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Maelstrom   Listen
noun
Maelstrom  n.  
1.
A celebrated whirlpool on the coast of Norway. Hence: Any large or powerful whirlpool.
Synonyms: whirlpool, vortex.
2.
Also (Fig.) An uncontrollable agitated or confusedly disordered state or situation; as, a maelstrom of vice.






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Maelstrom" Quotes from Famous Books



... and disused cannon; even that does not suggest a more anomalous association of ideas than the spectacle of a vine-clad cottage shaded by fig trees, basking peacefully in the sun, so close to what was at one time a veritable maelstrom of human passions. So far as the new Coloma is concerned, Marshall's discovery might never have been made. Nowhere else will you find a spot where gold and what it stands for would seem to mean so little, Coloma! It is passing ...
— A Tramp Through the Bret Harte Country • Thomas Dykes Beasley

... A whirling maelstrom of human activity and dynamic energy—the city which above all others is characteristic of the genius and virility of the American people—New York, with its congested polyglot population and teeming millions, is assuredly one of the ...
— The Lion and The Mouse - A Story Of American Life • Charles Klein

... of feeling as he stood waiting on the first motion of the little drum round which the rope wound. He was cool and clear brained—in fact he wondered why he was so collected. He felt he was standing out of all this maelstrom of suffering and terror. Not that he was impervious to anxiety for the men below, not that he was unmoved by all that it meant to those standing round; but after that first wild throb of terror that had clutched ...
— The Underworld - The Story of Robert Sinclair, Miner • James C. Welsh

... of thunder seemed to break around me, and as I closed my eyes before its shock, I felt myself whirling around and falling at the same time as though into a maelstrom, just as I had done before. The awful falling sensation ceased in a moment and the sound subsided. I opened my eyes. I was on the ground at the center of the familiar field from which I had vanished hours before, upon the morning of that day. It was night now, ...
— The Man Who Saw the Future • Edmond Hamilton

... point of view varied as the aftermath of the tragedy developed, the colonel alone pursuing his daily life without comment, although deep down in his heart a very maelstrom was boiling and seething. ...
— Kennedy Square • F. Hopkinson Smith

... posterity. Happy the man—if not in his own generation, yet most assuredly in the time to come—whose natural hesitation or fastidiousness has prompted him to weigh his words maturely, before launching them forth into the great ocean of literature, in the midst of which is a Maelstrom ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXLV. July, 1844. Vol. LVI. • Various

... through a little maelstrom of fine dust which a wind circle had picked up, and the sheriff led Bull into the jail. They crossed the tawdry little outer room with its warped floor creaking under the tread of Bull Hunter. Next they came face to face with a cage of steel bars, and behind ...
— Bull Hunter • Max Brand

... he leaped into the gangway so ferociously that the pirates scrambled over the side, brown men and white, preferring to take their chances in the sea. As he charged on, I lost sight of him in the maelstrom of struggling figures. On my left a Lascar was fighting for his life against one of our new crew. On every side men were splashing and ...
— The Mutineers • Charles Boardman Hawes

... arched brows and long lashes, there was a look that thrilled him to his soul. She was more beautiful than any woman he had seen through all the splendor of the night, and she had flashed to him a spark of kindness in a maelstrom of misery! Was this the girl who had been beckoning ...
— The She Boss - A Western Story • Arthur Preston Hankins

... third one's hat! Fair treat! You don't see poverty like that in Wimblehurst George! And many of them high Oxford honour men too. Brought down by drink! It's a wonderful place, George—a whirlpool, a maelstrom! whirls you up and whirls ...
— Tono Bungay • H. G. Wells

... king beheaded and a monster throned,— King Drone, flat fool that weather-cocked all winds, Gulped gall and vinegar and smacked it wine, Wig-wagged his way from gilded Oeil de Boeuf Through mob and maelstrom to the guillotine. Chateaus up-blazing torch the doom of France, While human wolves howl ruin round their walls. Contention hisses from a million mouths, And from ten thousand muttering craters smokes ...
— The Feast of the Virgins and Other Poems • H. L. Gordon

... gay maelstrom there suddenly arrived a couple of young foreigners. They were well-to-do, and what impressed the little story particularly on Monsieur Beaucourt's mind was the fact that they were on their honeymoon—you know how sentimental the ...
— The End of Her Honeymoon • Marie Belloc Lowndes

... believed that there would or could be a great Continental war, and when that had become, with stunning suddenness, an accomplished fact, she had felt sure that her country would remain out of the awful maelstrom. ...
— Good Old Anna • Marie Belloc Lowndes

... ever been good. If one intends to be good, one must take it up as a profession. It is quite the most engrossing one in the world. Have you ever been with a good person who is taking a holiday from being good? It is like falling into the Maelstrom. They carry you off your feet. Their enjoyment terrifies the imagination. They are like a Sunday school let loose in the Moulin Rouge, or Mr. Toole when he has made a pun! Sometimes I wish that I ...
— The Green Carnation • Robert Smythe Hichens

... acres, the more hopelessly was he manacled by taxes. "Reconstructionists" most thoroughly inoculated with "Loyal" rabies, held in lofty disdain the claims of widows and orphans, and the right of minors was as dead as that of secession. In the general maelstrom, Colonel Gordon's large estate went to pieces; but after a time, Judge Dent took lessons from his new political masters in the science of wrecking, and by degrees, as fragments and shreds stranded, he collected and secreted them. Certain mining interests were protected, and some ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson

... The manvantara opens: the Crest-Wave, the great tide of life, rushes in. It finds the world of mind cluttered up and encumbered; there is an acute disparity between the future and the past, which produces a kind of psychic maelstrom. Blessed is that nation then, which has a man at its head who can guide things, so that the good may not go with the bad, the useful with the useless! The very facts that Ts'in Shi Hwangti, when the manvantara opened at the beginning of the ...
— The Crest-Wave of Evolution • Kenneth Morris

... poor shelters away. If the courts above take note of blasphemy under such provocation, the Recording Angel's office was hard worked these days. One would be reading a letter, already wretched enough with heat and flies, and suddenly you would be fighting for breath and sight in a maelstrom of dirt, indescribably filthy dirt, whilst your papers flew up twenty feet and your rifle hit you cruelly over the head. As a Marian martyr observed to an enthusiast who thrust a blazing furze-bush into his face, 'Friend, ...
— The Leicestershires beyond Baghdad • Edward John Thompson

... of Norway, close to the Lofoden Islands, the current runs so strong north and south for six hours and then in the opposite direction for a similar period, that the water is thrown into tremendous whirls. This is the far-famed Maelstrom, or whirling-stream. The whirlpool is most active at high and low tide, and when the winds are contrary the disturbance of the sea is so great that few boats can live in it. In ordinary circumstances, however, ships can sail ...
— Little Folks (July 1884) - A Magazine for the Young • Various

... was not altogether a suitable resort for British visitors. The political atmosphere was distinctly ruffled. Revolution was in the air. Sir Jasper sniffed the coming changes; and was tactician enough to avoid being engulfed in the threatened maelstrom by slipping back to England with his young charges in the nick of time. Others of his compatriots, not so fortunate or so discreet, found themselves clapped into ...
— The Magnificent Montez - From Courtesan to Convert • Horace Wyndham

... spread out in disorderly suburbs and slums, without plan or direction—how men and women became factory workers and office workers without knowing why, most of them scantily educated, housed as the competing jerry-builders thought fit, and flung into the maelstrom of competitive labour. All this we knew in a certain sense, but it was Mr. Wells more than anyone else who made us aware of this national life by presenting it in the only possible effective way, the imaginative ...
— Personality in Literature • Rolfe Arnold Scott-James

... they were, and having no other special objective point in view, it was only natural for the two fugitives to drift into Sheridan. This was at that time the human cesspool of the plains country, a seething, boiling maelstrom of all that was rough, evil, and brazen along the entire frontier. Customarily quiet enough during the hours of daylight, the town became a mad saturnalia with the approach of darkness, its ceaseless orgies being noisily continued until ...
— Keith of the Border • Randall Parrish

... for the peace of poets. They are the little things in the confused maelstrom of human endeavor. Poets are taught with the whip. They must bleed for their divine idea, or so it was then. Sometimes it seems as if a change had come, for so many poets sit in chairs of ease these days. Science produces other ...
— Adventures in the Arts - Informal Chapters on Painters, Vaudeville, and Poets • Marsden Hartley

... cursed room, a swaying, swirling maelstrom of death, while the air grew thick with miasma, the floor foul with shreds of shrouds, and yellow parchment, clattering bones, ...
— Black Spirits and White - A Book of Ghost Stories • Ralph Adams Cram

... again. The sight was to some people too awful for prolonged contemplation, myself feeling relieved as from a threat when returning to the hotel, but still with a desire to go back and again gaze into that awful maelstrom. The surface of the pit is not stationary, at one time being, as then, sunk 200 feet; another time flush with the brim and threatening destruction; and again almost disappearing out of sight. At any time and in whatever condition ...
— Ranching, Sport and Travel • Thomas Carson

... pleasant, kindly people, who had never harmed any one. But this maelstrom swallows good and ...
— Caesar's Column • Ignatius Donnelly

... first place, I must explain how I came to be without money in mine, so soon after arriving in Paris, where so much of the article is necessary. My woes all arise from vanity. That is the rock, that is the quicksand, that is the maelstrom. I presume you don't know anybody else who is afflicted with that complaint? If you do, I'll but teach you how to tell my story, and that will cure him; or, at least, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 102, April, 1866 • Various

... inclined to attribute your restless impatience to nervous disease were I not assured by your appearance that you are in perfect health. Remember, that quietude of manner constitutes a woman's greatest charm; and, unfortunately, you seem almost a mimic maelstrom. But, pardon me, I did not intend to lecture you; and, hoping all things, I will patiently wait for the future that you seem to have dedicated to some special object. I will try to have faith in my perverse little friend, though she sometimes ...
— Vashti - or, Until Death Us Do Part • Augusta J. Evans Wilson

... recluse, and call while I am here,' she had said as she was being drawn away from me into a sort of maelstrom of gaily coloured dresses, and laughing, compliment-paying men. And I blessed ...
— The Record of Nicholas Freydon - An Autobiography • A. J. (Alec John) Dawson

... cut the line in order to save her from being dragged ashore, when the quarry, which probably also objected to shallow water, wheeled suddenly right round and, rushing close past the cutter, in a perfect maelstrom of foam and spray, headed back for the lower end of the lake, with its companion still bearing it company. To thrust the helm hard over, and to shout to everybody to lie down and hang on for their lives, was, ...
— Harry Escombe - A Tale of Adventure in Peru • Harry Collingwood

... and excellent vocabulary" of his ambitious reporter, who was, even then, he says, "determined upon a high and useful career." In a letter to Colonel Irish, in 1913, Lane wrote, "That simple little card of yours was a good thing for me. It took me for a minute out of the maelstrom of pressing business and carried me back, about thirty years, to the time when I was a boy working for you—an unbaked, ambitious chap, who did not know where he was going, but ...
— The Letters of Franklin K. Lane • Franklin K. Lane

... it inevitably must—to women, and the unalterable and uncharted mystery of their mental currents: the jagged and cruelly unsuspected reefs that rear suddenly under rippling shoal-water, the maelstrom that boils just beyond the soft ...
— The Strange Cases of Dr. Stanchon • Josephine Daskam Bacon

... of Drunkenness finds a ship adrift, —no steady wind in its sails, no thoughtful pilot directing its course,—he steps on board, takes the helm, and steers straight for the maelstrom. ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)

... class, a large number of whom are the victims of mis-education—of the hereditary policy of the colleges, which is almost as difficult to change as a national church, or a national despotism. The young men who enter the maelstrom of college life are generally borne along as helpless as rowing boats in a whirlpool. It is impossible for even the strongest minds to be exposed for years, surrounded by the contaminating influence of falsehood, and come forth uninjured. But while we pity the victims of medical colleges ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, November 1887 - Volume 1, Number 10 • Various

... into view above the little whirlpool caused by the sinking bodies' suction. And, at the same moment, the convulsed features of Homer Wefers showed through the eddy. The man was thrashing and twisting in a way that turned the lake around him into a white maelstrom. ...
— Further Adventures of Lad • Albert Payson Terhune

... great tragedies of London,—the terrible maelstrom of fallen humanity which is allowed to circulate there year after year, sweeping into its vortex tens and hundreds of thousands of boys and girls, who, but for it, might and probably would escape. In war time when soldiers were involved, it was ...
— On the Fringe of the Great Fight • George G. Nasmith

... A swish! A cat on a small bear's back. A scene impossible! A hairy tornado, rolling, twisting, flopping, yelling, screeching, roaring, and howling, tore, bit, scratched, clawed, and walloped all over the place. An epileptic nebula; a maelstrom that revolved in every way known to man at the same instant; a prodigy of tooth and claw. If that fight were magnified a hundred times, a glimpse of it would kill; as it was, myself and the clothing store boy clung weakly to ...
— Red Saunders' Pets and Other Critters • Henry Wallace Phillips

... continued. "I have prayed night after night to God to relieve my necessities; I have walked the town through and through in the effort to procure work, but my prayers have been unanswered, and my efforts have proven unavailing. At times the thought of the maelstrom of woe into which I am plunged, has well nigh driven me to madness. My brain has seemed on fire, and the shrieks of the maniac would have been heard resounding through the walls of this room, but my children would come before me, ...
— The Trials of the Soldier's Wife - A Tale of the Second American Revolution • Alex St. Clair Abrams

... of righteousness. God educates men by casting them upon their own resources. Man learns to swim by being tossed into life's maelstrom and left to make his way ashore. No youth can learn to sail his life-craft in a lake sequestered and sheltered from all storms, where other vessels never come. Skill comes through sailing one's craft amidst rocks and bars and opposing fleets, amidst storms and whirls and counter currents. ...
— A Man's Value to Society - Studies in Self Culture and Character • Newell Dwight Hillis

... practice of cruelty; and it was said there were times when he became humanized amidst his debauchery, laughed at the terror which his furious declamations excited, and might be approached with safety, like the Maelstrom at the turn of tide. His profusion was indulged to an extent hazardous to his popularity, for the populace are jealous of a lavish expenditure, as raising their favourites too much above their own degree; and ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 10, Issue 262, July 7, 1827 • Various

... strikingly good, neither is it necessarily feeble-minded, but it shows itself so entirely unimaginative and inane that it is no wonder that the charlatan in religion, politics, and education rampages over the world through a perfect maelstrom of bouquets. Nothing impersonal ever seems to stir the sluggishness of their "souls." They feel nothing that does not hit them straight between the eyes. They never perceive the tragedy behind the smile, the wrong behind the justice of the ...
— Over the Fireside with Silent Friends • Richard King

... upstairs without a word. Unused to any worry, always able to pay others for the execution of necessary details, this young man was a victim of the system which had engulfed his unfortunate sire in the maelstrom of reckless pleasure. ...
— The Voice on the Wire • Eustace Hale Ball

... the gaunt form on my study floor; Gatton's voice shouting orders. Then, we had jumped into the cab and enjoining the man to drive like fury, were speeding off through the busy London streets. Leaving the quietude of one suburb for the maelstrom of central London, we presently emerged into an equally quiet backwater upon ...
— The Green Eyes of Bast • Sax Rohmer

... to any man according to his powers and diligence in any direction? If not, why not have an end of the superstition which has caused our race to go on so long writing and reading of the difference between talent and genius? It is within the memory of middle-aged men that the Maelstrom existed in the belief of the geographers, but we now get on perfectly well without it; and why should we still suffer under the notion of "genius" which keeps so many poor little authorlings trembling in question whether they have it, or have ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells

... Robert Hall (a most gallant officer, one of his heroes, and of Lancashire origin, strangely!), flew to the South American station, in and about Lord Cochrane's waters; then as swiftly back. For, like the frail Norwegian bark on the edge of the maelstrom, liker to a country of conflicting interests and passions, that is not mentally on a level with its good fortune, England was drifting into foreign complications. A paralyzed Minister proclaimed it. The governing people, which is looked to for direction in grave dilemmas ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith

... stream of fire-mist, the lightning, which with its "terror-gleam" flows as a barrier round Asgard, the home of the gods; the other falls in fructifying shower upon the earth, to return to its original source in the underworld. The famous maelstrom is the storm-centre, so to speak, of the down-tending flood. The fountain Hvergelmer may therefore be regarded as embodying impressions made on the Teuton mind by the physical forces of the universe in the grand ...
— Nature Mysticism • J. Edward Mercer

... On the swift maelstrom of the eddying world We hurl our woes, and think they are no more. But round and round by dizzy billows whirled, They reach out sinewy arms and swim ...
— Yesterdays • Ella Wheeler Wilcox

... The Maelstrom! Could a more frightening name have rung in our ears under more frightening circumstances? Were we lying in the dangerous waterways off the Norwegian coast? Was the Nautilus being dragged into this whirlpool just as the skiff was about to detach ...
— 20000 Leagues Under the Seas • Jules Verne

... height of the Maelstrom, on the 26th of April, the ship, putting for the cape, by reason of bad weather and south-west winds, perceived signals of distress made by a schooner to the leeward. This schooner, deprived of its mizzen-mast, ...
— A Winter Amid the Ice - and Other Thrilling Stories • Jules Verne

... vomiting forth huge wreaths of that black smoke which forms the canopy—occasionally a gorgeous one—of the more than Babel city. Stretching before me, the troubled breast of the mighty river, and, immediately below, the main whirlpool of the Thames—the Maelstrom of the bulwarks of the middle arch—a grisly pool, which, with its superabundance of horror, fascinated me. Who knows but I should have leapt into its depths?—I have heard of such things—but for a rather startling occurrence which broke the spell. As I stood upon the bridge, gazing ...
— Lavengro - The Scholar, The Gypsy, The Priest • George Borrow

... about an axis, turning aound an axis, circulation, roll; circumrotation^, circumvolution, circumgyration^; volutation^, circination^, turbination^, pirouette, convolution. verticity^, whir, whirl, eddy, vortex, whirlpool, gurge^; countercurrent; Maelstrom, Charybdis; Ixion. [rotating air] cyclone; tornado, whirlwind; dust devil. [rotation of an automobile] spin-out. axis, axis of rotation, swivel, pivot, pivot point; axle, spindle, pin, hinge, pole, arbor, bobbin, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget

... presses set up, and even churches appear. Post-office, banks, steamer and freight lines spring up within the year of the reign of gold. Disease raises its fevered head, and the physician appears by magic. The human maelstrom settles into an ebb and flood tide ...
— The Little Lady of Lagunitas • Richard Henry Savage

... had taken passage with the Olandese Volante. There was nothing in the world for it, however, but to go to bed, and there, with the accession of a slight sea-sickness, my views of the situation underwent a total change. I had gone down into the Maelstrom with the Ancient Mariner—I was a ...
— Italian Journeys • William Dean Howells

... out of the great maelstrom of war, can cultivate humane sentiments and abolish the barbarism of dueling, which still holds its ground in France and Germany in the highest ranks ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, August 1887 - Volume 1, Number 7 • Various

... angle (the dip-dial and my bouncing body record it) of thirty-five. Our turbines scream shrilly; the propellers cannot bite on the thin air; Tim shunts the lift out of five tanks at once and by sheer weight drives her bulletwise through the maelstrom till she cushions with a jar on an up-gust, three thousand ...
— With The Night Mail - A Story of 2000 A.D. (Together with extracts from the - comtemporary magazine in which it appeared) • Rudyard Kipling

... had twisted the halter ropes under his feet. He seized a pole and swerved the raft to the current, pointing in to the other side. They could hear the roar of the wild mountain stream pouring a maelstrom down from the glare ice and snow of the upper meadows. The next plunge of the pole missed bottom. There was a yielding creak of logs. The ...
— The Freebooters of the Wilderness • Agnes C. Laut

... mad-houses. He always shuddered when he heard their names, and rebelled with sick fear against the mere mention of them. They had worked as he had worked, they had been stricken with the delirium of accumulation—accumulation—as he had been. They had been caught in the rush and swirl of the great maelstrom, and had been borne round and round in it, until having grasped every coveted thing tossing upon its circling waters, they themselves had been flung upon the shore with both hands full, the rocks about them strewn with rich possessions, while ...
— The Dawn of a To-morrow • Frances Hodgson Burnett

... hands, of dull-clashing weapons. I seemed to see it all through a red fog whence the blood dripped, and I lost consciousness of everything save my unswerving duty to strike hard until I fell. At last out from the maelstrom of that wild melee but a single warrior seemed to face me; and some instinct of the fight caused me to draw back a pace and wipe the obscuring blood away, that I might see him better. It came to me that this was to be the end,—the final duel which ...
— When Wilderness Was King - A Tale of the Illinois Country • Randall Parrish

... while dodging furious trams and enormous waggons piled with merchandise, in that maelstrom of traffic near the Marseilles docks, which must be passed before we could escape into the country. At last, coasting down a dangerously winding hill with a too suggestively named village at the bottom—L'Assassin—the Aigle turned westward. ...
— The Motor Maid • Alice Muriel Williamson and Charles Norris Williamson

... here the waters plunged into a roaring caldron with a din that stunned the ears; and now it was that Lionel discovered Miss Honnor's intention—he was to have the amusement of throwing a fly over this maelstrom from the side of the sheer bank, while the only foothold afforded him was the stump of an out-projecting pine. Well, he was not going to refuse—and ask a young lady to take his place. He dug his feet into the soft herbage about the roots of the tree; ...
— Prince Fortunatus • William Black

... "Wait for me, I'm going down!" But his voice was lost in the maelstrom of sound just as his body was lost in the maelstrom of motion. Besides, an automatic elevator cannot hear. It is merely a mechanism that goes up and down, just like the other mechanisms that go in and out, or around and around, and you get caught up in them the way a squirrel gets caught ...
— This Crowded Earth • Robert Bloch

... simultaneously cried Judge Merlin and Mr. Brudenell, as they saw a tremendous sea break in thunder over the wreck, which was instantly whirled violently around as in the vortex of a maelstrom. ...
— Self-Raised • Emma Dorothy Eliza Nevitte Southworth

... said at last as youth and beauty whirled by in a maelstrom of modern Terpsichorean liveliness, "she is a great success. I don't know whether it is quite what you intended ...
— The Head of the House of Coombe • Frances Hodgson Burnett

... the chimney; he, who had always dwelt among the sand-hills, now saw a great city for the first time. How lofty the houses seemed, and what a number of people there were in the streets! some pushing this way, some that—a perfect maelstrom of citizens and peasants, monks and soldiers—the jingling of bells on the trappings of asses and mules, the chiming of church bells, calling, shouting, hammering and knocking—all going on at once. Every trade was located in the ...
— Fairy Tales of Hans Christian Andersen • Hans Christian Andersen

... advantages for Al," said Mr. Elkins. "This financial maelstrom, which will draw everything to Lattimore, will have its core right in this hotel—a mighty good place to be. Things of all kinds have been floating about in the air for months; the precipitation is beginning now. The psychological ...
— Aladdin & Co. - A Romance of Yankee Magic • Herbert Quick

... that I am restless. I think, and think, and I cannot cease from thinking. I have been in the thick of life so long that I am oppressed by the peace and quiet, and I cannot forbear from dwelling upon that mad maelstrom of death and destruction so soon to burst forth. In my ears are the cries of the stricken; and I can see, as I have seen in the past,* all the marring and mangling of the sweet, beautiful flesh, and the souls torn with violence from proud bodies ...
— The Iron Heel • Jack London

... of the work of the prophets bring out clearly their ethical inspiration. Israel was at this period being drawn, for the first time, into the currents created by the strife of the mammoth empires of Assyria and Egypt, in whose maelstrom she at length went down. Public affairs were becoming matters of international relationship. The prophets threw themselves heartily into the national politics, standing between the party of Assyria and the party of Egypt, as independents concerned with the interests of neither ...
— The Right and Wrong Uses of the Bible • R. Heber Newton

... and gathered about the priest; the lamp has been lit, the Host uplifted. The Hun is aware of this; with malice aforethought he lands shells into the cathedral every Sunday in an effort to smash the altar. So far he has failed. One finds in this a symbol—that in the heart of the maelstrom of horror, which this war has created, there is a quiet place where the lamp of gentleness and honour is kept burning. The Hun will have to do a lot more shelling before he puts the lamp of kindness out. From the polluted trenches of Vimy the poppies spring up, blazoning abroad in vivid ...
— The Glory of the Trenches • Coningsby Dawson

... to the window and looked out. A slender arc of silver hung above the trees, bathing the fields in mystic splendor. It was not late. Only the maelstrom of torture through which he had passed had transformed the minutes to hours, and the hours to years. Why, the evening was still young, young enough for him to go to Lucy and speak into her ear all the love that surged ...
— The Wall Between • Sara Ware Bassett

... Christianity having made some progress, a council was held, and a bishop appointed to the city, and from that time onward its position in the Christian world appears to have been assured. For centuries afterward, however, it was the centre of a maelstrom of internal strife, in which Armoricans, Britons, Franks, and Romans appear to have been inextricably involved. Then came the Northmen, who burned the former Cathedral of St. Peter. This was rebuilt in the eleventh century, and in no small ...
— The Cathedrals of Northern France • Francis Miltoun

... travel, education, and reflection; no bureaucracy arbitrarily guiding the details of governmental routine; no aristocracy, born umpires of the doings of their underlings. All the manifold currents of life seemed swallowed up in the commercial maelstrom. By the standards of what happened in this season of exuberance and intense materialism, the American people were hastily judged by critics who failed to see that the period was but the prelude to a maturer ...
— The Armies of Labor - Volume 40 in The Chronicles Of America Series • Samuel P. Orth

... the Giaour—a penitential despair arising from a cause undisclosed. The Giaour, though wounded and fettered, and laid in a dungeon, would not have felt as Conrad is supposed to feel in that situation. The following bold and terrific verses, descriptive of the maelstrom agitations of remorse, could not have been appropriately applied to the despair of grief, the predominant source of ...
— The Life of Lord Byron • John Galt

... matters that her multitudinous store— The garnered fruit of measureless desire— Sank in the maelstrom of abysmal fire, To be of man beheld on earth no more? Her loyal children, cheery to the core. Quailed not, nor blenched, while she, above the ire Of elemental ragings, dared aspire On victory's wings resplendently to soar. What ...
— The California Birthday Book • Various

... grew wistful. He felt something tugging at his heartstrings. Only a few years ago life here had seemed so wonderful a thing—only a few years, but with all the passions and struggles of a lifetime crowded into them. The maelstrom was there still, but he himself had crept out of it. What was there left? Peace, haunted with memories, rest, troubled by desire. He heard the sound of their voices in the rose-garden, and he turned ...
— A Lost Leader • E. Phillips Oppenheim

... fitness for survival, had won safely through a whirlpool. The next few years were a troublous time, a stormy era of transition, for most English people. For many besides myself the period was a veritable maelstrom of confusion, of blind battling with unrecognized forces, of wasted effort, neglected duty, ...
— The Message • Alec John Dawson

... as the world caught its first, full, horrified sight of it between the beginning of August and the end of December 1914. But even out of that maelstrom of horror there had been glimpses of great things—great heroisms, great victories, and great proofs of the power to endure. A rigid censorship, rightly designed to keep back from the enemy the information that would endanger the lives of our soldiers, ...
— The Drama Of Three Hundred & Sixty-Five Days - Scenes In The Great War - 1915 • Hall Caine

... burst, with an almost tropic vigor, into riotous growth. Flamboyant youth, calculating middle age, doddering senility, all these were there, all treading on one another's heels, to reap and be reaped. To-day a scene of marvelous activity, a maelstrom of bustling commissariat and fretting supply-trains, cut by never-ending counter-currents of hoboes to and from the front, to-morrow it would simmer down into the desuetude of a siding. ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol. 31, No. 1, May 1908 • Various

... long intervals developed here and there in the mass—eddies that not impossibly might widen at any time with perilous quickness to the maelstrom of a stampede. So as he rode Bunt sang to these great brutes, literally to put them to sleep—sang an old grandmother's song, with all the quaint modulations of sixty, seventy, a hundred ...
— A Deal in Wheat - And Other Stories of the New and Old West • Frank Norris

... Bride, On that unreturning tide;— By the blood of all the sea-kings of yore, 'Twere better for her fame, That Denmark sunk her shame Where the maelstrom might ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol. 6, No. 1, July, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various

... escaped"—except the God-directed Argo: surely a sufficient warning. Then the second way also leads to two rocks, but of a different kind; at their bases in the sea are found Scylla, the monstrous sea-bitch, on one side, and Charybdis, the yawning maelstrom, on the other; between them Ulysses must pass with his ship ...
— Homer's Odyssey - A Commentary • Denton J. Snider

... is a peculiar thing that cotton has always new riddles in store for us. The fluctuations in prices are enough to drive a man mad. Woe to him, who is drawn into that maelstrom. The hedges are a safe guard against price fluctuations. The careful merchant thinks he is on solid ground, when, all of a sudden, the premium for the quality begins to rock and he wonders what is worse? the fluctuation ...
— Bremen Cotton Exchange - 1872/1922 • Andreas Wilhelm Cramer

... West Indies, as the monsoon may be said to assimilate with the trade-winds of the opposite hemisphere; but this "strong wind" blows with even more violence, and has a circular motion. Ships have had their masts bodily twisted out of them, and many, more unfortunate, have been ingulfed in the maelstrom created by its fury. From its veering so suddenly to every point of the compass, the usual precautions against ordinary gales afford but little protection. A heavy, boding swell precedes, to give ...
— Kathay: A Cruise in the China Seas • W. Hastings Macaulay

... hold inviolate the Monroe doctrine. European or Asiatic complications scarcely even interested her. Those times have passed, Dicky. Cuba and the Philippines were the start of other things. We are being drawn into the maelstrom. In another ten years we shall be there, whether we want ...
— The Illustrious Prince • E. Phillips Oppenheim

... has but three flounces, and it is felony to drink champagne; wait till these changes show themselves, the signs of deeper wants, the preludes of exhaustion and bankruptcy; then let us talk of the Maelstrom;—but till then, let us not be cowards with our purses, while brave men are emptying their hearts upon the earth for us; let us not whine over our imaginary ruin, while the reversed current of circling events is carrying us farther and farther, every hour, out of the influence of the great failing ...
— Pages From an Old Volume of Life - A Collection Of Essays • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.

... the body of the girl slip from his shoulder. As he did so he heard a shout. Boreland and his wife were running down from the cabin trail. He did not pause but plunged back again through the drenching maelstrom. ...
— Where the Sun Swings North • Barrett Willoughby

... clung to their heavy banner poles, trying to keep the banners above the maelstrom. But the police seized them, tore the pennants, broke the poles, some of them over our backs, trampled them underfoot, pounded us, dragged us, and in every way behaved like frantic beasts. It would have been so simple ...
— Jailed for Freedom • Doris Stevens

... growling dogs, Donald made the pack, and fastened it on the sledge. But, before they were ready to scatter the fire and plunge into the maelstrom of the storm, the Scotchman ...
— The Wilderness Trail • Frank Williams

... a dull leadenish hue, and there was nothing anywhere to be seen beyond sky and water save the poor Josephine tearing along through the chaotic maelstrom, labouring and groaning heavily as she rolled from side to side, dipping her yard-arms from time to time with each lurch, with the wind shrieking and whistling the most wonderful harp music through the rigging—nothing ...
— The White Squall - A Story of the Sargasso Sea • John Conroy Hutcheson

... the station accompanied by their families and friends; but among them were little clusters of bewildered tourists, labouring along with bags and bundles, and watching their luggage pushed before them on hand-carts—puzzled inarticulate waifs caught in the cross-tides racing to a maelstrom. ...
— Fighting France - From Dunkerque to Belport • Edith Wharton

... in those days a favorite resort of mine. Every morning I plunged into the rush downtown I dived from the elevated railway station into the tatterdemalion life of Park Row, and when I raised my head above that ragged human maelstrom and climbed to the editorial room of The Record it seemed as though I lifted my body out of a little muddy stream and plunged my mind into a Charybdis which embraced the whole world. Its centre was the same desk which I had so often approached with ...
— David Malcolm • Nelson Lloyd

... they were buried in the swirling maelstrom, and then as the Halfmoon rose again, shaking the watery enemy from her back, the two men were disclosed—Theriere half over the ship's side—the mucker clinging to him with one hand, the other clutching desperately at a huge ...
— The Mucker • Edgar Rice Burroughs

... great and bitter trial confronted him. He had never been a politician. Now he was caught in a maelstrom of ungenerous and malignant politics. All his influence and effort had been addressed to promote the calming of the passions of the war, and a reunion in fact as well as in form. The President, professing an intention of carrying out the policy of his predecessor, began a method ...
— Ulysses S. Grant • Walter Allen

... seething maelstrom, and a heavy toll in lives is taken from the brave and hardy fellows whose lot is cast by these ...
— Life and sport in China - Second Edition • Oliver G. Ready

... general movement—economic, sociological or military. If the expansion, expulsion and rehabilitation had produced greater degrees of stability and security for individuals and social groups they might have been tolerated and assimilated by the diverse populations caught up in the maelstrom of drastic expansion. But rapid, coercive social transformation produces neither stability nor security. Its normal consequence is chaos, conflict and further change. In the course of these internal conflicts the Roman ...
— Civilization and Beyond - Learning From History • Scott Nearing

... of his first night in Castle Blandings, he was conscious to a remarkable degree that Fortune was treating him well. He had survived—not merely without discredit, but with positive triumph—the initiatory plunge into the etiquette maelstrom of life below stairs. So far from doing the wrong thing and drawing down on himself the just scorn of the steward's room, he had been the life and soul of the party. Even if to-morrow, in an absent-minded fit, he should anticipate the groom of the chambers in the march to the table, he ...
— Something New • Pelham Grenville Wodehouse

... his exterior, he was suffering not less than Marian; self-tossed with passion, the strong currents and counter-currents of his soul whirled as a moral maelstrom, in which both reason and conscience threatened to ...
— The Missing Bride • Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth

... there was no thought of Robert Herrick. He had complied with the ebb-tide in man's affairs, and the tide had carried him away; he heard already the roaring of the maelstrom that must hurry him under. And in his bedevilled and dishonoured soul there was no thought ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. XIX (of 25) - The Ebb-Tide; Weir of Hermiston • Robert Louis Stevenson

... approach to that Maelstrom recall might be hopeless. Possibly many anchors had been thrown out to pick up, had all dragged, and last of all came to the Jewish trial. (Of course, under the Pagan absence of sin, a fall was impossible. A return was impossible, in the sense ...
— The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. 1 (2 vols) • Thomas De Quincey

... to Grosvenor Square, knocked, and were admitted into a large, elegantly-furnished mansion. The footman announced us—"My dear Lady Maelstrom, allow me the honour of introducing to you my very particular friend, Mr Newland, consigned to my charge by my Lord Windermear during his absence. He has just arrived from the continent, where he has been making the ...
— Japhet, In Search Of A Father • Frederick Marryat

... real maelstrom," he said, "they don't be carried away; they go over the edge, down into the black hole, whole ships and ships, and you never see them again. I wonder where they stop, or whether it goes through to the other ...
— Nautilus • Laura E. Richards

... Graduated in a single year from the University of Copenhagen, "at which," his teachers bore witness, "no one need wonder who knows the man," he became at twenty-two pastor of a parish up in the Lofoden Islands, where the fabled maelstrom churns. Eleven years he preached to the poor fisherfolk on Sunday, and on week-days helped his parishioners rebuild the old church. When it was finished and the bishop came to consecrate it, he chided Egede ...
— Hero Tales of the Far North • Jacob A. Riis

... transient favorite of the fickle goddess. When gambling lost its power to drown the voice of conscience, there was the race, the play and the wine cup! To each of them appealing in turn, he went whirling madly around the outer circles of the great maelstrom in which so many brilliant youths were swallowed in ...
— The Redemption of David Corson • Charles Frederic Goss

... some almost forgotten lumber lands that his father had failed to heave into the Confederate maelstrom. Perhaps it had come a little soon for the very best upbuilding of the character of David Kildare, but he had stood shoulder to shoulder with them all in the fight for the establishment of the new order of things and his generosity with himself and his wealth had been superb. The delight with which ...
— Andrew the Glad • Maria Thompson Daviess

... was more or less true of the American writer up to a date roughly coinciding with that of the Chicago World's Fair in 1892. During the thirty years more or less which have elapsed since that date, there has been an ever widening seething maelstrom of cross currents thrusting into more and more powerful conflict from year to year the contributory elements brought to a new potential American culture by the dynamic creative energies, physical and spiritual, ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1921 and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various

... the maelstrom!" Could a more dreadful word in a more dreadful situation have sounded in our ears! We were then upon the dangerous coast of Norway. Was the Nautilus being drawn into this gulf at the moment our boat was going to leave its sides? We knew that at the tide the pent-up waters between the islands of ...
— Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea • Jules Verne

... we too entered this maelstrom chasm, and, though the helm was hove hard up, and the after-sails shivered, yet, before the 'Scourge's' bows, going at the rate she was, could turn the sharp angle of that water-gate, her port bilge grated against a coral ledge, and grooved and broomed the planks and copper ...
— Captain Brand of the "Centipede" • H. A. (Henry Augustus) Wise

... from plunging into riotous and blind commotions, to keep his own judgment and emotions as free as possible from a power that seizes all it can reach, draws them into its current, and sweeps them round and round like the Maelstrom, until they are overwhelmed and buried in its devouring vortex. When others are heated, the only wisdom is to determine to keep cool; whenever a people or an individual is rushing headlong, it is the duty of patriotism and of friendship to ...
— Salem Witchcraft, Volumes I and II • Charles Upham

... tail, where it leaped a barrier of boulders and became a succession of rapids. The middle of this pool was, however, comparatively tranquil, very deep, and more like an eddy than a stream. This was the lie of the salmon, and there was said to be always one there. To fish this maelstrom you waded across a platform of shallow paved with slippery boulders bushel basket size, and stood in rough water about a foot deep on a narrow ledge of rock protruding a yard or so into the pool. It was deep enough beneath to drown an elephant; the din of that roaring foss and the swirl of the ...
— Lines in Pleasant Places - Being the Aftermath of an Old Angler • William Senior

... just told you—" George plunged again into the maelstrom, and a pretty girl appeared from the firelit room behind to stir him to his highest flights of eloquence. A smell of savoury cooking came also, and out in the street night shut down dark and chill and sinister, as it does ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, Jan. 29, 1919 • Various

... among cataracts and boiling gulfs, and the pith of all his first criticisms, including the Reflections, was the proposition that to separate freedom from justice was nothing else than to steer the ship of state direct into the Maelstrom. It is impossible to deny that this was true. Unfortunately it was a truth which the wild spirits that were then abroad in the ...
— Burke • John Morley

... attributed the accident to Pepper himself, whose mouth, being open at the instant I fired, acted upon the arrow much after the fashion of a whirlpool, and drew in the fatal shaft. I was about to explain how a comparatively small maelstrom could suck in the largest ship, when the curtain fell of its own accord, amid the ...
— McGuffey's Fourth Eclectic Reader • William Holmes McGuffey

... shot over my shoulder and the whistle was dashed from my grasp. Then came a whirl of maelstrom fighting with Smith and myself ever sinking lower amid a whirlpool, as it seemed, of blood-lustful eyes, yellow fangs, ...
— The Return of Dr. Fu-Manchu • Sax Rohmer

... in early sunlight, an aerial island jutting up above a smoky sea. From the terrible, veiled maelstrom roaring below, battle thunder reverberated and the lightning ...
— Special Messenger • Robert W. Chambers

... light, there was no place where a man could redeem his manhood better than on the Woman's Rights Platform. Gentlemen in distant seats were perhaps trembling to think that they had actually got that far into this dangerous place. They might think themselves well off—no, badly off—if the maelstrom did not draw them nearer and nearer and nearer in, as it did him. He began, like them, hesitating and smiling on the back seats; they saw what he had got to now, and he hoped they, too, might get into such noble company before long. He was prouder to train in this band than to be at the head of the ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume I • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage

... a man of intense nervosity, lived his life alone in a remote old manor-house in Suffolk, his only companion being a person of Eastern origin, named Ul-Jabal. The baronet had consumed his vitality in the life-long attempt to sound the too fervid Maelstrom of Oriental research, and his mind had perhaps caught from his studies a tinge of their morbidness, their esotericism, their insanity. He had for some years past been engaged in the task of writing a stupendous work on Pre-Zoroastrian ...
— Prince Zaleski • M.P. Shiel

... 4, '88. DEAR WILL,—I received your letter yesterday evening, just as I was starting out of town to attend a wedding, and so my mind was privately busy, all the evening, in the midst of the maelstrom of chat and chaff and laughter, with the sort of reflections which create themselves, examine themselves, and continue themselves, unaffected by surroundings —unaffected, that is understood, by the surroundings, but not ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain

... canoe, whilst his body was evidently entangled in the meshes of the net. So desperate had been the charge that our little craft was now actually a serious encumbrance to the monster. It struggled madly to free itself, leaping almost clear of the water and lashing the placid lagoon into a perfect maelstrom. ...
— The Adventures of Louis de Rougemont - as told by Himself • Louis de Rougemont

... destined for your two youngest Dolorosi, who were just recovering from the measles, and needed something light and palatable) vanished in large rectangular masses within your throat, drawn downward in a maelstrom of coffee;—only that the original whirlpool is, I believe, now proved to have been imaginary;—"that cup was a fiction, but this is reality." The resources of the house also afforded certain very hot biscuits or breadcakes, in a high state of saleratus;—indeed, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 3, No. 18, April, 1859 - [Date last updated: August 7, 2005] • Various

... outside ring is a bit over 160,000 miles across, and it revolves in less than eleven hours. In other words we might find the ring a sort of celestial maelstrom, and if we once got into the whirl, and Saturn exerted his full pull on us, we might become a satellite, too, and go on swinging round with the rest for a good bit ...
— A Honeymoon in Space • George Griffith

... effectively carry his message to the very hearths of the poorest labourers. Courtier and student, tradesman and freeman, thief and prostitute, beggar and loafer, all were alike carried by an indignation which launched them on a maelstrom of enthusiasm. So general became the outcry that, in Coxe's words, "the lords justices refused to issue the orders for the circulation of the coin.... People of all descriptions and parties flocked in crowds to the bankers to demand their money, ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, Vol. VI; The Drapier's Letters • Jonathan Swift

... they escaped this island, when such a hurricane broke over the St. Peter for seventeen days that the ship could only scud under bare poles before a tornado wind that seemed to be driving north-northwest. The ship was a chip in a maelstrom. There were only fifteen casks of water fit to drink. All food was exhausted but mouldy sea-biscuits. One sailor a day was now dying of scurvy, and those left were so weak that they had no power to man ...
— Vikings of the Pacific - The Adventures of the Explorers who Came from the West, Eastward • Agnes C. Laut

... to have been born to bloom for a few years in the rugged garden of this world, and then be transplanted to the better land. Only the youngest son survived. He entered the army and went to India—that deadly maelstrom which has swallowed up so much of British youth and blood and beauty! When the old couple became bankrupt and died, the old nurse found herself alone and almost destitute in ...
— The Garret and the Garden • R.M. Ballantyne

... be crashed and man overthrown, the mighty strength of Edward widened the breach more and more, till faster and faster poured in his bands, and the centre of Warwick's army seemed to reel and whirl round the broadening gap through its ranks, as the waves round some chasm in a maelstrom. ...
— The Last Of The Barons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton

... Anglo-Saxon propriety. The Short-story should not be void or without form, but its form may be whatever the author please. He has an absolute liberty of choice. It may be a personal narrative, like Poe's "Descent into the Maelstrom" or Hale's "My Double, and How he Undid me;" it may be impersonal, like Mr. F.B. Perkins's "Devil-Puzzlers" or Colonel De Forest's "Brigade Commander;" it may be a conundrum, like Mr. Stockton's insoluble ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, October 1885 • Various

... a mad splash—a little maelstrom of foam and ripples, the line runs out to its full length, and the canoe careers about, accurately steered by the aft man, in the erratic course of the wounded creature. As it tires, the heavy haft of the harpoon secured by the half hitches round the thin end ...
— The Confessions of a Beachcomber • E J Banfield



Words linked to "Maelstrom" :   vortex, Charybdis, current, stream



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