"Wrack" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... hold them, it remains now that I speak in general of the offences and defences, that may chance in each of the forenamed. We have formerly said that it is necessary for a Prince to have good foundations laid; otherwise it must needs be that he go to wrack. The Principal foundations that all States have, as well new, as old, or mixt, are good laws, and good armes; and because there cannot be good laws, where there are not good armes; and where there are good armes, there must needs be good laws, ...
— Machiavelli, Volume I - The Art of War; and The Prince • Niccolo Machiavelli
... wildly boisterous, but now the wind had dropped, only its rags went fluttering through the night. The rays of the full moon fell in a shower between the branches. Overhead still raced the scud and wrack, shaped like hurrying monsters; but below the earth was quiet. Still and dripping stood the hosts of trees. Their trunks gleamed wet and sparkling where the moon caught them. There was a strong smell of ...
— The Man Whom the Trees Loved • Algernon Blackwood
... meshed from the sea by the numberless rocks round me engrossed my attention. How white and pellucid was the shallow near me—no shadow but the shadow of my face bending over it—nothing to ripple its surface, but my imperceptible breath! By and by a bunch of knotted wrack floated in from the outside and lodged in a crevice; a minute creature with fringed feet darted from it and swam across it. After the knotted wrack came the fragment of a green and silky substance, delicate enough to have been the remnant of a web, woven in the ...
— The Morgesons • Elizabeth Stoddard
... thrying all ways of spelling the name of the blamed thing so as to get the same right wunst any way—is played wid the feet. You slide the sheet wid the holes punched into 'em into the wrack over the keeze and then wurrk the feet up and down like yer husband Tana used to do at ...
— The Launch Boys' Adventures in Northern Waters • Edward S. Ellis
... soul can first lift tired eyes On her changed world of ruin, waste and wrack, Ah, what a pang of aching sharp surprise Brings all sweet memories of the lost past back, With wild self-pitying grief of one betrayed, Duped in a land of dreams where Truth ...
— The Poems of Emma Lazarus - Vol. I (of II.), Narrative, Lyric, and Dramatic • Emma Lazarus
... was getting low, but he decided that did not matter either. Even so, Ross got to his feet, moving over to the drifts of storm wrack to gather more. Why should he stay here by a useless beacon? But somehow he could not force himself to move on, as futile as his ...
— The Time Traders • Andre Norton
... through Concepcion Strait, or even weathered Duke of York Island. He nodded to his junior, whose presence on the bridge was a mere matter of form, owing to the powerless condition of the ship and the impenetrable wrack of foam and mist that barred vision ahead, and strode off on a tour of inspection. As wind and sea were now beating more directly on the port side, there was some degree of shelter along the covered-in deck to starboard. He found that two boats had ...
— The Captain of the Kansas • Louis Tracy
... extinguished sun, flying blindly through space, plunge into a vast cloud of meteoric particles, and, under the lashing impact of so many myriads of missiles, break into superficial incandescence, while the cosmical wrack through which it had driven remained glowing with nebulous luminosity? Such an explanation has been offered by Seeliger. Or was Vogel right when he suggested that Nova Aurigae could be accounted ...
— Pleasures of the telescope • Garrett Serviss
... best at night when the storm tore and tugged at the stones and birchbark of the turf roof, and the sea-wrack came right up to the ...
— Weird Tales from Northern Seas • Jonas Lie
... think anybody'd be ashamed," said he, "to let things go to wrack an' ruin this way." The paths were thick with weeds. Faithful sweet-william and phlox had evidently struggled for years and barely held their own against misfortune, and bouncing-bet was thrifty. But others of ...
— Country Neighbors • Alice Brown
... against the table across the room, quietly observing Portsmouth upon the word-wrack. Her whole manner had changed. She watched with evident delight the play of discomfiture, mingled with contempt, ...
— Mistress Nell - A Merry Tale of a Merry Time • George C. Hazelton, Jr.
... the Poor are old, cumbrous, unequal, as stupid as those who administer them. Forth steps the Reformer, and cries out—"Clear this wrack away! Get rid of your antiquated Bumbledom, your parochial and non-parochial distinctions, your complicated map of local authorities; re-distribute the kingdom on some more practical system, redress ...
— Ginx's Baby • Edward Jenkins
... central masses raised their heads above the surface, higher and higher with every earthquake throe from beneath; till at length the gigantic Ben More attained to its present altitude of two thousand three hundred feet over the sea-level, and the sandstone, borne up from beneath like floating sea-wrack on the back of a porpoise, reached in long outside bands its elevation of from six to eight hundred. And such is the piece of history, composed in silent but expressive language, and inscribed in the old geological character, on ...
— The Cruise of the Betsey • Hugh Miller
... pray for? To what purpose and end ought she to steel herself? Ought she to hope, or ought she to despair? "O God, help me!" she kept whispering to Jehovah whenever the heavenly vision shone through the wrack of her meditation. "O God, help me!" She had a conscience that, when it was in the mood for severity, could ...
— The Old Wives' Tale • Arnold Bennett
... and pale, With the terror of death upon him; of failure is all his tale: "They have fled while the flag waved o'er them! they've turned to the foe their back! They are scattered, pursued, and slaughtered! the fields are all rout and wrack!" ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XI., April, 1863, No. LXVI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics. • Various
... wind abated its rage and the thunder pealed faint with distance, while ever and anon the gloom gave place to a vague light, where, beyond the flying cloud-wrack, ...
— Black Bartlemy's Treasure • Jeffrey Farnol
... great dramatist. "They have acted my fatal tragedies on the stage," wrote Smith. Many circumstances in The Tempest were doubtless suggested by the wreck of the Sea Venture on "the still vext Bermoothes," as described by William Strachey in his True Repertory of the Wrack and Redemption of Sir Thomas Gates, written at Jamestown, and published at London in 1610. Shakespeare's contemporary, Michael Drayton, the poet of the Polyolbion, addressed a spirited valedictory ode to the three shiploads of "brave, heroic minds" who sailed from London in 1606 ...
— Initial Studies in American Letters • Henry A. Beers
... net were curious; and as the cork line was drawn back flat on the sands, there was plenty of work for the men to pick off the net the masses of tangled fucus and bladder-wrack which had come up with the tide. Jelly-fish—great transparent discs with their strangely-coloured tentacles—were there by the dozen; pieces of floating wood, scraps of rope and canvas, and a couple of the curious squids with ...
— Sappers and Miners - The Flood beneath the Sea • George Manville Fenn
... side. Behind them were half a dozen women, playing fifes and horns. One was carrying a tattered flag. Behind the musicians came a motley crowd. Old women, young women, half-grown children, and dozens of old men. All were armed. And they came forward like the wrack of a surviving army ...
— Hunters Out of Space • Joseph Everidge Kelleam
... the wine ye drank last night an' the fancy grub ye et to-day. 'Twas a grand wrack ...
— The Harbor Master • Theodore Goodridge Roberts
... the shortness of a triennial sitting would have the following ill effects: It would make the member more shamelessly and shockingly corrupt; it would increase his dependence on those who could best support him at his election; it would wrack and tear to pieces the fortunes of those who stood upon their own fortunes and their private interest; it would make the electors infinitely more venal; and it would make the whole body of the people, who are, whether they have votes or not, concerned in elections, more lawless, more idle, more ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. VII. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... edge of the reef, always a perilous haven! There is one rock in the coral belt, through which a boat can safely run to shore; but the little wharf, built there of the largest coral blocks that could be rolled together, has been once and again swept clean off by the hurricane, leaving "not a wrack behind." ...
— The Story of John G. Paton - Or Thirty Years Among South Sea Cannibals • James Paton
... across the room to the window which he half opened. A puff of wind dispelled the stifling atmosphere which was enveloping him. To exercise his limbs, he walked up and down gazing at the ceiling where crabs and sea-wrack stood out in relief against a background as light in color as the sands of the seashore. A similar decor covered the plinths and bordered the partitions which were covered with Japanese sea-green crepe, slightly wrinkled, imitating a river rippled by the wind. In ...
— Against The Grain • Joris-Karl Huysmans
... walked along in no very happy frame of mind, the more so, as the rising wind and flying wrack of clouds above (through which a watery moon had peeped at fitful intervals) seemed to presage a wild night. It needed but this to make my misery the more complete, for, as far as I could tell, if I slept at all (and I was already ...
— The Broad Highway • Jeffery Farnol
... stood like an ancient man in a gray-streaked mantle wrapt. The clouds cast their burdens down on the broad plain of al-Ghabit, as a trader from al-Yaman unfolds from the bales his store; And the topmost crest, on the morrow, of al-Mujaimir's cairn, was heaped with the flood-borne wrack, like wool ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 2 • Charles Dudley Warner
... dangerous rock, so slightly above water that at two leagues' distant it was not visible from the look-out, was discovered in latitude 15 degrees 50 minutes, and 148 degrees 10 minutes longitude. The constant recurrence of breakers, trunks of trees in large quantities, fruits and sea wrack, and the smoothness of the sea, all indicated the neighbourhood of extensive land to the south-east. It was New Holland. Bougainville determined to leave these dangerous latitudes, where he was likely to meet with nothing ...
— Celebrated Travels and Travellers - Part 2. The Great Navigators of the Eighteenth Century • Jules Verne
... four ingredients, will, after being a month or more in the aquarium, acquire the other constituents which are normally present in minute quantities in the natural sea-water. It must derive them from the action of the plants or animals, or both. Bromine may come from sponges, or sea-wrack, perhaps. Thus ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, No. 47, September, 1861 • Various
... pinnace, or cock, or upon rafters, and such like means presenting themselves to men in those extremities, for we desired to save the men by every possible means. But all in vain, sith God had determined their ruin; yet all that day, and part of the next, we beat up and down as near unto the wrack as was possible for us, looking out if by good hap we ...
— Sir Humphrey Gilbert's Voyage to Newfoundland • Edward Hayes
... think I did not know, I did not feel— what wrack, what weal for him: golden one, golden one, turn again Aphrodite with the yellow zone, I am cursed, cursed, undone! Ah and my face, Aphrodite, beside your gold, is cut out of ...
— Hymen • Hilda Doolittle
... (when he saw his countries go to wrack), From bick'ring with his folk, to keep the Britons back, Cast up that mightly mound of eighty miles in length, ...
— Cameos from English History, from Rollo to Edward II • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... I think now that I could get on by myself; but still, Edward, you know we cannot tell what a day may bring forth, and I might fall sick, or something happen which might prevent my attending to anything; and then, without you or Pablo, everything might have gone to wrack and ruin. Certainly, when we think how we were left, by the death of old Jacob, to our own resources, we have much to thank God for in ...
— The Children of the New Forest • Captain Marryat
... said nay; I look'd for Jamie back; But the wind it blew high, and the ship it was a wrack; His ship it was a wrack—Why didna Jamie dee? Or why do I live to ...
— The Golden Treasury - Of the Best Songs and Lyrical Poems in the English Language • Various
... the next few days. It really seemed as though that frantic hyperbole, "blown to atoms," had for once realised itself. There was not a visible particle of Plattner to be seen; not a drop of blood nor a stitch of clothing to be found. Apparently he had been blown clean out of existence and left not a wrack behind. Not so much as would cover a sixpenny piece, to quote a proverbial expression! The evidence of his absolute disappearance as a consequence of that ...
— The Country of the Blind, And Other Stories • H. G. Wells
... deed alike are lost: Not a pillar nor a post In his Croisic keeps alive the feat as it befell; Not a head in white and black On a single fishing-smack, In memory of the man but for whom had gone to wrack All that France saved from the fight whence England bore the bell. Go to Paris: rank on rank Search the heroes flung pell-mell On the Louvre, face and flank! You shall look long enough ere you come to Herve Riel. So, for better ...
— Elson Grammer School Literature, Book Four. • William H. Elson and Christine Keck
... crawl A brindled loach to bask and sprawl, Tasting the warm sun ere it dipped Into the water; but quick as fear Back his shining brown head slipped To crouch on the gravel of his lair, Where the cooled sunbeams, broke in wrack, Spilt shattered gold about his back. So within that green-veiled air, Within that white-walled quiet, where Innocent water thought aloud,— Childish prattle that must make The wise sunlight with laughter shake On the leafage overbowed,— Often ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 2 (of 4) • Various
... through space, or even a screw get loose and cause a momentary stoppage of the motor, it is abundantly evident that escape from total and swift destruction would be "miraculous" indeed, for the whole affair would come to the ground like a thunderbolt, and "leave not a wrack behind!" ...
— Up in the Clouds - Balloon Voyages • R.M. Ballantyne
... to the realms which he coasted! for there Was shedding of blood and rending of hair, Rape of maiden and slaughter of priest, Gathering of ravens and wolves to the feast; When he hoisted his standard black, Before him was battle, behind him wrack, And he burned the churches, that heathen Dane, To light his band ...
— Sir Henry Morgan, Buccaneer - A Romance of the Spanish Main • Cyrus Townsend Brady
... Anselm lives in ev'ry page, And sits archbishop still, to vex the age. Had he foreseen—and who knows but he did?— This fatal wrack, which deep in time lay hid, 'Tis but just to believe, that little hand Which clouded him, but now benights our land, Had never—like Elias—driv'n him hence, A sad retirer for a slight offence. For were he now, like the returning year, Restor'd, to view these ...
— Poems of Henry Vaughan, Silurist, Volume II • Henry Vaughan
... cruelties and wrongs—his picture of their miserable lot and of the envied aristocrats' pleasures—and then consider the pitch of frenzied republicanism to which this wonderful fraternal climax uplifted them! With crash of thunder and wrack of the elements the Storm must break, directly the popular feeling found immediate object of ...
— Orphans of the Storm • Henry MacMahon
... shrouded in mist, the nearer leafless shrubs swaying in the chill wind, pavement glistening in the flickering light of street lamps. A dismal morning to be setting off to the sea! Portent of head winds and foul weather that we may meet in Channel before the last of Glasgow's grime and smoke-wrack ...
— The Brassbounder - A Tale of the Sea • David W. Bone
... separated the Stone Farm fields from the sea. Within this belt of sand the land was stony and afforded poor grazing; but on both sides of the brook a strip of green meadow-land ran down among the dunes, which were covered with dwarf firs and grass-wrack to bind the sand. The best grazing was on this meadow-land, but it was hard work minding both sides of it, as the brook ran between; and it had been impressed upon the boy with severe threats, that no animal ...
— Pelle the Conqueror, Complete • Martin Andersen Nexo
... to overwhelm me, Hell never hated good, as I hate you, Sir; And I dare tell it to your face: What glory Now after all your Conquests got, your Titles, The ever-living memories rais'd to you, Can my defeat be? my poor wrack, what triumph? And when you crown your swelling Cups to fortune, What honourable tongue can sing my story? Be as your Emblem is, a g[l]orious Lamp Set on the top of all, to light all perfectly: Be as your office ...
— Beaumont & Fletcher's Works (2 of 10) - The Humourous Lieutenant • Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher
... surely. The wrack and ruin of three score years; and it's a terror to live that length, I tell you, and to have your sons going to the dogs against you, and you wore out scolding them, and skelping them, and God ...
— The Playboy of the Western World • J. M. Synge
... Mary, and Joan, Let's cut the meat up unto the bone, For welcome you need not fear; And here for good liquor we shall not lack, It will whet my brains and strengthen my back; This jolly good cheer it must go to wrack: God send us a merry ...
— In The Yule-Log Glow, Vol. IV (of IV) • Harrison S. Morris
... and gloom-wrack, Out of the dim and yore, Freighted as train or caravan Was never ...
— Behind the Arras - A Book of the Unseen • Bliss Carman
... wrack tattered and the stars appeared, Millions of stars that seemed to speak in fire; A byre-cock cried aloud that morning neared, The swinging wind-vane flashed ...
— Georgian Poetry 1913-15 • Edited by E. M. (Sir Edward Howard Marsh)
... tossed the barque Since first it had its maiden trip, Full many a conflagration's spark Has scorched and seared the laboring ship; And yet it ploughs a straightway course, Through wrack of billows; wind-tossed, spent, On sails the troubled Ship of State, ...
— Poems Teachers Ask For, Book Two • Various
... toilets, the eddy of trailing robes with its fairy-foam of lace, the ivorine loveliness of glossy shoulders and jewelled throats, the glimmering of satin-slippered feet,—than to watch the raging of the flood without, or the flying of the wrack ... ...
— Chita: A Memory of Last Island • Lafcadio Hearn
... saw the slanting spars, And if he watched the shifting track, He marked, too, the eternal stars Shine through the wrack. ...
— The Little Book of Modern Verse • Jessie B. Rittenhouse
... October 1896 Brandon was filled with a great exultation. As he stood, for a moment, at the door of his house in the Precincts before crossing the Green to the Cathedral, he looked up at the sky obscured with flying wrack of cloud, felt the rain drive across his face, heard the elms in the neighbouring garden creaking and groaning, saw the lights of the town far beneath the low wall that bounded the Precincts sway and blink ...
— The Cathedral • Hugh Walpole
... flatten'd heights, When fish were in the elm-tops caught, Where once the stock-dove wont to bide, And does were floating, all distraught, Adown the tide. Old Tiber, hurl'd in tumult back From mingling with the Etruscan main, Has threaten'd Numa's court with wrack And Vesta's fane. Roused by his Ilia's plaintive woes, He vows revenge for guiltless blood, And, spite of Jove, his banks o'erflows, Uxorious flood. Yes, Fame shall tell of civic steel That better Persian lives had spilt, ...
— Odes and Carmen Saeculare of Horace • Horace
... "A wrack!" gasped Mrs. Trefethen, "and 'im in hit! Save us! but 'twill be worse than down shaft. Shaft be dry land, anyway, but they awful sea that rageth like a lion seeking whom it may devour. Oh, ...
— The Copper Princess - A Story of Lake Superior Mines • Kirk Munroe
... and in January he died on his ship, at Nombre de Dios. His remains were consigned to a sailor's grave—the wide ocean—and as the ship moved on her way, the crew, looking back to the place where the body had gone down, saw the phantom smack rise from the deep, rush like a wind-blown wrack across the spot, and melt into the air as it ...
— Myths & Legends of our New Possessions & Protectorate • Charles M. Skinner
... their awfish(3) skreekin', They 'tice folk to their death; Then ride aboon yon billows An' gloor at them beneath. They gloor at eenless corpses Slow driftin' wi' the tide, Deep doon amang the weedy wrack, Wheer ...
— Songs of the Ridings • F. W. Moorman
... certainly a distinction between the author he has understood and the author he has not understood. Carlyle believed in himself, but he could not have believed in himself more than Ruskin did; they both believed in God, because they felt that if everything else fell into wrack and ruin, themselves were permanent witnesses to God. Where they both failed was not in belief in God or in belief in themselves; they failed in belief in other people. It is not enough for a prophet to believe in his message; he must ...
— Varied Types • G. K. Chesterton
... us peace and plenty, and the quiet we've sought so long; He hath thwarted the wily savage, and kept him from wrack and wrong; And unto our feast the Sachem shall be bidden, that he may know We worship his own Great Spirit, who ...
— The Elson Readers, Book 5 • William H. Elson and Christine M. Keck
... power; as it must have, since it was sold for ten thousand francs, fifteen years later. It was as simple, however, as that two and two make four, and had nothing to do with academic rules. The whole of the right side of my canvas represented a rock, an enormous rock, covered with sea-wrack, brown, yellow, and red, across which the sun poured like a stream of oil. The light, without which one could see the stars concealed in the background, fell upon the stone, and gilded it as if with fire. That was all. A first stupid attempt at dealing ...
— Selected Writings of Guy de Maupassant • Guy de Maupassant
... post of the wagon and a wrack of rainy cloud I saw it, uplifted and withdrawn under all the arching heavens of its history, alone with its benediction and its blasphemy, the city that is set upon a hill, ...
— The New Jerusalem • G. K. Chesterton
... the night, but the wind had dropped with the dawning, and now the rising sun tinted the fringe of the storm-wrack as it dwindled into the west and glinted on the endless crests of the long, green waves. To north and south and west lay a skyline which was unbroken save by the spout of foam when two of the great Atlantic seas dashed each other into spray. To the east ...
— The Great Shadow and Other Napoleonic Tales • Arthur Conan Doyle
... "Sanguine" means "blood red"; "rack" or "wrack" is broken or floating cloud. What is the "morning star"? What is meant by its "shining dead"? What are the "burning plumes" and what the "meteor eyes" of the sunrise? What becomes of broken clouds when the sun ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 10 - The Guide • Charles Herbert Sylvester
... pour out from the glands on their sides a copious mucus, which makes them as disagreeable to handle as they are unsightly to look at. Mackerel and cod are the hag's principal victims; but often the fisherman draws up a hag-eaten haddock on the end of his line, of which not a wrack remains but the hollow shell or bare outer simulacrum. As many as twenty of these disgusting parasites have sometimes been found within the body of ...
— Science in Arcady • Grant Allen
... cold, seasonable night of March, with a pale moon, lying on her back as though the wind had tilted her, and a flying wrack of the most diaphanous and lawny texture. The wind made talking difficult, and flecked the blood into the face. It seemed to have ...
— Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde • ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON
... round Carnsore Point, and causing a nasty chopping sea; which, save in the sullen green hollows of the waves, was dead and lead-coloured as far as the eye could reach—as leaden, indeed, as the heavy grey sky overhead, where some fleecy floating clouds of lighter wrack, rapidly drifting across the darker background that lined the horizon all round, made the latter of a deeper tone by contrast, besides acting as the avant courier of a fresh squall—the wind just then tearing and shrieking through ...
— The Island Treasure • John Conroy Hutcheson
... mine had been sprung beneath the spot upon which had been dumped her emotions of the last two months, blowing some to atoms, bringing to light others that had lain buried. Out of the wrack, joy, shame, fear fell at her feet—and a sentence out of a letter was staring ...
— Anthony Lyveden • Dornford Yates
... meet new conditions they developed new qualities with which they have not previously been credited, qualities of stubborn scientific stolidity. They out-Germaned the Germans in the way their organization withstood the shock and wrack of battle. It was the German machine which broke down first. On that field a new France was born. Let no German ever again say that she is effete. It was purely a French victory. This is no aspersion ...
— The Note-Book of an Attache - Seven Months in the War Zone • Eric Fisher Wood
... harder," and presently the gale would give them the lie with a piercing shriek, and drive their breath back into their throats. A fierce squall seemed to burst asunder the thick mass of sooty vapours; and above the wrack of torn clouds glimpses could be caught of the high moon rushing backwards with frightful speed over the sky, right into the wind's eye. Many hung their heads, muttering that it "turned their inwards out" to look at it. Soon the clouds ...
— The Nigger Of The "Narcissus" - A Tale Of The Forecastle • Joseph Conrad
... The empty, silent streets smelled of the sea, of wrack, of fish. Huge brown nets were still hanging up to dry outside the houses, or stretched out on the shingle. The gray, cold sea, with its eternal roaring foam, was going out, uncovering the green rocks at the foot of ...
— Une Vie, A Piece of String and Other Stories • Guy de Maupassant
... his eyes to hear his boots crush crackling wrack and shells. You are walking through it howsomever. I am, a stride at a time. A very short space of time through very short times of space. Five, six: the nacheinander. Exactly: and that is the ineluctable modality of the audible. Open your eyes. No. Jesus! ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce
... should be sailing over a trough, wide and deep below us, the next a mighty billow would toss itself aloft and vanish utterly into space. Everywhere wreaths of mist with ragged fringes were withering away into empty air, and, more remarkable yet, was the conflict of wind which sent the cloud wrack flying ...
— The Dominion of the Air • J. M. Bacon
... machinery, the gutted barns, the burned houses. In many cases not a habitable building was left after the cyclone passed. In one hamlet of thirty houses near Esternay I remember, all but seven had been devastated—by incendiary fire. Indeed, it was clearly distinguishable—the "legitimate" wrack of war, from the deliberate spite of incendiarism. Maurupt was the one case, Sermaize-les-Bains (where there was no fighting) the other. If it had been simple war, shell and machine gun, probably fifty per cent or more of the devastation would have been saved. But the German makes war ...
— The World Decision • Robert Herrick
... to all places, but of all Enter Myldew and Sarlaboys to her. This, this the greatest, and to this one compard All that are past but trifles. Oh that grand maister Of mechall[90] lusts, that bulke of brothelree, That stillary of all infectious sinnes, Hath scapt the wrack, and with his fellowe guest And partner in corruption makes this waye, And with no tarde pace. Where shall I hyde mee! Whether shall I fly to Palestra back And with this sadd relation kill her quite That's scarce recovered! ...
— A Collection Of Old English Plays, Vol. IV. • Editor: A.H. Bullen
... her face, and her voice was e'en as a cry: "I will sleep in a great king's bed, I will bear the lords of the earth, And the wrack and the grief of my youth-days shall be ...
— The Story of Sigurd the Volsung and the Fall of the Niblungs • William Morris
... ring; Figured by hand divine—there's not a gem Wrought by man's art to be compared to them; Soft, brilliant, tender, through the wave they glow, And make the moonbeam brighter where they flow. Involved in sea-wrack, here you find a race Which science, doubting, knows not where to place; On shell or stone is dropp'd the embryo-seed, And quickly vegetates a vital breed. While thus with pleasing wonder you inspect Treasures the vulgar in their ...
— The Borough • George Crabbe
... thou hast been so slack To wound her heart whose eyes have wounded me And suffered her to glory in my wrack, Thus to my aid I lastly conjure thee! By hellish Styx, by which the Thund'rer swears, By thy fair mother's unavoided power, By Hecate's names, by Proserpine's sad tears, When she was wrapt to the infernal bower! By thine own loved Psyche, ...
— Elizabethan Sonnet Cycles - Idea, by Michael Drayton; Fidessa, by Bartholomew Griffin; Chloris, by William Smith • Michael Drayton, Bartholomew Griffin, and William Smith
... distracted for some time, and, upon looking again, we find that she has not moved, and impart the fact to Sandy, who looks steadily through his long spy-glass, evidently made up of several others; then, gazing intently over the top, he brings all hands to their feet by the cry of "Wrack!" For Sandy is ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, October 1885 • Various
... wit; and is there aught in nature more ridiculous? A poor, dull, heart-broken man, who must needs be merry, or he will be whipped; who must rejoice, lest he starve; who must jest you, jibe you, quip you, crank you, wrack you, riddle you, from hour to hour, from day to day, from year to year, lest he dwindle, perish, starve, pine,and die! Why, when there's naught else to laugh at, I laugh at myself till I ...
— The Complete Plays of Gilbert and Sullivan - The 14 Gilbert And Sullivan Plays • William Schwenk Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan
... A formless wrack of clouds streams across the awful sky, and the rain sweeps almost parallel with the horizon. Beyond, the heath stretches off into endless blackness, in the extreme of which either fancy or art has conjured up some undefinable shapes that seem riding into ...
— Masterpieces of Mystery - Riddle Stories • Various
... down upon us early, and so dark that we could not see as far as the length of the ship, there being no moon, while the light of the stars was completely obscured by the dense canopy of storm-wrack that overshadowed us, the only objects visible outside the bulwarks being the faintly phosphorescent heads of the breaking seas as they swept down menacingly upon us from to windward; the air was raw and chill, although it was only the first week in September; ...
— A Middy of the King - A Romance of the Old British Navy • Harry Collingwood
... huge and black, She crushed our ribs in her iron grasp! Down went the Cumberland all a wrack, With a sudden shudder of death, And the cannon's ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 62, December, 1862 • Various
... was, and huge, Still rough—like those which men in treeless plains To build them boats fish from the flooded rivers, Hyphasis or Hydaspes, when, high up By their dark spring, the wind in winter time Hath made in Himalayan forests wrack, And strewn the channels with torn boughs—so huge The club which Rustum lifted now, and struck One stroke; but again Sohrab sprang aside, Lithe as the glancing snake, and the club came Thundering to earth, and leapt from ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 6 • Charles H. Sylvester
... if thou wed my fortunes with my state, This sauing health shall suffocate my breath, To flye from them that holds my God in hate, My Mistres, Countrey, me, and my sworne fayth, Were to pull of the load from Typhons back, And crush my selfe, with shame and seruille wrack. ...
— The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques, and Discoveries of The English Nation, v. 7 - England's Naval Exploits Against Spain • Richard Hakluyt
... the world, and all its virtue, all its pleasures and all its pains, will have effected nothing. They will all have faded like an unsubstantial pageant, and not left a wrack behind. ...
— Is Life Worth Living? • William Hurrell Mallock
... breaking and showing ebon patches and infrequent stars through a wind-harried wrack of cloud. The night had grown sensibly colder, and noisy with the rushing sweep of a ...
— The Lone Wolf - A Melodrama • Louis Joseph Vance
... tempest as they start out black and unmoved behind rifts of swirling mists. On the right there is the same fretwork of land and water, but wrought in less high relief—a tract of lonely strands, where shells and daisies whiten the grass, and pink-belled creepers trail, entangled with tawny-podded wrack, across the shingle. You are apt thereabouts to happen on clattering pebble-banks and curling foam when you are apparently deep among meadows and corn-land, or to come on sturdy green potato-drills round some corner where you had confidently supposed the unstable furrows of the ...
— Stories by English Authors: Ireland • Various
... turning out of great men as is talked of, but that it is only to fright people, but I do fear there may be such a thing doing. He do mightily inveigh against the folly of the King to bring his matters to wrack thus, and that we must all be undone without help. I met with Cooling at the Temple-gate, after I had been at both my booksellers and there laid out several pounds in books now against the new year. From the 'Change (where I met with Captain Cocke, ...
— Diary of Samuel Pepys, Complete • Samuel Pepys
... October night. There was a storm brewing, a wicked one, reckoned by the headlong drop of the aneroid. MacRae had a hundred or so salmon aboard for all his Squitty round, and he had yet to pick up those on the boats in the Cove. He cocked his eye at a cloud-wrack streaking above, driving before a wind which had not yet dropped to the level of the Gulf, and he said to himself that it would be wise to stay in the Cove that night. A southeast gale, a beam sea, and the tiny opening of the Jew's Mouth was a bad combination to face in a black ...
— Poor Man's Rock • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... was a spreading wall of heavy clouds traveling at seemingly great speed, while below the wrack the water darkened ominously and became ...
— The Boy Scouts of the Eagle Patrol • Howard Payson
... devil nor Spaniard feared, Their cities he put to the sack; He singed his Catholic Majesty's beard, And harried his ships to wrack. He was playing at Plymouth a rubber of bowls When the great Armada came; But he said, "They must wait their turn, good souls," And he ...
— Poems: New and Old • Henry Newbolt
... away the rain That all day long had soaked the level plain. Against the horizon's fiery wrack, The sheds loomed black. And higher, in their tumultuous concourse met, The streaming clouds, shot-riddled banners, wet With the flickering storm, Drifted and smouldered, warm With flashes sent From the lower firmament. And they concealed— They only here and there through rifts ...
— Georgian Poetry 1916-17 - Edited by Sir Edward Howard Marsh • Various
... province. The capitalists of Nova Scotia treat it like a hired house, they won't keep it in repair; they neither paint it to preserve the boards, nor stop a leak to keep the frame from rottin'; but let it go to wrack sooner than drive a nail or put in a pane of glass. 'It will sarve our ...
— The Clockmaker • Thomas Chandler Haliburton
... which has vanished and left no wrack behind, rose once in this spot where we now stand, on the very threshold of the solitudes; but its necropoles, more venerated even than those of Memphis, and its thrice-holy temples, are a little farther on, in the marvellously conserving sand, ...
— Egypt (La Mort De Philae) • Pierre Loti
... event was at hand. It seemed impossible that Mary could be there—that she was about to stand before him. His mind was filled with the things he had arranged to say to her, but they were now in confused mass, circling and circling like the wrack of a boat ...
— The Eagle's Heart • Hamlin Garland
... moral far more strongly than Eden could do. As by a lightning flash, the purblind politicians of Vienna could now discern the storm-wrack drifting upon them. The weakness of the Piedmontese army, their own unpreparedness in the Milanese, the friendliness of Genoa to France, and the Jacobinical ferment in all parts of Italy, portended a speedy irruption ...
— William Pitt and the Great War • John Holland Rose
... portal open'd, Which to his speech did honey passage yield, 452 Like a red morn, that ever yet betoken'd Wrack to the seaman, tempest to the field, Sorrow to shepherds, woe unto the birds, Gusts and foul flaws to herdmen and ...
— Venus and Adonis • William Shakespeare
... down over the boulders, and plunged off a rock into the clear sea, his white figure being traceable against the olive brown sea-wrack waving far below, as he swam for some distance below the surface, and then rose, shook the water from his eyes, and struck out for the lugger lying becalmed in ...
— A Terrible Coward • George Manville Fenn
... do our courting afterward. I can take Mam'selle out to the booths Saturday night, and we can look at the dancing. There will be all day Sunday when I am at liberty. But you see there is the house going to wrack, the servant spending my money, and the discomfort. I miss my sister so much. And I thought we would not make a long story. Dear Madame, ...
— A Little Girl in Old Detroit • Amanda Minnie Douglas
... while they wondered, The battle-wrack was sundered; To Victory they thundered, But . . ...
— Ballads of a Bohemian • Robert W. Service
... the woods bear. Thou art the friend of the husbandmen, In no respect injuring any one; And thou art honored among men, Sweet prophet of summer. The Muses love thee, And Phoebus himself loves thee, And has given thee a shrill song; Age does not wrack thee, Thou skilful, earthborn, song-loving, Unsuffering, bloodless one; Almost ...
— Excursions • Henry D. Thoreau
... to be aweary of the sun, And wish the estate o' the world were now undone.— Ring the alarum bell! Blow wind! Come, wrack! At least we'll die with ...
— The Man Shakespeare • Frank Harris
... Dame Safford herself, and was continually "straightening things out," as she called it. Her temper, like her hair, was somewhat fiery; and when her work did not suit her, she was prone to a gloomy view of life. If she was to be believed, things were always "going to wrack and ruin" about the house; and she had a queer way of taking time by the forelock. In the morning it was "going on to twelve o'clock," and at noon it was "going ...
— The Wit of Women - Fourth Edition • Kate Sanborn
... fool'n 'long er no wrack. We's doin' blame' well, en we better let blame' well alone, as de good book says. Like as not dey's ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... love, The moon above Shines bright and ever brighter; And all the black And sullen wrack ...
— Welsh Lyrics of the Nineteenth Century • Edmund O. Jones
... gun still angry-hot, And my lids tingled with the tears held back; 20 This scorn methought was crueller than shot: The manly death-grip in the battle-wrack, Yard-arm to yard-arm, were more friendly far Than such ...
— The Vision of Sir Launfal - And Other Poems • James Russell Lowell
... desert. The currents account for it, thus:—where two of them meet,—as is often the case,—vast quantities of material substances, both vegetable and animal, are drifted together; where they are held, to a certain extent, stationary; or circling around in great ocean eddies. The wrack of sea-weed,—waifs from the distant shores,—birds that have fallen lifeless into the ocean, or drop their excrement to float on its surface,—fish that have died of disease, violence, or naturally,—for the finny tribes are not exempt from the natural laws of ...
— The Ocean Waifs - A Story of Adventure on Land and Sea • Mayne Reid
... to his descent.[577] Through his presence on the bridge at Montereau on that day, when, according to a wise man, it were better to have died than to have been there,[578] he had grown pale and trembling, looking dully at everything going to wrack and ruin around him. After their victory of Verneuil and their partial conquest of Maine, the English had left him four years' respite. But his friends, his defenders, his deliverers had alike been terrible. Pious and humble, well content with his plain wife, he led a sad, anxious life in his ...
— The Life of Joan of Arc, Vol. 1 and 2 (of 2) • Anatole France
... train rushed swiftly through the dimly-lighted suburbs of London, and entered upon the open country. A wan, watery line of light lay under the brooding clouds in the west, tinged with a lurid hue; and all the great field of sky stretching above the level landscape was overcast with storm-wrack, fleeing swiftly before the wind. At times the train seemed to shake with the Wast, when it was passing oyer any embankment more than ordinarily exposed; but it sped across the country almost as rapidly as the clouds across the sky. No one in the carriage spoke. Then came over me that ...
— The Doctor's Dilemma • Hesba Stretton
... vain against the blows of Towerculla's followers. As he sank to the ground overpowered, he caught himself murmuring, "They cannot kill me, until we three say grace together again," even while he longed for death to cut short the agony which was beginning to wrack every limb of his cruelly beaten body. Then out of the mist of red which seemed to swim before his eyes, a merciful black cloud descended and he knew nothing more until he regained consciousness and found himself in "Old Milly's" cabin, with Becky, still calm ...
— The New Land - Stories of Jews Who Had a Part in the Making of Our Country • Elma Ehrlich Levinger
... real answer was the subsequent passing through Parliament of an Act of Oblivion in favour of the lords, which he urged on the unkingly ground that, if severe measures were taken against them, they would go 'to armes and get forean assistance quhilk might wrack King, Country, and Relligion.' ...
— Andrew Melville - Famous Scots Series • William Morison
... your conquering eyes Love owes its chiefest victories, And borrows those bright arms from you With which he does the world subdue; Yet you yourselves are not above The empire nor the griefs of love. Then wrack not lovers with disdain, Lest love on you revenge their pain; You are not free, because you're fair, The boy did not his mother spare: Though beauty be a killing dart, It is no ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 14, Issue 387, August 28, 1829 • Various
... him that he might, after all, leave France smaller and weaker than he found her. Then the lightnings of his wrath flash forth, and we see the tumult and anguish of that mighty soul: but previously the storm-wrack of passion and the cloud-bank of his clinging will are lit up by few gleams of the earlier piercing intelligence. On January the 4th he had written to Caulaincourt that the policy of England and the personal ...
— The Life of Napoleon I (Volumes, 1 and 2) • John Holland Rose
... You must know that on the top of this mountain you will find a ruined house, which was built long ago, time out of mind. The walls are cracked, the foundations crumbling away, the doors worm-eaten, the furniture all worn out—and, in short, everything is gone to wrack and ruin. On one side are seen shattered columns, on another broken statues; and nothing is left in a good state except a coat-of-arms over the door, quartered on which you will see a serpent biting its tail, a stag, a raven, and ...
— Stories from Pentamerone • Giambattista Basile
... lest his mind should fail him through grievous wrack of pain of body, but that trouble ...
— Penshurst Castle - In the Days of Sir Philip Sidney • Emma Marshall
... who was ugly in the other act comes on very beautiful (but hideously dressed, why don't they get Worth or Doucet, I wonder, to help them?) and she sings a great deal and very loud, and kisses Parsifal, and then everything goes suddenly to wrack and ruin. I shall never dare kiss any very good young man again—not after that! In the last act, this same creature, looking more like Act I., washes Parsifal's feet. I should hate to play that part, but it's all very pretty and affecting, and the music—well there are no words to describe ...
— The Smart Set - Correspondence & Conversations • Clyde Fitch
... or of pitch trees; a wood not commonly known to our people, nor found growing in England. They have no edge-tools to make them withal; if they have any they are very few, and those, it seems, they had twenty years since, which, as those two men declared, was out of a wrack, which happened upon their coast, of some Christian ship, being beaten that way by some storm and outrageous weather, whereof none of the people were saved, but only the ship, or some part of her, being cast upon the sand, out of whose sides they drew the nails and the ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 1-20 • Various
... commanders. He had looked upon the strangeness and beauty of the world in its most remote and least-known quarters, had witnessed fights with savages, threaded unmapped straits, and had, to crown his youthful achievements, striven amidst the wrack and thunder of grim-visaged war. We may picture his welcome: the strong grasp of his father's hand, the crowding enthusiasm of his brother and sisters fondly glorying in their hero's prowess. The warnings of uncle John were all forgotten now. When the midshipman's younger brother, ...
— The Life of Captain Matthew Flinders • Ernest Scott
... another Wrens' nest a few evenings ago, I found the young ones had flown, and as there was a cock-nest in some wrack left by the river in a bush a few yards off, I gave it a shake to see if the old ones had taken possession of it for another brood; and I was surprised to see one, and then a second young one come ...
— Essays in Natural History and Agriculture • Thomas Garnett
... take him back To trail the mountain-fox's track, In corries of the shifting wrack Where one may spy Old Cruachan's twin Titan ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, May 13, 1914 • Various
... castles, palaces and pyramids; of the frightful hurricane of the night when Duncan was murdered; of the blast on which pity rides like a new-born babe, or on which Heaven's cherubim are horsed. There is thus something magnificently appropriate in the cry 'Blow, wind! Come, wrack!' with which Macbeth, turning from the sight of the moving wood of Birnam, bursts from his castle. He was borne to his throne on a whirlwind, and the fate he goes to meet comes ...
— Shakespearean Tragedy - Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth • A. C. Bradley
... And hath my father from his tender youth Vouchsaf'd to bring thee up? did I therefore Believe so earnestly thy perjur'd truth, Advancing still thine honour evermore, That, not contented with a common wrack, Thou shouldst intend the ruin of us all; And when thou seemd'st afraid to turn thy back, To make a glory of our greater fall? Before thou triumph in thy treachery, Before thou 'scape untouched for thy sin, Let never Fates nor ...
— A Select Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. VI • Robert Dodsley
... met my cousin Sasha. To see her going to wrack and ruin shocked me terribly. Moreover, it has reached me, through a side wind, that she has been making inquiry for me, and dogging my footsteps, under the pretext that she wishes to pardon me, to forget the past, and to renew our acquaintance. Well, among other ...
— Poor Folk • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... eastward—of a black line along the sea. Was it land or fog, ice or deep water? And when the wind blew from the east, strange land birds alighted on the yard-arms. Dead whales with the harpoons of strange hunters washed past the ship; and driftwood of a kind that did not grow in Asia tossed up on the tide wrack. It was the word brought back by these free-lances of the sea that induced Peter the Great to send Vitus Bering on a voyage of discovery to the west coast of America; and when the castaways of Bering's wreck returned with a new fur that was ...
— Vikings of the Pacific - The Adventures of the Explorers who Came from the West, Eastward • Agnes C. Laut
... thy honour's wrack; Yet for thy honour did I entertain him; Coming from thee, I could not put him back, For it had been dishonour to disdain him: Besides, of weariness he did complain him, And talk'd of virtue: O unlook'd-for evil, When virtue is profaned in ...
— The Rape of Lucrece • William Shakespeare [Clark edition]
... the proud Spanish Armado to wrack, And Travell'd all o'er the old World, and came back, In his old Ship, laden with Gold and old Sack, Like an ...
— Wit and Mirth: or Pills to Purge Melancholy, Vol. 5 of 6 • Various
... he an unfortunate man? for whoever would go down to Squire Dickson's hagyard, would see the same Larry's handiwork so beautiful and illegant, though his own was in such brutheen.* Even his barn to wrack; and he was obliged to thrash his oats in the open air when ther would be a frost, and he used to lose one-third of it; and if there came a thaw, 'twould almost brake ...
— The Ned M'Keown Stories - Traits And Stories Of The Irish Peasantry, The Works of - William Carleton, Volume Three • William Carleton
... supposing many to have sought her. So, the Bride had mounted into her handsome chariot, incidentally accompanied by the Bridegroom; and after rolling for a few minutes smoothly over a fair pavement, had begun to jolt through a Slough of Despond, and through a long, long avenue of wrack and ruin. Other nuptial carriages are said to have gone the same ...
— Little Dorrit • Charles Dickens
... burnt to something like the natural coloring of the bird they were intended to represent; but a large proportion of them were "sea-weed" or "spruce" decoys; that is, bunches of the weather-bound sea-wrack, or bundles of evergreen twigs, made about the shape and size of the body of ...
— Adrift in the Ice-Fields • Charles W. Hall
... upon patriotism. "Do you intend to let this glorious country go to wrack and ruin, oh, my good friends," he demanded, "or do you intend to save her? Look forth upon this country of ours, I bid you, oh, my countrymen, and tell me what you see. You see a fair domain of forest, mountain, plain, ...
— Ramsey Milholland • Booth Tarkington
... skirts close to her body and walked rapidly to the brow of the hill. The twinkling lights were all below. The wrack of cloud torn by the wind into a thousand flapping sails skurried across a sky which the hidden moon patched with a hard angry silver. Far away and high in the storm the great cross on Calvary seemed dancing an inebriated jig above the ...
— The Californians • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... fit guide to lead my way, And as I deemed I did pursue her track; Wit lost his aim, and will was fancy's prey; The rebel won, the ruler went to wrack. But now sith fancy did with folly end, Wit, bought with loss — will, ...
— David Elginbrod • George MacDonald
... you a man who has used up the name of Waife, and who on entering the town of Gatesboro' becomes a sober, staid, and respectable personage, under the appellation of Chapman. You are Miss Chapman. Rugge and his Exhibition 'leave not a wrack behind.'" ...
— What Will He Do With It, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... sun's warmth so long as we were cruising among the ice-wrack. Some of the passengers, having been forewarned, were provided with heavy overcoats, oilskin hats, waterproofs, woolen socks, and stogies with great nails driven into the soles. They were iron-bound, copper-fastened tourists, thoroughly ...
— Over the Rocky Mountains to Alaska • Charles Warren Stoddard
... Iceland also, the higher rose the barometer, the higher rose the norther; the latter being a cold dry wind is, consequently, a heavy wind. And when the sky was comparatively clear and blue, the display of cirri was noticeable. In some places they formed filmy crosses and thready lozenges; in others the wrack fell into the shape of the letter Z; and from the western horizon the curl-clouds shot up thin rays, with a common centre hid behind the mountains of Sinai, affecting all the airs of ...
— The Land of Midian, Vol. 1 • Richard Burton
... Under the salt sea's foam. It lay At the outermost point of a rocky bay. A sandy, tide-pooly, cliff-bound cove, With a red-roofed fishing village above, Of irregular cottages, perched up high Amid pale yellow poppies next to the sky. Shells and pebbles, and wrack below, And shrimpers shrimping all in a row; Tawny sails and tarry boats, Dark brown nets and old cork floats; Nasty smells at the nicest spots, And blue-jerseyed ...
— Verses for Children - and Songs for Music • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... sailors, gladly enough, and then rowed back, over a bottom of white sand, bedded here and there with the short manati-grass (Thalassia Testudinum), one of the few flowering plants which, like our Zostera, or grass-wrack, grows at the bottom of the sea. But, wherever the bottom was stony, we could see huge prickly sea- urchins, huger brainstone corals, round and gray, and branching corals likewise, such as, when cleaned, may be seen in any curiosity shop. These, and a flock ...
— At Last • Charles Kingsley
... the world has this progress been more marked than in Latin America. Out of the wrack of Indian fighting and race conflicts and civil wars, strong and stable governments have arisen. Peaceful succession in accord with the people's will has replaced the forcible seizure of power permitted ...
— Latin America and the United States - Addresses by Elihu Root • Elihu Root
... the wayside flowers Clipped by the truant's staff in daisied lanes. For over me burned lustrous the dear eyes Of my beloved; I strove as at a joust To gain at end the guerdon of her smile. And ever, as in the dense melee I dashed, Her name burst from my lips, as lightning breaks Out of the plunging wrack of summer storms. ...
— Pike County Ballads and Other Poems • John Hay
... broker;' Yet am I Suffolk and the cardinal's broker. Hume, if you take not heed, you shall go near To call them both a pair of crafty knaves. Well, so its stands; and thus, I fear, at last Hume's knavery will be the duchess' wrack, And her attainture will be Humphrey's fall. Sort how it will, I shall have ...
— King Henry VI, Second Part • William Shakespeare [Rolfe edition] |
