"Slough" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... on the divine lineaments of the risen Christ. And this brought to him a sense of almost awed repose. It released him from the vicious circle of self, of sharp-toothed disappointment and leaden-heavy discouragement, in which he had so long fruitlessly turned. He seemed consciously to slough off the foul and ragged garment of the past and all its base, unprofitable memories, as the snake sloughs off her old skin in the warm May weather and glides forth, glittering, in a coat of untarnished, silver mail. The whole complexion of his thought ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet
... would have deserted to them had they dared. La Salle's Mohegan could kill no game except two lean deer, with a few wild geese and swans. At length, in their straits, they made a happy discovery. It was a buffalo bull, fast mired in a slough. They killed him, lashed a cable about him, and then twelve men dragged out the shaggy monster whose ponderous carcass demanded their utmost efforts. [Footnote: I remember to have seen an incident ...
— France and England in North America, a Series of Historical Narratives, Part Third • Francis Parkman
... to have ready a Theme to send off to Harvard. Of course, every Thursday morning We, with one accord, begin to make excuses. Well, the Dread Day rolls around to-morrow, and consequently I am deep in the Slough of Despond. My only consolation is that our Geniuses can't write regularly, but then the mood to write never possesses me.... This week, in writing a comparison between Hamlet and Antonio, I did succeed in jotting down something, but ...
— The Happy End • Joseph Hergesheimer
... delicacy of treatment which would have been thrown away upon the melodramatic subjects which Verdi had hitherto affected. Much of his music is really graceful and refined, but his efforts to avoid vulgarity occasionally land him in the slough of sentimentality. Nevertheless, the pathos which characterises some of the scenes has kept 'La Traviata' alive, though the opera is chiefly employed now as a means of allowing a popular prima donna to display her high ...
— The Opera - A Sketch of the Development of Opera. With full Descriptions - of all Works in the Modern Repertory • R.A. Streatfeild
... and 20 feet long, had fallen off and blocked up all passage except by one path made and mixed up by the feet of buffaloes and elephants. In places like this the leg goes into elephants' holes up to the thigh and it is grievous; three hours of this slough tired the strongest: a brown stream ran through the centre, waist deep, and washed off a little of the adhesive mud. Our path now lay through a river covered with tikatika, a living vegetable bridge made by a species ...
— The Last Journals of David Livingstone, in Central Africa, from 1865 to His Death, Volume II (of 2), 1869-1873 • David Livingstone
... was jerked out of the saddle, and must have fallen, ignominiously, face downward in her Slough of Despond, but that Lenox,—reaching her in the nick of time—caught and crushed ...
— The Great Amulet • Maud Diver
... and for three leagues pressed on at tolerable speed. Then, for no reason stated, our guide gave us the slip as we passed through a wood, and was seen no more. We lost the road, and had to retrace our steps. We strayed into a slough, and extracted ourselves with difficulty. The man who was riding the bay I had purchased forgot the secret which I had imparted to him, and got an ugly fall. In fine, after all these mishaps it wanted little of noon, and less to ...
— A Gentleman of France • Stanley Weyman
... said De Montaigne, "you have certainly made the most of an argument, which, if granted, would consign government to fools and knaves, and plunge the communities of mankind into the Slough of Despond. But a very commonplace view of the question might suffice to shake your system. Is life, mere animal life, on the whole, a ...
— Alice, or The Mysteries, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... piece with this setting. He fitted into it as an acorn fits its cup. All his life he had lived on Reelfoot, always in the one place, at the mouth of a certain slough. He had been born there, of a negro father and a half-breed Indian mother, both of them now dead, and the story was that before his birth his mother was frightened by one of the big fish, so that the child came into the world most hideously marked. Anyhow, Fishhead was a human ...
— The Escape of Mr. Trimm - His Plight and other Plights • Irvin S. Cobb
... cigarette. I watched the first few puffs, awaiting a repartee. None came. I felt a qualm of apprehension. Was he already becoming de-Paragot-ised? I did not realise then what it means to a man to cast aside the slough of many years' decay, and take his stand clean before the world. He shivers, is liable to catch cold, like the tramp whose protective hide of filth is summarily removed in the workhouse bath. Nor did my dear ...
— The Beloved Vagabond • William J. Locke
... moment, in a wretched slough of helplessness, Dorothy found her conviction wavering. Could it really be possible that he was speaking the truth; that he did not know? But with the dreadful thought came also the realization that she must not let him fathom her mind. She told herself that she must keep her countenance, ...
— Hidden Gold • Wilder Anthony
... camp were in a deplorable condition. They were merely tracks trodden down by our feet and carts, heavily rutted, uneven, and either a slough of mud and water, or a desert of dust, according to the weather. We persistently urged the German authorities to improve these roads, but they turned a deaf ear ...
— Sixteen Months in Four German Prisons - Wesel, Sennelager, Klingelputz, Ruhleben • Henry Charles Mahoney
... man The curate in all woes that plague mankind,— Too learned, for he was but young. His heart Had yearned till it was overstrained, and now He—plunged into a narrow slough unblest, Had struggled with its deadly waters, till His own head had gone under, and he took Small joy in work he could not look to ...
— Poems by Jean Ingelow, In Two Volumes, Volume II. • Jean Ingelow
... Belle, a fine boat, one of my children was taken with croup. Dr. N——, a Universalist minister, got off at Dubuque and bought medicine for me. This saved the child, but he was sick all the way. We were stuck in Beef Slough for several days. I never left the cabin as my child needed me, but some time during the first day a boat from St. Paul was stuck there too, so near us that passengers passed from one boat to the other all day. It was only when I got to Hastings, where I had thought to meet my husband that ...
— Old Rail Fence Corners - The A. B. C's. of Minnesota History • Various
... airy zenith through the immense Sink to the low expedients of an hour, And barter soul for all the slough of sense,— ...
— Poems • Denis Florence MacCarthy
... all her thoughts. Had he allowed it, she would have devoted herself exclusively to him, but this he would not have. Very slowly, very painfully, he had struggled out of his Slough of Despond, and what that struggle had meant to him none but himself would ever know. And now that he had made it, and in a measure succeeded, he suffered scarcely less than before. His strength was undoubtedly greater, his spirits were more even; but these were the only ...
— The Knave of Diamonds • Ethel May Dell
... river?" broke in De Noyan, who had managed to make something out of our conversation, especially as the Puritan illustrated his knowledge by rudely tracing with a stumped forefinger a map on the board where he sat. "Sacre! 'tis the dirtiest red slough ever I navigated. Why not try the other thing? A brush with those gentlemen below would be more ...
— Prisoners of Chance - The Story of What Befell Geoffrey Benteen, Borderman, - through His Love for a Lady of France • Randall Parrish
... threw away his shield in battle, and yet, when it was over, gathered with the victors to share the spoils, as old as cowardice and lust in the human and animal world; only to cease from being when, perhaps, an enlarged and expanded humanity shall have cast the last slough of ...
— Woman and Labour • Olive Schreiner
... though, both on ye kin hitch on next load," drawled the driver, turning his horses into the slough of mud ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 90, April, 1865 • Various
... A meeting is advertised for to-morrow, to take place at Apsley House. Then to proceed to Slough or Salt Hill, or to Eton, to deliver there a petition to the Duke of Cumberland, who is then to present it to the King, and the people are ...
— A Political Diary 1828-1830, Volume II • Edward Law (Lord Ellenborough)
... as if—for about a quarter of a mile—the ground had been honey-combed by disease into numerous sores and orifices; not a blade of grass grew on its hot, inflamed surface, which consisted of unwholesome-looking red livid clay, or crumpled shreds and shards of slough-like incrustations. Naturally enough, our first impulse on dismounting was to scamper off at once to the Great Geysir. As it lay at the furthest end of the congeries of hot springs, in order to reach it we had to run the gauntlet ...
— Letters From High Latitudes • The Marquess of Dufferin (Lord Dufferin)
... situation, neglected his orders, left his ground, and at the head of his heavy-armed horse made an attack on the Scottish infantry,'in hopes of gaining all the honor of the victory. On advancing, he found a slough and ditch in his way; and behind were ranged the enemy armed with spears, and the field on which they stood was fallow ground, broken with ridges which lay across their front, and disordered the movements of the English cavalry. From all these accidents, the shock of this body of horse was feeble ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part C. - From Henry VII. to Mary • David Hume
... bad," because once an individual feels he is responsible to himself for undue physical indulgences—for laws of natural life set at naught, and spiritual impulses disregarded—he will try to emerge from the slough of evil, and he will learn with startling rapidity to value all joys of the senses less and less. There can be no high order of morality without this sense of responsibility, for when a man feels he is moulding his own character, ...
— The Mystery of a Turkish Bath • E.M. Gollan (AKA Rita)
... certain proportion of the members of every great aggregation of mankind should constantly tend to establish and populate such a Slough of Despond as this is inevitable, so long as some people are by nature idle and vicious, while others are disabled by sickness or accident, or thrown upon the world by the death of their bread-winners. So long as that proportion ...
— Evolution and Ethics and Other Essays • Thomas H. Huxley
... from the heavy slough of the pale, underworld, automatic colliers. He started out of the mud. He was master. She saw his back, the movement of his white loins. But not that—it was the whiteness he seemed to enclose as ...
— Women in Love • D. H. Lawrence
... efforts alluded to was a prose work entitled Hand and Soul. More poem than story, this beautiful idyl may be briefly described as mainly illustrative of the struggles of the transition period through which, as through a slough, all true artists must pass who have been led to reflect deeply upon the aims and ends of their calling before they attain that goal of settled purpose in which they see it to be best to work from their own heart simply, without regard for the spectres that would draw them apart into ...
— Recollections of Dante Gabriel Rossetti - 1883 • T. Hall Caine
... opponents. Leading Republicans are to be consulted personally, and they are to be appealed to and asked patriotically to banish all party and "sectional" feelings from their minds, while discussing the best mode of helping "our neighbor" out of the Slough of Despond, so that she may be enabled to meet the demands we have upon her,—not in money, for that she has not, and we purpose giving her a round sum, but in land, of which she has a vast supply, and all of it susceptible of yielding good returns ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 30, April, 1860 • Various
... of view on life, a thing scarce enough in this day when all existence is either sordid or vicious. I had reached a Slough of Despond, Mr. Canby, weary of the attainable, not strong enough or clever enough or courageous enough to defy criticism and obey the small voice that urged. I was sick with self-analysis, filled to the brim ...
— Paradise Garden - The Satirical Narrative of a Great Experiment • George Gibbs
... their fairs on the Way, he may have had other scenes in his mind which suggested other names. The Delectable Mountains may have been the blue line of the Sussex Downs, or the hills by Black Down and Hindhead. The Slough of Despond may have been the marshy pools of Shalford Common, or the ponds under the hill by Chilworth; and Doubting Castle, spelt Dowding Castle, is actually a name to be found on the Surrey map, south of Epsom ...
— Highways and Byways in Surrey • Eric Parker
... its best traditions in that Battle of Jutland, it seems nothing short of criminal that the English censor should have permitted the world to hold Great Britain in contempt for twenty-four hours and sink poor France in the slough of despond. However, he is used to abuse, and presumably does ...
— The Living Present • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... contribution of one dollar, he did nothing else but cavil and deplore. He inveighed against the low standards of the masses, and went on his way sadly, making all the money he could at his private calling, and keeping his hands clean from the slime of the political slough. He was a censor and a gentleman; a well-set-up, agreeable, quick-witted fellow, whom his men companions liked, whom women termed interesting. He was apt to impress the latter as earnest and at the same time fascinating—an alluring combination to the sex which always ...
— The Law-Breakers and Other Stories • Robert Grant
... to make Dinah feel herself dependent on him, kept her in a state of constant intoxication by incessant amusement. These circumstances hindered two persons so clever as these were from avoiding the slough into which they fell—that of a life in common, a piece of folly of which, unfortunately, many instances may be seen ...
— The Muse of the Department • Honore de Balzac
... seen to be subtle branches of a lost art. The people of the armistice were weary and apprehensive—weary of the war, weary of politics, weary of the worn-out framework of existence, and filled with a vague, nameless apprehension of the unknown. They feared that in the chaotic slough into which they had fallen they had not yet touched bottom. None the less, with the exception of fervent Catholics and a number of earnest sectarians, there were few genuine seekers after anything ...
— The Inside Story Of The Peace Conference • Emile Joseph Dillon
... fables. It was woman, charming woman, that led unpolished man forth from the forests and the dens, and taught him to bend before thy shrine, humanity! See how the face of nature changes! Where late the slough mantled, or the serpent hissed among the briars and the reeds, all is pasture and fertility. The cottages arise. The shepherds assume the guise of gentleness and simplicity. They attire themselves with care, they braid the garland, and they tune the pipe. Wherefore do ...
— Imogen - A Pastoral Romance • William Godwin
... is impossible for any good man to be born from me and from her." As time went on, the finding of a serpent skin around Nero's neck when he was but a boy caused the seers to say: "He shall acquire great power from the aged man." Serpents are thought to slough off their old age with their old ...
— Dio's Rome, Volume V., Books 61-76 (A.D. 54-211) • Cassius Dio
... their equal. Their productive capability is the marvel even of this age of industrial miracles. And yet, with every nerve strained to its utmost tension; toiling, saving—at very death-grips with destiny—they are sinking year by year deeper into the Slough of Despond—into that most frightful of all Gehennas, the hell ...
— Volume 1 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... as she passed down the sharp side of a dried-out slough. She plunged through a thicket of long grass, and a grey cloud of mosquitoes rose and enveloped horse and rider. The vicious insects settled like a grey cloth upon the heated mare, and Prudence's soft flesh was punctured by hundreds of venomous needles at once. The girl swept ...
— The Hound From The North • Ridgwell Cullum
... which to you is the unerring judge, seems best, and be careless about the whimsies of such a half-baked notionist as I am. We are here in a most pleasant country, full of walks, and idle to our hearts desire. Taylor has dropt the London. It was indeed a dead weight. It has got in the Slough of Despond. I shuffle off my part of the pack, and stand like Xtian with light and merry shoulders. It had got silly, indecorous, pert, and every thing that is bad. Both our kind remembrances to Mrs. K. and yourself, ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb (Vol. 6) - Letters 1821-1842 • Charles and Mary Lamb
... she could give no account of any 'law work.' And as one of the old examiners, who thought there could be no genuine conversion without a period of deep conviction, asked her, "But, my dear, how about the Slough of Despond?" she dropped a courtesy and said, "Please, sir, ...
— George Muller of Bristol - His Witness to a Prayer-Hearing God • Arthur T. Pierson
... dog, the entrails of the lynx, the backbone of the hyena, and the marrow of a stag that had dieted on serpents, the sinews of the remora, and the eyes of a dragon, the eggs of the eagle, the flying serpent of Arabia, the viper that guards the pearl in the Red Sea, the slough of the hooded snake, and the ashes that remain when the phoenix has been consumed. To these she adds all venom that has a name, the foliage of herbs over which she has sung her charms, and on which she had voided her rheum as ...
— The Haunters & The Haunted - Ghost Stories And Tales Of The Supernatural • Various
... time," said the old man drily; "and it has long been a commonplace that that slough awaits State Socialism in the end, if it gets to the end, which as you know it did not with us. However it went further than this minimum and maximum business, which by the by we can now see was necessary. The government now found it imperative on them to meet the outcry of the ...
— News from Nowhere - or An Epoch of Rest, being some chapters from A Utopian Romance • William Morris
... into which you have ventured for the love of the country, form a sad quagmire. They are like John Bunyan's Slough of Despond, into which, as he observes, millions of cart-loads of good resolutions have been thrown, without perceptibly mending the way. From what you say, and from what I have heard from others, ...
— Memoirs of the Life of Sir Walter Scott, Volume V (of 10) • John Gibson Lockhart
... have been the making of Illinois. Nobody who has ever seen her spring roads, where there are no rails, can ever question it. From the very fatness of her soil, the greater part of the State must have been one Slough of Despond for three quarters of the year, and her inhabitants strangers to each other, if these iron arms had not drawn the people together and bridged the gulfs for them. No roads but railroads could possibly have ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 11, September, 1858 • Various
... or makes concessions, or assents through good-nature, or goes abroad; who is not afraid of giving offense; "who answers you without supplication in his eye,"—in fact, who stands like a granite pillar amid the slough of life. You may wrestle with this man, he says, or swim with him, or lodge in the same chamber with him, or eat at the same table, and yet he is a thousand miles off, and can at any moment finish with you. He is a sheer ...
— Birds and Poets • John Burroughs
... freed himself from all distractions; his pupils and concerts, his whole connection at Bath, were immediately renounced; he accepted the King's offer with alacrity, and after one or two changes settled permanently at Slough, near Windsor. ...
— The Story of the Heavens • Robert Stawell Ball
... preacher himself live well, His predication will help never a dell, And I know well that thy living is nought: Thou art an apostate, if it were well sought. An homicide thou art, I know well enough, For myself knew where that thou slough A wench with thy dagger in a couch: And yet, as thou say'st in thy sermon, ...
— A Select Collection of Old English Plays, Volume I. • R. Dodsley
... know their weakness; they only seek to overwhelm the accused with their votes.(2) Nor have I forgotten how Cleon treated me because of my comedy last year;(3) he dragged me before the Senate and there he uttered endless slanders against me; 'twas a tempest of abuse, a deluge of lies. Through what a slough of mud he dragged me! I almost perished. Permit me, therefore, before I speak, to dress in the manner most likely to ...
— The Acharnians • Aristophanes
... days more, and the sort of prestige with which opulence had invested him would vanish. Not a hand would be offered, not a purse would be open to him. Unless some favorable event occurred he would fall into a slough of contempt, deeper perhaps than he deserved, precisely because he had mounted to a height he could not maintain. At this juncture he happened to hear that a number of strangers of distinction, diplomats ...
— Juana • Honore de Balzac
... swept away for ever, and ignorant what fate by fire or iron might be their portion ere the night was done. They saw the corn that was their winter store to save their offspring from famine poured out like ditch-water. They saw oats and wheat flung down to be trodden into a slough of mud and filth. They saw the walnut presses in their kitchens broken open, and their old heirlooms of silver, centuries old, borne away as booty. They saw the oak cupboards in their wives' bed-chambers ransacked, and the homespun linen and the quaint bits of plate that had formed ...
— Stories By English Authors: France • Various
... world is visible only to a few, the moral world is a closed book to nearly all. I was full of France, and France had to be got rid of, or pushed out of sight before I could understand England; I was like a snake striving to slough ...
— Confessions of a Young Man • George Moore
... rock. But what can be done against an amorphous mass which gives like a jelly, collapses under the least pressure, and retains no imprint of it? All thought and energy and everything disappeared in the slough. When a stone fell there were hardly more than a few ripples quivering on the surface of the gulf: the monster opened and shut its maw, and there was left no trace of what ...
— Jean-Christophe, Vol. I • Romain Rolland
... merit when he saw it. From that morning a feeling of self-respect dawned upon me, I was not so altogether ignorant as I had thought myself, I had some available knowledge; and with that feeling came the determination to raise myself out of that slough of despond into which I ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 76, February, 1864 • Various
... us somewhat else, For sickerly, n'ere* clinking of your bells, *were it not for the That on your bridle hang on every side, By heaven's king, that for us alle died, I should ere this have fallen down for sleep, Although the slough had been never so deep; Then had your tale been all told in vain. For certainly, as these clerkes sayn, Where as a man may have no audience, Nought helpeth it to telle his sentence. And well I wot the substance is in me, If anything shall well ...
— The Canterbury Tales and Other Poems • Geoffrey Chaucer
... were plentiful. To live without work was the lot of none. What blessing above these blessings was needed to make a people great and happy? And now a stranger visiting them would declare that they are wallowing in a very slough of despond. The only trade open is the trade of war. The axe of the woodsman is at rest; the plow is idle; the artificer has closed his shop. The roar of the foundery is still heard because cannon are needed, and the river of molten iron comes out as an implement of death. The stone- ...
— Volume 2 • Anthony Trollope
... benighted, lost in the darkness. Radically, 'to founder' is to go to the bottom (Fr. fondrer; Lat. fundus, the bottom), hence applied to ships; it is also applied to horses sinking in a slough. The compound is Miltonic (see Par. Lost, i. 204), and is sometimes stigmatised as meaningless; on the contrary, it is very expressive, implying that the brothers are swallowed up in night and have lost their way. 'Founder' is here used in the secondary ...
— Milton's Comus • John Milton
... so sanguine of his country's future. He had come a long way from the buoyant faith of '66, and the change in him was typical of the change in the West—in America—and it produced in me a sense of dismay, of rebellious bitterness. Why should our great new land fall into this slough ...
— A Son of the Middle Border • Hamlin Garland
... an' six shillin' in my pocket an' a lot more hid in the bush. It's all yourn to the last round penny. I reckon it'll purty nigh bridge the slough. I want ye to be married respectable like a gentleman—slick duds, plenty o' cakes an' pies an' no slightin' the minister er ...
— In the Days of Poor Richard • Irving Bacheller
... the train at Slough, and a wave of freshness, with an odour of verdure and sap, blew into their faces. The dog leaped and barked, and Glory skipped along with it, breaking every moment into enthusiastic exclamations. There was hardly any wind, and ...
— The Christian - A Story • Hall Caine
... swamp, morass, marish^, moss, fen, bog, quagmire, slough, sump, wash; mud, squash, slush; baygall [U.S.], cienaga^, jhil^, vlei^. Adj. marsh, marshy; swampy, boggy, plashy^, poachy^, quaggy^, soft; muddy, sloppy, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... dies, as a slough in the throat, or the mortified part of a carbuncle, if it be kept moist and warm, as during its abhesion to a living body, it will soon putrify. This, and the origin of contagion from putrid animal ...
— Zoonomia, Vol. I - Or, the Laws of Organic Life • Erasmus Darwin
... just like exercising your muscles in a gymnasium. You can lift twice or three times as much after you've been in training a month as you could before. And I can see that it's going to be just so with your son. His going through college won't hurt him,—he'll soon slough all that off,—and his bringing up won't; don't be anxious about it. I noticed in the army that some of the fellows that had the most go-ahead were fellows that hadn't ever had much more to do than girls before the war broke out. Your ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... that in the vast tundra regions of Northern Siberia the frozen soil had dissolved into a bottomless slough, from whose depths uprose prehistoric mammoths, their long hair matted with mud, and their curved tusks of ivory gleaming like trumpets over the field of their resurrection. The dispatch concluded with a heart-rending account of the loss of a large party of ...
— The Second Deluge • Garrett P. Serviss
... would be secured by the proposed method which under the existing system we miss. There is, of course, such a danger as that of providing too much liturgical variety. Amateur makers of Prayer Books almost invariably fall into this slough. Hymn-books, as is well known, often destroy their own usefulness by including too many hymns; and Prayer Books may do the same by having ...
— A Short History of the Book of Common Prayer • William Reed Huntington
... with the calmness of the older man who has fewer years to taste it in. He could not ask the boy to consider, to make no hasty judgment. Whatever lay behind the words, it was something of a grave consequence. And Dick himself led the way out of the slough where they ...
— Old Crow • Alice Brown
... a circuit,—came by the old trail around the head of the slough. We haven't passed anybody, have we, Tony?" he asked of the silent ...
— Foes in Ambush • Charles King
... daughter and to return to Paris. Her husband wrote to her from Warsaw: "I have your letter of January 15. It is impossible for me to let women undertake such a journey: bad roads, unsafe, and a slough of mud. Go back to Paris; be happy and contented there; perhaps I shall be there soon. I laugh at what you say, that you married to be with your husband. I had thought in my ignorance that the wife was created for the husband, the husband for the country, the family, and glory. ...
— The Court of the Empress Josephine • Imbert de Saint-Amand
... and culture. Boscan was handicapped by writing in a tongue not native to him and by the constant holding of foreign models before his eyes, and he was not a man of genius; yet his verse kept to a loftier ideal than had appeared for a long time and his effort to lift Castilian poetry from the slough of convention into which it had fallen was successful. During the rest of the century the impulse given by Boscan divided Spanish lyrists into two opposing hosts, the Italianates and those who clung to the native meters (stanzas of short, chiefly octosyllabic, ...
— Modern Spanish Lyrics • Various
... one as the many dull would meanly scorn and the few wise nobly envy. For him love comes like a mighty wind of fire and burns his heart clean. He may have been stained and spotted in the slough of life, but when the woman ...
— The Proud Prince • Justin Huntly McCarthy
... similar to that which is said to recall the memory of a former state of existence, suggested to them a notion that the garment had once been their own. Indeed, his whole appearance was then wonderfully second-hand. Now he had cast his slough. A most undeniable taglioni, with trimmings just bordering upon frogs, gave dignity to his demeanour and twofold amplitude to his chest. The horn eye-glass was exchanged for one of purest gold, the dingy ...
— Stories by English Authors: Scotland • Various
... was an old person of Slough, Who danced at the end of a bough; But they said, "If you sneeze, you might damage the trees, You ...
— Nonsense Books • Edward Lear
... faint-heartedness and contradictions of the Administration had no selfish object. His heart was wrenched by the humiliation into which the honor of the United States had been dragged. The greatest patriotic service which he could render was to lift it out of that slough, and he did. The best evidence that he was right lies in the fact that President Wilson, tardily, reluctantly, adopted, one by one, Roosevelt's demands. He rejected Preparedness, when it could have been attained with comparative leisure; he ...
— Theodore Roosevelt; An Intimate Biography, • William Roscoe Thayer
... darkness was beginning to come on, we came to an almost impassable slough in the trail, where a small stream descended into a little flat marsh and morass. This had been used as a camping-place by others, and we decided to camp, because to travel, even in the twilight, was ...
— The Trail of the Goldseekers - A Record of Travel in Prose and Verse • Hamlin Garland
... swell up in me? No wonder! And you hain't guessed why? Well, them pitiful remnant of Saints, the sick, the old, the poor, waitin' to be helped yender to winter quarters, has been throwed out into that there slough acrost the river, six hundred ...
— The Lions of the Lord - A Tale of the Old West • Harry Leon Wilson
... could not regain his balance, he could not even for an instant stand upright on it. But from its support he leapt on convulsively, and, as a pike, flung from above, wounded him in the shoulder, he fell his length in the slough—but forward, with his outstretched hands resting on soil of a harder nature. They sank, it is true, to the elbow, but he dragged his body forward on them, and forward, and freeing one by a last effort of strength—he could not free both, and, as it was, half his face ...
— Count Hannibal - A Romance of the Court of France • Stanley J. Weyman
... had been. Now, however, all was changed; and for any thing which regarded my sister's memory, in one hour I received a new heart. Once in Westmoreland I saw a case resembling it. I saw a ewe suddenly put off and abjure her own nature, in a service of love—yes, slough it as completely as ever serpent sloughed his skin. Her lamb had fallen into a deep trench, from which all escape was hopeless without the aid of man. And to a man she advanced, bleating clamorously, until he followed her and rescued her ...
— Autobiographic Sketches • Thomas de Quincey
... world, we arise up and become another creature; performing the reasonable actions of man, and obscurely manifesting that part of divinity in us, but not in complement and perfection, till we have once more cast our secundine, that is, this slough of flesh, and are delivered into the last world, that is, that ineffable place of Paul, that proper ubi of spirits. The smattering I have of the philosopher's stone (which is something more than the perfect exaltation of gold) hath taught me a great ...
— Religio Medici, Hydriotaphia, and the Letter to a Friend • Sir Thomas Browne
... were in the most frightful condition, insomuch that had not the zealous Mayor of Barbonne collected 500 horses, and come to their assistance, they must have been forced to leave all their artillery in a slough near that town; yet this determined band marched nearly forty miles ere they halted with the dark. Next morning they proceeded with equal alacrity, and at length debouched on the road by which Blucher's army was advancing, at Champaubert. Alsusieff ...
— The History of Napoleon Buonaparte • John Gibson Lockhart
... spirit of comradarie. Then one day in a gallop came a stronger manifestation, a brief minute of exhilaration, with after-hours of thankfulness, and beyond that, alas for the uncertainty of a spoiled temper, an added period of wallowing in the Slough of Despond! ...
— Thoroughbreds • W. A. Fraser
... was thus sinking deeper and deeper in the Slough of Despond, the firing of a musket, and the shriek of the man who was struck, attracted my attention. Looking towards the opposite end of the pen I saw a guard bringing his still smoking musket to a "recover ...
— Andersonville, complete • John McElroy
... Is it always to be thus with Israel? Are we to struggle out of one slough only to sink into another? But these doubts dishonor the Master. Let me be humbler in judging others, cheerfuller in looking out upon the future, more enkindling towards the young men who are growing up around me, and who may yet pass on the torch of ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... of the mysteries would appear to have had a real meaning, and were not talking nonsense when they intimated in a figure long ago that he who passes unsanctified and uninitiated into the world below will lie in a slough, but that he who arrives there after initiation and purification will dwell with the gods. For 'many,' as they say in the mysteries, 'are the thyrsus-bearers, but few are the mystics,'—meaning, as I interpret the words, 'the true philosophers.' In the number ...
— Phaedo - The Last Hours Of Socrates • Plato
... was a sure passport. When the girls worked they worked hard, and when playtime came it was enjoyed to the full. Naturally, with so many dispositions surrounding her, Miss Preston often in secret floundered in a "slough of despond," for that which could influence one girl for her good might prove a complete failure when brought to bear upon another. Never was the old adage, "What is one man's meat is another man's poison," ...
— Caps and Capers - A Story of Boarding-School Life • Gabrielle E. Jackson
... wonder where a Galilean fisherman got the impulse that lifted him to such a height; one may well wonder that he ventured to address such wide, absolute commandments to the handful of people just dragged from the very slough and filth of heathenism to whom he spoke. But he had dwelt with Christ, and they had Christ in their hearts. So for him to command and for them to obey, and to aim after even so wide and wonderful an attainment as perfecting like God's was the most ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ephesians; Epistles of St. Peter and St. John • Alexander Maclaren
... villages have all departed, and the recollection that they have been here makes the solitude more complete. The woods in which they wandered are impassable, for the rain has been heavy, and the dry, baked clay of August has been turned into a slough a foot deep. The wind, what there is of it, is from the south-west, soft, sweet and damp; the sky is almost covered with bluish-grey clouds, which here and there give way and permit a dim, watery gleam to float slowly over the distant pastures. The grass for the most part is greyish-green, ...
— Pages from a Journal with Other Papers • Mark Rutherford
... one declaring that it had been a great treat. Larry kept the two drumsticks as well as the wings of the gobbler. Possibly he might many a time feel a queer little sensation creeping up and down his spinal column as memory carried him back again to that slough, where the treacherous black mud was slowly but surely sucking ...
— Chums in Dixie - or The Strange Cruise of a Motorboat • St. George Rathborne
... is at present covered with a thick slough of oil and varnish (the perishable vehicle of the English school), like an envelope of goldbeaters' skin, so ...
— Table-Talk - Essays on Men and Manners • William Hazlitt
... human beings sink to the depths in which John B. Gough found himself at the age of twenty-five years. By sheer force of will he raised himself from the slough in which he wallowed, till he attained a position honored among men, and performed a service of exceptional ...
— Stories of Achievement, Volume III (of 6) - Orators and Reformers • Various
... of both. This earth is his footstool; yonder heaven his throne! I pretend not to enter into his sacred mysteries, or to proclaim the reason why one-half of his fair work hath been so long left in that slough of ignorance and heathenish abomination in which my fathers found it; why these hills never before echoed the songs of praise or why the valleys have been so long mute. These are truths hid in the secret designs of his sacred purpose, and they may not ...
— The Wept of Wish-Ton-Wish • James Fenimore Cooper
... acquired the alphabet and many a ginger-nut and decorative bonbon. And from her, too, he had set forth, with tears, in his new Eton jacket and broad white collar, to go to Mr. Chapman's preparatory school for little boys at Slough. Here he remained for several years, acquiring a respect for the poet Gray and a love of Slough peppermint that could only cease with life. Here too he made friends with Robert Green, son of Lord Churchmore, who was afterwards to be a certain influence in his life. His existence at Slough was ...
— The Prophet of Berkeley Square • Robert Hichens
... sings; The turtle to her make hath told her tale. Summer is come, for every spray now springs: The hart hath hung his old head on the pale; The buck in brake his winter coat he flings; The fishes flete with new repaired scale. The adder all her slough away she slings; The swift swallow pursueth the flies smale; The busy bee her honey now she mings; Winter is worn that was the flowers' bale. And thus I see among these pleasant things Each care decays, and yet my sorrow springs. HENRY HOWARD, EARL ...
— The Principles of English Versification • Paull Franklin Baum
... one were free to till the soil and cultivate it to the best advantage, without paying rent, agriculture, even though it should enjoy—which can by no means be taken for granted—a momentary prosperity, would soon fall back into the slough in which it finds itself to-day. The whole thing would have to be begun over again, ...
— The Conquest of Bread • Peter Kropotkin
... anxious. But their leader kept steadily on. The sand was hard enough and offered sufficient resistance to the broad hoof of a horse, but if one stood still for a minute or so, it began gradually to silt up and bury it. It was a horrible place. When at noon that devil's slough resolved itself into a comparatively narrow strip, and Dorothy saw that they could easily have left it, she began to understand their reason for keeping on such dangerous ground—they did not wish to leave any tracks behind them. In all truth there was absolutely ...
— The Rising of the Red Man - A Romance of the Louis Riel Rebellion • John Mackie
... drought and scarcity ask not the distressed dervish, saying: "How are you?" Unless on the condition that you apply a balm to his wound, and supply him with the means of subsistence:—The ass which thou seest stuck in the slough with his rider, compassionate from thy heart, otherwise do not go near him. Now that thou went and asked him how he fell, like a sturdy fellow bind up thy loins, and take his ass by ...
— Persian Literature, Volume 2, Comprising The Shah Nameh, The - Rubaiyat, The Divan, and The Gulistan • Anonymous
... strange and unreal regions become well-known places, and moral qualities distinct human beings. Evangelist, who puts Christian on the way to the Wicked Gate; Pliable, who deserts him at the first difficulty; Help, who pulls him out of the Slough of Despond; Mr. Worldly Wiseman, who shows him an easy way to be rid of his burden, are all life-like individuals. Timorous, Talkative, Vain Confidence, Giant Despair, are not mere personifications, but distinct human beings with ...
— A History of English Prose Fiction • Bayard Tuckerman
... Napoleon III., we shall not be inclined to condemn it. His rule has not been a perfect one, but it has been the best that France has known for fifty years, not only for the French themselves, but for foreign peoples. He has lifted France out of that slough in which she had floundered under both branches of the Bourbons, and he has done so without being guilty of any act of injustice toward other nations. The greatness of the France of Napoleon I. was unpleasingly associated with the idea of the degradation ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 7, No. 44, June, 1861 • Various
... is best known were results of those accidents that happen only to the indefatigable enthusiast. Such was the discovery of Uranus, which led to funds being provided for constructing his 40-feet telescope, after which, in 1786, he settled at Slough. In the same way, while trying to detect the annual parallax of the stars, he failed in that quest, but discovered binary systems of stars revolving in ellipses round each other; just as Bradley's attack on stellar parallax failed, but led to ...
— History of Astronomy • George Forbes
... compliment Polonius takes the form in which she expresses her dislike of his tediousness, and her anxiety after his news: pretending to wave it off, he yet, in his gratification, coming on the top of his excitement with the importance of his fancied discovery, plunges immediately into a very slough of ...
— The Tragedie of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark - A Study with the Text of the Folio of 1623 • George MacDonald
... up-looking of her better nature; and her charity was unbounded. Shall we—reared and instructed in all righteous ways—shall we show less charity to the memory of one who in her latter days rose out of the slough into which circumstance—not vice—had plunged her? Shall we be less charitable than the bishop who honored her memory and his own character by recording her benevolence, her penitence, her exemplary end? The good bishop's testimony renders it needless ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 1, April, 1851 • Various
... for we could not eat the salt grass, and Scrag had turned north by a mud slough where the waters were bitter, and red moss grew on the roots of the willows. We ate for a quarter of the moon's course before we went back around the hard land to see what had become of Taku-Wakin. We fed as far as there was any browse between the sea and the marsh, and at last we saw them come, ...
— The Trail Book • Mary Austin et al
... see it once again; we should be near it now; It's scarce a mile to where the trail strikes off to skirt the slough, And then the dip to Indian Spring, the wooded rise, and—strange! Yet here should stand the blasted pine that marked our farther range; And here—what's this? A ragged swab of ruts and stumps and mire! Sure this is not the sacred grove that hid ...
— Complete Poetical Works of Bret Harte • Bret Harte
... his carelessness (but then he had been so worn out with watching), his fatal mistake, his heartless mistake (and yet he would almost have given his own life for his children) had brought him down to this slough of despond. There was no hope, the doctors never told him of any, and he knew he could not bear this ...
— Fated to Be Free • Jean Ingelow
... never get into any proper relation to Jimville unless you could slough off and swallow your acquired prejudices as a lizard does his skin. Once wanting some womanly attentions, the stage-driver assured me I might have them at the Nine-Mile House from the lady barkeeper. The phrase tickled all my after-dinner-coffee sense of humor into an anticipation ...
— The Land of Little Rain • Mary Austin
... day—dethroned him more than once; but he had the hearts of the merry dames of London, and the purses and veins of the cockneys bled freely, till they brought him home again. How say you?—shall I shake off my northern slough, and speak with Alice in my own character, showing what education and manners have done for me, to make the best amends they can ...
— Woodstock; or, The Cavalier • Sir Walter Scott
... week at least having killed all your mules for you, before I shot down your dogs—but not being exactly Phoibos Apollon, you are to know further that when I did think I might go modestly on, ... [Greek: omoi], let me get out of this slough of a simile, never mind with what dislocation of ancles! Plainly, from waiting and turning my eyes away (not from you, but from you in your special capacity of being written-to, not spoken-to) when I turned again you ...
— The Letters of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett, Vol. 1 (of 2) 1845-1846 • Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett
... him by his grace, and fooled him with his wit; he laid little plots to turn his mustache and guitar into ridicule; he seduced him into a hunt with the buckhounds (though Castleton himself had not hunted before since he was thirty), and drew him, spluttering German oaths, out of the slough of a ditch; he made him the laughter of the clubs; he put him fairly out of fashion,—and all with such suavity, and politeness, and bland sense of superiority, that it was the finest piece of high comedy you ...
— The Caxtons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... through the 'Dutch Original,' and made notes from it;—there is not the slightest resemblance in it to anything in the 'Pilgrim's Progress. The three striking circumstances which you mentioned of the 'Hill of Difficulty,' the 'Slough of Despond,' and 'Vanity Fair,' do not afford any ground for supposing that Bunyan had ever heard of this book; or that even if he had read it, he should have taken one hint from it. Here the incidents are, 1st that the wilful Pilgrim stops in a village crowd to see some juggler's tricks ...
— Reminiscences of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Robert Southey • Joseph Cottle
... the circumstances, but I never heard about the bear and bull episode before. I seem to have sort of a dim notion that you were packing a deer home on your back and fell into a barranca with it and lost it in a mud slough, but perhaps I'm mistaken. You forgot to tell me ...
— Bears I Have Met—and Others • Allen Kelly
... not help him out of his present slough of despond. He thought of how lonesome he should be after Harrington went away the next day. He could have Scott or Charlie Minturn up to see him, to be sure, but somehow, since he had known Harrington, these old friends had not seemed ...
— Two Boys and a Fortune • Matthew White, Jr.
... Island, thirty square miles; the area of Suisun Bay, to the confluence of the San Joaquin and Sacramento rivers, is sixty-three square miles. The total bay area is therefore four hundred and eighty square miles; and there are hundreds of miles of slough, river, and creek. A yachtsman, starting from Alviso, at the southern end of the bay, may sail in one general direction one hundred and fifty-four miles to Sacramento, before turning. All of this, ...
— The California Birthday Book • Various
... no place for you," she defiantly said. "The rest of us are all more or less born to the plains and farm-life, but you're not; you're just 'sagging,' that's all. You're getting deeper into the slough all ...
— They of the High Trails • Hamlin Garland
... waited till the grave was filled and the turf laid down, a trying quarter of an hour. Ah me! the thud of the spade on your mother's grave! None gave any sign of what he felt save Drumsheugh, whose sordid slough had slipped off from a tender heart, and Chalmers, who went behind a tombstone and sobbed aloud. Not even Posty asked the reason so much as by a look, and Drumtochty, as it passed, made as though it ...
— Beside the Bonnie Brier Bush • Ian Maclaren
... creative. All these colonizers had their special projects, and each project, being inspired by imperfect ideals, failed more or less, or changed its character from time to time. The first and third projects were at one time guided by the same hand; but the first project gradually cast off its colonizing slough, and resolved itself once more into discovery for discovery's sake; and the third project ceased to be a plan of campaign, and resolved itself into sober and peaceful schemes for settling in the land. Even the second project, which was unled, uninspired, ...
— The Story of Newfoundland • Frederick Edwin Smith, Earl of Birkenhead
... the old, and the law of inheritance holds in her as it holds in the State. She is a mixture of good and evil, of liberty and license. She must still draw forward, for a time, the dead weight of her past, just as the West must bear with and gradually slough off its violent moods." ...
— Cavanaugh: Forest Ranger - A Romance of the Mountain West • Hamlin Garland
... saw was from a curtained auto as we swayed and bumped over broken roads, with an occasional interlude when Jeremy and I got out to lend our shoulders and help the Arab driver heave the car out of a slough. ...
— Affair in Araby • Talbot Mundy
... after my failure would be incomplete without its testimony to the devotion of my wife and children under the new conditions. My wife was a glorious sunbeam whose rays of cheerfulness never dimmed. Her wonderful spirits and courage lifted me out of the Slough of Despondency, and her love and tenderness supported me through ...
— The Romance and Tragedy • William Ingraham Russell
... with a sick wife, and seven disorderly children," established in his palace. To Mrs. Hunt he was positively brutal; nor could he tolerate her self-complacent husband, who, while he had voyaged far and wide in literature, had never wholly cast the slough of Cockneyism. Hunt was himself hardly powerful enough to understand the true magnitude of Shelley, though he loved him; and the tender solicitude of the great, unselfish Shelley, for the smaller, harmlessly conceited Hunt, is pathetic. They spent a pleasant day or two ...
— Percy Bysshe Shelley • John Addington Symonds
... insensible degrees, overdone with work, bereft of conjugal consolations, and weary of a world in which he wandered alone, by the time he was two-and-thirty had sunk into the Slough of Despond. He hated life. Having too lofty a notion of the responsibilities imposed on him by his position to set the example of a dissipated life, he tried to deaden feeling by hard study, and began a ...
— A Second Home • Honore de Balzac
... sufficient to entirely arrest the circulation in any part, the structures soon die. The disorder manifests itself as lameness in one or more limbs; swelling about the ankle which may result in only a small slough or the loss of a toe, but it may circumscribe the limb at any point below the knee or hock by an indented ring below which the tissues become dead. The indentation soon changes to a crack, which extends completely around the limb, forming the line of separation between the dead and living ...
— Special Report on Diseases of Cattle • U.S. Department of Agriculture
... at, should it not indeed be forgiven him, if, impelled by the anxieties and privations at home, the unfortunate poet, driven to the brink of madness, plunged still deeper into the Slough of Despond? Unable to provide for the pressing necessities of his beloved ...
— Edgar Allan Poe's Complete Poetical Works • Edgar Allan Poe
... idle above them, in a fool's paradise of luxury and riot, never looking down but to squeeze from them an extra drop of honey— like sheep-boys stuffing themselves with blackberries while the sheep are licking up flukes in every ditch? And now you wish to leave the poor man in the slough, whither your neglect and your example have betrayed him, and made his too apt scholarship the excuse for your own remorseless greed! As a Christian, I am ashamed of you all; as a Churchman, doubly ashamed of those prelates, hired stalking-horses of the rich, who would fain gloss over ...
— The Saint's Tragedy • Charles Kingsley
... from Brown's, at Slough, a princely establishment, worthy of its regal neighbourhood, to the pretty rural gardens at South Warnborough, not forgetting our own most intelligent and obliging nurseryman, Mr. Sutton of Reading—(Belford Regis, I mean)—whose collection of flowers of all sorts ...
— The Lost Dahlia • Mary Russell Mitford
... in black; 'but let it once obtain emancipation, and it will cast its slough, put on its fine clothes, and make converts by thousands. 'What a fine Church!' they'll say; 'with what authority it speaks! no doubts, no hesitation, no sticking at trifles. What a contrast to the sleepy English Church! They'll go over ...
— Lavengro - The Scholar, The Gypsy, The Priest • George Borrow
... this region of the Columbia was named Wappatoo Island by the explorers. This is a large extent of country lying between the Willamette and an arm of the Columbia which they called Wappatoo Inlet, but which is now known as Willamette Slough. It is twenty miles long and from five to ten miles wide. Here is an interesting description of the manner of gathering the roots of the wappatoo, of which we have heard so much in ...
— First Across the Continent • Noah Brooks
... break every plank he walks on, and strip him stark till he flops down shivering into his slough—a convicted common swindler, with his dinners and Balls and his private bands! Richmond, you killed one of my daughters; t' other fed you, through her agent, this Mr. Charles Adolphus Bannerbridge, ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... this slough of sense be cast, This dust of thoughts be laid at last, The man of flesh and soul be slain And the man of ...
— A Shropshire Lad • A. E. Housman
... cruelties upon them. But a much easier, and even kinder, guess would be that they knew things about her that had not been and must not be told, if she could possibly prevent it. A high temper, let us say, had led her into a slough of misdoing to a depth beyond all her expectation, and the only way out was on the ...
— Strange True Stories of Louisiana • George Washington Cable
... the cozeners: for so soon as I came beyond Eton, they threw me off, from behind one of them, in a slough of mire; and set spurs and away, like three German devils, ...
— The Merry Wives of Windsor - The Works of William Shakespeare [Cambridge Edition] [9 vols.] • William Shakespeare
... Gazette (California) describes the fall of a meteor in that vicinity, witnessed by Dr. Goodspeed, which fell in a slough and so heated the water as to kill the catfish that inhabited it. It lies in the pond, and looks as if a hundred feet wide. A much more marvellous story has been published of an engraved meteoric stone falling in an obscure portion of Georgia near Clayton Court-house, ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, October 1887 - Volume 1, Number 9 • Various
... than half way to Lectoure, and I was growing each minute more impatient when our road, which had for a little while left the river bank, dropped down to it again, and I saw before us another crossing, half ford half slough. My men tried it gingerly and gave back and tried it again in another place; and finally, just as Mademoiselle and her brother came up to them, floundered through and sprang slantwise ...
— Under the Red Robe • Stanley Weyman
... relations with the course of the dull world; he is not quite a man, as the world goes, and not at all an angel, as the celestials see. He must be his own motive, path, and guide, his own priest, king, and law. The world may be his footstool, and may be his slough of despond, but is never his final end. His aims are transcendental, his realm is art, his interests ideal, his life divine, his destiny immortal. All the old theories of saintship are revived in him. He is in the world, but not of it. Shadows of infinitude are his realities. He sees ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 83, September, 1864 • Various
... between lovers, had informed Donald the night previous of the motherly soul's interest in his affairs; wherefore he returned Mrs. Daney's warm greeting with such chilly courtesy that she was at no loss to guess the reason for it and was instantly plunged into a slough of terror and despair. She retained sufficient wit, however, to draw her husband away, thus preventing him from ...
— Kindred of the Dust • Peter B. Kyne
... tegument, derm; epidermis, cuticle, scarfskin; true skin, dermis, derma, cutis; membrane, epithelium, ecteron, enderon, ecderon; pelt, pell, pelage, peltry; hide, kip; husk, hull, glume; (of fruit) peel, peeling, rind, paring, epicarp; pellicle, film; episperm, testa, tegmen; slough, exuviae (cast-off-skin); parchment, vellum. Antonyms: pulp, flesh. Associated Words: dermatology, dermatologist, dermic, dermatic, dermal, cutaneous, dermatitis, dermatography, dermatoid, smegma, caul, dermatopathic, dermoplastic, dermoplasty, hypodermic, subcutaneous, dermatopathy, exuviate, exuviation, ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming
... upon him, half relenting; and at that he raised the stick that was in his hand and cruelly struck me on the face. 'Lead on!' he cried again. 'Must I be all day, catching my death in this vile slough, and all ...
— The Dynamiter • Robert Louis Stevenson and Fanny van de Grift Stevenson
... fine, clear morning when we started for Windsor by railroad, a distance of twenty-one miles. The country is fine; but our thoughts were on the castle. At Slough we took an omnibus, and rode into the town. It is a pretty, quiet place, of about ten thousand inhabitants. There are some six or seven streets, and they present but few attractions. The castle is every thing. You know this has been the favorite residence ...
— Young Americans Abroad - Vacation in Europe: Travels in England, France, Holland, - Belgium, Prussia and Switzerland • Various
... their two guests think so, but the whole country, far and wide around, entertained precisely the same opinion. It is not, therefore, surprising that two young men like Frank and Vernon should be well pleased with their quarters, or that, having so early gotten into the slough of love, they should daily continue to sink deeper into the mire. The young poet's lame leg, though not a very serious affair, was still sufficient to keep him for several days a close prisoner to the house; but if any one had asked him—no, we don't go so far as to say that, for if any one had ...
— Blackwoods Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 365, March, 1846 • Various
... earth! from the airy changeling of the caterpillar, up or down to the lion and to man, ye all of you, fostering a brief momentary spark in you, like the glance from the flint and steel ... gone is the red bubbling up of the spark ... and again a mere slough is lying before us, after its short dream of life and love, dust upon dust, rottenness upon decay ... the great-grandfather beside his mouldering great-grandchild ... and neither knows the other, neither has ever heard ...
— The Old Man of the Mountain, The Lovecharm and Pietro of Abano - Tales from the German of Tieck • Ludwig Tieck
... our society;" and continued, "I can't think you could have taken any offence at anything we may have done or said; but if so, upon your mentioning it, we will endeavour to make the amende honorable,"—he was perfectly reclaimed from his "slough of despond." At the same time he knew he could make no explanation, and therefore kept silent. What was he to do? he was again enslaved as hopelessly as ever; for the charm of Eleanor's presence he could not ...
— Fern Vale (Volume 1) - or the Queensland Squatter • Colin Munro
... man's whole intellectual character, and declare him to be incapable of poetry, on the score of a few legal papers about matters of business. Apparently Shakspere helped that Elizabethan Mr. Micawber, his father, out of a pecuniary slough of despond, in which the ex-High Bailiff of the town was floundering,— pursued by the distraint of one of the friendly family of Quiney— Adrian Quiney. They were neighbours and made a common dunghill in Henley Street. {171a} I do not, like Mr. Greenwood, see anything "at all out ...
— Shakespeare, Bacon and the Great Unknown • Andrew Lang
... finally proposes to give poor old Severn his due as a master by proxy. Imagine Sir William Herschel's pleasure when his beloved sister Caroline begins to receive her full deserts. And Tschaikowsky will slough his morbidness and improvise a Slavic Hallelujah Chorus when his unseen patroness comes into her own. It is true that the world has already given her memory two fingers and a perfunctory "thank ye." This was for putting her purse at Tschaikowsky's disposal, thus making it possible for him ...
— The Joyful Heart • Robert Haven Schauffler
... good cause. Upon his friends R. H. D. had the same effect. And it was not only in proximity that he could distribute energy, but from afar, by letter and cable. He had some intuitive way of knowing just when you were slipping into a slough of laziness and discouragement. And at such times he either appeared suddenly upon the scene, or there came a boy on a bicycle, with a yellow envelope and a book to sign, or the postman in his buggy, or the telephone rang ...
— Appreciations of Richard Harding Davis • Various
... this as I see it, sweetheart. I'm a man—primitive, if you like. I've done wild and evil things—plenty of them. What of that? I slough them off and trample them down. The heart of me is clean, ...
— The Highgrader • William MacLeod Raine
... grape-vines,—where the air is sweet with woodland odors, and vocal with the song of birds. Then the deep cypress-swamp, where dark trunks rise like the columns of some vast sepulchre. Above, the impervious canopy of leaves; beneath, a black and root-encumbered slough. Perpetual moisture trickles down the clammy bark, while trunk and limb, distorted with strange shapes of vegetable disease, wear in the gloom a semblance grotesque and startling. Lifeless forms lean propped in wild disorder ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, August, 1863, No. 70 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various
... halls of legislation and the marts of commerce. Save us from such a war! Let not the mad anger of such a people be aroused. And, gentlemen, if war comes it must be long and terrible. You will see both parties rise in their majesty at both ends of the line. They will slough off every other consideration and devote themselves, with terrible energy, to the work of death. Oh ye! who bring such a calamity as this upon this once happy country! Pause, gentlemen, before you do it, and think of the fearful accountability that awaits you ...
— A Report of the Debates and Proceedings in the Secret Sessions of the Conference Convention • Lucius Eugene Chittenden
... stands before the portal, bright With steel, his head and bust secured in mail, Like to a serpent, issued into light, Having cast off his slough, diseased and stale: Who more than ever joying in his might, Renewed in youth, and proud of polished scale, Darts his three tongues, fire flashing from his eyes; While every frighted beast before ...
— Orlando Furioso • Lodovico Ariosto |
