"Welter" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... creative artist is to turn chaos into cosmos. He has the welter of raw material around him; the shaping instinct crystallizes it into coherent forms. For that intellect is indispensable, and almost from the beginning Haydn's intellect was at work slowly building his folk-music into definite forms easily ...
— Haydn • John F. Runciman
... of our love are poured Through the slow welter of the primal flood From some blind source of monster-haunted mud, And flung together by random forces stored Ere the vast void with rushing worlds was scored— Because we know ourselves but the dim scud Tossed from their heedless keels, the sea-blown ...
— Artemis to Actaeon and Other Worlds • Edith Wharton
... mightiest!" answered 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 ...
— Idylls of the King • Alfred, Lord Tennyson
... 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 in ...
— Clayhanger • Arnold Bennett
... staggering before their foes, the Spanish fleet was now close upon the fatal sands of Zeeland. Already there were but six and a-half fathoms of water, rapidly shoaling under their keels, and the pilots told Medina that all were irretrievably lost, for the freshening north-welter was driving them steadily upon the banks. The English, easily escaping the danger, hauled their wind, and paused to see the ruin of the proud Armada accomplished before their eyes. Nothing but a change of wind at the instant ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... blood-lust which delighted in motiveless murder for the sake of murder, were the order of the day. The revolution was strong enough neither to crush the reactionaries nor to control the revolutionaries themselves. The foundations of the social structure seemed to be dissolving in a welter of blood and crime, and public opinion, which in its hatred of bureaucracy had hitherto sided with the revolution, suddenly drew back in horror from the abyss which opened out in front of it. Stolypin, the Strafford of modern Russia, ...
— The War and Democracy • R.W. Seton-Watson, J. Dover Wilson, Alfred E. Zimmern,
... welter of proposals and counter-proposals there emerged, sometime during 1852 a scheme, propounded by Mr. Bethell, of Westminster for constructing a railway connecting the existing line at Shrewsbury with Aberystwyth. It was to run by way of the Rea Valley, through Minsterley, ...
— The Story of the Cambrian - A Biography of a Railway • C. P. Gasquoine
... splash was wicked and messy. So he splashed—in his mother's face, in Emmie's face, in the fire. He pretty well splashed the fire out. Ten minutes before, the bedroom had been tidy, a thing of beauty. It was now naught but a wild welter of towels, socks, binders—peninsulas of ...
— The Grim Smile of the Five Towns • Arnold Bennett
... sorted itself out on the bottom of the lighter when the hatches overhead were being nailed down. Yet by an odd chance the young Capuchin and Leroy, who had been companions in the chain, were not separated even now. Amid the human welter in that agitated place of darkness, the cries and wails that rang around him, Leroy recognized the voice of the young friar exhorting them ...
— The Historical Nights' Entertainment • Rafael Sabatini
... heart in that fine swift stretch of water known as "The Dip," which connects the pools of the "Heathery Isle" and the "Red Craig," and which is now leased by that good fisherman, Mr. Justice North. I think the Dundurcas water then belonged to the late Mr. Little Gilmour, the well-known welter-weight who went so well to hounds season after season from Melton Mowbray, and who was as keen in the water on Spey as he was over the Leicestershire pastures. A servant of Mr. Little Gilmour was drowned in the ...
— Camps, Quarters, and Casual Places • Archibald Forbes
... 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 most enlightened ...
— The Constitution of the United States - A Brief Study of the Genesis, Formulation and Political Philosophy of the Constitution • James M. Beck
... hills who ravaged, and 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 ...
— A History of the Four Georges, Volume II (of 4) • Justin McCarthy
... an orgy of sentimentality. He seemed to be alone in the world which had paired itself off into a sort of seething welter of happy couples. Taxicabs full of happy couples rolled by every minute. Passing omnibuses creaked beneath the weight of happy couples. The very policeman across the Street had just grinned at a flitting shop girl, and she had smiled back ...
— A Damsel in Distress • Pelham Grenville Wodehouse
... resting upon the world. She was wrapt in rosy dreams and a kimono of the same hue. She wondered what the people in Greenland and Tasmania and Beloochistan were saying one to another about her marriage to Kid McGarry. Not that it made any difference. There was no welter-weight from London to the Southern Cross that could stand up four hours—no; four rounds—with her bridegroom. And he had been hers for three weeks; and the crook of her little finger could sway him more than the fist of any ...
— The Voice of the City • O. Henry
... the sacrifice. I'm very unhappy tonight, darling mother, and selfishly crying out to you. I feel almost like leaving Bernd, and starting for Glion tomorrow. And then when I think of him without me—He's as spiritually alone in this welter as I am. I'm the only one he has, the only human being who understands. Today he said, holding me in his arms—you should see how we cling to each other now as if we were drowning—"When this is over, Chris, when I've paid off my bill of duty ...
— Christine • Alice Cholmondeley
... 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 ...
— Martin Eden • Jack London
... 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 ...
— Ireland In The New Century • Horace Plunkett
... its amplest significance—walls of slightly overhanging rock, through which aided by grinding boulders and scoring shingle, the river has widened as well as deepened its channel a little every century, while between the white welter at their feet lies a breadth of troubled green where the stream flows heaped up, as it were, ...
— Lorimer of the Northwest • Harold Bindloss
... that reason his heart was audibly knocking against his ribs. Again the fantastic incalculableness of life struck him as so remarkable. An occasion, a condition such as this he had scarcely hoped to reach in weeks, or even months, certainly not in the wild welter of New York. From the noise of the steamer and the city, from the rushing and roaring of the Atlantic Ocean, he was suddenly plunged into the silence of the grave. It affected him with a sense of desertion and oblivion. ...
— Atlantis • Gerhart Hauptmann
... 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 ...
— The Strange Case of Mortimer Fenley • Louis Tracy
... Some in the welter of this surging tide Move like the mystic lamps, the Spirits Seven, Their burning love runs kindling far and wide, That fire they needed not to steal from heaven, 'Twas a free gift flung down with them to bide, ...
— Poems by Jean Ingelow, In Two Volumes, Volume II. • Jean Ingelow
... it; it seemed to be floating idly to the run of the seas. Just at this moment the sun's upper limb flashed into view over the edge of the cloud-bank, darting a long gleam of golden radiance athwart the heaving welter to the schooner, and I looked again, half expecting to catch the answering flash of wet oar-blades; but there was nothing of the kind to be seen. Undoubtedly, however, there was something out there,—something that might prove to be a boat,—and ...
— A Pirate of the Caribbees • Harry Collingwood
... 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
... roller tumbled inboard and filled the space forward of the break of the main-deck. The swirling water touched the sides of the long-boat and then receded when the stricken schooner struggled up from the welter. A scuttle-butt was torn from its lashings and went by the board, and ...
— Blow The Man Down - A Romance Of The Coast - 1916 • Holman Day
... 'but think 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
... shot down there in a dirty place— From the mansions 'n' huts we'd come— 'N' of all the welter the 'ardest case Was a little swine with a dimpled face, Who a year ago was dispensin' ...
— 'Hello, Soldier!' - Khaki Verse • Edward Dyson
... 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 ...
— Defenders of Democracy • Militia of Mercy
... 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 ...
— Europe—Whither Bound? - Being Letters of Travel from the Capitals of Europe in the Year 1921 • Stephen Graham
... still afraid of Montgomery, but still more afraid of my cracking red whip-lash; and after some fumbling and hesitation, some whip-cracking and shouting, they lifted him gingerly, carried him down to the beach, and went splashing into the dazzling welter of the sea. ...
— The Island of Doctor Moreau • H. G. Wells
... shape, you see," he told her without his usual diffidence. "I don't know quite why. Everybody says I'm through, but sometimes I think something may turn up. Enough to bring me a little stake anyhow. And, anyway, it pays me a little. I'm working out with Jack English. He's a welter; he's getting ready for a go with Levitt. I've told you a lot about this business, but you can't judge much just from talk. I—I'd like to have you come ...
— Winner Take All • Larry Evans
... with—first, the tract inside the inner line, the settled districts of the North-West Frontier Province, inhabited for the most part by sturdy and somewhat turbulent Pathans; second, the tract between the two lines, that welter of mountains where dwell the hardy brigand hillmen: the tribes of the Black Mountain, of Swat and Bajur, the Mohmands, the Afridis, the Orakzais, the Wazirs, the Mahsuds, and a host of others, whose ...
— Essays in Liberalism - Being the Lectures and Papers Which Were Delivered at the - Liberal Summer School at Oxford, 1922 • Various
... universe of ideas, and as no 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 ...
— The Necessity of Atheism • Dr. D.M. Brooks
... rocks below,—now hidden by the rushing fury of the surges, now outstanding gaunt and grim, with creamy cascades pouring back into the roaring welter below,—showed him how impossible it would have been for any ...
— Pearl of Pearl Island • John Oxenham
... the most admirable of virtues. I think of this last war and of the share our women and the women of other lands have played in it. No one caviled nor complained at the one-ideaness of womankind while the world was in a welter of woe and slaughter. Of all that they had, worth having, our women gave and gave and gave and gave. They gave their sons and their brothers, their husbands and their fathers, to their country; they gave of their time and of their energies and of their talent; they gave of their ...
— 'Oh, Well, You Know How Women Are!' AND 'Isn't That Just Like a Man!' • Irvin Shrewsbury Cobb
... deformity of the national soul. It was a strange 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
... white, red, and amber striped cloth of close-woven camel's hair, rose nobly above all the others, as a mosque rises above a crowd of prostrate worshippers at prayer. For background, there was a clump of trees; for here, in the far southern desert, just outside a waving welter of dunes, lay a region of dayas, where a wilderness of sand and tumbled stones was brightened by green hollows half ...
— A Soldier of the Legion • C. N. Williamson
... "Out-heroding Herod" bears witness to that. One must conceive the development of the Elizabethan age as something so rapid in its accessibility to new impressions and new manners and learning and modes of thought that for years the old and new subsisted side by side. Think of modern Japan, a welter of old faiths and crafts and ideals and inrushing Western civilization all mixed up and side by side in the strangest contrasts and you will understand what it was. The miracle plays stayed on beside Marlowe and Shakespeare ...
— English Literature: Modern - Home University Library Of Modern Knowledge • G. H. Mair
... see; you are stunned, stupefied, as if you yourself had been crushed and numbed in the same catastrophe. Only now and then a face upturned (a face that your guide hasn't pointed out to you) surging out of this incredible welter of faces and forms, smites you with pity, and you feel as if you had received a lacerating wound ...
— A Journal of Impressions in Belgium • May Sinclair
... empty welter of the Fronde there grew with surprising rapidity the conception of a central and united polity of France which has gone on advancing and developing, and, in spite of outrageous revolutionary earthquakes, ...
— Three French Moralists and The Gallantry of France • Edmund Gosse
... 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 ...
— Orphans of the Storm • Henry MacMahon
... March, 44 B.C., plunged the political situation into a worse chaos than had ever been reached during the Civil wars. For several months it was not at all plain how things were tending, or what fresh combinations were to rise out of the welter in which a vacillating and incapable senate formed the only constitutional rallying-point. In spite of all his long-cherished delusions, Cicero must have known that this way no hope lay; when at last he flung himself into the conflict, and broke away ...
— Latin Literature • J. W. Mackail
... were a collection of jagged rocks, exposed at low tide. Under the incessant flashes their black heads appeared and disappeared in a welter of frothy white. It was an ominous spectacle for ...
— Jim Spurling, Fisherman - or Making Good • Albert Walter Tolman
... was the Conqueror. The artificial mound on which the Round Tower stands may or may not be pre-historic. The slopes of the hill were inhabited, like nearly all our English sites, by the Romans, and by the savages before and after the Romans; but the welter of the Saxon dark ages did not use this abrupt elevation for a stronghold. What military reasoning led William of Falaise to discern it at once and there to ...
— The Historic Thames • Hilaire Belloc
... 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 sin for heavenly ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... 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 me from the most obvious and banal of conditions—the ...
— The Garden of Survival • Algernon Blackwood
... fathers crossed the 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, such toils impelled ...
— The American Union Speaker • John D. Philbrick
... is like 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 a ...
— Godfrey Marten, Undergraduate • Charles Turley
... having been forced by the exigencies 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 of our effort to give the islanders a constantly increasing measure of self-government, ...
— Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents - Section 2 (of 2) of Supplemental Volume: Theodore Roosevelt, Supplement • Theodore Roosevelt
... passed since that day of lunacy. What a noise and a fuss and a chattering and an uproar there was! And what a welter of unseemliness and disorder and stupidity and bad manners! And I the cause of it all! Yet part of the scene was also ridiculous—at all events to myself it was so. I am not quite sure what was the matter with me—whether I was merely stupefied or whether I purposely broke loose and ran amok. At ...
— The Gambler • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... little house, with its sagging blinds! It squatted there through the year like a one-eyed beggar without a friend—lost in its venerable white-beard winters, or contemplating an untidy welter of rusty farm machinery through ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1917 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... furtive glance about him. His stripped and naked soul was enduring a foretaste of the Judgment Day. The whip of scorn with which the lawyer lashed him cut into his shrinking sensibilities, and left him a welter of raw and livid wales. Good God! why had he not known it would be like this? He was paying for his treachery and usury, and it was being burnt into him that as the years passed he must continue to pay in self-contempt and ...
— Ridgway of Montana - (Story of To-Day, in Which the Hero Is Also the Villain) • William MacLeod Raine
... "In the welter of the conflict an emperor of Austria-Hungary has died, full of years and of sorrow, a czar of Russia has stepped from his throne, and a king of Greece has lost his crown," said a well-known publicist, reviewing the ...
— America's War for Humanity • Thomas Herbert Russell
... a welter of rocks above it as a dam holds the pressure of water—and the dam had burst. The torrent of stone from above had swept into motion and carried with it the accumulation of loose rubble below. Where the ledge had been was now a ...
— Astounding Stories, March, 1931 • Various
... books and all about machinery, and have good habits, and so forth. Surely on one of those far worlds there was at least one boy like himself, who was being a boy for the last time and would to-morrow be a man. For Wilbur Cowan, beneath this starry welter of creation—of worlds to be or in being, or lifeless hulks that had been worlds and were outworn—was on this June night uplifted to face the parting of the ways. His last day had been lived as a boy with ...
— The Wrong Twin • Harry Leon Wilson
... 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 ...
— The Golden Bowl • Henry James
... that the mind can conceive. For 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 ...
— Freedom In Service - Six Essays on Matters Concerning Britain's Safety and Good Government • Fossey John Cobb Hearnshaw
... her eyes. There were dreadful sounds of falling bodies, of bodies dragged on the ground, with grunts and groans and smothered cries. Then silence. When she dared to look she could see at first only a welter of men and horses half-hidden by the dust. Near her lay the gold horse with his head twisted backward by the taut rope, which choked him until his eyes bulged, and foam dripped from his lips. The man who had held the lariat lay half ...
— The Heart of Thunder Mountain • Edfrid A. Bingham
... be listened in on. But maybe the monitoring men are having their hair stand on end from the welter of communications ...
— Long Ago, Far Away • William Fitzgerald Jenkins AKA Murray Leinster
... for our ensamples," and we should be foolish indeed if we did not take stock of them with an anxious eye to the future. The main and startling fact is that with every apparent desire for the re-establishment of Europe on better lines, Europe, as a matter of fact, drifted back into the old welter of conflicting nationalities, while the very instrument of peace—the Holy Alliance—was used by autocratic governments for the subjection of smaller nationalities and the destruction of popular freedom. It is accordingly ...
— Armageddon—And After • W. L. Courtney
... blasts as they rush up across the layers of rock below, like hounds leaping up at their prey; and far beneath, the horrible confused battle-roar of that great leaguer of waves. He cannot see them, as he strains his eyes over the wall into the blank depth,—nothing but a confused welter and quiver of mingled air, and rain, and spray, as if the very atmosphere were writhing in the clutches of the gale: but he can hear,—what can he not hear? It would have needed a less vivid brain than Elsley's to ...
— Two Years Ago, Volume I • Charles Kingsley
... Bough—God! she was madhouse and purgatory rolled into one! My own agility and knowledge saved me from ill usage for the moment, since the mates had plenty of ignorant, clumsy material to work upon. Such material! I never before or after saw such a welter of human misery as on that bright morning, such a crowd of sick, suffering, terrified men. Most of them knew not one rope from another, some of them knew not a word of English, half of them were still drunk, and stumbled and fell as they were driven about, the other half were seasick and all ...
— The Blood Ship • Norman Springer
... and unspeakable divinities. The gods of wealth, of egoism, of alcohol, of fornication, we must not acknowledge; nay, we must resist unto death their malign influence and power. But alas, what are we doing to-day? Instead of looking up to the pure and lofty souls of Europe for guidance, we welter in the mud with the lowest and most degenerate. We are beginning to know and appreciate English whiskey, but not English freedom; we know the French grisettes, but not the French sages; we guzzle German beer, but of German wisdom ...
— The Book of Khalid • Ameen Rihani
... the year made it difficult to delay its appearance in England any longer. It came out in the thirteenth month of the war, and my conscience was troubled by the awful incongruity of throwing this bit of imagined drama into the welter of reality, tragic enough in all conscience but even more cruel than tragic and more inspiring than cruel. It seemed awfully presumptuous to think there would be eyes to spare for those pages in a community which in the crash of the big guns and in the din of brave ...
— Notes on My Books • Joseph Conrad
... or part 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 ...
— Deadham Hard • Lucas Malet
... or shore. All was as primal, as chaotic, as menacing as it had been on that Friday night three centuries before when the Pilgrims' shallop beat in by the point, its tiny white sail drowned like the wing of a seagull in the dusky welter of ...
— Old Plymouth Trails • Winthrop Packard
... sticks his head out the window. Me! Well, I'm in trainin' down the Street. The old man's goin' to put a seat on the Stock Exchange in my stockin' my next birthday. But it all sounds like a lemon to me. What I like is golf and yachtin' and—er—well, say a corkin' fast ten-round bout between welter-weights with walkin' gloves." ...
— Strictly Business • O. Henry
... Bertram's ruffian band now enter, and range themselves across the stage, giving fresh cause for Imogine's screams and madness. St. Aldobrand, having received his mortal wound behind the scenes, totters in to welter in his blood, and to die at the feet of this ...
— Biographia Literaria • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... at this moment of a whole welter of doubt and confusion and misunderstanding of people's motives and positions, to explain a great deal. Was that the reason why he'd been so happy in old Zachary Tan's shop years ago? Why he'd been happy through ...
— Fortitude • Hugh Walpole
... to Hazel of Reddin's visit. He forgot it himself when she came home; it slipped into the weary welter of life as he saw it now—all life, that is, other than Hazel's. Brutality, lust, cruelty—these summed up the world of good people and bad people. He rather preferred the bad ones; their eyes were less awful, ...
— Gone to Earth • Mary Webb
... 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 Fifth-Dimension Tube • William Fitzgerald Jenkins
... hit, squarely on top of him. Something ripped and splattered and blacked out in an unbearable welter of agony. ...
— The Sky Is Falling • Lester del Rey
... the main floor were holding the slaans partially in check. Bodies were lying in a welter—I shall not describe it. Then abruptly, upon a table a huge slaan leaped—his garments blood-stained from his victims, a blade of dripping steel in his hands. He shouted above the tumult—words not ...
— Tarrano the Conqueror • Raymond King Cummings
... let him finish on that uncontrolled phrase, though it will be acknowledged that his provocation was great. Nor must we leave him in heavy captivity to the thought of oblivion in the unregarding welter of the near republic, of plunging into more strenuous activities and abandoning his ideal, in queer inverted analogy to the refuging of weak women in a convent. We know that his ideal was strong enough to reassert itself, under a keen irony of suggestion, ...
— The Imperialist • (a.k.a. Mrs. Everard Cotes) Sara Jeannette Duncan
... bothered to know the whole context of anything. An old trick to fasten on phrases and slogans to fix an attitude in the public mind, for a phrase or slogan was about all the public was able to master. Anyone who had ever served on a jury, observed its deliberations, knew that out of all the welter of evidence, only certain isolated statements or facts, often minor and insignificant, penetrated the juror's mind, and around these bits he formed his conclusions. Any smart lawyer knew that, and tried to set up his ...
— Eight Keys to Eden • Mark Irvin Clifton
... went down-stairs to see how the dining and reception rooms looked, and Fadette began putting away the welter of discarded garments—she was a radiant vision—a splendid greenish-gold figure, with gorgeous hair, smooth, soft, shapely ivory arms, a splendid neck and bust, and a swelling form. She felt beautiful, and yet she was a little nervous—truly. Frank himself would be critical. ...
— The Titan • Theodore Dreiser
... too. Thou didst promise to marry me. Deny it if thou canst." Instead, she plunges into a prolix recital of the circumstances of the engagement, so that the all-important fact that the engagement exists has no special emphasis in her welter of words. "If thou wert an honest man," she cries, "thyself and the money too. Thou didst swear to me upon a parcel-gilt goblet, sitting in my Dolphin-chamber, at the round table, by a sea-coal ...
— The Century Vocabulary Builder • Creever & Bachelor
... the changes of the bay. The southwest wind sweeps rain over it in slanting drifts. The islands show dimly grey amid a welter of grey water, breaking angrily in short, petulant seas, which buffet boats confusedly and put the helmsmen's skill to a high test. Or chilly, curling mists wrap islands and promontories from sight. Terns, circling somewhere up above, cry to ...
— Priscilla's Spies 1912 • George A. Birmingham
... walked slowly to the 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 ...
— Autobiography of a YOGI • Paramhansa Yogananda
... momentary devices and desires of the separate heart. It will be borne in mind that these definitions are too clear-cut; that these divisions appear in the complexities of human experience, blurred and modified by the welter of cross currents, subsidiary conflicting movements, which obscure all human problems. They represent genuine and significant divisions of thought and conduct. But they appear in actual experience as controlling emphases ...
— Preaching and Paganism • Albert Parker Fitch
... the pain has become intolerable. Everybody turned in their seats—gazing through the dimness to a point in the Promenade near to where I was. The ghosts on the screen were forgotten. The faked patriotism of the songs we had listened to had become a thing of naught. Through the welter of bombast, excitement and emotion we ...
— The Glory of the Trenches • Coningsby Dawson
... history, at any rate, the lords vindicated their independence. The church was the only other body which profited by the strife; within its portals and its courts there was some law and order, some peace and refuge from the worldly welter; and it seized the opportunity to broaden its jurisdiction, magnify its law, exalt its privileges, and assert that to it belonged principally the right to elect and to depose sovereigns. Greater still would have been its services to civilization, ...
— The History of England - A Study in Political Evolution • A. F. Pollard
... bell chimes: 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 sea-bird beats against ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. XXII (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... glorious countersigns. Can you conceive that their appearance, all in that one epoch, was a matter of chance? Is not some prearrangement suggested,—a put-up job, as they say: a definite plan formed, and a definite end aimed at? Then by whom? Can you escape the conclusion that, behind all this welter of races and separate histories aloof or barking at each other, there is yet somewhere, within the ringfence of humankind, incarnate or excarnate, One Center from which all the threads and currents proceed, and all the ...
— The Crest-Wave of Evolution • Kenneth Morris
... 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, ...
— The Works Of Lord Byron, Vol. 3 (of 7) • Lord Byron
... 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 ...
— Life of John Milton • Richard Garnett
... joy, of yearning, was a thing cosmic, so strong that regret and grief were for the time swept on and buried in the welter of emotions running free. ...
— The Sagebrusher - A Story of the West • Emerson Hough
... clothes from one side of my body, and sent me, sprawling and breathless, into the welter of sagging weeds. ...
— The Terror from the Depths • Sewell Peaslee Wright
... thrust forward blindly into this reek, with naught of comfort on any hand, nor even the dimmest ray of hope visible from any fixed thing on ahead, in like travail of going, in like groaning to the very soul, the bark of my life now lay in the welter, helpless, reft of storm and strife, blind, counseled by no fixed ray ahead. I know not what purpose remained in me, that, like the ship which bore us, I still, dumbly and without conscious purpose, forged onward to some point fixed by reason ...
— The Lady and the Pirate - Being the Plain Tale of a Diligent Pirate and a Fair Captive • Emerson Hough
... shadow-boxer he excelled; as a 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 ...
— Sundry Accounts • Irvin S. Cobb
... in his own sight; he could then only sin when he did some act against his 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 ...
— Virginibus Puerisque • Robert Louis Stevenson
... discontent took life and fire. The act was of his own conception; the dull dog was ambitious. Brandeis declares he would not be dissuaded; perhaps his adviser did not seriously try, perhaps did not dream that in that welter of contradictions, the Samoan constitution, any one point would be considered sacred. I have told how Tamasese assumed the title of Tuiatua. In August 1888 a year after his installation, he took a more formidable step and assumed that of Malietoa. This name, as I have said, is of peculiar honour; ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 17 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... I have found myself weaponless and with an undefended back, amidst a crowd of these Selenites, but never quite so vividly. It is, of course, as absolutely irrational a feeling as one could well have, and I hope gradually to subdue it. But just for a moment, as I swept forward into the welter of the vast crowd, it was only by gripping my litter tightly and summoning all my will-power that I succeeded in avoiding an outcry or some such manifestation. It lasted perhaps three minutes; then I had myself ...
— The First Men In The Moon • H. G. Wells
... good deal cracked and bad travelling. From thence through low sandhills, flooded box flats, steep sandhills; crossed Narro Dhaerrie swamp; crossed creek at east end of main water; this drying up fast. Crossed creek twice and camped on south side of lower end of Tac Welter. ...
— McKinlay's Journal of Exploration in the Interior of Australia • John McKinlay
... published his first poem, and Canova was still in the height of his well-earned fame. It was before the first steamboat of Robert Fulton had vexed the quiet waters of the Hudson, or Aaron Burr had failed in his attempted treason, or Daniel Welter had entered upon his professional career, or Thomas Jefferson had completed his first official term as President of ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, August, 1863, No. 70 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various
... Home Rule Bill, the Welsh Church Disestablishment Bill and the Plural Voting Bill. It was terrific. The newspapers could scarcely print it—or anything—terrifically enough. Adjectives and epithets became exhausted with overwork and burst. The word crisis lost all meaning. There was such a welter of crises that the explosions of those that came to a head were unnoticed and pushed away into the obscurest corners of the newspapers, before the alarming swelling of those freshly rushing to a head. It was magnificent. It was a deliciously ...
— If Winter Comes • A.S.M. Hutchinson
... chosen—men, for instance, like Cecil Reeve and Arthur Ensart—perhaps even such a man as James Allys, 3rd. Captain Dane, of course, had been a foregone conclusion, and John Lyndhurst was logical enough; also W. Grismer, and the jaunty, obese Mr. Welter, known in sporting circles as Helter Skelter Welter, and more briefly and profanely as Hel. His running mate, Harry Ferris had been included. And there was a number of others privileged to drift into the rooms of Athalie Greensleeve when she chose to be at ...
— Athalie • Robert W. Chambers
... ones, or who shade their eyes and point to a glory on the horizon, or who, having striven forward, sink on their knees, overcome by a vision which they alone can behold. And recollecting that fresco of Signorelli's, you feel as if this vast, tall canvas at S. Maria dell' Orto, where topple and welter the dead and the quick, were merely so much rhetorical rhodomontade by the side of the old hymn of ...
— Renaissance Fancies and Studies - Being a Sequel to Euphorion • Violet Paget (AKA Vernon Lee)
... time we got down, our information had come and we set off through a welter of transport trains, artillery, ambulances, marching troops, and goodness knows what else, in the direction of X——. When we got within a couple of kilometers of the place, an officer stopped us and asked if we knew where we were going. He ...
— A Journal From Our Legation in Belgium • Hugh Gibson
... build from west to east, From Gihon to Olivet, Waters to lead and wells to clear, And the garden furrows to set. From the Sheep Gate to the Fish Gate Is a welter of mire and mess; And southward over the common lands ...
— The Moon Endureth—Tales and Fancies • John Buchan
... not be sedately and patiently dining at second-table and murmuring "Yes, me Lady" in that meek and obedient manner. But it fairly took my breath, the adroit and expeditious manner in which Struthers had that welter of luggage unstrapped and unbuckled and warped into place and things stowed away, even down to her ladyship's rather ridiculous folding canvas bathtub. In little more than two shakes she had a shimmering litter of toilet things out on the dresser tops, and even a nickel alcohol-lamp ...
— The Prairie Mother • Arthur Stringer
... general cheerful activity in lump sums of bitter sorrow. There were nights—and especially after seasons of exceptional excitement and nervous activity—when the reckoning would be presented and Mr. Britling would welter prostrate and groaning under a stormy sky of unhappiness—active insatiable unhappiness—a ...
— Mr. Britling Sees It Through • H. G. Wells
... him all about, And all the forces of embattled wrong, There are so many devils to cast out— Save God be with him, how shall Man be strong? With his own heart at war, to weakness prone, And all the honeyed ways of joyous sinning, How in this welter shall he hold his own, And, single-handed, e'er have hopes of winning? How shall he fight ...
— A Jongleur Strayed - Verses on Love and Other Matters Sacred and Profane • Richard Le Gallienne |
