"Sodden" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... same fair parchment with obscenities, Or gild with benedictions; nay," he cried, "Because a satyr feasted in this wood, And fouled the grasses with carousing foot, Shall not a hermit build his chapel here And cleanse the echoes with his litanies? The sodden grasses spring again—why not The trampled soul? Is man less merciful Than nature, good more fugitive than grass?" And so—if, after all, he had not died, And suddenly that door should know his hand, And with that voice as kind as yours he said: "Come, ...
— Artemis to Actaeon and Other Worlds • Edith Wharton
... Theirs is the sovereignty of land and sea. But if a myriad realms spread far and wide O'er earth, if myriad nations till the soil To which heaven's rain gives increase: yet what land Is green as low-lying Egypt, when the Nile Wells forth and piecemeal breaks the sodden glebe? Where are like cities, peopled by like men? Lo he hath seen three hundred towns arise, Three thousand, yea three myriad; and o'er all He rules, the prince of heroes, Ptolemy. Claims half Phoenicia, and half Araby, Syria and Libya, and the AEthiops murk; Sways the Pamphylian ...
— Theocritus • Theocritus
... Summoning an officer, he bade the man conduct her. Iron doors opened and closed for her. She was conscious of long, ill-smelling, concrete-floored corridors, with little steel cages at either side—cages where hopeless, sodden wrecks of men were standing, or sitting in attitudes of brutal despair, or lying on foul bunks, motionless and ...
— The Air Trust • George Allan England
... not rare— With sodden ground and chilly air; The sky presented everywhere A low-pitched roof of doleful grey; With a rain-flusht flood the river ran; Adown it floated a dying Swan, And loudly did lament. It was the middle of the day, The "Swanherd" and his men went on, "Nicking" ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 99, August 9, 1890. • Various
... lowering darkly. On going to the window she found a most depressing change from the scene of bright merriment she had studied the night before. A chill Winter rain was falling with dreary persistence, pattering on the dead leaves that covered the ground, and soaking into the sodden earth. A few forlorn little birds hopped wearily about, searching in vain in the dry husks and empty insect shells for the food that had once been so plentiful there. Up and down the streets, as ...
— The Red Acorn • John McElroy
... best walk without ever turning round. There is nothing in the story; and yet you will understand how much there is, if one chose to set it forth. You see, she was so ugly; and you know there is something terribly, miserably pathetic in a certain smile, a certain sodden aspect of invitation on such faces. It is so terrible, that it is in a way sacred; it means the outside of degradation and (what is worst of all in life) false position. I hope you understand ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 23 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... wild flounder over the sodden ground, three hundred yards of it, with shell-holes where the rain took you up to your armpits, but the Reedshires had tasted the glories of conquest, and there was no holding them back, if, indeed, anyone had wished to ...
— With Haig on the Somme • D. H. Parry
... cooled off by this time; in fact, the chill breath of the snow-fields had begun to penetrate his sodden clothing, therefore he prepared to take up ...
— The Winds of Chance • Rex Beach
... shore. "Guess there must be something hellish afoot after all," he muttered again. "The flicker of green that stopped the signals, and the green fire that got us—what can they mean?" He looked toward the looming black shadow of the island, and began divesting himself of his clinging, sodden garments. "I don't wonder somebody wanted battleships. But even a battleship, if that green ...
— Astounding Stories, July, 1931 • Various
... dwell in your graves all the year, and creep out, this one night, to enter at the midnight door, left open for welcome! A poor welcome truly!—just an open door, a clean-swept floor, and a fire to warm your rain-sodden limbs! The household asleep, and the house-place swarming with the ghosts of ancient times,—the miser, the spendthrift, the profligate, the coquette,—for the good ghosts sleep, and are troubled with no waking like yours! Not one man, sleepless like yourselves, to question you, ...
— The Portent & Other Stories • George MacDonald
... which has passed the chrism of the immortal and everlasting life. We need a new perception of that great law of the "survival of the fittest." Who are the "fit"? The nomadic tramp who yields no meed of use to his fellows? The willfully sin-sodden who poisons all his surrounding atmosphere with the noxious exhalations from his decaying organism? He who hoards and locks away from his fellows his treasures of gold or precious knowledge, and ...
— Insights and Heresies Pertaining to the Evolution of the Soul • Anna Bishop Scofield
... agreed Jessie, and for a few minutes they sat silent, while the dreary, sodden, steaming streets of London, as, in their short experience, they had already begun to think of them, faded before the magic power of memory and they were once more back in camp—eating, swimming, walking, canoeing—subject always to the slightest word or wish of their ...
— Lucile Triumphant • Elizabeth M. Duffield
... ruins of the cities, and the analysis of these pieces shows the marvellous skill of the ancient workers in enamel; the shades of colour are pure and pleasant to the eye, while the material is so evenly put on and so solid, that neither centuries of burial in a sodden soil, nor the wear and tear of transport, nor the exposure to the damp of our museums, have succeeded in ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 3 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... minister, for the sake of his first day, and passed over some very shallow experience without remark, but an autumn sermon roused him to a sense of duty. For some days a storm of wind and rain had been stripping the leaves from the trees and gathering them in sodden heaps upon the ground. The minister looked out on the garden where many holy thoughts had visited him, and his heart sank like lead, for it was desolate, and of all its beauty there remained but one rose clinging to its stalk, ...
— Beside the Bonnie Brier Bush • Ian Maclaren
... darkened the doorway, passed out, and the light of the sky streamed into the cabin again. Carley sat staring. She heard Ruff's spurs tinkle, then the ring of steel on stirrup, a sodden leathery sound as he mounted, and after that a rapid pound of hoofs, ...
— The Call of the Canyon • Zane Grey
... neckerchief, gilt chains, and filagreed buttons, to that of the scrupulously inornate clergyman, than which nothing could be less liable to suspicion. Still all were distinguished by a certain sodden swarthiness of complexion, a filmy dimness of eye, and pallor and compression of lip. There were two other traits, moreover, by which I could always detect them;—a guarded lowness of tone in conversation, and a more than ordinary extension of the thumb in a direction at right angles ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 5 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... my rifle, which, though severely wounded, gave me a long chase before I could capture it; this furnished us with a welcome and luxurious repast. We had been so long living upon nothing but the bush baked bread, called damper (so named, I imagine, from its heavy, sodden character), with the exception of the one or two occasions upon which the native boy had added an opossum to our fare, that we were delighted to obtain a supply of animal food for a change; and the boy, to shew how he appreciated our good luck, ate several pounds ...
— Journals Of Expeditions Of Discovery Into Central • Edward John Eyre
... In fine but sodden clothes she was sitting, heedless of every person but the young man standing dumbly beside her. "And I told them I was going to stay with a girl friend out of town over Sunday," she was saying. "And now they'll know. Whether ...
— Wide Courses • James Brendan Connolly
... pisses cowily. Outside a shuttered pub a bunch of loiterers listen to a tale which their brokensnouted gaffer rasps out with raucous humour. An armless pair of them flop wrestling, growling, in maimed sodden playfight.) ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce
... slices of bacon, set the frying-pan back, and boiled the coffee. From the grub-box he resurrected the half of a cold heavy flapjack. He looked at it dubiously, and shot a quick glance at her. Then he threw the sodden thing out of doors and dumped the contents of a sea-biscuit bag upon a camp cloth. The sea-biscuit had been crumbled into chips and fragments and generously soaked by the rain till it had become a mushy, pulpy mass of ...
— A Daughter of the Snows • Jack London
... Bush to-night (it might be years after) and perishing from hunger, thirst, or cold. That mad idea haunts 'em all their lives. It's the same, I believe, with friends drowned at sea. Friends ashore are haunted for a long while with the idea of the white sodden corpse tossing about and drifting round in ...
— Joe Wilson and His Mates • Henry Lawson
... Make two sashes, each three feet by five, with the panes of glass lapping like shingles, instead of having cross bars. Set the frame over the pit, which should then be filled with fresh horse-dung, which has not lain long, nor been sodden by water. Tread it down, hard, then put into the frame, light, and very rich soil, ten or twelve inches deep, and cover it with the sashes, for two or three days. Then stir the soil, and sow the seeds in shallow drills, placing ...
— A Treatise on Domestic Economy - For the Use of Young Ladies at Home and at School • Catherine Esther Beecher
... on him. "What's three? Go and try it, if you want to know, you pap-sodden suckling! Three, I said, and they've ended by making the place too hot to hold me. But I'm done now. No more for me!—if my name's what ...
— Maurice Guest • Henry Handel Richardson
... to a dead pause. The semi-wakened sailor dropped into his sodden snooze again, and all was quiet. I waited for some little time with my eyes on the parlour door, but it did not open again; and as no one came in from outside, and I needed no more either of drink or victual, I felt that I must needs be trudging. So I drained my can to the black eyes of my ...
— Marjorie • Justin Huntly McCarthy
... we will seek you, dear Cyclops, bleating, and if we find you with your wallet full of fresh herbs, all disgusting in your filth, sodden with wine and sleeping in the midst of your sheep, we will seize a great flaming stake and ...
— The Eleven Comedies - Vol. I • Aristophanes et al
... him except, occasionally, the ring of hoofs. At other times silence engulfed him. For in the deep sand of the level the laboring ponies of pursued and pursuer made no noise. Masten could hear a sodden squish at times, as his own animal whipped its hoofs out of ...
— The Range Boss • Charles Alden Seltzer
... logger who had been taken out into the night things were different. Wesley Everest was thrown, half unconscious, into the bottom of an automobile. The hands of the men who had dragged him there were sticky and red. Their pant legs were sodden from rubbing against the crumpled figure at their feet. Through the dark streets sped the three machines. The smooth asphalt became a rough road as the suburbs were reached. Then came a stretch of open country, with the Chehalis river bridge only a short distance ahead. The cars ...
— The Centralia Conspiracy • Ralph Chaplin
... the invariable rule was to consider as ladies those who possessed patches on the seats of their trousers. This was the distinguishing mark. Take it all around, the day was one of noisy, good-humored fun. There was very little sodden drunkenness, and the miners went back to their work on Monday morning with freshened spirits. Probably just this sort of irresponsible ebullition was necessary to balance the ...
— The Forty-Niners - A Chronicle of the California Trail and El Dorado • Stewart Edward White
... reached. My greatest anxiety, next to the food supply, was regarding fuel. Every drop of oil had been exhausted some days before reaching Sredni-Kolymsk, where no more was procurable, so that artificial heat, that essential of Arctic travel, would have to be entirely derived from the sodden drift-wood occasionally found on the shores of the Polar Sea. I did not care to think much about what would happen if this commodity failed us for any length of time. All things considered, it is no exaggeration to say that my expedition was about as suitably equipped for the work before ...
— From Paris to New York by Land • Harry de Windt
... trencherman, but the performance of Hamilton was Gargantuan, alarming. Duty dragged us from this Eden; yet in hurried adieus I did not forget to claim of the fair hostess the privilege of a cousin. I watched Hamilton narrowly for a time. The youth wore a sodden, apoplectic look, quite out of his usual brisk form. A gallop of some miles put him right, but for many days he dilated on the breakfast with the gusto of one of Hannibal's veterans ...
— Destruction and Reconstruction: - Personal Experiences of the Late War • Richard Taylor
... still unconscious. The heavy lifebelt round her person must (so I divined) have kept her afloat after the wreck. Her clothes were sodden, so I reasoned, with ...
— Winsome Winnie and other New Nonsense Novels • Stephen Leacock
... reached the stature of a man, He wishes my departure hence, the waste Viewing indignant by the suitors made. But I have dream'd. Hear, and expound my dream. My geese are twenty, which within my walls I feed with sodden wheat; they serve to amuse Sometimes my sorrow. From the mountains came An eagle, huge, hook-beak'd, brake all their necks, 670 And slew them; scatter'd on the palace-floor They lay, and he soar'd swift into the skies. Dream only as it was, I wept ...
— The Odyssey of Homer • Homer
... at these stores is literally sodden with tar, though here and there little drains are cut in order to collect it; the air being permeated by ...
— Through Finland in Carts • Ethel Brilliana Alec-Tweedie
... eagerly scanned the surroundings. On each side of the sodden track that did duty for a road there was a mango grove. Desmond directed Toley to take four men to one side, and Bulger four men to the other, and place themselves among the trees. When the first three files of the horsemen should have passed through, the seamen were to give the word to fire; ...
— In Clive's Command - A Story of the Fight for India • Herbert Strang
... it, loosening the stones and choking the drains. There was then no rattle of rain against my window-sill, nor dancing of diamond drops on the roofs, but blobs of water grew on the panes of glass to reel heavily down them. Then the sodden square would have shed abundant tears if you could have taken it in your hands and wrung it like a dripping cloth. At such a time the square would be empty but for one vegetable cart left in the care of a lean collie, which, tied to the wheel, whined and shivered underneath. Pools of water gather ...
— Auld Licht Idylls • J. M. Barrie
... the ground, and last of all, a terrible outbreak of cholera, which one of the regiments in the column brought with it from France. And we had the mental agony to boot of being kept ever so long at the foot of a mountain, the Raz el Akbah, which was so sodden that no gun nor vehicle could get up it, even with triple teams, and listening to the firing of the attacking batteries before Constantine without being able to ...
— Memoirs • Prince De Joinville
... like a night of moon and swift clouds, now dark and hopeless, now clear and ghastly. He was Master of the Earth, he was a man sodden with thawing snow. Of all his fluctuating impressions the dominant ones presented an antagonism; on the one hand was the White Council, powerful, disciplined, few, the White Council from which he had just escaped; and on the ...
— When the Sleeper Wakes • Herbert George Wells
... the autumn, dear reader, autumn away in the country with its squalls, its long gusts, its yellow leaves whirling in the distance, its sodden paths, its fine sunsets, pale as an invalid's smile, its pools of water in the roadway; do you know all these? If you have seen all these they are certainly not indifferent to you. One either detests ...
— Monsieur, Madame and Bebe, Complete • Gustave Droz
... The sodden surprise on Mr. Fenelby's face melted away. A dish-pan full of hot water served during the course of a cold dinner had amusing elements, and Mr. Fenelby smiled. So did Mrs. Fenelby. Everybody smiled ...
— The Cheerful Smugglers • Ellis Parker Butler
... took a foot trail where the bluff, having rolled back a mile from the river, tumbled precipitately into a deep yawning gully. From the timbered eminence the prospect below was as dank and gloomy as a paleolithic fern forest. Sodden, mossy, and almost impenetrable, the hill split and dropped into Choke Gulch. From far down within the black and tangled fastnesses came the solemn ripple of slow-running water. A veil of weird loneliness hung ...
— Sally of Missouri • R. E. Young
... have they this mettle? Is not their climate foggy, raw, and dull, On whom, as in despite, the sun looks pale, Killing their fruit with frowns? Can sodden water, A drench for sur-rein'd jades, their barley-broth, Decoct their cold blood to such valiant heat? And shall our quick blood, spirited with wine, Seem frosty? O, for honour of our land, Let us not hang like roping icicles Upon our houses' thatch, whiles a more ...
— The Life of King Henry V • William Shakespeare [Tudor edition]
... Plume, and that night Mr. Plume had a conference in his private office with a man—a secret conference, to judge from the care with which doors were locked, blinds pulled down, and voices kept lowered. He was a stout, youngish fellow, with a low forehead, lowering eyes, and a sodden face. He might once have been good-looking, but drink was written on Mr. William Bluffy now in ineffaceable characters. Plume alternately cajoled him and hectored him, trying to get his consent to some act which he was ...
— Gordon Keith • Thomas Nelson Page
... of the shapeless gloom Shudders to drizzling daybreak that reveals Disconsolate men who stamp their sodden boots And turn dulled, sunken faces to the sky Haggard and hopeless. They, who have beaten down The stale despair of night, must now renew Their desolation in the truce of dawn, Murdering the livid hours that ...
— The War Poems of Siegfried Sassoon • Siegfried Sassoon
... over with drops that sparkled in the sun like jewels. The brook that ran down from the fells was tumbling along in a great brown stream, thundering under the bridge; robins, hopping in the wet hedgerows, twittered their plaintive little autumn song. A woman picked a marigold from her battered, rain-sodden garden, and handed it over the wall to Wendy. Everybody seemed to want to speak, even to strangers, and to tell how many of their relations had served in ...
— A harum-scarum schoolgirl • Angela Brazil
... fight against virtue, that humanity is in its nature a forlorn hope, this was the very spirit that through the whole of Stevenson's work sounded a trumpet to all the brave. The story of Henry Durie is dark enough, but could anyone stand beside the grave of that sodden monomaniac and not respect him? It is strange that men should see sublime inspiration in the ruins of an old church and see none in the ruins of ...
— Twelve Types • G.K. Chesterton
... rope fra' somewheers, an' we creeps out after nightfall. It was a dree night, the owd bracken underfoot damp an' sodden, an' th' tall firs looking grim an' gho-ostly in th' gloom. Soon theer was a crackling o' twigs, like ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, June 11, 1919 • Various
... for further permission, he went and closed the large doors, shutting out the sound of the rain and the sight of the streaming glass, with sodden leaves stuck here and there upon it. Wanda watched him with a tolerant smile. Her daily life was lived among men; and she knew that it is not only women who have unaccountable humors, a sudden anger, or a quick and passing access of tenderness. There was a shadow of uneasiness ...
— The Vultures • Henry Seton Merriman
... be alarmed." Johnnie summoned his most agreeable smile, then he extended the sodden package he had carried beneath his arm. "I come from your brother Tomas. He asked me to hand you this book and to say that he is returning it ...
— Rainbow's End • Rex Beach
... jibes, father," answered Wilkin.—"I know full well that you English think that Flemings have nought in their brainpan but sodden beef and cabbage; yet you see there goes wisdom ...
— The Betrothed • Sir Walter Scott
... one egg each, and the fragments of bacon, there were sodden biscuits and a broken-nosed pitcher holding molasses. A cup of roiled coffee stood ready poured beside each plate, and that was the breakfast upon which Joe cast his curious eyes. It seemed absurdly inadequate to the needs of two strong men, accustomed as Joe ...
— The Bondboy • George W. (George Washington) Ogden
... General Foch's army was not only covering the exposed flank of General von Buelow's forces, but parts of it were two miles to the rear. Under the driving rain, morning broke slowly, and almost before a sodden and rain-soaked world could awake to the fact that day had come, General Foch had nipped the rear of the flank of the opposing army, and was bending the arc in upon itself. Under normal circumstances, such an action would tend but to strengthen the army thus ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume III (of 12) - The War Begins, Invasion of Belgium, Battle of the Marne • Francis J. Reynolds, Allen L. Churchill, and Francis Trevelyan
... gardens looked grey and sodden with the desolation of autumn in a city, and the road facing the window was empty, except for two female figures—a lady, and a girl of sixteen, who were slowly approaching the corner. The lady was dressed ...
— Betty Trevor • Mrs. G. de Horne Vaizey
... down the slope beyond Rock City he pulled up short with a "What the hell!" that did not sound profane, but merely amazed. In the sodden road were the unmistakable footprints of a woman. Lone did not hesitate in naming the sex, for the wet sand held the imprint cleanly, daintily. Too shapely for a boy, too small for any one but a child or a woman with little feet, and with the point at the toes proclaiming ...
— The Quirt • B.M. Bower
... reached his quarters in the Clarendon and flung himself full length upon the bed, sodden with weariness. For two hours he had tramped the deserted streets, striving in sharp travail of soul to fit the invincible, chance-given weapon to his hand. When he came in the thing was done, and he slept the ...
— The Grafters • Francis Lynde
... against the sunset. Behind the hills, the splendid tapestry glowed and flamed, sending far messages of light to the grey East, where lay the sea, crooning itself to sleep. Bare boughs dripped rain upon the sodden earth, where the dead leaves had so long been hidden by the snow. The thousand sounds and scents of Spring at last had ...
— Flower of the Dusk • Myrtle Reed
... why and how the Bishop, my old and dear friend, after long argument and many protests, at length yielded and had me transferred from fashionable St. Jean Baptiste's to the poverty-stricken missionary parish of sodden laboring folk in a South Carolina coast-town: he meant to cure me, the good man! I should have the ...
— Slippy McGee, Sometimes Known as the Butterfly Man • Marie Conway Oemler
... orderlies sped to the front, covering them with slush. It was a chilly, silent march through sodden meadows wreathed in fog. Along the railroad embankment across the ditch, another column moved parallel to their own. Trent watched it, a sombre mass, now distinct, now vague, now blotted out in a puff of fog. Once ...
— The King In Yellow • Robert W. Chambers
... farewell to Edith Hester some two weeks before. Now it was silent and deserted. The empty frames of a few lodges stood like gaunt skeletons of human habitations, and Donald was gazing wofully at the sodden ashes ...
— At War with Pontiac - The Totem of the Bear • Kirk Munroe and J. Finnemore
... was supposed to be far above and beyond such emotional signallings, she blushed very prettily. Which merely proves that one may be a diplomaed sociologist with a burning zeal for alleviating the miseries of a sodden world, without having parted with ...
— The Honorable Senator Sage-Brush • Francis Lynde
... girl who is looking after certain wounded of both nations. The peaceful and picturesque air of the little place during this quiet occupation is well contrasted with the horrors that befall it when the draggled and drink-sodden soldiery come surging back in their retreat from the Marne. Eventually, just as the Germans are leaving, Keller is fatally wounded, and dies holding the hand of the enemy who has become so dear to him. One can hardly call the tale anything but sentimental, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 150, March 29, 1916 • Various
... of a Wisconsin soldier, who, taken prisoner, effected his escape from Richmond. Hiding by day, he forced his way at night through morass and forest, snatched such sleep as he dared on the damp and sodden earth, went without food whole days, reached our lines bruised, torn, shivering, starving, and his wounds, which had never been properly cared for, opened afresh. Let him tell the rest, straight ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 77, March, 1864 • Various
... thickly bestrewn with the skeletons of elder offspring. In measure, as badinage had previously passed him harmlessly by, it now cut deeply. No one in the entire town thought him a more complete failure than he considered himself. Skies, from being sunny, grew suddenly sodden; not a tenement or alley but thrust obtrusively forward its ...
— A Breath of Prairie and other stories • Will Lillibridge
... her dream of May in a bad temper. The day after the picnic a cold autumn rain set in, and we got up to find our world a drenched, wind-writhen place, with sodden fields and dour skies. The rain was weeping on the roof as if it were shedding the tears of old sorrows; the willow by the gate tossed its gaunt branches wildly, as if it were some passionate, spectral ...
— The Story Girl • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... midnight woods, the desolate monotony of the beach, along whose margin curled the foam-wreaths of the rising tide, while beyond phosphorescent lights played over a world of weltering black waters,—as he told how, after hours of patient search, they found the poor sodden corpse and tenderly cared for it,—as Monsieur quietly told his tale and never knew that he was a hero, Miselle turned shuddering from sea and beach and the mocking play of the crested waves, as they leaped in the sunshine and then sank back to sport hideously with other ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 83, September, 1864 • Various
... matter, its majesty of mystery and of potentiality—mystery of its living mechanism, potentiality of its position as a source of ever-ascending forms of life. From the protoplasmal cell descends the genius; from the loins of the sodden toiler chained to the soil springs the mother of genius or genius itself. And where little people were bored and isolated, Dory Hargrave could without effort pass the barriers to any human heart, could enter in and sit at its inmost hearth, a welcome ...
— The Second Generation • David Graham Phillips
... second his thoughts escaped his control, and settled on the pleasantness that bare ugly work-a-day room had meant to him all the winter through. The sodden winter streets, swept by bitter winds, horrible in fog and snow, through which he had hurried on his way had had something heavenly about them. "Ah, ...
— Mary Gray • Katharine Tynan
... him, but answered nothing. Her presence seemed to him a sinister menace against even his obscurest holdings in Acadia. The stockade was easily entered, for La Tour was unable to maintain a garrison there. All that open country lay sodden with the breath of the sea. From whatever point she had approached, La Tour could scarcely believe her feet came tracking the moist ...
— The Lady of Fort St. John • Mary Hartwell Catherwood
... that feel; but much it matters here Firstly, how small the seeds which thus compose The feeling thing, then, with what shapes endowed, And lastly what they in positions be, In motions, in arrangements. Of which facts Naught we perceive in logs of wood and clods; And yet even these, when sodden by the rains, Give birth to wormy grubs, because the bodies Of matter, from their old arrangements stirred By the new factor, then combine anew In such a way as ...
— Of The Nature of Things • [Titus Lucretius Carus] Lucretius
... Tourainean word "bourrier" which has no other meaning than a "bit of straw." But there are pretty little straws, yellow, polished, and shining, the delight of children, whereas the bourrier is straw discolored, muddy, sodden in the puddles, whirled by the tempest, crushed under ...
— The Celibates - Includes: Pierrette, The Vicar of Tours, and The Two Brothers • Honore de Balzac
... on the row of crestfallen faces, and a sudden silence fell, during which Elleney, who had stood listening with deep interest, suddenly remembered the now sodden toast and handed ...
— North, South and Over the Sea • M.E. Francis (Mrs. Francis Blundell)
... of air moving, nor a sound but that of the surf booming half a mile away along the beaches and against the rocks outside. A peculiar stagnant smell hung over the anchorage—a smell of sodden leaves and rotting tree-trunks. I observed the doctor sniffing and sniffing, like some one tasting a ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 6 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... of the man, for I was far spent, and together we went down the stream—he the dead and I the living. Lacking that help I should have sunk: the cold was in my marrow, and my flesh was ribbed and sodden on my bones. But he had no fear who had known the uttermost of the power of the river; and I let him go where he chose. At last we came into the power of a side-current that set to the right bank, ...
— Indian Tales • Rudyard Kipling
... thought illustrates the unfruitfulness of a godless life. There is no correspondence between what such a man does and what he is intended to do. Think of what the most degraded and sensuous wretch that shambles about the slums of a city, sodden with beer and rotten with profligacy, could be. Think of the raptures of devout contemplation and the energies of holy work which are possible for that soul, and then say—though it is an extreme case, the principle holds in less extreme cases—Are these things that men do apart ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ephesians; Epistles of St. Peter and St. John • Alexander Maclaren
... army was bad in the extreme. Neither food nor forage were to be obtained from the country round. The troops were almost on famine rations, worn out by fatigue, and by the march through heavy rains, and nights spent on the sodden ground. Tippoo's horsemen hovered round them. The cavalry of the Nizam, which had been specially engaged to keep the foe at a distance, never once ventured to engage them. It was absolutely impossible to communicate ...
— The Tiger of Mysore - A Story of the War with Tippoo Saib • G. A. Henty
... had nothing to do with the way that he kept himself to himself, after his farewells at the hotel with the Pendletons, and took him to an out-of-the-way Greek cafe where he dined very badly upon stringy lamb and sodden baklava. ...
— The Fortieth Door • Mary Hastings Bradley
... seen such a desolation of utter destruction, for amid the endless ocean of trees every oasis was a blackened waste, every town but a heap of sodden ashes, every garden a mass of decay, rotting ...
— The Hidden Children • Robert W. Chambers
... back from a holiday to a sodden and monstrous London, it is best to be welcomed by something young—by a creature that is convinced that it has been enjoying itself, and that convinces you as well, although you can't for the life of you understand the details. Why should anything enjoy itself ...
— Somehow Good • William de Morgan
... country. With all his craft and his lynx-like stealth, it was at times hair-raising work. Not only the ground thickets, but the tree-tops as well, were swarming with his keen-eyed foes. He had to worm his way between swamp-sodden roots, and sometimes lie moveless as a stone for hours, enduring the stings of a million insects. Sometimes, not daring to lift his head to look about him, he had to trust to his ears and his hound-like sense of smell for information as to what was going on. And sometimes it was only his tireless ...
— In the Morning of Time • Charles G. D. Roberts
... of steam radiators was a haunting one. More than once the Little Woman was moved to refer to our "cosy little apartment" of the winter before. Also, the railway station seemed farther away through a dark night and a pouring rain, the fields were gray and sodden, and the grasshoppers across the road ...
— The Van Dwellers - A Strenuous Quest for a Home • Albert Bigelow Paine
... down, concentrating itself upon soggy knees. Broad sheets, like the flow of a water-cart, radiated from coat tails of every description; and rivers descending trouser-legs, turned boots and shoes into lakes, which sodden stockinged feet pumped out in returning fountains. Happily there was no necessity for using gun or pistol, since these weapons shared in the general pervading moisture. Yet the corporal marched erect, with his left hand on his prisoner's shoulder. ...
— Two Knapsacks - A Novel of Canadian Summer Life • John Campbell
... before his dream became fact. Drawn from his retirement in Gloucestershire by the news of Luther's protest at Wittemberg, he found shelter for a year with a London Alderman, Humfrey Monmouth. "He studied most part of the day at his book," said his host afterwards, "and would eat but sodden meat by his good will and drink but small single beer." The book at which he studied was the Bible. But it was soon needful to quit England if his purpose was to hold. "I understood at the last not only that there was no room in my ...
— History of the English People, Volume III (of 8) - The Parliament, 1399-1461; The Monarchy 1461-1540 • John Richard Green
... terms of pain and dirt and drug and disease the city wafted itself in and out of the White Linen Nurse's well-grooved consciousness. From every filthy street corner sodden age or starved babyhood reached out its fluttering pulse to her. Then, suddenly sweet as a draught through a fever-tainted room, the squalid city freshened into jocund, luxuriant suburbs with rollicking tennis courts, and flaming yellow forsythia blossoms, and green velvet lawns ...
— The White Linen Nurse • Eleanor Hallowell Abbott
... leverits, &c. All which (for the most part) are rather to be roasted then boyled. Neverthelesse those, who are affected with any dry distemper, or those, who otherwise are so accustomed to feed, may have their meats sodden; but the plainer ...
— Spadacrene Anglica - The English Spa Fountain • Edmund Deane
... the cottage; but I found myself remembering it perfectly, without a glance at the finger-posts. Rain had been falling heavily, driving the late leaves off the trees; and everything looked rather sodden and misty, though the sun was now shining. I had known this landscape only in spring, summer, early autumn. Mary had held to a theory that at other seasons I could not be acclimatised. But there were groups of trees that I knew, even without their leaves; ...
— And Even Now - Essays • Max Beerbohm
... friendly trunk and swung round to find his balance and a new line before him. So quick was the turn, that the giant behind him lost the yard he had gained. Down through a grey beechwood, over a teeming brook, into a sodden drift of leaves, up through a welter of bracken, on to the silence of pine-needles, over the top of the ridge into the cursed undergrowth again, panting, straining, sobbing for breath, his temples bursting, his hands and arms bleeding, ...
— Anthony Lyveden • Dornford Yates
... of fresh, painful perception was this that was being added to the rest? Was it a consequence of sleeping in the sodden fields, or did it arise from my not having had any breakfast yet? Looking the whole thing squarely in the face, there was no meaning in living on in this manner, by Christ's holy pains, there wasn't. I failed to see either how I had made myself deserving ...
— Hunger • Knut Hamsun
... ill sour'd, ill seil'd, ill sauted, ill sodden, thin, an' little o' them. Ye may stay a' night, but ye may gang hame if ye like. It's weel kenn'd your faither's son was ...
— The Proverbs of Scotland • Alexander Hislop
... try. Come into this little park and let us talk." And drawing her hand through his arm, Archie led her into what to other eyes was a very dismal square, with a boarded-up fountain in the middle, sodden grass plots, and dead leaves ...
— Rose in Bloom - A Sequel to "Eight Cousins" • Louisa May Alcott
... that man, who couldn't let it alone, is shuffling his way against the bitter wind. And even in his poor, sodden brain reform and wisdom are striving to ...
— Editorials from the Hearst Newspapers • Arthur Brisbane
... are content to grovel in dark alleys, among a sordid picturesqueness, surrounded by a throng of garlic-sodden natives, rather than while their time away on the open mountainside or wide-spread lake or plain. All such are advised to keep away from Southern Belgium, the Ardennes, and the valley of the Meuse ...
— The Automobilist Abroad • M. F. (Milburg Francisco) Mansfield
... resigned himself to the inevitable, and the little group moved up the nave, enveloped in an atmosphere of its own, of which wet overcoats and umbrellas were resolvable constituents. The air in the church was raw and cold, and a smell of sodden matting drew Westray's attention to the fact that the roofs were not water-tight, and that there were pools of rain-water on ...
— The Nebuly Coat • John Meade Falkner
... found something. For there were some chests hidden away, and prizing these open, we discovered great books of yellow parchment, so old and so sodden that they fell to pieces as soon as one touched them. They were in some Mongol or Manchu script. They, too, were centuries old. But there was something else—a great discovery. Beneath the books we found helmets, inlaid ...
— Indiscreet Letters From Peking • B. L. Putman Weale
... would not come. One cannot do more than one thing at a time fairly well, and she was certainly crying magnificently. "Such a steady downpour I never did see since that week mother and I spent at Oban," she thought into her sodden handkerchief. "It was a shame the way it rained all the time, when we had had to save for months to pay for the trip. But life is like that...." Ah, what did they think she had been doing with that man ...
— The Judge • Rebecca West
... summer had been a wet one, and, in common humanity, he had had to make a considerable reduction in his farm rents; improvements in his cottage property had led to an outlay for which he well knew he could receive no adequate interest, and, as he had tramped over the sodden land this morning, he had been occupied with the anxious consideration how best to make ...
— The Village by the River • H. Louisa Bedford
... enough; I've been Cook, slut, and butler here this fifteen-year, As thrang as Throp's wife when she hanged herself With her own dishclout. Needs must, the fire will burn, Barred in the grate: burn—nay, I've only smouldered Like sodden peat. Ay, true, I've drudged; and yet, What could I do against that old dead witch, Lying in wait for me the day I came? Her very patience was a kind of cunning That challenged me, hinting I'd not have grit To stand her life, even for a dozen years. ...
— Krindlesyke • Wilfrid Wilson Gibson
... great homesickness overpowered him. He could see plainly the half-sodden grass of the campus, the budding trees, the red "gym" building, and the crowd knocking up flies. In a little while the shot putters and jumpers would be out in their sweaters. Out at Regents' Field the runners were getting into shape. Bob could almost hear ...
— The Rules of the Game • Stewart Edward White
... a faint green filming the sodden pasture field, and a rose-pink veil covering the maples, and blue-grey catkins tinting the dark alders, spring had come to the lonely little clearing in the backwoods. From the swampy meadow along the brook's edge, across the road from the cabin and the straw-littered barn-yard, ...
— The Backwoodsmen • Charles G. D. Roberts
... looking down Over the enchanted whiteness of the town, Seeing through whirls of white the vague grey towers, Desires like this to forget what will not pass, The littered papers, the dust, the tarnished grass, Grey death, stale ugliness, and sodden hours. Deep in his heart old bells are beaten again, Slurred bells of grief and pain, Dull echoes of hideous times and poisonous places. He desires to drown in a cold white peace of snow. He desires to forget a million ...
— The House of Dust - A Symphony • Conrad Aiken
... melancholy, remorse-stricken wretch than Cap'n Davis? Or a gentler and seedier poet than Herrick? Or a more finely sodden and soaked old rum sport than Huish (not—Whish!) But it was not until they fell in with Attwater that their weakness as scoundrels was exposed. Attwater was so splendidly religious! He was determined to have things right if he had to have them so by bloodshed; he ...
— The Delicious Vice • Young E. Allison
... end of July. The weather, which for many weeks had been fine and warm, suddenly changed to a spell of cold and wet. Rain dripped dismally from the eaves, the tennis courts were sodden, and the orchard was a marsh. The girls had grown accustomed to spending almost all their spare time out of doors, and chafed at their enforced confinement to the house. They hung about in disconsolate little groups, and grumbled. ...
— The Madcap of the School • Angela Brazil
... white lily. The heart of this one was banded with bars of flame and gold. The other grew colorless and cold by comparison, and his hands twitched to pluck this fiery, vivid thing before him and carry it away out of reach of Lorimer's sodden, defiling touch. What had Sidney Lorimer, drunkard, profligate that he was, to do with this high-bred, high-spirited, heart-broken woman? Why not rather he, Cotton Mather Thayer—He thrust his hands into his pockets and lowered his eyes to hide ...
— The Dominant Strain • Anna Chapin Ray
... as the first turn the lights from the club-house helped them. Immediately afterwards, however, the obscurity was enveloping. Their faces were wet and shiny with moisture. Even the fingers of Lane's gloves which gripped the wheel were sodden. He proceeded at a snail's pace, keeping always on the inside of the road and only a few inches from the wall or bank. Once he lost his way and his front wheel struck a small stump, but they were going too slowly for disaster. Another time he failed to follow the turn of the road ...
— Mr. Grex of Monte Carlo • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... water-front, all the way round, the mournful remains of the docks and piers lay in a mere sodden jumble of decay, with an occasional ...
— Darkness and Dawn • George Allan England
... the Pit. The air was heavy with poisonous vapors; the walls were foul with the slime of uncounted generations; under foot was the horror of the ages; yet still the man slept, for he was used to the place, and his brain sodden with the fumes of it. But by and by, as he slept, a sound crept into his ears, a weary, crying voice that went on and on and would not still; till the man stirred uneasily in his sleep, and awoke with the sound in ...
— The Silver Crown - Another Book of Fables • Laura E. Richards
... land thou hast reviled; Better in the stifling cabin, on the sofa thou shouldst lie, Sickening as the fetid nigger bears the greens and bacon by; Better, when the midnight horrors haunt the strained and creaking ship, Thou shouldst yell in vain for brandy with a fever-sodden lip; When amid the deepening darkness and the lamp's expiring shade, From the bagman's berth above thee comes the bountiful cascade, Better than upon the Broadway thou shouldst be at noonday seen, Smirking like a Tracy Tupman with a Mantalini ...
— The Bon Gaultier Ballads • William Edmonstoune Aytoun
... Meanwhile the child had paused before one of the cells and, fascinated, was gazing within. What was it that held her? the pity of the spectacle? the terror of it? Her blue eyes continued to rest on the convict, a young fellow of no more than one-and-twenty, of magnificent proportions, but with face sodden and brutish. For his part he looked at her, open-mouthed, with an expression of stupid surprise at the sight of the figure so daintily and slenderly fashioned, at the tangles of bright golden hair that seemed to have imprisoned some of the sunshine ...
— Half A Chance • Frederic S. Isham
... cabman, being old and accustomed to evening- party work in the Five Towns, knew the length of a jiff, and got down from his seat to exercise both arms and legs. With sardonic pleasure he watched the young cabman cut a black streak in the sodden lawn with his near front-wheel as he clumsily turned to leave. Then Martha banged the front door, and another servant appeared in the hall to help the trunk ...
— Hilda Lessways • Arnold Bennett
... known the Conte Leandro meditated inflicting on the society. He was known to have written a poem for the opening of the new year, which was then in his pocket, and which he purposed reading aloud to the company, if he only could get a chance! He was looking very pale, and more sodden and pasty about the face than usual, from the effects of his excesses at the Legate's the night before. But his friends had no hope that this would save them from the poem, if he could in anywise ...
— A Siren • Thomas Adolphus Trollope
... pour down on them for an hour or so. The squelch-squelch of soaking boots and the creaking of leather equipment was all he heard. They halted for breakfast, and Tim chewed his rations sitting on the sodden ground in sodden clothes; and as he sipped his lukewarm coffee, he shivered in the ...
— War and the Weird • Forbes Phillips
... men resumed their march, and the misery of that night's journey was probably never exceeded during any subsequent movement in the war. Sodden, hungry, weary, disheartened; men and transport animals inextricably intermingled; the column plodded onwards in the rain and the night. A halt at daylight next morning brought in some of the stragglers and gave a little rest to those ...
— A Handbook of the Boer War • Gale and Polden, Limited
... life. These were tales of foul sounds and foul air, where men and women gathered and drank and gambled and laughed with laughter that was like the grinning of skulls, hollow and despairing. They were stories of girls with sodden eyes and men with wooden faces—of innumerable schemes to suck money by any means but those of honor. And these were the phases of his study that Dick looked upon with a kind of anguished fascination, as more and more he saw how ...
— Jewel Weed • Alice Ames Winter
... the Osteria del Sole, I supped and lay. I found a company of gentlemen in the common-room, who upon espying my motley—when I had thrown off my sodden cloak and hat—pressed me, willy-nilly, into amusing them. And so I spent the night at my Fool's trade, giving them drolleries from the works of Boccacci and Sacchetti—the ...
— The Shame of Motley • Raphael Sabatini
... and dressed in a tweed suit. He had a gold watch-chain with a little ornament on it representing a pair of compasses and a square. His beard was brown and soft. His eyes were very sodden. When he got in he first wrapped a rug round and round his legs, then he took off his top hat and put on a cloth cap, ...
— On Nothing & Kindred Subjects • Hilaire Belloc
... "I can smell some of them now. Can you not hear the cheerful din of the iron tires upon the cobbled streets? Can you not see the grateful smile spreading over the beer-sodden features of the cathedral verger, as he pockets the money we pay for the privilege of following an objectionable rabble round an edifice, which we shall remember more for the biting chill of its atmosphere than anything ...
— The Brother of Daphne • Dornford Yates
... all signs of rain had cleared off, and the sun shone down on an absolutely sodden ground. Runs would be very hard to get. A lead of thirty-seven meant a lot on such a wicket. An atmosphere of nervous expectation overhung the House. Everyone was glad when ...
— The Loom of Youth • Alec Waugh
... for you. Poor boy! Here, let's take that bit out of your mouth and see if you can find something to eat. There's not much around here, is there?" The horse commenced chewing at some weeds which had sprung up along the roadside. Tom pulled out the sodden remains of the food Andrews had given him, gave the bread to the horse and ate the meat. Then, leading the horse, he walked along the road. He had passed Coal Mines shortly after midnight, but without coming upon ...
— Tom of the Raiders • Austin Bishop
... had entered the study and stretched his long limbs from the armchair. He was a tall, gaunt man of sixty, with clear-cut features and a small goatee beard which gave him a general resemblance to the caricatures of Uncle Sam. A half-smoked, sodden cigar hung from the corner of his mouth, and as he sat down he struck a match and relit it. "Making ready for a move?" he remarked as he looked round him. "Say, mister," he added, as his eyes fell upon the safe from which the curtain was ...
— His Last Bow - An Epilogue of Sherlock Holmes • Arthur Conan Doyle
... pretie Prince of puppits, we do know, and give you gentle warning, you talke no more such bugs words, lest that sodden Crowne should be scracht with a musket; deare Prince pippin, I'le have you codled, let him loose my spirits, and make a ring with your bils my hearts: Now let mee see what this brave man dares doe: note sir, ...
— Philaster - Love Lies a Bleeding • Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher
... mare. His clothes were seamy and worn, and his physical proportions had shrunk so much that the shabby garments seemed a world too wide for him. His face, which three months ago had been bloated and sodden, had become pale and emaciated, and the scar upon his left cheek seemed to have developed until it was the most noticeable thing about him. His step was feeble and tremulous, and it was evident that his health had completely broken down. He was in fact in a ...
— The Gerrard Street Mystery and Other Weird Tales • John Charles Dent
... long in silencing them; and then a number of boats full of troops had landed, and stormed the stockade, and driven out the Burmese. The land column had been unable to take guns with them, owing to the impossibility of dragging them along the rain-sodden paths; and the Burmese chiefs, confident in the strength of their principal post—which was defended by three lines of strong stockades, one above another—and in their immensely superior force, treated with absolute contempt ...
— On the Irrawaddy - A Story of the First Burmese War • G. A. Henty
... and read by the entire population. Its green sheet appeared to be a permanent waving feature of the main thoroughfares. The offices lay round a corner close by, and as we drew up in front of them a crowd of tattered urchins interrupted their diversions in the sodden road to celebrate our glorious arrival by unanimously yelling at the top of ...
— The Matador of the Five Towns and Other Stories • Arnold Bennett
... indoors to a jolly fire when you like, it was a very different matter to us now to experience all the discomforts of those dreadful, icy, spongy, little feathery nuisances penetrating beneath every loophole they could find entrance to, in the apology for a tent that we had, and to have our clothing sodden by it, our fire put out, and our blood congealed. Perhaps even the most ardent snow-lover would lose his taste for the soft ...
— On Board the Esmeralda - Martin Leigh's Log - A Sea Story • John Conroy Hutcheson
... had rushed off into the melancholy meadows, among the sodden hay-cocks still standing among the green growth of grass; but a shower, increasing the damp forlornness of the ungenial day, made him turn homewards. When, late in the afternoon, Ethel came into the schoolroom ...
— The Trial - or, More Links of the Daisy Chain • Charlotte M. Yonge
... their clay walls shored up with wickerwork, and their outskirts fringed with barbed wire whose intricate and volatile coils looked like thistledown. The village behind whose walls we now sheltered lay in a No Man's Land between the enemy's lines and our own, and the sodden fields ...
— Leaves from a Field Note-Book • J. H. Morgan |
