"Welter" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... cities sprang up, as it were, in a night. Everything was fluid, there was no permanence; rules and customs altered before they got familiar, a new nation, with new thoughts and aims, was rising from the welter of tense activity. ...
— The Girl From Keller's - Sadie's Conquest • Harold Bindloss
... completely, flying apart in a welter of fragile springs and gears. The fact was of some deeper significance, Ludovick knew, but he was too numbed by his incredible success to be able to think clearly. All he knew was that The Belphin would be able ...
— The Blue Tower • Evelyn E. Smith
... the Upper Road, not far distant from Guadalajara. It was the road that connected that town with Bonneville and that ran parallel with the railroad tracks. On the other side of the track he could see the infinite extension of the brown, bare land of Los Muertos, turning now to a soft, moist welter of fertility under the insistent caressing of the rain. The hard, sun-baked clods were decomposing, the crevices between drinking the wet with an eager, sucking noise. But the prospect was dreary; the distant horizons were ...
— The Octopus • Frank Norris
... little lot! The old hunting or "Rake's Progress" prints in the old inns were worth looking at—but this sentimental stuff—well, Victorianism had gone! "Tell them to hold on!" old Timothy had said. But to what were they to hold on in this modern welter of the "democratic principle"? Why, even privacy was threatened! And at the thought that privacy might perish, Soames pushed back his teacup and went to the window. Fancy owning no more of Nature than the crowd out there owned of the flowers and trees and waters of Hyde ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... we have for long been so debilitated by pastorals, by graceful presentation of the Arthurian legend for drawing-rooms, by idylls, not robust and Theocritean, by verse directly didactic, that a rude blast of air from the outside welter of human realities is apt to give a shock, that might well show in what simpleton's paradise we have been living. The ethics of the rectory parlour set to sweet music, the respectable aspirations of the sentimental ...
— Studies in Literature • John Morley
... charity, but despite our gospel he never gets it, never. We give him execration, injustice; if we let him go with a word, it is never a gentle word, but a bitter epithet; and we wonder he is estranged, when he sees our amazing composure in an amazing welter of hypocrisy and deceit. There is, of course, the better side, the many thousands of Catholics and Protestants who sincerely aim at better things. But what has to be admitted is that most sincerely religious people adopt to the man of no established religion the same attitude ...
— Principles of Freedom • Terence J. MacSwiney
... feet. To his irritated vision the opposite wall seemed to heave and bulge forward, its chocolate design to become distended and to burst, spreading itself in blotches on the yellow ochre. On the face of the hideous welter swam the face of Mr. Soper, as it ...
— The Divine Fire • May Sinclair
... have breath and she drew apart for a moment. Then, she kissed him again. And Lance, for the first time, listened and made sense out of the welter of hysterical sobbing words ...
— Next Door, Next World • Robert Donald Locke
... bosom with reflected blight! And make thee in thy leprosy of mind As loathsome to thyself as to mankind! Till all thy self-thoughts curdle into hate, Black—as thy will or others would create: 90 Till thy hard heart be calcined into dust, And thy soul welter in its hideous crust. Oh, may thy grave be sleepless as the bed, The widowed couch of fire, that thou hast spread! Then, when thou fain wouldst weary Heaven with prayer, Look on thine earthly victims—and despair! Down to the dust!—and, as thou rott'st away, Even worms shall perish on thy poisonous ...
— The Works Of Lord Byron, Vol. 3 (of 7) • Lord Byron
... a statistician and a sporting encyclopaedia. Ask him the grain output of Paraguay for 1903, or the English importation of sheetings into China for 1890, or at what weight Jimmy Britt fought Battling Nelson, or who was welter-weight champion of the United States in '68, and you'll get the correct answer with the automatic celerity of a slot-machine. And there's Andy, a stone- mason, has ideas on everything, a good chess-player; and another fellow, Harry, a baker, red hot socialist and strong union man. By the ...
— Martin Eden • Jack London
... food, but in the haze which filled the room they sat forever, talking, talking, while he agonized, "Darn fool to be eating all this—not 'nother mouthful," and discovered that he was again tasting the sickly welter of melted ice cream on his plate. There was no magic in his friends; he was not uplifted when Howard Littlefield produced from his treasure-house of scholarship the information that the chemical symbol for ...
— Babbitt • Sinclair Lewis
... the henhouse together in silence. Maurice was saying to himself, "I might not be able to get a job in New York... I'll fight." Yet certain traditional decencies, slowly emerging from the welter of his rage and terror, made him add, "If it was mine, I'd have to give her something... ...
— The Vehement Flame • Margaret Wade Campbell Deland
... other's century, if they had the gift of tongues, than in most of those which have intervened. It is neither necessary nor possible to go deeply into the resemblance here [Footnote: Some words of Sir Leslie Stephen's may be given, however, describing the welter of religious opinions that prevailed at both epochs: 'The analogy between the present age and that which witnessed the introduction of Christianity is too striking to have been missed by very many observers. The ...
— Works, V1 • Lucian of Samosata
... had finished the cigarette, he flung the butt over the rail into the gushing water, which swam south in its phosphorescent welter, descended between decks to the stateroom that had been assigned to him, and fitted the ...
— Peter the Brazen - A Mystery Story of Modern China • George F. Worts
... levied tribute, and established dominion of their own, and such still powerful viceroys as held their own, and offered a nominal allegiance to the Mogul line, the glory of the race of Tamerlane was dimmed indeed. It occurred to one man, watching all the welter of the Indian world, where Mussulman and Hindoo struggled for supremacy—it occurred to Dupleix that in this struggle lay the opportunity for some European power—for his European power—for France—to gain for herself, and for the daring adventurer who should shape ...
— A History of the Four Georges, Volume II (of 4) • Justin McCarthy
... of an astounding letter, pages and pages, to Rosalie from Miss Salmon. Pages and pages, having the appearance, each one, of a battlefield or of a riot: a welter of thick, black underscores strewn about like coffins or like corpses, and a bristling pin-cushionful (black pins) of notes of exclamation leaping about like war-dancing Zulus or staggering about like drunken or like wounded men. A welter you ...
— This Freedom • A. S. M. Hutchinson
... flung herself backwards, with eyes dilated and a warmth in her cheeks, the rod bending above her, and the line ripping its way towards the welter at the head of the pool. There it curved inwards a ...
— Alton of Somasco • Harold Bindloss
... loomed up massively before him, was conscious of a weakening of his determination to inflict bodily chastisement. The truth of Steve's remark, that it made a difference whether one's intended victim is a heavyweight, a middle, or a welter, came upon ...
— The Coming of Bill • P. G. Wodehouse
... that ray of sun peering over the black cloud that illumined their faces to each other, while already the sharp peaked shadow of it had come between them. For that second, while he spoke, it seemed possible that, in the middle of welter and chaos and death and enmity, these two souls could stand apart, in the passionate serene of love, and the moment lasted for just as long as she flung herself into his arms. And then, even while her face was pressed ...
— Michael • E. F. Benson
... it with a small, intense girl named Sylvia Shouff, if you believed the little plastic sign on her desk. There was barely room for it in the welter of paper, files, notebooks, phones, calendars and other junk she had squirreled. She was much too busy banging at a typewriter and handling the phone to pay any attention to me. Her pert, lively manner said she hadn't taken any ...
— The Trouble with Telstar • John Berryman
... sea, no more anything,' she thought dazedly, as she sat in the midst of this fierce welter of sunshine. It seemed to her as if all the lightness of her fancy and her hope were being burned away in this tremendous furnace, leaving her, Helena, like a heavy piece of slag seamed with metal. She tried to imagine herself resuming the ...
— The Trespasser • D.H. Lawrence
... deliberations of the Conference there was a curious mixture of efficiency and ineffectiveness; a wealth of information upon the topics under discussion and an inability to concentrate that information. Important decisions were made and forgotten in the welter of conferential disorganization. ...
— Woodrow Wilson and the World War - A Chronicle of Our Own Times. • Charles Seymour
... a welter of words as he tried to find phrases to compass his hate for that ship. And then, as if conjured out of nothing by his thoughts, the great craft itself came in view overhead in all ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, November, 1930 • Various
... station. Joy was within me as I boarded the train, but this was Jitendra's day for tears. My affectionate farewell to Pratap had been punctuated by stifled sobs from both my companions. The journey once more found Jitendra in a welter of grief. Not for himself this time, but ...
— Autobiography of a YOGI • Paramhansa Yogananda
... clear conviction; the light that he walked by was obscure, but it was single. Now, when two people of any grit and spirit put their fortunes into one, there succeeds to this comparative certainty a huge welter of competing jurisdictions. It no longer matters so much how life appears to one; one must consult another: one, who may be strong, must not offend the other, who is weak. The only weak brother I am willing to consider is (to make a bull for once) my wife. ...
— Virginibus Puerisque • Robert Louis Stevenson
... lay down his life. Within the tent were a few—very few—more advanced beings, who had discarded all irksome restrictions and would sooner be shot than address a white man as 'Sahib.' Such is India in transition; a welter of incongruities, of shifting perilous uncertainties, of subterranean ferment beneath a surface that still appears very much ...
— Far to Seek - A Romance of England and India • Maud Diver
... death-warrants and ropes, this sawing of the air and chewing of the rag by people so d——d ignorant that they couldn't find either end of themselves in the dark, this chortling over the fact that one desk-emaciated welter-weight had been caught unawares and trampled upon by a sanctified mob—a refreshing sight, I say, in a temple consecrated to that Christ who forgave even his enemies from the cross. But every man at that meeting who said he never read the ICONOCLAST deliberately lied. The Baptists all read it. ...
— Volume 10 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... These things had been testimony, after all, to supersede any other, for on the spot, even while she looked, the warmly-washing wave had travelled far up the strand. She had subsequently lived, for hours she couldn't count, under the dizzying, smothering welter positively in submarine depths where everything came to her through walls of emerald and mother-of-pearl; though indeed she had got her head above them, for breath, when face to face with Charlotte again, on the morrow, in Eaton Square. Meanwhile, none the less, as was ...
— The Golden Bowl • Henry James
... concentration of all the available thought and energy of Irish public men upon an appeal to the passions and prejudices of English parties had led to the further postponement of all Irish endeavour to deal rationally and practically with her own problems at home. But during the welter of contention which prevailed after the fall of Parnell, there grew up in Ireland a wholly new spirit, born of the bitter lesson which was at last being learned. The Irish still clung undaunted to their political ideal, but its pursuit to the exclusion of all ...
— Ireland In The New Century • Horace Plunkett
... be an excellent and worthy reason for it; but I venture to suggest that to take advantage of so many pitiful corpses, is not pretty. And the exploiting of the mere sensation on the other side is not pretty in its wealth of heartless inventions. Neither is the welter of Marconi lies which has not been sent vibrating without some reason, for which it would be nauseous to inquire too closely. And the calumnious, baseless, gratuitous, circumstantial lie charging poor Captain Smith with desertion of his post by means of suicide is ...
— Notes on Life and Letters • Joseph Conrad
... of the welter of sobs, came faint articulations, and little by little he learnt the entire story of her difficulties, her misfortunes, her struggles, and her defeats. He listened to a frank confession of guilt. But ...
— The Card, A Story Of Adventure In The Five Towns • Arnold Bennett
... magnificence of Pandemonium; the ineffable welter of Chaos; proudly eminent over all like a tower, the colossal personality of Satan. The description of Paradise and the story of Creation, if making less demand on the poet's creative power, required greater resources of knowledge, and more consummate skill in combination. ...
— Life of John Milton • Richard Garnett
... had no desire whatever to be ejected from this snug nest into the welter of the wet and friendless world, puffed at his cigar, and looked at his host with the irresistible ...
— The Joyous Adventures of Aristide Pujol • William J. Locke
... arising, as it were, from the tripod, can be more radiantly just to those from whom he differs; but then the tenor of his thoughts is even calumnious; while Athelred, slower to forge excuses, is yet slower to condemn, and sits over the welter of the world, vacillating but still judicial, and still faithfully contending ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson, Volume 9 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... man's words—while Thorn stared at the packet of papers with unbelieving eyes. It had never occurred to him that the Ziegler plans might be in that very room, on the table with the rest of the welter of letters, thumbed documents, and cups and saucers. And there they were—the vital projector plans—not in a safe or hidden in some fantastic place, but right ...
— The Radiant Shell • Paul Ernst
... the favourite too! The terror that came from his stall, With the spirit of fire and of dew, To show the road home to them all; From the back of the field to the straight He has come, as is ever his wont, And carried his welter-like weight, Like a tradesman, ...
— The Poems of Henry Kendall • Henry Kendall
... side alone the hill gave shelter, So vast that phalanx of unconquered men, 2435 And there the living in the blood did welter Of the dead and dying, which in that green glen, Like stifled torrents, made a plashy fen Under the feet—thus was the butchery waged While the sun clomb Heaven's eastern steep—but when 2440 It 'gan to sink—a fiercer ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley Volume I • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... the door. He obeyed mechanically. The strength of that chant took hold of him, stirred him, emboldened him. The hall opened to him, a vast welter of fluttering colour swaying to ...
— When the Sleeper Wakes • Herbert George Wells
... Anyhow it was gone, and the history of the next twenty-nine years is a confused and distracting medley of petty outbreaks—that in 1803 of which Robert Emmett was the leader being the most important—and of recurrent acts of repression, out of the monotonous welter of which one great figure presently rises like a colossus, till it comes to dominate the ...
— The Story Of Ireland • Emily Lawless
... even those whom we have just quoted. Is this the only cause we can give, Shelley might ask, why the poet should not reverence his gift as something apart from himself and truly divine? If, after the fashion of modern psychology, we denote by the subconscious mind only the welter of myriad forgotten details of our daily life, what is there here to account for poesy? The remote, inaccessible chambers of our mind may, to be sure, be more replete with curious lumber than those continually swept and garnished for everyday use, yet, ...
— The Poet's Poet • Elizabeth Atkins
... supper time, too drunk to take the sail off her, so we drove on down Channel, trusting to the goodness of the gear. There would have been a pretty smash-up if we had had to alter our course hurriedly. As it was we were jumping like a young colt, in a welter of foam, with two men at the tiller, besides a gang on the tackles. I never knew any ship to bound about so wildly. I passed the evening after supper on deck, enjoying the splendour of that savage leaping ...
— Martin Hyde, The Duke's Messenger • John Masefield
... rebellion means the breaking-up of the existing order, the throwing of institutions into the melting-pot, the letting loose of incalculable forces of discord and destruction, the suspension of law, the return to chaos, in the hope that out of the welter a new and better cosmos—one more fitted to promote the common good—may be evolved. Every rebel, or prospective rebel, whether of the passive or the active type, ought to ponder well the logical consequences of his revolt against authority, ought to ...
— Freedom In Service - Six Essays on Matters Concerning Britain's Safety and Good Government • Fossey John Cobb Hearnshaw
... with a lost soul peering in anguish through the red bars of hell. Each and every apparition was of the old life; all were emissaries from the forsaken West summoning me back to my renounced allegiance. When the fever left me, returning reason slowly brought order amid the welter of confused ideas, as the ants sorted the grain for distracted Psyche, and for the first time I considered in the detachment of reminiscence the nature of my action in leaving England. I sifted the evidence at length as I lay under the verandah slowly recovering strength; and when ...
— Apologia Diffidentis • W. Compton Leith
... the seas to a welter of white, Look at the fleet that he leads to the fight. O, they're dancing like witches to open the ball; And old Cap'n Storm-along's ...
— The New Morning - Poems • Alfred Noyes
... still less is there any question of inferiority or superiority. The Irish difficulty, historically considered, arises in the main from two circumstances. The first of these, to which I have just referred, is that when England began to intervene in the welter of Irish inter-tribal warfare, she was already an organised State, slowly working its way through feudal monarchy to constitutional freedom. The second is that while the religious revolution of the sixteenth century profoundly and permanently ...
— Against Home Rule (1912) - The Case for the Union • Various
... or more. I remember only one man who walked his deck with a springy step, and gave the first course of the passage in an elated voice. But he, as I learned afterwards, was leaving nothing behind him, except a welter of debts and threats ...
— The Mirror of the Sea • Joseph Conrad
... for, ere they put forth sail, Did every store, each minish'd vessel, fail, While all the Achaean host At Aulis anchored lay, Looking across to Chalics and the coast Where refluent waters welter, rock, and sway; And rife with ill delay From northern Strymon blew the thwarting blast— Mother of famine fell, That holds men wand'ring still Far from the haven where they fain would be!— And pitiless ...
— The House of Atreus • AEschylus
... Lord's sake," cried Blaise, staring into the welter below, "give me something in my bare hand. Rats, he called us, rats, and I won't die like a rat, I won't, I won't." It was the cry of primitive nature and the Dauphin ...
— The Justice of the King • Hamilton Drummond
... June day, and out of the welter of din and rumble the cool plash of falling water came to his straining ears refreshingly. At once he considered the dog and, thankful for the distraction, stepped beneath the portico of a provision store and ...
— Anthony Lyveden • Dornford Yates
... nor distribute them fairly and economically on any anarchic plan: nay, that without concerting our social action to a much higher degree than we do at present we can never get rid of the wasteful and iniquitous welter of a little riches and a deal of poverty which current political humbug calls our prosperity and civilization. Liberty is an excellent thing; but it cannot begin until society has paid its daily debt to Nature by first earning its living. There is no liberty ...
— The Perfect Wagnerite - A Commentary on the Niblung's Ring • George Bernard Shaw
... one today holds that ideas are self-existing realities, the foundation of his theism is destroyed. James Harvey Robinson, in his "Mind in The Making," discusses the influence of Plato, and remarks, "Plato made terms with the welter of things, but sought relief in the conception of supernal models, eternal in the heavens, after which all things were imperfectly fashioned. He confessed that he could not bear to accept a world which was like a leaky pot or a man running at the nose. In short, he ascribed ...
— The Necessity of Atheism • Dr. D.M. Brooks
... that gang" were flocking to the Dutch as enthusiastic allies.] It seemed as if every evil which Divine vengeance, religious frenzy, human folly, foreign enemies abroad, and deep-rooted political discontent at home, could engender, were poured out into the welter of confusion that reigned in England during these unhappy years. In such a turbid flood had Clarendon to steer the ...
— The Life of Edward Earl of Clarendon V2 • Henry Craik
... bonvenu! Welcome bonvena. Weld kunforgxi. Welfare bonstato. Well nu. Well (pit) puto. Well, to be sani. Well (adv.) bone. Well-mannered bonmaniera. Well-nigh preskaux. Well-spring fonto, akvoputo. Well-wishing bonvola, bonvolanta. Welter ensxlimigxi. Wen tubero. Wench knabulino. West okcidento. Westerly okcidenta. Westward (adv.) okcidente. Wet malsekigi. Wet malseka. Whale baleno. Whalebone balenosto. Wharf ensxipigejo. What, what a? kia? What? kio, kion? Whatever kia ajn. Whatsoever ...
— English-Esperanto Dictionary • John Charles O'Connor and Charles Frederic Hayes
... turned into a Union prison of detention, where their fathers and grandfathers had been wont to send their disorderly and insubordinate niggers. They were packed away, as the miserable slaves had been, to taste something of the bitterness of the negro's lot. So came Bert Russell to welter in a low room whose walls gave out the stench of years. How you cooked for them, and schemed for them, and cried for them, you devoted women of the South! You spent the long hot summer in town, and every day you ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... listened, however, to no low tongues of ours, even when we pointed silently to their feet of clay. Perhaps we, as folk of simpler soul and more primitive type, have been most struck in the welter of recent years by the utter failure of white religion. We have curled our lips in something like contempt as we have witnessed glib apology and weary explanation. Nothing of the sort deceived us. A nation's religion ...
— Darkwater - Voices From Within The Veil • W. E. B. Du Bois
... in it. And, as she had foreseen—when drifting down the tide-river in the rain and darkness—once the supporting tension of Faircloth's presence removed, chaos would close in on her. It only waited due opportunity. That granted, as a tempest-driven sea it would submerge her. In the welter of the present, she clutched at the high dignities and distinctions of the past as at a lifebelt. Not vulgarly, in a spirit of self-aggrandizement; but in the simple interests of self-preservation, as a means of keeping endangered sanity afloat. For the distinctions ...
— Deadham Hard • Lucas Malet
... political state. Even in the narrower confine of the latter, the fires of revolution are either violently burning, or, at least, smouldering. Two of the oldest empires in the world, which, together, have more than half of its population (China and Russia) are in a welter of anarchy; while many lesser nations are in a stage of submerged revolt. If the revolt were confined to autocratic governments, we might see in it merely a reaction against tyranny; but even in the most stable of democracies and among ...
— The Constitution of the United States - A Brief Study of the Genesis, Formulation and Political Philosophy of the Constitution • James M. Beck
... this," he answered, picking up both the telegrams; "one of our groom fellows at home has a brother who knows everything about Blackmore's stable, and he has just wired to me that Dainty Dick will win the Flying Welter at Hurst Park to-day, and I was off to back it when I get a wire from my tipster, Tom Webb, that The Philosopher can't lose the same race. It is Tom's 'double nap' and I am in ...
— Godfrey Marten, Undergraduate • Charles Turley
... was descending gradually widened after the fashion of any normal valley; but, at the lower end, it pinched narrowly between high precipitous walls and abruptly stopped in a cross wall. At the base of this, in a welter of broken rock, the streamlet disappeared, evidently finding its way out underground. Climbing the cross wall, from the top Smoke saw the lake beneath him. Unlike any mountain lake he had ever seen, it was not blue. Instead, its ...
— Smoke Bellew • Jack London
... Myo[u]zen, broke down his hesitation. Slowly he removed the bars. Tomobei entered, dripping with wet. He cast down his straw coat at the entrance. The man's eyes and manner were wild. He kept casting frightened looks into the wild welter of storm outside. When the priest would withdraw into the room he held him by the skirt. "What has happened?" commanded Myo[u]zen briefly. Replied Tomobei—"A terrible thing! To-day the master was ready to attend the funeral of Ito[u] Inkyo[u]. ...
— The Yotsuya Kwaidan or O'Iwa Inari - Tales of the Tokugawa, Volume 1 (of 2) • James S. De Benneville
... of society from the welter of selfishness and brutishness and cruelty into which it is now plunged will be a costly undertaking. The church is here, as Christ's representative, to take up this work; and it must not expect to accomplish it ...
— The Church and Modern Life • Washington Gladden
... time before either of them spoke. The damsel seemed preoccupied, and Agravaine's mind was a welter of confused thoughts, the most prominent of which and the one to which he kept returning being the startling reflection that he, who had pined for romance so long, had got it ...
— The Man Upstairs and Other Stories • P. G. Wodehouse
... from the calendar; they obliterated themselves as quietly as our ship's wake to the north, as we planed over the smooth waters toward the equator. Gradually the passengers took on character, and out of the first welter of contacts came those definite impressions which are almost always right and which, though we modify them or reverse them by acquaintance, we ...
— Mystic Isles of the South Seas. • Frederick O'Brien
... the clockworks strain: The turning lenses flash and pass, Frame turning within glittering frame With frosty gleam of moving glass: Unseen by me, each dusky hour The sea-waves welter up the tower Or in the ebb subside again; And ever and anon all night, Drawn from afar by charm of light, A ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. XXII (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... this attitude runs the grave risk of seeming to abstract a single motive—the desire for wealth—from the confused welter of human impulses and to make it dominant at the expense of human nature itself. A hasty reading of Adam Smith would, indeed, confirm that impression; and that is perhaps why he seemed to Ruskin to blaspheme human nature. But a more careful ...
— Political Thought in England from Locke to Bentham • Harold J. Laski
... had risen against the tyranny and oppression of the French kings and nobles, and out of the welter of the Revolution Napoleon rose to power and, by his magnetic personality, welded the chaotic elements into unity, framed laws which are still in operation, and led his country to ...
— Drake, Nelson and Napoleon • Walter Runciman
... hit the road and had time to think, I knew that my half-formed intention was a sort of martyrdom; I was going to renounce myself in a fine welter of tears and then go staggering off into the setting sun to die of my mental wounds. I took careful stock of myself and faced the fact that my half-baked idea was a sort of suicide-wish; walking into any Mekstrom way station now was just asking ...
— Highways in Hiding • George Oliver Smith
... co-operation of the Indians who flocked to their "factories." At home too it was not dominion, but the profits derived from the Indian trade that occupied the mind of the nation. Not till the disintegration of the Moghul Empire in the eighteenth century plunged India into a welter of anarchy which endangered not only our trade but the safety of our settlements, which, like the foreign settlements in the Chinese Treaty Ports to-day, attracted in increasing numbers an indigenous population in search of security for life ...
— India, Old and New • Sir Valentine Chirol
... some creeping fungus stuff, and on one side of the city the wall was overwhelmed by a triumphant tide of green. There the jungle had crawled over the ramparts and surged into the city. Three of the towers had their bases in the welter of growing things, and creepers had climbed incredibly and were still climbing to enter and then destroy the ...
— The Fifth-Dimension Tube • William Fitzgerald Jenkins
... witnesses That Thy glory goodness is. Not for sport of mind and force Hast Thou made Thy universe, But as atmosphere and zone Of Thy loving heart alone. Man, who walketh in a show, Sees before him, to and fro, Shadow and illusion go; All things flow and fluctuate, Now contract and now dilate. In the welter of this sea, Nothing stable is but Thee; In this whirl of swooning trance, Thou alone art permanence; All without Thee only seems, All beside is choice of dreams. Never yet in darkest mood Doubted I that Thou wast good, Nor mistook my will for fate, Pain of ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 11, No. 63, January, 1863 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... does honour to her fine sympathy, but which is not ethnologically justifiable, is the persistent attempt to draw a sharp racial distinction between Highlander and Lowlander. The truth is, that no part of the Highlands is purely Celtic: the population is a welter of Picts, Gaels, Norsemen, Danes, and Saxons. The Lowland blood is, in like manner, a bewildering blend, there being no uncontaminated Anglo-Saxon district in any single county of Scotland. Mr. J. M. Robertson's clever book, The Saxon and the Celt, seems to me ...
— Literary Tours in The Highlands and Islands of Scotland • Daniel Turner Holmes
... into the middle distance, an individual of dishevelled aspect sidled up, a vagrant of almost the maximum seediness, from whose midriff there protruded a trayful of a strange welter of collar-studs, shoe-laces, rubber rings, buttonhooks, and dying roosters. For some minutes he had been eyeing his lordship appraisingly from the edge of the kerb, and now, secure in the fact that there seemed to be no policeman ...
— Uneasy Money • P.G. Wodehouse
... because he was more shaken than he expected to be—he 'phoned the Yard and the doctor. We couldn't arrive for nearly an hour, and the doctor starts on his rounds at nine o'clock sharp. What so easy, therefore, as to wander out in a welter of grief and anger, and search the wood for the murderer on his own account? One solitary minute would enable him to put the rifle in a hiding-place where it would surely ...
— The Strange Case of Mortimer Fenley • Louis Tracy
... simple views about things out of date, and is called upon to pronounce views upon entirely new matters—aristocracy and democracy, religion and scepticism, art and morality, Tolstoy and Nietzsche. A welter of odd ideas and delirious fanaticisms is suddenly sprung upon his simple consciousness. He finds all the intellectual circles in England working themselves into a fury about ideas, factitious ideas, which positively did not ...
— Personality in Literature • Rolfe Arnold Scott-James
... at the rancher's daughter. What had happened? She was the same, yet not the same. Her eyes were awaiting his. They did not flinch. They were wells of light; a strange new light; depth of light. Had the veil lifted at last? The welter of sullen anger subsided within him. The wrapped mystery of the mountain twilight hushed speech. What folly it all was—that far off clamor of greed in the Outer World, that wolfish war of self-interest down in the Valley, that clack of the wordsters ...
— The Freebooters of the Wilderness • Agnes C. Laut
... pretty one: but Er the Pamphylian comes back to report no more than the one thing Man already grasps for a certainty amid his welter of guesswork about the Universe—that its stability rests on ordered motion—that the "firmament" stands firm on a balance of active and tremendous forces somehow harmoniously composed. Theology asks "By whom?": Philosophy inclines rather to guess "How?" Natural Science, allowing ...
— Poetry • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... mean is he a heavy or a middle or a welter or what? It makes a kind o' difference, ...
— The Coming of Bill • P. G. Wodehouse
... drawing to their end; and appropriately he died in a welter of innocent blood. When the Duke of Hamilton was appointed Ambassador to the French Court, the Whigs were so alarmed by his known partiality for the Pretender that the more unscrupulous of them decided that, at any cost, he must be got rid ...
— Love Romances of the Aristocracy • Thornton Hall
... handling a sailboat that he did not know, but it taxed all his skill to rescue the man who had been thrown into the water. Had the sea been smooth, it would have been an easy matter to wear about and pull him on board. But in this welter of wind and waves, it was all he could do to get the Ariel to obey her helm. Twice he swooped down near the struggling swimmer, but each time the waves beat the man back just far enough to be out of reach of the boathooks. Lester ...
— The Rushton Boys at Treasure Cove - Or, The Missing Chest of Gold • Spencer Davenport
... heard, when his children did not, the premonition of breakers in seas having no landmark that he knew; felt the trend and push of new and inimical forces, and currents that carried him helpless, whither he would not go, but must, heartbroken, into the uproar and welter of ...
— London River • H. M. Tomlinson
... exhausted. Whether the enslavers of Germany thought, in that crass ignorance of other men's minds they have so often displayed, that America meant to keep out of the war at all costs, or were merely careless of consequences so long as the immediate end was attained, is now immaterial. From the welter of Teutonic misdeeds and lies arises the vital, the soul-inspiring spectacle of a union of all democracies against ...
— Defenders of Democracy • Militia of Mercy
... hundred books out of the worst would be a drop out of the sea; there would remain an immeasurable welter of badness, of which we are now happily ignorant, and from which we are safe, as long as our minds are not turned to ...
— Imaginary Interviews • W. D. Howells
... high light on one of the most interesting personalities in the history of the English monarchy. We see EDWARD as a young man, wild, reckless and brutal; then, grown to his full powers and sobered by responsibility, making by sheer force of character something abiding and coherent out of the strange welter of warring factions from which Great Britain emerged as a united kingdom. Wales was a hot-bed of rebellion, Scotland the "plague-spot of the North," the Cinque Ports on the verge of going over to France. Only a strong man, with strong men under him, could ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 150, January 26, 1916 • Various
... years, with the villainies of a boys' school in view. In fact, boxing was this young man's diversion, and the Coster on several occasions expressed great regret that writing and politics had robbed the ring of one who showed promise of being the cleverest welter-weight ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 5 (of 14) • Elbert Hubbard
... curve leads to the entrance of Rock Cut. Running easily, Banneker had reached the beginning of the turn, when he became aware of a lumbering figure approaching him at a high and wild sort of half-gallop. The man's face was a welter of blood. One hand was pressed to it. The other swung crazily as he ran. He would have swept past Banneker unregarding had not the agent caught him ...
— Success - A Novel • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... bag-puncher also. But in an incautious hour for himself and his backer, Flash Purdy, owner of Purdy's Dixieland Bar, he had permitted himself to be entered for a match before an athletic club at Louisville against one Max Schorrer, a welter-weight appearing professionally under the nom de puge of Slugging Fogarty. It was to have been a match of twelve rounds, but early in the second round Mr. Ditto suddenly lost all conscious interest in ...
— Sundry Accounts • Irvin S. Cobb
... what folly it is. However, that's a long story, and will bore you. To cut matters short, for we ought to be turning in, I got to Borkum—that's the first of the German islands.' He pointed at a round bare lozenge lying in the midst of a welter of sandbanks. 'Rottum—this queer little one—it has only one house on it—is the most easterly Dutch island, and the mainland of Holland ends here, opposite it, at the Ems River'—indicating a dismal cavity in the coast, sown with names suggestive ...
— Riddle of the Sands • Erskine Childers
... his head he had a vision of another horseman mounted on a frenzied trampling roan that, apparently out of control and mad with excitement, was charging down upon them, a horseman whose fluttering close-drawn headgear shaded features that were curiously Mongolian—and then he went down in a welter of men and horses. A flying hoof touched the back of ...
— The Shadow of the East • E. M. Hull
... came driving a big boat that rushed on the rocks at Fort Point, pounded there a brief second, and was hurled by the following sea on to the beach, so nearly high and dry that her crew, by the aid of lines, were readily saved. And then into view through the welter came staggering a new boat, one whose first trip it was, sore battered, but battling gallantly for life, and making wonderful weather of it. Yet, even as hope told the flattering tale of her certain safety, there came racing ...
— Stories of the Border Marches • John Lang and Jean Lang
... gun sprays of the rearguard actions of the retreating enemy. He had never been in the cavalry, and any squadron knew well what he and all of those who shared his views were thinking whenever it passed over the brow of a hill that afforded a view of the welter of shell fire over a field cut with shell-craters and trenches which are pitfalls for horses. Yet it returned gamely and with fastidious application to its practice in crossing such obstacles in case ...
— My Second Year of the War • Frederick Palmer
... the sentimental idea of being buried in couples in big jars. A strange notion of our Allies unburying quiet people who had enjoyed dreamless rest for 2,000 years whilst, within a few yards, their own dead still welter in ...
— Gallipoli Diary, Volume 2 • Ian Hamilton
... been said to register the opinion that the new State of Bohemia is very promising, and that it is a redeeming case in the welter of New Europe. As far as Prague is concerned it leaves behind its provincial recent-past, recovers its ancient-past, and looks towards a great future. New buildings will arise worthy of a capital, new administrative offices and a new Parliament House are to be built. ...
— Europe—Whither Bound? - Being Letters of Travel from the Capitals of Europe in the Year 1921 • Stephen Graham
... encyclopaedia of German biographies in the latter half of the eighteenth century. Who reads every word of these ten volumes? Who cares to know how big was the belly of some court chamberlain, or who were the lovers of some unendurable Frau? What a welter of dull garbage! In what dust-heaps dost thou not smother us, Teufelsdroeckh! O, Thomas, Thomas, what Titania has bewitched thee with the head of Dryasdust on thy noble shoulders? Compare Friedrich with Cromwell. In the Life of the Puritan ...
— Studies in Early Victorian Literature • Frederic Harrison
... Lancelot, with a groan; "O King!"—and when he paused, methought I spied A dying fire of madness in his eyes— "O King, my friend, if friend of thine I be, Happier are those that welter in their sin, Swine in the mud, that cannot see for slime, Slime of the ditch: but in me lived a sin So strange, of such a kind, that all of pure, Noble, and knightly in me twined and clung Round that one sin, until the wholesome flower And poisonous grew together, ...
— Idylls of the King • Alfred, Lord Tennyson
... proceed from this Battle of Muhldorf. [Rentsch, p. 313; Pauli; &c.] Battle fought on the 28th of September, 1322:—eight years after BABBOCKBURN; while our poor Edward II. and England with him were in such a welter with their Spencers and their Gavestons: eight years after Bannockburn, and four-and-twenty before Crecy. That will date it ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol, II. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—Of Brandenburg And The Hohenzollerns—928-1417 • Thomas Carlyle
... course of history went into the welter of religious wars which gradually merge into dynastic wars and confuse the record of the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth century. At the end of the last of these divisions of time came ...
— Hilaire Belloc - The Man and His Work • C. Creighton Mandell
... sick and sorry, and to whisper in their ears that cosmic secret—"Bon Espoir y gist au fond!" "Good Hope lies at the Bottom!" "Good Hope" for all; for the best and the worst—for the whole miserable welter of this ...
— Visions and Revisions - A Book of Literary Devotions • John Cowper Powys
... tracked him to this secluded corner of the earth, and in the hands of the most unscrupulous politician of South America was being used as a tool. But, precisely to what end, his wild thought did not as yet disclose. Still, above the welter of it all, he saw clearly that there must be no further delay on his part. Before he could speak, however, Rosendo ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... Plainly, then, the cook had been a Chinaman; and, if so, who was Jos. Amalu? Or had Jos. stolen the chest before he proceeded to ship under a false name and domicile? It was possible, as anything was possible in such a welter; but, regarded as a solution, it only led and left me deeper in the bog. For why should this chest have been deserted and neglected, when the others were rummaged or removed? and where had Jos. come by that second ...
— The Wrecker • Robert Louis Stevenson and Lloyd Osbourne
... of. A spectacle of pity to Landgraf Wilhelm, to King Friedrich, and serious on-lookers;—and perhaps not of pity only, but of "pity and fear" to some of them!—sullen Austria taking its sweet revenges, in this fashion. Readers who will look through these small chinks, may guess what a world-welter this was; and how Friedrich, gazing into phase on phase of it, as into Oracles of Fate, which to him they were, had a History, in these months, that will ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XIV. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... France was already appearing inevitable; the colonists must bear a hand in it, but they also were at odds with England herself on questions vital to their prosperity and happiness. In the welter of events of the next few years we find a mingling of conditions deliberately created (with a view, on England's part, of checking the independent tendencies of the Americans and of forcing tribute from them) and of unforeseen ...
— The History of the United States from 1492 to 1910, Volume 1 • Julian Hawthorne
... ocean's wave To seek this shore; They left behind the coward slave To welter in his living grave;— With hearts unbent, and spirits brave, They sternly bore Such toils as meaner souls had quelled; But souls like these, ...
— The American Union Speaker • John D. Philbrick
... there to be said? Horror looked out of the eyes of Prester Kleig, and was reflected in those of Carlos Kane. Both men turned, peering out across the tumbled welter of waters. ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science April 1930 • Various
... are harder than the task of the critic holding a steady course through the welter of novels which make a tumult in the world and trying to indicate those which have some genuine significance as works of art or intelligence or as documents upon the time. How shall he dispose, for example, of such beguilers of the millions as Gene Stratton ...
— Contemporary American Novelists (1900-1920) • Carl Van Doren
... sensitiveness to Beauty I have mentioned has opened me to that receptiveness which is aware of subtlety and owns to sharp surprise. The thrill is of its very essence. It is unexpected. Out of the welter of prolific detail Nature here glories in, a delicate hint of wonder and surprise comes stealing. The change, of course, is in myself, not otherwise. And on the particular "crude" occasion I will briefly mention, it reached ...
— The Garden of Survival • Algernon Blackwood
... defined; the epic lacks impetus and has no salient points; outlines are blurred in an unpoetic haze. The history of Tacitus has been described as history 'seen by lightning flashes'. Such should be the history of historical epic. In its stead Silius presents us with a confused welter of archaistic battle, learned ...
— Post-Augustan Poetry - From Seneca to Juvenal • H.E. Butler
... flask. I have been re-casting the beginning of the Hanging Judge or Weir of Hermiston; then I have been cobbling on my Grandfather, whose last chapter (there are only to be four) is in the form of pieces of paper, a huge welter of inconsequence, and that glimmer of faith (or hope) which one learns at this trade, that somehow and some time, by perpetual staring and glowering and re-writing, order will emerge. It is indeed a queer hope; there is one piece ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 25 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... Yarmouth. But I was minded to call you, lad," he said, with a sort of cry leaping from his throat. "The wave struck us at about twelve, and it's been mighty lonesome on deck since with Willie callin' out of the sea. All night he's been callin' out of the welter of the sea. Funny that I haven't heard Upton or Deakin, but on'y Willie! All night until daybreak he called, first on one side of the smack and then on t'other, I don't think I'll tell his mother that. An' I don't see how I'm to put you on shore ...
— Ensign Knightley and Other Stories • A. E. W. Mason
... Night or Scott's Heart of Midlothian, when the poor man was part of a social, political, and ecclesiastical order, disciplined, trained, and self-respecting, not a loose waif and stray in a chaotic welter of separate atoms. These were the facts which really suggested his theory of the 'excrescent' population, produced by the over-speculation of capitalists. The paupers of Glasgow were 'excrescent,' and the 'gluts' were visible ...
— The English Utilitarians, Volume II (of 3) - James Mill • Leslie Stephen
... The stimulus and impetus and inspiration are not lost, and shall not be. No one has counted the youngsters he has hauled, by the scruff of the neck as often as not, out of a slough of middle-class mediocrity, and sent careering off into some welter or current of ideas and conjecture. Carl didn't know where they would end, and no more do any of the rest of us. He knew he loathed stagnation. And he stirred things and stirred people. And the end of the stirring is far from being yet known ...
— An American Idyll - The Life of Carleton H. Parker • Cornelia Stratton Parker
... vanity back of him and a welter of cost ahead. He could see no hope of ever catching up, of ever resting. His only rest would ...
— In a Little Town • Rupert Hughes
... form so omnipotent an element will assume—how long it will welter to and fro as a wild democracy, a wilder anarchy—what constitution and organization it will fashion for itself, and for what depends on it in the depths of time, is a subject for prophetic conjecture, wherein brightest hope is ...
— Captain Sword and Captain Pen - A Poem • Leigh Hunt
... extent of hundreds of pounds, and enormous worry, did not influence him. His reason did not influence him, nor his personal danger. He saw a large hook in the wall to which he could cling when the exquisite crash came, and pictured a welter of broken machinery and timber ten feet below him, and the immense pother that the affair would create ...
— Clayhanger • Arnold Bennett
... irony that even the aristocracy should end by falling victim to its own environment. Exploited by miracle-mongers, thrown off its balance by paroxysms of so-called mysticism, it disappeared from view in a welter of practices and beliefs that were perverse and ...
— Modern Saints and Seers • Jean Finot
... of war to take possession of an alien land, has behaved to its inhabitants with the disinterested zeal for their progress that our people have shown in the Philippines. To leave the islands at this time would mean that they would fall into a welter of murderous anarchy. Such desertion of duty on our part would be a crime against humanity. The character of Governor Taft and of his associates and subordinates is a proof, if such be needed, of the sincerity ...
— State of the Union Addresses of Theodore Roosevelt • Theodore Roosevelt
... picked out the lines of a set purpose from among the welter of promptings in his mind, he found it delayed at ...
— The Woman in Black • Edmund Clerihew Bentley
... semi-sentience, his mind dominated and oppressed by a deathly fear of drowning and a deadening sense of suffocation, with attendant tortures as of being broken on the wheel—limb rending from limb; of compression of his ribs that threatened momentarily to crush in his chest; of a world a-welter with dim swirling green half-lights alternating with flashes of blinding white; of thunderings in his ears like salvoes from ...
— The Black Bag • Louis Joseph Vance
... In the welter of evidence conflicting with apparent fact which was given before the commission and in the trials of the Great Oyer, in the mass of writing both contemporary and of later days round the Overbury mystery, it is hard ...
— She Stands Accused • Victor MacClure
... pang that the hegira meant farewell, perhaps forever, to the chance of recovering her lost daughter Louise from this welter of Paris. How mysterious the ways of the Higher Power! Her beloved nephew the Chevalier, at least, was safe in the distant fortress to which the Count her husband had condemned him. Pray God Louise might be saved—, yes! and ...
— Orphans of the Storm • Henry MacMahon
... Chesterfield, who weighed fourteen stone himself, and was, therefore, out of all but welter-races, and wanted a weight-carrier of tremendous power even for them, subsided under a heap of velvet and cashmere, and Cecil laughed; lying on a divan just under one of the gas branches, the light fell full on his handsome face, with ...
— Under Two Flags • Ouida [Louise de la Ramee]
... the hard knotty tree, and instead of a pillow He had a crown of thorns. And say then, with sore sighing, till thy desire cool, "My dear-worthy Lord hanged on the Rood for me; and I lie in this soft bed, and welter me in sin, like a foul swine that loves but filth." Rise then quickly, and hold thee with prayers, love-sighings and tears. Of three points beware. The first, that the devotions thou hast through grace stirring, be not known ...
— The Form of Perfect Living and Other Prose Treatises • Richard Rolle of Hampole
... and Carlyle set the fashion, it may possibly seem tame to those who are not satisfied with proportion in form and harmony in tint; it will certainly not seem so to those who are more fortunately gifted. Indeed, compared either with Wilson's welter of words, now bombastic, now gushing, now horse-playful, or with the endless and heartbreaking antitheses of what Brougham ill-naturedly but truly called "Tom's snip-snap," it is infinitely preferable. The conclusion of the essay on ...
— Essays in English Literature, 1780-1860 • George Saintsbury
... work of his fellow labourers tell the story in detail, and although no one is in a position to write "finis" to it, there is no doubt as to what its end will be. And the manner of the pilgrimage is quite plain. The starting point is the creation by the befogged ignorance of primitive man of that welter of ghosts and gods which make so much of early existence a veritable nightmare. The journey commences in a world in which the "supernatural" is omnipresent, in which man's chief endeavours is given to ...
— Theism or Atheism - The Great Alternative • Chapman Cohen
... fact, indeed; but I think, that, notwithstanding the Duke of Rutland's patronage, Mr. Crabbe must have written inordinately long sermons. It is strange how many good men do,—losing point and force and efficiency in a welter of words! If there is one rhetorical lesson which it behooves all theologic or academic professors to lay down and enforce, (if need be with the ferule,) it is this,—Be short. It is amazing the way in which ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 83, September, 1864 • Various
... which left the others simply standing in a field of forty-four at Kempton Park, and carrying eight-stone-seven. Here he has a paltry four-pound penalty for the Worcester Welter Handicap, yet one can have seven ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 159, July 7th, 1920 • Various
... discipline which is now displayed in war, might achieve a far more perfect protection for what is good in national life than armies and navies can ever achieve, without demanding the carnage and waste and welter of brutality involved ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 5, August, 1915 • Various
... stopped. More than one frenzied, despairing father, forgetful for the moment of the divine right of property, rushed at a guard and madly strove with him, only to be clubbed into complaisance, or, perchance, be left in a welter of crimson on the drifting snow. Carmen saw it all. She had been to see Pillette that same morning, and had been laughed from his presence. She did not understand, she was told, what miserable creatures these were that dared ask for ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... the address of the Essex University Hospital to the cabby, and settled back in the seat, gripping the hand-guard tightly to fight down the returning pain in his side and leg. His mind was whirling, fighting in a welter of confusion, trying to find some avenue of approach, some way to make sense of the mess. The face in the cab recurred again and again before his eyes, the gaunt, putty-colored cheeks, the sharp glittering eyes. His acquaintance with Frank Mariel ...
— Bear Trap • Alan Edward Nourse
... ruddy glare, that smoky skurry? O is it something in a blaze? Quick, quick, my comrades, hurry! Nicodice, helter-skelter! Or poor Calyce's in flames And Cratylla's stifled in the welter. O these dreadful old men And their dark laws of hate! There, I'm all of a tremble lest I turn out to be too late. I could scarcely get near to the spring though I rose before dawn, What with tattling of tongues and rattling of pitchers in one jostling ...
— Lysistrata • Aristophanes
... his car. He didn't question the patrolman; he hardly even heard him. His mind raced in a welter of confusion, trying desperately to refute the brilliant picture in his mind from that split-second that the spotlight had rested on the driver of the black car, trying to fit the impossible pieces into their places. For the second man in ...
— Infinite Intruder • Alan Edward Nourse
... hear him talk about the races and, very occasionally, as a bonne bouche, about his nephew, the Emperor; or to have him pause for a moment in his walk to ask after the progress of our cures or to be benignantly interested in the amount of money we had put on Leloeffel's hunter for the Frankfurt Welter Stakes. ...
— The Good Soldier • Ford Madox Ford
... Barry. He found himself at once in touch with not an official thinking in terms of military regulations and etiquette, but a soldier and a man. For the A. D. C. S. was both. Through all the terrible days at Ypres, where the Canadians, in that welter of gas and fire and blood, had won their imperishable fame as fighting men, he had been with them, sharing their dangers and ministering to their wants with his brother officers of the fighting line. Physically an unimpressive ...
— The Sky Pilot in No Man's Land • Ralph Connor |
