Diccionario ingles.comDiccionario ingles.com
Synonyms, antonyms, pronunciation

  Home
English Dictionary      examples: 'day', 'get rid of', 'New York Bay'




Maelstrom   /mˈeɪlstrəm/   Listen
Maelstrom

noun
1.
A powerful circular current of water (usually the result of conflicting tides).  Synonyms: vortex, whirlpool.






WordNet 3.0 © 2010 Princeton University








Advanced search
     Find words:
Starting with
Ending with
Containing
Matching a pattern  

Synonyms
Antonyms
Quotes
Words linked to  

only single words



Share |





"Maelstrom" Quotes from Famous Books



... point of revising her estimate of the little actress. Was she, after all, wholly mercenary in her attitude toward Warrington? Was he merely a live spender whom she could not afford to lose? Or was she merely a beautiful, delicate creature caught in the merciless maelstrom of the life into which she had been thrown? Did she realize the perilous position this all was placing ...
— Constance Dunlap • Arthur B. Reeve

... realized for some charity,—I forget what,—and the affair was voted highly successful. The next day, the 28th, we were creeping towards our harbor through one of those dense fogs which are more dangerous than the old rocks of the sirens, or Scylla and Charybdis, or the much-lied-about maelstrom. ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)

... Drunkenness finds a ship adrift,—no steady wind in its sails, no thoughtful pilot directing its course,— he steps on board, takes the helm, and steers straight for the maelstrom. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II, No. 8, June 1858 • Various

... haunted this room before I let his words creep much beyond my ears. I had a brother who needed all my care and all my affection, and I did not mean to marry, much less to love. But slowly and by degrees he got a hold upon my heart, and then, like the wretch who trusts himself to the maelstrom, I was swept round and round into the whirlpool of passion till not earth nor heaven could save me or make me again the free and light-hearted girl I was. This was two years ...
— The Mill Mystery • Anna Katharine Green

... turned out as the saint had foretold, and after a long day's march they encountered the Jesuit and became Christians. *7* This account seems to have been lost, and a careful search has not disinterred it from the Maelstrom of Simancas, that prison-house of so many documents, without whose aid so much of Spanish ...
— A Vanished Arcadia, • R. B. Cunninghame Graham

... on my study floor; Gatton's voice shouting orders. Then, we had jumped into the cab and enjoining the man to drive like fury, were speeding off through the busy London streets. Leaving the quietude of one suburb for the maelstrom of central London, we presently emerged into an equally quiet backwater upon ...
— The Green Eyes of Bast • Sax Rohmer

... horticulture. One has read of birds building their nests in the muzzles of old and disused cannon; even that does not suggest a more anomalous association of ideas than the spectacle of a vine-clad cottage shaded by fig trees, basking peacefully in the sun, so close to what was at one time a veritable maelstrom of human passions. So far as the new Coloma is concerned, Marshall's discovery might never have been made. Nowhere else will you find a spot where gold and what it stands for would seem to mean so little, Coloma! It is passing strange that a name so sweet and restful should forever ...
— A Tramp Through the Bret Harte Country • Thomas Dykes Beasley

... according to his powers and diligence in any direction? If not, why not have an end of the superstition which has caused our race to go on so long writing and reading of the difference between talent and genius? It is within the memory of middle-aged men that the Maelstrom existed in the belief of the geographers, but we now get on perfectly well without it; and why should we still suffer under the notion of "genius" which keeps so many poor little authorlings trembling in question whether they have it, or ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells

... ice-floes, and either go down entirely or else be forced out on the top of the ice, to be rafted along for a space until the cake upon which it rested suddenly up-ended or turned completely over in the maelstrom of swirling water and ice. Continuously carcasses seemed to be going down while others kept bobbing up at one point or another ...
— Roosevelt in the Bad Lands • Hermann Hagedorn

... kindled again hereafter. Being and not being came round in endless succession for all save him, into whom all being was resolved, and out of whom it emerged again, as from the vortex of some aeonian Maelstrom. ...
— A Little Book of Stoicism • St George Stock

... built away out," said Madam Rachel, "there will be quite a whirlpool; you might call it the Maelstrom. There, you see, Caleb can have a little harbour up there on the shore, and one of you can go out to the end of the mole, and put a little ship into the water, and the eddy will carry it round to him. Then he can take out the cargo, and put in a new one, and then set the ship in the water, and ...
— Caleb in the Country • Jacob Abbott

... feeling of delightful content surged through me. Approaching New York. Above the haze, out of all the hustle and bustle of the human maelstrom. That look of absolute futility I had seen on the faces in the subway, on the streets, in the early hours of 5 morning—these receded from memory. Life was good, after all. It was a wonderful thing if you viewed it correctly. And this was the ...
— Story Hour Readings: Seventh Year • E.C. Hartwell

... where a man could redeem his manhood better than on the Woman's Rights Platform. Gentlemen in distant seats were perhaps trembling to think that they had actually got that far into this dangerous place. They might think themselves well off—no, badly off—if the maelstrom did not draw them nearer and nearer and nearer in, as it did him. He began, like them, hesitating and smiling on the back seats; they saw what he had got to now, and he hoped they, too, might get into such noble company before long. He was prouder to train ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume I • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage

... restless. I think, and think, and I cannot cease from thinking. I have been in the thick of life so long that I am oppressed by the peace and quiet, and I cannot forbear from dwelling upon that mad maelstrom of death and destruction so soon to burst forth. In my ears are the cries of the stricken; and I can see, as I have seen in the past,* all the marring and mangling of the sweet, beautiful flesh, and the ...
— The Iron Heel • Jack London

... thieving tomcat of conscience. It has no more stability than a bad smell in a simoon. It has deified and damned every statesman by turn. It has been on every possible side of every public question, and wept bitter tears of regret because further change of policy were impossible. It is a perfect maelstrom of misinformation, the avatar of impudence, the incarnation of infamy—a social cesspool whose malodor spreads contagion like the rank breath of the gila-monster or the shade of a upas tree. Yet its editor, I am told, aspires to the ...
— Volume 1 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann

... as the world caught its first, full, horrified sight of it between the beginning of August and the end of December 1914. But even out of that maelstrom of horror there had been glimpses of great things—great heroisms, great victories, and great proofs of the power to endure. A rigid censorship, rightly designed to keep back from the enemy the information that would ...
— The Drama Of Three Hundred & Sixty-Five Days - Scenes In The Great War - 1915 • Hall Caine

... spinning, gyration, turning about an axis, turning aound an axis, circulation, roll; circumrotation^, circumvolution, circumgyration^; volutation^, circination^, turbination^, pirouette, convolution. verticity^, whir, whirl, eddy, vortex, whirlpool, gurge^; countercurrent; Maelstrom, Charybdis; Ixion. [rotating air] cyclone; tornado, whirlwind; dust devil. [rotation of an automobile] spin-out. axis, axis of rotation, swivel, pivot, pivot point; axle, spindle, pin, hinge, pole, arbor, bobbin, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget

... brilliance shot up toward the zenith. Under it whirled a maelstrom of varied radiance, pale with distance, but marvellously beautiful. Forsythe passed them with a troubled face, on his way below to report, as his ...
— The Mystery • Stewart Edward White and Samuel Hopkins Adams

... characterized as the effort of a star-gazer to find satisfaction in the things of the earth; "The Breaking of Bonds," a Shelleyan drama of social unrest, where he has tried to formulate a hope for our final emergence from the maelstrom of class-conflict; and "Twelve Japanese Painters," a group of poems expressive of the peculiar and alluring charm of the great Japanese painters and their ...
— Mr. Faust • Arthur Davison Ficke

... matters that her multitudinous store— The garnered fruit of measureless desire— Sank in the maelstrom of abysmal fire, To be of man beheld on earth no more? Her loyal children, cheery to the core. Quailed not, nor blenched, while she, above the ire Of elemental ragings, dared aspire On victory's wings ...
— The California Birthday Book • Various

... ten yards behind John was suddenly churned into froth. Red, bloody froth it was and evidently some gigantic struggle was going on. All at once, just on the outside of the miniature maelstrom, appeared a small round, ...
— The Go Ahead Boys and the Treasure Cave • Ross Kay

... worse, she not only knit steadily, hour after hour, but she bestowed the sweetest words of encouragement on a young girl from the Pacific Coast, who was embroidering rosebuds on another rag, the very girl I had endeavored to rescue from the maelstrom of embroidery, by showing her the unspeakable folly of giving her optic nerves to such base uses, when they were designed by the Creator to explore the planetary world, with chart and compass to guide mighty ships across ...
— Eighty Years And More; Reminiscences 1815-1897 • Elizabeth Cady Stanton

... circle of tribes of the Indo-Germanic family. Odin and his terrific pantheon of war gods and social deities could only exist in the dreary latitudes of storms and fire which produce a Hecla and a Maelstrom. These latitudes have invariably produced nations whose influence has been felt in an elevating power over the world. From such a source the Indian could have derived none of him vague symbolisms and mental idiosyncrasies which have left him as he is found to-day, without a government ...
— The Algonquin Legends of New England • Charles Godfrey Leland

... veritable maelstrom of war. From not many miles away, by night and by day, comes an almost uninterrupted roar of heavy gunfire, and all day long the main street is filled with the rumble and clatter of caissons, guns, and transports going forward on one side, while on the other side is an unending ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume V (of 8) • Francis J. (Francis Joseph) Reynolds, Allen L. (Allen Leon)

... had asked the driver of the taxicab to recommend a respectable hotel for a lady travelling alone; and he had driven her to the Hotel Aurora Borealis—that great, gay palace of Indiana limestone and plate glass towering above the maelstrom ...
— The Gay Rebellion • Robert W. Chambers

... overthrown, the mighty strength of Edward widened the breach more and more, till faster and faster poured in his bands, and the centre of Warwick's army seemed to reel and whirl round the broadening gap through its ranks, as the waves round some chasm in a maelstrom. ...
— The Last Of The Barons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton

... of popular feeling, and to prevent the community to which he belongs from plunging into riotous and blind commotions, to keep his own judgment and emotions as free as possible from a power that seizes all it can reach, draws them into its current, and sweeps them round and round like the Maelstrom, until they are overwhelmed and buried in its devouring vortex. When others are heated, the only wisdom is to determine to keep cool; whenever a people or an individual is rushing headlong, it is the duty of patriotism and of friendship ...
— Salem Witchcraft, Volumes I and II • Charles Upham

... of an emotional maelstrom, watched the struggle from the prison of her own horror. At that moment she was physically, mentally and spiritually ill; a human being caught in the midst of forces beyond ...
— Ten From Infinity • Paul W. Fairman

... smaller breakers; her speed was checked, her stern was dragged around. For an instant it seemed that the back suction would hold her in its grip. She tore herself from the grasp of the current. Enveloped in a blinding hail of spray she struggled desperately to extricate herself from the maelstrom in which she was involved before the resumption of the larger seas should roll her over ...
— The Riverman • Stewart Edward White

... man of intense nervosity, lived his life alone in a remote old manor-house in Suffolk, his only companion being a person of Eastern origin, named Ul-Jabal. The baronet had consumed his vitality in the life-long attempt to sound the too fervid Maelstrom of Oriental research, and his mind had perhaps caught from his studies a tinge of their morbidness, their esotericism, their insanity. He had for some years past been engaged in the task of writing a stupendous work on Pre-Zoroastrian Theogonies, in which, it is to ...
— Prince Zaleski • M.P. Shiel

... but, whether the leviathan of the deep had been caught in the maelstrom of the waterspout, or had gone towards it from choice, they could not tell. There he was, however, at all events, circling round in the eddy of the sea at the foot of the cloud, and sending up columns of ...
— Picked up at Sea - The Gold Miners of Minturne Creek • J.C. Hutcheson

... His special gift is his magnetic and unconquerable personality, his towering egoism united with such a fund of human sympathy. His power is centripetal, so to speak,—he draws everything into himself like a maelstrom; the centrifugal power of the great dramatic artists, the power to get out of and away from himself, he has not. It was not for Whitman to write the dramas and tragedies of democracy, as Shakespeare wrote those of feudalism, or as Tennyson sang in delectable verse the swan-song of an ...
— Whitman - A Study • John Burroughs

... account for that current which has proved a deadly maelstrom to hundreds—aye, thousands—of ships, in all ages, whose misfortune it has been to sail unsuspectingly along the western shores of the ...
— The Boy Slaves • Mayne Reid

... bouncing body record it) of thirty-five. Our turbines scream shrilly; the propellers cannot bite on the thin air; Tim shunts the lift out of five tanks at once and by sheer weight drives her bullet wise through the maelstrom till she cushions with jar on an up-gust, three thousand ...
— Actions and Reactions • Rudyard Kipling

... presence brings both cheerfulness and prosperity;—with a delightful sense of their own wisdom and virtue; and of the 'progress' of things in general:—in smooth sea and fair weather,—and with no need either of helm touch, or oar toil: as when once one is well within the edge of Maelstrom. ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin

... in those days a favorite resort of mine. Every morning I plunged into the rush downtown I dived from the elevated railway station into the tatterdemalion life of Park Row, and when I raised my head above that ragged human maelstrom and climbed to the editorial room of The Record it seemed as though I lifted my body out of a little muddy stream and plunged my mind into a Charybdis which embraced the whole world. Its centre was the same desk which I had so often approached with ...
— David Malcolm • Nelson Lloyd

... her mind a maelstrom of conflict. She knew nothing about money; it had never occurred to her that her father had none, and the cryptic allusion to the "bar'l" was even more puzzling. She knew that her father was a man to be feared, but he had always been the same; she expected nothing else of ...
— Captivity • M. Leonora Eyles

... bear's back. A scene impossible! A hairy tornado, rolling, twisting, flopping, yelling, screeching, roaring, and howling, tore, bit, scratched, clawed, and walloped all over the place. An epileptic nebula; a maelstrom that revolved in every way known to man at the same instant; a prodigy of tooth and claw. If that fight were magnified a hundred times, a glimpse of it would kill; as it was, myself and the clothing store boy clung weakly to ...
— Red Saunders' Pets and Other Critters • Henry Wallace Phillips

... article in this month's Bookman, called "How Old Is Sherlock Holmes?" has revived our old ambition to own a complete set of all the Sherlock Holmes tales, and we are going to set about scouring the town for them). Every time we pass through the Atlantic Avenue maelstrom, which is twelve times a week, we see, as plain as print, the beginning ...
— Plum Pudding - Of Divers Ingredients, Discreetly Blended & Seasoned • Christopher Morley

... out into the light of self-control and concentration. The hurried, crowding, exciting methods of the public schools are disastrous to fully half of the unformed minds sent into the intellectual maelstrom which America provides under the ...
— The Eugenic Marriage, Volume I. (of IV.) - A Personal Guide to the New Science of Better Living and Better Babies • W. Grant Hague, M.D.

... learns to swim by being tossed into life's maelstrom and left to make his way ashore. No youth can learn to sail his life-craft in a lake sequestered and sheltered from all the storms, where other vessels never come. Skill comes through sailing one's craft amidst rocks and bars and opposing fleets, amidst storms and whirls ...
— Leaves of Life - For Daily Inspiration • Margaret Bird Steinmetz

... through a little maelstrom of fine dust which a wind circle had picked up, and the sheriff led Bull into the jail. They crossed the tawdry little outer room with its warped floor creaking under the tread of Bull Hunter. Next they came ...
— Bull Hunter • Max Brand

... burst, with an almost tropic vigor, into riotous growth. Flamboyant youth, calculating middle age, doddering senility, all these were there, all treading on one another's heels, to reap and be reaped. To-day a scene of marvelous activity, a maelstrom of bustling commissariat and fretting supply-trains, cut by never-ending counter-currents of hoboes to and from the front, to-morrow it would simmer down into the desuetude of a siding. ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol. 31, No. 1, May 1908 • Various

... shifted at length—as it inevitably must—to women, and the unalterable and uncharted mystery of their mental currents: the jagged and cruelly unsuspected reefs that rear suddenly under rippling shoal-water, the maelstrom that boils just beyond the soft ...
— The Strange Cases of Dr. Stanchon • Josephine Daskam Bacon

... some progress, a council was held, and a bishop appointed to the city, and from that time onward its position in the Christian world appears to have been assured. For centuries afterward, however, it was the centre of a maelstrom of internal strife, in which Armoricans, Britons, Franks, and Romans appear to have been inextricably involved. Then came the Northmen, who burned the former Cathedral of St. Peter. This was rebuilt in the eleventh century, ...
— The Cathedrals of Northern France • Francis Miltoun

... France upon him. In the next number, while the "Murders" were still the talk of the hour, he made an excursion into the world of pseudo-science the result of which was his thrilling "Descent into the Maelstrom;" but later in the same month he returned to his experiments in analysis—publishing in The Saturday Evening Post an advance review of Charles Dickens' story "Barnaby Rudge," which was just beginning to come out in serial form. In the review ...
— The Dreamer - A Romantic Rendering of the Life-Story of Edgar Allan Poe • Mary Newton Stanard

... sovereignty; but it is the duty of nations to resort to force, and to declare themselves against things which dishonor them and disgrace their independence." * But an invitation to enter the European maelstrom and battle for neutral rights made no impression upon ...
— Jefferson and his Colleagues - A Chronicle of the Virginia Dynasty, Volume 15 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Allen Johnson

... developed, which was not traceable to any definite source. Although Danvers avowed a dislike for politics, in reality he had the inherent instinct for political life characteristic of the upper-class Englishman, and he threw himself into the maelstrom with all his forces well in hand. Office-seeking was disgusting to him, but the fight for his friend ...
— A Man of Two Countries • Alice Harriman

... provider." I remember how the beefsteak (for the sausages were especially destined for your two youngest Dolorosi, who were just recovering from the measles, and needed something light and palatable) vanished in large rectangular masses within your throat, drawn downward in a maelstrom of coffee;—only that the original whirlpool is, I believe, now proved to have been imaginary;—"that cup was a fiction, but this is reality." The resources of the house also afforded certain very hot biscuits or breadcakes, in a high state of saleratus;—indeed, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 3, No. 18, April, 1859 - [Date last updated: August 7, 2005] • Various

... for this gray-haired woman's plight, and she evidently regarded him as a kind-hearted and eminently trustworthy young man. He stood and watched the cab as it bore her off swiftly into the maelstrom of London. He could not help thinking that seldom had he met one less fitted for the notoriety thrust upon all connected with ...
— Number Seventeen • Louis Tracy

... some vague, restless impulse within him, that clamored for an outlet; but he misjudged himself in imagining that he could be compelled to drown the memory of his disappointment in the wine-cup, the vortex of the gaming-table, or the more fearful maelstrom of siren allurements. To a young heart which has not been sullied by familiar contact with evil, there is no aegis so invulnerable to the assaults of those deadly enemies, who make their attacks in the fascinating garb of licentious liberty, as a strong, pure, ...
— Fairy Fingers - A Novel • Anna Cora Mowatt Ritchie

... the bar, and some time afterwards, he sided with his college mates Tazewell, Randolph, Cabell, Thompson, and James Barbour, and hailed with rapture the progress of the French revolution; but, shocked by the barbarities which disgraced the later stages of that moral and political maelstrom, and indignant at the unprecedented conduct of the diplomatic agents of France in our own country, he determined to separate from his early friends, and to uphold with all his influence the administration of Washington and that of his ...
— Discourse of the Life and Character of the Hon. Littleton Waller Tazewell • Hugh Blair Grigsby

... The conversation was not taking the turn that was congenial to him. The ball seemed to him a kind of maelstrom in which all his hopes were likely to be wrecked. And here was his old friend, the keenest-sighted woman he knew, looking upon it simply as literary material—a ridiculous social event. He had better ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner

... ancestral acres, the more hopelessly was he manacled by taxes. "Reconstructionists" most thoroughly inoculated with "Loyal" rabies, held in lofty disdain the claims of widows and orphans, and the right of minors was as dead as that of secession. In the general maelstrom, Colonel Gordon's large estate went to pieces; but after a time, Judge Dent took lessons from his new political masters in the science of wrecking, and by degrees, as fragments and shreds stranded, he collected and secreted them. Certain mining interests were protected, and ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson

... Rudyard Kipling unconsciously came into the very centre of the suffragists' maelstrom of attack when he sent Bok his famous poem: "The Female of the Species." The suffragists at once took the argument in the poem as personal to themselves, and now Kipling got the full benefit of their vitriolic abuse. Bok sent a handful of these criticisms to Kipling, who was very gleeful about them. ...
— The Americanization of Edward Bok - The Autobiography of a Dutch Boy Fifty Years After • Edward William Bok (1863-1930)

... buried in the swirling maelstrom, and then as the Halfmoon rose again, shaking the watery enemy from her back, the two men were disclosed—Theriere half over the ship's side—the mucker clinging to him with one hand, the other clutching desperately at a huge cleat ...
— The Mucker • Edgar Rice Burroughs

... gathered about the priest; the lamp has been lit, the Host uplifted. The Hun is aware of this; with malice aforethought he lands shells into the cathedral every Sunday in an effort to smash the altar. So far he has failed. One finds in this a symbol—that in the heart of the maelstrom of horror, which this war has created, there is a quiet place where the lamp of gentleness and honour is kept burning. The Hun will have to do a lot more shelling before he puts the lamp of kindness out. From the polluted trenches of Vimy the poppies spring up, ...
— The Glory of the Trenches • Coningsby Dawson

... punishment, befell us. The rocks smote our frail shallop; they did not crush it. Foam and spray dashed in our faces; solid fluid below the crest did not overwhelm us. There we were, presently, in water tumultuous, but not frantic. There we were, three men floating in a birch, not floundering in a maelstrom,—on the water, not under it,—sprinkled, not drowned,—and in a wild wonder how we got into it and how we ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 61, November, 1862 • Various

... pertains to posterity. Happy the man—if not in his own generation, yet most assuredly in the time to come—whose natural hesitation or fastidiousness has prompted him to weigh his words maturely, before launching them forth into the great ocean of literature, in the midst of which is a Maelstrom of ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXLV. July, 1844. Vol. LVI. • Various

... cataracts, quite without any physical reason for existence, were thought to roar and roll just beyond the horizon. It is only within a few decades that the geographies have abandoned the pleasing fiction of the maelstrom, and a few centuries ago the sudden downpour of the waters at the "end of the world" was a thoroughly accepted tenet of physical geography. Yet men, adventurous and inquisitive, kept ever pushing forward into the unknown, until now there remain no strange seas and few uncharted and unlighted. ...
— American Merchant Ships and Sailors • Willis J. Abbot

... Again he read, cursing the dizzy fever of his head. Houdania! Houdania! Where was Houdania? Surely the name was familiar. With a superhuman effort of will he clenched his hands and jaws and sat motionless, seeking the difficult boon of concentration. Out of the maelstrom of his mind haltingly it came, and with ...
— Diane of the Green Van • Leona Dalrymple

... musical Maelstrom I send you a voice, which, if heard instead of read, would be lamentable enough. We are lifted off our feet by the perfect torrent of engagements, of visits, of going out and receiving; our house is full, from morning till night, of people coming to sing with or listen to my sister. ...
— Records of Later Life • Frances Anne Kemble

... of Norway there is an extensive vortex, or eddy, which lies between the islands of Moskoe and Moskenas, and is called Moskoestrom, or Maelstrom; it occupies some leagues in circumference, and is said to be very dangerous and often destructive to vessels navigating these seas. It is not easy to understand the existence of a constant descending stream without supposing it must pass through a subterranean cavity to some ...
— The Botanic Garden - A Poem in Two Parts. Part 1: The Economy of Vegetation • Erasmus Darwin

... adjusted, he stepped once more into the moonlight.... And then, suddenly, there was no moonlight at all, or just the faintest glimmer of it, like light seen through milky water. Instead, he had stepped into a swirling vapor that in an instant lost him completely from the door he had just left; a maelstrom of fog, that choked him, half blinded him, twisted about him like wet, coiling ropes, and in a dreadful moment he saw that through the fog were thrust out toward him arms of a famine thinness, the extended fingers of which groped at his ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1919 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various

... poet has ever been wicked, just as no real artist has ever been good. If one intends to be good, one must take it up as a profession. It is quite the most engrossing one in the world. Have you ever been with a good person who is taking a holiday from being good? It is like falling into the Maelstrom. They carry you off your feet. Their enjoyment terrifies the imagination. They are like a Sunday school let loose in the Moulin Rouge, or Mr. Toole when he has made a pun! Sometimes I wish that I could be good too, in order to have such ...
— The Green Carnation • Robert Smythe Hichens

... agitation left her, and she became cold and still. She was in a maelstrom of feeling a minute before, though she could not have said what the feeling meant; now she was dominated by a haunting sense of injury, roused by resentment, not against him, but against everything and everybody, himself ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker

... found, which is on the whole, perhaps, best—for them certainly. The others, the lost, drift from the tenements and back, a host of thousands year by year. The two I am thinking of were of these, typical of the maelstrom. ...
— Children of the Tenements • Jacob A. Riis

... went upstairs without a word. Unused to any worry, always able to pay others for the execution of necessary details, this young man was a victim of the system which had engulfed his unfortunate sire in the maelstrom of reckless pleasure. ...
— The Voice on the Wire • Eustace Hale Ball

... each side were in the play, and for nearly half a minute the swaying mass moved inch by inch, first forward, then backward, the Robinson left tackle refusing to believe that their famous play was for once a failure and so clinging desperately to the ball, the center of a veritable maelstrom of panting, struggling players. Then the whistle sounded and the dust of battle cleared away. Robinson ...
— Behind the Line • Ralph Henry Barbour

... she discovered this new maelstrom in her sea of troubles; but here was Carmela herself speaking to ...
— The Stowaway Girl • Louis Tracy

... intervention of good angels, the little paper-nautilus bark of Lillie's fortunes was prevented from going down in the great ugly maelstrom, on the verge of which it had been so ...
— Pink and White Tyranny - A Society Novel • Harriet Beecher Stowe

... maelstrom!" Could a more dreadful word in a more dreadful situation have sounded in our ears! We were then upon the dangerous coast of Norway. Was the Nautilus being drawn into this gulf at the moment our boat was going to leave its sides? We knew that at ...
— Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea • Jules Verne

... actually in the express heading for London that he realised quite all the difficulties which lay ahead. He was just a big-hearted, impulsive boy, and, without wasting time in futile blame or vain regrets, he had plunged straight into the maelstrom which had engulfed his pal, determined to help ...
— The Moon out of Reach • Margaret Pedler

... some German batteries lived through it. Several times Tom and Jack, by means of their wireless, sent back corrections so that the American pieces might be aimed more effectively. Below them was a maelstrom—an indescribable chaos of death and destruction. They only had glimpses of it—glimpses of a seemingly inextricable mixture of men ...
— Air Service Boys in the Big Battle • Charles Amory Beach

... he was a transient favorite of the fickle goddess. When gambling lost its power to drown the voice of conscience, there was the race, the play and the wine cup! To each of them appealing in turn, he went whirling madly around the outer circles of the great maelstrom in which so many brilliant youths were swallowed in ...
— The Redemption of David Corson • Charles Frederic Goss

... what fortunes were sacrificed, what treasures were drawn into the maelstrom of this mad enterprise, ...
— The Lost Lady of Lone • E.D.E.N. Southworth

... Nov 4, '88. DEAR WILL,—I received your letter yesterday evening, just as I was starting out of town to attend a wedding, and so my mind was privately busy, all the evening, in the midst of the maelstrom of chat and chaff and laughter, with the sort of reflections which create themselves, examine themselves, and continue themselves, unaffected by surroundings —unaffected, that is understood, by the surroundings, but not uninfluenced by them. Here was the ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain

... On the swift maelstrom of the eddying world We hurl our woes, and think they are no more. But round and round by dizzy billows whirled, They reach out sinewy ...
— Yesterdays • Ella Wheeler Wilcox

... Anglo-Saxon propriety. The Short-story should not be void or without form, but its form may be whatever the author please. He has an absolute liberty of choice. It may be a personal narrative, like Poe's "Descent into the Maelstrom" or Hale's "My Double, and How he Undid me;" it may be impersonal, like Mr. F.B. Perkins's "Devil-Puzzlers" or Colonel De Forest's "Brigade Commander;" it may be a conundrum, like Mr. Stockton's insoluble query, "The Lady or the Tiger?" it may be "A Bundle of Letters," ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, October 1885 • Various

... spoke, and the cup from the terrible steep, That, rugged and hoary, hung over the verge Of the endless and measureless world of the deep, Swirl'd into the maelstrom that madden'd the surge. "And where is the diver so stout to go— I ask ye again—to the ...
— The Ontario Readers: The High School Reader, 1886 • Ministry of Education

... unsettled—how the cities spread out in disorderly suburbs and slums, without plan or direction—how men and women became factory workers and office workers without knowing why, most of them scantily educated, housed as the competing jerry-builders thought fit, and flung into the maelstrom of competitive labour. All this we knew in a certain sense, but it was Mr. Wells more than anyone else who made us aware of this national life by presenting it in the only possible effective way, the imaginative way. It may almost be said ...
— Personality in Literature • Rolfe Arnold Scott-James

... boiling caldron, this 'hell' of angry meeting waters—Threadneedle Street and Cornhill, Queen Victoria Street and Cheapside, each 'running,' again metaphorically, 'like a mill-race'—here in this wild maelstrom of human life and human conveyances, here is the true 'Niagara in London,' here are the most wonderful falls in ...
— Prose Fancies (Second Series) • Richard Le Gallienne

... clung to their heavy banner poles, trying to keep the banners above the maelstrom. But the police seized them, tore the pennants, broke the poles, some of them over our backs, trampled them underfoot, pounded us, dragged us, and in every way behaved like frantic beasts. It would have been so simple quietly to detain ...
— Jailed for Freedom • Doris Stevens

... the city its best and its worst. We hear of the few who succeed, but of the many who are lost in the maelstrom we know nothing. Sometimes in country homes it is even forbidden to mention certain names. "She went to the city," you are told—and there the history ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 1 of 14 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Good Men and Great • Elbert Hubbard

... beyond his years wary as well as enterprising, calm as well as ardent, quite as rich in patience as in promptitude and vigour. But Alec Bolt was a headlong youth, volatile, hot, and hasty, fit only to fish the Maelstrom, or a torrent of new lava. And the moment he had laid that wager he expected his crown piece; though time, as the lawyers phrase it, was "expressly of the ...
— Crocker's Hole - From "Slain By The Doones" By R. D. Blackmore • R. D. Blackmore

... not among the punch-table devotees, who were being humorous and amorous over cigarettes; not among the Caustic Wits exclusively assembled in a corner; not among the shy sisters aligned on the davenport and wondering why they had come; not in the general maelstrom in ...
— The Trail of the Hawk - A Comedy of the Seriousness of Life • Sinclair Lewis

... interesting. I was honoured by the reproaches of several private and by the reprobation of several public critics; some correspondents favoured me with their anonymous scurrility, and some bigots relieved me of their acquaintance. On the other hand, there were people who, in the midst of a maelstrom of passion, retained ...
— Greece and the Allies 1914-1922 • G. F. Abbott

... suffocated and crushed. The Comte and Comtesse de Vandieres owed their lives to the carriage. The horses that had trampled and crushed so many dying men were crushed and trampled to death in their turn by the human maelstrom which eddied from the bank. Sheer physical strength saved the major and the grenadier. They killed others in self-defence. That wild sea of human faces and living bodies, surging to and fro as by one impulse, left the bank of the Beresina clear for ...
— Farewell • Honore de Balzac

... of evils for which I can see no remedy, and as a matter of common experience they apparently never are remedied. Good steering and careful seamanship are immensely important; but of what use are they if one is caught in a tornado or maelstrom, or wedged in among rocks, so that going to pieces is only a question of time? Good seamanship ought to keep one from such a fate, it may be said. So it does in the majority of instances; but often the ...
— A Face Illumined • E. P. Roe

... thickness of the spring jam, but it was sharp enough to cut our canoe, and we poled our way far oftener than we paddled. Where the currents of the two rivers joined, the wind had whipped the waters to a maelstrom. The night was moonless. It was well we did not see the white turmoil, else M. Radisson had had a mutiny on his hands. When the canoe leaped to the throb of the sucking currents like a cataract to the plunge, La Chesnaye clapped his pole athwart and called out ...
— Heralds of Empire - Being the Story of One Ramsay Stanhope, Lieutenant to Pierre Radisson in the Northern Fur Trade • Agnes C. Laut

... being dashed to utter destruction, I do not know. I remember our little craft creaked and groaned, as if its joints were breaking. It rocked and staggered to and fro as if clutched by some fierce undertow of whirlpool or maelstrom. ...
— The Smoky God • Willis George Emerson

... I must explain how I came to be without money in mine, so soon after arriving in Paris, where so much of the article is necessary. My woes all arise from vanity. That is the rock, that is the quicksand, that is the maelstrom. I presume you don't know anybody else who is afflicted with that complaint? If you do, I'll but teach you how to tell my story, and that will cure him; or, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 102, April, 1866 • Various

... enveloping the lower part of the procession, till the black heads and waving arms emerged as if from a maelstrom. The thunder of the drums was like the thunder of a cataract in which the singers, disappearing towards the village, seemed to be ...
— The Garden Of Allah • Robert Hichens

... shoulders came into view above the little whirlpool caused by the sinking bodies' suction. And, at the same moment, the convulsed features of Homer Wefers showed through the eddy. The man was thrashing and twisting in a way that turned the lake around him into a white maelstrom. ...
— Further Adventures of Lad • Albert Payson Terhune

... information. You have the ability, have you also the inclination, to aid a poor, weary mariner on the voyage of life, (in the steerage,) who has been buffeted by reason, tempest-tossed by imagination, becalmed by fancy, wrecked by stupidity, (other people's,) and is now whirling helplessly in the Maelstrom of conundrums? (If that doesn't touch your heart, then has language failed to accomplish the end for which ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 15, July 9, 1870 • Various

... ever since he could remember,—that he failed to respond to her welcome and the simple congratulations she felt forced to repeat. He could neither speak the commonplace, nor listen to it. This was his crucial hour. He must find support here, or yield hopelessly to the maelstrom in whose whirl he ...
— Initials Only • Anna Katharine Green

... toward its own laws and its own ideals—without courage to enforce them, without conscience to change them, the United States presents the spectacle of a Nation drifting aimlessly, so far as this vital, National problem is concerned, upon the sea of irresolution, toward the maelstrom ...
— The Wife of his Youth and Other Stories of the Color Line, and - Selected Essays • Charles Waddell Chesnutt

... leaped into the gangway so ferociously that the pirates scrambled over the side, brown men and white, preferring to take their chances in the sea. As he charged on, I lost sight of him in the maelstrom of struggling figures. On my left a Lascar was fighting for his life against one of our new crew. On every side men were ...
— The Mutineers • Charles Boardman Hawes

... in an emotional maelstrom that swept her towards a cataract. The cataract might inspire her with dread, standing as it did for death and disaster, but the maelstrom was not to be resisted. She was helpless in it, unequal to breasting such strong waters, she who in all her futile, charming life had been borne snugly ...
— The Snare • Rafael Sabatini

... the Maelstrom, on the 26th of April, the ship, putting for the cape, by reason of bad weather and south-west winds, perceived signals of distress made by a schooner to the leeward. This schooner, deprived of its mizzen-mast, was running towards ...
— A Winter Amid the Ice - and Other Thrilling Stories • Jules Verne

... long intervals developed here and there in the mass—eddies that not impossibly might widen at any time with perilous quickness to the maelstrom of a stampede. So as he rode Bunt sang to these great brutes, literally to put them to sleep—sang an old grandmother's song, with all the quaint modulations of sixty, seventy, a ...
— A Deal in Wheat - And Other Stories of the New and Old West • Frank Norris

... brown arm shot over my shoulder and the whistle was dashed from my grasp. Then came a whirl of maelstrom fighting with Smith and myself ever sinking lower amid a whirlpool, as it seemed, of blood-lustful eyes, yellow fangs, and ...
— The Return of Dr. Fu-Manchu • Sax Rohmer

... there was something doing every minute and not enough minutes in a working day to accommodate half of these somethings. What more natural, therefore, than that Cappy presently should find himself caught in the maelstrom, even though he told himself daily that, come what might he ...
— Cappy Ricks Retires • Peter B. Kyne

... thousand dollars a month writing serials for Hitch's;' 'Smith sold two novels on synopsis for thirty thousand dollars;' 'Green's signed up with Tagwicks for four years at two thousand dollars a month writing problem novels.' Into the maelstrom of 'Dollars, Dollars, Dollars,' the sensitive brains of all America were drifting, throwing overboard ideals and aspirations in order to keep ...
— The Parts Men Play • Arthur Beverley Baxter

... some almost forgotten lumber lands that his father had failed to heave into the Confederate maelstrom. Perhaps it had come a little soon for the very best upbuilding of the character of David Kildare, but he had stood shoulder to shoulder with them all in the fight for the establishment of the new order of things and his generosity with himself and his wealth had been superb. The ...
— Andrew the Glad • Maria Thompson Daviess

... "I have prayed night after night to God to relieve my necessities; I have walked the town through and through in the effort to procure work, but my prayers have been unanswered, and my efforts have proven unavailing. At times the thought of the maelstrom of woe into which I am plunged, has well nigh driven me to madness. My brain has seemed on fire, and the shrieks of the maniac would have been heard resounding through the walls of this room, but ...
— The Trials of the Soldier's Wife - A Tale of the Second American Revolution • Alex St. Clair Abrams

... had given her a letter to Miss Carter, who in turn had given her a tea— and as her husband was brilliant, accomplished, and of the best blood of Louisiana, the little set, tenaciously clinging to its traditional exclusiveness amidst the whirling ever-changing particles of the political maelstrom, found no fault in him beyond his calling. And as he was a man of tact and never mentioned politics in its presence, and as his wife was not at home to the public on the first Tuesday of the month, reserving that day for such of her friends as shunned ...
— Senator North • Gertrude Atherton

... the South, And maelstrom in the sea; Say, Jesus Christ of Nazareth, Hast thou no arm ...
— Poems: Three Series, Complete • Emily Dickinson

... my share of the holiday spirit; I have had a social holiday, a moral holiday, a business holiday. I have gone a-fishing while others were struggling and groaning and losing their souls in the great social or political or business maelstrom. I know, too, I have gone a-fishing while others have labored in the slums and given their lives to the betterment of their fellows. But I have been a good fisherman, and I should have made a poor missionary, or reformer, or leader of any crusade against sin and crime. I am not a fighter, I ...
— Our Friend John Burroughs • Clara Barrus

... preferential tariff reduction of from twenty-five to thirty-three per cent. on British goods which the Laurier government later introduced, and she had established her right to negotiate commercial treaties with foreign powers independent of the Mother Country. By 1907 she was in the very maelstrom of the maddest real estate boom and immigration flood tide that a sane ...
— The Canadian Commonwealth • Agnes C. Laut

... looking back into his. In those eyes, big and brown beneath dark, arched brows and long lashes, there was a look that thrilled him to his soul. She was more beautiful than any woman he had seen through all the splendor of the night, and she had flashed to him a spark of kindness in a maelstrom of misery! Was this the girl who had ...
— The She Boss - A Western Story • Arthur Preston Hankins

... which required long hours of coaxing, during which he tossed restlessly, a prey to those hideous nightmares that lurk on the border-land of dreams. His distorted imagination flung him again and again into the agonizing maelstrom of the last thirty-six hours, and in his waking moments the gaunt spectre of failure haunted him. This was no new apparition, but never before had it appeared so horrible as now. He was too worn out to rave, his ...
— The Silver Horde • Rex Beach

... a balloon, as a ball might be carried on the summit of a waterspout, had been taken into the circling movement of a column of air and had traversed space at the rate of ninety miles an hour, turning round and round as if seized by some aerial maelstrom. ...
— The Mysterious Island • Jules Verne



Words linked to "Maelstrom" :   vortex, current, whirlpool, stream, Charybdis



Copyright © 2024 Diccionario ingles.com