"Dank" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... gallows dark against a pale sky and the little fire beneath where the entrails of traitors were burned—a nightmare which had long ridden him—nerved him to the next step. "His life or mine," he told himself, as he groped his way into a lane as steep, dank, and black as the sides ...
— The Path of the King • John Buchan
... the fire escapes Or sprawl over the stoops... Upturned faces glimmer pallidly— Herring-yellow faces, spotted as with a mold, And moist faces of girls Like dank white lilies, And infants' faces with open parched mouths that suck at the air ...
— The Ghetto and Other Poems • Lola Ridge
... inhabitants of towns? Nothing can be more graceful, certainly, than the ellipses arched by the boughs from its taper stem. Few contrivances more umbrageous than the combination of its long, feathery foliations into its perfection of a parasol. But there are times in the dank, hot nights of midsummer, when the ailantus is but a diluted upas-antiar of Macassar, tainting, albeit with no deadly essence, the muggy air that rocks its slumbering branches and rolls away thence along the parapets and in at ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume V, Number 29, March, 1860 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... all glad to be out of it. No more fighting for them, Gott sei Dank! War was no good, at least not for the ...
— Combed Out • Fritz August Voigt
... father virtuous son, Now that the fields are dank and ways are mire, Where shall we sometimes meet, and by the fire Help waste a sullen ...
— The Golden Treasury - Of the Best Songs and Lyrical Poems in the English Language • Various
... knees; and, in the silence that followed was heard the drip, drip, drip, from the sodden rags on the beaten earth floor. The people without, staring, open-mouthed and silent, saw the Friar look up; his hand hastily outstretched touched the dank, muddy hair; then he knew all, and fell on his face with an exceeding bitter cry. It was answered by another cry—the glad cry of a lost child ...
— The Gathering of Brother Hilarius • Michael Fairless
... had ruth, and bare The boy's drowned body back to Grecian land, And mermaids combed his dank and dripping hair And smoothed his brow, and loosed his clenching hand; Some brought sweet spices from far Araby, And others bade the halcyon sing ...
— Poems • Oscar Wilde
... pathways dank on brown, The branches on grey cloud a web, The long green roller of the down, An image ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... from his impious brows, "Tear from his murderous hand the bloody rod, 290 "And teach the trembling nations, "THOU ART GOD!"— —SYLPHS! in what dread array with pennons broad Onward ye floated o'er the ethereal road, Call'd each dank steam the reeking marsh exhales, Contagious vapours, and volcanic gales, 295 Gave the soft South with poisonous breath to blow, And rolled the dreadful whirlwind on the foe!— Hark! o'er the camp the venom'd tempest sings, Man falls on Man, on buckler buckler rings; Groan answers groan, ...
— The Botanic Garden - A Poem in Two Parts. Part 1: The Economy of Vegetation • Erasmus Darwin
... billow, breaker, swell, ripple, undulation. Wave (verb), brandish, flourish, flaunt, wigwag. Weariness, languor, lassitude, enervation, exhaustion. Wearisome, tiresome, irksome, tedious, humdrum. Wet (adjective), humid, moist, damp, dank, sodden, soggy. Wet (verb), moisten, dampen, soak, imbrue, saturate, drench Whim, caprice, vagary, fancy, freak, whimsey, crotchet. Wind, breeze, gust, blast, flaw, gale, squall, flurry. Wind, coil, twist, twine, wreathe. Winding, tortuous, ...
— The Century Vocabulary Builder • Creever & Bachelor
... hole was untempting. A dank smell came out of it, like the breath of those old Egyptian tombs in which the bones of horses, buried with their masters, lie all about on shelves. You couldn't see into it more than a yard or two, for the only light ...
— Jimgrim and Allah's Peace • Talbot Mundy
... led, if I may say so, round the top of the valley, beyond the head waters of the dark river, and was kept on the high level until he got to the other side. You and I have to go down the hill, out of the sunshine, in among the dank weeds, to stumble over the black rocks, and wade through the deep water; but we shall get over to the same place where he stands, and He that took him round by the top will 'take' us through the river; and so shall we 'ever be ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus and Numbers • Alexander Maclaren
... Humfrey's special glory. The thought of such pleasures did not seem out of keeping. The lane was overhung with bushes; the banks, a whole wealth of ferns, climbing plants, tall grasses, and nettles, had not yet felt the sun and were dank and dreary, so she hurried on, and arriving at the clerk's door, knocked and opened. He was gone to his work, and sounds above showed the wife to be engaged on the toilette of the younger branches. She called out that she had come for the keys of the church, and seeing them on the ...
— Hopes and Fears - scenes from the life of a spinster • Charlotte M. Yonge
... him. He turned on a small pressure lamp attached to the belt at his waist, and chanced taking the helmet off. Dank and nauseous was the air that he breathed, since it no longer came through the filters in his helmet. But it was ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, June, 1930 • Various
... sound. And yet I've never seen a wilder light Glow in the beauteous eyes of dawning love, Than flashes from this strange man's soul at sight Of some rare flower he finds in mountain cove: Mere fungus, or the poisonous, dank mushroom, Enchants him more than rich ...
— The Loom of Life • Cotton Noe
... with life as there enjoyed; To brighter world they never had aspired, Had they not felt unfilled an aching void, And heard a whisper of a life attired In sapphire robes, 'midst gleams of golden light, Above their present world, so dank and chill, Where all day long they wing their happy flight From roses sweet ...
— Gleams of Sunshine - Optimistic Poems • Joseph Horatio Chant
... stands deep in the Klamm, in the dank gorge where it is always half-night. The road runs under the rock and the trees, half-way up the one side of the pass. Below, the stream rushes ceaselessly, embroiled among great stones, making an endless loud noise. ...
— Twilight in Italy • D.H. Lawrence
... cedar-crowned heights of Murree, dank boughs dripped and drooped above ill-made houses, that gave free admittance to the moist outer world; tree ferns, springing to sudden life on moss-clad trunks and boughs, showed brilliant as emeralds on velvet. The whole earth was quick with hidden stirrings and strivings, ...
— Captain Desmond, V.C. • Maud Diver
... sees none of this. Another spectacle appears to his fancy, commands his eyes. Four walls, bare and dank, enclose a narrow cell, lighted by a single streak of day. On the moist and noisome floor is a mat; on the mat an old man dying. Beaten down by fever, he lies and looks about him, calling a name, ...
— An Eagle Flight - A Filipino Novel Adapted from Noli Me Tangere • Jose Rizal
... foul, unholy spell, Of malisons and curses fell, Which steeped that soil with venom dank, Of which the fated ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 25, November, 1859 • Various
... romantic, situation. So various are the characters which water can assume, that there is scarcely an idea in which it may not concur, or an impression which it cannot enforce; a deep stagnated pool, dank and dark with shades which it dimly reflects, befits the seat of melancholy; even a river, if it be sunk between two dismal banks, and dull both in motion and colour, is like a hollow eye which deadens the countenance; and over a sluggard, silent ...
— On the Portraits of English Authors on Gardening, • Samuel Felton
... tonight—early to bed and tomorrow morning you'll all start out in your natty knickers and short kilts to murder things that will fall in bloody feathery heaps at your feet. Native woodcock, jack snipe, black mallard, grouse, etc., the restless eager setters doing their own retrieving; the soft dank ground daintily overspread with the frond of marvelous fern like my window pane this morning with its delicate tracery in frost; the tall-stemmed alders echoing your shots to skyward; the big dense timber with its springy ground all saturated with the fragrance of the mounting sea: ...
— Letters of a Dakota Divorcee • Jane Burr
... unfold of toiling oars, Ill rest, scant landings on a shore rock-strewn, All pains, all sorrows, for our daily doom. And worse and hatefuller our woes on land; For where we couched, close by the foeman's wall, The river-plain was ever dank with dews, Dropped from the sky, exuded from the earth, A curse that clung unto our sodden garb, And hair as horrent as a wild beast's fell. Why tell the woes of winter, when the birds Lay stark and stiff, so stern was Ida's snow? Or summer's scorch, what time the ...
— The House of Atreus • AEschylus
... mountains and the forest and the lake had been out all night. For seventy miles of Canadian wilderness only the mountains and the forest and the lake stood actually convicted of having been out all night. Dank and white with its vaporous vigil the listless lake kindled wanly to the new day's breeze. Blue with cold a precipitous mountain peak lurched craggedly home through a rift in the fog. Drenched with mist, bedraggled with dew, a green-feathered ...
— The White Linen Nurse • Eleanor Hallowell Abbott
... splashing warily through the rich mud and the dank mist of Trafalgar Road, past all those strange little Indian-red houses, and ragged empty spaces, and poster-hoardings, and rounded kilns, and high, smoking chimneys, up hill, down hill, and up hill again, encountering and overtaking many electric trams that dipped and rose like ships at sea, into ...
— The Matador of the Five Towns and Other Stories • Arnold Bennett
... aspect of arrested development which is a new country's substitute for the solemn grace of ruin wrought by time. Wherever there remained a patch of the original soil a rank overgrowth of weeds and brambles had spread upon the scene, and from its dank, unwholesome shades the visitor curious in such matters might have obtained numberless souvenirs of the camp's former glory—fellowless boots mantled with green mould and plethoric of rotting leaves; an occasional old felt ...
— The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce, Vol. II: In the Midst of Life: Tales of Soldiers and Civilians • Ambrose Bierce
... the hotel, while Winter went to the station to make sure of Siddle's departure and destination. Yes, the chemist had taken a return ticket to Epsom, where a strip of dank meadow-land on the road to Esher marks the last resting-place of many of London's epileptics. On returning to the high-street, Winter lighted a cigar, a somewhat common occurrence in his everyday life, where-upon Furneaux walked swiftly up the hill. A farmer, living ...
— The Postmaster's Daughter • Louis Tracy
... mists hang dank, on front and flank, My straining eye can naught discover; But well I know that many a foe Around that narrow path ...
— Old Groans and New Songs - Being Meditations on the Book of Ecclesiastes • F. C. Jennings
... to me—a pity distinct from the harrowing sensations of his miserable end. He had been evil in the obscurity of his life, as there are plants growing harmful and deadly in the shade, drawing poison from the dank soil on which they flourish. He was as unconscious of his evil as they—but he had a man's right ...
— Romance • Joseph Conrad and F.M. Hueffer
... panthers, and bears. Many kinds of deer are there, to be preyed upon by man or beast, from the pretty little gyi or barking deer to the lordly sambur. Wild pig also are very numerous, and lurking in the dank undergrowth or fissures of the rocks are many venomous snakes ...
— Burma - Peeps at Many Lands • R.Talbot Kelly
... is dank on me, Sigrun of Sevafell, This is thy doing, O sun-fraught lady, Golden woman, the tears thou sheddest Upon thy bed stay not beside thee; Like blood they fall, cold and deathly, Like sobs they stab ...
— Gudrid the Fair - A Tale of the Discovery of America • Maurice Hewlett
... was chill and dank, lit only by a half light which at times dwindled to a deep dusk as the rock walls beetled together hundreds of feet above his head. Always when he stumbled through one of the darkest passages, he heard and half saw immense gray bats flapping ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, December 1930 • Various
... sluggish, stagnant water on the one hand, thick and turbid, and somewhat resembling in form and colour a broad muddy highway, lined by low walls; not a tuft of vegetation is to be seen on its tame rectilinear sides: all is slimy and brown, with here and there dank, muddy recesses, as if for the frog and the rat; while on the damp flat above, there lie, somewhat in the style of the grouping in a Dutch painting, the rotting fragments of canal passage-boats and coal-barges, with here and there some broken-backed hulk, muddy ...
— Leading Articles on Various Subjects • Hugh Miller
... chose to represent that evening,—and with her usual success; for no woman ever knew more thoroughly her material of shape or color, or how to work it up. Not an ill-chosen fancy, either, that of the moist, warm month. Some tranced summer's day might have drowsed down into such a human form by a dank pool, or on the thick grass-crusted meadows. There was the full contour of the limbs hid under warm green folds, the white flesh that glowed when you touched it as if some smothered heat lay beneath, the sleeping face, the amber ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 8, No. 50, December, 1861 • Various
... the cavern of the fog was now so far above him that he had to strain to see it. And that warmth which had been there was gone. A dank chill wrapped him here, dampened the holds to which he clung until he was afraid of slipping. While the murmur of the water grew louder, until its slap-slap sounded within arms' distance. His boot toe skidded from a niche. Shann fought to hold on with numbed fingers. The other ...
— Storm Over Warlock • Andre Norton
... dank, fat, savage island of New Gibbon, lying fifty miles to leeward of Choiseul. Geographically, it belonged to the Solomon Group. Politically, the dividing line of German and British influence cut it in half, hence the joint control by the ...
— A Son Of The Sun • Jack London
... through the mist! There is a leaden glare peculiar to clouds, which makes the snow and ice more lurid. Not far from the house where I am writing, the avalanche that swept away the bridge last winter is lying now, dripping away, dank and dirty, like a rotting whale. I can see it from my window, green beech-boughs nodding over it, forlorn larches bending their tattered branches by its side, splinters of broken pine protruding from its muddy ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... wide, with high trees, and thick underwood close to the water's edge. All was silent, the sun shone clown upon us like the concentrated rays of a burning glass, and there was no breeze to dissipate the heavy dank mist that hovered over the surface of the unwholesome canal, nor was there any appearance of a living thing, save and except a few startled waterfowl, and some guanoes on the trees, and now and then an alligator, like a black log of charred wood, would roll off a slimy bank of brown mud, ...
— Tom Cringle's Log • Michael Scott
... revert; she sought the soil, but she was determined it should be the soil of her own choosing. She found Morrell coarse, dry, hard, sandy, gritty. What she sought was some dank, rich loam, dark, moist, productive. To be sure, great towering things grew in the sand—pine-trees, for example, with vast trunks and with broad heads that spread out far above the humbler growths below; but on the whole she ...
— Under the Skylights • Henry Blake Fuller
... half a mile in length, then the river was hidden from view, for in its course from the mountains through the heavily-jungled littoral it took many bends and twists, sometimes running swiftly over rocky, gravelly beds, sometimes flowing noiselessly through deep, muddy-bottomed pools and dank, steamy swamps, the haunt of ...
— John Corwell, Sailor And Miner; and, Poisonous Fish - 1901 • Louis Becke
... drew on and on Till no sun came, dank fogs the house enfolding; And she saw inside, when the form in the flesh had gone, As a vision what she had missed ...
— Late Lyrics and Earlier • Thomas Hardy
... the night before, had unanimously agreed to cover every brake and brier with gossamer- cradles, and never a fly to be caught in them; like Manchester cotton-spinners madly glutting the markets in the teeth of 'no demand.' The steam crawled out of the dank turf, and reeked off the flanks and nostrils of the shivering horses, and clung with clammy paws to frosted hats and dripping boughs. A soulless, skyless, catarrhal day, as if that bustling dowager, old mother Earth—what with match-making in spring, and ...
— Yeast: A Problem • Charles Kingsley
... under the eye and with the sanction of Religion. This was even beyond my hopes. I returned home well satisfied. The sun that was still labouring pale and wan through the sky, obscured by thick mists, seemed an emblem of the good cause; and the cold dank drops of dew that hung half-melted on the beard of the thistle, had something genial and refreshing in them; for there was a spirit of hope and youth in all nature, that turned everything into good The face of nature had not then the brand of JUS ...
— English Critical Essays - Nineteenth Century • Various
... several adjectives that are not used in prose, or are used but seldom; as, azure, blithe, boon, dank, darkling, darksome, doughty, dun, fell, rife, rapt, rueful, ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... DOCTOR WANGEL'S garden. It is boggy and overshadowed by large old trees. To the right is seen the margin of a dank pond. A low, open fence separates the garden from the footpath, and the fjord in the background. Beyond is the range of mountains, with its peaks. It is afternoon, almost evening. BOLETTE sits on a stone seat, and on the seat lie some books and a ...
— The Lady From The Sea • Henrik Ibsen
... sight the camp had presented before we started digging out. The ponies like drowned rats, their manes and tails dank and dripping, a saturated blotting-paper look about their green horse cloths, eyes half closed, mouths flabby and wet, each animal half buried in this Antarctic morass, the old snow walls like ...
— South with Scott • Edward R. G. R. Evans
... she was breathing the air of a different world as she walked along the broad clean sidewalk with the handsome old houses on either side, with carriages and automobiles speeding past, with clean, happy-faced, well dressed human beings in sight everywhere. It was like coming out of the dank darkness of Dismal Swamp into smiling fields with a pure, star-spangled sky above. She was free—free! It might be for but a moment; still it was freedom, infinitely sweet because of past slavery and because of the fear of slavery closing in again. She had abandoned the old toilet articles. She ...
— Susan Lenox: Her Fall and Rise • David Graham Phillips
... went inside. It was a curious, gruesome place, and the dank air was stifling. He climbed the stone steps upward until he came to a small room. The walls were bare but there were a bed and chairs and tables, all of oak, an iron ring in the wall, a rusty chain, and a padlock of huge size lay on ...
— The Rider in Khaki - A Novel • Nat Gould
... Dank and fetid boxes and barrows, to say naught of the more ambitious shops, fill the Whitechapel Road and Petticoat Lane (now changed to Middlesex Street, but some measure of the old activities may still be seen of ...
— Dickens' London • Francis Miltoun
... in the atmosphere collects That vapour dank, returning into water, Soon as it mounts where cold condenses it. That evil will, which in his intellect Still follows evil, came, and rais'd the wind And smoky mist, by virtue of the power Given by his nature. Thence the valley, soon ...
— The Divine Comedy, Complete - The Vision of Paradise, Purgatory and Hell • Dante Alighieri
... when you do lay hands on him," said I, wresting my eyes from the yellow dead face of the foreign scoundrel. The moon shone full upon his high forehead, his shrivelled lips, dank in their death agony, and on the bauble with the sacred device that he wore always in his tie. I recovered my property from the shrunken fingers, and so turned away with a harder heart than I ever had before or since for ...
— Dead Men Tell No Tales • E. W. Hornung
... of Bacchus. But so it is, that for sundry years together he saw a most pitiful havoc, desolation, and destruction made amongst the sprouts, shootings, buds, blossoms, and scions of the vines by hoary frost, dank fogs, hot mists, unseasonable colds, chill blasts, thick hail, and other calamitous chances of foul weather, happening, as he thought, by the dismal inauspiciousness of the holy days of St. George, St. Mary, St. Paul, St. Eutrope, ...
— Gargantua and Pantagruel, Complete. • Francois Rabelais
... indignation. For each cell door as it was unbarred and thrown open revealed the same piteous scene, the deliverers starting back, or standing quite transfixed before the ghastly and withered figures which rose up before them from dank pallets of putrid straw. The faces of these dismal apparitions expressed the terror and apprehension which the tumult and uproar about the jail had created in minds no longer capable ...
— The Duke of Stockbridge • Edward Bellamy
... the satellite burst at once upon my sight—my brain reeled as I saw the mighty walls rushing asunder—there was a long tumultuous shouting sound like the voice of a thousand waters—and the deep and dank tarn at my feet closed sullenly and silently over the fragments ...
— Short-Stories • Various
... she talks like the heroine of a romance. Listen. (Ansard reads.) "The beauteous and divinely-moulded form of the angelic Angelicanarinella pressed the dank and rotten straw, which had been thrown down by the scowling, thick-lipped Ethiop for her repose—she, for whom attendant maidens had smoothed the Sybaritic sheet of finest texture, under the elaborately carved and sumptuously gilt canopy, the silken curtains, ...
— Olla Podrida • Frederick Marryat
... and art shall other changes find, And open still and vary still the mind. The countless clans that tread these dank abodes, Who glean spontaneous fruits and range the woods, Fixt here for ages, in their swarthy face Display the wild complexion of the place. Yet when the hordes to happy nations rise, And earth By ...
— The Columbiad • Joel Barlow
... into my room and sat down. I was upset, and no mistake. Outside my windows the continuous symphony of the city played on—the busses, the trains, the never-silent voices. I gazed out. What a tremendous acreage of dank brick houses and dank British souls! I felt horribly alone. I may add that I felt a bit frightened, as though that great city were slowly closing in ...
— The Agony Column • Earl Derr Biggers
... For here, at the river level, mist and drizzle took the form of fog. Opaque, chill and dank, it drifted in continuous, just perceptible, undulations past and in at the open casement. Soon the air of the room grew thick and whitish, the dark oak furniture and the floor boards furred with moisture. ...
— Deadham Hard • Lucas Malet
... womb of the true tropical forest." The mind of man with difficulty endeavours to realise this immensity of wooded wilderness, covering a territory half as large again as the whole of France, where the rays of the sun never penetrate, where in the dark, dank air, filled with the steam of the heated morass, human beings dwarfed into pygmies and brutalised into cannibals lurk and live and die. Mr Stanley vainly endeavours to bring home to us the full horror of that awful ...
— "In Darkest England and The Way Out" • General William Booth
... fact was that Waller couldn't or wouldn't work with others. So was conceived "Brother Francesco," an opera set in a monastery in Italy during the Seventeenth Century, and bringing up a vivid picture of monks, medieval chapels—dark, massive and severe—and the dank scent of deep tragedy. There were but four main characters, a quartette of voices, in "Brother Francesco," which was in one act of about an hour and ten minutes, the whole story unravelling itself in the ...
— The Dead Men's Song - Being the Story of a Poem and a Reminiscent Sketch of its - Author Young Ewing Allison • Champion Ingraham Hitchcock
... go and call the cattle home, And call the cattle home, And call the cattle home, Across the sands o' Dee!" The western wind was wild and dank wi' foam, And all ...
— Standard Selections • Various
... reaching this windowless room, with its low ceilings and dank airs. If one had the secret in his possession, he could go down through the mysterious trap door in the workshop of William Spantz, armourer to the Crown; or he might come up through a hidden aperture in the walls of the great government sewer, which ran directly parallel with ...
— Truxton King - A Story of Graustark • George Barr McCutcheon
... der Nacht denket an euch mein Lied, Wo mein ewiger Gram jeglichen Stundenschlag, Welcher naeher mich bringt dem Trauten Grabe, mit Dank begruesst.[56] ...
— Types of Weltschmerz in German Poetry • Wilhelm Alfred Braun
... corruption. I stood at the edges of the wood, gazing at all the pomp and procession of the foxgloves towering amidst the bracken and shining red in the broad sunshine, and beyond them into deep thickets of close undergrowth where springs boil up from the rock and nourish the water-weeds, dank and evil. But in all my wanderings I avoided one part of the wood; it was not till yesterday that I climbed to the summit of the hill, and stood upon the ancient Roman road that threads the highest ridge of the wood. ...
— The House of Souls • Arthur Machen
... Enoshima. High before us slopes the single street, a street of broad steps, a street shadowy, full of multi-coloured flags and dank blue drapery dashed with white fantasticalities, which are words, fluttered by the sea wind. It is lined with taverns and miniature shops. At every one I must pause to look; and to dare to look at anything in Japan is to want to buy it. So I buy, ...
— Glimpses of an Unfamiliar Japan - First Series • Lafcadio Hearn
... Jungle! I knew the place, a spot of dank pestilence and mystery. "You never could have gone ...
— New Burlesques • Bret Harte
... linger in her presence—had made her shrink from sending him to exile. Evil tongues at last had united their names together; Alan Bertie had left the woman he idolized lest slander should touch her through him, and fallen two years later under the dark dank forests on the desolate moor-side of the hills of Hindostan, where long before he had rendered "Bertie's Horse" the most famous of all the wild ...
— Under Two Flags • Ouida [Louise de la Ramee]
... spots along the line of march. This kind of work continued for two days, until we came in sight of the Rudewa river, another powerful stream with banks brimful of rushing rain-water. Crossing a branch of the Rudewa, and emerging from the dank reedy grass crowding the western bank, the view consisted of an immense sheet of water topped by clumps of grass tufts and foliage of thinly scattered trees, bounded ten or twelve miles off by the eastern front of the Usagara mountain range. The acme of discomfort and vexation ...
— How I Found Livingstone • Sir Henry M. Stanley
... back fairly turned, than he lost no time in following his example. But, ere they had done more than salute each other, with the usual courteous nourish of their weapons, Dr. Rochecliffe again stood between them, leading in his hand Alice Lee, her garments dank with dew, and her long hair heavy with moisture, and totally uncurled. Her face was extremely pale, but it was the paleness of desperate resolution, not of fear. There was a dead pause of astonishment—the combatants rested on their swords—and even the forwardness of Wildrake only vented itself ...
— Woodstock; or, The Cavalier • Sir Walter Scott
... Wingrace Shapcott (a tall and straight young woman, as Beautiful as an Angel), were continually bringing me Comforts and Needments, both in Raiment and Food. It churns my Old Heart now to think of that Beautiful Girl, sitting beside me in my dank Prison Room, the tears streaming from her mild eyes, calling me by Endearing names, and ever and anon taking my hand in hers, and sinking on her knees to the sodden floor (with no thought of soiling her kirtle), while with profound Fervour she prayed for the conversion of errant ...
— The Strange Adventures of Captain Dangerous, Vol. 1 of 3 • George Augustus Sala
... on the loneliness of the marsh land, and looked up at the low clouds about her, at the creeping mist, the dank grass. It seemed a place in which a newly-released soul might wander because it did not ...
— The Shuttle • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... dank and musty and cobwebs spread across the openings where the windows had been. Much broken glass and a couple of sash weights fastened to ends of rotten sash cord lay upon the floor. In the corner was a makeshift bed of straw, matted from age, damp ...
— Roy Blakeley in the Haunted Camp • Percy Keese Fitzhugh
... expect while alive, and the inevitable blue disc, imbedded in the walls, shall proclaim that "Here once dwelt" the gentle Master of all that is flippant and fine in Art, some anxious student, reading, fall out with Providence in his vain effort to reconcile such joyous reputation with the dank and hopeless appearance of this "model lodging," bequeathed to the people by ...
— The Gentle Art of Making Enemies • James McNeill Whistler
... a glistening round of what looked like a mirror with my face in it, but in a blurred indistinct way, for there was a musical splashing of water falling from the sides, and as I bent lower the air seemed cold and dank, while above it ...
— Brownsmith's Boy - A Romance in a Garden • George Manville Fenn
... Angelico, turns in proud and ineffable disgust from the first work of Rubens, which he encounters on his return across the Alps. But is he right in his indignation? He has forgotten that, while Angelico prayed and wept in his olive shade, there was different work doing in the dank fields of Flanders:—wild seas to be banked out; endless canals to be dug, and boundless marshes to be drained; hard ploughing and harrowing of the frosty clay; careful breeding of the stout horses and cattle; close setting of brick-walls against cold winds and snow; much hardening ...
— The Old Masters and Their Pictures - For the Use of Schools and Learners in Art • Sarah Tytler
... noise they had neither heard a low tap, several times repeated, nor the soft opening of the door that followed. When they rose from their knees, it was therefore with astonishment they saw a woman standing motionless in the doorway, without cloak or bonnet, her dank garments clinging to her form ...
— Paul Faber, Surgeon • George MacDonald
... over his brows, though the morning was yet too dark for the curate to perceive more than the outline of his features. Milestone after milestone glided by the wheels, and neither of the travellers broke the silence. It was a cold, raw morning, and the mists rose sullenly from the dank hedges and ...
— Alice, or The Mysteries, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... above the level of the fens there are dense woods tangled with parasitic creepers and filled with owls. Bats fly from wood to wood. The air on the lower ground is charged with the poisonous gases which exude from the marsh, while in the woods it is heavy with the dank odours of deadly ...
— Winsome Winnie and other New Nonsense Novels • Stephen Leacock
... mamam; her father's, papap. When the nurse is gone, amme om, amme am. The mother asked some one, "Do you hear?" and the child looked at her and took hold of her own ears. To the question, "How do we eat?" she makes the motion of eating. She says nein when she means to refuse. "Dank" (thank) is pronounced dakkn. "Bitte" (I beg, or please) is correctly pronounced. She understands the meaning of spoon, dress, mirror, mouth, plate, drink, and many other words, and likes to hear stories, especially when they contain the words already ...
— The Mind of the Child, Part II • W. Preyer
... in a fiery rank, Panting and fierce, drew up along the shore; (For here the vain pursuing they forbore, Nor cared they to surpass the river's bank,) Then, looking from the rocks and rushes dank, A sight they witnessed never seen before, And which, with its accompaniments glorious, Is writ i' the golden ...
— Ballads • William Makepeace Thackeray
... the door behind him and advanced into the room, his hand extended. Mary took it. It was dank and cold to ...
— The Yellow Streak • Williams, Valentine
... the land with milk and honey flowing, The promise of our God, our fancy's theme? Here over shattered walls dank weeds are growing, And blood and fire have run in mingled stream; Like oaks and cedars all around The giant corses strew the ground, And haughty Jericho's cloud-piercing wall Lies where it ...
— The Christian Year • Rev. John Keble
... with the girl on the indiscretion of gadding in strange places with no better escort than Diccon, and of entering into conversation with unknown persons. Moreover, Cicely's hair, her shoes, and camlet riding skirt were all so dank with dew that she was with difficulty made presentable by the time the horses ...
— Unknown to History - A Story of the Captivity of Mary of Scotland • Charlotte M. Yonge
... . . "Und will von Herzen gern der Thor der Thoren seyn; Jngst that ich ernst: gleich hielt die Narrheit mich beym Rocke. Wo, rief sie, willst du hin,—Du! weisst du unsern Bund. Ist das der Dank? Du lachtest dich gesund." ...
— Laurence Sterne in Germany • Harvey Waterman Thayer
... their way towards the castle. They entered its vast and silent halls, frightening the owls and bats that fled before them with hideous hootings and flappings of wings, and passing by a multiplicity of mouldy stairs, dank reeking roofs, and rickety corridors, at last came to an apartment which, dismal and dismantled as it was, appeared to be in rather better condition than the neighboring chambers, and they therefore selected it as their place of rest for the night. ...
— Burlesques • William Makepeace Thackeray
... shovels met us. Thence along a narrow muddy path through a wood. The path circles round the hill. The east side of the hill faces the Boche front line. It was still quite light. The undergrowth thick and dank. Our fellows very merry. The Boches know this path, which is pitted with shell holes. They shell the place by day, oddly enough, but ...
— Letters to Helen - Impressions of an Artist on the Western Front • Keith Henderson
... electricity, while the perspiration produced by my late violent exertions congealed in icy beads upon my forehead. My thirst was gone, and I fairly loathed the water. Starting to my feet, the sight of those dank rocks, oozing forth moisture at every crevice, and the dark stream shooting along its dismal channel, sent fresh chills through my shivering frame, and I felt as uncontrollable a desire to climb up towards the genial sunlight as I before had ...
— Typee - A Romance of the South Sea • Herman Melville
... strange spells and devices; Nightly she wandered the woods, searching for charms voodooistic— Scorpions, lizards, and herbs, dormice, chameleons and plantains! Serpents and caw-caws and bats, screech-owls and crickets and adders— These were the guides of the witch through the dank deeps of the forest. Then, with her roots and her herbs, back to her cave in the morning Ambled that hussy to brew spells of unspeakable evil; And, when the people awoke, seeing the hillside and valley Sweltered in swathes as of mist—"Look!" ...
— John Smith, U.S.A. • Eugene Field
... her own. Beneath the open sky she spreads the feast; 'Tis free to all—'tis ev'ry day renewed, Who scorns it, starves deservedly at home. He does not scorn it, who, imprisoned long In some unwholesome dungeon, and a prey To sallow sickness, which the vapours dank And clammy of his dark abode have bred Escapes at last to liberty and light; His cheek recovers soon its healthful hue, His eye relumines its extinguished fires, He walks, he leaps, he runs—is winged with joy, ...
— The Task and Other Poems • William Cowper
... motionless while the broadsword cut its circle in air and came down; and then I knew no more till I came to with a bees' hive buzzing in my ears, to find myself lying in the dank grass at the path side. My head was on Richard's knee, and he was dabbling it with ...
— The Master of Appleby • Francis Lynde
... worked, their honest hearts elate With love-inspiring toil, Oh, sad to tell! Another mass, far larger than the last, Fell from the dark flood-loosened mountain side, Burying those noble men beneath the deep Dank heap, like those ...
— Home Lyrics • Hannah. S. Battersby
... hateful-looking land, flat and desolate, dank and dirty-looking. The flat, dull, dirty marsh country seemed to be without life; the very grass seemed blighted. And we were drifting ashore to it, fast drifting ashore to the ...
— Jim Davis • John Masefield
... for a minute while a picture rose before me: a dank, gray dawn; a firing-squad, and Franz von Blenheim's dark, grim face. No doubt he had died bravely; but I could not pity him; I had too clear a recollection of the hall ...
— The Firefly Of France • Marion Polk Angellotti
... to whom untried thou seemest fair! By me, who late thy halcyon surface sung, [1]The walls of Neptune's fane inscrib'd, declare That I have dank and dropping garments hung, Devoted to the GOD, whose kind decree Snatch'd me to shore, from an ...
— Original sonnets on various subjects; and odes paraphrased from Horace • Anna Seward
... of the range to the other; and however dense and somber they may appear in general views, neither on the rocky heights nor down in the leafiest hollows will you find anything to remind you of the dank, malarial selvas of the Amazon and Orinoco, with, their "boundless contiguity of shade," the monotonous uniformity of the Deodar forests of the Himalaya, the Black Forest of Europe, or the dense dark ...
— The Mountains of California • John Muir
... rose that climbed over the verandah of the Crow's Nest had shed its first crop of blossoms. The border below was strewn with bright petals of storm-scattered flowers; while above the dank pines dripped and drooped beneath the dead weight of universal moisture. The far-off glory of the mountains was blotted out, as though it had never been; and the doll's house, with its subsidiary group of native huts, had the ...
— The Great Amulet • Maud Diver
... is nothing in life worth purchasing by pulsations and respirations. The world is a dank, malarious marsh, with fitful Will-o'-the-Wisp flashes of false radiance—a vast cemetery waiting for our corpses. There is ...
— Without Prejudice • Israel Zangwill
... Sixty indeed! In this dank rain from the northeast, and on this high ground, not a passage in the house could be got above forty-six; and the sitting-rooms were alternately stifling ...
— The Mating of Lydia • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... revealed the gloom of the dank rooms and twisting staircase, then fell to behind them with ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... on their strong limbs. Their armour was of bronze, and their houses of bronze, and of bronze were their implements: there was no black iron. These were destroyed by their own hands and passed to the dank house of chill Hades, and left no name: terrible though they were, black Death seized them, and they left the bright ...
— Hesiod, The Homeric Hymns, and Homerica • Homer and Hesiod
... as tall as most children of ten, immensely fat, with pendulous red cheeks that in spite of cold cream and soft water always looked as though they had just been rubbed with a grater. Her hair, long and fair, was dank, hanging in two emaciated pig-tails nearly to her waist, and her nails—another ineradicable trick—bitten ...
— The Halo • Bettina von Hutten
... weak spiral spring. Further on they intersected a knot of students, who eyed them askance and exchanged remarks in an undertone. Keeping on deeper into the foul heart of the town, they passed through swarms of idle children playing sportlessly, as poverty is apt to play, in the dank shadows of the narrow street. They seemed incited to mirth and ribaldry by the sight of Ronald's new friend, and one even ventured to hurl a clod at him; but this striking Ronald instead, and he facing ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 8 • Various
... level of gritty aridity; With pompous conceit make a pact, Be bondsman to bald insipidity; Be slab as a black Irish bog, Slow, somnolent, stupid, and stodgy; Plunge into sophistical fog, And the realms of the dumpishly dodgy. With trump elephantine and slow, Tread on through word-swamps, dank and darkling; But no, most decidedly no, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 104, April 15, 1893 • Various
... drawn gently from the stream and laid on the shingle just as the foot men arrived with torches. It was a sad spectacle, this fine old man we all loved and respected so much, only a few hours before full of life and health, now a ghastly corpse, his hair and long white beard lying dank over his cold white face and glaring eyes. The scene was rendered all the more weird and awful by the surroundings, the still dark night, the rushing water, and overhanging cliffs under the red glare of the torches. His ...
— Five Years in New Zealand - 1859 to 1864 • Robert B. Booth
... was no rest for the dead who tried to sleep within its broken walls. The sea kept undermining the crumbling cliffs upon which it stood, carrying away earth, and tombstones, and bones. Nor was it a garden. Nothing grew in the dank air but crawling things which were horrible to the eye. There were great rank growths of toadstools, yellow, blue, livid white, or spotted like adders, which squirmed and squelched underfoot to send up a sickly odour of decay. The only green thing was some ivy, a ...
— The Moon Rock • Arthur J. Rees
... To the rice-swamp, dank and lone; There no mother's eye is near them, There no mother's ear can hear them; Never, when the torturing lash Seams their backs with many a gash, Shall a mother's kindness bless them, Or a mother's arms ...
— Lands of the Slave and the Free - Cuba, The United States, and Canada • Henry A. Murray
... fetlocks dank, And goad, and lash, and shout— Great God! as every hoof-beat falls A hundred lives beat out! As weary as this broken steed Reels down the corduroys, So, weary, fight for morning light Our hot and grimy boys; Through ditches wet, ...
— The World's Best Poetry, Volume 8 • Various
... chain, While taste and reason plead in vain. Look east, and ask the Belgian why, Beneath Batavia's sultry sky, He seeks not eager to inhale The freshness of the mountain gale, Content to rear his whitened wall Beside the dank and dull canal? He'll say, from youth he loved to see The white sail gliding by the tree. Or see yon weather-beaten hind, Whose sluggish herds before him wind, Whose tattered plaid and rugged cheek His ...
— Marmion: A Tale of Flodden Field • Walter Scott
... his mistress! Beside the Vidame he had the air of being slight, even short. The face which I had known so bright and winning, was now white and set. His fair, curling hair—scarce darker than Croisette's—hung dank, bedabbled with blood which flowed from a wound in his head. His sword was gone; his dress was torn and disordered and covered with dust. His lips moved. But he held up his head, he bore himself bravely with it all; so bravely, that I choked, and my heart seemed bursting as I looked ...
— The House of the Wolf - A Romance • Stanley Weyman
... ships That carry trade for us on the high sea And warped out of each harbor in the States. It wasn't law, so it seems strange to me— A big mistake. Her keel's struck bottom now And her four masts sunk fathoms, fathoms deep To Davy Jones. The dank seaweed will root On her oozed decks, and the cross-surges sweep Through the set sails; but never, never more Her crew will stand away to brace and trim, Nor sea-blown petrels meet her thrashing up To windward on the Gulf Stream's stormy rim; Never again she'll head a no'theast ...
— A Treasury of War Poetry - British and American Poems of the World War 1914-1917 • Edited, with Introduction and Notes, by George Herbert Clarke
... the air it grew chill as the Gryxabodill Raised his dank, dripping fins to the skies To plead with the Plunk for the use of her bill To pick the tears ...
— A Nonsense Anthology • Collected by Carolyn Wells
... trilogy consisting of "Gebet," "Legende" and "Dank des Paria," was begun in 1816, but not finished until December, 1821. Even then it was not quite complete. The appearance of Delavigne's Le Paria and still more of Michael Beer's drama of the same name, spurred Goethe to a final effort ...
— The Influence of India and Persia on the Poetry of Germany • Arthur F. J. Remy
... smote him here, and he spanked him there, Upset his "balance," rumpled his hair. "I'll teach you," he cried, with pounding pinions, "To come intruding in my dominions!" And the frightened flags, and the startled reeds, And the willow-branches hoar and dank, And the shaking rushes and wobbling weeds, And the wave-worn horns of the echoing bank, And the Grand Old Swan's admiring throng (Who yelled at seeing him going so strong) Were flooded and fluttered by that ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 100, March 28, 1891 • Various
... lunch, Sally helped Gaga to undress and left him in bed with the curtains again closed and the bedroom, thus darkened, smelling close and dank, as if it were the haunt of blackbeetles. When the curtains were drawn the whole room faded to a uniformity of grey-brown, and the pictures and ornaments became dim shadows, and the mirror upon the dressing-table took upon ...
— Coquette • Frank Swinnerton
... examined. The general air of gloom—hopeless gloom—was depressing. Such mawkish sentimentality and despair; such inane and mortifying confessions; such longings for a lover to come; such sighings over a lover departed; such cravings for "only"—"only" a grave in some dark, dank solitude. As Mrs. Dodge puts it, "Pegasus generally feels inclined to pace toward a graveyard the moment he feels a side-saddle ...
— The Wit of Women - Fourth Edition • Kate Sanborn
... region. There the armies must pass over a flat, undulating country, almost as low in level as the Baltic, and therefore occupied in large part by marshes and lagoons through which they must struggle. In all parts the soil is unproductive. At one time it was a universal forest: thick, dark, and dank. A century ago, however, Catherine the Great distributed large areas of this comparatively worthless land among her favorites and courtiers. In this way a certain percentage was reclaimed, and with the incoming of the sunlight ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume III (of 12) - The War Begins, Invasion of Belgium, Battle of the Marne • Francis J. Reynolds, Allen L. Churchill, and Francis Trevelyan
... certain of its being something more than a passing appearance of sea or sky, and Morales was ready with his suggestion that this was Machin's island. The fog that hung over this part of the ocean would be natural to a thick and dank woodland like that on the island ...
— Prince Henry the Navigator, the Hero of Portugal and of Modern Discovery, 1394-1460 A.D. • C. Raymond Beazley
... was the Grand Bank—a triangle two hundred and fifty miles on each side—a waste of wallowing sea, cloaked with dank fog, vexed with gales, harried with drifting ice, scored by the tracks of the reckless liners, and dotted with the sails of ...
— "Captains Courageous" • Rudyard Kipling
... with moisture from a shower that had fallen during the night; and, after a tedious walk, reached the edge of the scrub. It was thicker than anything we had encountered before, the density of the foliage totally excluding the sun, and giving rise to a dank humid odour that struck a chill to the heart directly you entered. We wound along the path, or rather track, that the blacks had made, with the greatest difficulty. It was all very well for the troopers, who had stripped, but our clothes hitched up on a thorn at every other step. One ...
— Australian Search Party • Charles Henry Eden
... and highly colored notions of a smugglers' cave, his narrow lungs filled with air, Bubbles dove, swam between two slimy barnacled piles, and came up presently in a dark, dank, stale, gurgling region, wonderfully cool after the blazing sunlight which he ...
— The Penalty • Gouverneur Morris
... now come some twelve miles from my starting-place, and it was midnight. The plain, the level road (which often rose a little), and the dank air of the river began to oppress me with fatigue. I was not disturbed by this, for I had intended to break these nights of marching by occasional repose, and while I was in the comfort of cities—especially in the false hopes that one got by reading ...
— The Path to Rome • Hilaire Belloc
... she pushed her dank hair back into her hood and pressed her hand upon her heart. Then she was calm a while, but a new terror set it throbbing again. Close beside her—this time at her right—the loud laughter of men's harsh voices ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... the task, any deliberately-planned, systematic, persistent exploration of any portion of the Australian coast. The continent grew on the map of the world gradually, slowly, almost accidentally. It emerged out of the unknown, like some vast mythical monster heaving its large shoulders dank and dripping from the unfathomed sea, and metamorphosed by a kiss from the lips of knowledge into a being fair to look upon and rich in kindly favours. It took two centuries and a half for civilised mankind to know Australia, even in form, from the time when it was clearly understood that there ...
— The Life of Captain Matthew Flinders • Ernest Scott
... second, and then the unknown began again and stopped. Once more I chipped in and finished it. Then it seemed to me that he was coming nearer. The air in that dank tunnel was very still, and I thought I heard a light foot. I think I took a step backward. Suddenly there was a flash of an electric torch from a yard off, so quick that I could see nothing of the ...
— Greenmantle • John Buchan
... and remote cabins which sent their smoke curling into the dank morning air of the region thereabouts, there was not one in which disease was not already raging with fearful malignity. Doctors or hired nurses there were none; each stricken household was forced to battle single-handed with the destroyer who dealt his blows stealthily, ...
— Woman on the American Frontier • William Worthington Fowler
... sparkled in the cheery daylight; the clear mountain air drew everything nearer, and the stifling sense, inspired by the crush of towering hills, was exaggerated as the sun rose in the heavens and revealed the obscurer recesses of the stupendous world. And now, too, the forest grew dank and moist, and the steady dripping of the melting snow upon the branches became like a heavy rainfall ...
— In the Brooding Wild • Ridgwell Cullum
... dell ill card veal rank tell bill hard meal sank well fill bark neat hank yell rill dark heat dank belt hill dint bang dime rave cull hint fang lime gave dull lint gang tine lave gull mint hang fine pave hull tint ...
— McGuffey's Eclectic Spelling Book • W. H. McGuffey
... in canoes down one of the rivers—Moose or Abitibi—leading to Hudson Bay. Radisson had sprained his ankle; and the long portages by the banks of the ice-laden, rain-swollen rivers were terrible. The rocks were slippery as glass with ice and moss. The forests of this region are full of dank heavy windfall that obstructs the streams and causes an endless succession of swamps. In these the paddlers had to wade to mid-waist, 'tracking' their canoes through perilous passage-way, where the rip of an upturned ...
— The "Adventurers of England" on Hudson Bay - A Chronicle of the Fur Trade in the North (Volume 18 of the Chronicles of Canada) • Agnes C. (Agnes Christina) Laut
... Nothing can efface from my mind the picture of it as I saw it when first going to the Caucasus. The sunset illumined it with the hues of romance. All the multiplicity of its dingy buildings shone as if lit up from within, and their dank and mouldy greens and blues and yellows became burning living colours. The town lay spread out upon the high banks of the Don and every segment of it was crowned with a church. The gilt domes blazed in the sunlight and the crosses above them were changed into pure fire. Round about the ...
— A Tramp's Sketches • Stephen Graham
... dead!" he cried, in a despairing voice, removing the dank tresses from her brow, and imprinting a reverent kiss upon it. ...
— Windsor Castle • William Harrison Ainsworth
... worm delves in the sod and dines on clay; he makes no after-dinner speeches; he never responds to a toast; but silently revels on in his dark banquet halls under the dank violets or in the rich mould by the river. But the red worm never reaches the goal of his visions and dreams until he is triumphantly impaled on the fishhook ...
— Gov. Bob. Taylor's Tales • Robert L. Taylor
... with a clamminess that damped the spirits of the most rampant bulls. No class in the world is so susceptible to atmospheric conditions as stock-gamblers. Many a stout-hearted one has been known to postpone the inauguration of a long-planned coup merely because the air filled his blood with the dank chill of superstition. Because of the expected Sugar pyrotechnics, Stock Exchange members had gathered early; the brokers' offices were crowded to overflowing before ten; the morning papers, not only in New York but in Boston, Philadelphia, ...
— Friday, the Thirteenth • Thomas W. Lawson
... cabbage,—gross, indelicate vegetables! And even now, as well present upon my table that other diabolic cabbage of the New England swamps,—in old legend said to have been conjured up out of the ground by the Indian pow-wows, to beautify and perfume the dank and gloomy resorts where Satan was wont to drill them in their hellish exercises,—as its grandchild, the big booby of the garden. For is it not deservedly, if disrespectfully, named a cabbage-head? That is because it is the ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 108, October, 1866 • Various |
