"Vortex" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... exaggerated contempt for, and an extreme susceptibility to, the charm of women which has cried havoc and let loose the dogs of strife upon so many able men. In The Whirlpool of 1897, in which he shows us a number of human floats spinning round the vortex of social London,[21] Gissing brings a melodramatic plot of a kind disused since the days of Demos to bear upon the exhausting lives and illusive pleasures of the rich and cultured middle class. There is some admirable writing in the book, and symptoms of a change of tone (the ...
— The House of Cobwebs and Other Stories • George Gissing
... an attack, and was prepared to meet it. Pistols and dirks were in great demand, and formed a part of the personal habiliments of all those conspicuous for their opposition to the Convention measure. Even the gentler sex came within the vortex of this whirlwind of passion; and many were the angry disputations of those whose cares and interests were usually ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 3, 1918 • Various
... disaster. It is impossible to think deaths and mutilations in terms of millions. Even those who stand in the immediate presence of it and suffer most terribly become calloused to it: much more must we who stood so long apart and have not yet felt the brunt of it. Even our entrance into the whirling vortex, drawing ever nearer our shores, has failed to waken us to a realizing sense of it. Nevertheless, these years through which we are now living are the most important in the entire history of the world. It is probable that the future will look back upon them as the years determining ...
— The Soul of Democracy - The Philosophy Of The World War In Relation To Human Liberty • Edward Howard Griggs
... seventeenth century had vulgarized the motive, Correggio's bold attempt to paint heaven in flight from earth—earth left behind in the persons of the apostles standing round the empty tomb, heaven soaring upward with a spiral vortex into the abyss of light above—had an originality which set at naught all criticism. There is such ecstasy of jubilation, such rapturous rapidity of flight, that we who strain our eyes from below feel we are in the darkness of the grave ...
— New Italian sketches • John Addington Symonds
... chancellor. Of the progress made by Gustavus in his studies we know nothing. It may well be surmised, however, that the politics of his day engrossed a large share of his attention. Upsala was not then the peaceful town that it now is, and the chancellor of the University was in the very vortex of the struggle. If Gustavus was still connected with the University in 1512, we may suppose with reason that he took his part in the great demonstration which resulted in the election of ...
— The Swedish Revolution Under Gustavus Vasa • Paul Barron Watson
... to let them tell you about home matters, and wait until my strength returned. But you must not doubt where every waking memory of mine has centred; my thoughts have circled always around that central vortex from which, since I first laid eyes on you, they have ...
— Ailsa Paige • Robert W. Chambers
... observed on the beach, and Capt. Owen determined on paying them a visit, ordering a boat to be lowered for the purpose. Unfortunately, however, it being necessary, while in the act of lowering, to make a few retrograde strokes of the paddle, the boat was drawn into the vortex on the right hand, and nearly cut in two. By this accident, one of the seamen who were in it, was thrown within the paddle, but, miraculously, taken out unhurt; another made his escape on board the vessel; while two more were set adrift in the sea; they ...
— A Voyage Round the World, Vol. I (of ?) • James Holman
... blister well conceived, for this husband neither neglected to rear his family nor to invite to his house neighbors who were tiresome, stupid or old; and if he spent the winter in Paris, he flung his wife into the vortex of balls and races, so that she had not a minute to give to lovers, who are usually the fruit of ...
— The Physiology of Marriage, Part II. • Honore de Balzac
... the glorious treasures as well as on the dissolute filth of the intellectual development of Hellas. But it was an impulse still more profound and deep-rooted, which carried the Romans irresistibly into the Hellenic vortex. Hellenic civilization still doubtless called itself by that name, but it was Hellenic no longer; it was, in fact, humanistic and cosmopolitan. It had solved the problem of moulding a mass of different nations ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... they got notice to leave. The same fate met them in Charleston, to which city they removed. Her antecedents seemed to follow her wherever she went, like haunting spirits seeking her betrayal. She was homeless; and without a home there was nothing open to her but that vortex of licentiousness the world seemed pointing her to. Back she went to the house in Mercer street-was glad to get back; was at least free from the finger of scorn. Henceforward she associated with various friends, who sought ...
— Justice in the By-Ways - A Tale of Life • F. Colburn Adams
... more the thin ascetic face was dyed with an unbecoming flush. "Oh!" And then the barriers fell with a crash and she hurried on, the words tumbling over one another, as her memory, its inhibitions shattered, swept back into the dark vortex of her secret past. "Oh, Mary! You don't know! You don't know! You, who've had all the men you ever wanted. Who, they say, have a young man now. The nights of horror I've passed. I've never slept a wink the nights our girls married. I could have ...
— Black Oxen • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... scrabbled round, in choosing between cream and lemon, to hide the fact that they had not seen it themselves. She was therefore exactly the person to select a little library of the latest reading for an old gentleman who was so behind the times as her grandfather; but before she plunged into the mad vortex of new publications she thought she would delicately find out his preferences, or if he had none, would try to inspire him with a curiosity concerning these or those ...
— Imaginary Interviews • W. D. Howells
... capture of than a private defendant, such mingled streams of feelings broke loose again within me, that everything was for the first few minutes swept away before them, and I was going round and round in a vortex. I got out of it. I struggled, and got out of it. If it was the last word I had to speak, against that vortex with my utmost powers I strove, and out of it I came. I argued that if I had been rude, ...
— Little Dorrit • Charles Dickens
... paid, his three sureties of five hundred pounds each found, his name approved by the Committee, and all other formalities complied with, he found himself whirling round, an insignificant unit, in the vortex of the money market of the world. There, under the guidance of his father's friend, he was instructed in the mysteries of bulling and of bearing, in the strange usages of 'Change in the intricacies of carrying over and of transferring. He learned to know where to place his clients' ...
— Beyond the City • Arthur Conan Doyle
... her eyes on the ground, the withered leaves caught up every now and then in a wild dance by the frolicsome wind, she was suddenly aware of something among them which she could not identify, whirling in the aerial vortex about her feet. Scarcely caring what it was, she yet, all but mechanically, looked at it a little closer, lost it from sight, caught it again, as a fresh blast sent it once more gyrating about her feet, and now regarded it more steadfastly. Even then it looked like nothing but another withered leaf, ...
— Far Above Rubies • George MacDonald
... his bag. Miss Heredith and Phil were waiting to bid farewell to him. As Miss Heredith said good-bye, she looked into his face with the perplexed expression of a simple soul seeking reassurance from a stronger mind in the deep vortex of extraordinary events into which she had been plunged beyond her depth. Phil looked white and ill, and the hand which he gave into the detective's cool firm grasp was hot and feverish. While his aunt murmured ...
— The Hand in the Dark • Arthur J. Rees
... sad to think a doctrine dear to so many saintly men, maintained with an erudition so vast and exemplified by sacrifices so great, should have disappeared in the vortex of present-day conflict. It may some day reappear in Convocation. Kettlewell, who was a precise writer and accurate thinker, defined sovereignty as supremacy. 'Kings,' he said, 'can be no longer sovereigns, ...
— In the Name of the Bodleian and Other Essays • Augustine Birrell
... he finds are apparently gentlemen, and he is induced to think that he has been hitherto misled and deceived in regard to such men. He then cultivates their acquaintance, and finally, through his own depravity, he becomes worse and worse, until he is at last swallowed up in the vortex of degradation. This is the result of employing dishonourable measures to prevent him from visiting such places, or to carry ...
— Secret Band of Brothers • Jonathan Harrington Green
... kind, of which there are one or two instances in South America. It flowed down the valley between high rocks, and, a few hundred yards below the pool, it ran straight against the face of a precipice and there terminated to all appearance; but a gurgling vortex in the deep water at the base of the cliff, and the disappearance of everything that entered it, showed that the stream found a subterranean passage. There was no sign of its reappearance, however, in all the country round. ...
— Martin Rattler • Robert Michael Ballantyne
... snow was frightful, and I thought I had heard the reverberations of a disquieting wail as my companions vanished; but my power to linger was slight. As if beckoned by those who had gone before, I half-floated between the titanic snowdrifts, quivering and afraid, into the sightless vortex of ...
— Writings in the United Amateur, 1915-1922 • Howard Phillips Lovecraft
... own mind, however, was not comprehended in the vortex; where Kepler erred it was in the ...
— Hints towards the formation of a more comprehensive theory of life. • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... undertakes to surround him with startling and weird events. As a man is leaving his front door, an excited sweep approaches him and assures him of a plot against his life; he gets into a cab, and is driven to an opium den; he receives a mysterious telegram or a dramatic visit, and is immediately in a vortex of incidents. A very picturesque and moving story is first written by one of the staff of distinguished novelists who are at present hard at work in the adjoining room. Yours, Major Brown (designed by our Mr Grigsby), I consider ...
— The Club of Queer Trades • G. K. Chesterton
... crisis of Benjamin's life, he appeared to be on the highway to ruin. There is scarcely one similar case in ten, where the runaway escapes the vortex of degradation. Benjamin would have been no exception, but for his early religious training and ...
— From Boyhood to Manhood • William M. Thayer
... except in such an age as that of charles the Second, when the laws were overborne by perfidy, violence, and rapacity; or in an age when bankers become gamesters, instead of merchant-adventurers; when they affect to live like princes, and are, with their miserable creditors, drawn into the prevailing vortex of luxury. Backwell carried on his business in the same shop which was afterwards occupied by Child. He, to avoid a prison, retired into Holland, where he died. His body was brought for sepulture to Tyringham church, near Newport Pagnel." Frequent mention of the Alderman ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole Volume 3 • Horace Walpole
... belied her religious habit, and as she looked at me in eager inquiry, and yet with modest demeanour, I felt that I had already fallen into a veritable vortex ...
— The Count's Chauffeur • William Le Queux
... answered by the elevation of Mr. Muzzy six feet in the air. From this altitude he was let down into a vortex of strong-handed fellows, who whirled him about horribly, and then transmitted him to a more equable current, which pitched him forward at a steady rate towards the door. Sometimes he landed among a party of quiet elderly gentlemen over their wine, and the ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 5, No. 3, March, 1852 • Various
... ever so warily. You do not know that your holy image, rising up before me, shining upon the path I trod, and beckoning me into the right road when I swerved aside, has alone saved me from falling into that vortex of follies and vices by which men are daily swallowed up, and from which they emerge sullied and debased. You do not know that, while I am here beside you, listening to the sound of your voice, holding your hand, gazing upon your face, I feel like ...
— Fairy Fingers - A Novel • Anna Cora Mowatt Ritchie
... though her brain ached literally with an acute physical pain. What was she to do? What could she do? She must do something! There must be some way to save herself from being drawn into the very center of this vortex toward which she was being swept closer with every second that passed. Those two old faces, haggard in their despair and misery, rose before her again. She felt her heart sink. She had counted, only a few moments before, on getting their money back for them—through the police. The police! How ...
— The White Moll • Frank L. Packard
... strange experience to be ushered into the very vortex of a soldier's life, although my experience of military camp life was not a new one; in far back years happy service in a kilted regiment had left a mark which ...
— With The Immortal Seventh Division • E. J. Kennedy and the Lord Bishop of Winchester
... Irish members felt that they were coming to the end of their resources. They were about to call a halt, and so the Union became a necessary ingredient of Pitt's foreign policy. By it Ireland was swept into the vortex of his anti-French hysteria, and of what Mr Hartley Withers so properly styles his "reckless finance." In sixteen years she was brought to the edge of bankruptcy. Between 1801 and 1817 her funded ...
— The Open Secret of Ireland • T. M. Kettle
... whole time was taken up with supper parties, dinner engagements, breakfasts, and evening parties; he was swept away by an irresistible current into a vortex of dissipation and easy work. He no longer thought of the future. The power of calculation amid the complications of life is the sign of a strong will which poets, weaklings, and men who live a purely intellectual ...
— A Distinguished Provincial at Paris • Honore de Balzac
... festival: a vast procession of a mixed composition, religious and military, was streaming towards the cathedral; and by a moral compulsion, rather than by any physical pressure of the crowd, I was swept along into the general vortex. Suddenly an angle of the road brought me into such a position with respect to all who were in advance of my station, that I could see the whole vast line bent into the form of a crescent, and with its head entering ...
— Walladmor: - And Now Freely Translated from the German into English. - In Two Volumes. Vol. I. • Thomas De Quincey
... again the allotted time of Philip Oswald's stay; but when that had expired, he was persuaded to delay his departure for yet another week. He had been drawn, by accompanying his mother in her farewell visits, once more within the vortex of society, and his manly independence and energy, his knowledge of what was to his companions a new world, and his spirit-stirring descriptions of its varied beauty and inexhaustible fertility, made ...
— Evenings at Donaldson Manor - Or, The Christmas Guest • Maria J. McIntosh
... I can't do," said Howard, with a whimsical smile. "I am drawn, into the vortex; I am dragged at the chariot wheels of that wonderful father of yours. I am the victim of a peculiar kind of fascination which is as irresistible as the mesmeric influence or hypnotism. I feel towards Sir Stephen as I should ...
— At Love's Cost • Charles Garvice
... wildest haunts of that city of dissipation, and he was speedily engulphed in the vortex of vice and folly. If he had been a rich man, this life might have gone on for ever; but without money a man counts for very little in such a circle as that wherein Reginald alone could find delight, and to the inhabitants of that ...
— Run to Earth - A Novel • M. E. Braddon
... form of Janette Harford, invisible in the darkness and spray, was torn from my grasp by the cruel vortex of the sinking ship, and I fainted in the cordage of the floating mast to which I had ...
— Can Such Things Be? • Ambrose Bierce
... glimpse of Morgan during that mysterious midnight ride from the Canandaigua jail over the Rochester road, and on to the end in the magazine of the old fort at Lewiston. One cannot spend twenty-four hours in this country without being drawn into the vortex of this absorbing mystery; it hangs over the entire section, lingers along the road-sides, finds outward sign and habitation in old buildings, monuments, and ruins; it echoes from the past in musty books, papers, and pamphlets; it once was politics, now is history; the years ...
— Two Thousand Miles On An Automobile • Arthur Jerome Eddy
... parts took to changing, we should split them up in their turn. We should thus descend to the molecules of which the fragments are made, to the atoms that make up the molecules, to the corpuscles that generate the atoms, to the "imponderable" within which the corpuscle is perhaps a mere vortex. In short, we should push the division or analysis as far as necessary. But we should stop ...
— Creative Evolution • Henri Bergson
... successful in its primary purpose of facilitating the consolidation of the Confederation, it has not otherwise inspired confidence as a practical administrative device. Not only has constant judicial interference dislocated scientific legislation, but casting the judiciary into the vortex of civil faction has degraded it in the popular esteem. In fine, from the outset, the American bench, because it deals with the most fiercely contested of political issues, has been an instrument necessary to political success. Consequently, political parties have striven to control it, and therefore ...
— The Theory of Social Revolutions • Brooks Adams
... yet heard the hour of her conversion strike, continued to whirl round the vortex of the world with a greedy, jealous, and hateful ardor, for she saw that the last years of her ...
— The Wandering Jew, Complete • Eugene Sue
... administration. It was the basis of a system by which the intercourse with foreign nations was regulated, and which was rigidly adhered to. In fact, it was the only step that could have saved the United States from being drawn into the vortex of European wars, which raged with so much violence for a long time afterward. Its wisdom and its good effects are now so obvious, on a calm review of past events, that one is astonished at the opposition it met with, and the strifes it enkindled, ...
— Life And Times Of Washington, Volume 2 • John Frederick Schroeder and Benson John Lossing
... the fact that only by gradual absorption into infinity can the Part become acquainted with the Whole, and that that which is now something can only feel, know, and enjoy EVERYTHING when lost in Absolute Totality in the vortex of that Unalterable Circle wherein our Knowledge becomes Ignorance, and the Everything itself is identified ...
— Five Years Of Theosophy • Various
... bolt was shaken, and Lucifer and his chief counsellors were struck to the vortex of extremest Hell; and oh, how horrible it was to see the throat of Unknown opening to receive them! "Well," said the angel "we will now return; but you have not yet seen any thing in comparison with the whole, which is within ...
— The Sleeping Bard - or, Visions of the World, Death, and Hell • Ellis Wynne
... sight, it appears that there are in this desire body a number of whirling vortices. We have already explained that it is a characteristic of desire stuff to be in constant motion, and from the main vortex in the region of the liver there is a constant outwelling flow which radiates towards the periphery of this egg-shaped body and returns to the center through a number of other vortices. The desire body exhibits all the colors and shades which we ...
— The Rosicrucian Mysteries • Max Heindel
... said; "and the secret died with the man who discovered it—in the great explosion at the Vortex Works in 1917. You recall it? The T.N.T. factory? It shook all London, and fragments were cast into ...
— Tales of Chinatown • Sax Rohmer
... powers of reaction; all the powers of liberty and progress were arrayed on the other side. The half-barbarous races that lay between civilized Europe and Turkey mingled in the conflict: Turkey herself was drawn diplomatically into the vortex. In the mines of Mexico and Peru the Indian toiled to furnish both the Austrian and Spanish hosts. The Treaty of Westphalia, which concluded the struggle, long remained the Public Law ...
— Lectures and Essays • Goldwin Smith
... Globstock, Pondersby, Marks, old Wilovich, all dead; Bullhammer, the Jam-wagon, Mosher, the Winklesteins, plunged in the vortex of the gold-born city; and lastly, looming over all, dark and ominous, the handsome, bold, sinister face of Locasto. Well, maybe I would never see ...
— The Trail of '98 - A Northland Romance • Robert W. Service
... fast becoming the vortex of the conspiracy that was rushing to its inevitable conclusion. Event followed event in rapid succession, straws indicating the main current of the flood tide of labor-hatred. The Commercial Club was seething with intrigue like the court of old France under Catherine de ...
— The Centralia Conspiracy • Ralph Chaplin
... representing more than twenty nations, already dragged into the widening vortex of the present war; with more than five millions of the finest youth of Europe already slaughtered on the battlefield, with twenty millions who have already been wounded, nearly forty millions under arms, and whole nations organized for war and the manufacture of munitions; with the ...
— With Our Soldiers in France • Sherwood Eddy
... exclaimed Lila in an overwhelmingly effusive manner, "I am so dreadfully sorry, but I regret to say that I am already engaged for every number. Good-bye!" She slid her hand about her partner's waist and propelled her swiftly into the concealing vortex of waltzers. ...
— Beatrice Leigh at College - A Story for Girls • Julia Augusta Schwartz
... from the irrevocable past was not altogether confined to herself. It is one evil attached to chronic and domestic oppression, that it draws into its vortex, as unwilling, or even as loathing, cooperators, others who either see but partially the wrong they are abetting, or, in cases where they do see it, are unable to make head against it, through the inertia of their own nature, or through the coercion of circumstances. Too clearly, by the restless ...
— Autobiographic Sketches • Thomas de Quincey
... epistles—a fig for other correspondents, with their nonsensical apologies for "knowing nought about it"—you send me a delightful budget. I am here in a perpetual vortex of dissipation (very pleasant for all that), and, strange to tell, I get thinner, being now below eleven stone considerably. Stay in town a month, perhaps six weeks, trip into Essex, and then, as a favour, ...
— The Works Of Lord Byron, Letters and Journals, Vol. 1 • Lord Byron, Edited by Rowland E. Prothero
... fix, for it was clear that the steamer was sinking fast. Another moment, and down she would go, dragging the unfortunate old man with her and Ken too. He knew well enough that, as she sank, she was bound to pull him also down into the vortex, and that from this great eddy he would never have the strength to rise. His one chance for life was to swim away as hard ...
— On Land And Sea At The Dardanelles • Thomas Charles Bridges
... the world. From henceforth my secret influence is brought to its close. I will no longer be the unseen original of the grand movements of the figures that fill the political stage. I will stand aloof from the giddy herd. I will not stray from my little vortex. I will look down upon the transactions of courts and ministers, like an etherial being from a superior element. There I shall hope to see your lordship outstrip your contemporaries, and tower above the pigmies of the day. To repeat ...
— Four Early Pamphlets • William Godwin
... fierce anger succeeded his day dream. The sun shone around him, the fields were fair to see. Life ought to be like the sun and the fields—simple and good and beautiful. Instead it was difficult and cruel. He was being dragged into a vortex of hate and battle. He loathed the very thought of it. He wanted peace and love. And yet, what escape was there for him? Did he even want to escape if he could? The wrong and tyranny he was to resist were real, insistent, horrible. He would be less than a man, unworthy of ...
— The Northern Iron - 1907 • George A. Birmingham
... experience. And so, unresisting, I was borne along in the swift current of humanity that was swept down the street, like the water in a mill-race, to turn the wheels of workshop and factory. Before Springer's a great arm of this human mill-stream eddied inward, to be lost in another moment in the vortex of the wide black doors, whence issued muffled sounds of the pandemonium within. At the last moment I hesitated, obsessed once more with the indefinable horror of it all. Again there was the strong impulse to run away—far, far away from Springer's and from Thompson Street, when suddenly ...
— The Long Day - The Story of a New York Working Girl As Told by Herself • Dorothy Richardson
... moment I became the unwilling vortex of that mob of anxious men and women—I who by, my own confession knew Kagig, I who had sent Kagig a message, I who five minutes ago was on the verge of being hanged in the greasy noose that still swung above ...
— The Eye of Zeitoon • Talbot Mundy
... hazard any expedition of consequence against Great Britain, or any part of her dominions, while the ocean was covered with such powerful navies belonging to that nation; and that if one-third part of the money, annually engulphed in the German vortex, had been employed in augmenting the naval forces of England, and those forces properly exerted, not a single cruiser would have been able to stir from the harbours of France; all her colonies in the West Indies would have fallen an easy ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.II. - From William and Mary to George II. • Tobias Smollett
... confidence familiar to all who cross the open seas. The first period of a gale is terrifying. Later there comes an indifference born of supreme trust in the ship. The steady onward thrust of the engines—the unwavering path across the raging vortex of tumbling gray waters—the orderly way in which the members of the crew follow their duties—these are quietly persistent factors in the gradual soothing of the nerves. Many a timid passenger, after lying awake through a night of terror, ...
— The Captain of the Kansas • Louis Tracy
... smiled as Henry entered. "Here I am in a vortex of crime and misrule," he said, "and I should have been out of my wits if it had not been for that wine. There's another glass over there, Henry; get it and ...
— The Shoulders of Atlas - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... fiery furnace. A future historian may find the war more interesting, when considered as the supreme achievement of the industrial civilization of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, than as a mere vortex in the age-old ocean of European political strife. There is something awe-inspiring in the spectacle of all the continuous and multitudinous activity of a great nation feeding, by a thousand channels, a thousand rills, to the embattled furrows of ...
— A Volunteer Poilu • Henry Sheahan
... snatching the scraps that fall from her divine table d'hote. But some of us grow weary at last of the fruitless service. And then there are two fates open to us. We can get a job driving a grocer's wagon, or we can get swallowed up in the Vortex of Bohemia. The latter sounds good; but the former really pans out better. For, when the grocer pays us off we can rent a dress suit and—the capitalized system of humor describes it best—Get ...
— The Voice of the City • O. Henry
... meetings of the party, and won great distinction as its frequent Fourth-of-July orator. All those mild and economical measures by which Mr. Jefferson sought to keep the United States from being drawn into the roaring vortex of the great wars in Europe, he opposed, and favored the policy of preparing the country for defence, not by gunboats and embargoes, but by a powerful navy of frigates and ships of the line. His Fourth-of-July orations, ...
— Famous Americans of Recent Times • James Parton
... hopefully endeavouring to extract money from the bankrupt Government. It was a season of disillusionment in more senses than one; for there he saw for himself the seamy side of Parisian life, and drifted for a brief space about the giddy vortex of the Palais Royal. What a contrast to the limpid life of Corsica was that turbid frothy existence—already swirling ...
— The Life of Napoleon I (Volumes, 1 and 2) • John Holland Rose
... great discovery of the circulation of the blood, which was taught by Harvey in the reign of James. Apart from these illustrious names England took little share in the scientific movement of the Continent; and her whole energies seemed to be whirled into the vortex of theology and politics ...
— History of the English People, Volume VI (of 8) - Puritan England, 1642-1660; The Revolution, 1660-1683 • John Richard Green
... a one, Paris must be nothing better than a vast frippery shop, an ever-varying galantee show, an eternal vanity fair, a vortex of folly, a pandemonium ...
— The Diary of an Ennuyee • Anna Brownell Jameson
... Christian women who should have been the first to have held out a hand to save—I saw her turn away with a heart hardened into indifference, and plunge headlong into a bottomless gulf of ignominy and sin. Nor did the vision pass until, out of that seething vortex of lust and infamy, I saw arise the black phantom of a lost soul crying out unto God and His Christ for judgment ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Volume V. • Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton, Eds.
... to boil up and run over. These upshoots, as a rule, seemed to follow whirlpools. In the latter the water for a diameter of twenty or twenty-five feet would revolve around a centre with great rapidity, the surface inclining to the vortex, the top of which was perhaps eighteen or twenty inches lower than the general level. The vortex itself was perfectly formed, like a large funnel, and about six or eight inches in diameter, where it began to be a hole in the water, ...
— A Canyon Voyage • Frederick S. Dellenbaugh
... undisturbed possession. But the storm was already brewing in the far distance which, advancing progressively like the waves of the coming tempest, was destined first to shake them in their security, and finally to overwhelm them in its vortex. With the natural enterprize of their character, the Americans had no sooner ascertained the fall of Detroit, than means, slow but certain, were taken for the recovery of a post, with which, their national glory was in no slight degree identified. The country whence they drew their ...
— The Canadian Brothers - or The Prophecy Fulfilled • John Richardson
... as a whole had sincerely desired that the Union might be preserved. Yet a society based upon slavery had such community of interest with the States further south that it was soon dragged into the secession vortex. When once war had begun, the growth of hostility against what was regarded as their public enemy was rapid, and in every State a war party in time of war has a great advantage over the opposition. The charge of "giving aid and comfort to the enemy" is too powerful a weapon against the minority, ...
— Military Reminiscences of the Civil War V2 • Jacob Dolson Cox
... spoiled you, Mary, I do believe: now it has me. I have been absorbed in its mighty vortex, and gone into the midst of its greatness, and joined in its festivities and frivolities, and been intimate with its children. You may like me very well, my kind friend, while the purifying water, and your more ...
— Selected English Letters (XV - XIX Centuries) • Various
... first act was to clutch hold of the canoe, and throw all his energies into the task of avoiding the deadly suction of the whirlpool, for once he fell into its grip there must be only a question of seconds ere he reached its vortex and ...
— Canoe Mates in Canada - Three Boys Afloat on the Saskatchewan • St. George Rathborne
... wondered at himself and the rapidity of the fate which in two short weeks had swept him out of his solitude into the very vortex of a world unknown to him save through his books. He asked himself what power it was that had flung aside caste, religion, education, like a child's sandcastle before the onrush of a mighty tide. Caste, religion, ...
— The Native Born - or, The Rajah's People • I. A. R. Wylie
... affording these classes protection would have secured us the aid of their strong hands. As it was, these resources were in great measure frittered away—gradually drawn by what appeared an irresistible influence into the vortex of the Rebellion—or scattered wanderingly through the Loyal States, and worn down and exhausted in the support of ...
— Red-Tape and Pigeon-Hole Generals - As Seen From the Ranks During a Campaign in the Army of the Potomac • William H. Armstrong
... said to show that what we have here is only the absorption of even the profoundest religious meanings into the vortex of an all-dissolving metaphysical system. The most obvious meaning of the phrase 'Son of God,' its moral and spiritual, its real religious meaning, is dwelt on, here in Hegel, as little as Hegel claimed that the Nicene ...
— Edward Caldwell Moore - Outline of the History of Christian Thought Since Kant • Edward Moore
... the ——. Tall, properly handsome, with his crisp curling hair and his chin that was firm but not markedly so; eyes that were reflective rather than compelling; earnest to the point of an absorbed seriousness—we did right to note him well. He was destined to win great glory in the vortex of flame and smoke and agony and panic into which we were to be swept within the next thirty-six hours. My chief recollection of him that night was of his careful attentiveness to everything said by our own colonel on the science of present-day war—the understanding deference paid by ...
— Pushed and the Return Push • George Herbert Fosdike Nichols, (AKA Quex)
... PHILAMINTE). I come to announce you great news. We have had a narrow escape while we slept. A world passed all along us, and fell right across our vortex. [Footnote: Tourbillon. Compare act iii scene ii. Another reference to Cotin.] If in its way it had met with our earth, it would have dashed us to pieces ...
— The Learned Women • Moliere (Poquelin)
... Terrors, Conqueror of Conquerors, To our most revered kinsman and neighbour, Lucifer, Monarch of the Endless Night, and Emperor of the Sheer Vortex, Salutation: ...
— The Visions of the Sleeping Bard • Ellis Wynne
... benign government, are idly grieving over the taxation which the war imposes, and meanly asking if it will not soon end, that their coffers may become plethoric of gold; while the question is still unsettled whether the Rebellion shall sweep them and their all into the vortex of ruin and anarchy. The North is asleep! and it will become the sleep of death, national death, if a new ...
— Thirteen Months in the Rebel Army • William G. Stevenson
... tenfold fury, bore over their banks with impetuous, resistless force, carrying every check and principle before them. Counsel was an unheeded call to the passing hurricane; Reason a screaming elk in the vortex of Malstrom; and Religion a feebly-struggling beaver down the roarings of Niagara. I reprobated the first moment of my existence; execrated Adam's folly-infatuated wish for that goodly-looking but poison-breathing gift ...
— The Letters of Robert Burns • Robert Burns
... into various kinds of matter as we know it. He commences by defining the limit of His field of activity, a vast sphere whose circumference is far larger than the orbit of the outermost of His future planets. Within the limit of that sphere He sets up a kind of gigantic vortex—a motion which sweeps together all the bubbles into a vast central mass, the material of the nebula that ...
— A Textbook of Theosophy • C.W. Leadbeater
... her chair; not for long, however, for the black birds seemed to fill the whole room, describing swift, interminable spirals round her head. She could not hear them, but she could see them, and the whirling vortex fascinated her; she could not help turning her head to follow their flight; she grew giddy and she was forced to try to recover ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... partly dragged, partly I went to a certain extent of my own will, into this vortex. I felt myself to have earned a larger experience now of life and life's realities. I questioned when I should once have discreetly inclined the head and held my peace. I had a mind to examine this ...
— The First Violin - A Novel • Jessie Fothergill
... summons his deities the Clouds, who enter as the Chorus. These are the guardian deities of modern professors, seers, doctors, lazy long-haired long-nailed fellows, musicians who cultivate trills and tremolos, transcendental quacks who sing their praises. The old gods are dethroned, a vortex governing the universe. The Chorus tells Socrates to take the old man ...
— Authors of Greece • T. W. Lumb
... place upon her forehead which was settling into a bruise. Her eyes were puffed with crying until they were almost closed. Her breast rose with short, exhausted, but still convulsive sobs. Margery felt as if she was drawn into a vortex of agony. She could not resist it. She went to the bed, stood still a second, trembling, and then sank upon her knees and put her face down upon the wretched hand nearest and kissed it ...
— In Connection with the De Willoughby Claim • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... Socrates with a whole set of deities. There are the clouds themselves, which are of Aristophanes's own invention; there is also the air, which he has got from Diogenes of Apollonia, and finally a "vortex" which is supposed to be derived from the same source, and which at any rate has cast Zeus down from his throne. All this we must ignore, as it is only conditioned partly by technical reasons—Aristophanes had ...
— Atheism in Pagan Antiquity • A. B. Drachmann
... fill, and then had begun the long martyrdom that, she now saw, could have only one ending. She and the Governor were doomed. Already the great wave of revolution towered above them. Very soon it would burst and sweep both away into the terrible vortex of destruction. ...
— The Swindler and Other Stories • Ethel M. Dell
... the rings by shooting one through another which has expanded somewhat, or by destroying one by striking it with another, or by extinguishing a candle set up at a distance, and so on. The experimenter should notice how a vortex ring rotates in itself while moving forward, like a rubber ring being rolled along ...
— Things To Make • Archibald Williams
... of minds, strong in the north of Europe but still weak in France where, however, many facts called marvelous by superficial observers, were happening, but falling, alas! like stones to the bottom of the sea, in the vortex of Parisian excitements. ...
— Ursula • Honore de Balzac
... seem, every too constant buzzing visitor encroaches on its domain, and is drawn to its silken vortex, and is eventually shed below as a clean dried specimen; for this is an agalena spider, which dispenses with the winding-sheet of the field species—epeira and argiope. Last week a big bumble-bee-like fly paid me a visit and suddenly disappeared. ...
— My Studio Neighbors • William Hamilton Gibson
... with a jug of Hollands, were criticising our leader, and asking why he did not move. Meanwhile the army was as ill off as ever it had been since the camping at Valley Forge, while the air here in the city was full of vague rumours of defection and what not. I was of necessity caught in the vortex of gaiety which my chief loved and did much to keep up. He liked to see his aides at his table, and used them as a part of the excessive state we thought at ...
— Hugh Wynne, Free Quaker • S. Weir Mitchell
... similar to drift is observable at tennis, golf, base-ball and cricket; but this effect is explainable by the inequality of pressure due to a vortex of air carried along by the rotating ball, and the deviation is in the opposite direction of the drift observed in artillery practice, so artillerists are still awaiting ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 2 - "Baconthorpe" to "Bankruptcy" • Various
... say, the vortex that can draw Body to body in its strong control; Beloved Laura, what the charmed law That to the soul attracting plucks the soul? It is the charm that rolls the stars on high, For ever round the sun's majestic blaze— When, gay as children round ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Vol. 53, No. 331, May, 1843 • Various
... plunged, instantly invisible as she escaped the finger of the black beam; but she dropped into the vortex of ruin that she herself had created. Into a pit of blazing fire, criss-crossed by falling trees, that had engulfed the battery and ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, October, 1930 • Various
... There was but one thing precious to him; Juliet was the perfect flower of nature, the apex of law, the last presentment of evolution, the final reason of things! The very soul of the world stood there in the dusk, and there also stood the foolish curate, whirling his little vortex of dust and ashes between ...
— Paul Faber, Surgeon • George MacDonald
... and difficult as possible. He had escaped gladly. But the war had come to an end with him still in service on this side and he had at length returned with many things unsatisfied. One of these had been his idea about Mary Louise. She, too, had been swept into the vortex, into a mild eddy of it. The Red Cross had found her useful in the maintenance of a tea room for the enjoyment of the men at Camp Taylor. It had sounded innocent enough, but upon Joe's return he had found that she had in some way been galvanized. She was one ...
— Stubble • George Looms
... turn of the tide, the waters confined between the Faroe and Lofoten Islands rush out with irresistible violence. They form a vortex from which no ship has ever been able to escape. Monstrous waves race together from every point of the horizon. They form a whirlpool aptly called "the ocean's navel," whose attracting power extends a distance of fifteen ...
— 20000 Leagues Under the Seas • Jules Verne
... at the moment in the home of her father. I saw the house caught in the vortex of the cloud. It rose straight up into the air, its walls shattered and broken, but holding partially together. I am sure that I could not have moved an eyelash, if my life had depended ...
— The True Story of Our National Calamity of Flood, Fire and Tornado • Logan Marshall
... bluff on the coast of Lanai there is a cave whose only entrance is through the vortex of a whirlpool. Its floor gradually rises from the water, and is the home of crabs, polypi, sting-rays, and other noisome creatures of the deep, who find here temporary safety from their larger foes. It was a dangerous experiment to dive into this cave. One of the few who ...
— Primitive Love and Love-Stories • Henry Theophilus Finck
... fall of 1846, several parts of Clare were in a very wretched condition; but, at the opening of the new year, the most prosperous localities in that county had been sucked into the great famine vortex. Writing at this period from Ennis, the chief town, Captain Wynne says: "The number of those who, from age or exhaustion and infirmity, are unable to labour, is becoming most alarming; to those the public works are of ...
— The History of the Great Irish Famine of 1847 (3rd ed.) (1902) - With Notices Of Earlier Irish Famines • John O'Rourke
... with his thermodynamic researches, including the doctrine of the dissipation or degradation of energy. To this brief statement may be added mention of his work in connection with hydrodynamics and his magnetic and electric discoveries. His papers in connection with wave and vortex movements are also most remarkable. He was awarded the Royal and Copley medals and was an original member of the Order of Merit. He received distinctions from many universities ...
— The Glories of Ireland • Edited by Joseph Dunn and P.J. Lennox
... Baineses ignored the Wakes in every possible way, choosing that week to have a show of mourning goods in the left- hand window, and refusing to let Maggie outside on any pretext. Therefore the dazzling social success of the elephant, which was quite easily drawing Mrs. Baines into the vortex, ...
— The Old Wives' Tale • Arnold Bennett
... it is termed—or in other words, kept ignorant of myself and of the world I was destined to live in, until one fine day I was cut loose from the apron-strings of my lady mother, and the tether of my abbe tutor, and launched head-foremost into that vortex of temptation and iniquity, the world of Paris, like a ship without a chart or a compass. A precious race I ran in consequence, for a time; and if I had not been so fortunate as to meet you, Marie, whose bright eyes ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXIII No. 1 July 1848 • Various
... published, and bears date just one day ahead of the Pioneer, subsequently published by James M. Goodhue, which was actually printed in the territory. Dr. Randall did not carry out his intention, but was caught in the California vortex, and did not return ...
— The History of Minnesota and Tales of the Frontier • Charles E. Flandrau
... up a spectacle sufficient to appal the stoutest heart; and Roland gasped for breath, as he beheld the little canoe whirl into the narrow chasm, and then vanish, even before the light was over, as if swallowed up in its boiling vortex. ...
— Nick of the Woods • Robert M. Bird
... about her. They had run after her, fought over her, in a way to turn most girls' heads. But she had kept straight. And then had come Billy, her reward. She had devoted herself to him, to his house, to all that would nourish his love; and now she and Billy were sinking down into this senseless vortex of misery and ...
— The Valley of the Moon • Jack London
... world—cupidity is aroused and roguery shields itself under its name, as a more safe and rapid way of gaining its ends. Abroad, as well as at home, has it proved the rallying point of all rascality—the honest man is carried away by the current and becomes absorbed in the vortex; the timid, the quiet, the moral are, after some hesitation, caught in the whirlpool and follow those whom they have watched ...
— Fifty Years of Railway Life in England, Scotland and Ireland • Joseph Tatlow
... stunned and shocked before, his horror was increased a thousandfold when he got into this vortex of the riot, and not being an actor in the terrible spectacle, had it all before his eyes. But there, in the midst, towering above them all, close before the house they were attacking now, was Hugh on horseback, calling ...
— Barnaby Rudge • Charles Dickens
... This is the universal method of Nature on every plane. Some of the most advanced thinkers in modern physical science, in the endeavour to probe the great mystery of the first origin of the world, have postulated the formation of what they call "vortex rings" formed from an infinitely fine primordial substance. They tell us that if such a ring be once formed on the minutest scale and set rotating, then, since it would be moving in pure ether and subject to no friction, ...
— The Edinburgh Lectures on Mental Science • Thomas Troward
... roaring gulf! Yes, yes, down through that awful water-way, with more than the swiftness of an arrow, shot the boat, or skiff, right into the jaws of the pool. A monstrous breaker curls over the prow—there is no hope; the boat is swamped, and all drowned in that strangling vortex. No! the boat, which appeared to have the buoyancy of a feather, skipped over the threatening horror, and the next moment was out of danger, the boatman—a true boatman of Cockaigne, that—elevating one of his skulls in sign of triumph, the man hallooing, ...
— George Borrow - The Man and His Books • Edward Thomas
... be capable of being gratified within its confines. If I were to come to live on this side of the Atlantic I think I should elect to settle in a Southern city. New York has many attractions; it has drawn to it, vortex-like, much of the best that is bright, able, active, powerful, but, vortex-like, the life swirls, spinning ceaselessly at a terrific rate, in that noisy city of unrest. Chicago accentuates the worst features of life in New York while having few of its compensations, ...
— Impressions of a War Correspondent • George Lynch
... in a highly impressive, though necessarily inarticulate stage-whisper of thought, 'This is Society; this is what's called the Social Vortex; and I am right in the bubbling centre of it.' And then I thought how wonderful it would have been if Mr. Jokram, of Dursley's School of Arts Committee, and one or two others—say, Sister Agatha, for example—could have been permitted to take a peep between ...
— The Record of Nicholas Freydon - An Autobiography • A. J. (Alec John) Dawson
... civil school of that time, and entered the department of Foreign Affairs. Although he retained his entire sympathy with the poetic brotherhood, he now frequented the salons of the titled aristocracy and gave himself up to the vortex of luxurious society. Because of his political satires and too free opposition to the government, he was sent away from Petersburg in 1820, and attached to the Governor of the South Russian Colonies. Here he fell ill and went to the Caucas for recovery. ...
— Russian Lyrics • Translated by Martha Gilbert Dickinson Bianchi
... Thersilochus, Mydon, Astypylus, Mnesus, Thrasius, AEnius, and Ophelestes. And now had swift Achilles slain even more Paeonians, had not the deep-eddying River, enraged, addressed him, likening itself to a man, and uttered a voice from its deep vortex: ...
— The Iliad of Homer (1873) • Homer |
