"Oozy" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... of Buckwheat and Smart-weed; and especially the Pond Lilies, (Nymphoea and Nuphar.) The latter grow in water four or five feet deep, their leaves and long stems are thick and fleshy, and their roots, which fill the oozy mud, are often several inches in diameter. Their decaying leaves and stems, and their huge roots, living or dead, accumulate below and gradually raise the bed of the pond. Their living foliage which often covers the water almost completely for acres, becomes a shelter ...
— Peat and its Uses as Fertilizer and Fuel • Samuel William Johnson
... seized one of the ladders which were fortunately carried with the force in case they should be wanted for scaling, and holding this out across the oozy patch, he let the General support himself by it for a moment. Then he laid the ladder flat, and crept along it till he reached the still sinking man: he caught him by the arm at once, and started to haul him out. Anstey's strength was well known in the regiment, and perhaps he was the only man ...
— Chatterbox, 1906 • Various
... of old the sons of Morning sung,{31} While the Creator great His constellation set, And the well-ballanc't world on hinges{32} hung, And cast the dark foundations deep, And bid the weltring{33} waves their oozy ...
— Six Centuries of English Poetry - Tennyson to Chaucer • James Baldwin
... mingling each its sweetness with the good, rank smell of mud below. Here were the treasures of the water-course, close hidden, or blowing in the light of day. The pale, golden-hearted arrow-head neighbored the homespun pickerel-weed, and—oh, mysterious glory from an oozy bed!—luscious, sun-golden cow-lilies rose sturdily triumphant, dripping with color, glowing in sheen. The button-bush hung out her balls, and white alder painted the air with faint perfume; willow-herb built ...
— Meadow Grass - Tales of New England Life • Alice Brown
... road, as Thornton had said, was little more indeed than a logging trail through the heart of the woods; and now, deeper in, with increasing frequency, the tires slipped and skidded on damp, moist earth that at times approached very nearly to being oozy mud. ...
— The Miracle Man • Frank L. Packard
... even in unhappiness, called aloud for solitude. He must struggle alone through his deep waters: waters of the soul, wherein float neither life-preserver nor raft, rope or even light; neither coral reef nor oozy grave, for such as he. Darkness and struggle alike lasted till the end of his strength; but, with exhaustion and the coming of dawn, came at last one mighty breaker, by which Ivan was thrown high upon the ...
— The Genius • Margaret Horton Potter
... the lake. Gudrun had waded out to a gravelly shoal, and was seated like a Buddhist, staring fixedly at the water-plants that rose succulent from the mud of the low shores. What she could see was mud, soft, oozy, watery mud, and from its festering chill, water-plants rose up, thick and cool and fleshy, very straight and turgid, thrusting out their leaves at right angles, and having dark lurid colours, dark green and blotches of black-purple and bronze. But she could feel ...
— Women in Love • D. H. Lawrence
... hold was passed, the oozy road That separates the marsh, the grove sublime (5) Where reigns the Scythian goddess, and the path By which men bear the fasces to the feast On Alba's summit. From the height afar — Gazing in awe upon the walls of Rome His native city, ...
— Pharsalia; Dramatic Episodes of the Civil Wars • Lucan
... not more than six feet, and the average flow is said not to amount to more than two feet six inches—but even this flux is sufficient to produce large tracts of sea which the reflux converts into square miles of oozy sand. ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 4 • Various
... the night there was a cry. Ray had found the water falling from an oozy bank, and there we dozed fitfully until we were startled ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... basket, now an unhung and travelling basket, heavy, iron-ribbed, anciently mossy, oozy of slime, fell with neat exactitude upon the bald, bare cranium of Mr. Alastair Kenneth MacIlwraith, head gardener, and dour, ...
— Snake and Sword - A Novel • Percival Christopher Wren
... escaped. It was a tempest that wrecked all the vessels on the coast, and for twelve hours Smith was drifting about in his open boat, in momentary expectation of sinking, until he was cast upon the oozy isle of "Charowne," where the fowlers picked him up half dead with water, cold, and hunger, and he got to Rochelle, where he made complaint to the Judge of Admiralty. Here he learned that the rich prize had been wrecked in the storm and the captain and half ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... fossiliferous. In some the fresh-water character of the deposit is well marked: Cyprides are so exceedingly numerous in some of the bands, that they impart to the stone an Oolitic appearance; while others of a dark-colored limestone we see strewed over, like the oozy bottom of a modern lake, with specimens of what seem Paludina, Cyclas, and Planorbus. Some of the other shells are more equivocal: a Mytilus or Modiola, which abounds in some of the bands, may have been either a sea or a fresh-water shell; and ...
— The Cruise of the Betsey • Hugh Miller
... family and connexions, except for the loss of the stipend, it was a very gentle dispensation, for he had been long a heavy handful, having been for years but, as it were, a breathing lump of mortality, groosy, and oozy, and doozy, his faculties being shut up and locked in ...
— The Provost • John Galt
... bottom on which I now lay was of soft, oozy silt; about me were rocks, slippery and covered with a coating of grey-green slime. Spots in the slime moved. I could hear it, or rather feel it—a sort of bubbling quake, mere beginnings of the life impulse. The tops and sides ...
— Child and Country - A Book of the Younger Generation • Will Levington Comfort
... tempests cease, And, hush'd in peace, The flatten'd surges smoothly spread, Deep silence keep, And seem to sleep Recumbent on their oozy bed; ...
— The Poetical Works of Edward Young, Volume 2 • Edward Young
... may serve them, as it were, for sails. They have the art to turn those feathers against the wind, and, in a manner, to tack, as ships do when the wind does not serve. Water-fowls, such as ducks, have at their feet large skins that stretch, somewhat like rackets, to keep them from sinking on the oozy and miry ...
— The Existence of God • Francois de Salignac de La Mothe- Fenelon
... cry of alarm, and with good reason. His horse had struck a sink-hole, as they are called on the plains, and gone down to his knees. He made such a plunge that poor Hans was thrown over his head, to land full length in an oozy, sticky bog. ...
— The Rover Boys on the Plains - The Mystery of Red Rock Ranch • Arthur Winfield
... upon the sea, which was bounded only by the distant horizon. The sun was slowly sinking into the green of the western wilderness. A huge saurian dragged his mail-clad body out of the water, and settled quietly in his oozy bed. The sea glimmered in the long, horizontal rays of light which clothed it in a sheen of silver and of gold. The wild sea-gulls winnowed the air with their wings, as they settled in little flocks upon the smooth water, as though to enjoy the bath of soft sunlight that ...
— Four Months in a Sneak-Box • Nathaniel H. Bishop
... and not run like the water that covered it at high tide. Even the tall rushes wore an unsteady look; and the few oysters upon its surface evidently required all their balancing powers to lie upon their flat sides and avoid sinking edgewise into the oozy depths. In we sank, over ankles, at the first step, and deeper and deeper till we took a second; for our only safety lay in pushing down the rushes with the inside of one foot and treading upon them, till the other could be ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 106, August, 1866 • Various
... came in a sheet of flame,[B] And the towering sails in its folds were wound. Vain, vain was the shout, that in battle rout, Had rung as a knell in the ear of the foe, For the bursting deck was heaved from the wreck, And the sky was bathed in the awful glow! The ocean shook to its oozy bed, As the swelling sound to the canopy went, And the splintered fires like meteors shed Their light o'er the tossing element. A moment they gleamed, then sank in the foam, And darkness swept over the gorgeous ...
— Poems • Sam G. Goodrich
... night's aerial sea with no wind blust'rous, A ribbed tract of cloudy malachite Curve a shored crescent wide; And on its slope marge shelving to the night The stranded moon lay quivering like a lustrous Medusa newly washed up from the tide, Lay in an oozy pool of its ...
— Sister Songs • Francis Thompson
... and darken all the coasts; Boats follow boats along the shouting tides, 450 And spears and javelins pierce his blubbery sides; Now the bold Sailor, raised on pointed toe, Whirls the wing'd harpoon on the slimy foe; Quick sinks the monster in his oozy bed, The blood-stain'd surges circling o'er his head, 455 Steers to the frozen pole his wonted track, And bears the iron tempest ...
— The Botanic Garden - A Poem in Two Parts. Part 1: The Economy of Vegetation • Erasmus Darwin
... whole lot of trouble. Perhaps this might prove to be a valuable lesson to the boy. He could not help but see how smartly the others kept themselves from slipping off the narrow ridge of ground by planting their staves against some convenient stump, or the butt of a tree, anywhere but in the oozy mud. ...
— Boy Scouts on a Long Hike - Or, To the Rescue in the Black Water Swamps • Archibald Lee Fletcher
... soft, oozy blackness. One could tell from the way that Arcot's mind handled it that it was soft. It seemed cold, terribly ...
— Invaders from the Infinite • John Wood Campbell
... muddy banks; and nearer still, lonely and unprosperous by the bleak water-side, lay the lost little port of Slaughden, with its forlorn wharfs and warehouses of decaying wood, and its few scattered coasting-vessels deserted on the oozy river-shore. No fall of waves was heard on the beach, no trickling of waters bubbled audibly from the idle stream. Now and then the cry of a sea-bird rose from the region of the marsh; and at intervals, from farmhouses far in the inland waste, the faint winding ...
— No Name • Wilkie Collins
... and living. There is, unfortunately, not merely such breezy work-a-dayness as we have been talking of, but something very different indeed beyond the walls of our private garden. There are black, oozy factory yards and mangy grass-plots heaped with brickbat and refuse; and miles of iron railing, and acres of gaunt and genteel streets not veiled enough in fog; a metaphorical beyond the garden walls, in which a certain number of us graduate for the ownership of sooty shrubberies and clammy ...
— Hortus Vitae - Essays on the Gardening of Life • Violet Paget, AKA Vernon Lee
... there are in those same tubes of oozy paint horrific visions like Franz Stuck's "War," or portraits of plutocrats by Bonnat, and as there are in ink-bottles sad potencies of tailors' bills and scathing reviews of this very book, so it is possible under the name of music to write fugues and five-finger exercises, ...
— The Love Affairs of Great Musicians, Volume 2 • Rupert Hughes
... the road we wandered in among big trees and down slopes ankle deep with rustling leaves towards Chingford again. Here was pleasanter walking than the thawing clay, but now and then one felt the threat of an infinite oozy softness beneath the stiff frozen leaves. Once again while we were here the drifting haze of the sky became thinner, and the smooth green-grey beech stems and rugged oak trunks were brightly illuminated. But only for a moment, and thereafter the sky became not simply unsympathetic but ominous. ...
— Certain Personal Matters • H. G. Wells
... beneath the boat,—to rustle in through the long harsh grass that leads up some tranquil creek,—to take shelter from the sunbeams under one of the thousand-footed bridges, and look down its interminable colonnades, crusted with green and oozy growths, studded with minute barnacles, and belted with rings of dark muscles, while overhead, streams and thunders that other river, whose every wave is a human soul flowing to eternity as the river below flows to the ocean,—lying there moored unseen, in loneliness so profound ...
— Choice Specimens of American Literature, And Literary Reader - Being Selections from the Chief American Writers • Benj. N. Martin
... of sand Where the water bounds the elfin land, Thou shalt watch the oozy brine Till the sturgeon leaps in the bright moonshine, Then dart the glistening arch below, And catch a drop from his silver bow. The water-sprites will wield their arms And dash around, with roar and rave, And vain are the woodland spirits' charms, ...
— The Culprit Fay - and Other Poems • Joseph Rodman Drake
... alternation was kept up with great spirit, till Boreas, interfering in the shape of a stiffish "Nor'- wester," drifted the bone (and flesh) of contention ashore on the Shurland domain, where it lay in all the majesty of mud. It was soon discovered by the retainers, and dragged from its oozy bed, grinning worse than ever. Tidings of the godsend were of course carried instantly to the castle; for the Baron was a very great man; and if a dun cow had flown across his property unannounced by the warder, the Baron would have pecked him, the said warder, ...
— Half-Hours with Great Story-Tellers • Various
... at least two miles from the camp when they heard noises that indicated the passage of a small body of the Indians, and as they stepped behind trees to conceal themselves Shif'less Sol's foot suddenly sank with a bubbling sound into an oozy spot. In an instant, all the Indians stopped. Henry and his comrade heard rustling sounds for a moment, and then there was complete silence. The two knew that the warriors had taken to cover, and that probably they would not escape ...
— The Keepers of the Trail - A Story of the Great Woods • Joseph A. Altsheler
... in places where the tide ran fast; if we were trying for pollack, it was along close by the stones of the rocky shore; if for conger, in deep dark holes; and if for flat-fish, right out in deep water, where the bottom was all soft oozy sand. ...
— Devon Boys - A Tale of the North Shore • George Manville Fenn
... clinked as the iron palls caught the strain of the cable, the anchor was wrenched from its oozy bed, the vessel's head fell off, and, gathering way, she moved quietly down the ...
— Captain Brand of the "Centipede" • H. A. (Henry Augustus) Wise
... the branches often meeting before our faces, so that we had to raise our hands to part them. It rained as it always does here. While we young people were venturing on a short canter, my saddle turned completely, and I landed on my feet in an oozy place, fortunately unhurt. A few miles short of the half-way house,—miles are not measured by feelings there,—my horse gave out. For some time he had walked lame in all his feet, and at last refused to go at all. One of the young gentlemen lent me his horse, and led mine. We reached ...
— Scenes in the Hawaiian Islands and California • Mary Evarts Anderson
... palm in Shekel's Disease,— On a long long v'yage, as busy as bees, Never stopping for a moment to take our ease, Never changing our course, except when the breeze Took to blowing to windward,—we had slipped by degrees Down the oozy slopes of the Hebrides, And passed through the locks of the Florida Keys, Which in getting through was a rather tight squeeze, But danger is nothing to men like these, When suddenly the lookout, a Portuguese Who had better been below a-shelling peas, Shrieked out, 'They ...
— The Old Tobacco Shop - A True Account of What Befell a Little Boy in Search of Adventure • William Bowen
... skies, touched with faintest gleams of colour, like a dove's wing, blue plains and heights, over the nearer woodland; everywhere fallen rotting leaf and oozy water-channel; everything, tint and form, restrained, austere, delicate; nature asleep and breathing gently in the cool airs; a ...
— The Altar Fire • Arthur Christopher Benson
... the Dismal Swamp The Search-Light sends its ray! What is that hideous oozy tramp? What creatures crawling 'midst jungle damp Scuttle ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 101, September 5, 1891 • Various
... its existence; and that during that time the Editor stated many facts, from his own observation, connected with the refusal of sites, and other matters of a similar character. He saw congregations worshipping on bare hill-sides in the Highlands of Sutherland, and on an oozy sea-beach on the coast of Lochiel; he sailed in the Free Church yacht the Betsey, and worshipped among the islanders of Eigg and of Skye. Nor did he shrink from very minutely describing what he had witnessed on these occasions, nor yet ...
— Leading Articles on Various Subjects • Hugh Miller
... scouts, Wells, McClellan, and Miller, were ranging the woods to bring in some Indians for Wayne to question. They came upon a party of three Indians; Wells shot one, and Miller another, while McClellan, who was very swift of foot, ran down the third. Pursuer and pursued both stuck in the oozy bottom of a stream, and when Wells and Miller came up, they were threatening each other with knife and tomahawk. Miller had been taken captive when a child with one of his brothers; he had escaped, but this brother had remained with the savages, and somehow Miller felt ...
— Stories Of Ohio - 1897 • William Dean Howells
... words were intended, especially, for use in despatching tomatoes and they never failed to make good. There, upon the bulletin board was a vivid area which looked like the midday sun. From it trickled an oozy mass, down over the list of uncalled for letters, straight through the prize awards of yesterday, obliterating the Council Call, and bathing the list of new arrivals in soft and pulpy red. The "hike for to-morrow," as shown, was through ...
— Tom Slade's Double Dare • Percy Keese Fitzhugh
... third time burns, And the true Royal Oak and Royal James, Allied in fate, increase with theirs her flames. Of all our navy none shall now survive, But that the ships themselves were taught to dive, And the kind river in its creek them hides. Freighting their pierced keels with oozy tides." ...
— Andrew Marvell • Augustine Birrell
... long as Thames in streams majestic flows, Or Naiads in their oozy beds repose While Phoebus reigns above the starry train While bright Aurora purples o'er the main, So long, great Sir, the muse thy praise shall sing, So long thy praise shal' make Parnassus ring: Then grant, ...
— Religious and Moral Poems • Phillis Wheatley
... but I've always held on. You see, I was the first man there, honey, and there are things you see, that you can't ever make anybody else understand. She loved him Elnora, she just made an idol of him. There was that oozy green hole, with the thick scum broke, and two or three big bubbles slowly rising that were the breath of his body. There she was in spasms of agony, and beside her the great heavy log she'd tried to throw him. I ...
— A Girl Of The Limberlost • Gene Stratton Porter
... cup brimming with milky foam, A fair cloth wrought with cunning imagery Of hounds in chase, a waxen honey-comb Dripping with oozy gold which scarce the bee Had ceased from building, a black skin of oil Meet for the wrestlers, a great boar ...
— Poems • Oscar Wilde
... squeeze With hand and dry a sponge with water soaked. Next, all which forth we squeeze is spread about Along the pores and intertwined paths Of the loose-textured tongue. And so, when smooth The bodies of the oozy flavour, then Delightfully they touch, delightfully They treat all spots, around the wet and trickling Enclosures of the tongue. And contrariwise, They sting and pain the sense with their assault, According as with roughness they're supplied. Next, only ...
— Of The Nature of Things • [Titus Lucretius Carus] Lucretius
... sunny, wind-swept waters winding hither and thither toward the sea, and sometimes miles of deep forest swamp through which the railroad went by broad, frowzy, treeless clearings flanked with impassable oozy ditches; but ...
— Bonaventure - A Prose Pastoral of Acadian Louisiana • George Washington Cable
... I knew I was sneakin' out, And the oozy corpses was all about, And I felt so scared I wanted to shout, And me skin fair prickled wiv fear; And I sez: 'You coward! You 'ad no right To take on the job of a man this night,' Yet still I kept creepin' till ('orrid sight!) The trench ...
— Rhymes of a Red Cross Man • Robert W. Service
... men in once gaudy uniforms, now flattened and bruised in warm, oozy death, were piled in a mass where but a moment before the wondering vanguard of troopers had clustered. For many rods in all directions stunned creatures were struggling to their feet after the stupendous shock that had ...
— Truxton King - A Story of Graustark • George Barr McCutcheon
... afternoon they fought their way toward the trees. It was growing dark when they had won through. The ground beyond was lower than the saw-grass land and seemed to be composed of oozy slime. The growth that covered it was tangled and twisted as if thrown together by a mad burst of storms. Dark, sinister and threatening the interior loomed before them; and without needing to consult their maps they spoke as one: "The ...
— The Plunderer • Henry Oyen
... anyone. A sense of importance, of something tremendous to do, animated the company like wine, made the packs and the belts seem less heavy, made their necks and shoulders less stiff from struggling with the weight of the packs, made the ninety-six legs tramp jauntily in spite of the oozy mud ...
— Three Soldiers • John Dos Passos
... monuments, adorned its two streets, each stump and log, on account of the moist climate, moss-grown and tufted with grass and bushes, but muddy on the sides below the limit of the bog-line. The ground in general was an oozy, mossy bog on a foundation of jagged rocks, full of concealed pit-holes. These picturesque rock, bog, and stump obstructions, however, were not so very much in the way, for there were no wagons or carriages there. There was not a horse on the island. The domestic animals were ...
— Travels in Alaska • John Muir
... elemental sparks, and shooting with fiery speed in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, from hemisphere to hemisphere, far down among the uncouth monsters that wallow in the nether seas, along the wreck-paved floor, thorough the oozy dungeons of the rayless deep; the last intelligence of the crops, whose dancing tassels will in a few months be coquetting with the west wind on those boundless prairies, flashing along the slimy decks of old sunken galleons, ...
— Autobiography of Seventy Years, Vol. 1-2 • George Hoar
... green moss and tufted with giant fennel; and a shutter swinging loose on its hinge gave a glimpse of inner dimness. Odo guessed at once that this was the hunting lodge where Cerveno had found his death; and as he stood looking out across the oozy secrets of the marsh, the fever seemed to hang on his steps. He turned away with a shiver; but whether it were the sullen aspect of the house, or the close way in which the wood embraced it, the place suddenly ...
— The Valley of Decision • Edith Wharton
... (as 'tis said) Before was never made But when of old the sons of morning sung, While the Creator great His constellations set And the well-balanced world on hinges hung; And cast the dark foundations deep, And bid the weltering waves their oozy ...
— The Golden Treasury - Of the Best Songs and Lyrical Poems in the English Language • Various
... followed me or whether we had chosen the same vicinity by chance, I do not know; but at any rate as I came out from the underbrush on the edge of a low, swampy place, I almost stepped on the man. He was stretched face downward on the black, oozy soil with his arm buried in a hole at the foot ...
— The Four Pools Mystery • Jean Webster
... my head, which I ducked below the trench parapet. Splodge! went the officer in front of me, with a yell of dismay. The water was well above his top-boots. Splosh! went another man ahead, recovering from a side-slip in the oozy mud and clinging desperately to some bunches of yarrow growing up the side of the trench. Squelch! went a young gentleman whose puttees and breeches had lost their glory and were but swabs about his ...
— Now It Can Be Told • Philip Gibbs
... with pearls of great size. The treasures of the deep were revealed to him, and he saw that the riches on land were as nothing compared with them. He saw the coral insects at their work of building, and of entrancing beauty growing in the oozy bed of the ocean. ...
— Jewish Fairy Tales and Legends • Gertrude Landa
... hidden under inches of slush, the gutters were miniature brooks, and the ground seemed to be completely covered by a thick coating of red, oozy mud. ...
— Polly's Senior Year at Boarding School • Dorothy Whitehill
... desire— Thou sea, who wast to me a prophet deep Through all thy restless waves, and wasting shores, Of silent labour, and eternal change; First teacher of the dense immensity Of ever-stirring life, in thy strange forms Of fish, and shell, and worm, and oozy weed: To me alike thy frenzy and thy sleep Have been a deep and ...
— Andromeda and Other Poems • Charles Kingsley
... favorite Indian pipe; while Delorier was squatted over a hot bed of coals, shading his eyes with one hand, and holding a little stick in the other, with which he regulated the hissing contents of the frying-pan. The horses were turned to feed among the scattered bushes of a low oozy meadow. A drowzy springlike sultriness pervaded the air, and the voices of ten thousand young frogs and insects, just awakened into life, rose in varied chorus from the creek ...
— The Oregon Trail • Francis Parkman, Jr.
... and then the other, he ducked his head and began biting savagely at the leathern wrapping on his leg. But the uselessness of this soon appearing to him, he gave it up, and sought to ease his despair by diving and guttering with his bill among the roots of the oozy bottom. In this absorbing occupation he so far forgot his miseries that all at once he tried to lift himself on the water, flap his wings, and sound his trumpet-call. One wing did give a frantic flap. The other surged fiercely ...
— The Watchers of the Trails - A Book of Animal Life • Charles G. D. Roberts
... sea-chest slid a trifle and this was enough to push the gunwale clear under. The boat filled and capsized, what with the weight of the chest and the pressure of the canoe's fore part. Down to the oozy bed sank ...
— Blackbeard: Buccaneer • Ralph D. Paine
... were bare And black along the turbid brook; When catkined willows blurred and shook Great tawny tangles in the air; In bottomlands, the first thaw makes An oozy bog, beneath the trees, Prophetic of the spring that ...
— Poems • Madison Cawein
... them Lawrenceville boys, ain't you?" she said, eyeing with curiosity the oozy ruffle ...
— Skippy Bedelle - His Sentimental Progress From the Urchin to the Complete - Man of the World • Owen Johnson
... wild Indian, was so heedless and reckless as to let go for a moment his one-handed hold on the great cabled tackles suspending the head; or whether the place where he stood was so treacherous and oozy; or whether the Evil One himself would have it to fall out so, without stating his particular reasons; how it was exactly, there is no telling now; but, on a sudden, as the eightieth or ninetieth bucket came suckingly up —my God! poor ...
— Moby-Dick • Melville
... the valley was autumn, melancholy and sinister, as you find her only in such low-lying immemorial drifting places of leaves, and oozy sinks of dank water. For the moors autumn is the spring come back in purple, and in golden woods and many another place where the year dies happily, she smiles like a widow so young and fair that one thinks rather of life than ...
— The Worshipper of the Image • Richard Le Gallienne
... he was the high-priest of American politics; he was charged with the meaning of the mysteries, the clue to political hieroglyphics. Through him she hoped to sound the depths of statesmanship and to bring up from its oozy bed that pearl of which she was in search; the mysterious gem which must lie hidden somewhere in politics. She wanted to understand this man; to turn him inside out; to experiment on him and use him as young physiologists use frogs and kittens. If there was good or bad in him, ...
— Democracy An American Novel • Henry Adams
... land, the mermen who swim round them, wondering what those lights may mean. I made him walk with me on the land under the sea, where go the divers through the wrecks, and ascend the rocky mountains and penetrate the weedy valleys, and glide across the slippery, oozy plains. In fine, Uniacke, I drowned little Jack—I drowned him in the sea, I drowned him in ...
— Tongues of Conscience • Robert Smythe Hichens
... vines and wet with trickling rivulets from the numerous springs that oozed and gushed from the black, glistening rocks. This canyon was an eerie place of which ghostly tales were told from the old Blackfeet times. And to this day no Blackfoot will dare to pass through this black-walled, oozy, glistening canyon after the moon has passed the western lip. But in the warm light of broad day the canyon was a good enough place; cool and sweet, and I lingered through, waiting for the Old Timer, who failed to appear ...
— The Sky Pilot • Ralph Connor
... drooping head, And tricks his beams, and with new-spangled ore Flames in the forehead of the morning sky: So Lycidas sunk low, but mounted high, Through the dear might of him that walked the waves, Where other groves and other streams along, With nectar pure his oozy locks he laves, And hears the unexpressive nuptial song, In the blest kingdoms meek of joy and love. There entertain him all the saints above, In solemn troops, and sweet societies, That sing, and singing in their glory move, And wipe the tears ...
— Verses and Translations • C. S. C.
... deep in oozy mud as she scrambled on board, but that was a trifle compared with the relief of being ferried over the river. Her knight-errant was neither young nor handsome, being, indeed, rather bald and stout, but no orthodox interesting ...
— A Popular Schoolgirl • Angela Brazil
... the part of the harbor where the schooner had been anchored when Duff, heading the boat for the shore, plunged them into the leafy recesses that overhung the water. Having once penetrated this outer curtain, Ralph saw they were close to a rude landing made of logs sunk endways into the oozy bottom, and floored with large canes ...
— Ralph Granger's Fortunes • William Perry Brown
... unfortunate, because I seldom came forth from these trials unscathed. I was always tearing my dresses in clambering over fences, or bumping my head in creeping under. Where others cleared brooks with a light spring, I landed in the middle. I was sure to pick out spongy, oozy, slippery grass to stand upon, in marshy land, or was yet more likely to slump through over shoes in black mud. Banks always caved in beneath my feet, unexpectedly. Brambles seemed to enter into a conspiracy to lay violent hands on me, and hidden boughs lay in wait to trip me ...
— Autumn Leaves - Original Pieces in Prose and Verse • Various
... and little Dot trudging over the oozy ground, followed the Bittern's directions and found the cave, which proved a very snug retreat. Here they lay down together, full of happiness at their escape, and being worn out with fatigue and excitement, they ...
— Dot and the Kangaroo • Ethel C. Pedley
... everything is quite different when you walk into a tunnel on your own feet, and tread on shifting, sliding stones and gravel on a path that curves downwards from the shining metals to the wall. Then you see slimy, oozy trickles of water running down the inside of the tunnel, and you notice that the bricks are not red or brown, as they are at the tunnel's mouth, but dull, sticky, sickly green. Your voice, when you speak, is quite changed from what it was out ...
— The Railway Children • E. Nesbit
... the surface in glances of fire, like evil spirits watching to seize them as their prey. At length the screaming and shrieking of the birds, and clang of their the cattle, ceased; and the startled fish oozy caverns at the bottom of the sea, disappeared; and all was again black and undistinguishable, the deathlike silence being only broken by the hoarse murmuring of ...
— Tom Cringle's Log • Michael Scott
... a bright scarlet disturbance. "Had too much grub; oughtn't to eat this stuff," he groaned—while he went on eating, while he gulped down a chill and glutinous slice of the ice-cream brick, and cocoanut cake as oozy as shaving-cream. He felt as though he had been stuffed with clay; his body was bursting, his throat was bursting, his brain was hot mud; and only with agony did he continue to smile and shout as became a ...
— Babbitt • Sinclair Lewis
... assailed by a thirst that naught save Nantz and schnapps and strong ale of the Skull and Spectacles could assuage, and the gentlemen of the Chisholm Hunt would have discovered that the only way after a run with the harriers was through the vilest part of the town and among the oozy timbers of the wharves which formed the kingdom of the Skull ...
— Marjorie • Justin Huntly McCarthy
... at the edge of the moat. He stooped, and waving his torch along the ground he moved to the far angle of the chateau, examining the soft, oozy clay. It was impossible that a man could have clambered out over that without leaving some impression. He reached the corner and found the clay intact; at least, nowhere could he discover a mark of hands or a footprint set as would be that of a man ...
— St. Martin's Summer • Rafael Sabatini
... the bottom of the Atlantic were vast plains of soft mud, in some places 2500 fathoms (15,000 feet) deep; that is, as deep as the Alps are high. And more: they found out, to their surprise, that the oozy mud of the Atlantic floor was made up almost entirely of just the same atomies as make up our chalk, especially globigerinas; that, in fact, a vast bed of chalk was now forming at the bottom of the Atlantic, ...
— Madam How and Lady Why - or, First Lessons in Earth Lore for Children • Charles Kingsley
... fitting home for living men. San Michele is the island close before Murano, where the Lombardi built one of their most romantically graceful churches of pale Istrian stone, and where the Campo Santo has for centuries received the dead into its oozy clay. The cemetery is at present undergoing restoration. Its state of squalor and abandonment to cynical disorder makes one feel how fitting for Italians would be the custom of cremation. An island in the lagoons devoted to funeral pyres is a solemn and ennobling conception. This graveyard, ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece • John Addington Symonds
... mele seems to be the account of a perilous climb through that wild mountainous region that lies back of Hanalei, Kauai, a region of tangled woods, oozy steeps, fathomless bogs, narrow ridges, and overhanging cliffs that fall away into profound abysses, making such an excursion a most precarious adventure. This is what appears on the surface. Hawaiian poets, however, did not ...
— Unwritten Literature of Hawaii - The Sacred Songs of the Hula • Nathaniel Bright Emerson
... marshy piece of land that was full of springs which fed and kept puddles of mud moist through the dryest season. To-day, although everywhere else the dust was fine and white, the path along the spring lot was oozy and soft. ...
— Four Little Blossoms at Oak Hill School • Mabel C. Hawley
... dose of salts is then? You've seen it work? Experienced it, maybe? Hah! You'll understand me. I'm a grain of the Epsom Salt that went through Beersheba, time the Turks had all the booze in sight and we were thirsty. Muddy booze it was too—oozy booze—not fit for washing hogs! Ever heard of Anzacs? Well, I'm one of 'em. Now you know what the scorpion who stung you's up against! You lie there and think about it, cocky; I'll show you his ...
— Affair in Araby • Talbot Mundy
... mortar-bed just beyond the foundation trench. "Wait a second." She skipped across the small chasm which intervened between the foundation-wall and solid ground. She scooped up some water from a hallow puddle with a battered tin can, and began the formation of an oozy little pocket in the middle of the mortar-bed. "Now if I only had a shingle," she said, after she had reduced the mortar to the consistency ...
— With the Procession • Henry B. Fuller
... The crowding sampans, houseboats, and junks stretched far out into its oily, oozy flow, making a floating city as he neared the congested life of the coast, where the ever-increasing population failed to find ground space in its maggoty swarming. As the stream widened until the farther bank disappeared in the artificial mist of rising smoke and ...
— O Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1919 • Various
... side. A dismal orifice, from sea to sea Extended, pervious to the God of Day: Uncouthly join'd, the rocks stupendous form An arch, the ruin of a future storm: High on the cliff their nests the woodquests make, And sea-calves stable in the oozy lake. But when bleak Winter with his sullen train Awakes the winds to vex the watery plain; When o'er the craggy steep without control, Big with the blast, the raging billows roll; Not towns beleaguer'd, not the flaming brand, Darted ...
— The Poems of Jonathan Swift, D.D., Volume I (of 2) • Jonathan Swift
... asleep. And it seemed to me, though I could not tell why, that all this flotsam, and my own hulk along with it, slowly was drifting closer and closer together; and was packing tighter and tighter in the soft oozy tangle of the weed, which everywhere was matted so thickly that the water did not show ...
— In the Sargasso Sea - A Novel • Thomas A. Janvier
... is dredged through very soft material, a grayish-blue mud of oozy consistency, into which the sounding pole penetrates six feet with very little exertion. On top, a small amount of sand is found, but practically none in the lower stratum. The material is considerably softer than ...
— The Industrial Canal and Inner Harbor of New Orleans • Thomas Ewing Dabney
... last. Then, thro' the gate of iv'ry, he dismiss'd His valiant offspring and divining guest. Straight to the ships Aeneas his way, Embark'd his men, and skimm'd along the sea, Still coasting, till he gain'd Cajeta's bay. At length on oozy ground his galleys moor; Their heads are turn'd to sea, ...
— The Aeneid • Virgil
... my "Funny," as I'm wont, beneath the bank, Listening to Cam's rippling murmurs thro' the weeds and willows dank, As I chewed the Cud of fancy, from the water there appeared An old man, fierce-eyed, and filthy, with a long and tangled beard; To the oozy shore he paddled, clinging to my Funny's nose, Till, in all his mud majestic, Cam's gigantic form arose. Brawny, broad of shoulders was he, hairy were his face and head, And amid loud lamentations tears incessantly he shed. "Son," he cried, "the ...
— Sagittulae, Random Verses • E. W. Bowling
... 20th we weighed and stood in, and the pilot came aboard of us about noon, and the same afternoon brought us to anchor in five and a half fathoms, in a commodious bay on the continent, called by the French Bon-port. From our last anchorage to this, we found every where an oozy bottom, the water first regularly decreasing to five fathoms, and then increasing to seven, after which we had five and six fathoms alternately. The squadron weighed again next morning, in order to run above the two fortifications formerly mentioned, which are called the castles ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 11 • Robert Kerr
... came as if blown in off the icy lake, and oozy April fell from the clouds. How weary we grow of winter in a cold land, and how loath is winter to permit the coming of spring! May stole in from the south. There came a warm rain, and the next morning strips of green were stretched ...
— The Colossus - A Novel • Opie Read
... blood. About nine o'clock, for example, I went into a small wall-tent which sheltered a dozen or more dangerously wounded Spaniards and Cuban insurgents. Everything that I saw there was shocking. On the right-hand side of the tent, face downward and partly buried in the water-soaked, oozy ground, lay a half-naked Cuban boy, nineteen or twenty years of age, who had died in the night. He had been wounded in the head and at some time during the long hours of darkness between sunset and dawn the bandage had partly slipped off, and hemorrhage had begun. ...
— Campaigning in Cuba • George Kennan
... pushed into the breast-high grass, and the walking was easy. Once we crossed a patch of oozy turf from which arose a score of jack-snipe; again we skirted a drying pond whose boggy edges were the hunting ground of marsh hens. Yet other trails could be read here: deer, wildcat, raccoon, and innumerable wee things. And here, too, around the "bonnet" ...
— Wings of the Wind • Credo Harris
... down at his boots covered with the oozy brown fluid. "Jupiter aid us!" he exclaimed; and as if in answer to his call, "a daughter of the gods, divinely tall," rose on their sight, coming towards them from over the ridge of the hill. She came on swiftly, yet without hurry. She walked (a process little understood by the feminine half of ...
— Flint - His Faults, His Friendships and His Fortunes • Maud Wilder Goodwin
... by trailing weeds beclogged: Drifted, drifted, day by day, Pilotless on pathless way. It has drifted till each plank Is oozy as the oyster-bank: Drifted, drifted, night by night, Craft that never shows a light; Nor ever, to prevent worse knell, Tolls in fog the ...
— John Marr and Other Poems • Herman Melville
... from bed. He came staggering under his double burden, like trees in Java, bearing at once blossom, fruit, and falling fruit, as I have heard you or some other traveller tell, with his face literally as blue as the bluest firmament. Some wretched calico that he had mopped his poor oozy front with, had rendered up its native dye, and the devil a bit would he consent to wash it, but swore it was characteristic, for he was going to the sale of indigo; and set up a laugh which I did not ...
— The Best Letters of Charles Lamb • Charles Lamb
... regale his hearing on days of salutation; nor did he forget the sweet sound of mooring and unmooring ships in the river, and the pleasing objects on the other side of the Thames, displayed in the oozy docks and cabbage-gardens of Rotherhithe. Sir Launcelot was not insensible to the beauties of this landscape, but, his pursuit lying another way, he contented himself with a less enchanting situation, and Crowe accompanied him ...
— The Adventures of Sir Launcelot Greaves • Tobias Smollett
... round me in desire And press their oozy lips upon my hair, Toads kiss my feet and creatures of the mire, The snails will leave their shells ...
— English Poems • Richard Le Gallienne
... inhabitants of the waters come forth from their oozy beds and play and flounce in the beams of the moon. Round the luminary of the night the stars lead up the mystic dance, and compose the music of the spheres. The deities of the woods and the deities of the rivers come out from their secret haunts, and keep their pastimes unapprehensive ...
— Imogen - A Pastoral Romance • William Godwin |
