"Oozy" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... not more than six feet, and the average flow is said not to amount to more than two feet six inches—but even this flux is sufficient to produce large tracts of sea which the reflux converts into square miles of oozy sand. ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 4 • Various
... daughter? O heavens! that they were living both in Naples, The king and queen there! That they were, I wish Myself were mudded in that oozy bed Where my son lies. When did you ...
— The Tempest • William Shakespeare [Craig, Oxford edition]
... lump of soft, oozy blackness. One could tell from the way that Arcot's mind handled it that it was soft. It seemed cold, terribly cold. ...
— Invaders from the Infinite • John Wood Campbell
... headlong flight O'er desert bare. And on the woody height Trooped zebras, velvet-brown. The date's green crest Beneath, the peaceful camels lay at rest. And slender-straight camelopards the boughs Down-drew, the lush-green leaves thereon to browse. Or oft 'mong oozy bogs, or through the fens, Fearless she went, when low, 'mong reedy dens The water-courses by, huge creatures slept, Or in the jungles spotted panthers crept, And in the thickets deadly serpents wound Like blossomed wreaths, their coils upon the ground. All forms of life ...
— Lilith - The Legend of the First Woman • Ada Langworthy Collier
... from the trees, skimmed and struggled on the surface in glances of fire, like evil spirits watching to seize them as their prey. At length the screaming and shrieking of the birds, and clang of their the cattle, ceased; and the startled fish oozy caverns at the bottom of the sea, disappeared; and all was again black and undistinguishable, the deathlike silence being only broken by the hoarse murmuring of ...
— Tom Cringle's Log • Michael Scott
... and finding the boat too fast aground for him to stir it, hallooed out for the rest, who were straggling about: upon which they all soon came to the boat: but it was past all their strength to launch her, the boat being very heavy, and the shore on that side being a soft oozy sand, almost like a quicksand. In this condition, like true seamen, who are, perhaps, the least of all mankind given to forethought, they gave it over, and away they strolled about the country again; and I heard one of them say aloud to another, calling them ...
— Robinson Crusoe • Daniel Defoe
... Disease,— On a long long v'yage, as busy as bees, Never stopping for a moment to take our ease, Never changing our course, except when the breeze Took to blowing to windward,—we had slipped by degrees Down the oozy slopes of the Hebrides, And passed through the locks of the Florida Keys, Which in getting through was a rather tight squeeze, But danger is nothing to men like these, When suddenly the lookout, a Portuguese Who had better been below a-shelling ...
— The Old Tobacco Shop - A True Account of What Befell a Little Boy in Search of Adventure • William Bowen
... sitting up, endeavouring to get a breath of purer air. He rose to his feet, sinking almost to the top of his boots in the oozy slime. Foul gases were belched up to envelop him. He seized at irregularities in the bank, and got his head above the level of the ground. He thrust forward his chin and took great greedy breaths in a very gluttony of air—and never came Muscadine ...
— Mistress Wilding • Rafael Sabatini
... music as, 'tis said, Before was never made, But when of old the sons of morning sung, While the Creator great His constellations set, And the well-balanced world on hinges hung, And cast the dark foundations deep, And bid the weltering waves their oozy ...
— In The Yule-Log Glow—Book 3 - Christmas Poems from 'round the World • Various
... and still rich under foot, although it froze hard every night; but all along the brook's marge there were many small oozy bubbling springlets, which it required a stinging night to congeal; and round these the ground was poached up by the cattle, and laid bare in spots of deep, soft, black loam; and the innumerable chalkings told the experienced eye at half a glance, that, where they laid up for the night soever, ...
— Warwick Woodlands - Things as they Were There Twenty Years Ago • Henry William Herbert (AKA Frank Forester)
... I saw a woman in a white robe of some sort stretched out as though asleep. And it seemed to me, though I could not tell why, that all this flotsam, and my own hulk along with it, slowly was drifting closer and closer together; and was packing tighter and tighter in the soft oozy tangle of the weed, which everywhere was matted so thickly that the water did not ...
— In the Sargasso Sea - A Novel • Thomas A. Janvier
... blood of the oppressors did among the fleeing slaves. Indeed, if the host had any thought beyond the impulse of self-preservation, it was only a dim realization that they were walking over a most rocky, oozy and untender road and that the smell of the sea was very ...
— The Yoke - A Romance of the Days when the Lord Redeemed the Children - of Israel from the Bondage of Egypt • Elizabeth Miller
... Stumps and logs, like precious monuments, adorned its two streets, each stump and log, on account of the moist climate, moss-grown and tufted with grass and bushes, but muddy on the sides below the limit of the bog-line. The ground in general was an oozy, mossy bog on a foundation of jagged rocks, full of concealed pit-holes. These picturesque rock, bog, and stump obstructions, however, were not so very much in the way, for there were no wagons or carriages there. There was not a horse on the island. The domestic animals ...
— Travels in Alaska • John Muir
... stones of which felt damp and oozy to the touch, Ned ventured to light a match. The underground room was long and narrow, with rock walls in which there was no opening except the one by way of which the ...
— Boy Scouts in the Canal Zone - The Plot Against Uncle Sam • G. Harvey Ralphson
... bends his steps at last. Then, thro' the gate of iv'ry, he dismiss'd His valiant offspring and divining guest. Straight to the ships Aeneas his way, Embark'd his men, and skimm'd along the sea, Still coasting, till he gain'd Cajeta's bay. At length on oozy ground his galleys moor; Their heads are turn'd to ...
— The Aeneid • Virgil
... now an unhung and travelling basket, heavy, iron-ribbed, anciently mossy, oozy of slime, fell with neat exactitude upon the bald, bare cranium of Mr. Alastair Kenneth MacIlwraith, head gardener, and dour, irascible child ...
— Snake and Sword - A Novel • Percival Christopher Wren
... one-eyed mariner were on deck; they had only to turn up the small ship's boy, who quickly made his appearance on being summoned, and they set to work to turn round the windlass, which soon won the anchor from its oozy bed. The sails were set, and as a light breeze had just then sprung up, the galiot began to move slowly down the canal towards the open ocean, which was yet, however, a good way off. As the breeze freshened the galiot moved faster and faster, and soon the town, with its church steeples ...
— Voyages and Travels of Count Funnibos and Baron Stilkin • William H. G. Kingston
... of them Lawrenceville boys, ain't you?" she said, eyeing with curiosity the oozy ruffle of ...
— Skippy Bedelle - His Sentimental Progress From the Urchin to the Complete - Man of the World • Owen Johnson
... faintest gleams of colour, like a dove's wing, blue plains and heights, over the nearer woodland; everywhere fallen rotting leaf and oozy water-channel; everything, tint and form, restrained, austere, delicate; nature asleep and breathing gently in the cool airs; a tranquil and sober ...
— The Altar Fire • Arthur Christopher Benson
... the sight of one of the lizards, and offered my body to its attack. The challenge was accepted. It swooped like a dropping stone, and I swerved and drove in the lance at its oozy eye. ...
— The Lost Continent • C. J. Cutcliffe Hyne
... a blackthorn bush was a mass of pure white stars. At the far end, instead of a hedge, lay the moat, a shallow stagnant pool, bordered with drooping willows, tall reeds, and rushes that reared their spear-like stems from the dark oozy water. Originally this moat had encircled the mansion as a means of defence, but now, like the ruined gateway, its mission was long past, and it survived, a sleepy witness to the warfare of our forefathers, and a picturesque ...
— The Madcap of the School • Angela Brazil
... as before, we pushed into the breast-high grass, and the walking was easy. Once we crossed a patch of oozy turf from which arose a score of jack-snipe; again we skirted a drying pond whose boggy edges were the hunting ground of marsh hens. Yet other trails could be read here: deer, wildcat, raccoon, and innumerable wee things. And here, too, around the "bonnet" leaves, the ...
— Wings of the Wind • Credo Harris
... whom they aped even to the very patronage of painters; or, at the other end of this bastard brotherhood of righteousness, sore-eyed wretches trundling their flat carts of second-hand goods, or initiating a squalid ghetto of diamond-cutting and cigar-making in oozy alleys and on the refuse-laden borders of treeless canals. Oh! he was ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... over, the sea-chest slid a trifle and this was enough to push the gunwale clear under. The boat filled and capsized, what with the weight of the chest and the pressure of the canoe's fore part. Down to the oozy bed sank ...
— Blackbeard: Buccaneer • Ralph D. Paine
... eyes he was the high-priest of American politics; he was charged with the meaning of the mysteries, the clue to political hieroglyphics. Through him she hoped to sound the depths of statesmanship and to bring up from its oozy bed that pearl of which she was in search; the mysterious gem which must lie hidden somewhere in politics. She wanted to understand this man; to turn him inside out; to experiment on him and use him as young physiologists use frogs and kittens. If there was good or ...
— Democracy An American Novel • Henry Adams
... nosing along the bank, then stole down a waterway, a crystal channel between ramparts of green. This looped at a right angle, shone with a sudden glaze of sun, slipped into shadow and, rounding a point, an island with a bare, oozy edge ...
— Treasure and Trouble Therewith - A Tale of California • Geraldine Bonner
... mermen who swim round them, wondering what those lights may mean. I made him walk with me on the land under the sea, where go the divers through the wrecks, and ascend the rocky mountains and penetrate the weedy valleys, and glide across the slippery, oozy plains. In fine, Uniacke, I drowned little Jack—I drowned him in the sea, I ...
— Tongues of Conscience • Robert Smythe Hichens
... proved to be a cumbersome flat-boat of the type used by clam-fishers. In fact the smell that simply swirled up from its oozy bottom left no doubt that the boat had been used for that purpose. A pair of unbelievably heavy oars, cut from a sapling with a hand-axe, trailed in the water from "loose oarlocks." Dave gave a gasp of dismay as he "hefted" ...
— The Boy Scouts of the Air on Lost Island • Gordon Stuart
... tide swings round in the Race, and they're plaining whisht and low, And they come from the gray sea-marshes, where the gray sea-lavenders grow, And the cotton-grass sways to and fro; And the gore-sprent sundews thrive With oozy hands alive. Canst hear the curlews' whistle through thy dreamings dark and drear, How they're crying, crying, crying, ...
— The Haunted Hour - An Anthology • Various
... love! While any formal, heartless matrimony, Patched up by Court intrigues, and threats of cloisters, Drags on for six times six, and peasant slaves Grow old on the same straw, and hand in hand Slip from life's oozy bank, ...
— The Saint's Tragedy • Charles Kingsley
... The crowding sampans, houseboats, and junks stretched far out into its oily, oozy flow, making a floating city as he neared the congested life of the coast, where the ever-increasing population failed to find ground space in its maggoty swarming. As the stream widened until ...
— O Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1919 • Various
... towns they seem to be. The houses are built of sun-baked mud bricks, kneaded by mares that splash and trample through the oozy substance for hours to mix it well. The poorer people build ranches of long, slender canes or Indian cornstalks tied together by grass and coated with mud. These are all erected around and about the most imposing ...
— Through Five Republics on Horseback • G. Whitfield Ray
... perfection. There grew the fig-tree that had run wild and taken to wife the vine, which likewise had gone rampant out of all human control; so that the two wild things had tangled and knotted themselves into a wild marriage bond, and hung their various progeny—the luscious figs, the grapes, oozy with the Southern juice, and both endowed with a wild flavor that added the final charm—on the ...
— The Marble Faun, Volume II. - The Romance of Monte Beni • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... the total fall reaches 146 feet. At La Salle the Illinois River is met, and this stream, after a course of 225 miles, enters the Missouri. In the whole distance the Illinois River has a fall of 29 ft. "It has a sluggish current; an oozy bed and bars, formed chiefly by tributaries, with natural depths of 2 ft. to 4 ft.; banks half way to high waters, and low bottoms, one to six miles wide, bounded by terraces, overflowed during high water ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 795, March 28, 1891 • Various
... in oozy mud as she scrambled on board, but that was a trifle compared with the relief of being ferried over the river. Her knight-errant was neither young nor handsome, being, indeed, rather bald and stout, but no orthodox interesting hero of fiction could have been more welcome ...
— A Popular Schoolgirl • Angela Brazil
... outed Bill at last, Slugged me cobber hard 'n' fast. It's a kill. See the purple of his lip 'N' the red 'n' oozy drip! Ends our great ...
— 'Hello, Soldier!' - Khaki Verse • Edward Dyson
... verse; That, if such numbers can o'er time prevail, May tell posterity the wondrous tale. When actions, unadorned, are faint and weak, Cities and countries must be taught to speak; Gods may descend in factions from the skies, And rivers from their oozy beds arise; 470 Fiction may deck the truth with spurious rays, And round the hero cast a borrowed blaze. Marlborough's exploits appear divinely bright, And proudly shine in their own native light; Raised of themselves, ...
— The Poetical Works of Addison; Gay's Fables; and Somerville's Chase • Joseph Addison, John Gay, William Sommerville
... machine-guns at work a few yards away from my head, which I ducked below the trench parapet. Splodge! went the officer in front of me, with a yell of dismay. The water was well above his top-boots. Splosh! went another man ahead, recovering from a side-slip in the oozy mud and clinging desperately to some bunches of yarrow growing up the side of the trench. Squelch! went a young gentleman whose puttees and breeches had lost their glory and were but swabs about his ...
— Now It Can Be Told • Philip Gibbs
... touch the shining goblet's rim, Care-drowning Massic; let rich ointments flow From amplest conchs! No measure we shall know! What! shall we wreaths of oozy parsley trim, ...
— Horace • Theodore Martin
... spots, As when the great pencil dots Heaven with stars, doth scarce begin From its impulses within— Nature's stern necessity, To be schooled in cruelty,— Monster, waging ruthless war:— And with instincts better far Must I have less liberty? Fish are born, the spawn that breeds Where the oozy sea-weeds float, Scarce perceives itself a boat, Scaled and plated for its needs, When from wave to wave it speeds, Measuring all the mighty sea, Testing its profundity To its depths so dark and chill:— And with so much freer will, Must I have less liberty? Streams are born, a coiled-up snake ...
— Life Is A Dream • Pedro Calderon de la Barca
... pressed forward swiftly like a conqueror; and like a conqueror he whistled. Then he found the clothes-line, suddenly, pitched forward and fell, not heavily, for the mud was thick, but sprawling. He rose, oozy and dripping, took a long breath, and the welkin shuddered as ...
— The Terrible Twins • Edgar Jepson
... train. But everything is quite different when you walk into a tunnel on your own feet, and tread on shifting, sliding stones and gravel on a path that curves downwards from the shining metals to the wall. Then you see slimy, oozy trickles of water running down the inside of the tunnel, and you notice that the bricks are not red or brown, as they are at the tunnel's mouth, but dull, sticky, sickly green. Your voice, when you speak, is quite changed ...
— The Railway Children • E. Nesbit
... retired along channels scooped several fathoms deep in black mud, leaving our vessel aground six or seven feet below the top of the bank, and soon afterwards there was no water to be seen; as far as the eye could reach, all was a glistening oozy mud, except the bleak level surfaces of the islands, on which neither shrub nor tree grew. Soon after 2 p.m. a white line was seen on the low black horizon, which was the tide-wave, advancing at ...
— Himalayan Journals (Complete) • J. D. Hooker
... the languid deck passengers, sleeping on their bedding rolls. Very quiet it was ashore, so still and quiet that one could hear the bubbling, sucking noises of the large land-crabs, pattering over the black, oozy mud, or the sound of a lean pig scratching himself against the piles of a native hut, the clustered huts, mounted on stilts, of the village at ...
— Civilization - Tales of the Orient • Ellen Newbold La Motte
... cranberries—no, I am all wrong: there was nothing out yet but a few furze-blossoms; the rest were all waiting behind their doors till they were called; and no full, slow-gliding river with meadow-sweet along its oozy banks, only a little brook here and there, that dashed past without a moment to say, "How do you do?"—there (would you believe it?) while the same cloud that was dropping down golden rain all about the queen's new baby was dashing huge ...
— A Double Story • George MacDonald
... frankly in despair. In her free hours she sat in their little shelter, her thin, freckly hands busy with the worsted masterpiece that she was working. Pee-wee, at least, had his appetite to console him, but she had no relish for the stale lemonade and melting, oozy taffy which stood pathetically on the ...
— Pee-wee Harris • Percy Keese Fitzhugh
... undergrowths of briar; the haunt of innumerable small birds that dart in and out, chirping faintly. In its depressed portions the 'forest' has degenerated into a marsh through which a sluggish stream wends it way to the distant river. Slimy reptiles bask in the warm sun and glide lazily over the black, oozy soil. At intervals the stillness is broken by the splash of a gigantic bullfrog returning to his favorite pool. This acrobatic feat is usually accompanied by a deep-throated cry of satisfaction, not unlike the twanging of an ill-tuned guitar. On the edges of the marsh mud-covered terrapins ...
— The Statesmen Snowbound • Robert Fitzgerald
... Thames in streams majestic flows, Or Naiads in their oozy beds repose While Phoebus reigns above the starry train While bright Aurora purples o'er the main, So long, great Sir, the muse thy praise shall sing, So long thy praise shal' make Parnassus ring: Then grant, ...
— Religious and Moral Poems • Phillis Wheatley
... it, that as Daphnis had tormented her by his infidelity, so he in his turn may be agitated with a returning constancy. She prays that as the wanton heifer pursues the steer through woods and glens, till at length, worn out with fatigue, she lies down on the oozy reeds by the banks of the stream, and the night-dew is unable to induce her to withdraw, so Daphnis may be led on after her for ever with inextinguishable love. She buries the relics of what had belonged to Daphnis beneath her threshold. ...
— Lives of the Necromancers • William Godwin
... December twilight was settling over Boston, a thick foggy murk that soaked down full of smoke and smell and chill. The streets were oozy with a wet snow which had fallen through the afternoon and had been trodden into mud; and draughty with an east wind, that would have passed unnoticed across the open fields, but which drew up these narrow flues and sent a shiver ...
— Roof and Meadow • Dallas Lore Sharp
... Vain, vain was the shout, that in battle rout, Had rung as a knell in the ear of the foe, For the bursting deck was heaved from the wreck, And the sky was bathed in the awful glow! The ocean shook to its oozy bed, As the swelling sound to the canopy went, And the splintered fires like meteors shed Their light o'er the tossing element. A moment they gleamed, then sank in the foam, And darkness swept over the gorgeous glare— They lighted the mariners down ...
— Poems • Sam G. Goodrich
... daisies spread Where with surface dull like lead Arabian pools of slime invite Manticors down from neighbouring height To dip heads, to cool fiery blood In oozy depths of sucking mud. Sing then of ringstraked manticor, Man-visaged tiger who of yore Held whole Arabian waste in fee With raging pride from sea to sea, That every lesser tribe would fly Those armed feet, that hooded eye; Till preying on himself at last Manticor ...
— Country Sentiment • Robert Graves
... I now lay was of soft, oozy silt; about me were rocks, slippery and covered with a coating of grey-green slime. Spots in the slime moved. I could hear it, or rather feel it—a sort of bubbling quake, mere beginnings of the life impulse. The tops and ...
— Child and Country - A Book of the Younger Generation • Will Levington Comfort
... crumbling plaster, and even the huge, clustered chimney in the midst, seemed to constitute only the least and meanest part of its reality. So much of mankind's varied experience had passed there,—so much had been suffered, and something, too, enjoyed,—that the very timbers were oozy, as with the moisture of a heart. It was itself like a great human heart, with a life of its own, and full of ...
— The House of the Seven Gables • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... till sunset, makes it easy for any ship to go in before the wind; and it grows wider as the town is approached, so that a-breast of it there is room for the largest fleet, in five or six fathom water, with an oozy bottom. At the narrow part, the entrance is defended by two forts. The principal is Santa Cruz, which stands on the east point of the bay, and has been mentioned before; that on the west side is called Fort Lozia, and is built upon a rock that lies close to the main; the distance ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 12 • Robert Kerr
... trained and travelling industrials and all the sweet influences of Nature came and did all they could without man's help to make this great valley most delightful to the eye. But the wolves still prowled and howled; the briers grew rough and rank; the grass, coarse and thin; the heathered hills were oozy and cold in their watery beds; the clumpy, shrubby trees wore the same ragged coats of moss; and no feature of the scene mended for the better from year ...
— A Walk from London to John O'Groat's • Elihu Burritt
... thirst that naught save Nantz and schnapps and strong ale of the Skull and Spectacles could assuage, and the gentlemen of the Chisholm Hunt would have discovered that the only way after a run with the harriers was through the vilest part of the town and among the oozy timbers of the wharves which formed the kingdom of ...
— Marjorie • Justin Huntly McCarthy
... meat or skin. Fish of the infinite sea breaking their bark-fibre nets; fowl innumerable, migrant in the skies, for their flint-headed arrows; bred horses for their own riding; ships of no mean size, and of all sorts, flat-bottomed for the oozy puddles, keeled and decked for strong Elbe stream and furious Baltic on the one side, for mountain-cleaving Danube and the black lake of Colchos ...
— Our Fathers Have Told Us - Part I. The Bible of Amiens • John Ruskin
... said, was little more indeed than a logging trail through the heart of the woods; and now, deeper in, with increasing frequency, the tires slipped and skidded on damp, moist earth that at times approached very nearly to being oozy mud. ...
— The Miracle Man • Frank L. Packard
... great angle of the high-road, coming out again on a furzy opening dotted with old oaks, where the black pigs of the cottagers would by and by feast and grow fat on their common rights. It was a lovely, damp, perilous spot, haunted by the ghost of fever and ague. The soft, vivid turf was oozy there, and the long-rooted stones were clothed with wet, rusted moss. The few cottages of the hamlet wore deep hoods of thatch, and stood amongst prosperous orchards; one of them, a little larger than the rest, being the habitation of Mr. Moxon, the vicar of Littlemire, ...
— The Vicissitudes of Bessie Fairfax • Harriet Parr
... long-frozen soil and heating the foul moistures of the earth, brings to life and to the surface of the ground swarming myriads of noxious insects and reptiles, who, during the long winter months, have slept silent and torpid far down within the oozy depths, and hatches the thrice-told myriads of eggs deposited in seasons passed away, and which have long waited for his life-giving influence to pour forth their swarming millions to the upper air; even so this war has hatched the eggs of error, and brought forth the torpid ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 2, August, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... their way homeward, choosing a shorter route; and coming upon an oozy place in the woods, Jim said to Louise: "I'm going to carry you in my arms." He did not wait for her to protest, but gathered her in his arms, and her head ...
— An Arkansas Planter • Opie Percival Read
... Ranges last longer and are more varied than those of the great plain, on account of differences of soil and climate, moisture, and shade, etc. Some of the mountains are upward of 4000 feet in height, and small streams, springs, oozy bogs, etc., occur in great abundance and variety in the wooded regions, while open parks, flooded with sunshine, and hill-girt valleys lying at different elevations, each with its own peculiar climate and exposure, possess the ...
— The Mountains of California • John Muir
... leaving the road we wandered in among big trees and down slopes ankle deep with rustling leaves towards Chingford again. Here was pleasanter walking than the thawing clay, but now and then one felt the threat of an infinite oozy softness beneath the stiff frozen leaves. Once again while we were here the drifting haze of the sky became thinner, and the smooth green-grey beech stems and rugged oak trunks were brightly illuminated. ...
— Certain Personal Matters • H. G. Wells
... Duff, heading the boat for the shore, plunged them into the leafy recesses that overhung the water. Having once penetrated this outer curtain, Ralph saw they were close to a rude landing made of logs sunk endways into the oozy bottom, and floored with ...
— Ralph Granger's Fortunes • William Perry Brown
... the bottom was soft and oozy and there were little patches of green floating on the surface that she did not so much like the looks of. Otherwise conditions were perfect, and Mrs. Budlong submerged like a submarine when she reached the middle of it. She came up and stood ...
— The Dude Wrangler • Caroline Lockhart
... her mind off the runes, and the harassed philologer set himself resolutely to the task. For her slight advances he found bolder responses, and still scanning the irrigating ditches closely for an especially oozy bottom, he expatiated on the loveliness of the afterglow and confirmed the recollection of last evening that Frauelein Linda's dimpled hand might be an eminently pleasant thing to hold. Thus gradually she was won from the Lombard runes to more ...
— The Collectors • Frank Jewett Mather
... know mankind.— Nor was his energy confin'd alone To friends around his philosophick throne; Its influence wide improv'd our letter'd isle. And lucid vigour marked the general style: As Nile's proud waves, swoln from their oozy bed. First o'er the neighbouring meads majestick spread; Till gathering force, they more and more expand. And with ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 1 • Boswell, Edited by Birkbeck Hill
... my Delia, to the main Runs the sweet tide without a stain, Unsullied as it seems; The nymphs of many a sable flood Deform with streaks of oozy mud ...
— By-ways in Book-land - Short Essays on Literary Subjects • William Davenport Adams
... autumn, melancholy and sinister, as you find her only in such low-lying immemorial drifting places of leaves, and oozy sinks of dank water. For the moors autumn is the spring come back in purple, and in golden woods and many another place where the year dies happily, she smiles like a widow so young and fair that one thinks rather of life than death in ...
— The Worshipper of the Image • Richard Le Gallienne
... over the ice, and numbers were at times “screeved,” i.e., “split up,” in the process, and had to be slaughtered. The fen soil is a mass of decayed vegetation, chiefly moss, interlarded with silt, deposited by the sea, which formerly made its oozy way as far as Lincoln. Large trees of bog oak and other kinds are found in the soil. These, it is supposed, became rotted at their base by the accumulating peat; and the strong south-west winds, prevailing then as they do now, broke them off, and they are, in consequence, ...
— Records of Woodhall Spa and Neighbourhood - Historical, Anecdotal, Physiographical, and Archaeological, with Other Matter • J. Conway Walter
... shores of the Black sea, and in the fields of the Crimea, clouds of smoke and flame attracted my attention. They appeared to rise at the same time from all parts of the peninsula; and passing by the isthmus into the continent, they ran, as if driven by a westerly wind, along the oozy lake of Azof, and disappeared in the grassy plains of Couban; and following more attentively the course of these clouds, I observed that they were preceded or followed by swarms of moving creatures, which, like ants or grasshoppers disturbed by the foot of a passenger, agitated ...
— The Ruins • C. F. [Constantin Francois de] Volney
... January we plied to get in with the land, designing to anchor, fill water, and spend a little time in searching the country, till after the change of the moon, for I found a strong current setting against us. We anchored in thirty-eight fathom water, good oozy ground. We had an island of a league long without us, about three miles distant, and we rode from the main about a mile. The easternmost point of land seen bore east-by-south half-south, distance three leagues, and the westernmost west-south-west half-south, ...
— Early Australian Voyages • John Pinkerton
... fitting home for living men. San Michele is the island close before Murano, where the Lombardi built one of their most romantically graceful churches of pale Istrian stone, and where the Campo Santo has for centuries received the dead into its oozy clay. The cemetery is at present undergoing restoration. Its state of squalor and abandonment to cynical disorder makes one feel how fitting for Italians would be the custom of cremation. An island in the lagoons devoted to funeral pyres is a solemn ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece • John Addington Symonds
... is generally known as the "First Relief." Their route to the snow-belt lay through sections of country which had become so soft and oozy that the horses often sank in mire, flank deep; and the streams were so swollen that progress was alarmingly slow. On the second day they were driven into camp early by heavy rains which drenched clothing, blankets, and even the provisions carefully stored under the saddles and leather saddle-covers. ...
— The Expedition of the Donner Party and its Tragic Fate • Eliza Poor Donner Houghton
... chime, Thou laughest at the lapse of time. The same sweet sounds are in my ear My early childhood loved to hear; As pure thy limpid waters run, As bright they sparkle to the sun; As fresh and thick the bending ranks Of herbs that line thy oozy banks; The violet there, in soft May dew, Comes up, as modest and as blue, As green amid thy current's stress, Floats the scarce-rooted watercress: And the brown ground-bird, in thy glen, Still chirps as merrily ...
— Poems • William Cullen Bryant
... 'tis said) Before was never made, But when of old the sons of morning sung, While the Creator Great His constellations set, And the well-ballanc't world on hinges hung, And cast the dark foundations deep, And bid the weltring waves their oozy ...
— Book of English Verse • Bulchevy
... unhappiness, called aloud for solitude. He must struggle alone through his deep waters: waters of the soul, wherein float neither life-preserver nor raft, rope or even light; neither coral reef nor oozy grave, for such as he. Darkness and struggle alike lasted till the end of his strength; but, with exhaustion and the coming of dawn, came at last one mighty breaker, by which Ivan was thrown high upon the strand of ...
— The Genius • Margaret Horton Potter
... my mother's curse o'ertaken, Here I lie in slumber sunken; Here the youthful maid must languish On the bosom of the waters, And the bed is cold and oozy Where the ...
— The Hero of Esthonia and Other Studies in the Romantic Literature of That Country • William Forsell Kirby
... stopped and turned back at the boom near Drewry's Bluff. McClellan, bent on besieging Richmond in due form, crawled cautiously about the intervening swamps of the oozy Chickahominy. McDowell, who could not advance alone, remained at Fredericksburg. Shields stood behind him, near Catlett's Station, to keep another ...
— Captains of the Civil War - A Chronicle of the Blue and the Gray, Volume 31, The - Chronicles Of America Series • William Wood
... You've seen it work? Experienced it, maybe? Hah! You'll understand me. I'm a grain of the Epsom Salt that went through Beersheba, time the Turks had all the booze in sight and we were thirsty. Muddy booze it was too—oozy booze—not fit for washing hogs! Ever heard of Anzacs? Well, I'm one of 'em. Now you know what the scorpion who stung you's up against! You lie there and think about it, cocky; I'll show you his shirt ...
— Affair in Araby • Talbot Mundy
... bed of coals, shading his eyes with one hand, and holding a little stick in the other, with which he regulated the hissing contents of the frying-pan. The horses were turned to feed among the scattered bushes of a low oozy meadow. A drowzy springlike sultriness pervaded the air, and the voices of ten thousand young frogs and insects, just awakened into life, rose in varied chorus from the creek ...
— The Oregon Trail • Francis Parkman, Jr.
... (as 'tis said) Before was never made, But when of old the Sons of Morning sung, While the Creator great His constellations set, And the well-balanced world on hinges hung, And cast the dark foundations deep, And bid the welt'ring waves their oozy channel keep. ...
— The Ontario Readers: The High School Reader, 1886 • Ministry of Education
... colour and form, hid all beauty in the firmament, and shed heavy darkness on the earth. Dense, stagnant vapours clung to the mountain summits; from the drooping trees dead leaves and rotten branches sunk, at intervals, on the oozy soil, or whirled over the gloomy precipice; and a small steady rain fell, slow and unintermitting, upon the deserts around. Standing upon the path which armies had once trodden, and which armies were still destined to tread, and looking towards the ...
— Antonina • Wilkie Collins
... battered funnel and a bridge all blocked with hatches. That the beautiful shiny Corydon? There was the name on her stern—Corydon, London. She was loading coal from a big elevator. Her decks were piled high with it, and where there wasn't coal there was mud, black oozy mud, and ashes and ropes and soppy hatches. I climbed up the ladder and one by one got my grips aboard. And I stood there in the rain, my gloves all black with the coal on the ladder, my nice mackintosh barred with it, and my boots slipping on the iron plates. No one ...
— Aliens • William McFee
... Hither, thither, to and fro, Breathing mists and whisking lamps, Plashing in the shiny swamps; While my cousin Lantern Jack, With cook ears and cunning eyes, Turns him round upon his back, Daubs him oozy green and black, Sits upon his rolling size, Where he lies, where he lies, Groaning full of sack - Staring with his great round eyes! What a joy O ho! Sits upon him in the swamps Breathing mists ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... against the wind, and, in a manner, to tack, as ships do when the wind does not serve. Water-fowls, such as ducks, have at their feet large skins that stretch, somewhat like rackets, to keep them from sinking on the oozy and miry banks ...
— The Existence of God • Francois de Salignac de La Mothe- Fenelon
... gloomily gazing down at his boots covered with the oozy brown fluid. "Jupiter aid us!" he exclaimed; and as if in answer to his call, "a daughter of the gods, divinely tall," rose on their sight, coming towards them from over the ridge of the hill. She came on swiftly, yet without hurry. She walked (a ...
— Flint - His Faults, His Friendships and His Fortunes • Maud Wilder Goodwin
... Chaos, and still keep The awful secrets of that ancient dearth, Before the briny fountains of the deep Brimm'd up the hollow cavities of earth;— I saw each trickling Sea-God at his birth, Each pearly Naiad with her oozy locks, And infant Titans of enormous girth, Whose huge young feet yet stumbled on the rocks, Stunning the early world with ...
— The Poetical Works of Thomas Hood • Thomas Hood
... red and the roan together, and the dapple-grey and the black; Nor bits nor silken bridles, nor golden cloths they lack, And the horse-lads of King Atli with that horse-array are blent, And their shout of salutation o'er the oozy sand is sent: Then no more will the Niblungs tarry when they see that ready band But they leap adown from the long-ships, and waist-deep they wade the strand, And they in their armour of onset, beshielded, and sword by the side, E'en as men returning ...
— The Story of Sigurd the Volsung and the Fall of the Niblungs • William Morris
... push my boat among the reeds; I sit and stare about; Queer slimy things crawl through the weeds, Put to a sullen rout. I paddle under cypress trees; All fearfully I peer Through oozy channels when the breeze Comes rustling ...
— Rolling Stones • O. Henry
... blush this mele seems to be the account of a perilous climb through that wild mountainous region that lies back of Hanalei, Kauai, a region of tangled woods, oozy steeps, fathomless bogs, narrow ridges, and overhanging cliffs that fall away into profound abysses, making such an excursion a most precarious adventure. This is what appears on the surface. Hawaiian poets, however, did not indulge ...
— Unwritten Literature of Hawaii - The Sacred Songs of the Hula • Nathaniel Bright Emerson
... in a moment, as he sailed joyfully along, saying, "Aha," perhaps, like the war-horse among the trumpets, on the scented summer breeze, with the sun warm on his mail, to find himself stuck fast in a hot and oozy crevice, and presently to be crushed to death. His little taste of the pleasant world so soon over, and for me an agreeable hour spoilt, so far as I could see, to ...
— The Thread of Gold • Arthur Christopher Benson
... and unexpectedly upon Pig No. 2, who gave one agonized squeal, in which the pig in her arms joined. Fortunately, her victim did not get her whole weight or there would have been one pig the less in this vale of tears. Chicken Little squashed him down gently into some two inches of oozy mud and water. It splashed in all directions, baptizing Katy and Gertie and the fleeing pig as well as completing the ruin of Jane's pink gingham ...
— Chicken Little Jane on the Big John • Lily Munsell Ritchie
... always held on. You see, I was the first man there, honey, and there are things you see, that you can't ever make anybody else understand. She loved him Elnora, she just made an idol of him. There was that oozy green hole, with the thick scum broke, and two or three big bubbles slowly rising that were the breath of his body. There she was in spasms of agony, and beside her the great heavy log she'd tried to throw him. I can't ever forgive her for turning against you, and spoiling your childhood ...
— A Girl Of The Limberlost • Gene Stratton Porter
... thing for which we had been long prepared; and indeed, to his family and connexions, except for the loss of the stipend, it was a very gentle dispensation, for he had been long a heavy handful, having been for years but, as it were, a breathing lump of mortality, groosy, and oozy, and doozy, his faculties being shut up and locked in ...
— The Provost • John Galt
... where the tide ran fast; if we were trying for pollack, it was along close by the stones of the rocky shore; if for conger, in deep dark holes; and if for flat-fish, right out in deep water, where the bottom was all soft oozy sand. ...
— Devon Boys - A Tale of the North Shore • George Manville Fenn
... oozy mass so fatal a vapour that no animal can endure it. The black water bears a greenish-brown floating scum, which for ever bubbles up from the putrid mud of the bottom. When the wind collects the miasma, and, as ...
— After London - Wild England • Richard Jefferies
... of the Dismal Swamp The Search-Light sends its ray! What is that hideous oozy tramp? What creatures crawling 'midst jungle ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 101, September 5, 1891 • Various
... was soft and oozy, but as every boy wore either rubber boots or storm rubbers, they did not mind the mud. Perry Phelps said if they were going to explore, he thought it would be a good plan to follow the brook and see ...
— Sunny Boy and His Playmates • Ramy Allison White
... lake-dwellings, about these shelters on the deserted shore; two or three large fetichistic stones stand near their entrance; wickerwork objects of dark meaning strew the ground; a few stakes emerge, hard by, out of the placid and oozy waters. In such a cabin, methinks, dwelt those two old fishermen of Theocritus—here they lived and slumbered side by side on a couch of sea moss, among the ...
— Old Calabria • Norman Douglas
... What should you say to bells of real silver, glowing and shining? To fair maids blossoming and curtseying in the flower-beds, fair maids so beautiful that the Knight would fain have stopped with them all day? To roses flowering everywhere? To lillies trickling oozy scent into gold bowls laid ready to receive it? To whole bowers of honeysuckle, and whole beds of lavender? To hedges of every flowering shrub imaginable? To lofty trees whose leaves whispered soft invitations to the passers-by to come and sleep beneath their ...
— More Tales in the Land of Nursery Rhyme • Ada M. Marzials
... kept viciously going, but it could not drag the boat off. Then the crew toiled for an hour shifting what was movable to the stern, but without result. Next, an anchor was carried a hundred feet up stream and imbedded in the oozy bed of the river, while sturdy arms on board tugged at the connecting hawser by means of a windlass, with the screw desperately helping, but the hull would not yield an inch. Finally the efforts were given up. Nothing remained but to wait till the rising tide should lift the mountainous ...
— Up the Forked River - Or, Adventures in South America • Edward Sylvester Ellis
... teeming earth produc'd Spontaneous. Heated by the solar rays, The stagnant water quicken'd;—marshy fens Swell'd up their oozy loads to meet the beams: And nourish'd by earth's vivifying soil, The fruitful elements of life increas'd, As in a mother's womb; and in a while Assum'd a certain shape. So when the floods Of seven-mouth'd Nile desert the moisten'd fields, And to their ancient channels bring their streams, ...
— The Metamorphoses of Publius Ovidus Naso in English blank verse Vols. I & II • Ovid
... aboard of us about noon, and the same afternoon brought us to anchor in five and a half fathoms, in a commodious bay on the continent, called by the French Bon-port. From our last anchorage to this, we found every where an oozy bottom, the water first regularly decreasing to five fathoms, and then increasing to seven, after which we had five and six fathoms alternately. The squadron weighed again next morning, in order to run above the two ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 11 • Robert Kerr
... rule attend: When through the zone of heaven the mounted sun Hath journeyed half, and half remains to run; The seer, while zephyrs curl the swelling deep, Basks on the breezy shore, in grateful sleep, His oozy limbs. Emerging from the wave, The Phocas swift surround his rocky cave, Frequent and full; the consecrated train Of her, whose azure trident awes the main; There wallowing warm, the enormous herd exhales An oily steam, and taints the noontide gales. To that recess, commodious ...
— The Odyssey of Homer • Homer, translated by Alexander Pope
... very long survive her husband, and he had left his roots behind in his little place at Clonmena, where, as we know, he had farmed not wisely but too well, and had been put out of it for his pains to expend his energy upon our oozy black sods and stark-white bowlders. But instead he moped about, fretting for his fair green fields, and few proudly cherished beasts,—especially the little old Kerry cow. And at his funeral the neighbors said, "Ah, bedad, poor man, God ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 4 • Charles Dudley Warner
... the little band filed silently down the winding trail, threading its way, now through dark groves of pine or fir; now through jungles of underbrush; now over rocky points; frequently wading the cold mountain brook, waist deep, and tramping through oozy marshes of saw-grass; speaking only in whispers; their rifles loaded, eyes peering into the starlit night, and ears strained to catch the slightest sound that might indicate the hiding-place of any lurking foe who might ...
— The Battle of the Big Hole • G. O. Shields
... muscles ached and burned so keenly, he could no longer continue the overarm. Then he took the buoy in both hands, held it straight out, thrust it edge down into the oozy substance, used it as a kind of anchor and drew it to him. At first this technique seemed to advance him somewhat, but presently he appeared merely to disturb the viscous mass without going forward. He grew acutely discouraged; his back, shoulders, cramped, ached and burned. ...
— The Cruise of the Dry Dock • T. S. Stribling
... upon a stream flowing to the northwest. But the joy was short-lived. The descent of this mountain's side was by all odds the most terrible piece of trail we had yet found. It led down the north slope, and was oozy and slippery with the melting snow. It dropped in short zigzags down through a grove of tangled, gnarled, and savage cedars and pines, whose roots were like iron and filled with spurs that were sharp as chisels. The horses, sliding ...
— The Trail of the Goldseekers - A Record of Travel in Prose and Verse • Hamlin Garland
... the beach of sand Where the water bounds the elfin land, Thou shalt watch the oozy brine Till the sturgeon leaps in the bright moonshine, Then dart the glistening arch below, And catch a drop from his silver bow. The water-sprites will wield their arms And dash around, with roar and rave, And vain are the ...
— The Culprit Fay - and Other Poems • Joseph Rodman Drake
... partly covered with water, with black knobs rising here and there above the surface, affording a precarious foothold for the animals in crossing it. Where the water was not, there lay in place of it a bed of black oozy mud, which looked as if it might give way under the foot, and let it, at each step, ...
— Wau-bun - The Early Day in the Northwest • Juliette Augusta Magill Kinzie
... just broken; a southerly wind blew gently down the harbour, and Captain Villegagnon gave the order to lift the heavy anchors from their oozy beds. "A boat is coming from the shore and pulling rapidly towards us," said Nigel to the captain. "The people on board her are making signals. Shall ...
— Villegagnon - A Tale of the Huguenot Persecution • W.H.G. Kingston
... do not think I jibe or jeer However strangely they career. In soothing accents, sweet as spice, I offer them my best advice, Or deftly show them how to plant a Propulsive pole in oozy Granta, Observing, "If you only knew it This is the proper way to do it;" Till soon each watching Looty's face Grows full of wonder at my grace, And daring Subs in frail Rob Roys Attempt to ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, May 28, 1919. • Various
... that Tashtego, that wild Indian, was so heedless and reckless as to let go for a moment his one-handed hold on the great cabled tackles suspending the head; or whether the place where he stood was so treacherous and oozy; or whether the Evil One himself would have it to fall out so, without stating his particular reasons; how it was exactly, there is no telling now; but, on a sudden, as the eightieth or ninetieth bucket came suckingly up—my God! ...
— Moby Dick; or The Whale • Herman Melville
... weight, down hurtled from the steep, Coursers and cavaliers, who sate them well; And dived into the river's darksome deep, To search for beauteous nymph in secret cell. Nor this the first nor yet the second leap Which from the bridge had made that infidel! Who, often floundering in its oozy bed, Well in the soundings of ...
— Orlando Furioso • Lodovico Ariosto
... and boulders aside to find a place to dig, and then it was harder work in digging the nasty worms from the granite grit in which they resided, dwelt, or had their horrid being. Probably these hairy, oozy creatures have their joys and pleasures, and their woes, just as every other of God's creatures, but of what their happiness consists who can tell? Anyway they are good for bait, and so have use if not ...
— Jethou - or Crusoe Life in the Channel Isles • E. R. Suffling
... or the drainage from it descended on the other side of the divide. It was also, though not quite summer yet, unusually hot weather, and the season had been exceptionally dry, and they had contented themselves for a week with the little muddy fluid they scraped up here and there from oozy pools that were lined with pine needles and rotting leaves, when they came ...
— The Gold Trail • Harold Bindloss |
