"Mire" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... back, the shoulders of which would have done honor to a six foot pugilist,—his legs, though short and bowed a little outward, by continual horse exercise, were right tough serviceable members, and I have seen them bearing their owner on through mud and mire, when straighter, longer, and more fair proportioned limbs were ...
— Warwick Woodlands - Things as they Were There Twenty Years Ago • Henry William Herbert (AKA Frank Forester)
... mutter of rough voices without, a tramp of feet, and the door swung suddenly open to admit two men, or rather three, for between them they dragged one, a short, squat fellow in riding boots and horseman's coat, but all so torn and bedraggled, so foul of blood and mire, as to seem scarce human. His hat was gone and his long, rain-soaked hair clung in black tangles about his bruised face and as he stood, swaying in his bonds, I thought him ...
— Peregrine's Progress • Jeffery Farnol
... beginning where all those began who have since ended in ruin. But by entire abstinence from strong drink. Let us renounce entirely what cannot profit us, what forms no important item in our comforts, what may bring us, as it has brought such multitudes as strong as we, to the mire and ...
— Select Temperance Tracts • American Tract Society
... perplexity and dismay, and I think I never beheld more pale faces assembled. By my father's direction, we looked about to find anything which might indicate or account for the noise which we had heard; but no such thing was to be seen—even the mire which lay upon the avenue was undisturbed. We returned to the house, more panic-struck than I ...
— The Purcell Papers - Volume III. (of III.) • Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu
... could get for ourselves, to the unspeakable treasures which God had promised to give us, and turned away from the blessings of His kingdom, to our own foolish pleasure and covetousness, like "the dog to his vomit, and the sow that was washed to her wallowing in the mire." ...
— Sermons on National Subjects • Charles Kingsley
... the mire? Surely, my son, whatever you feel about your mother and sister, you can't wish your poor father to suffer anything more on that ...
— The Quality of Mercy • W. D. Howells
... insisted disrespectfully, with rustic fury, that Mrs. Weir should stay at home. But, "No, no," she said, "it's my lord's orders," and set forth as usual. Archie was visible in the acre bog, engaged upon some childish enterprise, the instrument of which was mire; and she stood and looked at him a while like one about to call; then thought otherwise, sighed, and shook her head, and proceeded on her rounds alone. The house lasses were at the burn-side washing, and saw her pass with her ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. XIX (of 25) - The Ebb-Tide; Weir of Hermiston • Robert Louis Stevenson
... towed to the shore; but here it was wet and slippery, and it required considerable agility to get ashore without slipping in the soft mud. Every one accomplished it safely but Dimple, whose foot slipped, and over she went, full length into the mire. A sorry sight she was indeed, when she was picked up; plastered from head to foot; face, hands and hair full of the soft ooze. But after she had been scraped off, Callie concluded that it would be better to let the sun dry her well, before attempting to get rid ...
— A Sweet Little Maid • Amy E. Blanchard
... out of the nest, did she?—she never preened her wings, and thought all the world lay before her, and she could fly as straight as any lark of them all, and catch as many flies as any swallow? Ay, nor she never tumbled off into the mire, and found she could not fly a bit, and all the insects went darting past her as safe as if she were a dead leaf? Eh, my lassies, this would be a poor world, if it were all. I have seen something of it, though you thought ...
— Out in the Forty-Five - Duncan Keith's Vow • Emily Sarah Holt
... the vision of better things breaks through the cloud and storm. Then the vision strikes clarity into reason, memory and imagination. In these hours the soul scoffs at sordid things. As the flower climbs upward to escape from the slough, as the foot turns away from the mire, as the nostril avoids the filth, as the ear hates discord, so in these hours the soul scoffs at selfishness and sin. Oh, how beautiful seem purity and gentleness, and sympathy and truth! And these hours are big with prophecy. They tell us what the soul shall be ...
— A Man's Value to Society - Studies in Self Culture and Character • Newell Dwight Hillis
... grown indignant, in some instances, and were vociferously imperative and minatory; but in the dark who needed mind them?—they went raving elsewhere, and, for the first time, Prussian word-of-command saw itself futile. Pitch darkness, bitter cold, ground trampled into mire. On Siptitz Hill there is nothing that will burn: farther back, in the Domitsch Woods, are numerous fine fires, to which Austrians and Prussians alike gather: "Peace and truce between us; to-morrow morning we will see which are prisoners, ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XX. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... foul with mire, Our faces blind with mist; But all the night was naked fire About us where ...
— The Vigil of Venus and Other Poems by "Q" • Q
... safely," replied Edith. "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
... my power from what I am in process of doing for Raoul. Ought he not to be preferred before all? Raoul de Frescas is a young man who has remained pure as an angel in the midst of our mire-pit; he is our conscience; moreover, he is my creation; I am at once his father, his mother, and I desire to be his guiding providence. I, who can never know happiness, still delight in making other people happy. I breathe through his lips, I live in his life, his passions are my own; ...
— Vautrin • Honore de Balzac
... Bonaparte and Talleyrand as our representative in America; because we then intended to strike, and not to negotiate. But during the present embroiled state of Europe, an intriguer was more necessary there than either a warrior or a politician. A man who has passed through all the mire of our own Revolution, who has been in the secrets, and an accomplice of all our factions, is, undoubtedly, a useful instrument where factions are to be created and directed, where wealth is designed for pillage, and a State for overthrow. General Turreaux is, therefore, in his place, and at ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton
... being forced into an awakening at last by his falling bruised and bleeding over the Natural Laws which he ignored. Keep your mind ever on the Star, but let your eyes watch over your footsteps, lest you fall into the mire by reason of your upward gaze. Remember the Divine Paradox, that while the Universe IS NOT, still IT IS. Remember ever the Two Poles of Truth the Absolute and the ...
— The Kybalion - A Study of The Hermetic Philosophy of Ancient Egypt and Greece • Three Initiates
... 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 ...
— Forgotten Tales of Long Ago • E. V. Lucas
... Wilton could not have understood it. For Rosamund's creeping hunger had been not for the life of hard work among the poor in religion, not for the dedication of all her energies to the lost and unreclaimed, who are sunk in the mire of the world, but for that peculiar life of the mystic who leaves the court of the outer things for the court of the mysteries, the inner things, who enters into prayer as into a dark shell filled with the vast and unceasing murmur of the ...
— In the Wilderness • Robert Hichens
... the evil spirit of King Saul, the hag of the merchant Abudah, the personal devil of the mediaeval monk, is with me—is in me," tapping on his breast. "The vices of my nature are now uppermost; innocent pleasures woo me in vain; I long for Paris, for my wallowing in the mire. See," he would continue, producing a handful of silver, "I denude myself, I am not to be trusted with the price of a fare. Take it, keep it for me, squander it on deleterious candy, throw it in the deepest of the river—I will homologate your action. Save me from that part of myself ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 6 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... and conquer your love,—as I will. Get it under your feet and press it to death. Tell yourself that it is shameful and must be abandoned. That you, Arthur Fletcher, should marry the widow of that man,—the woman that he had thrust so far into the mire that she can never again be clean;—you, the chosen one, the bright star among us all;—you, whose wife should be the fairest, the purest, the tenderest of us all, a flower that has yet been hardly breathed on! While I— Arthur," she said, "I know my duty better than that. I will ...
— The Prime Minister • Anthony Trollope
... the letter R, there is a slight sound of e between the vowel and the consonant. Thus, bare, parent, apparent, mere, mire, more, pure, pyre, are pronounced nearly baer, paerent, appaerent, me-er,mier, moer,puer, pyer. This pronunciation proceeds from the peculiar articulation of r, and it occasions a slight change of the sound of a, which can only be ...
— Enquire Within Upon Everything - The Great Victorian Domestic Standby • Anonymous
... neglected his work, Ariel (who was invisible to all eyes but Prospero's) would come slily and pinch him, and sometimes tumble him down in the mire; and then Ariel, in the likeness of an ape, would make mouths at him. Then swiftly changing his shape, in the likeness of a hedgehog, he would lie tumbling in Caliban's way, who feared the hedgehog's sharp quills would prick his bare feet. With a variety of such-like ...
— Tales from Shakespeare • Charles Lamb and Mary Lamb
... worse with him every day; for every interval of twenty-four hours sinks a man so much the deeper in the mire when renewed accommodation-bills with his name upon them are ripening in the iron safes of Judah. Philip Sheldon found himself sinking gradually and almost imperceptibly into that bottomless pit of difficulty in whose black depths the demon Insolvency holds his dreary ...
— Birds of Prey • M. E. Braddon
... and he pulled it up with an oath. Now he was vividly conscious, every nerve strung taut, every sense alert, as a man will sometimes oddly waken from heavy slumber. They went down the slope at a lurching gallop, along the road churned into mire by the passing of many carts, and splashed into the muddy waters of the ford. And on the further bank the good gray stumbled again, tried gallantly to regain its stride, and came crashing to the ground ...
— Nicanor - Teller of Tales - A Story of Roman Britain • C. Bryson Taylor
... 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
... venom in his soul! Was the marquis telling the truth? Had he lied? Was not this the culmination of the series of tortures the marquis had inflicted upon him all these years: to let him fly once more, only to drag him down into swallowing mire from which he might never rise? And yet . . . if it were true!—and the pall of shame and ignominy were lifted! The Chevalier ...
— The Grey Cloak • Harold MacGrath
... indeed, in order that you may get deeper into the mire! A capital idea, truly! go and sit down at that table and take a ...
— Louise de la Valliere • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... spoken since his fall, so furious was he at having been outwitted by a boy, and having not only allowed him to escape, but being himself rolled in the mire—raised his voice in a tremendous shout. All listened intently, but ...
— Wulf the Saxon - A Story of the Norman Conquest • G. A. Henty
... dazzling beams of light through the dripping dark. She floundered blindly into a pool of water before she reached it, and was doubly startled by Monck lifting her bodily, without apology, out of the mire, and placing her on the seat. The beat of the rain upon the hood made her wonder if they could make any headway under it. And then, while she was still wondering, the engine began to throb like a living thing, and she was aware of Monck squeezing ...
— The Lamp in the Desert • Ethel M. Dell
... second-rate little American girl, to whom the atmosphere of the "Halls" was far more congenial than the humdrum, quiet life she led in the Camberwell New Road, and she slipped back little by little into the mire out of which ...
— If Only etc. • Francis Clement Philips and Augustus Harris
... on the street vocalist, who was accompanied in all her wanderings by a fragile infant, which she seemed to carry with especial care and tenderness. Sometimes, too, in the bleak afternoons, she would be seen wending her way through mud and mire, setting her weary face against the bitter east wind, and patiently singing on; and motherly women, coming from the gay shops and stores, where they had been purchasing Christmas toys for their own children, would often stop to look at the baby's pinched, ...
— Stories By English Authors: London • Various
... 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 port ...
— Legends of the Rhine • Wilhelm Ruland
... all fiction there is probably no more graphic and poignant study of the way in which man loses his grip on life, lets his pride, his courage, his self-respect slip from him, and, finally, even ceases to struggle in the mire that has engulfed him. * * * There is more tonic value in Sister Carrie than in a whole ...
— The Forsaken Inn - A Novel • Anna Katharine Green
... 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 way, and was still far from ...
— The House in the Water - A Book of Animal Stories • Charles G. D. Roberts
... blustering talk on statecraft, for the rest of the day. Then the good bishop would have in a few pretty London women and a dance would follow with wine and cards and dice, and Henry would spend the night at Wolsey's, and Brandon lie another night in the mire of ...
— When Knighthood Was in Flower • Charles Major
... not slow to travel. Relatives and friends of the President made their appearance: amazed, excited, eager, malicious. To see the impenetrably peculiar, elusively unapproachable Clarissa cast into the mire was a sight they were all anxious to enjoy. A few of the older ladies attempted a hypocritically gentle persuasion, and Clarissa's contemptuous silence and the pained look of her eyes seemed to imply avowals. The Prefect came once more, accompanied by two officials. For ...
— The German Classics, v. 20 - Masterpieces of German Literature • Various
... did scare and affright me with fearful dreams, and did terrify me with dreadful visions.'[19] 'I often wished that there had been no hell, or that I had been a devil to torment others.' A common childish but demoniac idea. His mind was as 'the troubled sea, when it cannot rest, whose waters cast up mire and dirt.' 'A while after, these terrible dreams did leave me; and with more greediness, according to the strength of nature, I did let loose the reins of my lusts, and delighted in all transgression against the law of God.' 'I was the very ringleader ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... shelf quest shine spin hate chide flax wore shad tape fringe still think band race clock trim marsh pack mire cheek door booth bath kite full clung wince dock bank frock loft spray gold fell troop pulp join pipe pink glass grape friz club hilt lurk pose brow shop last ...
— McGuffey's Eclectic Spelling Book • W. H. McGuffey
... our breath to cool oor ain porridge. What is this I hear, that Athole is playing the knave, and that Gordon cannot be trusted to keep the castle? Has the day come upon us that the best names in Scotland are to be dragged in the mire? I sairly doot that for the time the throne is lost to the auld line, but if it is to be sold by the best blood of Scotland, then I wish their silver bullet had found John ...
— Graham of Claverhouse • Ian Maclaren
... entirely different person—a low, vulgar creature proud of the brutal strength and coarseness of her man. I seem to be a part of this human beast! When I wake up I feel as if my soul had been stained, dragged in the mire, almost lost. It seems as if I could never again feel any self-respect. Oh, doctor," Penelope's voice broke and the tears filled her eyes, "you must help me! I cannot bear this torture any longer! What can I do to escape from such ...
— Possessed • Cleveland Moffett
... which hates voluntary falsehood and is extremely indignant at herself and others when they tell lies, but is patient of involuntary falsehood, and does not mind wallowing like a swinish beast in the mire of ignorance, and has ...
— The Republic • Plato
... see your father, child?" she exclaimed. "See what a bonnie gentleman he is, and what a pretty horse he rides, while we tread along through the mire." ...
— The Recollections of Geoffrey Hamlyn • Henry Kingsley
... tramps from shire to shire, And he must till the crack of doom; He takes the road in the dust and mire, And he sleeps in the windy broom; He's no address and he's no abode, And his jacket's the worse o' wear; And I've met him once on the Portsmouth Road, And ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, April 8, 1914 • Various
... following the example of several of the chiefs, alighted from his saddle, and with his companion entered the swamp. It was with the greatest difficulty that he made his way across it, and his lightly armed companion did him good service in assisting several times to drag him from the treacherous mire when he began to sink in it. At last they reached firmer ground in the heart of the swamp, and here some 5000 or 6000 fugitives were gathered. At least 4000 had fallen on the field. Many had escaped across the river, although numbers had lost their lives in the attempt. Others ...
— In Freedom's Cause • G. A. Henty
... the word 'inconceivable.' But he is too well satisfied with his own system ever to consider the effect of what is unknown on the element which is known. To the Hegelian all things are plain and clear, while he who is outside the charmed circle is in the mire of ignorance and 'logical impurity': he who is within is omniscient, or at least has all the elements of ...
— Sophist • Plato
... the night before, had let run some water over the floor, which, by standing there, had made a pretty slough in the place. And Master Wolfe, not knowing as well as we did that the bottom step of the ladder was a-wanting, and being encumbered with his candle, fell flat on his face into the mire, and lay there spitting and kicking a round five minutes before we above had the ...
— Sir Ludar - A Story of the Days of the Great Queen Bess • Talbot Baines Reed
... situated at the foot of the lesser Carpathians, and is easily reached from the main line of the railway. The scenery is lovely and the air healthy, but this is nothing compared to the wondrous waters and hot mire which oozes out of the earth in the vicinity of the river Vag. Hot sulfuric water, which contains radium, bubbles up in all parts of Poestyen, and even the bed of the cold river is full of steaming ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume VI • Various
... snow, and gathering round the wood fire of an 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
... But for what reason now, and to what end, since his virginal-pure, dew-pearled, Convent lily lay trodden in the mire? And yet, to look in ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves
... as though walking in a swamp, in danger of sinking at each step in the mire and slime, while his godfather, like a river loach, wriggled himself on a dry, firm little spot, vigilantly watching the life of his godson ...
— Foma Gordyeff - (The Man Who Was Afraid) • Maxim Gorky
... 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 coast, ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 23 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... to the Government. I speak to the House. I appeal to those who, on Monday last, voted with the Ministers against the test proposed by the honourable Baronet the Member for North Devon. I know what is due to party ties. But there is a mire so black and so deep that no leader has a right to drag his followers through it. It is only forty-eight hours since honourable gentlemen were brought down to the House to vote against requiring the professors in the Irish Colleges to make a declaration of belief in the ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 4 (of 4) - Lord Macaulay's Speeches • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... and harshness, refinement and vulgarity, sentiment and sensuality; now soaring up into ether, and then dragging along in mud. Mire and sublimity; all that is strangely blended in this admixture of inspired dust. It may seem strange, but to me it appears that a true voluptuary should never abandon his thought to the coarseness of reality. It is only by exalting whatever terrestrial, material, physical element ...
— My Recollections of Lord Byron • Teresa Guiccioli
... who had trampled it in the mire, this dagger scene was sneered at as a stage trick; but Burke was above all pantomime. The dagger was one which had been sent from France to a Birmingham manufacturer, with an order for a large number ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 378, April, 1847 • Various
... said. "If it do but happen pat, we shall have served the King and punished two cozening faint-hearts. For the best of it is that neither can complain. Each is neck-high in the mire of lies, each has plundered the other, and must be dumb for shame of ...
— The Lady of Loyalty House - A Novel • Justin Huntly McCarthy
... kind, and, to await the Franks, he fixed his camp between the Vienne and the Clain, near Poitiers, not far from the spot where, two hundred and twenty-five years before, Clovis had beaten the Visigoths; or, according to others, nearer Tours, at Mire, in a plain still called the ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume I. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... as easy as they had thought. The peninsula was very low and the greater part of it had been overflowed recently. Their feet, no matter how lightly they stepped, sank in the mire, and when they pulled them out again the mud emitted a sticky sigh. An owl perched in a tree, high above the marsh, began to hoot dismally, and Shif'less ...
— The Free Rangers - A Story of the Early Days Along the Mississippi • Joseph A. Altsheler
... the painter of pictures, yon carcass that rots on the wire; His hand with its sensitive cunning is crisped to a cinder with fire; His eyes with their magical vision are bubbles of glutinous mire. ...
— Ballads of a Bohemian • Robert W. Service
... fed more cocoa-husks to his make-shift oven. The shower had passed, moving in a gray curtain down the valley, and picking my way through the mire of the yard, I ...
— White Shadows in the South Seas • Frederick O'Brien
... love—no eyes of light— Will make your wants their care, Or soothe you thro' the dreary night, Or smooth your clotted hair. But crushed by sickness, famine, thirst, You'll strive in vain to sleep, Mid corpses mangled, blackened, burst, And blood and mire deep; While horrid groans, and fiendish yells, And every loathsome stench, Will kindle images of hell You'll strive in vain to quench. Yet on—press on, in all your might, With banners to the field, And mingle in the glorious ...
— American Scenes, and Christian Slavery - A Recent Tour of Four Thousand Miles in the United States • Ebenezer Davies
... treachery was meant, reddened all over with anger and with shame. But yet he dared not break his geasa, even although by holding to it the honour he had pledged to the three brothers for their safe-conduct and that of Deirdre was dragged through the mire. He therefore gave them his sons for escort and went to the feast at the dun of Borrach, full well knowing that Deirdre spoke truth when she told him sadly that he had sold his honour. The gloomy forebodings that had assailed the heart ...
— A Book of Myths • Jean Lang
... the bosky grove and the clouded sky without. The glass was now blankly white, opaque, sheeted with ice, and only the wind gave token how the storm raged. It was indeed a wild night for a drive of fifty miles through a mountain wilderness, over roads sodden with the late rains, the deep mire corrugated into ruts by the wheels of travel ...
— The Ordeal - A Mountain Romance of Tennessee • Charles Egbert Craddock
... for several years without any intermission or diminution in quantity, except when the food was scarce and dry; but a full flow of milk always came back upon the return of a full supply of green food. This cow ran in the Mississippi low grounds or swamp near Natchez, got cast in deep mire, and was found dead. Upon her death, Mr. Winn caused a second cow to be spayed. The operation was entirely successful. The cow gave milk constantly for several years, but in jumping a fence stuck a stake in her bag, ...
— Cattle and Their Diseases • Robert Jennings
... instead of laying stumbling-blocks in her way, we should clear the path before her, that she may readily attain that virtue which is essential in her. Naturalists inform us that the ermine is a little creature with extremely white fur, and that when the hunters are in pursuit of it, they spread with mire all the passes leading to its haunts, to which they then drive it, knowing that it will submit to be taken rather than defile itself. The virtuous and modest woman is an ermine, and her character whiter than snow; and in order to preserve it, a very different method must ...
— Wit and Wisdom of Don Quixote • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... you'd say that. I knew what you'd think about it, but it's all the same now. I did it for you and Safie! I knew I was in the way; I knew you was the man she orter had; I knew you was the man who had dragged her outer the mire and clay where I was leavin' her, as you did when she fell in the water. I knew that every day I lived I was makin' YOU suffer and breakin' HER heart—for all she tried ...
— The Bell-Ringer of Angel's and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... way by which, out of the mire and clay of earth, there can be formed a fair image of holiness, and that is, that Jacob's experience, in deeper, more inward, more wonderful form, should be repeated in each one of us; and that thus, penitent and yet hopeful, we should behold the glory of God in ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Isaiah and Jeremiah • Alexander Maclaren
... beautiful as gods, who graced with their presence scenes where men like that met a death of torture, one weeps for human nature with its stains, its blots. Ah! well, even the flowers one loves best are bespattered in the mire, and soiled by the skirts of mortals with not too clean a record, and the pure snow-flake as it falls goes down with smut from the chimney upon it, it is only the trail of the serpent ...
— A Heart-Song of To-day • Annie Gregg Savigny
... down; tread them out; follow after them with muddy shoes, and cover them up. In vain. See how they rise through the mire! Who can tread out the footprints ...
— Smith and the Pharaohs, and Other Tales • Henry Rider Haggard
... clothes he went to the window and looked out. Men were yelling at one another, screeching delightful oaths, capering about hatless, coatless, in the rain that still came steadily down. The corral yard was a mire of sticky mud in which the horses reared and plunged in evident appreciation of the welcome change from dry heat to lifegiving moisture. Riderless horses stood about, no one caring about the saddles, several calves capered awkwardly in the pasture. Norton's dog—about which he had joked to Hollis ...
— The Coming of the Law • Charles Alden Seltzer
... us?—oh, would vertue had been forbidden! we should then have proved all vertuous, for tis our blood to love that were forbidden. Had not drunkenness been forbidden, what man would have been fool to a beast, and Zany to a swine, to show tricks in the mire? what is there in three dice to make a man draw thrice three thousand acres into the compass of a round little table, and with the gentlemans palsy in the hand shake out his posterity thieves or beggars? Tis ...
— A Yorkshire Tragedy • William Shakespeare [Apocrypha]
... out his hypothesis—shows us his capitalist acquiring one after another the products of his employees' labor, he sinks deeper and deeper into the mire; and, as his argument does not change, our reply of course ...
— What is Property? - An Inquiry into the Principle of Right and of Government • P. J. Proudhon
... Certain it is that our Occidental sultana dresses her fair head with towers and spires, and hangs about her neck long rows of gems in the shape of stately and elegant dwellings,—yet, descending to her feet, we sink in mud and mire, or tumble unguardedly into excavations set like traps for the unwary, or oust whole colonies of rats from beneath plank walks where they have burrowed securely ever since "improvements" began. At some seasons, indeed, there is no mud; because ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 11, September, 1858 • Various
... below the spot where he stood its channel was spanned by the stringers of an unfinished bridge. The creek had shrunk to a thread of water, but Festing, who had been wading about its bed, was wet and splashed with mire. Moreover he had torn his threadbare overalls and his hot face was smeared where he had rubbed off the mosquitoes ...
— The Girl From Keller's - Sadie's Conquest • Harold Bindloss
... upon the wagon beame Rode Sathan, with a smarting whip in hand, With which he forward lasht the laesie teme, So oft as Slowth still in the mire did stand. Hugh routs of people did about them band, 320 Showting for joy, and still before their way A foggy mist had covered all the land; And underneath their feet, all scattered lay Dead sculs and bones of men, ...
— Spenser's The Faerie Queene, Book I • Edmund Spenser
... do under the circumstances—hung on in the great city as best they could, in the hope of a better fortune soon, living expectantly from day to day. Each month the city life seemed to demand more money, and each month Bragdon sank deeper into the mire of journalistic art. Worst of all they got into the habit of regarding their life as a temporary makeshift, which they expected to change when they could, tolerating it for the present as best they could,—like most of the workers of the world. Bragdon, at least, knew what he hoped for, ...
— One Woman's Life • Robert Herrick
... bay and through a succession of pleasant groves and villages. The road, one of the works of Brandeis, is now cut up by pig fences. Eight times you must leap a barrier of cocoa posts; the take-off and the landing both in a patch of mire planted with big stones, and the stones sometimes reddened with the blood of horses that have gone before. To make these obstacles more annoying, you have sometimes to wait while a black boar clambers sedately over the so-called pig fence. ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 17 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... Forgot by all almost as well as me. Sometimes he has some humour, never wit, And if it rarely, very rarely hit, 'Tis under such a nasty rubbish laid, To find it out's the cinder-woman's trade; Who for the wretched remnants of a fire, Must toil all day in ashes and in mire. So lewdly dull his idle works appear, The wretched text deserves no comments here; Where one poor thought sometime's left all alone, For a whole page of dulness to atone: 'Mongst forty bad, one tolerable line, ...
— The Dramatic Works of John Dryden Vol. I. - With a Life of the Author • Sir Walter Scott
... 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
... proselytism had been too sudden to be generally sincere; and, as the task of dissimulation was too irksome to be permanently endured, they gradually became less circumspect, and exhibited the scandalous spectacle of apostates returning to wallow in the ancient mire of Judaism. The clergy, especially the Dominicans, who seem to have inherited the quick scent for heresy which distinguished their frantic founder, were not slow in sounding the alarm; and the superstitious populace, easily roused to acts of violence in the name of religion, began ...
— History of the Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella V1 • William H. Prescott
... "they, too, go afoot. Often they must help the horses drag the guns through the mire. Only on parade they ride, or when rushing to and fro in battle, whips cracking, horses plunging, the hills smoking and shaking!" The rare creature sparkled frankly, seeing the battery whirling into action with ...
— Kincaid's Battery • George W. Cable
... the army marched on the natural ground along an established line of route which no art had prepared for the passage of man or beast. Portions of the route would often be soft and muddy; the carts and litters would become immovable, their wheels sinking into the mire up to the axles; all the efforts of the teams would be unavailing; it must have been imperative to halt the main line, and employ the soldiers in the release of the vehicles, which had to be lifted and carried forward till the ground was sufficiently firm to bear them. When a river crossed the line ...
— The Seven Great Monarchies Of The Ancient Eastern World, Vol 5. (of 7): Persia • George Rawlinson
... for the king was not able to do anything against them.(593) 6. So they took Jeremiah and cast him into the cistern of Malchiah the king's son, in the Court of the Guard; and they let down Jeremiah with cords. In the cistern there was no water, only mire, and ...
— Jeremiah • George Adam Smith
... everything was enough to banish all patience. Yesterday, on leaving Rosas, she believed herself to be withdrawn forever from the wretched Bohemian life she had so painfully endured. To-day, she felt herself sunk deeper in its mire. Too much mire and misery at last! However, if ...
— His Excellency the Minister • Jules Claretie
... hast lifted us forth from the melly, Thou hast told, with thick heavings of pride, Of the Package in Jonadge's belly, And the Camel that rich folks may ride; From the mire and the murk of a stern Age In the Font of St. Polge we are clean, O Gold as has passed through the Furnage, Our Lady ...
— Rhymes of the East and Re-collected Verses • John Kendall (AKA Dum-Dum)
... infus'd into his brain, Mislikes the place, and fled into his feet; And there it wanders up and down the street,[474] Dabbled in the dirt, and soaked in the rain. Doubtless his wit intends not to aspire, Which leaves his head, to travel in the mire. ...
— The Works of Christopher Marlowe, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Christopher Marlowe
... 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 read ...
— Pushing to the Front • Orison Swett Marden
... Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill. Smoke lowering down from chimney-pots, making a soft black drizzle, with flakes of soot in it as big as full-grown snowflakes—gone into mourning, one might imagine, for the death of the sun. Dogs, undistinguishable in mire. Horses, scarcely better; splashed to their very blinkers. Foot passengers, jostling one another's umbrellas in a general infection of ill temper, and losing their foot-hold at street-corners, where tens of thousands of other foot passengers have been slipping and sliding since ...
— Bleak House • Charles Dickens
... of frosty wreck, Enrobed in morning's mounted fire, When lowly, with a broken neck, The crocus lays her cheek to mire.' ...
— From a Cornish Window - A New Edition • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... danced in air, where was it? Burned to the ground; only a sorry heap of ruin marked where once it stood. No more cotton bales came from the Sea Islands. First one army, then the other, had swept over the Beaufort plantation, trampling its fields into mire. It had been seized, confiscated, retaken, re-confiscated, sold to this person and that. Nobody knew exactly to whom it belonged nowadays; but it was not to little Annie, rightful heiress of all. Stripped of every thing, reduced to utter want, Mrs. Pickens and her daughter took refuge ...
— Nine Little Goslings • Susan Coolidge
... should have been built in damp places, near rivers or bogs, both for the sake of the fish, and to be useful in draining; but why any other mortal except Dutchmen, tadpoles, and newts, should delight in mud and mire, passes my poor comprehension.' ...
— Abbeychurch - or, Self-Control and Self-Conceit • Charlotte M. Yonge
... mind! He maligned you. The burdens that I have carried for all the years, the horrors that I've wrestled with, the secret shames that I've hidden, he's exposed them all in the open marketplace. And he dragged you into my mire! Diana, each man must be broken in a different way. Some are broken by money, some by physical fear, some by ...
— The Enchanted Canyon • Honore Willsie Morrow
... were constantly reacted in these vast western solitudes, and the fate of the unfortunate traders would be unknown, until some day, perchance, a living skeleton, a famished being, covered with blood, dust, and mire, would arrive at one of the military posts on the borders, and relate an awful and bloody tragedy, from which he ...
— Monsieur Violet • Frederick Marryat
... unblushing face Dare ye claim sonship to our heavenly Sire, Who serve brute vices, crouching in the mire To hounds and conies, beasts that ape our race? Such truckling is called virtue by the base Hucksters of sophistry, the priest and friar,— Gilt claws of tyrant brutes,—who lie for hire, Preaching that God delights in this disgrace. Look well, ye brainless ...
— Sonnets • Michael Angelo Buonarroti & Tommaso Campanella
... (who was a French student), who maintained that election did proceed upon foreseen faith; but the doctor stated himself in the opposition to Mr. Blair, in a way which tended to Arminianism; and Mr. Blair being urged to a second dispute by the doctor himself, did so drive him to the mire of Arminianism, as did redound much to the doctor's ignominy afterward, and although he and Mr. Blair were afterward reconciled, yet he, being so nettled in that dispute, improved all occasions against him; and, for that purpose, when Mr. Blair was on a visit ...
— Biographia Scoticana (Scots Worthies) • John Howie
... the legends represent as being the most prompt of all the heavenly host to assist the unfortunate among mankind. Thus in one of the stories a peasant is driving along a heavy road one autumn day, when his cart sticks fast in the mire. Just then St. ...
— Russian Fairy Tales - A Choice Collection of Muscovite Folk-lore • W. R. S. Ralston
... Their main object in life is to gratify their physical desires. Some of them are delicate, and some of them are coarse. That is a matter of temperament. But all of them are hungry. That is a matter of principle. Whether they grub in the mire for their food like swine, or browse daintily upon the tree-tops like the giraffe, the question of life for those who follow this way is the same. "How much can we hold? How can we obtain the most pleasure for these five senses of ours before they wear out?" And the watchword of their journey ...
— Joy & Power • Henry van Dyke
... of meditation, the colossal pillars of the audience chamber of the Deity! The Mount of Contemplation rises far above the mists of partial opinion and the mire of conflict, the discords of jangling interests and the refractions of divided policies, girt by a serene and sublime horizon, and within hearing of Nature's ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. 5, Issue 2, February, 1864 • Various
... haunts us Deceives our rash desire; It whispers of the glorious gods, And leaves us in the mire. We cannot learn the cipher That's writ upon our cell; Stars taunt us by a mystery Which we ...
— Poems - Household Edition • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... battle-axe. The spiny lobster was leaping with agility over the peaks, by means of the hooks on its claws, its weapons of war and nutrition. Its nearest relative, the cricket of the sea, a dull and heavy animal, was sulking in the corners covered with mire and with sea weed, in an immovability that made it easily confounded with the stones. Around these giants, like a democracy accustomed to endure from time to time the attack of the strong, crayfish and shrimps were swimming in shoals. Their movements ...
— Mare Nostrum (Our Sea) - A Novel • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... breaks out in loud denunciations and open and disgusting conflict. And could you draw back the vail that hides the privacies of this life, and see the black waves of distrust and the deep waters of disquietude that cast up mire and dirt continually, which roll and heave in constant commotion out of the world's sight in the seclusion of the Marriage relation, you might doubt that the institution was ordained in mercy, and question its utility. Like every other good, ...
— Aims and Aids for Girls and Young Women • George Sumner Weaver
... We shall be cheerful and happy. You remember: 'Where beauty shines amidst mire and baseness there is only torment'.... You need not mind, ...
— Tales of the Wilderness • Boris Pilniak
... with him. He was too perfect, too immaculate. His "unco' guidness," as Lady Elspeth would have said, bordered on ostentation. The sight and sound of him aroused in some people a wild inclination towards unaccustomed profanity and wallowing in the mire. He was so undisguisedly and self-satisfiedly better than his fellows that one felt his long and flawless life almost in the nature of a rebuke if not an affront. He was too obtrusively good for this world. One could not but feel that if he had been cut off in his youth, ...
— Pearl of Pearl Island • John Oxenham
... fail to catch the contagion of public profligacy. If the representative men of a country, those in whom its high trusts are reposed, be corrupt and shameless, they will drag down into the same mire the morals of the people they plunder and misrepresent. Indeed we want no prophet, nor one raised from the dead, to tell us the awfully fatal results. What can be done to stem the fearful torrent of evils that flood the land? We all know that when, in 1765, the famous Stamp Act was passed ...
— Public School Education • Michael Mueller
... university, turning his energies to this great task, has succeeded in making a well-nigh final record of the life and work of that unequalled organizer, that sublime dissembler, that cruel reformer, that heartless philanthropist, who, for half a lifetime, converted old Europe into a mire of murder and desolation, for the ultimate good ...
— The Arena - Volume 18, No. 92, July, 1897 • Various
... conquest. He beat the army in the field, and then let the fortresses drop one by one into his hands. The change of things has helped this bold system. Formerly there was but one road through a province—it led through the principal fortress—all the rest was mire and desolation. Thus the fortress must be taken before a gun or a waggon could move. Now, there are a dozen roads through every province—the fortress may be passed out of gun-shot in all quarters—and the "grand army" of a hundred and fifty thousand ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. 327 - Vol. 53, January, 1843 • Various
... 19th the 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 buffaloes, ...
— 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
... Franciscan or Grey Friars, built by Simon Montfort, Earl of {401} Leicester, whither (after Bosworth Field) the dead body of Richard III., naked, trussed behind a pursuivant-at-arms, all dashed with mire and blood, was there brought and homely buried; where afterward King Henry VII. (out of royal disposition) erected for him a fair alabaster monument, with his picture cut out, and made thereon."—Quoted ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 235, April 29, 1854 • Various
... is unfathomable. This one now pitched weakly once or twice, then gave up in unconditional surrender. Bob's surprise was complete. He had expected, after being shaken violently, to be flung into the mire again. The reaction was instantaneous and exhilarating. He forgot that he was covered with mud and bruises, that every inch of him cried aloud with aches. He had won, had mastered a wild outlaw horse as he had seen busters do. For the moment he saw the world at ...
— The Fighting Edge • William MacLeod Raine
... breast to quiet the beating, and dropped them when she surprised herself embracing the memory. He had brought political news, and treated her as—name the thing! Not designedly, it might be: her position invited it. 'The world had given her to him.' The world is always a prophet of the mire; but the world is no longer an utterly mistaken world. She ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... negation with neither courage nor 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
... ample-skirted, hanging a foot lower in front than behind, the garment could have been designed from no other pattern. From then on, the major and Miss Lydia sat bewitched, and saw the counterfeit presentment of a haughty Talbot "dragged," as the major afterward expressed it, "through the slanderous mire of a corrupt stage." ...
— Sixes and Sevens • O. Henry
... of the whole ideal world. The hunted one flees, as men so constantly flee from the Highest, and seeks refuge in every possible form of earthly experience—at least in every clean and noble form, for there is nothing suggestive of low covert or the mire. It is simply the second-best as a refuge from the best that is depicted here—the earth at its pagan finest, in whose charm or homeliness the soul would fain hide itself from the spiritual pursuit. And the Great Huntsman is remorseless in his ...
— Among Famous Books • John Kelman
... 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
... of calumny and lies: Men gloat on evil—even woman's hand Will dabble in the mire, nor heed the cries Of the poor victim whom she seeks to brand In thy sweet name, Religion, through the land! Like the keen tempest she doth strip her prey, Tossing him bare and wrecked upon the strand, While vaunting her misdeeds before ...
— Strange Visitors • Henry J. Horn
... on you, goodman! The ox and the cat themselves would laugh at you. The cat ate a rat, and it did not set well on her stomach, and the ox slipped in the mire in ...
— Giles Corey, Yeoman - A Play • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... so that we must either have spoiled our trick, or else have let ourselves be mauled by the rude yokel, from whose conduct one can learn how haughty and overbearing such people become when they suddenly rise from the mire to a station of worth and honor. If I had, in an unlucky moment, impersonated a secretary myself, I might have got a thrashing, and the whole affair would have been a failure, for people would have laughed more ...
— Comedies • Ludvig Holberg
... up hooks and shears to scare Hence the hag that rides the mare, Till they be all over wet With the mire and the sweat: This observ'd, the manes shall be Of your horses ...
— The Hesperides & Noble Numbers: Vol. 1 and 2 • Robert Herrick
... three score year, In wet and dry, in dust and mire, I've sweated, never getting near Fulfilment of my heart's desire. Ah, well I see that bliss below 'Tis Heaven's will to vouchsafe none, Harvest and vintage come and go, ...
— In the Heart of the Vosges - And Other Sketches by a "Devious Traveller" • Matilda Betham-Edwards
... cold neglect. But if such had been the superficial and ill-founded character of Christ's compassion, where should we have been at this present hour? There is not a wretch now wallowing in the deepest mire of sin, who is so vile and low in our eyes, as we all were in the eyes of infinite purity. Yet the more wretched we were, the more deeply did Christ feel for us. This spirit of Christ is the only true spirit ...
— Thoughts on Missions • Sheldon Dibble
... round thy forehead ever bloom; May'st thou, nor can I wish a greater curse; Live full despis'd, and die without a nurse; Or, if same wither'd hag, for sake of hire, Should wash thy sheets, and cleanse thee from the mire, Let her, when hunger peevishly demands The dainty morsel from her barb'rous hands, Insult, with hellish mirth, thy craving maw And snatch it to herself, and call it law, Till pinching famine waste thee to the bone And break, at last, ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 13, - Issue 350, January 3, 1829 • Various
... the sun Doth all things wake, and where all mix and tire Themselves and others, I consent and run To every mire; And by this world's ill guiding light, Err more than I can ...
— England's Antiphon • George MacDonald
... almost ferocious. Those black angularities which his face had used to put on when his wishes were thwarted now did duty in picturing the incorrigible backslider who would insist upon turning again to his wallowing in the mire. ...
— Tess of the d'Urbervilles - A Pure Woman • Thomas Hardy
... fountains, dingy street-cars, and, with the exception of three or four principal thoroughfares, unpaved streets. It was raining when I arrived and some of these unpaved streets were absolutely impassable. Wheels sank to the hubs in red mire, and I actually stood for an hour and watched four or five men work to save a mule, which had stepped into a deep sink, from drowning, or, rather, suffocating in the mud. The Atlanta of today ...
— The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man • James Weldon Johnson
... he was, he cared not through what mire of treachery and fraud he trailed his baleful folds, so that, at last, he could spring upon his prey. Nature had given him sagacity and strength. The curse of circumstance had humbled, but reconciled him to the dust. He had the crawl of the reptile,—he had, also, ...
— Leila or, The Siege of Granada, Book I. • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... wretchedness is an eternal law, that sufferers must give up hope of relief, that it is a crime to sigh for welfare in this world, since the crown of glory on high is the only reward for misery here), then the stupefied people will resignedly wallow in the mire, all their impatient aspirations for better days smothered, and the volcano-blasts blown aside, which made the future of rulers so horrid and so dark? They see not, in truth, that this blind and passive faith which we demand from the mass, ...
— The Wandering Jew, Complete • Eugene Sue
... once, however, by confounding the mill road with the mill lane, and a shaggy dog that lay in a wagon shed pursued me about a mile. The road was full of mire; no dwellings adjoined it, and nothing human was to be seen in any direction. I came to a crumbling negro cabin after two plodding hours, and, seeing a figure flit by the window, called aloud for information. Nobody replied, and when, dismounting, I looked into ...
— Campaigns of a Non-Combatant, - and His Romaunt Abroad During the War • George Alfred Townsend
... Peninsula, we struck across for Dirk Hartog's Island; our former ill-luck however still attended us, for just as we were making the land another fearful gale from the south-south-west came on, and had we not had the good luck to have got under the lee of the Coin de Mire of the French we must infallibly have been wrecked; as it was we pulled along under this promontory and beached the boats in a little bay at its north-west extremity. Nothing but absolute necessity could however have induced me to take such a step, ...
— Journals Of Two Expeditions Of Discovery In North-West And Western Australia, Vol. 1 (of 2) • George Grey
... this poor woman whose clothes you have torn, whom you have beaten, dragged in the mire, who is a coward! Do you not see how she weeps, how she trembles in looking at you? It is she who is a coward, since she is ...
— The Mysteries of Paris V2 • Eugene Sue
... whoever opposes him." The Egyptians gave no quarter that memorable day. Vengeance had free course: the slain Libyans lay in heaps upon heaps—the chariot wheels passed over them—the horses trampled them in the mire. Hundreds were pushed and forced into the marshes and into the river itself, and, if they escaped the flight of missiles which followed, found for the most part a watery grave in the strong current. Ramesses portrays this ...
— Ancient Egypt • George Rawlinson
... wounded. That part, across which he was walking now, was less saturated with gore, and the number of corpses scattered over it was much smaller. Here and there was the wreck of a cannon besmeared with blood and mire, and empty knapsacks, fragments of broken wagons and muskets, in ...
— Napoleon and the Queen of Prussia • L. Muhlbach
... given over beating the vizier Saouy, left him in the mire, and taking the fair Persian, marched home with her, attended by the people, with shouts and acclamations for ...
— The Arabian Nights Entertainments vol. 2 • Anon.
... exhaled away, wilting in the air of unrestrained debauches, perishing in the warm musk-laden atmosphere of disreputable houses, defiled by the breath of abandoned women, trampled into the spilt wine-lees of the Imperial, dragged all fouled and polluted through the lowest mire of the ...
— Vandover and the Brute • Frank Norris
... Achilles left the field, and fled; Which was so liuely by the Painter done, That one would sweare the very cloth did runne. Trecherous Vlysses bringing in that horse, Which proued a fatall coffin for Troies corse. False-hearted Synon groueling on the mire, Whose oily words prou'd fewell to Troies fire. Flint-brested Pyrrhus with an iron mace Murdring the remnants of great Priams race. Vertuous AEneas, with the armes of Greece, Venturing for Troy as Iason for his fleece. And vpward if you lookt, you might behold The roofe of ...
— Seven Minor Epics of the English Renaissance (1596-1624) • Dunstan Gale
... it. He is come back. It was in the Cathedral. O Richard—at the elevation of the Host! Guy and Simon de Montfort fell on him, stabbed him to the heart, and rushed out. Then they came back again, and dragged him by the hair of his head into the mire, and shouted that so their father had been dragged through the streets of Evesham. And then they went off to the Maremma! And," continued the boy breathlessly, "Hob Long-bow is on guard, and he bade me tell you, that for love of your father ...
— The Prince and the Page • Charlotte M. Yonge
... passions to deeds of dark dishonor and unmeasured infamy; men who receiving such instruction will concoct schemes for the burning of cities, for the liberation of their prisoners; and, lastly, they have sunk so low in the mire of dishonor, impelled by savage ferocity and hate, that it would appear folly, if not downright criminality to longer deal with them on the principles of liberality and gentleness, which has marked our conduct hitherto. It was our generosity, our mildness, our spirit of conciliation that moved ...
— The Great North-Western Conspiracy In All Its Startling Details • I. Windslow Ayer
... to preach that the secret of achievement is to be found in "courage-faith" and "courage-confidence," and that the way to acquire these qualities is to assume that you have them. There is no denying the undoubted fact that men and women have been rescued from the deepest mire of poverty and despair and lifted to planes of happy abundance by what is known as "faith." But what is "faith"? And "faith" in What? And ...
— Psychology and Achievement • Warren Hilton
... came by me at whose word the bitter condemnation died. His brows were crowned with thorns of light: his eyes were bright as one who sees The starry palaces shine o'er the sparkle of the heavenly seas. 'Is it not beautiful?' he cried. Our Faery Land of Hearts' Desire Is mingled through the mire and mist, yet stainless keeps its lovely fire. The pearly phantoms with blown hair are dancing where the drunkards reel: The cloud frail daffodils shine out where filth is splashing from the heel. O sweet, and sweet, and sweet to hear, the melodies in rivers run: The rapture of ...
— By Still Waters - Lyrical Poems Old and New • George William Russell
... reckless player, fired by the false stimulation of Rocket's bad whiskey, he began to plunge to recoup himself, and, as ever happens in such circumstances, he got deeper into the mire. At first these heavy losses had a salutary effect upon him, and he would "hit the trail" for the hills, and once more ply his trade ...
— The One-Way Trail - A story of the cattle country • Ridgwell Cullum
... to the ground. It would have fared ill with the licentiate, in this emergency, but fortunately a small party of troopers on the other side, who had watched the chase, now galloped briskly forward to the rescue, and, beating off his pursuers, they recovered Cepeda from the mire, and bore him ...
— History Of The Conquest Of Peru • William Hickling Prescott
... slave, and to produce abhorrence of slavery, was made upon these, and not upon the Gentile Christians; because, perhaps, that they, who had always possessed the Oracles of God, could bear it; and they who had just come up out of the mire of heathenism, could not. If this explanation be just, it enforces my argument for ascribing to causes, other than the alleged sinfulness of the institution, the Apostle's omission to utter specific ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society
... conversations. They are conquerors to the last one. They administer stinging rebukes that leave the adversary writhing. They rise to Alpine heights of pure wisdom and power, leaving him to flounder ignobly in the mire of his ...
— The Spenders - A Tale of the Third Generation • Harry Leon Wilson
... of loving one's honour and conscience more than life. I came hither thinking to make this rock of virtue a sure foundation of love. But you have in a moment shown me, Amadour, that instead of a pure and cleanly rock, this foundation would have been one of shifting sand or filthy mire; and although a great part of the house in which I hoped always to dwell had already been raised, you have suddenly demolished it. Lay aside, therefore, any hope you had concerning me, and make up your mind not to seek me by look or word wherever I may be, or to hope ...
— The Tales Of The Heptameron, Vol. II. (of V.) • Margaret, Queen Of Navarre
... rest, he waited until they had passed a bend in the road. Then he turned and rode back as fast as his poor old horse could carry him through the mud. Dismounting, he surveyed the ground. The pig had struggled until it was almost buried in the mire, and was now too exhausted to move. After studying the case as if it were a problem in civil engineering, he took some rails off the fence beside the road. Building a platform of rails around the now exhausted hog, ...
— The Story of Young Abraham Lincoln • Wayne Whipple
... it, missionary, to come to me, a man condemned to residence in this foetid place, where every sense bestowed upon me for my delight becomes a torment, and where every minute of my numbered days is new mire added to the heap under which I lie oppressed! But, give me my first glimpse of Heaven, through a little of its light and air; give me pure water; help me to be clean; lighten this heavy atmosphere and heavy ...
— Some Christmas Stories • Charles Dickens
... wrestling, then to blowes and theirin grew to that feircnes that the master of the pinnace thought the boatswain would have puled out his eies; and they toumbled on the ground down the hill into the creeke and mire shamefully wallowing theirin." In his pain and terror the master called out, "Hoe, the Watch! Hoe, the Watch!" "The Watch made hast and for the present stopped the disorder, but in his rage and distemper the boatswaine fell a-swearinge Wounds and Hart as if he were not ...
— Sabbath in Puritan New England • Alice Morse Earle
... especially after travelling a fortnight in the rain, as we have done. At this season of the year, every thing is deluged; and the roads, full of deep mudholes and formidable stumps, are now at their worst. The heavy wagons move slowly and laboriously forward, sometimes getting so deep in the mire that it is almost impossible to extricate them, and at times impeded by fallen trees, which the driver has to cut away. They are poorly protected against the searching rains, and for the last two ...
— Life at Puget Sound: With Sketches of Travel in Washington Territory, British Columbia, Oregon and California • Caroline C. Leighton
... minute shut as soone as showne. Why should weake Nature tire her selfe in vaine In such a peice, to dash it straight againe? Why should she take such worke beyond her skill, Which when she cannot perfect, she must kill? Alas, what is't to temper slime or mire? But Nature's puzled when she workes in fire: Great Braines (like brightest glasse) crack straight, while those Of Stone or Wood hold out, and feare not blowes. And wee their Ancient hoary heads can see Whose Wit was never their mortality: Beaumont dies young, so Sidney did ...
— The Works of Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher in Ten Volumes - Volume I. • Beaumont and Fletcher
... Everything saved." Kielland urged the administrator up the ladder and sighed with relief as the hatch clanged shut. The jets bloomed and sprayed boiling mud far and wide as the landing craft lifted soggily out of the mire and roared for the ...
— The Native Soil • Alan Edward Nourse
... The Dialogue (Mire Festivus), which in the edition of 1710 occurs between the first and second parts of the Epistolae, bears especial marks of Hutten's manner, and is doubtless by him. The interlocutors are three of the ...
— Notes & Queries, No. 38, Saturday, July 20, 1850 • Various
... a good joke in my life.' BOSWELL. 'But, sir, you will allow he is a hawk.' Dr Johnson, thinking that I meant this of his joking, said, 'No, sir, he is not the hawk there. He is the beetle in the mire.' I still adhered to my metaphor. 'But he SOARS as the hawk.' JOHNSON. 'Yes, sir; but he catches nothing.' M'Leod asked, what is the particular excellence of Burke's eloquence? JOHNSON. 'Copiousness and fertility of allusion; a power of diversifying his matter, by placing it in various ...
— The Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides with Samuel Johnson, LL.D. • James Boswell
... I serve and whom I have loved from a child, thy brain is sick, and not thy heart. Thou canst not love him. Dost thou not remember that thou art Queen of Khem and Pharaoh's wife? Wilt thou throw thy honour in the mire to be ...
— The World's Desire • H. Rider Haggard and Andrew Lang
... axe, or were left standing in mournful isolation to please a speculative architect; bits of wayside hedge still shivered in fog and wind, amid hoardings variegated with placards and scaffolding black against the sky. The very earth had lost its wholesome odour; trampled into mire, fouled with builders' refuse and the noisome drift from adjacent streets, it sent forth, under the sooty rain, a smell of corruption, of all the town's uncleanliness. On this rising locality had been bestowed the title of 'Park.' Mrs. Morgan was decided in her choice of a dwelling here ...
— In the Year of Jubilee • George Gissing
... heartless wretch you fancy her. She is alone in the world; she is friendless, penniless. There is nobody to lend her a helping hand, nobody to believe in her wish to lead a better life but only poor little me. And of what avail is my belief in her, of what avail is my wish to lift her from the mire if you should go from me and trumpet her past abroad. I knew her, Captain Fyffe, when she was richer and happier than she is now, when she was received by society in St. Petersburg, when she was courted, admired, adored. I am sorry for her in my soul. It would wring my ...
— In Direst Peril • David Christie Murray
... raven scented his trophies afar off; age and youth alike were crushed under the tread of his war-horse; honor and valor and life's best prime opposed him as summer opposes the Arctic hail-fury, and lay beaten into mire at his feet. Hated, feared, followed to the death; victorious or vanquished, the same strong, imperturbable, sullen nature; persistent rather than patient in effort, vigorously direct in action; a minister ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 32, June, 1860 • Various
... Has moulded your son)—Ver. 898. "Mire finxit." He sarcastically uses the same word, "fingo," which Chremes himself employed in ...
— The Comedies of Terence - Literally Translated into English Prose, with Notes • Publius Terentius Afer, (AKA) Terence
... sober, and just. If one should stand beside a limpid stream and cease not to revile it, would the spring stop pouring forth its refreshing waters? Nay, if such an one should even cast into the stream mud and mire, would not the stream quickly scatter it, and so bear it away that not even a trace would remain? How then wilt thou be able to have within thee not a mere well that may fail thee, but a fountain that shall never cease to flow? By wonting thyself every moment to independence in judgment, ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 3 • Various
... dungeon in the prison, the only access to which was from above. Prisoners were let down into it with ropes, and left there to die of hunger. The bottom of it was wet and miry, and the prophet, when let down into its gloomy depths, sank into the deep mire. Here he would soon have died of hunger and misery; but the king, feeling some misgivings in regard to what he had done, lest it might really be a true prophet of God that he had thus delivered into the hands of his enemies, inquired what the people had done ...
— Cyrus the Great - Makers of History • Jacob Abbott
... 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 ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 16 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... had never known the way of righteousness, than that they should know it, and turn themselves away from the holy command that has been given them. For it has happened to them according to the proverb, The dog turns to his own vomit again, and the sow after her washing wallows in the mire. This proverb St. Peter has taken out of the book of Prov. xxvi., where Solomon says, "A man who repeats his folly is like the dog who turns again to his vomit." By baptism they have thrown off unbelief, and have been washed from their polluted life, and ...
— The Epistles of St. Peter and St. Jude Preached and Explained • Martin Luther
... I remained as ardently devoted and valiantly true to Emmy as ever. I felt a desire to shield her with my life against the baseness of this world and let my body serve her as a bridge across the earthly pool of mire. And higher than ever, I held her image above every profaning thought. I considered it a sacrilege to think of her as one of the thousand females about me and to confound my love with the wooing and wedding of the ...
— The Bride of Dreams • Frederik van Eeden |
