"Mire" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Punahou. He had sat at meat with lords and chiefs and the high representatives of alien powers who protected the interests of traders and missionaries. Such had been Kapalei. But now, as Koolau had said, he was a hunted rat, a creature outside the law, sunk so deep in the mire of human horror that he was above the law as well as beneath it. His face was featureless, save for gaping orifices and for the lidless eyes that ...
— The House of Pride • Jack London
... increase in number, make this city poorer, morally and spiritually; they drag it down and down into the mire. This is not American civilization; it is the rottenness of Gomorrah. This is not Democracy—it is savagery. It shows the glutton hunt for the Dollar with no thought for aught else under the sun or over the earth. It is decadence of the spirit in ...
— Architecture and Democracy • Claude Fayette Bragdon
... ones 'tis a character we never shall want. Oh! it infests the court, the camp, the cabinet; it infests the Church. Go where you will, in every quarter, in every profession, you see a Shimei following the wheels of the fortunate through thick mire and clay. Haste, Shimei, haste! or thou wilt be undone forever. Shimei girdeth up his loins and speedeth after him. Behold the hand which governs everything takes the wheel from his chariot, so that he who driveth, driveth on ...
— Sterne • H.D. Traill
... your son)—Ver. 898. "Mire finxit." He sarcastically uses the same word, "fingo," which Chremes himself ...
— The Comedies of Terence - Literally Translated into English Prose, with Notes • Publius Terentius Afer, (AKA) Terence
... the clouds had discharged their burden, and, meanwhile, the dust on the road became kneaded into mire, and the horses' task of pulling the britchka heavier and heavier. Also, Chichikov had taken alarm at his continued failure to catch sight of Sobakevitch's country house. According to his calculations, it ought to have been reached long ago. He gazed about him on every side, but the ...
— Dead Souls • Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol
... The all-powerful and terrible mystery will not be defied. It produces result. You are here. Do I dare to lose caste? Yes. Do I dare to be your mistress—your concubine—your slave—your chattel? Joyfully. Gwynplaine, I am woman. Woman is clay longing to become mire. I want to despise myself. That lends a zest to pride. The alloy of greatness is baseness. They combine in perfection. Despise me, you who are despised. Nothing can be better. Degradation on degradation. What joy! I pluck the double blossom of ignominy. Trample ...
— The Man Who Laughs • Victor Hugo
... sudden discovery that his friends at Rome were almost powerless to help him. They could not parade a question of principle when it came to persons; a kingdom in Numidia was more easily defended than its king; every act of assistance which they rendered plunged them deeper in the mire of suspicion; it was a time to walk warily, for those who had no judge in their own conscience found one in the keen scrutiny of a hostile world. But the danger was too great to permit Jugurtha to relax his efforts through the failure of his friends. He appealed to his own ...
— A History of Rome, Vol 1 - During the late Republic and early Principate • A H.J. Greenidge
... home to Fremont, wet with rain and splashed with mire, for it was thawing fast and he had ridden far. He sloughed off his outer garments, and turned to Breckenridge, who had been waiting him, ...
— The Cattle-Baron's Daughter • Harold Bindloss
... "clothed in soft raiment"! They shrink from the rough fustian, the labourer's cotton smock, the leather suit of George Fox. They are ultra-"finicky." They are afraid of the mire. They touch the sorrows of the world with a timid finger, not with the kindly, healing grasp of ...
— My Daily Meditation for the Circling Year • John Henry Jowett
... about the question; he would keep his hands clean anyhow, retrench his social work, abandon the types of cocoa involved, and pass by on the other side. But indeed I do not believe we came into the mire of life simply to hold our hands up out of it. Messrs. Cadbury follow a better line; they keep their business going, and exert themselves in every way to let light into the secrets of Portuguese East Africa and ...
— First and Last Things • H. G. Wells
... anything more about it," Sommers answered, closing his lips firmly. "It is part of the mire; we must avert ...
— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick
... the very ditch and dust of degradation and take her in his arms. I never saw a man stand at the shore where she had been morally wrecked, waiting for the waves to bring back even her corpse to his arms but I have seen woman do it. I have seen woman with her white arms lift man from the mire of degradation, and hold him to her bosom as though ...
— Lectures of Col. R. G. Ingersoll, Volume I • Robert Green Ingersoll
... persuading himself that she would not dare refuse when the deeds were recorded in court, and he held them in his hand;—and very few women would have been brave enough, too; he did not know My Miriam! I can fancy the poor horse lashed through the heavy mire, tired, foaming, panting, while his strong arm urged it on, with whip and spur; I can hear the exulting beating of his heart, that wild refrain that was raging as his death-knell—"Mine! Mine at last!" ...
— A Confederate Girl's Diary • Sarah Morgan Dawson
... jealous lest he be thought better than other men,—lest he seem to stand apart from even criminals and offenders. When the passion for human brotherhood is upon him, he is balked by nothing; he goes down into the social mire to find his lovers and equals. In the pride of our morality and civic well-being, this phase of his work shocks us; but there are moods when the soul says it is good, and we rejoice in the strong ...
— Whitman - A Study • John Burroughs
... the mirage will depart when real water comes, dust and sand-pillars will be no longer to be seen, and all the nine horses and mules of the diligence-team, floundering, splashing, and kicking, will hardly keep the heavy coach from settling down inextricably in the mire. And so on until October, and then the season of water, "la estacion de las aguas," will cease, and things will be ...
— Anahuac • Edward Burnett Tylor
... doubted his word and the village burst into joy. Women, for they were the worst sufferers gave thanks, both silently and aloud. Henry took Ross, Sol and others to the valley in the forest, where the savages had kept their war camp. Here they had soaked in the mire during the storm, and all about were signs of their hasty flight, the ground being littered with bones of deer, ...
— The Young Trailers - A Story of Early Kentucky • Joseph A. Altsheler
... who dined without forks, and thought pewter dishes too great a luxury to be used in common by the highest nobility; who transported their ladies on pillions for want of coaches, and themselves struggled through mire for want of pavements; who, with a knowledge of the manufacture of glass, and possessed beyond ourselves of an exquisite skill in coloring it, were yet too frugal or careless to use it freely in ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, April 1844 - Volume 23, Number 4 • Various
... of the bosky grove and the clouded sky without. The glass was now blankly white, opaque, sheeted with ice, and only the wind gave token how the storm raged. It was indeed a wild night for a drive of fifty miles through a mountain wilderness, over roads sodden with the late rains, the deep mire corrugated into ruts by the wheels of travel ...
— The Ordeal - A Mountain Romance of Tennessee • Charles Egbert Craddock
... as ardently devoted and valiantly true to Emmy as ever. I felt a desire to shield her with my life against the baseness of this world and let my body serve her as a bridge across the earthly pool of mire. And higher than ever, I held her image above every profaning thought. I considered it a sacrilege to think of her as one of the thousand females about me and to confound my love with the wooing and wedding of the rest ...
— The Bride of Dreams • Frederik van Eeden
... Taunt me with my mortality? "Weak things, Brought forth from earth,"—"Poor simple child of clay,"— These are thy words, when well thou knows't that I, Though bound to earth by bonds made of its mire, Am mightier than thou. Were it not so, Thou would'st not now be face to face with one Of mortal birth. Thou, too, canst feel revenge, And knowest how to wreak it; but, take heed,— The power which brought thee hither, can, and may Deal harshly with thee. If thou knowest aught ...
— Mazelli, and Other Poems • George W. Sands
... from the simplest to the sublimest! He turned back to the biography; he read on; he saw the proud, daring, mournful spirit alone in the Great City, like himself. He followed its dismal career, he saw it falling with bruised and soiled wings into the mire. He turned again to the later works, wrung forth as tasks for bread,—the satires without moral grandeur, the politics without honest faith. He shuddered and sickened as he read. True, even here his ...
— My Novel, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... hunting man now, and I sit by the fire, And whenever the wind keens around by the byre, I shiver and rock like a reed that has root in the mire. ...
— Sprays of Shamrock • Clinton Scollard
... and Rose were pulling off fence-rails and dragging them to the edge of the swamp. Then, while Rose brought more, Russ began to lay the rails on the quivering mire, side by side but about a foot apart, the ends of the first row of rails being only a few inches from the side of ...
— Six Little Bunkers at Cowboy Jack's • Laura Lee Hope
... are now following, that they may take and slay him?—'Why should your rider turn his bridle our way?' say you in your hearts; 'we will none of him; if we may help ourselves, we will rather turn us to wallow in the mire of monarchy, with the sow that was washed but newly.' Come, men of Woodstock, I will ask, and do you answer me. Hunger ye still after the flesh-pots of the monks of Godstow? and ye will say, Nay;—but wherefore, except that the pots are cracked ...
— Woodstock; or, The Cavalier • Sir Walter Scott
... quick up flew, and kicked the beam, Which Gabriel spying, thus bespake the Fiend. Satan, I know thy strength, and thou knowest mine; Neither our own, but given: What folly then To boast what arms can do? since thine no more Than Heaven permits, nor mine, though doubled now To trample thee as mire: For proof look up, And read thy lot in yon celestial sign; Where thou art weighed, and shown how light, how weak, If thou resist. The Fiend looked up, and knew His mounted scale aloft: Nor more; but fled Murmuring, and with him ...
— Paradise Lost • John Milton
... analysis as in everything these days, personal sense of achievement had been too unsubtly annihilated. Recalling his just completed task—the Citizen Files and persona-tapes and the endless annotating—Beardsley felt himself sinking still further into that mire of futility that encompassed neither excitement ...
— We're Friends, Now • Henry Hasse
... seat. "Lady!" he cried, "Lady! whom I serve and whom I have loved from a child, thy brain is sick, and not thy heart. Thou canst not love him. Dost thou not remember that thou art Queen of Khem and Pharaoh's wife? Wilt thou throw thy honour in the mire to be trampled by a ...
— The World's Desire • H. Rider Haggard and Andrew Lang
... themselves to tread these tortuous ways, to stoop, to cringe, and creep through the mire of these cloacas, where the presence of a fine mind only alarmed the other denizens. The ambitious man of genius grows old in obtaining his triple crown; he does not follow in the steps of Sixtus the Fifth merely to become head of a bureau. No one comes or stays in the government offices but ...
— Bureaucracy • Honore de Balzac
... should not have lost our North American Colonies, or have got plunged over head and ears in debt as we are, alack! already; and now, with war raging and all the world in arms against us, getting deeper and deeper into the mire." Without holding my worthy principal in such deep admiration as our head clerk evidently did, I had a most sincere regard and ...
— James Braithwaite, the Supercargo - The Story of his Adventures Ashore and Afloat • W.H.G. Kingston
... Buey, an old name given to the head of a large marsh, which extends from Bahia Blanca. Here we changed horses, and passed through some leagues of swamps and saline marshes. Changing horses for the last time, we again began wading through the mud. My animal fell and I was well soused in black mire — a very disagreeable accident when one does not possess a change of clothes. Some miles from the fort we met a man, who told us that a great gun had been fired, which is a signal that Indians are near. ...
— The Voyage of the Beagle • Charles Darwin
... said than done. Comparative strangers as yet to the country surrounding Bellwood, even when they had got on solid ground out of the muck and mire of the boggy waste, they knew not which way ...
— The Boys of Bellwood School • Frank V. Webster
... you come, dear Dean, Your humble friend to entertain, Through dirt and mire along the street, You find no scraper for your feet; At which you stamp and storm and swell, Which serves to clean your feet as well. By steps ascending to the hall, All torn to rags by boys and ball, With scatter'd fragments on the floor; A sad, uneasy parlour door, Besmear'd with chalk, ...
— Poems (Volume II.) • Jonathan Swift
... salt meadow or marsh to the kill, which was full half an hour's distance; but when we came to the canoe, the ebb tide was still running strong, and we required the flood. The canoe lay in a bend of a small creek, and it was impossible to get it out of this bight and over the mire, except at high water, which would not take place until evening. We were, therefore, brought to a stand, whether to proceed in the evening, to which we were not much inclined, or await until the next morning, which was too much of a delay ...
— Journal of Jasper Danckaerts, 1679-1680 • Jasper Danckaerts
... from very different motives, had fought the marriage bill of 1753. The thought that stirred him was indicated in a phrase or two to his wife at Hawarden: 'July 31.—Parliamentary affairs are very black; the poor church gets deeper and deeper into the mire. I am to speak to-night; it will do no good; and the fear grows upon me from year to year that when I finally leave parliament, I shall not leave the great question of state and church better, but perhaps even worse, than I ...
— The Life of William Ewart Gladstone, Vol. 1 (of 3) - 1809-1859 • John Morley
... Who could be the wife of demons, and know the seed whose fruit is monstrous? Or who would fain share her couch with a barbarous giant? Who caresses thorns with her fingers? Who would mingle honest kisses with mire? Who would unite shaggy limbs to smooth ones which correspond not? Full ease of love cannot be taken when nature cries out against it: nor doth the love customary in the use of women ...
— The Danish History, Books I-IX • Saxo Grammaticus ("Saxo the Learned")
... never preened her wings, and thought all the world lay before her, and she could fly as straight as any lark of them all, and catch as many flies as any swallow? Ay, nor she never tumbled off into the mire, and found she could not fly a bit, and all the insects went darting past her as safe as if she were a dead leaf? Eh, my lassies, this would be a poor world, if it were all. I have seen something of it, though you thought not, likely enough. But flowers are flowers, and dirt is ...
— Out in the Forty-Five - Duncan Keith's Vow • Emily Sarah Holt
... width, and sixteen inches deep. I started off with two 2nd Corps motor-cyclists. There was an almost continuous line of transport on the road—motor-lorries that did not dare deviate an inch from the centre of the road for fear of slipping into the mire, motor ambulances, every kind of transport, and some infantry battalions. After following a column of motor-lorries a couple of miles—we stuck twice in trying to get past the rearmost lorry—we tried the road by Dranoutre ...
— Adventures of a Despatch Rider • W. H. L. Watson
... exiled from heaven!" thought the tall stranger. "Which of us all has a right to undeceive him? Not I—I, who am so often lifted by some magic spell so far above the earth; I who am dedicate to God; I who am a mystery to myself. Have I not already seen the fairest of the angels dwelling in this mire? Is this child more or less crazed than I am? Has he taken a bolder step in the way of faith? He believes, and his belief no doubt will lead him into some path of light like that in which I walk. But though he is as beautiful as an angel, is he not too feeble to stand ...
— The Exiles • Honore de Balzac
... Lee's right flank. June 8, the battle of Cold Harbor followed this movement. The Union forces were shot down in the mire and brush by Lee's troops, now snugly in out of the wet, behind the Cold Harbor defences. One historian says that in twenty minutes ten thousand Yankee troops were killed; though Badeau, whose accuracy in counting dead has always been perfectly marvellous, admits ...
— Comic History of the United States • Bill Nye
... too, where there is no sense of education, think of the children dragging weary feet from the filthy hovels that still house peasants the whole world over, to work in the mire and the pitiless winds, scaring birds, bending down to plant and weed. Even in London again, think just a little of the real significance of some facts I have happened upon in the Report of the Education Committee of the London County Council for ...
— New Worlds For Old - A Plain Account of Modern Socialism • Herbert George Wells
... seemes but a dreaming dolt, Still walking like a ragged Colt, 290 And oft out of a Bush doth bolt, Of purpose to deceiue vs. And leading vs makes vs to stray, Long Winters nights out of the way, And when we stick in mire and clay, Hob doth with laughter ...
— Minor Poems of Michael Drayton • Michael Drayton
... yet paved, so if the sun shone two days continuously, they turned to powder which covered everything. But let it rain a day, you had a mire, reflecting at night the shifting lamps of the carriages and bespattering the foot-passengers on the narrow walks. How many women had lost their embroidered slippers in ...
— An Eagle Flight - A Filipino Novel Adapted from Noli Me Tangere • Jose Rizal
... pumped Jack made him laugh; but he assured them he was just about as "deep in the mud as they were in the mire." ...
— Air Service Boys Over The Enemy's Lines - The German Spy's Secret • Charles Amory Beach
... loved to dwell; and it was in reference to these that he collected. If the book were the one desired by him, no anxiety and toil, no payable price, was to be grudged for its acquisition. If the book were an inch out of his own line, it might be trampled in the mire for aught he cared, be it as rare or costly ...
— The Book-Hunter - A New Edition, with a Memoir of the Author • John Hill Burton
... hunde dschinawe duge gole dui trin Lawinser mire zelle gowe, har geas mange an demaro foro de demare Birengerenser. Har weum me stildo gage lean demare Birengere mr lowe dele, de har weum biro gage lean jon man dran o stilibin bri, de mangum me mr lowe lender, gai deum dele. Jon pendin len wellen geg mander. Gai me deum miro lowe lende, naste ...
— The English Gipsies and Their Language • Charles G. Leland
... whom nevermore we wrestle down, Thou Fury of this home, how oft and oft Thou dost descry what far aloof is laid, Yea, from afar dost bend th' unerring bow And rendest from my wretchedness its friends; As now Orestes—who, a brief while since, Safe from the mire of death stood warily,— Was the home's hope to cure th' exulting wrong; Now thou ordainest, ...
— The House of Atreus • AEschylus
... that the heat of day is best, Flat on his belly in the pit's much mire, With elbows wide, fists clenched to prop his chin, And, while he kicks both feet in the cool slush, And feels about his spine small eft-things course, Run in and out each arm, and make him laugh: And while above ...
— Browning's Shorter Poems • Robert Browning
... can think up," Dolly answered. "Warren Wilks reads all the philosophical and scientific magazines, and he fairly floors us—there I go again; when I talk I either grab the stars or stick my nose in the mire. I mean that Warren's subjects are generally abstruse ...
— The Desired Woman • Will N. Harben
... chastity, but chaste thou wilt not be; Abstraction is thy faith, but void thou may'st not see; Thy precious, gemlike self will, pitiful to say, Into the mundane mire collapse at length ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book I • Cao Xueqin
... own grounds. At Castelnau de Montmirail, near Cahors, the head of one of two brothers, De Ballud, was cut off and the blood left to drip upon the face of the surviving brother; the Comtesse de la Mire was seized in her own house by the peasants and her arms cut to pieces; M. Guillin was slain, roasted, and eaten before the eyes of his wife. At Bordeaux the Abbes de Longovian and Dupuy were beheaded and their heads carried about on ...
— France and the Republic - A Record of Things Seen and Learned in the French Provinces - During the 'Centennial' Year 1889 • William Henry Hurlbert
... brutal passion. It is needless for me to speak plainer ladies. There is a passage of Scripture which reads as follows: 'The dog has returned to his vomit, and the sow that was washed is wallowing in the mire.' The young mother brought the child to Wilmington, gave her to me, and disappeared. Molly was then about four years old. Those who knew of me and my affairs know how carefully I raised the girl. She graduated from Hampton with honors, has a fair musical education, ...
— Hanover; Or The Persecution of the Lowly - A Story of the Wilmington Massacre. • David Bryant Fulton
... know, don't know anything these days except that I'm down—down; down in the mire, deep!" It was the end, the last crumb of confidence, and Armstrong leaped to his feet. "But what's the use of dissecting any more, what possible use?" His hat was in his hand and he was heading for the ...
— The Dominant Dollar • Will Lillibridge
... I though deluges down pour Beating earth to mire, Though heaven shattering with the thunder's roar Scorcheth now in fire, Though every planet molten from its place Should ...
— My Beautiful Lady. Nelly Dale • Thomas Woolner
... day the legions, posted on the wings, whether from perverseness or fear, deserted their post and took sudden possession of a field beyond the bogs; neither did Arminius fall straight upon them, though they lay open to assault; but when the baggage was set fast in the mire and ditches, the soldiers about it in disorder, the order of the standards confounded, and—as usual at such a time—each man acting hastily for himself, when the ears are slow to catch the word of command, he then commanded his Germans to charge, exclaiming vehemently, ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 03 • Various
... persistent for over three years in trying to hunt down the tricky woman, who had imposed upon Justin Cutler, and it was a bitter pill for him to swallow, to discover, just as he believed himself to be on the verge of success, that he was only getting deeper into the mire. ...
— True Love's Reward • Mrs. Georgie Sheldon
... and we pushed on once more until we came to a little village called Braine something, and there we stopped; and time too, for a sudden thunderstorm broke over us, and a plump of rain that turned all the roads and the fields into bog and mire. We got into the barns at this village for shelter, and there we found two stragglers—one from a kilted regiment, and the other a man of the German Legion, who had a tale to tell that was as dreary as ...
— The Great Shadow and Other Napoleonic Tales • Arthur Conan Doyle
... Tropics, doesn't entirely approve of work. What he did at Ahloon on the morning of my visit he did with infinite deliberation, and he stopped much to rest between tugs. Also when some enormous log, thirty or forty feet long and two or three feet thick, was given him to pull through the mire, he would roar mightily at each hard place, getting down on his knees sometimes to use his strength to better advantage, and one could hardly escape the conclusion that at times he "cussed" in violent Elephantese. The king of ...
— Where Half The World Is Waking Up • Clarence Poe
... brute force, was guilty of mixing himself up in this vulgar squabble which had led to such an ignominious end. The disgrace of it, too, was hard to bear; keenly sensitive as he was, and with an abhorrence of anything like brawls of any sort, he felt as though he was dragged through mire. Of course the unions took up their case and promised to defend them. They had a large amount of money at their disposal in the union funds, and they promised that the best legal advice obtainable should be employed in their behalf. As I have said, feeling ran very ...
— The Day of Judgment • Joseph Hocking
... we paused, sandwich in hand, to consider what would come of that resolution of Wickedness in boots, to sever Innocence in flowered chintz from Honest Industry in striped stockings. When the curtain fell for the night, we still fell back upon sandwich, to help us through the rain and mire, and home ...
— The Uncommercial Traveller • Charles Dickens
... dreaming I seem to be an entirely different person—a low, vulgar creature proud of the brutal strength and coarseness of her man. I seem to be a part of this human beast! When I wake up I feel as if my soul had been stained, dragged in the mire, almost lost. It seems as if I could never again feel any self-respect. Oh, doctor," Penelope's voice broke and the tears filled her eyes, "you must help me! I cannot bear this torture any longer! What can I do to escape from such ...
— Possessed • Cleveland Moffett
... hovers about to catch a peep of me now and then; I suppose the little sharper is angling for a few more sixpences. But this would have been, in Joshua's eyes, a return of the washed sow to wallowing in the mire, and I resolved, while I remained his guest, to spare him so violent a shock to his prejudices. The next point was, to shorten the time of my proposed stay; but, alas! that I felt to be equally impossible. I had named a week; and however rashly my promise had been pledged, it must be held ...
— Redgauntlet • Sir Walter Scott
... Popolo and through its open gates the via Flaminia stretching straight to the north across the free Campagna was discernible. With that sight I comprehended Caterina's intention and at the same instant the boy-girl Giovanni let fall the Borgia emblem, which was instantly trampled in the mire by the mob, and snatching the banner bearing the Medici balls from his sister's hand he waved it triumphantly in its proper position, crying "Palle, ...
— Romance of Roman Villas - (The Renaissance) • Elizabeth W. (Elizbeth Williams) Champney
... emitted smoke or steam all the day, and the volcano was unusually furious, insomuch that the air was loaded with its ashes. The rain which fell at this time was a compound of water, sand, and earth; so that it properly might be called showers of mire. Whichever way the wind was, we were plagued with the ashes; unless it blew very strong indeed from the opposite direction. Notwithstanding the natives seemed well enough satisfied with the few expeditions we had made in the neighbourhood, they were ...
— A Voyage Towards the South Pole and Round the World Volume 2 • James Cook
... was sure the order had not passed through his office, and that the humanity of his late majesty would not have permitted him to sanction so satanic a measure. But Chatham was now floundering in the mire, and the more he endeavoured to extricate himself, the deeper he got into it. The fallacy of this pretence was exposed by Lord Suffolk, who said, that all instructions to governors and commanders-in-chief necessarily ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... meditation, the colossal pillars of the audience chamber of the Deity! The Mount of Contemplation rises far above the mists of partial opinion and the mire of conflict, the discords of jangling interests and the refractions of divided policies, girt by a serene and sublime horizon, and within hearing ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. 5, Issue 2, February, 1864 • Various
... Would to God a man like the great-hearted, pure-bodied Milton, a man whom young men are compelled to respect, would in this our age, utter such a word as, making "mad the guilty," if such grace might be accorded them, would "appal the free," lest they too should fall into such a mire of ...
— Annals of a Quiet Neighbourhood • George MacDonald
... going minutely over a path so long since trodden to mire as the life of Swift, let us expend a page or two in seeking to form some estimate of his character and genius. It is refreshing to come upon a new thing in the world, even though it be a strange or ...
— Specimens with Memoirs of the Less-known British Poets, Complete • George Gilfillan
... renders a man (homo) blessed, but the emulation of wives contending for the honor of the first place in the husband's favor?" As he said this, a man entered into the women's apartment and opened the two doors; whence there issued a libidinous effluvium, which had a stench like mire; this arose from polygamical love, which is connubial, and at the same time adulterous; so I rose and shut the doors. Afterwards I said, "How can you subsist upon this earth, when you are void of any love truly conjugial, ...
— The Delights of Wisdom Pertaining to Conjugial Love • Emanuel Swedenborg
... reading slowly, Noting every trace around, Of the travel gone before him, Every mark upon the ground, Down the winding, deep-cut roadway Furrowed out by grinding tire, Where the ruts lead to the water, In the half-dried plastic mire, He beholds the telltale marking Of an odd-shaped band of steel, Welded to secure the fellies Of old ...
— Nancy MacIntyre • Lester Shepard Parker
... rooms and dressed, sad, thoughtful, and dispirited. The world of Paris was like an ocean of mud for him just then; and it seemed that whoever set foot in that black mire must needs sink into it up to ...
— Father Goriot • Honore de Balzac
... army within the lines of the place. In furtherance of this plan, Porter himself, with a large body of his ships, ran the batteries at Vicksburg on the night of April 16. The fleet then kept pace with the necessarily slow progress of the army, encumbered with trains, through the roads heavy with the mire of the recent overflow. On the 29th of April the Mississippi squadron fought a sharp engagement with the Confederate batteries at Grand Gulf, which they could not reduce; and the following day Grant's ...
— Admiral Farragut • A. T. Mahan
... angel. Had he only died to her, still the angel smile would have survived and warned. But the man had not died; the angel itself had deceived; the wings could uphold her no more,—they had touched the mire, and were sullied with the soil; with the stain, was forfeited the strength. All was deceit and hollowness and treachery. Lone again in the universe rose the eternal I. So down into the abyss she looked, depth upon depth, and the ...
— Lucretia, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... emerged on the topmost rung, having become one Ruth, pure, and fair, and divine, and with power to make him know love, and to aspire toward purity, and to desire to taste divinity—him, Martin Eden, who, too, had come up in some amazing fashion from out of the ruck and the mire and the countless mistakes and abortions of unending creation. There was the romance, and the wonder, and the glory. There was the stuff to write, if he could only find speech. Saints in heaven!—They were only ...
— Martin Eden • Jack London
... we must either have spoiled our trick, or else have let ourselves be mauled by the rude yokel, from whose conduct one can learn how haughty and overbearing such people become when they suddenly rise from the mire to a station of worth and honor. If I had, in an unlucky moment, impersonated a secretary myself, I might have got a thrashing, and the whole affair would have been a failure, for people would have laughed more at me than at the peasant. We had better let him sleep ...
— Comedies • Ludvig Holberg
... kindly ale-houses to rest his legs in. But that day it rained as if the floodgates of heaven had opened. When I crossed Clyde by the bridge at Hyndford the water was swirling up to the key-stone. The ways were a foot deep in mire, and about Carnwath the bog had overflowed and the whole neighbourhood swam in a loch. It was pitiful to see the hay afloat like water-weeds, and the green oats scarcely showing above the black floods. In two minutes after starting I was wet to the skin, and I thanked Providence ...
— Salute to Adventurers • John Buchan
... barefoot to lighten it, she even helped to coax a wheel up the further bank. At last we were saved from relapse. But that night our travelers' joy flickered and faded. We stuck grimly at a crossing; stuck at a mean little stream; there we found odds against us, both rocks and also deep mire. So we camped, leaving our wagon jammed ...
— Cinderella in the South - Twenty-Five South African Tales • Arthur Shearly Cripps
... just see the blaze of bonfires at Annapolis," groaned Douglass. "Say, the middies just fairly tore our scalps off. I always had an ambition to captain the Army eleven, but I never thought I'd be dragged down so deep under the mire!" ...
— Dick Prescotts's Fourth Year at West Point - Ready to Drop the Gray for Shoulder Straps • H. Irving Hancock
... wrong, there it is for ever, and all its horrible things with it—deceit, concealment, falsehood, subterfuge, pretence: vile and beastly things like that. I couldn't endure them; and I much less could endure thinking I had caused you to suffer them. And then on through that mire to dishonour.—It's easy, it sounds rather fine, to say the world well lost for love; but honour, honour's not well lost for anything. You ...
— If Winter Comes • A.S.M. Hutchinson
... ankle-deep in slush from the melted snow. This was his daily walk, he explained. An hour and a half down, in the chill twilight of dawn; two hours' trudge home, always up hill, dead tired, through mud and mire, in pitch darkness, often with snow and ...
— Alone • Norman Douglas
... that we could not pursue him, by which means he made his escape to the Shore badly wounded. I have observed buffalow floating down which I suppose must have been drounded in Crossing above. more or less of those animals drown or mire in passing this river. I observed Several floating buffalow on the R. Rochejhone imediately below where large gangues had Crossed. The wind blew hard all the after part of the day. I derected the men to dress their ...
— The Journals of Lewis and Clark • Meriwether Lewis et al
... And into every hayfield And through the swamp and mire Still Barney ran and ran and ran As ...
— Boys and Girls Bookshelf; a Practical Plan of Character Building, Volume I (of 17) - Fun and Thought for Little Folk • Various
... law; our pledge that, having no law, we have been eager to act lawfully as we might. The reign of lawlessness and terror must end in this country. We must contrive some machinery of the law which shall command respect. We must not continually drag the name of the South—the name of America— in the mire of lawlessness. To do that is to smirch the flag—the one flag of America. But we denounce and will always denounce that false decree which says that black is white; that inequality is equality; that lack of manhood is manhood itself; ...
— The Law of the Land • Emerson Hough
... undertaken many years after his entrance into Parliament, as the following curious political memorandum will prove:—"I like it no better for being from France—whence all ills come—altar of liberty, begrimed at once with blood and mire." ...
— Memoirs of the Life of the Rt. Hon. Richard Brinsley Sheridan V1 • Thomas Moore
... ensample to his shepe he yaf, [11] That first he wrought, and afterward he taught, Out of the gospel he the wordes caught, And this figure he added yet thereto, That if gold ruste, what should iren do. He sette not his benefice to hire, And lette [12] his shepe accombred [13] in the mire, And ran unto London unto Seint Poules, To seken him a chanterie for soules, Or with a brotherhede to be withold, But dwelt at home, and kepte wel his fold, So that the wolf ne made it not miscarie: He was a shepherd and no mercenarie; And though he holy were and vertuous, He was to sinful ...
— Literary Remains (1) • Coleridge
... she paid them no great attention, the surroundings had a depressing effect on her. There was, however, very little to see; the mass of the great elevators that cut against a lowering sky, the little cluster of houses, and the sea of churned-up mire between them and the track. There also appeared to be no station except a big water tank and a rather unsightly shed, about which stood a group of blurred and shapeless figures. It seemed very cold, and Agatha shivered as she felt the ...
— Hawtrey's Deputy • Harold Bindloss
... sensuality. Those who walk in it take appetite as their guide. Their main object in life is to gratify their physical desires. Some of them are delicate, and some of them are coarse. That is a matter of temperament. But all of them are hungry. That is a matter of principle. Whether they grub in the mire for their food like swine, or browse daintily upon the tree-tops like the giraffe, the question of life for those who follow this way is the same. "How much can we hold? How can we obtain the most pleasure for these five senses of ours before they wear out?" And the watchword of their journey is, ...
— Joy & Power • Henry van Dyke
... with the view of throwing more dust into the eyes of the police. Patience Crabstick had, of course, been one of the gang throughout, and she had now been allowed to go off with her mistress's money and lesser trinkets,—so that the world of Scotland Yard might be thrown more and more into the mire of ignorance and darkness of doubt. To this view Gager was altogether opposed. He was inclined to think that Lord George had taken the diamonds at Carlisle with Lizzie's connivance;—that he had restored them in London to her keeping, finding the suspicion against him too heavy to admit of his dealing ...
— The Eustace Diamonds • Anthony Trollope
... and soon in the slimy bottom, yards below, huge fat salamanders, long-lost and forgotten tadpoles as large as rats, gigantic toads, enormous flat beetles, all kinds of hairy, scaly, spiny, blear-eyed, bulbous, shapeless monsters without name, mud-colored offspring of the mire that had been sleeping there for hundreds of years, woke up, and crawled in and out, and wallowed and interwriggled, and devoured each other, like the great saurians and batrachians in my Manuel de Geologie Elementaire. Edition illustree a l'usage des enfants. Par Jules ...
— Peter Ibbetson • George du Marier et al
... o'er field and fell, Through muir and moss, and mony a mire; His spurs o' steel were sair to bide, And fra her fore-feet flew ...
— A Collection of Ballads • Andrew Lang
... no man's land. Their food the cattle's scorn, Their rest is mire and their desire ...
— Songs from Books • Rudyard Kipling
... which they rule, provoke, and move at the pleasure of their influences.] ... Of all creatures man is the most miserable and frail, and therewithal the proudest and disdainfullest. Who perceiveth himself placed here, amidst the filth and mire of the world ... and yet dareth imaginarily place himself above the circle of the Moon, and reduce heaven under his feet. It is through the vanity of the same imagination that he ...
— Montaigne and Shakspere • John M. Robertson
... laughed as the gay banners danced in air, where was it? Burned to the ground; only a sorry heap of ruin marked where once it stood. No more cotton bales came from the Sea Islands. First one army, then the other, had swept over the Beaufort plantation, trampling its fields into mire. It had been seized, confiscated, retaken, re-confiscated, sold to this person and that. Nobody knew exactly to whom it belonged nowadays; but it was not to little Annie, rightful heiress of all. Stripped of every thing, reduced to utter want, Mrs. Pickens and her daughter ...
— Nine Little Goslings • Susan Coolidge
... von Singer, an Austrian citizen and a man of great wealth, who lifted midgets out of the mental mire of being regarded as children and gave them their rightful place. The story is told that the baron became interested in little people through the pleadings of an invalid daughter. He invited several midgets to his home. Finding them agreeable and companionable, he founded a ...
— David Lannarck, Midget - An Adventure Story • George S. Harney
... mean? keep faith with her, with his wife? how else should he do it but by saving her from the wrath to come, by plucking her as a flower out of the mire? ...
— Marie • Laura E. Richards
... their highway to a rookery. After a search, an almost dry gulley bed was found to yield water when a pit was dug in its bed. This spot was some eighty yards from the beach and to reach it one traversed an area of tussocks between which sea elephants wallowed in soft mire. ...
— The Home of the Blizzard • Douglas Mawson
... compass all worlds! the same, endowed with this sentiment of pride, which drives me on to active exertion. My fate wavered whether I should become one such as these or whether I should rise into that circle which the world calls the higher. The mist-form did not sink down into the mire, but rose above into the high refreshing air. And am I become happy through this?" His eye stared upon the bright disk of the moon. Two large tears rolled over his pale cheeks. "Infinite Omnipotence! I acknowledge ...
— O. T. - A Danish Romance • Hans Christian Andersen
... bog, did he? said Berry, drawing his left leg out of some mire with a noise that made me shudder. Jill slid a warm arm into mine, ...
— The Brother of Daphne • Dornford Yates
... something disarranged. Some clamoured loud for armour lost; Some brawled and wrangled with the host; "By Becket's bones," cried one, "I fear That some false Scot has stol'n my spear!" Young Blount, Lord Marmion's second squire, Found his steed wet with sweat and mire; Although the rated horse-boy sware, Last night he dressed him sleek and fair. While chafed the impatient squire like thunder, Old Hubert shouts, in fear and wonder, "Help, gentle Blount! help, comrades all! Bevis lies dying in his stall: To Marmion ...
— Marmion: A Tale of Flodden Field • Walter Scott
... great In straps and buttons—haughtily silenced Paul, Hand-bound and sent him guarded to the camp, And the poor comrade shivering stood the watch Till dawn of day and I was made aware. Among the true were some vainglorious fools Called by the fife and drum from native mire To lord and strut in shoulder-straps and buttons. Scrubs, born to brush the boots of gentlemen, By sudden freak of fortune found themselves Masters of better men, and lorded it As only base and brutish natures can— Braves on parade and cowards ...
— The Feast of the Virgins and Other Poems • H. L. Gordon
... for the pacifying of a dying man, to the murmur and shuffle, which was a lie; and the lie burnt him, contributed to the brand on his race. He and his father upheld a solitary bare staff, where the Cambrian flag had flown, before their people had been trampled in mire, to do as the worms. His loathing of any shadow of the lie was a protest on behalf of Welsh blood against an English charge, besides the passion for spiritual cleanliness: without which was no comprehension, ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... of the Gridiron one thought alone occupied him. Murray McTavish had lied. He had lied deliberately to Bill Brudenell. He had made no attempt to save the boy from the mire into which he had helped to fling him. On the contrary, he had thrust him deeper and deeper into it. Why? What—what was the meaning of it all? Where were things heading? What purpose lay ...
— The Triumph of John Kars - A Story of the Yukon • Ridgwell Cullum
... and waves, yea all the billows and waves of the judgment of the holy God passed over Him. In another Psalm the Holy Spirit describes His agony. (Ps. lxix). There we read His cry "Save me, O God; for the waters are come in unto my soul. I sink in deep mire, where there is no standing; I am come into deep waters, where the floods overflow me. I am weary of my crying, my throat is dried; mine eyes fail while I wait for my God." And deeper He went for our sakes. The miry clay has a special ...
— The Lord of Glory - Meditations on the person, the work and glory of our Lord Jesus Christ • Arno Gaebelein
... island a peculiar ghostly appearance. The canoes soon grounded in the marsh grass, and, fastening them to paddles, stuck down in the mud, our hunters shouldered their fowling-pieces and trudged ahead through the mire. They had prepared themselves well for the trip and each wore a pair of rubber boots reaching to the hip drawn on over their rawhide boots ...
— The Boy Chums in the Forest - or Hunting for Plume Birds in the Florida Everglades • Wilmer M. Ely
... mule-team plodding through the Gallic mire for Catullus' graceful yacht speeding home from Asia, follows the original ...
— Vergil - A Biography • Tenney Frank
... our way, passing through every mire, running along the verge of every abyss; and we are the most ...
— The Temptation of St. Antony - or A Revelation of the Soul • Gustave Flaubert
... year innumerable earless blades of wheat rose from the bottom of the sea like a forest, catching up mud, mire, weed, and remains of animals, so that by and by a dune rose under water which stopped the ships from ...
— Legends of the Rhine • Wilhelm Ruland
... in the cities. There was nothing of the dandy about this fellow. From head to heel he was a man's son, full of the vim of living, strong with the lust of life. The sweat ran down his face, dirty with the dust kicked up by the cattle in the stockyard. His clothes were not guiltless of mire, for he had been knocked over more than once that morning, and there was an edge upon his voice as he rapped out his orders to the stockmen who were working with him. He did not look in the least ...
— Campaign Pictures of the War in South Africa (1899-1900) - Letters from the Front • A. G. Hales
... of female conquest, which began as soon as he had emancipated himself from his mother's apron strings, he left behind him a wake of ruined lives; not the least tragic of which was that of the lovely and foolish Henrietta Vernon, Countess Grosvenor, whom he dragged through the mire of the Divorce Court, only to fling her aside, a soiled and crushed flower of too ...
— Love Romances of the Aristocracy • Thornton Hall
... The Dialogue (Mire Festivus), which in the edition of 1710 occurs between the first and second parts of the Epistolae, bears especial marks of Hutten's manner, and is doubtless by him. The interlocutors are three ...
— Notes & Queries, No. 38, Saturday, July 20, 1850 • Various
... I did?" answered Fanny, who was disposed to have her associate as deep in the mud as she herself was in the mire; and she knew that it would be impossible to deny the fact when she exhibited the great roll of bills in ...
— Hope and Have - or, Fanny Grant Among the Indians, A Story for Young People • Oliver Optic
... upon the eastern. The plain, slowly heaving upwards, as smoothly as the beach of a watering-place, for the distance of a mile, until it culminated in a gentle and rounded ridge, presented none of those difficulties which troubled us on the other side. There were none of those cataclysms of mire and sloughs of black mud and over-tall grasses, none of that miasmatic jungle with its noxious emissions; it was just such a scene as one may find before an English mansion—a noble expanse of lawn and sward, with boscage sufficient to agreeably diversify it. After traversing the ...
— How I Found Livingstone • Sir Henry M. Stanley
... on every side of them the howling of wolves coming to eat them up. They scarce dared to speak or turn their heads. After this, it rained very hard, which wetted them to the skin; their feet slipped at every step they took, and they fell into the mire, whence they got up in a very dirty pickle; their ...
— The Blue Fairy Book • Various
... innumerable who will never have any home at all. Capitalists of America, build plain homes for the people. Let this tenement-house system, in which hundreds of thousands of the people of our cities are wallowing in the mire, be broken up by small homes, where people can have their own firesides and their own altar. In this great continent there is room enough for every man and woman to have a home. Morals and ...
— The Wedding Ring - A Series of Discourses for Husbands and Wives and Those - Contemplating Matrimony • T. De Witt Talmage
... con rapido vuelo; Goce la tierra durable consuelo; Mire a los hombres piadoso el Senor... page lxxv The 11-syllable line of ternary movement has had less vogue in artistic verse than those of ...
— Modern Spanish Lyrics • Various
... fool. Shall I sue for a legal divorce? "Si fuerit dolus?" Had I not had enough of notoriety? Enough of laughter, calumny, and ridicule? Must I drag my honest and hitherto respected name through the mire, and become the laughing-stock of every fop throughout the country? No, anything but that! Help me, thou worser self, thou Devil in my own breast, help me to find some revenge worthy of a Devil's ...
— Dr. Dumany's Wife • Mr Jkai
... And twice he pulled his sister's hair, and thrice he smote her side; "Ha' done, ha' done with your impudent fun—ha' done with your games!" she cried; "You have made mud-pies of a marvellous size—finger and face are black, You have trodden the Way of the Mire and Clay—now up and wash you, Jack! Or else, or ever we reach our home, there waiteth an angry dame— Well you know the weight of her blow—the supperless open shame! Wash, if you will, on yonder hill—wash, if ...
— The Book of Humorous Verse • Various
... Comte—following out his hypothesis—shows us his capitalist acquiring one after another the products of his employees' labor, he sinks deeper and deeper into the mire; and, as his argument does not change, our reply of course remains ...
— What is Property? - An Inquiry into the Principle of Right and of Government • P. J. Proudhon
... almost into a swamp. He was obliged to walk upon bog tufts and watch his feet to keep from the oily mire. Pausing at one time to look about him he saw, out at some black water, a small animal pounce in and emerge directly with a ...
— The Red Badge of Courage - An Episode of the American Civil War • Stephen Crane
... wrongly. Standing near her with clenched hands, he said, in the same hard tones which seemed to have passed beyond the expression of feeling, "I'm a brute and worse. I have been wounding you as with blows by my vile story. I have been dragging your pure thoughts through the mire of my ...
— Opening a Chestnut Burr • Edward Payson Roe
... run!" sounded the loud cries, from the English within the fort. Their comrades on the outside hastened—scrambling, wading, straddling the log or knee-deep in the half frozen mire. ...
— Boys' Book of Indian Warriors - and Heroic Indian Women • Edwin L. Sabin
... and although the widespread notion that the shock of the war would automatically make a new heaven and a new earth, and that the dog would never go back to his vomit nor the sow to her wallowing in the mire, is already seen to be a delusion, yet we are far more conscious of our condition than we were, and far less disposed to submit to it. Revolution, lately only a sensational chapter in history or a demagogic claptrap, is now a possibility so imminent that hardly by trying to suppress it ...
— Heartbreak House • George Bernard Shaw
... right here and watch, and I'll get some wood." Nuck had brought a tomahawk which, with his skinning knife, was thrust into his belt. With the hatchet he obtained dry branches from the lower limbs of some spruce-trees which grew near, and packed a big fagot through the mire to the hillock where Bryce stood guard. This wood he flung into the mouth of the lair, started the fire with his flint and steel, and when the flames began to wreathe the branches hungrily, he flung on leaves ...
— With Ethan Allen at Ticonderoga • W. Bert Foster
... affairs, and the earl spoke despondingly about ten thousands and twenty thousands, and the viscount somewhat flippantly of fifty thousands and sixty thousands; and this was continued till the earl felt that his son was too deep in the mire to be pulled out, and the son thought that, deep as he was there, it would be better to remain and wallow in it than undergo so disagreeable a process as that to which his father subjected him in extricating him from it. It was settled, however, that Mr. Jervis, Lord Cashel's agent, should ...
— The Kellys and the O'Kellys • Anthony Trollope
... we did not go to church because the weather was bad, or there was no preaching within twenty miles of us, or my mother was not well, or the roads were impassable with mire or frost, Mary 'Liza and I learned two questions in the Shorter Catechism, and she learned the references as well. We also committed a hymn to memory, and five verses of a psalm. Beyond this, no religious exercise was binding upon us, and there was a ...
— When Grandmamma Was New - The Story of a Virginia Childhood • Marion Harland
... just done twenty miles in slush and mire, and their hearts were heavier than their heels. No, they would go to bed while the others did the jumpin', and next day they would fill ...
— The Magnetic North • Elizabeth Robins (C. E. Raimond)
... curious to learn whether the truth will ever be generally known concerning the seizure of the Anglo-rebel steamer Peterhoff. Then the people would learn how old Welles bravely defended what turpe Seward had decided to drag in the mire. The people would learn what an utterly ignorant impudence presided over the restoring to England of the Peterhoff's mail bag of a vessel a contrabandist, a blockade runner, and a forger. The people would know ...
— Diary from November 12, 1862, to October 18, 1863 • Adam Gurowski
... was lazy and neglected his work, Ariel (who was invisible to all eyes but Prospero's) would come slily and pinch him, and sometimes tumble him down in the mire; and then Ariel, in the likeness of an ape, would make mouths at him. Then swiftly changing his shape, in the likeness of a hedgehog, he would lie tumbling in Caliban's way, who feared the hedgehog's sharp quills would prick ...
— Tales from Shakespeare • Charles and Mary Lamb
... young girl who crossed with me on the Ivernia is in the mire too," thought Edestone; for it seemed to him that the King's order of exile against the Duchess and herself could mean nothing else. Yet somehow his feeling of disdain and aversion for the traitor did not extend to the feminine members of the family. ...
— L. P. M. - The End of the Great War • J. Stewart Barney |
