bye-paths

Updated: May 18, 2025

The straight lines became the walls and turrets of one of those two-or three-hundred-year-old German country houses, half castle, half mansion, which every explorer of the bye-paths of the Fatherland has seen and admired so often.

George Chetwynd Griffith - The Mummy and Miss Nitocris: A Phantasy of the Fourth Dimension

Once more we find the notes of uncertainty, of straying into paths, not always quite blind-alleys, but bye-paths certainly, the presence of isolated burst and flash, of effort unsuccessful or unequal as a whole. But here we find, what in the earlier chapter or section we do not find, distinct imitativeness and positive school-following.

George Saintsbury - A History of Nineteenth Century Literature (1780-1895)

He would go back to Oxford, attend steadily to his books, put aside all distractions, avoid bye-paths, and do his best to acquit himself well in the schools. The Church of England as it was, its Articles, bishops, preachers, professors, had sufficed for much better persons than he was; they were good enough for him.

John Henry Newman - Loss and Gain: The Story of a Convert