"Mire" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... he could live with them. He had hoped to serve Art, to keep his service pure; but, having one day let his acid temperament out of hand to revel in an orgy of personal retaliation, he had since never known when she would slip her chain and come home smothered in mire. Moreover, he no longer chastised her when she came. His ideals had left him, one by one; he now lived alone, immune from dignity and shame, soothing himself with whisky. A man of rancour, meet for pity, and, in his cups, contented. He had lunched freely before coming ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... matters were naturally not improved by its confluence with the charming and copious stream which, at Macon, is said once to have given such a happy opportunity to the egotism of the capital. A visitor from Paris (the anecdote is very old), being asked on the quay of that city whether he didn't ad- mire the Saone, replied good-naturedly that it was very pretty, but that in Paris they spelled it with the ei. This moment of general alarm at Lyons had been chosen by certain ingenious persons (I credit them, perhaps, with too ...
— A Little Tour in France • Henry James
... and forbear, Or at the least hold back thy hand and spare! I sally forth to seek my daily bread And find my living vanished into air. How many a fool's exalted to the stars, Whilst sages hidden in the mire must fare! ...
— The Book Of The Thousand Nights And One Night, Volume I • Anonymous
... Ireland in your care, Who watched o'er pits of blood and mire, From iron roots leap up in air Wild forests, magical, of fire; Yet while the Nuts of Death were shed Your memory would ever stray To your own isle. Oh, gallant dead— This wreath, ...
— Imaginations and Reveries • (A.E.) George William Russell
... waiting-women, a fictitious person). Why, she set to work and made a rochet in little, and set it on the dog's back. Heardst thou ever the like? And there was he, a-running about the house with his rochet on him, and all trailing in the mire. I know not whether Annis were wholly free of some knowledge thereof—nor Bertie neither. He said he knew not; I ...
— Robin Tremain - A Story of the Marian Persecution • Emily Sarah Holt
... no hope for either of them? He had surrounded her with his friends, and she thought of the invitations ahead of her. Her profession of an opera singer chained her to this life.... She felt that a miracle would have to happen to extricate her from the social mire into which she was ...
— Evelyn Innes • George Moore
... Miss Carvel was infinitely more haughty than her Majesty. Was not the Captain hired to do a degrading service? Indeed, he thought so as he followed her about the house and he felt like the lowest of criminals as he opened a closet door or looked under a bed. He was a beast of the field, of the mire. How Virginia shrank from him if he had occasion to pass her! Her gown would have been defiled by his touch. And yet the Captain did not smell of beer, nor of sauerkraut; nor did he swear in any language. ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... anger were very strong; and Vivian felt even a little surprised that he took the matter so much to heart. He himself was not convinced that the whole truth of the story had been told: he was certain, at any rate, that Hugo Luttrell had dragged Kitty's name through the mire in a most unjustifiable way, and he felt a strong desire to wreak vengeance upon him. For Kitty's sake, therefore, it was better that he should keep out of the way: he did not want to quarrel with her husband, and ...
— Under False Pretences - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant
... was Baron Leopold von Singer, an Austrian citizen and a man of great wealth, who lifted midgets out of the mental mire of being regarded as children and gave them their rightful place. The story is told that the baron became interested in little people through the pleadings of an invalid daughter. He invited several midgets to his home. Finding them ...
— David Lannarck, Midget - An Adventure Story • George S. Harney
... father, child?" she exclaimed. "See what a bonnie gentleman he is, and what a pretty horse he rides, while we tread along through the mire." ...
— The Recollections of Geoffrey Hamlyn • Henry Kingsley
... Sir Nigel," cried the prince, "fasten not the offence upon Sir Robert Briquet, for we are one and all bogged in the same mire. Truth to say, our ears have just been vexed by the doings of the same company, and I have even now made vow to hang the man who held the rank of captain over it. I little thought to find him among the bravest of my own chosen chieftains. But the vow is now nought, for, as you have never ...
— The White Company • Arthur Conan Doyle
... stony platform, who is the sister of Vasudeva, one who is always decked in celestial garlands and attired in celestial robes,—who is armed with scimitar and shield, and always rescues the worshipper sunk in sin, like a cow in the mire, who in the hours of distress calls upon that eternal giver of blessings for relieving him of their burdens. And the king, desirous with his brothers of obtaining a sight of the Goddess, invoked her and began to praise her by reciting various names ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 2 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... sounded the loud cries, from the English within the fort. Their comrades on the outside hastened—scrambling, wading, straddling the log or knee-deep in the half frozen mire. ...
— Boys' Book of Indian Warriors - and Heroic Indian Women • Edwin L. Sabin
... faltar fail, be missing, be lacking, give way. fallido, -a frustrated, amiss. fama f. reputation, report, rumor; es —— it is said. famoso, -a famous, renowned, notorious. fanal m. lantern, light, beacon. fanfarrn m. boaster, bully. fango m. mud, mire, slime. fantasa f. fancy, imagination, caprice, whim. fantasma m. f. phantom, ghost, specter, scarecrow. fantstico, -a fantastic, imaginary. farsa f. farce, humbug. fascinar fascinate. fatal adj. fatal, ominous, unfortunate. fatdico, ...
— El Estudiante de Salamanca and Other Selections • George Tyler Northup
... live in the conviction of the exceeding abominableness and filthiness of sin, which is compared to the vomit of a dog, and to the mire wherein the sow walloweth, 2 Pet. ii. 22; filthy rags, Isa. lxiv. 6; to a menstruous cloth, Isa. xxx. 22, and the like, that this may move them to seek with greater care and diligence, to have that ...
— Christ The Way, The Truth, and The Life • John Brown (of Wamphray)
... the truth. This is the fallacy of the photographic method; and from this fallacy arise the tedious minuteness of George Eliot in her more pedestrian moments, the interminable tea-cups of Anthony Trollope, and the mire of the imitators of Zola. Realism latterly, especially in France, has shown a tendency to degenerate into so-called "naturalism," a method of art which casts the unnatural emphasis of photographic reproduction upon phases of actual ...
— A Manual of the Art of Fiction • Clayton Hamilton
... done before her, Angel dragged out the weary years, almost hopeless; and the one object of her toil and solicitude, was only a pitiful wreck of the former stalwart William Way. Only a miserable, wretched creature, that grovelled in the mire of its own degradation, and from whose bosom the last spark of manhood seemed to have forever fled. To look upon him, you would ask, 'Can this ...
— Clemence - The Schoolmistress of Waveland • Retta Babcock
... plerumque aliud nihil esse, quam sacr Scriptur abusiones manifestas. Sed non necesse erat, hoc saltem in loco, ut tali krsphyget uterentur. Nam, (4) qucunque in hoc foedere continentur, in Evangelium mire quadrant. (i.) Quod ad prcepta attinet, prscribuntur hic ea tantum, qu ad mores pertinent, et per se honesta sunt; illorum rituum, qui, si verba spectes, pueriles videri possent, quorumque totum foedus legale fere plenum est, nulla facta mentione. Addas, totam illam obedientiam, qu ...
— Inspiration and Interpretation - Seven Sermons Preached Before the University of Oxford • John Burgon
... home that night with the mire thick on his boots. Having fed him, I went to the stables, and finding no Holgar made sure that he had killed the poor beast in wrath for his discomforture at the tilt. The true reason he gave me many days after. I misjudged him, judging him ...
— The White Wolf and Other Fireside Tales • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... afternoon one and twenty knights were riding along the highway in the northern part of Spain. As they were passing a deep mire they heard cries for help, and turning, saw a poor leper who was sinking in the mud. One of the knights, a handsome young man, was touched by the cries. He dismounted, rescued the poor fellow, took him upon his own ...
— Famous Men of the Middle Ages • John H. Haaren
... their overcoats, or, fully dry, colored every part of the uniform with its powder. One saw men that appeared to have rolled over and over in a puddle bath of this whitish mud, and sometimes there was seen a sinister mixture of blood and mire. There is nothing romantic about a wounded soldier, for his condition brings a special emphasis on our human relation to ordinary meat. Dirty, exhausted, unshaven, smelling of the trenches, of his wounds, ...
— A Volunteer Poilu • Henry Sheahan
... philosopher's vocabulary the word 'inconceivable.' But he is too well satisfied with his own system ever to consider the effect of what is unknown on the element which is known. To the Hegelian all things are plain and clear, while he who is outside the charmed circle is in the mire of ignorance and 'logical impurity': he who is within is omniscient, or at least has all the elements of knowledge ...
— Sophist • Plato
... than they would do. The children of genius have not always lived up to their moral light. Burns' mind ran swiftly forward, but his will followed afar off. If the poet's forehead was in the clouds, his feet were in the mire. How noble, also, Byron's thoughts, but how mean his life! Goethe uttered the wisdom of a sage, as did Rousseau, yet their deeds were often those we would expect from a slave with a low brow. Even of Shakespeare, it is said in the morning he polished his sonnets, while at midnight he poached game ...
— The Investment of Influence - A Study of Social Sympathy and Service • Newell Dwight Hillis
... are not idlers; for they do their fair share of the work of the state, and usually take more than their fair share of its dangers. It was a fine thing said of a subaltern officer in the Peninsular campaigns, observed trudging alone through mud and mire by the side of his regiment, "There goes 15,000l. a year!" and in our own day, the bleak slopes of Sebastopol and the burning soil of India have borne witness to the like noble self-denial and devotion on the part of our gentler classes; ...
— Self Help • Samuel Smiles
... the end only demonstrated the clearer to me the perilous state in which I was. The deeper the bog, the more my spirit writhed to be free. Better, I thought, to die struggling than gradually to sink down and be suffocated beneath the mire of ...
— The "Goldfish" • Arthur Train
... fearing to soil her slippers. This was the young courtier's chance. Raleigh had been in the background, but seeing the Queen hesitate he sprang forward, and sweeping his new plush cloak from his shoulders, spread it in the mire, so that she might cross. The Queen's face lighted up with pleasure at the graceful act, and she thanked the youthful gallant. Later she saw that he was given many court suits for the cloak he ...
— Historic Boyhoods • Rupert Sargent Holland
... party entered a hollow between two low ranges. The hills receded as they progressed, the basin widened and grew more difficult to traverse, for the ground was boggy and thickly covered with small, rotting pines. Every here and there some had fallen and lay in tangles among pools of mire. A sluggish creek wound through the hollow and the men had often to cross it; and as they plodded through the morass they found their loads intolerably heavy. Still, Clarke's directions had plainly indicated this valley as their road, ...
— The Intriguers • Harold Bindloss
... present; and that had he been at the head of affairs we should not have lost our North American Colonies, or have got plunged over head and ears in debt as we are, alack! already; and now, with war raging and all the world in arms against us, getting deeper and deeper into the mire." Without holding my worthy principal in such deep admiration as our head clerk evidently did, I had a most sincere ...
— James Braithwaite, the Supercargo - The Story of his Adventures Ashore and Afloat • W.H.G. Kingston
... life- long trouble. Just so; it was the slough in himself that so kept poor Mr. Fearing back. This poor pilgrim, who had so little to fear in his past life, had yet so much scum and filth, spume and mire in his present heart, that how to get on the other side of that cost him not a month's roaring only, but all the months and all the years till he went over the River not much above wet-shod. And, till then, not twenty ...
— Bunyan Characters (Second Series) • Alexander Whyte
... are feeling shocked that those who ought to be so far above the greed of gain have let their honor be trampled in the mire for the sake of the ...
— The Great Round World and What Is Going On In It, Vol. 1, No. 34, July 1, 1897 - A Weekly Magazine for Boys and Girls • Various
... likely to mislead us. We attribute to magnificence what was really the effect of a very disagreeable necessity. People, in the time of Charles the Second, travelled with six horses, because with a smaller number there was great danger of sticking fast in the mire. Nor were even six horses always sufficient. Vanbrugh, in the succeeding generation, described with great humour the way in which a country gentleman, newly chosen a member of Parliament, went up to London. ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 1 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... my lantern, I found my Master there and helping the strange lady to dismount, with the porter and two sleepy grooms standing by and holding torches. Beneath the belly of the lady's horse stood her hound, his tongue lolling and his coat a cake of mire. The night had been chilly and the nostrils of the hard-ridden beasts made a steam among the lights we held, while above us the upper frontage of the house stood out clear between the growing daylight and the waning moon poised above ...
— Old Fires and Profitable Ghosts • A. T. Quiller-Couch
... ghastly, and they were plastered from head to foot with mud from their falls upon the foul and slippery roads. Yet, spent as they were, their spirit was excellent, and they pushed and hauled at the gun-carriages when the wheels sank up to the axles in the mire, and the weary horses were floundering knee-deep unable ...
— The Adventures of Gerard • Arthur Conan Doyle
... boys at football. Even as they did so, Fetuao leaped bolt upright on the wall, and swinging her carbine round her head, opposed her slender body to the whole attack. In an instant she was tumbling backward with a bullet through her throat, and as she lay coughing and strangling in the mire, Jack ran forward with a cry and caught her in his arms. There she died, amid the crash and roar of a hand-to-hand fight, jostled and stumbled on, her little hot hands clinging to his in the convulsive grasp ...
— Wild Justice: Stories of the South Seas • Lloyd Osbourne
... outside. Slipping on his clothes he went to the window and looked out. Men were yelling at one another, screeching delightful oaths, capering about hatless, coatless, in the rain that still came steadily down. The corral yard was a mire of sticky mud in which the horses reared and plunged in evident appreciation of the welcome change from dry heat to lifegiving moisture. Riderless horses stood about, no one caring about the saddles, several calves capered awkwardly in the pasture. Norton's dog—about which he had joked to ...
— The Coming of the Law • Charles Alden Seltzer
... malplimulto. Minstrel bardo, kantisto. Mint mento. Minute menueto. Minuet (time) minuto. Minute (note) noto. Minute malgrandega. Minuti detaleto. Miracle miraklo. Miraculous mirakla. Mire sxlimo, koto. Mirror spegulo. Mirth gajeco, kun—. Miry sxlimhava. Misapply eraralmeti. Misapprehend malkompreni. Misapprehension malkompreno. Misanthrope homevitulo. Misbehave malbonkonduti. Miscalculation kalkuleraro. ...
— English-Esperanto Dictionary • John Charles O'Connor and Charles Frederic Hayes
... his bust carried about Paris, after his unworthy schemes against the King had been discovered, it was thrown into the mire. Necker passing, perhaps by mere accident, stopped his carriage, and expressing himself with some resentment for such treatment to a Prince of the blood and a friend of the people, ordered the bust to be taken to the Palais Royal, where it was washed, crowned with laurel, and thence, with Necker's ...
— The Memoirs of Louis XV. and XVI., Volume 5 • Madame du Hausset, and of an Unknown English Girl and the Princess Lamballe
... though he was, all his blood was on fire With the rush of the wind and the gleam of the mire, And the leap of his heart to the skylarks in quire, And the feel of his horse going onward, on, on, Under sky with white banners and ...
— Right Royal • John Masefield
... I though deluges down pour Beating earth to mire, Though heaven shattering with the thunder's roar Scorcheth now in fire, Though every planet molten from its place Should trickle lost through ...
— My Beautiful Lady. Nelly Dale • Thomas Woolner
... pursue Ambition's fire That shines, Oblivion, above thy mire. The latest mounts his predecessor's trunk, And sinks his brother ere himself is sunk. So die ingloriously Fame's elite, But dams of dunces ...
— Shapes of Clay • Ambrose Bierce
... no such thing on record. It is shifting the ground from one field of observation to another to make this statement, and when the assertions go so far as to exclude from the domain of science those who will not be dragged into this mire of mere assertion, then it is time ...
— Evolution - An Investigation and a Critique • Theodore Graebner
... thus: 'Go thou from me to fate, And to my father my foul deeds relate. Now die!' With that he dragg'd the trembling sire, Slidd'ring thro' clotter'd blood and holy mire, (The mingled paste his murder'd son had made,) Haul'd from beneath the violated shade, And on the sacred pile the royal victim laid. His right hand held his bloody falchion bare, His left he twisted in his hoary hair; Then, with a speeding ...
— The Aeneid • Virgil
... recovered before long. But Grumkow and the old Dessauer, main aspirants; getting wind of this Will, and hunting out the truth of it,—what a puddling of the waters these two made in consequence; stirring up mire and dirt round the good Queen, finding she had been preferred to them! [Wilhelmina, i. 26, 29.] Nay Wilhelmina, in her wild way, believes they had, not long after, planned to "fire a Theatre" about the King, one afternoon, in Berlin City, and take his life, thereby securing for themselves ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Volume V. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... it pass, without looking twice at the car itself, which indeed was disguised out of knowledge in the promiscuous mire of many countries; but the red eyes behind the driver's goggles were not so slow. Down went his feet on clutch and brake without a second's interval; round spun the car in a skid that tore studs from the tyres, and fetched her up against the kerb with a shivered wheel. Pocket started forward ...
— The Camera Fiend • E.W. Hornung
... diction—as in the famous cartoon of Lord Brougham as Mrs. Caudle, of the original sketch for which a reproduction is given opposite—but he steadily carried into execution his threat of earlier days, to drag Lord Brougham "in the mire." He has been as good as his word ever since the day when Dicky Doyle drew the famous cover which is familiar to us all—that is to say, in 1849—for, as you will see if you will refer to last week's Punch, a young faun in the grand procession that appears as a ...
— The History of "Punch" • M. H. Spielmann
... canvas with beauty, sportiveness, and pensive grace. Poor charming woman! Had she not met that wandering boy on the highway; had she not opened to him her house and heart, his sensitive and suffering genius might have been extinguished in the mire. The meeting seemed like the effect of chance, but it was predestination meeting the great man under the form of his first love. That woman saved him; she cultivated him; she excited him in solitude, in liberty, and in love, as the houris of the East through pleasure raise up martyrs in ...
— Raphael - Pages Of The Book Of Life At Twenty • Alphonse de Lamartine
... Frankfort Parliament had been, as a whole, from the taint of Republicanism or of revolutionary violence, it had nevertheless had its birth in revolution: the crown which it offered would, in the King's expression, have been picked up from blood and mire. Had the princes of Germany by any arrangement with the Assembly tendered the crown to Frederick William the case would have been different; a new Divine right would have emanated from the old, and conditions fixed by negotiation between ...
— History of Modern Europe 1792-1878 • C. A. Fyffe
... the heart that Princess Tourandocte of the Mille et un Jours—each one of them fain to be her Prince Calaf. But never a one of them reads the riddle. One by one they drop, some into the trench where failures lie, some into the mire of journalism, some again into the quagmires ...
— A Distinguished Provincial at Paris • Honore de Balzac
... guns over rocks and through mire, Trembling with weakness, yet straining each nerve, Fated at last in despair to expire, Uncomprehending, yet willing ...
— Poems • John L. Stoddard
... and daring; beginning as a mere clerk, he had risen to be a notary; but at this period his face showed, to the eyes of an observer, certain haggard lines, and an expression of weariness in the pursuit of pleasure. When a man plunges into the mire of excesses it is seldom that his face shows no trace of it. In the present instance the lines of the wrinkles and the heat of the complexion were markedly ignoble. Instead of the pure glow which suffuses the tissues of a virtuous man and stamps them, as ...
— Rise and Fall of Cesar Birotteau • Honore de Balzac
... like Thee is my desire; Thy Voice finds echo in my soul. Suffering I crave! Thy words of fire Lift me above earth's mire, And sin's control. ...
— The Story of a Soul (L'Histoire d'une Ame): The Autobiography of St. Therese of Lisieux • Therese Martin (of Lisieux)
... Devachan. "Bad" is a relative term for us—as you were told more than once before—and the Law of Retribution is the only law that never errs. Hence all those who have not slipped down into the mire of unredeemable sin and bestiality go to the Devachan. They will have to pay for their sins, voluntary and involuntary, later on. Meanwhile they are rewarded; receive the effects of the ...
— Death—and After? • Annie Besant
... advance, they view a watery belt smoothly circling round the shore: the following troops plough their way through the thick mire with labour; the chief who leads the rear, filled with ...
— Tales from the Hindu Dramatists • R. N. Dutta
... but don't talk to me in that ribald tone, Mark; I have enough to bear as it is. Once for all I ask you, Is it true what my brother tells me, that you have returned to the mire like the sow in the Scriptures; that you are going to let your name be connected with—with a novel, after all ...
— The Giant's Robe • F. Anstey
... are their food and their clothes and their housing. It is the Way Things Are that the Buffalo People should make the trails and men should ride in them. They go up along the watersheds where the floods cannot mire, where the snow is lightest, and ...
— The Trail Book • Mary Austin et al
... cattle-sheds and stalls. In the midst of it was a quantity of manure, all wet and sloppy, and upon the very top of this heap stood that charming boy, Master Tom, with his shoes and stockings all covered with mire. ...
— The Fairchild Family • Mary Martha Sherwood
... got 'lected to de legislatur. Den he got a fine house, an' his ole wife warn't good 'nuff for him. Den dere war a young school-teacher, an' he begun cuttin' his eyes at her. But she war as deep in de mud as he war in de mire, an' he jis' gib up his ole wife and married her, a fusty thing. He war a mean ole hypocrit, an' I wouldn't sen' fer him to bury my cat. Robby, I'se down on dese kine ob preachers like ...
— Iola Leroy - Shadows Uplifted • Frances E.W. Harper
... mud and water; there poor Tommy tumbled about for some time, endeavouring to get out; but it was to no purpose, for his feet stuck in the mud, or slipped off from the bank; his fine waistcoat was dirtied all over, his white stockings covered with mire, his breeches filled with puddle water; and, to add to his distress, he first lost one shoe and then the other—his laced hat tumbled off from his head and was completely spoiled. In this distress he must probably have remained ...
— The History of Sandford and Merton • Thomas Day
... his entrance into Parliament, as the following curious political memorandum will prove:—"I like it no better for being from France—whence all ills come—altar of liberty, begrimed at once with blood and mire." ...
— Memoirs of the Life of the Rt. Hon. Richard Brinsley Sheridan V1 • Thomas Moore
... that she is in her wrong place; that it is she who ought to worship the man, and not the man her; and when she becomes properly conscious of her destiny, has not he a right to be conscious of his? If the grey hens will stand round in the mire clucking humble admiration, who can blame the old blackcock for dancing and drumming on the top of a moss hag, with outspread wings and flirting tail, glorious and self-glorifying. He is a splendid fellow; and he was made splendid for some purpose surely? Why did Nature give him ...
— Two Years Ago, Volume I • Charles Kingsley
... your love was pure and lawful I am sure your angel guardian smiled upon you; and if it was not, I cannot say you have nothing to answer for, and yet I think God may have said: 'She is a quadroone; all the rights of her womanhood trampled in the mire, sin made easy to her—almost compulsory,—charge it to account ...
— Madame Delphine • George W. Cable
... political danger was past, and people resumed their ordinary occupations, those who loved foreign literature returned to their old favourites—or, as the ultra-patriots called it, to their "wallowing in the mire"—simply because the native literature did not supply them with what they desired. "We are quite ready," they said to their upbraiders, "to admire your great works as soon as they appear, but in the ...
— Russia • Donald Mackenzie Wallace
... the bridegroom dares to judge the bride, Or he the bridegroom may appoint? Not he That is not of the house, but from the street Stain'd with the mire thereof. I had been so true To Henry and mine office that the King Would throne me in the great Archbishoprick: And I, that knew mine own infirmity, For the King's pleasure rather than God's cause Took it upon me—err'd thro' love of him. Now therefore God from ...
— Becket and other plays • Alfred Lord Tennyson
... through the cloud and storm. Then the vision strikes clarity into reason, memory and imagination. In these hours the soul scoffs at sordid things. As the flower climbs upward to escape from the slough, as the foot turns away from the mire, as the nostril avoids the filth, as the ear hates discord, so in these hours the soul scoffs at selfishness and sin. Oh, how beautiful seem purity and gentleness, and sympathy and truth! And these hours are ...
— A Man's Value to Society - Studies in Self Culture and Character • Newell Dwight Hillis
... reference to these that he collected. If the book were the one desired by him, no anxiety and toil, no payable price, was to be grudged for its acquisition. If the book were an inch out of his own line, it might be trampled in the mire for aught he cared, be it as rare or costly as ...
— The Book-Hunter - A New Edition, with a Memoir of the Author • John Hill Burton
... passage, to the hut of a gentleman, where, after a very liberal supper, when I was conducted to my chamber, I found an elegant bed of Indian cotton, spread with fine sheets. The accommodation was flattering; I undressed myself, and felt my feet in the mire. The bed stood upon the bare earth, which a long course of rain had softened ...
— A Journey to the Western Isles of Scotland • Samuel Johnson
... with mud from heel to head, Our gallant lord his true men led. Will Lund's earl halt his hasty flight, And try on land another fight? His banner yesterday was seen, The sand-bills and green trees between, Through moss and mire to the strand, In arrow flight, leaving ...
— Heimskringla - The Chronicle of the Kings of Norway • Snorri Sturluson
... which no amount of gall or satire could have imparted; and, in the brief silence that ensued, Salome's heart was suddenly smitten with a humiliating consciousness of her childish flippancy,—her utter inferiority to this man, who seemed to walk serenely in a starry plane far beyond the mire ...
— Vashti - or, Until Death Us Do Part • Augusta J. Evans Wilson
... to a mission-worker will fill his heart with enthusiasm and energy, and give him a host of jewels washed from the mire and shining like meteors. The same experience coming to a mechanic will fire him with a love for Jesus and a solicitude for souls that will make him pray and fast and weep and work for his fellow-laborers, for his neighbors, and for ...
— The Heart-Cry of Jesus • Byron J. Rees
... loves and honours in this narrow world—not his father, but the grey old father of his sweetheart; it tells him in an instant of a life of narrow means for the girl he loves; it hurls his own hopes in the mire, and makes the very thought of them a dishonour; it snatches from him the bright prospect of the career on which he has set his heart, the gate to which stood wide open but a moment earlier. And all this in the tick of a watch, in the space of time filled by ...
— VC — A Chronicle of Castle Barfield and of the Crimea • David Christie Murray
... of the mire and ran along the edge of the creek toward the roar of the battle. He knew now that he had passed around the flank of the Southern army and could approach the flank of his own. He ran fast, and then began to hear bullets again. But now they were coming ...
— The Guns of Shiloh • Joseph A. Altsheler
... speculative axe, or were left standing in mournful isolation to please a speculative architect; bits of wayside hedge still shivered in fog and wind, amid hoardings variegated with placards and scaffoldings black against the sky. The very earth had lost its wholesome odour; trampled into mire, fouled with builders' refuse and the noisome drift from adjacent streets, it sent forth, under the sooty rain, a smell of corruption, of all the town's uncleanliness. On this rising locality had been bestowed the title of "Park." Mrs. Morgan was decided in her choice of a dwelling here by the ...
— The House of Cobwebs and Other Stories • George Gissing
... The Rebel officers undertook to carry off the immense supplies of food which had been accumulated; but in the panic, barrels of meat and flour, sacks of coffee, hogsheads of sugar were rolled into the streets and trampled into the mire. Millions of dollars' worth were lost to the Confederacy. The farmers in the country feared that they would lose their slaves, and from all the section round they hurried the poor creatures towards the South, hoping to find a place ...
— My Days and Nights on the Battle-Field • Charles Carleton Coffin
... carnal side of Man's being,—we shall realise how easy it is for the secular life, once it has lost, through its divorce from religion, the tonic stimulus of a central aim, to sink, without directly intending to do so, into the mire of materialism,—a materialism of conduct ...
— What Is and What Might Be - A Study of Education in General and Elementary Education in Particular • Edmond Holmes
... foot. We went about two kilometres as bravely as possible, and then I stopped, quite exhausted. The mud which clung to our shoes made these very heavy. The effort we had to make at every step to get our feet out of the mire tired us out. I sat down on a milestone, and declared that I would not ...
— My Double Life - The Memoirs of Sarah Bernhardt • Sarah Bernhardt
... girl who carried her head so high. "How like a Kentucky Laughton. Thoroughbred stock, all!" He tossed the bag in his hand. "'Tis why they are where they are today." Then his keen old eyes softened. "And why they are what they are, today. Bless her tender heart to stoop to an old cattle man in the mire. As for this—I must see Irish Mike," and he ...
— Down the Mother Lode • Vivia Hemphill
... sex. "In a case of that sort, Susan, you can't put all the blame off on to the man. There's a woman in it, too, every time, and the one's as deep in the mud as the other is in the mire. And like as not," continued Mrs. West, a tell-tale tension in her voice, "he was a nice, clean-minded young man when she came along, making eyes at him, like a snake charming a sparrow. I'm not crazy about voting, ...
— Other People's Business - The Romantic Career of the Practical Miss Dale • Harriet L. Smith
... alive to the fact that they were ruined, and as they staggered and stumbled along, a sinking of heart unusual to their gay and cheerful natures seemed to have the effect of sinking their steps deeper in the soft mire ...
— The Settler and the Savage • R.M. Ballantyne
... but a dreaming dolt, Still walking like a ragged colt, And oft out of a bush doth bolt, Of purpose to deceive us; And leading us makes us to stray, Long winter's nights, out of the way; And when we stick in mire and clay, Hob doth ...
— The Sources and Analogues of 'A Midsummer-night's Dream' • Compiled by Frank Sidgwick
... Vandal and the Visigoth come here, The trampler under foot, and he whose eyes, Unblest, behold not where the glory lies; The wallower in mire, whose ...
— Bog-Myrtle and Peat - Tales Chiefly Of Galloway Gathered From The Years 1889 To 1895 • S.R. Crockett
... and up through the vanishing whiteness dawned the dark colours of the wintry landscape. For a day or two the soft wet snow lay mixed with water over all the road. After that came mire and dirt. But it was still so far off spring, that nobody cared to be reminded of it yet. So when, after the snow had vanished, a hard black frost set in, it was welcomed by the schoolboys at least, whatever the old people and the poor people, ...
— Alec Forbes of Howglen • George MacDonald
... everything was enough to banish all patience. Yesterday, on leaving Rosas, she believed herself to be withdrawn forever from the wretched Bohemian life she had so painfully endured. To-day, she felt herself sunk deeper in its mire. Too much mire and misery at last! However, if she ...
— His Excellency the Minister • Jules Claretie
... imprisonment, but from herself as well—from herself as Maitland knew her. The burglar out of the way, by ruse, evasion, or subterfuge she would be secreted from the prying of the police, smuggled out of the house and taken to a place of safety, given a new chance to redeem herself, to clean her hands of the mire of theft, to become worthy of the womanhood ...
— The Brass Bowl • Louis Joseph Vance
... poisonous emotions as grew within the wretched breast of Loony Honeycutt. And these golden trails, though inevitably they brought him trail fellows like Honeycutt, like Swen Brodie, were none the less paths in which a man's feet might tread without shame and in which the mire might be left to ...
— The Everlasting Whisper • Jackson Gregory
... retiring from service that he is made minister of finances,—and men call that Genius, just as they call the face of Mousqueton Beauty, and the mien of Claude Majesty. With the constellations of space they confound the stars of the abyss which are made in the soft mire of the puddle by the feet ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... shiver ran over David Lawrence. That part of courage allied to hope seemed crushed out of him as if by torture. Could he drag his daughter's name through the mire? for it would be that in any attempt to bring Eastman ...
— Hope Mills - or Between Friend and Sweetheart • Amanda M. Douglas
... preparation, the precipitation is only very slowly and incompletely effected—one part of the magnesia will be covered by the mire and the formed carbonate of magnesia in such a way, that it can no more dissolve in water and have any ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 286 - June 25, 1881 • Various
... sister's hair, and thrice he smote her side; "Ha' done, ha' done with your impudent fun—ha' done with your games!" she cried; "You have made mud-pies of a marvellous size—finger and face are black, You have trodden the Way of the Mire and Clay—now up and wash you, Jack! Or else, or ever we reach our home, there waiteth an angry dame— Well you know the weight of her blow—the supperless open shame! Wash, if you will, on yonder hill—wash, ...
— The Book of Humorous Verse • Various
... sigh, "you've pricked my bubble, Daddy, and made me ashamed. With all my professed scorn of theories, and my endeavors to avoid them, I walked straight into the theoretic mire and stuck there." ...
— Mary Louise in the Country • L. Frank Baum (AKA Edith Van Dyne)
... straddle which he had acquired; but there were men around him who meant every word of it. This was their religion. Treaties? They tangled the feet of Germany in her advance. Cut them with the sword. Little nations? They hinder the advance of Germany. Trample them in the mire under the German heel. The Russian Slav? He challenges the supremacy of Germany and Europe. Hurl your legions at him and massacre him. Britain? She is a constant menace to the predominancy of Germany in the world. Wrest the trident out of her ...
— Selected Speeches on British Foreign Policy 1738-1914 • Edgar Jones
... men are "clothed in soft raiment"! They shrink from the rough fustian, the labourer's cotton smock, the leather suit of George Fox. They are ultra-"finicky." They are afraid of the mire. They touch the sorrows of the world with a timid finger, not with the kindly, healing grasp ...
— My Daily Meditation for the Circling Year • John Henry Jowett
... Fixed in the mire they say, 'We sullen were In the sweet air, which by the sun is gladdened, Bearing within ourselves the ...
— Divine Comedy, Longfellow's Translation, Hell • Dante Alighieri
... leagues before me of a road mostly uphill, and now deep in mire. So soon as I was clear of the last street lamp, darkness received me—a darkness only pointed by the lights of occasional rustic farms, where the dogs howled with uplifted heads as I went by. The wind continued to decline: it had been but ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 20 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... record the perils of the journey:—"We set out at six o'clock in the morning (at Portsmouth) to go to Petworth, and did not get out of the coaches, save only when we were overturned or stuck fast in the mire, till we arrived at our journey's end. 'Twas hard service for the prince to sit fourteen hours in the coach that day, without eating anything, and passing through the worst ways that I ever saw in my life: we were thrown but once indeed in going, but both our coach which was leading, and his highness's ...
— Highways & Byways in Sussex • E.V. Lucas
... heavy imitations, which drove his genius to other pursuits, and which filled the public ear with such enormities of octo-syllabic ennui, that it hates poetry ever since. The Helicon of which he drank the gushing and pure stream, was stirred into mire by the slippers of school-girls, city-apprentices, and chambermaid-poetesses of every ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 62, No. 384, October 1847 • Various
... grass, and fancied I could detect two or three dark spots; but there had been heavy showers in the night, and as the mould had been thrown up here and there, discoloring the verdure, I could not determine whether these spots were blood-marks, as I feared, or the mere beating of rain and mire. But I did not trouble myself any further. Our persecutor was gone. That was all we cared to be assured of; and our next step was to escape from a place in which it was no longer safe for ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Vol. 3, July, 1851 • Various
... of a shepherd's house. "We had miserable up-putting," the diary continues, "and on both sides of the ferry much anxiety of mind. Our beds were clean straw, and but for the circumstance of the boat, I should have slept as soundly as ever I did after a walk through moss and mire of sixteen hours." ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 16 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... "The mire, the strife And vanities of this man's life, Who more than all that e'er have glowed With fancy's flame (and it was his In fullest warmth and radiance) showed What an impostor Genius is; How, with that ...
— Among My Books - First Series • James Russell Lowell
... may exist, he must have divined it. This labor of invention might be abridged; no one, either in heaven or on earth, will come to man's aid; no one will instruct him. Humanity, for hundreds of centuries, will devour its generations; it will exhaust itself in blood and mire, without the God whom it worships coming once to illuminate its reason and abridge its time of trial. Where is divine ...
— The Philosophy of Misery • Joseph-Pierre Proudhon
... loneliness went on eating and eating into me till I got so desperate in the end I was ready to snatch at any diversion." He paused a moment, and into his steady eyes there came a shadow that made them very human. "I went to hell," he said. "I waded up to the neck in mire. I gave myself up to it body and soul. I wallowed. And all the while it revolted me, though it was so sickeningly easy and attractive. I loathed myself, but I went on with it. It seemed anyhow one degree better than that ...
— The Bars of Iron • Ethel May Dell
... which was from above. Prisoners were let down into it with ropes, and left there to die of hunger. The bottom of it was wet and miry, and the prophet, when let down into its gloomy depths, sank into the deep mire. Here he would soon have died of hunger and misery; but the king, feeling some misgivings in regard to what he had done, lest it might really be a true prophet of God that he had thus delivered into the hands of his ...
— Cyrus the Great - Makers of History • Jacob Abbott
... suddenly open to admit two men, or rather three, for between them they dragged one, a short, squat fellow in riding boots and horseman's coat, but all so torn and bedraggled, so foul of blood and mire, as to seem scarce human. His hat was gone and his long, rain-soaked hair clung in black tangles about his bruised face and as he stood, swaying in his bonds, I thought him the very figure ...
— Peregrine's Progress • Jeffery Farnol
... feel the fatigues of their long-continued journey. They had set out at an early hour, and had halted only at noon. The traveling was very difficult at times, often leading through tangled underwood and swamps, where a person's weight bore him deep into the mire; and now and then some sluggish, poisonous serpent crawled from beneath their feet, or hissed at them ...
— The Ranger - or The Fugitives of the Border • Edward S. Ellis
... brave fellow! he keeps his tides well. Those healths will make thee and thy state look ill, Timon. Here's that which is too weak to be a sinner, Honest water, which ne'er left man i' the mire: This and my food are equals; there's no odds: Feasts are too proud to give thanks to the gods. Immortal gods, I crave no pelf; I pray for no man but myself. Grant I may never prove so fond To trust man on his oath or bond; Or a harlot for her weeping; Or a dog that seems a-sleeping; Or a ...
— The Life of Timon of Athens • William Shakespeare [Craig edition]
... Rospigliosis, not combine to prevent this monstrosity? Nobility is like love, those who buy those sacred things degrade them in paying for them, and those to whom they are given are no better than mire.... Princess d'Ardea! That creature! Ah, what a disgrace!... But we must remember our engagement relative to that brave young Chapron. The boy pleases me; first, because very probably he is going to fight for some one else and out of a devotion which I can not very well understand! ...
— Cosmopolis, Complete • Paul Bourget
... how deep Herzog had led him in the mire. His moral sense had disappeared, but he had a vague instinct of the danger he had incurred. The financier's last words came to his mind: "Confess all to your wife; she can get you out of this difficulty!" He understood the meaning ...
— Serge Panine, Complete • Georges Ohnet
... different from that of an average nineteenth-century Englishman as that of a West African negro is now, in these respects. The modern world is slowly, but surely, shaking off these and other monstrous survivals of savage delusions; and, whatever happens, it will not return to that wallowing in the mire. Until the contrary is proved, I venture to doubt whether, at this present moment, any Protestant theologian, who has a reputation to lose, will say that he believes ...
— Lectures and Essays • Thomas Henry Huxley
... opinion that, while they might not take quite so much time to christen as to marry, there was still no need to rush off with the priest's vestments out of order and his own fetlocks weighted with mire. The two had many friendly contests on these occasions, but Toby's will was the stronger, and his temper was not quite so mild; and as it is always the less amiable who wins, it was commonly he who ...
— Round Anvil Rock - A Romance • Nancy Huston Banks
... me. Thou hast also made mine enemies turn their backs unto me, That I might cut off them that hate me. They looked, but there was none to save; Even unto the LORD, but he answered them not. Then did I beat them small as the dust of the earth, I did stamp them as the mire of the streets, and did spread them abroad. Thou also hast delivered me from the strivings of my people; Thou hast kept me to be the head of the nations: A people whom I have not known shall serve me. The strangers shall submit themselves unto me: As soon as they hear of ...
— Select Masterpieces of Biblical Literature • Various
... their track. Even Shakspeare, with all his sublimity, suffers us to fall very low now and then. Again, Lope De Vega, Moliere, Regnard, Goldoni worry us with frequent trifling. Holberg drags us down into the mire. Schlegel, a German poet, among the most remarkable for intellectual talent, with genius to raise him to a place among poets of the first order; Gellert, a truly simple poet, Rabener, and Lessing himself, if I am warranted to introduce his name in this category—this highly-cultivated ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... 'righteousness' as a standard of conduct is lower than 'morality'; but that, having fallen, he learned to abhor his sin, and with deepened trust in God's mercy, and many tears, struggled out of the mire, and with unconquered resolve and strength drawn from a divine source, sought still to press towards the mark. It is not the attainment of purity, not the absence of sin, but the presence and operation, though it be partial, of an energy which is at war ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... being once more in possession of the holy walls, took down the great cross from the Church of the Sepulchre, and soiled it with the mire of the streets. They also melted the bells which had summoned the Christians to devotion, and at the same time purified the Mosque of Omar by a copious sprinkling of rose-water. Ascalon, Laodicea, Gabala, ...
— Palestine or the Holy Land - From the Earliest Period to the Present Time • Michael Russell
... years of peace,—such peace as the wicked make for themselves—A troubled sea, casting up mire and dirt. Wicked women, wicked counts (mayors of the palace, one may call them) like Aetius and Boniface, the real rulers of ...
— The Roman and the Teuton - A Series of Lectures delivered before the University of Cambridge • Charles Kingsley
... and roofs in the desperate effort to escape their doom; of hundreds of houses crashing down the surging river, carrying men, women and children beyond the hope of rescue; of a night of horrors, multitudes dying amid the awful terrors of flood and fire, plunged under the wild torrent, buried in mire, or consumed in devouring flames; of helpless creatures rending the air with pitiful screams crying aloud in their agony, imploring help with outstretched hands, and finally sinking with no one to ...
— The Johnstown Horror • James Herbert Walker
... made of Hermes pipe, To force an hundred watchfull eyes to sleepe: And him Epeus hauing made the horse, With sacrificing wreathes vpon his head, Vlysses sent to our vnhappie towne: Who groueling in the mire of Zanthus bankes, His hands bound at his back, and both his eyes Turnd vp to heauen as one resolu'd to dye, Our Phrigian shepherd haled within the gates, And brought vnto the Court of Priamus: To ...
— The Tragedy of Dido Queene of Carthage • Christopher Marlowe
... mastodons and trilobites are here—and with about as much chance of reappearing as mastodons as humanity has of reproducing those antique horrors. The fragments of witch-madness and star-faith may be still raked in tolerably perfect lumps out of the mire or chaff of mankind; but I do not think, young lady, that you will ever be accused of riding on a broom, though you unquestionably had an ancestress, somewhere before or after Hengist, who enjoyed the reputation of understanding ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol I, Issue I, January 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... of the last day was over, and the dawn which he had bound himself in honor not to see found him sitting alone in his room, where he had sat all night, horror fell upon him at what he had done. Now that its mire was upon him he saw by how foul, by how dastardly ...
— Red Pottage • Mary Cholmondeley
... Kielland urged the administrator up the ladder and sighed with relief as the hatch clanged shut. The jets bloomed and sprayed boiling mud far and wide as the landing craft lifted soggily out of the mire and roared ...
— The Native Soil • Alan Edward Nourse
... every fowl Hides beak and eyes in breast, the owl Only awake to hoot."—But clover Is beaten down now, and birds hover, Peering for shelter round; no blade Of grass stands sharp and tall; men wade Thro' mire with frequent plashing sting Of rain upon their faces. Sing, Then, Mary, to me thro' the dark: But kiss me first: my hand shall mark Time, pressing yours the ...
— The Germ - Thoughts towards Nature in Poetry, Literature and Art • Various |
