrier ...
— The Ontario Readers: Fourth Book • Various

... through the lace-work of steel, and knew every hope was gone. She must calm herself and wait. But she could not refrain from watching it a moment, with hungry eyes, pressed like a child's against the barrier. It was carrying George home, and she was left behind! She felt like a deserted waif, and looked it. Somebody, watching the little pantomime from behind a baggage truck not far away, read in the gaze almost more than he ...
— Joyce's Investments - A Story for Girls • Fannie E. Newberry

... respectable nations have always been found, where at least one part of the frontier has been washed by the sea. This barrier, perhaps the strongest of all in the times of ignorance, does not, however, even then supersede the cares of a national defence; and in the advanced state of arts, gives the greatest scope and ...
— An Essay on the History of Civil Society, Eighth Edition • Adam Ferguson, L.L.D.

... southward across the Ohio every year to hunt and to make salt at the licks. Most of the temporary camps or villages in Kentucky and West Virginia were built by the Shawnee and Delaware. The Shawnee and Delaware were the principal barrier to the settlement of Kentucky and West Virginia for a period of 20 years, while in all that time neither the Cherokee nor the Iroquois offered any resistance or checked the opposition of ...
— Indian Linguistic Families Of America, North Of Mexico • John Wesley Powell

... at once, alone, and on foot. He was very much agitated. He had done suddenly and unawares the thing of all others he had determined never to do; his resolutions had been broken down and carried away as an ineffectual barrier is swept to the sea by the floods of spring. His heart had spoken in spite of him, and in speaking had silenced every prompting of reason. He blamed himself bitterly, as he strode out across the deserted bridge of Sant' Angelo and into the ...
— Saracinesca • F. Marion Crawford

... little barrier of age instinctively, hastily snatching at the first defensive object she could find. And he sat down as she bade him, but now that he had her permission said nothing,—nothing with his tongue, but with his clasped hands and with his eyes so much, that she covered ...
— A Country Gentleman and his Family • Mrs. (Margaret) Oliphant

... on the way out; we talked like automatons rather than like human, thinking beings. Suffering, hunger, and drugs had dulled our senses. Only the will to escape somehow, the instinct of self-preservation, was fully awake in us. A sweep of the machete to cut a barrier bushrope or climber, one foot placed before the other, meant that much nearer to home and safety. Such was now the simple operation of our stupefied and tired brains, brains that could not hold one complex thought to its ...
— In The Amazon Jungle - Adventures In Remote Parts Of The Upper Amazon River, Including A - Sojourn Among Cannibal Indians • Algot Lange

... United States should conclude a peace with the Indian allies of Great Britain, and that a species of neutral belt of Indian territory should be established between the dominions of the United States and Great Britain, so that these dominions should be nowhere conterminous, upon which belt or barrier neither power should be permitted to encroach even by purchase, and the boundaries of which should be settled in this treaty. 2. That the United States should keep no naval force upon the Great Lakes, and should ...
— John Quincy Adams - American Statesmen Series • John. T. Morse

... never to decide on such subjects, and to attach to them no importance; in a word, we must trace a line of distinction between those that are capable of verification, and those that are not; and separate by an inviolable barrier the world of fantastical beings from the world of realities; that is to say, all civil effect must be taken away from theological and ...
— The Ruins • C. F. [Constantin Francois de] Volney

... been so for three years. During that time my wife and I have loved each other as fondly and lived as happily as any two that ever were joined. We have not had a difference, not one, in thought or word or deed. And now, since last Monday, there has suddenly sprung up a barrier between us, and I find that there is something in her life and in her thought of which I know as little as if she were the woman who brushes by me in the street. We are estranged, and I ...
— Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes • Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

... these Gates of Heaven; and shall here only add, that Homer gives us the same Idea of the latter, as opening of themselves; tho he afterwards takes off from it, by telling us, that the Hours first of all removed those prodigious Heaps of Clouds which lay as a Barrier ...
— The Spectator, Volume 2. • Addison and Steele

... there tte—tte, she smiled across the table at me with such perfect friendliness, it seemed as though a magic barrier separated our two selves from all the chattering, rustling crowd around us. When she spoke, a little quiver of feeling blended adorably with the low, sweet tones of her voice. We talked, indeed, of trifles, but with just that charming hint of intimacy which men friends have who may have known ...
— Not George Washington - An Autobiographical Novel • P. G. Wodehouse

... by the way which he dedicated for us, a new and living way, through the veil, that is to say, his flesh; and having a great priest over the house of God; let us draw near with a true heart in fulness of faith." It is because of the death of Christ, which removed the barrier that stood between God and us so that He could not consistently hear and answer our prayers, that He can now hear and answer the petitions of ...
— The Great Doctrines of the Bible • Rev. William Evans

... backward violently and the very world was rocked to its core by the concussion, but that iron-driven wall held. The massive nets swayed and gave back, and tidal waves hurled their mountainously destructive masses through the Third City, but the mighty barrier remained intact. And Nerado, still attacking two of the powerful tanks with his every weapon, was still dodging those flashing balls charged with the quintessence of destruction. The fishes could ...
— Triplanetary • Edward Elmer Smith

... emptying themselves into the Caribbean Sea, and others into the Lakes of Nicaragua and Managua. Further south rises the volcano of Cartago. Here the Cordilleras resume their general character of a vast mountain barrier, but once more sink down into low ridges as the chain passes through the ...
— The Western World - Picturesque Sketches of Nature and Natural History in North - and South America • W.H.G. Kingston

... adding s to the singular, or, when euphony requires it, es; as, tree, trees; sun, suns; dish, dishes; box, boxes. Some retain the old plural form; as, ox, oxen; child, children; chick, chicken; kit, kitten. But habit has burst the barrier of old rules, and we now talk of chicks and chickens, kits and kittens. Oxen alone stands as a monument raised to the memory ...
— Lectures on Language - As Particularly Connected with English Grammar. • William S. Balch



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