"Mire" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... the dust,' Katharine said. 'I would kiss the mire from the shoon of the vilest man there is if in that way I might win ...
— The Fifth Queen Crowned • Ford Madox Ford
... Egyptian mythology. The reasons for the prohibition may be considered as two,—the impossibility of setting forth the glory of the Infinite Spirit in any form, and the certainty that the attempt will sink the worshipper deeper in the mire of sense. An image degrades God and damages men. By it religion reverses its nature, and becomes another clog to keep the soul among the things seen, and an ally of all fleshly inclinations. We know how idolatry seemed to cast a spell ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus and Numbers • Alexander Maclaren
... severe the world may be upon a woman after she is down in the mire, there is no denying that it is reluctant to tumble her from her eminence and throw her there. A woman will find more champions than detractors in the face of the most serious charge; especially a young and pretty one, or one whose ...
— The Bondboy • George W. (George Washington) Ogden
... massed up, as "Albert's Line," and with a History ever more condensing itself almost to the form of LABEL, can they pretend to memorability with us. What can Dryasdust himself do with them? That wholesome Dutch cabbages continued to be more and more planted, and peat-mire, blending itself with waste sand, became available for Christian mankind,—intrusive Chaos, and especially Divine TRIGLAPH and his ferocities being well held aloof:—this, after all, is the real History of our Markgraves; ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol, II. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—Of Brandenburg And The Hohenzollerns—928-1417 • Thomas Carlyle
... still pending. As administrator of the estate of Professor Kelton—you remember him—Madison College—I filed a petition to be let into the case. It's been sleeping along for a couple of years—stockholders too poor to put up a fight. I've undertaken to probe clear into the mire. I've got lots of time ...
— A Hoosier Chronicle • Meredith Nicholson
... while a separation would accomplish nothing. When once a man has given his name to a woman, he told me, he cannot take it back; it belongs to her for the rest of her days, and she has a right to dispose of it. She may sully it, cover it with mire, drag it from wine shop to wine shop, and her husband can do nothing. That being the case, my course was soon taken. That same day, I sold the fatal meadow, and sent the proceeds of it to Claudine, wishing to keep nothing of the price of shame. I then had a document ...
— The Widow Lerouge - The Lerouge Case • Emile Gaboriau
... loves and one made white Thy singing lips, and golden hair; Born of the city's mire and light, The shame and splendour of the night, She trapped and fled thee unaware; Not through the lamplight and the rain Shalt thou behold this ...
— Ballads and Lyrics of Old France: with other Poems • Andrew Lang
... subjection; and if I mistake not, 'breaking away' will prove to be no joke. If any of the students feel like giving up, now is the best time to take the back track, for the farther we go the deeper in the mire we shall be. If there are any who are sick of their bargain, they had better say ...
— Breaking Away - or The Fortunes of a Student • Oliver Optic
... says the black-coat gent to the female; 'he's a-flounderin' in the mire of sin. Don't you know,' he goes on to Texas, 'my perishin' friend, you are bein' swept downward in the river of your own sinful life till your soul will ...
— Wolfville • Alfred Henry Lewis
... inherent and fatal defects in private capitalism as a machine for producing wealth which, quite apart from its ethical character, made its abolition necessary if the race was ever to get out of the mire ...
— Equality • Edward Bellamy
... conductor can easily lift a recalcitrant passenger, and project him through one of the windows of the car, (provided said window is large enough to admit of such exit,) into any selected pool, or pond, or quagmire, or any other sort of mire, of the miasmatic salt meadows, with the produce of which Morris and Essex stock is so satisfactorily ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 16, July 16, 1870 • Various
... impossible to believe that any human being is incapable of understanding that, in allowing herself merely to smile at the expense of a fellow-creature who has loyally held out his hand to her, she is casting herself into a mire from which it will be impossible, with the best will in the world, ever to rescue her. I dwell so many miles above the puddles in which these filthy little vermin sprawl and crawl and bawl their cheap obscenities, that I cannot possibly be spattered by the ...
— Swann's Way - (vol. 1 of Remembrance of Things Past) • Marcel Proust
... the material side of the Universe and the carnal side of Man's being,—we shall realise how easy it is for the secular life, once it has lost, through its divorce from religion, the tonic stimulus of a central aim, to sink, without directly intending to do so, into the mire of materialism,—a materialism of conduct as well as ...
— What Is and What Might Be - A Study of Education in General and Elementary Education in Particular • Edmond Holmes
... night-shrouded town, and called the peasants from their well-earned rest to toil onwards in their march. The wind howled fiercely over the moorland; a close, thick, wetting rain descended. Chilled to the bone, worn out with long fatigue, sinking to the knees in mire, onward they marched to destruction. One by one the weary peasants fell off from their ranks to sleep, and die in the rain-soaked moor, or to seek some house by the wayside wherein to hide till daybreak. One by one at first, then in gradually increasing numbers, at every shelter that was seen, ...
— Lay Morals • Robert Louis Stevenson
... 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
... twig her legs." The irate dame turns round to reprove them by words, or wither them with a glance; but alas! in her indignation she raises a threatening hand, forgetful of the important duties it was fulfilling, and down go gown, petticoats, and auxiliaries in the filthy mire; the boys of course roar with delight—it's the jolliest fun they have had for many a day; the old lady gathers up her bundle in haste, and reaches the opposite side with a filthy dress and a furious temper. Let any mind, unwarped ...
— Lands of the Slave and the Free - Cuba, The United States, and Canada • Henry A. Murray
... following her, though all the time they fancied themselves doing it of their own accord. The cow was by no means very nice in choosing her path; so that sometimes they had to scramble over rocks, or wade through mud and mire, and all in a terribly bedraggled condition, and tired to death, and very hungry, into the bargain. What a weary ...
— Tanglewood Tales • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... ponderous coach and six, with four outriders and two equerries kicking up the dust; whilst a small body of heavy dragoons rode solemnly after the huge vehicle. It waded, with inglorious struggles, through a deep mire of mud, between the Palace and Hyde Park, until the cortege entered Kensington Park, as the gardens were then called, and began to track the old road that led to the red-brick structure to which William III. had added a higher story, built ...
— The Wits and Beaux of Society - Volume 1 • Grace Wharton and Philip Wharton
... was greeted with renewed glee by her assailants. They were now roused to the highest point of frenzy: the crowd of brutes would in the nex moment have torn the helpless girl from her place of refuge and dragged her into the mire, an outraged prey, for the satisfaction ...
— I Will Repay • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... tillers of the soil cursed the traveller who brought them potatoes in place of bread, the daily food of the poor man.... They snatched the precious gift from the hands outstretched to them, flung it in the mire, trod ...
— A Reckless Character - And Other Stories • Ivan Turgenev
... Goblin, Wood-god, Fairy, Elfe, or Fiend, Satyr or other power that haunts the Groves, Shall hurt my body, or by vain illusion Draw me to wander after idle fires; Or voyces calling me in dead of night, To make me follow, and so tole me on Through mire and standing pools, to find my ruine: Else why should this rough thing, who never knew Manners, nor smooth humanity, whose heats Are rougher than himself, and more mishapen, Thus mildly kneel to me? sure there ...
— The Faithful Shepherdess - The Works of Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher (Vol. 2 of 10). • Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher
... himself from the mire into which he sank, was advised to make use of a Political Pull. When the Political Pull had arrived, the Ox said: "My good friend, please make fast to me, and let nature ...
— Fantastic Fables • Ambrose Bierce
... that was washed returned to her wallowing in the mire;" and in like manner Cuff left off steering the souls of sinners through the temptations and sorrows of this wicked world, or the infant mind through the intricacies of a—b ab, and once more betook ...
— An Old Sailor's Yarns • Nathaniel Ames
... pursue them as a star may guide those who wish to reach the place over which it happens to shine. But an eternal possibility has no material power. It is only one of an infinity of other things equally possible intrinsically, yet most of them quite unrealisable in this world of blood and mire. The realm of eternal essences rains down no Jovian thunderbolts, but only a ghostly Uranian calm. There is no frown there; rather, a passive and universal welcome to any who may have in them the will and the power to climb. ...
— Winds Of Doctrine - Studies in Contemporary Opinion • George Santayana
... not clinging, it was not like real mire. There was no suction to hold the wheel down. Merely the crust had broken in and the wheel had encountered an impediment of a sound tree root in front of it so that, when the horses tugged, the tire had come against the root and ...
— Nan Sherwood at Pine Camp - or, The Old Lumberman's Secret • Annie Roe Carr
... its walls, turned into a scene thus swept clean for it, a wave of olive drab, impeccable row after impeccable row of scissors-like legs advancing. Recruits, raw if you will, but already caparisoned, sniffing and scenting, as it were, for the great primordial mire of war. ...
— Americans All - Stories of American Life of To-Day • Various
... further north the mire grew deeper. About eight o'clock it began to fall heavily, and, as we crossed the wild heaths hereabout, there was no vestige of a track. The mail kept on well, however, and at eleven we reached a bare place with a house standing alone in the midst of a dreary moor, which ...
— The Letters of Charles Dickens - Vol. 1 (of 3), 1833-1856 • Charles Dickens
... Silliness, animal passion, which intertwines itself with our seemingly tender feelings, which tricks itself out with blossoms, and then eats canker-like into them, to make them too shed their leaves, to trample that, which it called heavenly, in the mire, and—far worse than the comparatively innocent beasts of the field, that are driven by a blind instinct without anything of volition—to deface and spoil everything which but now it worshipt as holy. From this conflagration then shoot forth ever and anon those disasterous ...
— The Old Man of the Mountain, The Lovecharm and Pietro of Abano - Tales from the German of Tieck • Ludwig Tieck
... ancle deep slush and mire, that 'tis hard to get to the post office, and cruel to send the maid out. 'Tis a slough of despair, or I should sooner have thankd you for your offer of the Life, which we shall very much like to have, and will return duly. I do ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb (Vol. 6) - Letters 1821-1842 • Charles and Mary Lamb
... time, the man who had fallen into the ditch had succeeded in making his appearance in the visible world again, and as he crawled up the bank, looking a thing of mire and mud, Jack walked up to him with all the carelessness in the ...
— Varney the Vampire - Or the Feast of Blood • Thomas Preskett Prest
... had a little pony, his name was Dapple Grey; I lent him to a lady, to ride a mile away. She whipped him and she lashed him, She rode him through the mire; I would not lend my pony now For ...
— A History of Nursery Rhymes • Percy B. Green
... "When our feet were in slippery places, and we leaned on Him, did he not support us firmly? and when the mire and clay were deep in our path, did He not ...
— True Riches - Or, Wealth Without Wings • T.S. Arthur
... this child, And grass, and white and red morning-glories,[1] and white and red clover, and the song of the phoebe-bird,[2] And the Third-month lambs, and the sow's pink-faint litter, and the mare's foal, and the cow's calf, And the noisy brood of the barn-yard, or by the mire of the pond-side, And the fish suspending themselves so curiously below there—and the beautiful, curious liquid, And the water-plants with their graceful fiat heads—all became part of him. The field-sprouts of Fourth-month and Fifth-month ...
— Poems By Walt Whitman • Walt Whitman
... monophysitism made this result inevitable. Extremes meet. Extreme spirituality readily passes into its opposite. It cuts the ground from under its own feet. It soars beyond its powers, and falls into the mire of materialism. Illustrations of this fact can be found in the history of philosophy. The Stoics, for instance, contrived to be both pantheists and materialists. Coming nearer to our own time, we find ...
— Monophysitism Past and Present - A Study in Christology • A. A. Luce
... midst of this uproar, the Rector entered the village, and was coming full upon Scourhill and his retinue when the ass made a sudden halt before the door of a tinker, its master, and threw its rider upon a large heap of mire. The youth instantly started up, and, without ever looking behind him to thank his attendants for the procession, he ran home ...
— Forgotten Tales of Long Ago • E. V. Lucas
... have done," he said. "You can have nothing to say. Be silent and listen to me. You have destroyed the greatest happiness the world ever knew. You have dishonoured me and mine. You have dragged my faith in you—God knows how great—into the mire of your infamous life. And worse than that—I could almost have forgiven that, I am ...
— Sant' Ilario • F. Marion Crawford
... locality, they are a well-known resort of the vicious. In the fields are [Page 10] the tillers of the soil wading barefoot and bareheaded in mud and water, holding plough or harrow drawn by an amphibious creature called a carabao or water-buffalo, burying by hand in the mire the roots of young rice plants, or applying as a fertiliser the ordure and garbage of the city. Such unpoetic toils never could have inspired the georgic ...
— The Awakening of China • W.A.P. Martin
... about for a foothold in another direction. At the same time she drew out her body to its full length, and lay flat, so that she might gain as much support as possible by distributing her weight. Because of this sagacity, and because the mire at this point had more substance than in most of the other "honey-pots," she made a good fight, and almost, but not quite, held her own. By the time the tide had once more overtaken her she had sunk but a little ...
— The House in the Water - A Book of Animal Stories • Charles G. D. Roberts
... now to carry out her scheme in coming to Washington, for she was already deep in the mire of politics and could see with every advantage how the great machine floundered about, bespattering with mud even her own pure garments. Ratcliffe himself, since entering the Treasury, had begun to talk with a sneer of the way in which laws were made, and openly said that he wondered how ...
— Democracy An American Novel • Henry Adams
... He's no a sheep, nor in some ways as guid's a sheep, A grant ye that, but such as he is was it no ma duty to pull him oot o' the mire o' Sawbath ...
— To Him That Hath - A Novel Of The West Of Today • Ralph Connor
... constantly doing, or to a particularly steep hill. At such times, the desperate straining of the team, their agonized leaping and plunging under the pitiless lashing of hunger, the many who fainted at the rope and were trampled in the mire, made a very distressing spectacle, which often called forth highly creditable displays of feeling on the top of the coach. At such times the passengers would call down encouragingly to the toilers of the rope, exhorting them to patience, and holding out hopes of possible compensation in another ...
— Looking Backward - 2000-1887 • Edward Bellamy
... cold, wet, dirty night. Grisell's little sister, a girl not well able to walk, soon lost her shoes in the dirt. Whereupon the Lady Polwarth took her upon her back, the gentlemen carrying all their baggage, and Grisell going through the mire ...
— The Red True Story Book • Various
... a long night as I pushed onward through the mire. For presently it had come on to rain—a thick, dank rain, which wetted through all covering, yet fell soft as caressing ...
— Red Axe • Samuel Rutherford Crockett
... 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
... threatened, Otherwise events had happened, For they wanted to o'erthrow me, Threatened they would sink me deeply 160 In the swamp when I was walking, That in mire I might be sunken, In the mud my chin pushed downward, And my beard in filthy places. But indeed a man they found me, And they did not greatly fright me, I myself put forth my magic, And began my spells to mutter, Sang the wizards with their arrows, And ...
— Kalevala, Volume I (of 2) - The Land of the Heroes • Anonymous
... the christening of an infant. It was then plainly Toby's opinion that, while they might not take quite so much time to christen as to marry, there was still no need to rush off with the priest's vestments out of order and his own fetlocks weighted with mire. The two had many friendly contests on these occasions, but Toby's will was the stronger, and his temper was not quite so mild; and as it is always the less amiable who wins, it was commonly he who ...
— Round Anvil Rock - A Romance • Nancy Huston Banks
... not abject yet; there was one that loved them—their chief and their friend! Below their level was a deeper depth, in which, alas, lie many of like heart and, passions with them, trodden into the mire ...
— What's Mine's Mine • George MacDonald
... Caliph in Bagdad; they founded dynasties in India. The fanaticism of Christianity and the fanaticism of Mohammedanism were alike powerless against them. The valor of the bravest fighting men in Europe was impotent to check them. They trampled Russia into bloody mire beneath the hoofs of their horses; they drew red furrows of destruction across Poland and Hungary; they overthrew with ease any force from western Europe that dared encounter them. Yet they had no ...
— African and European Addresses • Theodore Roosevelt
... chief charm. Everybody who knew him felt that he was a man, a large-hearted, generous friend, always ready to help everybody and everything out of their troubles, whether it was a pig stuck in the mire, a poor widow in trouble, or a farmer who needed advice. He had a helpful mind, open, frank, transparent. He never covered up anything, never had secrets. The door of his heart was always open so that anyone could ...
— Pushing to the Front • Orison Swett Marden
... dipped, and she felt the deepening slush of swamp-mire under her feet. She sank in it to her shoe-tops, and stumbled into pools knee-deep, and Peter wallowed in it to his belly. A quarter of an hour they fought through it to the rising ground beyond. And by that time the last of the black storm clouds had passed ...
— The Country Beyond - A Romance of the Wilderness • James Oliver Curwood
... were not yet over, when a tired Cinderella, trudging through the mire, was suddenly provided with a comfortable carriage, springing as it were out of the earth to carry her to her destination. It was extraordinary how often Dr Maclure's brougham "happened" to be travelling in the same ...
— The Fortunes of the Farrells • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... convenient bashluk (a sort of woollen hood) over their heads and ears. The Arab, in his long camel-skin coat, looks impervious to the weather, and women with veiled faces and long black cloaks pick their way through the mire. Throngs of donkeys, melancholy and overladen, their small feet sinking in the slush, may be with the foot-passengers. Some pariah dogs make a dirty patch in the snow, and a troop of Cossacks, their long cloaks spotted with ...
— My War Experiences in Two Continents • Sarah Macnaughtan
... although there was a little sprinkling of snow on the ground, as befitted the season, it had thawed in the streets of Westham, and as a matter of course the doctor, who always appeared to choose the very muddiest of places to tramp in, had managed to collect as much of the mire as he could on ...
— Afloat at Last - A Sailor Boy's Log of his Life at Sea • John Conroy Hutcheson
... Golgotha, and this despite that the books out of which you probably got it are carefully labelled "Fiction." Lamb says somewhere that we think of the "Dark Ages" as literally without sunlight, and so I fancy people like you, dear, think of the "East-end" as a mixture of mire, misery, and murder. How's that for alliteration? Why, within five minutes' walk of me there are the loveliest houses, with gardens back and front, inhabited by very fine people and furniture. Many of my university ...
— The Grey Wig: Stories and Novelettes • Israel Zangwill
... 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 ...
— The Day of Judgment • Joseph Hocking
... suspicion in her frank acceptance of the stranger. There had been open amusement in her tone at his suggestion of danger to her from any in Limasito, and genuine love and pride when she spoke of her father and his calling. How was it possible that the mire of her surroundings had left ...
— The Fifth Ace • Douglas Grant
... finished mi wark, An' wor tooastin mi shins anent th' fire, A chap rushes in aat 'o'th' dark Throo heead to fooit plaistered wi' mire. ...
— Yorkshire Ditties, Second Series - To which is added The Cream of Wit and Humour - from his Popular Writings • John Hartley
... exchange for his own soul? Will he sell that? Will he consent to see another man sell his soul? Will he consent to see the conditions of his community such that men's souls are debauched and trodden underfoot in the mire? What shall he give in exchange for his own soul, or any other man's soul? And since the world, the world of affairs, the world of society, is nothing less and nothing more than all of us put together, it is a great enterprise for the salvation of the soul in ...
— President Wilson's Addresses • Woodrow Wilson
... of mine anger, The staff in whose hand is mine indignation. Against an impious nation am I wont to send him. And against the people of my wrath I give him charge, To take spoil and gather booty, And to tread them down like the mire in the streets. But he—not so doth he plan; And his heart—not so doth it purpose. For destruction is in his heart, And to cut off nations not a few. For he saith, By the strength of my hand have I done it, And by my wisdom, ...
— Stories of the Prophets - (Before the Exile) • Isaac Landman
... said than done. Our unfortunate Normans struggled vainly in the darkness and in the mire, uttering piteous exclamations—cold and frozen, and mocked ever and anon by some blazing light. Many a vow did they make to our Lady of Sorrows, and to St. Erroutt, St. Gervaise, St. Denys, and every ...
— The Rival Heirs being the Third and Last Chronicle of Aescendune • A. D. Crake
... setting out on foot. We went about two kilometres as bravely as possible, and then I stopped, quite exhausted. The mud which clung to our shoes made these very heavy. The effort we had to make at every step to get our feet out of the mire tired us out. I sat down on a milestone, and declared that I ...
— My Double Life - The Memoirs of Sarah Bernhardt • Sarah Bernhardt
... hast lighted the sun, Oh, Thou who hast darkened the tare, Judge Thou The sin of the Stone that was hurled By the Goat from the light of the sun As she sinks in 'the mire of ...
— The Second Chance • Nellie L. McClung
... the toils of the journey and the nature of their tasks, promptly mutinied on arrival. Others dispatched after them failed to turn up, and Lisle never discovered what became of them. The camp-site was a sea of puddled mire with big stones in it; tents and shacks were almost continuously dripping; and every hollow was filled with a raging torrent. Nobody had dry clothes, even to sleep in; the work was mostly carried on knee-deep in water, and at first things got little ...
— The Long Portage • Harold Bindloss
... virtuous 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 day, what may be won From the hard season gaining? Time will run On smoother, till Favonius reinspire The frozen earth, and clothe in fresh attire The lily and rose, that ...
— The Life of John Milton, Volume 5 (of 7), 1654-1660 • David Masson
... the beginning. Having beguiled her into an extravagant mode of expenditure, from motives of self-protection I have been forced to plunge deeper into the mire of deception. I have informed her that she is to refer all tradespeople to Nevin. Quite innocently she may let us in for any amount ...
— The Orchard of Tears • Sax Rohmer
... that counts in the formation of character. All fall short, all fail, but in the end those who seek to climb out of the pit, those who strive, however vainly, to fashion failure to success, are, by comparison, the righteous, while those who are content to wallow in our native mire and to glut themselves with the daily bread of vice, are the unrighteous. To turn our backs thereon wilfully and without cause, is the real unforgiveable sin against the Spirit. At least that is the best definition ...
— Finished • H. Rider Haggard
... men of all ranks, peers and yokels, prize-fighters and Jews, and the last came to plunder, and are now plundering amidst that wild confusion of hail and rain, men and horses, carts and carriages. But all hurry in one direction, through mud and mire; there's a town only three miles distant which is soon reached, and soon filled, it will not contain one-third of that mighty rabble; but there's another town farther on—the good old city is farther on, only twelve miles; what's that! who'll ...
— George Borrow - The Man and His Books • Edward Thomas
... hopeless trade; it only plunged Derues deeper and deeper into the mire of financial disaster. The noblemen either forgot to pay while they were alive, or on their death were found to be insolvent. Derues was driven to ordering goods and merchandise on credit, and selling ...
— A Book of Remarkable Criminals • H. B. Irving
... trampling his memory in the mire, the Baron von Blitzenberg, deserted and dejected, his face still buried in his hands, endured the slow passage of the doleful afternoon. Unlike the prisoner at The Lash, who, by a coincidence that happily illustrates the dispensations of ...
— Count Bunker • J. Storer Clouston
... and (as a necessary consequence) such distinction? Besides, I suddenly felt quite a curiosity to drink some liquor, just to see how it tasted. After all, it was only very low people who got drunk and wallowed in the mire. Gentlemen (I thought) never get drunk, and they always seem so happy and joyous after they have been drinking! How they shake hands, and swear eternal friendship, and seem generously willing to ...
— My Life: or the Adventures of Geo. Thompson - Being the Auto-Biography of an Author. Written by Himself. • George Thompson
... crossed a black and fetid mire, and struck inland to a higher and drier level. The vegetation was that of the Calumbo road, but not so utterly sunburnt: there were dwarf fields of Manioc and Thur (Cajanus indicus), and the large wild ...
— Two Trips to Gorilla Land and the Cataracts of the Congo Volume 2 • Richard F. Burton
... these Reports "more faith-strengthening and soul-refreshing than many a sermon," particularly so after just wading through the mire of a speech of a French infidel who boldly affirmed that of all of the millions of prayers uttered every day, not one is answered. We should like to have any candid skeptic confronted with Mr. Muller's unvarnished story of a life of faith, and see how he would on any principle ...
— George Muller of Bristol - His Witness to a Prayer-Hearing God • Arthur T. Pierson
... 'Go thou from me to fate, And to my father my foul deeds relate. Now die!' With that he dragg'd the trembling sire, Slidd'ring thro' clotter'd blood and holy mire, (The mingled paste his murder'd son had made,) Haul'd from beneath the violated shade, And on the sacred pile the royal victim laid. His right hand held his bloody falchion bare, His left he twisted in his hoary hair; Then, with a speeding thrust, ...
— The Aeneid • Virgil
... you thy true love's grace," (Fly away, my heart, fly away) And now there is joy in the traveller's face: (Fly away, my heart, fly away) Oh, wild does he ride through the rain and mire, To greet his love by the smithy fire— (Fly ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... about it," Sommers answered, closing his lips firmly. "It is part of the mire; we ...
— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick
... is so awful hard. Better almost to die an' be done with it, he sometimes thinks. Then comes a day when his temptation is ten times more than he is able to bear. He throws up the sponge; he has done his best an' failed, so away he goes like the sow that was washed to his wallowing in the mire. But he has not done his best. He has not gone to his Maker; an' surely the maker of a machine is the best judge o' how to mend it. Now, when a believer in Jesus comes to the same point o' temptation he falls on his knees an' cries for help; an' he gets ...
— The Young Trawler • R.M. Ballantyne
... fatal as the fight between the rival Highland clans, described by Scott in "The Fair Maid of Perth." I used to wonder at their folly, when I was stumbling over the rough hassocks, and sinking knee-deep in the black mire, raking the sharp sickle-edged grass which we used to feed out to the young cattle in midwinter when the bitter cold gave them appetite for even such fodder. I had an almost Irish hatred of snakes, and these meadows were full of them,—striped, green, dingy water- snakes, ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... imagine. Women are neither as good as their admirers and defenders maintain, nor as bad as their enemies make them out to be. Woman's character is characterlessness. The best woman will momentarily go down into the mire, and the worst unexpectedly rises to deeds of greatness and goodness and puts to shame those that despise her. No woman is so good or so bad, but that at any moment she is capable of the most diabolical as well as of the ...
— Venus in Furs • Leopold von Sacher-Masoch
... transfigured sunshine; as clear and mellow, only showing everything in a new wonderful significance. The shadows of the leaves on the road were so strangely black that Dowson and I had difficulty in believing that they were not solid, or at least pools of dark mire. And the hills and the trees, and the white Italian houses with lit windows! O! nothing could bring home to you the keenness and the reality and the wonderful Unheimlichkeit of all these. When the moon rises every night over the Italian ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 23 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... hastened through the thin, reflecting mire, amid beams of light and illuminated numbers that advanced upon him in both directions thundering or purring, and crossed Piccadilly, and hurried ahead of her, to watch her in safety from the other side of the thoroughfare. He could hardly see her; she was only a moving shadow; but still he ...
— The Pretty Lady • Arnold E. Bennett
... very large yard, surrounded on three sides by buildings, stables, and store-houses, and cattle-sheds and stalls. In the midst of it was a quantity of manure, all wet and sloppy, and upon the very top of this heap stood that charming boy, Master Tom, with his shoes and stockings all covered with mire. ...
— The Fairchild Family • Mary Martha Sherwood
... fell Upon us, with design To root us out, then had not God Appeared to take our part, And them chastized with His rod, And made them feel the smart, We then had overwhelmed been And trodden in the mire; Our enemies on us had seen Their cruel hearts' desire. When stoned, when stocked, when rudely stripped, Some to the waist have been (Without regard of sex), and whipped, Until the blood did spin; Yea, when their skins with stripes looked black, Their flesh to jelly beat, Enough to make ...
— The History of Thomas Ellwood Written by Himself • Thomas Ellwood
... were left dead upon the field. The victorious army marched to York. As King Harold sat there at the feast, in the midst of all his company, a stir was heard at the doors; and messengers all covered with mire from riding far and fast through broken ground came hurrying in, to report that the ...
— A Child's History of England • Charles Dickens
... happier things as remembering that the happy state came to an end by one's own wrongdoing. Still, most modern readers will think that Goethe, in elaborating the Brocken scene as an interesting study of the uncanny and the vile, let his hero sink needlessly far into the mire. ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... children raised to the full enjoyment of their privileges as social and rational beings, and he seems to have established society for this very end, among others, that there may be an agency and a machinery adequate and fitted to drag even the unwilling out of the mire into which they have fallen. Without such an interposition on the part of society as a whole, the work will not be done. The mass of the people will remain in ignorance in every community, in which the community as such does not provide the means ...
— In the School-Room - Chapters in the Philosophy of Education • John S. Hart
... enemy, the Parisians have succeeded in emptying the cup of disgrace to the dregs by dragging down the monument of their military glory, amid hoots and hisses, and toppling over the effigy of their greatest soldier-hero on to a bed of mire, at the same time publicly tearing the tricoloured national flag which has for so many years led their armies to victory. Upon the official announcement some days back that the Vendome Column was to be sacrificed as an insult to the principles ...
— The Insurrection in Paris • An Englishman: Davy
... free. 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 selfish dishonour! ...
— Annals of a Quiet Neighbourhood • George MacDonald
... miles of their journey, and this was undertaken on foot, but soon a storm brought five inches of snow. Mr. Wright says: "My wife was very lame, and what woman would not be after walking twenty long miles through mire and water, over high hills and through gullies, in snow from four to ...
— The American Missionary, Volume 49, No. 3, March, 1895 • Various
... person). Why, she set to work and made a rochet in little, and set it on the dog's back. Heardst thou ever the like? And there was he, a-running about the house with his rochet on him, and all trailing in the mire. I know not whether Annis were wholly free of some knowledge thereof—nor Bertie neither. He said he knew not; I marvel whether he ...
— Robin Tremain - A Story of the Marian Persecution • Emily Sarah Holt
... 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 ...
— The Eustace Diamonds • Anthony Trollope
... they extend this merriment with the largest, to the preiudice of ouer-credulous people, perswading them to fight with a Dragon lurking in Halgauer, or to see some strange matter there: which concludeth at least, with a trayning them into the mire. ...
— The Survey of Cornwall • Richard Carew
... 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 ...
— Possessed • Cleveland Moffett
... reflected, "maybe likened to the Sibyl, who in the pantheon of the false gods, proclaimed the coming Redeemer to the Nations. The mire of old-world falsehoods yet clings about the hoofs of his feet, but his forehead is uplifted to the light, and ...
— The Well of Saint Clare • Anatole France
... 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 he ...
— Lectures of Col. R. G. Ingersoll, Volume I • Robert Green Ingersoll
... same 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 entering the ...
— Legends of the Rhine • Wilhelm Ruland
... again. She begged him to kill her rather than exact this ultimate love- payment. She told him of the penalty of breaking the taboo of the Red One—a week of torture, living, the details of which she yammered out from her face in the mire until he realized that he was yet a tyro in knowledge of the frightfulness the human was capable of ...
— The Red One • Jack London
... not have any divorce trial," said Ishmael firmly. "We will not have your daughter's pure name dragged through the mire of a divorce court; we will have Lord Vincent and his accomplices arrested and tried; the valet for murder, and the viscount and the opera singer for conspiracy and kidnaping. We have proof enough to convict them all; the valet will be hanged; and the viscount ...
— Self-Raised • Emma Dorothy Eliza Nevitte Southworth
... happier in all his life. The past?—he wiped that off his recollection as with a sponge; now he was a new man with his feet out of the mire and a clean road all the rest of the way, with a clean sweet soul for his companion. He loved her to his very heart of hearts; he had, honestly, for her but the rendered passion of passion—why! what ...
— Doom Castle • Neil Munro
... the long silence that followed and the distant voices that flashed across it now and then—the call of the mire drum in the marshes and the songs of the winter wren and the swamp robin. It was a ...
— The Light in the Clearing • Irving Bacheller
... rapture. Damn it, couldn't he be freed from one without falling into the other? Lee told himself that it must be possible to leave permanently the fenced roads of Eastlake for the high hills; it wasn't necessary to go down into the bottoms, the mire. ...
— Cytherea • Joseph Hergesheimer
... before the wall they fought, While Death exulted o'er them; deadly Strife Shrieked out a long wild cry from host to host. With blood of slain men dust became red mire: Here, there, fast fell the ...
— The Fall of Troy • Smyrnaeus Quintus
... evening, tell pleasant tales of ancient days, while the wind powdered the glass with drift, and roared in the chimney. Then a man thanked God that he was not confined to a place where the pure snow was trodden into mire, and the thick fog made it ...
— Kate Carnegie and Those Ministers • Ian Maclaren
... rain ceased, but the fog continued. Their path led through marshy ground thoroughly soaked with rain, so that they often sank to their knees in the mire. Their feet were shod with moccasins made of the hide of buffaloes. These being alternately wet and dried, became stiff, and blistered their feet cruelly. Fortunately, they struck upon one of the "streets" made by the ...
— The Adventures of the Chevalier De La Salle and His Companions, in Their Explorations of the Prairies, Forests, Lakes, and Rivers, of the New World, and Their Interviews with the Savage Tribes, Two Hu • John S. C. Abbott
... the characteristic of those who are yearning to rise above their low environment. It is not from external filth alone that a man seeks to cleanse himself, but from inward corruption also. And so he strives, and strives again, for purity—and falls the deeper in the mire. ...
— Maxim Gorki • Hans Ostwald
... crucial trials. It condemned him, 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
... these last had ever been as "the morning cloud and the early dew," and like all good resolutions repeatedly broken, had only added fresh rivets to the chains of his evil habits. And so he had plunged deeper and deeper into the mire of intemperance and ungodliness, till scarce the faintest trace of the divine image could be discerned ...
— True to his Colours - The Life that Wears Best • Theodore P. Wilson
... martyr detrahatur, Petrus Martyr Vermilius, omnesque cum eo foederati, peiores adulteris et sacrilegis habeantur. Ac ne singulis insistam diutius, Patres huius saeculi damnantur omnes, "quippe qui doctrinam de poenitentia mire depravarint."[49] Quo pacto? Nam austeritas canonum, quae viguit ea tempestate, maiorem in modum displicet huic sectae plausibili, quae tricliniis aptior, quam templis, voluptarias aures titillare et pulvillos omni cubito[50] ...
— Ten Reasons Proposed to His Adversaries for Disputation in the Name • Edmund Campion
... prodigality of genius has wasted upon so poor a theme. Not even that libretto could degrade the pure, serious, and essentially innocent character of Mozart's conceptions; but, in turn, his refined musical conception has been unable to lift the subject from the mire of Da Ponte's delineation. We know that page after page has been written to unfold the mystic meanings and profound philosophy contained in the story, but our observation has been, that the effect of the whole upon pure minds is simply—disgust. The musical grandeur of the finale rarely saves its ...
— Continental Monthly, Volume 5, Issue 4 • Various
... gentleman's shoulder. He took him in the instant in which, with one foot off the ground and the other on the step of the carriage, the foreigner was easily thrown' off his balance; he dragged him violently backward, span him round and dropped him floundering in the mire of the street-kennel. ...
— St. Martin's Summer • Rafael Sabatini
... without adding to thine iniquity, by allowing that man to know what should never have been revealed to him? Do you not feel that you make that man your own accomplice the very moment that you throw into his heart and soul the mire of your iniquities? He is as weak as you are; he is not less a sinner than yourself; what has tempted you will tempt him; what has made you weak will make him weak? what has polluted you will pollute him; what has thrown you down into the dust ...
— The Priest, The Woman And The Confessional • Father Chiniquy
... for refusing the oath of supremacy, were arrested at their firesides: herded together like cattle; driven at the point of the bayonet, amid the gibes, jeers, and scoffs of soldiers, up to this dreary place, and thrust promiscuously into a dark vault in this castle; almost smothered in filth and mire; a prey to pestilent disease, and to every malignity which brutality could inflict, they died here unpitied. A few escaping down the rocks were recaptured, ...
— Sunny Memories Of Foreign Lands, Volume 1 (of 2) • Harriet Elizabeth (Beecher) Stowe
... fell asleep, it was in the thick of marveling over the processes of evolution that could produce from primeval mire and dust the glowing, glorious flesh and ...
— The Little Lady of the Big House • Jack London
... for help as I was sticking in the mire, and, more propitious than Hercules, he put his own shoulder to the wheel. Through his favourable representations Murray was quickly induced to undertake the future publication of the work which he had previously declined. A further edition of the first volume was put to press, and from ...
— A Publisher and His Friends • Samuel Smiles
... just above the end of the stock, poise the piece on the hammer on either shoulder, stock uppermost, and roll up our breeches to the knees. Then like Tam O'Shanter, we "skelpit on through dub and mire, despising wind, and rain, and fire," and singing "John Brown's Body," or whatever else came handy. But rainy days in camp, especially such as we had at Benton Barracks, engender feelings of gloom and dejection that have to be experienced ...
— The Story of a Common Soldier of Army Life in the Civil War, 1861-1865 • Leander Stillwell
... 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 ...
— Poems (Volume II.) • Jonathan Swift
... 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 how Mr. Seward, aided by Mr. Lincoln, has done all in his ...
— Diary from November 12, 1862, to October 18, 1863 • Adam Gurowski
... quench the God-born fire, Pulsing at the soul's deep root? Tyrants! grind it in the mire, ...
— Old Spookses' Pass • Isabella Valancy Crawford
... me, and have good courage." They followed their guide, who, believing he led them well, brought them to the way which the governor had barricaded. Not being able to pass that way, they went to the other newly made in the wood among the mire, which the Spaniards could shoot into at pleasure; but the pirates, full of courage, cut down the branches of trees and threw them on the way, that they might not stick in the dirt. Meanwhile, those of Gibraltar fired with ...
— Great Pirate Stories • Various
... if she were there, which I know is not the case. I was there myself yesterday, and they had never heard anything about her. I wish to heaven you would leave us alone, and let us sink into the mire we are made for! We don't want such fine ladies as you coming patronising us, and trying to make pious examples of us. We are quite happy—oh, quite happy—as ...
— The Guinea Stamp - A Tale of Modern Glasgow • Annie S. Swan
... results! He saw how, whenever failure and dishonor had filtered in, it was where weakness, self-indulgence, or untruthfulness, had left an opening. He saw how one wrong had been a sure and easy path to another, until in the end he had groveled face downward in the mire. ...
— Bressant • Julian Hawthorne
... his torn tunic and his cothurni, covered from head to foot with blood and mire, his left arm hanging useless, and his face like the face of a dead man, neither his miserable plight nor his story brought softness to the stern lips ...
— The Lion's Brood • Duffield Osborne
... shelter of a shepherd's house. 'We had miserable up-putting,' the diary continues, 'and on both sides of the ferry much anxiety of mind. Our beds were clean straw, and but for the circumstance of the boat, I should have slept as soundly as ever I did after a walk through moss and mire ...
— Records of a Family of Engineers • Robert Louis Stevenson
... 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 ...
— L. P. M. - The End of the Great War • J. Stewart Barney
... loneliness. How could she ever drop it all—all this wild freedom, this boundless health, this great outdoors, this life, life, how could she drop it all and go back into the little circle where convention fenced out the tiniest alien streamlet, although the circle itself might lie deep in mire? And how would she give up this boy who had grown so imperceptibly but so intimately into the very soul of her being; give him up with all his strength, and virility, and—yes, and coarseness, if you will—but sincerity too; an essential man, as ...
— The Cow Puncher • Robert J. C. Stead
... 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 wretched life." ...
— Opening a Chestnut Burr • Edward Payson Roe
... 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 ...
— Hope and Have - or, Fanny Grant Among the Indians, A Story for Young People • Oliver Optic
... I say, of the flesh; even of that flesh, who, or which also committeth the greatest enormities; for the flesh is but one, though its workings are divers: sometimes in a way most notoriously sensual and devilish, causing the soul to wallow in the mire. ...
— The Pharisee And The Publican • John Bunyan
... married. But with Jeff it would be for one of the least of these. There flashed into her mind an old Indian proverb she had read. "I met a hundred men on the road to Delhi, and they were all my brothers." Yes! None were too deep sunk in the mire to be brothers and sisters to ...
— The Vision Spendid • William MacLeod Raine
... controversy. It is possible to set the standard too high as well as too low—to plant it on an elevation so distant that its symbol can no longer be deciphered, as well as to fix it so low that its folds draggle in mire and dust. If genius systematically appeal only to the initiated few, it must learn to do without the homage of the outer multitude. For its slender income of fame, it has mainly itself to thank. These remarks apply with primary force to that class of contemporary poets who delight in ...
— Chambers' Edinburgh Journal - Volume XVII., No 422, New Series, January 31, 1852 • Various
... hog or wild boar, enemy of Adonis; because in that country the functions of the Northern Bear were performed by the animal whose inclination for mire and dirt was emblematic of winter. And this is the reason, followers of Moses and Mahomet! that you hold him in horror, in imitation of the priests of Memphis and Balbec, who detested him as the murderer of their God, the sun. This likewise, O Indians! is the type of your Chib-en; and ...
— The Ruins • C. F. [Constantin Francois de] Volney
... a story that the king of gods, 'Indra,' once became a pig, wallowing in mire. He had a she pig and a lot of baby pigs and was very happy. Then some other angels saw his plight, came to him and told him, 'You are the king of the gods, you have all the gods to command. Why are you here?' But Indra said, 'Let me be. I am all right here, I don't ...
— A California Girl • Edward Eldridge
... their lips, and it has not been permitted to pass, as His was not permitted to pass. In the souls of men and of women is something of the divine, something high and marvelous—a gift from Heaven to hold the human race above the mire which threatens to engulf it.... Every day it asserts itself somewhere; in sacrifice, in devotion, in simple courage, in lofty renunciation. It is common; wonderfully, beautifully common... yet there are men who do not see it, or, seeing, do not comprehend, and so despair of humanity.... ...
— Youth Challenges • Clarence B Kelland |
