"Vortex" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... presently discovered filling the air over the garden, and whirling excitedly around. Gradually they began to drift over the street; a moment more, and they had become separated from the other bees, and, drawing together in a more compact mass or cloud, away they went, a humming, flying vortex of bees, the queen in the centre, and the swarm revolving around her as a pivot,—over meadows, across creeks and swamps, straight for the heart of the mountain, about a mile distant,—slow at first, so that the youth who gave chase ...
— Birds and Bees, Sharp Eyes and, Other Papers • John Burroughs
... Goodbody any further into the intricacies of his subject until he has solved my problem. This he resolutely professes himself unable to do, and begs to be allowed to leave it and plunge into the giddy vortex of the multiplication table. ...
— Punch, Volume 156, January 22, 1919. • Various
... for lack of funds. At this juncture, he resolved to make the financial news of the day a special feature of "The Herald." The monetary affairs of the country were in great confusion—a confusion which was but the prelude to the crash of 1837; and Wall Street was the vortex of the financial whirlpool whose eddies were troubling the whole land. Every body was anxious to get the first news from the street, and to get it as full and reliable as possible. At this time, too, our relations with France were exceedingly ...
— Great Fortunes, and How They Were Made • James D. McCabe, Jr.
... to her eyes, and answered "No" in a smothered tone. It seemed to her she was whirling in the vortex of such agonising dreams as accompany a raging fever, Piero had ceased speaking. Two or three minutes slipped by. She withdrew her hands from her tearful eyes, and fixed her gaze upon the cross, which shone there in front of her, beyond ...
— The Saint • Antonio Fogazzaro
... Wagnerian gesture. The vortex of steel and glass and gold, the black express-packets plowing the seven seas, the smoking trains piercing the bowels of the mountains and connecting cities vibrant with hordes of business men, the telegraph wires setting the world aquiver with their incessant reports, ...
— Musical Portraits - Interpretations of Twenty Modern Composers • Paul Rosenfeld
... that steady backward drag, the resistance ceased. The lynx had launched itself forward in one last convulsive struggle to free itself from those strangling teeth at its throat. For a second or two Sonny felt himself overwhelmed, engulfed, in a vortex of rending claws. In a tight ball of hate and ferocity and horror the two rolled over and over in the underbrush. Sonny, doubled up hard to protect his belly, heard a shrill cry of fear from the Kid. At the sound he summoned ...
— The House in the Water - A Book of Animal Stories • Charles G. D. Roberts
... the second came full two-thirds; the third dashed the senseless body of Ben Burnley, with bleeding head and broken bones, against the very edge of the truck, then surged back with him into a whirling vortex. ...
— A Perilous Secret • Charles Reade
... downstairs, carrying his bag. Miss Heredith and Phil were waiting to bid farewell to him. As Miss Heredith said good-bye, she looked into his face with the perplexed expression of a simple soul seeking reassurance from a stronger mind in the deep vortex of extraordinary events into which she had been plunged beyond her depth. Phil looked white and ill, and the hand which he gave into the detective's cool firm grasp was hot and feverish. While his aunt murmured those conventional ...
— The Hand in the Dark • Arthur J. Rees
... immediate followers had scarcely turned from the scene at the cafe before they were swallowed up in the vortex that now met them. Indeed, Jean had not witnessed either the horrible brutality of the butcher or his punishment. The cries of "Les agents! a bas les agents!" had suddenly carried him elsewhere on the field of battle. He ...
— Mlle. Fouchette - A Novel of French Life • Charles Theodore Murray
... hundred Spartans, could throw themselves into the Thermopylae of death for the salvation of their country, it would ill become one humble Canadian to hesitate at any sacrifice, or shrink from any responsibility, or even danger, in order to prevent his own countrymen from rushing into a vortex, which, he is most certainly persuaded, will involve many of them in calamities more serious than those which followed the events ...
— The Story of My Life - Being Reminiscences of Sixty Years' Public Service in Canada • Egerton Ryerson
... wherefore do we now exist? "By what right?"—and by what right are we? To exist is just as gratuitous as to go on existing for ever. Do not let us talk of merit or of right or of the wherefore of our longing, which is an end in itself, or we shall lose our reason in a vortex of absurdities. I do not claim any right or merit; it is only a necessity; I need it ...
— Tragic Sense Of Life • Miguel de Unamuno
... strange experience to be ushered into the very vortex of a soldier's life, although my experience of military camp life was not a new one; in far back years happy service in a kilted regiment had left a mark which time ...
— With The Immortal Seventh Division • E. J. Kennedy and the Lord Bishop of Winchester
... whether you remember the place of Jones's residence or no, you will immediately conclude that I am with him. I quitted London about three weeks ago, where my time passed in a strange manner, sometimes whirled about by the vortex of its strenua inertia, and sometimes thrown by the eddy into a corner of the stream. Think not, however, that I had not many pleasant hours.... My time has been spent since I reached Wales in ...
— The Prose Works of William Wordsworth • William Wordsworth
... God, in the vortex I have not been hurled. If experience breeds such a mental disease, I am glad I have lived with the birds and the bees, And the winds and the waves, and let people alone So far in my life but good women ...
— Three Women • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... "invisible empire" established by Lenine and Trotzky can be traced in the quotations in this book as a great dramatic energy which has seized and dragged into its vortex one after another of the radical organizations in the United States until none are now left out, and some even of the comparatively conservative trades union bodies appear to be trembling on the verge of peril. The evil ...
— The Red Conspiracy • Joseph J. Mereto
... discovered the sugar-loaf hat of the Heer at the mast-head. None dared to climb for it, and it was not until she had driven past Pollopel's Island—the limit of the Heer's jurisdiction—that she righted. As she did so the little hat spun into the air like a top, creating a vortex that drew up the storm-clouds, and the sloop kept her way prosperously for the rest of the voyage. The captain had nailed a horse-shoe to the mast. The "Hat Rogue" of the Devil's Bridge in Switzerland must be a relative of this gamesome sprite, for his mischief is usually ...
— Myths And Legends Of Our Own Land, Complete • Charles M. Skinner
... tight and fastening everything that can be fastened. We may only get the edge of the hurricane, we may get the center. There is no telling. An island is not like a ship, which can direct its course so as to escape the terrible vortex of the center. We've got to stay ...
— Plotting in Pirate Seas • Francis Rolt-Wheeler
... soon, as swiftly as those fast wild horses could run another mile. He saw them sweep down on the bluff and round it, and then begin to spread, to disintegrate. Again dust clouds settled over one place. It was in the apex. What a vortex of furious horses must be there! Pan lost sight of them for some moments. Then out of the yellow curtain streaked black strings, traveling down the fence toward Pan, across the valley, back up the way they had come. Pan let out a stentorian yell of victory. He knew ...
— Valley of Wild Horses • Zane Grey
... thereabouts, His Majesty held a man and a woman who had met on the roof of the world in thrall. He was lurid at the outset, dipping his camel's hair in at the round furnace door sinking toward the hills, whose red vortex shot tongues of flame into canyons and crevasses and drove out their lurking shadows with the fire of its inquisition. The foliage of Little Rivers became a grove of quivering leaves of gold, set on a vast beaten platter of gold. And the man and the woman, like ...
— Over the Pass • Frederick Palmer
... vigorous than that of his cousin, he also possessed passions less under control, a will more stubborn, and prejudices that often neutralized his reason. His father had inherited most of the personal property of the family, and with this he had plunged into the vortex of monied speculation that succeeded the adoption of the new constitution, and verifying the truth of the sacred saying, that "where treasure is, there will the heart be also," he had entered warmly and blindly into all the factious and irreconcilable ...
— Homeward Bound - or, The Chase • James Fenimore Cooper
... business, his feeble efforts are to the workings of passion as the infant frosts of an autumnal morning to the unclouded fervour of the rising sun: and no sooner are the tumultuous doings of the wicked deed over, than, amidst the bitter native consequences of folly, in the very vortex of our horrors, up starts conscience, and harrows us with the feelings of ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham
... milliards of vortices in which the material of your body moves at such an amazing rate will not stand still when you are dead, nor even when every visible atom of your body has vanished from sight in the course of ages. Every vortex is imperishable, eternal, of infinite duration. The vortex was the cause before the beginning and it will remain itself after ...
— Greifenstein • F. Marion Crawford
... a careless laugh, "it is for us to strike more heavily still and draw them with the very wind of our advance into a common vortex ...
— The Hidden Children • Robert W. Chambers
... only gave eighteen dollars, when Madame Caradori showed them those lovely ones, like the Misses Sibthorpe's, for forty-five; and how they go home descanting on virgin simplicity, and resolving that they will not allow themselves to be swept into the vortex of extravagance, whatever ...
— Household Papers and Stories • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... at that time," he continued, "what you-all East would call a swirlin' vortex of trade; still she has her marts. Thar's the copper mines, the Bird Cafe Op'ry House, the Red Light, the O. K. Restauraw, the Dance Hall, the New York Store an' sim'lar hives of commerce. Which ondoubted the barkeeps is the hardest worked folks in camp, ...
— Wolfville Days • Alfred Henry Lewis
... while it seemed an excitement that was filled with joy, then it grew into an ecstasy where all existence was lost in a vortex of movement. I could not think there had ever been a life beyond ...
— The Aran Islands • John M. Synge
... have seen, Pitt discouraged the bellicose tendencies of the emigres and of the Austrian and Prussian Courts. But the passions of the time ran too high to admit of the continuance of peace; and State after State was soon to be drawn into the devouring vortex of strife. Strange to say the first to suffer from the outbreak of hostilities was Poland. That Republic entered on a new lease of life in the spring of the year 1791. The constitution adopted with enthusiasm on 3rd May substituted an hereditary for an elective monarchy, and otherwise ...
— William Pitt and the Great War • John Holland Rose
... surmounted by a cross. Faust's soliloquy, "Nature, immense, impenetrable et fiere," was inspired by Goethe's exalted invocation to nature. Faust signs the compact, Mephistophetes summons the infernal steeds, Vortex and Giaour, and the ride to hell begins. Women and children at the foot of the cross supplicate the prayers of Mary, Magdalen, and Margaret. The cross disappears in a fearful crash of sound, the supplicants flee, and a moving panorama ...
— A Book of Operas - Their Histories, Their Plots, and Their Music • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... though the March dusk. As the suburban trains pulled out from minute to minute, thick wreaths of smoke shot up above the white steam blasts of the surrounding buildings. The smoke and steam were sucked together into the vortex ...
— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick
... pillow; there was a discoloured place upon her forehead which was settling into a bruise. Her eyes were puffed with crying until they were almost closed. Her breast rose with short, exhausted, but still convulsive sobs. Margery felt as if she was drawn into a vortex of agony. She could not resist it. She went to the bed, stood still a second, trembling, and then sank upon her knees and put her face down upon the wretched hand nearest and kissed it with ...
— In Connection with the De Willoughby Claim • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... over him who at first encouraged them only for show. Every desire is a viper in the bosom, who, while he was chill, was harmless; but when warmth gave him strength, exerted it in poison. You know a gentleman, who, when first he set his foot in the gay world, as he prepared himself to whirl in the vortex of pleasure, imagined a total indifference and universal negligence to be the most agreeable concomitants of youth, and the strongest indication of an airy temper and a quick apprehension. Vacant to every object, and sensible of every impulse, ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 1 • Boswell
... the village officers. Bart had made a jump towards Dale Wacker, but the latter had faded into the vortex of pell-mell fugitives rushing away downhill ...
— Bart Stirling's Road to Success - Or; The Young Express Agent • Allen Chapman
... said to show that what we have here is only the absorption of even the profoundest religious meanings into the vortex of an all-dissolving metaphysical system. The most obvious meaning of the phrase 'Son of God,' its moral and spiritual, its real religious meaning, is dwelt on, here in Hegel, as little as Hegel ...
— Edward Caldwell Moore - Outline of the History of Christian Thought Since Kant • Edward Moore
... including the doctrine of the dissipation or degradation of energy. To this brief statement may be added mention of his work in connection with hydrodynamics and his magnetic and electric discoveries. His papers in connection with wave and vortex movements are also most remarkable. He was awarded the Royal and Copley medals and was an original member of the Order of Merit. He received distinctions from many ...
— The Glories of Ireland • Edited by Joseph Dunn and P.J. Lennox
... untrammelled conversation of New York cabmen on an occasion when they set their moral shoulders against congested traffic, knowing that it helps THEM, at all events. She shuddered and clung to Henry's arm. It was all too plain that they were in the vortex of godlessness, but even as the realization of this was borne to her on the winged speech of the driver, Mrs. Smith was conscious of an inward thrill. It was awful, but it was life—not life as lived in Clayton Centre, ...
— Many Kingdoms • Elizabeth Jordan
... write most excellent epistles—a fig for other correspondents, with their nonsensical apologies for "knowing nought about it"—you send me a delightful budget. I am here in a perpetual vortex of dissipation (very pleasant for all that), and, strange to tell, I get thinner, being now below eleven stone considerably. Stay in town a month, perhaps six weeks, trip into Essex, and then, as a favour, irradiate Southwell for three days with the light ...
— The Works Of Lord Byron, Letters and Journals, Vol. 1 • Lord Byron, Edited by Rowland E. Prothero
... passions," he interrupted, "which nothing betrays externally. Gambling is more terrible than fire. After a fire, some charred remnants are found. What is there left after a lost game? Fortunes may be thrown into the vortex of the bourse, without a trace ...
— Other People's Money • Emile Gaboriau
... conceived national objects alone to be before the Convention: not such as, like the present, were of a local nature. Georgia was decided on this point. That State has always hitherto supposed a General Government to be the pursuit of the central States, who wished to have a vortex for everything; that her distance would preclude her from equal advantage; and that she could not prudently purchase it by yielding national powers. From this, it might be understood in what light she would view an attempt to abridge one of her ...
— The Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government • Jefferson Davis
... them assume a thoughtful air at times. But such was the preponderating opulence of his fancy, that I am persuaded, not for any half hour together, did they ever look their own prospects fairly in the face. There was no resisting the vortex of his temperament. His riotous imagination conjured up handsome settlements before their eyes, which kept them up in the eye of the world too, and seem at last to have realised themselves; for they both have married since, I ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Volume 2 • Charles Lamb
... self-denying ordinance forbidding any power to take any portion of the Chinese territory? In this she was backed up by Great Britain; the other powers fell into line and the integrity of the Empire was assured. Again, when China was in danger of being drawn into the vortex of the Russo-Japanese war, who but America secured for her the privileges of neutrality—thus a second time protecting her national life? And now you turn [Page 250] against us! Is not such conduct condemned by ...
— The Awakening of China • W.A.P. Martin
... had been thus planned to give me such opportunity, I stood at the very vortex of canal interest and fame, with nearly an entire day before the evening train should carry me back to Corozal. I descended to the "observation platform." Here at last at my very feet was the famous "cut" known to the world by the name of Culebra; a mighty channel ...
— Zone Policeman 88 - A Close Range Study of the Panama Canal and its Workers • Harry A. Franck
... being ruined by his vanity is very good: but I wish you would not let him plunge into a "vortex of dissipation." I do not object to the thing, but I cannot bear the expression: it is such thorough novel slang; and so old that I dare say Adam met with it in the first novel that ...
— Memoir of Jane Austen • James Edward Austen-Leigh
... think deaths and mutilations in terms of millions. Even those who stand in the immediate presence of it and suffer most terribly become calloused to it: much more must we who stood so long apart and have not yet felt the brunt of it. Even our entrance into the whirling vortex, drawing ever nearer our shores, has failed to waken us to a realizing sense of it. Nevertheless, these years through which we are now living are the most important in the entire history of the world. It is probable that the future will look back upon them ...
— The Soul of Democracy - The Philosophy Of The World War In Relation To Human Liberty • Edward Howard Griggs
... corporeal being, whose attribute is extension, and whose modes are motion and rest. The most famous application of the mechanical conceptions which he bases upon this first principle, is his theory of the planets, which are conceived to be embedded in a transparent medium, and to move with it, vortex fashion, about the sun.[230:4] ...
— The Approach to Philosophy • Ralph Barton Perry
... countries; a proceeding which naturally tends to weaken their nursery, prejudice in favour of the Religion in which they were bred, and by removing them from all means of public worship, to relax their practical habits of Religion. They return home, and commonly are either hurried round in the vortex of dissipation, or engage with the ardour of youthful minds in some public or professional pursuit. If they read or hear any thing about Christianity, it is commonly only about those tenets which are subjects of controversy: and what reaches their ears of ...
— A Practical View of the Prevailing Religious System of Professed Christians, in the Middle and Higher Classes in this Country, Contrasted with Real Christianity. • William Wilberforce
... invariable division of interests. The powers of earth, like those of heaven, have two distinct motions. Each of them rolls in his own political orb, but each of them is hurried at the same time round the great vortex of his religion. If this general notion be just, apply it to the present case. Whilst a Roman Catholic holds the rudder, how can we expect to be steered in our proper course? His political interest will certainly incline him to direct our first motion right, but his mistaken religious interest ...
— Letters to Sir William Windham and Mr. Pope • Lord Bolingbroke
... downwards upon a frozen bank. Many little crystals of ice and feathers of snow had drifted on to him as he lay, and sparkled upon his dark seaman's jacket. As we came up some wandering puff of wind caught these tiny flakes in its vortex, and they whirled up into the air, partially descended again, and then, caught once more in the current, sped rapidly away in the direction of the sea. To my eyes it seemed but a snow-drift, but many of my companions averred that it ...
— The Captain of the Pole-Star and Other Tales • Arthur Conan Doyle
... bitterly, but the two months since my return have convinced me of its truth, which I have fought against for many years; for even the most staid of us who, either of choice or necessity, give the social vortex a wide berth, cannot escape from the unrest of it, or sight of the wreckage it from time to time gives forth. It is strange that I have not met this Cortright, or never even knew that he shared your father's ...
— People of the Whirlpool • Mabel Osgood Wright
... during the next two weeks messengers—many of whom were chiefs disguised—came and went. I should have liked to follow their example—that is, so far as their departure was concerned—for I felt that I was being drawn into a very dangerous vortex. But, as a matter of fact, I could not escape, since I was obliged to wait to receive payment for my stuff, which, as usual, was made ...
— Child of Storm • H. Rider Haggard
... mobilized; but there was no definite acceptance of these offers by the Government. The native uncertainty that arose from this attitude of the South African Government went on until October, when our colleagues of the native deputation returned home from England and threw themselves into the vortex of the martial enthusiasm that was then sweeping through the country, and as no offers were accepted by the Government, Dr. Rubusana made to it the following ...
— Native Life in South Africa, Before and Since • Solomon Tshekisho Plaatje
... officers and men all killed, maxim all killed, 91st (the gun escort) one officer and one man not hit, all the rest killed or wounded; staff, every officer hit.' That is what it means to those who are caught in the vortex of the cyclone. The ...
— The Great Boer War • Arthur Conan Doyle
... the macchinisti of the seventeenth century had vulgarized the motive, Correggio's bold attempt to paint heaven in flight from earth—earth left behind in the persons of the apostles standing round the empty tomb, heaven soaring upward with a spiral vortex into the abyss of light above—had an originality which set at naught all criticism. There is such ecstasy of jubilation, such rapturous rapidity of flight, that we who strain our eyes from below feel we are in the darkness of the grave which Mary left. ...
— New Italian sketches • John Addington Symonds
... wrote the above remarks, the conditions of Indian trade have been revolutionized by the development of roads, railways, motors, telegraph, postal facilities, and exports. The Indian merchant has been drawn into the vortex of European and American commerce. He is, in consequence, not quite so cautions as he used to be, and is more liable to severe loss or failure, though he is still, as a rule, far more inclined to caution than are his Western rivals. The ...
— Rambles and Recollections of an Indian Official • William Sleeman
... of the party, and won great distinction as its frequent Fourth-of-July orator. All those mild and economical measures by which Mr. Jefferson sought to keep the United States from being drawn into the roaring vortex of the great wars in Europe, he opposed, and favored the policy of preparing the country for defence, not by gunboats and embargoes, but by a powerful navy of frigates and ships of the line. His Fourth-of-July orations, if we ...
— Famous Americans of Recent Times • James Parton
... we conquer the South, as conquer we must, unless chastened by visible misfortunes in the North, our triumph breeding unbounded conceit, we plunge the deeper in the vortex of voluptuous prosperity, our country forgotten by the people, its honors and dignities the sport and plunder of every knave and fool that can court or bribe the mob, the national debt repudiated, justice purchased in her temples as laws now are in the Legislature, the life and property of ...
— Phrases for Public Speakers and Paragraphs for Study • Compiled by Grenville Kleiser
... it is true, had suffered greatly in the recent sanguinary action with their enemies; but the excitement of victory, and the intense sympathy with their unexampled triumph, had again swelled their ranks—and would probably act with the force of a vortex to draw in their simple countrymen from the Caspian. The question, therefore, of pre-occupation was reduced to a race. The Cossacks were marching upon an oblique line not above fifty miles longer than that which led to the same point from the Kalmuck ...
— Narrative And Miscellaneous Papers • Thomas De Quincey
... hundred thousand more, Graham was swept into the bloody vortex, and through summer heat, autumn rains, and winter cold, he marched and fought with little rest. He was eventually given the colonelcy of his regiment, and at times commanded a brigade. He passed through ...
— His Sombre Rivals • E. P. Roe
... master-hand of their pilot would bring the bows of the canoe to stem the rapid. A long, a vigorous, and, as it appeared to the females, a desperate effort, closed the struggle. Just as Alice veiled her eyes in horror, under the impression that they were about to be swept within the vortex at the foot of the cataract, the canoe floated, stationary, at the side of a flat rock, that lay on a ...
— The Last of the Mohicans • James Fenimore Cooper
... the air, and pierces the heart of Martin Paz. He falls forward in the bark of the victim; and, re-descending the current of the river in her arms, is engulfed with Sarah in the vortex of the cataract. ...
— The Pearl of Lima - A Story of True Love • Jules Verne
... in his way to ensnare his feet, be they disposed to walk ever so warily. You do not know that your holy image, rising up before me, shining upon the path I trod, and beckoning me into the right road when I swerved aside, has alone saved me from falling into that vortex of follies and vices by which men are daily swallowed up, and from which they emerge sullied and debased. You do not know that, while I am here beside you, listening to the sound of your voice, holding your hand, gazing upon your ...
— Fairy Fingers - A Novel • Anna Cora Mowatt Ritchie
... books resolves itself at length into two categories. Either the patient grows rapidly worse and plunges headlong into the vortex of auctions, catalogues, and bibliographies, amassing during the process a vast nondescript collection of books; or else he improves slowly but surely, growing daily shrewder in his purchases. So that at length, having completely recovered his composure, he finds himself the possessor of a collection ...
— The Book-Hunter at Home • P. B. M. Allan
... marks, at all times, a deep, over-swollen torrent, heightened by the bleak mountain scenery around them, and the dark, angry voracity of the river where they had sunk, might have impressed the spectators with utter hopelessness as to the fate of those now engulfed in its vortex. This, however, I leave to those who are deeper read in philosophy ...
— The Ned M'Keown Stories - Traits And Stories Of The Irish Peasantry, The Works of - William Carleton, Volume Three • William Carleton
... fade daily, and pathetically tried to conceal its decay by powders and paints. She grew daily weaker; but, with a brave smile, held her place in the vortex of gaiety. Even when the inevitable end was near she insisted on attending the trial of Lord Ferrers for the murder of his ...
— Love Romances of the Aristocracy • Thornton Hall
... out-leading steps, . . the only visible last hope and chance of safety, . . and he now leaned against its cold stone arch, trembling in every limb, clasping the dead Sah-luma close, and looking back in affrighted awe at the tossing vortex of fury from which he had miraculously escaped. And,—as he looked,—a host of spectral faces seemed to rise whitely out of the flames and wonder at him! ... faces that were solemn, wistful, warning, and beseeching ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... these, from the Catholic stand-point, are abortive and incomplete Catholicisms. The Bethesda of human faith is world-wide and as old as time; only in one particular spot an angel has come down and troubled it; and the waters have been circling there, thenceforth, in a healing vortex. Such is the sort of claim that the Catholic Church makes for herself; and, if this be so, what she is, does not belie what she claims to be. Indeed, the more we compare her with the other religions, her rivals, ...
— Is Life Worth Living? • William Hurrell Mallock
... the numerous and affluent colonists of the lower province with their new compatriots; but the thinner and more humble population above, was almost immediately swallowed in the vortex which attended the tide of instant emigration. The inroad from the east was a new and sudden out-breaking of a people, who had endured a momentary restraint, after having been rendered nearly resistless by success. The toils and hazards of former undertakings were forgotten, ...
— The Prairie • J. Fenimore Cooper
... nothing less than the whole dramatic vortex regarded from the aesthetic point of view. Life with all its contradictions, considered as an aesthetic spectacle, will become "beautiful" to us. This is undoubtedly one form which the aesthetic sense assumes; the form of justifying existence, in all ...
— The Complex Vision • John Cowper Powys
... that it thence proceeds with an increasing eastward motion, appearing in our northern hemisphere as the prevailing northeastward winds. Approaching the poles with a spiral motion, the air there rises, according to this hypothesis, in a vortex, and returns toward the equator in the upper atmosphere, gradually acquiring a westward motion; till, returning to the tropics, it is again brought down to the earth, and thence proceeds, with a still increasing westward motion, as the trade-winds. At the equator ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I., No. 3, January 1858 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various
... class to make myself a party in the system by which they were allowing themselves (under temptation enough, God knows) to be enslaved. But now I looked with horror on the gulf of penury before me, into the vortex of which not only I, but my whole trade, seemed irresistibly sucked. I thought, with shame and remorse, of the few shillings which I had earned at various times by taking piecework home, to buy my candles for study. I whispered ...
— Alton Locke, Tailor And Poet • Rev. Charles Kingsley et al
... architecture in the Ecole des Beaux-Arts at Paris. When Austria-Hungary declared war on Serbia on July 24th, the atmosphere of the city became so surcharged with excitement that to persist in study was difficult. Within a week I myself had been swept into the vortex of rushing events, from which I did not emerge ...
— The Note-Book of an Attache - Seven Months in the War Zone • Eric Fisher Wood
... drift is observable at tennis, golf, base-ball and cricket; but this effect is explainable by the inequality of pressure due to a vortex of air carried along by the rotating ball, and the deviation is in the opposite direction of the drift observed in artillery practice, so artillerists are still awaiting theory ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 2 - "Baconthorpe" to "Bankruptcy" • Various
... naked stalk, Mounted aloft, is suffered not to use Its natural gifts for purposes of rest, 140 Driven by the autumnal whirlwind to and fro Through the wide element? or have you marked The heavier substance of a leaf-clad bough, Within the vortex of a foaming flood, Tormented? by such aid you may conceive 145 The perturbation that ensued; [8]—ah, no! Desperate the Maid—the Youth is stained with blood; Unmatchable on earth is their disquiet! [9] Yet [10] as the troubled ...
— The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, Vol. III • William Wordsworth
... long cathedral aisles. Down one of these, with the fiery pace of a quarrel from a cross-bow, ran a frigate right athwart our course. "Are they mad?" some voice exclaimed from our deck. "Do they woo their ruin?" But in a moment, as she was close upon us, some impulse of a heady current or local vortex gave a wheeling bias to her course, and off she forged without a shock. As she ran past us, high aloft amongst the shrouds stood the lady of the pinnace. The deeps opened ahead in malice to receive her, towering surges of foam ran after her, the billows were fierce to catch her. But far ...
— The English Mail-Coach and Joan of Arc • Thomas de Quincey
... for making the most of a hint. Not a murmur of shame, Or buzz of blame, Not a flying report that flew at a name, Not a plausible gloss, or significant note, Not a word in the scandalous circles afloat, Of a beam in the eye, or diminutive mote, But vortex-like that tube of tin Sucked the censorious particle in; And, truth to tell, for as willing an organ As ever listened to serpent's hiss, Nor took the viperous sound amiss, On the snaky head ...
— Playful Poems • Henry Morley
... The force of this comparison is strengthened when those cakes reach the center, for there they go to pieces exactly after the manner of large pieces of ice, and turning upon their edges, disappear in the ravenous vortex below, which is forever swallowing up all that approaches it, giving ...
— Complete Story of the San Francisco Horror • Richard Linthicum
... with her eyes on the ground, the withered leaves caught up every now and then in a wild dance by the frolicsome wind, she was suddenly aware of something among them which she could not identify, whirling in the aerial vortex about her feet. Scarcely caring what it was, she yet, all but mechanically, looked at it a little closer, lost it from sight, caught it again, as a fresh blast sent it once more gyrating about her feet, and now regarded it more steadfastly. Even ...
— Far Above Rubies • George MacDonald
... better than if we merely described them as they exist at present."[21] The Copernican theory is rejected in name, but retained in substance. The earth, or other planet, does not actually move round the sun; yet it is carried round the sun in the subtle matter of the great vortex, where it lies in equilibrium,—carried like the passenger in a boat, who may cross the sea and yet ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 8, Slice 2 - "Demijohn" to "Destructor" • Various
... become acquainted, retired early, after shedding a lurid radiance of symptoms on the family circle; and it, as a dutiful circle, had given her its blessing and dropped a tear by implication over her early departure from it. Sir Hamilton had involved his daughter in a vortex of backgammon, a game draught-players detest, and vice versa, because the two games are even as Box and Cox, in homes possessing only one board. So Gwen and Adrian had themselves to themselves, and wanted nothing ...
— When Ghost Meets Ghost • William Frend De Morgan
... down upon Silverado, and admire the favoured nook in which it lay. The sunny plain of fog was several hundred feet higher; behind the protecting spur a gigantic accumulation of cottony vapour threatened, with every second, to blow over and submerge our homestead; but the vortex setting past the Toll House was too strong; and there lay our little platform, in the arms of the deluge, but still enjoying its unbroken sunshine. About eleven, however, thin spray came flying over the friendly ...
— The Silverado Squatters • Robert Louis Stevenson
... induction of facts, a study of phenomena, or any fair process of reasoning, but was arbitrarily created to rescue a dogma from otherwise inevitable rejection. It was the desperate clutch of a heady theologian reeling in a vortex of hostile argument, and ready to seize any fancy, ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... Lord Henry examined him closely; the former wondering what could take the steward, at the age of seventy, for the first time in his life, into the vortex of the capital; and the latter in admiration at this figure and equipments of the old man. Peter was in full costume, with the exception of the goggles, and was in reality a subject to be gazed at; but nothing relaxed ...
— Precaution • James Fenimore Cooper
... above him. It tapped the rock close over his head. He looked up and saw a rope. He could not see over the rounded brink of the cliff, but he had no need. There was a rescuer above him who knew his desperate situation. Could it be Blake? Surely not! He must have perished in the frightful vortex ...
— Out of the Depths - A Romance of Reclamation • Robert Ames Bennet
... shining and forever pure. But honor him! could that be done? What respect or trust was it possible to keep for a self-degraded man like that? And where honor goes down, obedience is sucked into the vortex, and the wreck flies far over the lonely sea, historic and prophetic to ship ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 22, Aug., 1859 • Various
... that he might post Brophy on the advantages of a cafeteria plan of operating his hostelry. But he had by these thoughts summoned the memory of one certain cafeteria, and of a handsome girl who sat across from him and who had so suddenly been swallowed up in the vortex of the city throngs—gone forever—only a memory that troubled him so much and so often that he was glad when his own Tomah men appeared to him, asking for commands and taking his mind off a constantly ...
— Joan of Arc of the North Woods • Holman Day
... form of Janette Harford, invisible in the darkness and spray, was torn from my grasp by the cruel vortex of the sinking ship, and I fainted in the cordage of the floating mast to which ...
— Can Such Things Be? • Ambrose Bierce
... country that is most nearly anarchical. He comes here, partly to better himself under our milder institutions, partly to secure immunity while conspiring to destroy them. There is thunder in Europe, but if the storm ever break it is in America that the lightning will fall, for here is a great vortex into which the decivilizing agencies are pouring without obstruction. Here gather the eagles to the feast, for the quarry is defenceless. Here is no power in government, no government. Here an enemy of order is thought to be least dangerous when suffered to ...
— The Shadow On The Dial, and Other Essays - 1909 • Ambrose Bierce
... movement of minds, strong in the north of Europe but still weak in France where, however, many facts called marvelous by superficial observers, were happening, but falling, alas! like stones to the bottom of the sea, in the vortex ...
— Ursula • Honore de Balzac
... him, and he encountered it with a snarl and a splashing of his forepaws. He was half-whirled about in the vortex of the thing's passage caused by the alarmed flirt of its tail. Shark it was, and not crocodile, and not so timidly would it have sheered clear but for the fact that it was fairly full with a recent feed of a huge sea turtle too feeble with age ...
— Jerry of the Islands • Jack London
... ignored the Wakes in every possible way, choosing that week to have a show of mourning goods in the left- hand window, and refusing to let Maggie outside on any pretext. Therefore the dazzling social success of the elephant, which was quite easily drawing Mrs. Baines into the vortex, cannot ...
— The Old Wives' Tale • Arnold Bennett
... facts give some slight idea of the economic meaning of the Negro to-day as a worker and industrial factor. "Tropical Africa and its peoples are being brought more irrevocably every year into the vortex of the economic influences that sway the ...
— The Negro • W.E.B. Du Bois
... which there are one or two instances in South America. It flowed down the valley between high rocks, and, a few hundred yards below the pool, it ran straight against the face of a precipice and there terminated to all appearance; but a gurgling vortex in the deep water at the base of the cliff, and the disappearance of everything that entered it, showed that the stream found a subterranean passage. There was no sign of its reappearance, however, ...
— Martin Rattler • Robert Michael Ballantyne
... to have held out a hand to save—I saw her turn away with a heart hardened into indifference, and plunge headlong into a bottomless gulf of ignominy and sin. Nor did the vision pass until, out of that seething vortex of lust and infamy, I saw arise the black phantom of a lost soul crying out unto God and His Christ ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Volume V. • Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton, Eds.
... something supremely ridiculous in the attitude of a man who tells you women are angelic in their nature; that it is his veneration for the high and lofty position they occupy which hopes to keep them forever from the dirty vortex of politics, and then to see him glower at her because she wishes politics were not so dirty, and believes the mother element, by all that makes humanity to her doubly sacred, is just what is ...
— Debate On Woman Suffrage In The Senate Of The United States, - 2d Session, 49th Congress, December 8, 1886, And January 25, 1887 • Henry W. Blair, J.E. Brown, J.N. Dolph, G.G. Vest, Geo. F. Hoar.
... perception, cutting at the aloofness logically demanded of one in his position. Stubborn, and not spiritually subtle, though by no means dull in practical matters, he was resolutely letting the waters bear him on, holding the tiller firmly, without perceiving that he was in the vortex of a whirlpool. Indeed, his common sense continually impelled him, against the sort of reactionaryism of which his son Miltoun had so much, to that easier reactionaryism, which, living on its spiritual capital, makes what material capital it can ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... inquire what he meant. They reached the station, and in a few minutes he was shooting along towards London, that social vortex, which draws everything towards ...
— David Elginbrod • George MacDonald
... poop or forecastle. The capture always affords high and peculiar sport, for it is one in which every person on board sympathises, and, to a certain extent, takes a share. Like a fox-chase, it is ever new, and draws within its vortex every description of person. Even the monkey, if there be one on board, takes a vehement interest in the whole progress of this wild scene. I remember once observing Jacko running backwards and forwards along the after-part of the poop hammock-netting, grinning, screaming, and ...
— The Lieutenant and Commander - Being Autobigraphical Sketches of His Own Career, from - Fragments of Voyages and Travels • Basil Hall
... hide behind falsehood, for investment behind the screen. It will turn to vexation, all your deeds are plainly seen. Your might soon fades in the swelling vortex as brown changes the green. And when you can strive no longer, Satan's ...
— The Secret of the Creation • Howard D. Pollyen
... vested by the Constitution. Mr. Madison, in referring to the difficulty of providing some practical security for each against the invasion of the others, remarks that "the legislative department is everywhere extending the sphere of its activity and drawing all power into its impetuous vortex." "The founders of our Republic * * * seem never to have recollected the danger from legislative usurpations, which by assembling all power in the same hands must lead to the same tyranny as is threatened by Executive usurpations." "In a representative republic, where the executive ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents - Section 2 (of 2) of Volume 6: Andrew Johnson • James D. Richardson
... motion, separation, and cognition, it is something entirely unique, pure, and unmixed; and so, being unhindered by any interfering influence limiting its independence of individual action, it has Supreme Empire over all things, over the vortex of worlds as well as over all that live in them. It is most penetrating and powerful, mixing with other things, though no other thing mixes with it; exercises universal control and cognition, and includes the ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike
... 'Change. His three hundred guinea entrance fee paid, his three sureties of five hundred pounds each found, his name approved by the Committee, and all other formalities complied with, he found himself whirling round, an insignificant unit, in the vortex of the money market of the world. There, under the guidance of his father's friend, he was instructed in the mysteries of bulling and of bearing, in the strange usages of 'Change in the intricacies of carrying over and of transferring. He learned to ...
— Beyond the City • Arthur Conan Doyle
... the laws were overborne by perfidy, violence, and rapacity; or in an age when bankers become gamesters, instead of merchant-adventurers; when they affect to live like princes, and are, with their miserable creditors, drawn into the prevailing vortex of luxury. Backwell carried on his business in the same shop which was afterwards occupied by Child. He, to avoid a prison, retired into Holland, where he died. His body was brought for sepulture to Tyringham ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole Volume 3 • Horace Walpole
... evident, that with less of the instinctive philosophy which, now and then, stands so well in the stead of experience, Mr. Ellison would have found himself precipitated, by the very extraordinary successes of his life, into the common vortex of Unhappiness which yawns for those of preeminent endowments. But it is by no means my present object to pen an essay on Happiness. The ideas of my friend may be summed up in a few words. He admitted but four unvarying laws, or rather elementary principles, of Bliss. ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 4 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... broken out between England and France, and all the other nations of Europe were in consequence arming, both afloat and on shore, not knowing when they might be drawn into the vortex of strife. ...
— Ronald Morton, or the Fire Ships - A Story of the Last Naval War • W.H.G. Kingston
... which on either side a loud torrent rushed at a vertiginous depth below. At first our helpless flight,—for I was bound hand and foot like Mazeppa,—proceeded in a straight line, but presently it began to curve, and we raced and roared along, in what gradually became a monstrous vortex, reverberant with noises, loud with light, while, as we proceeded, enormous concentric circles engulfed us, and wheeled above and about us. It seemed as if we,—I, that is, and the undefined force which carried me,— were pushing feverishly on towards a goal which our whole concentrated ...
— Father and Son • Edmund Gosse
... every man within hearing, from oldest to youngest, would be wriggling and shuffling, as if through some magic piper's bewitchment; for even those who at first affected contemptuous indifference would be drawn into the vortex erelong. ...
— Army Life in a Black Regiment • Thomas Wentworth Higginson
... converted to holy water and Catholic nonsense. They never see that, while they are saving these venerable ladies from perdition, Ireland may be lost, England broken down, and the Protestant Church, with all its deans, prebendaries, Percevals, and Rennels, be swept into the vortex ...
— Peter Plymley's Letters and Selected Essays • Sydney Smith
... descent into the liquid. As it disappears below the surface the outward and downward flow causes a hollow to be again formed, up the sides of which an annulus of milk is carried, while the remainder descends to be torn again a second time into a vortex ring, which, however, is liable to disturbance from the falling in of the drops which once formed the upper part of the ...
— The Splash of a Drop • A. M. Worthington
... vortex of Goldite's sudden revulsion Van was swept like a straw. There was no real chance for a hearing. His friends of the morning had lost all sense of loyalty. They were almost as crazed as those whom his recent success had irritated. The story ...
— The Furnace of Gold • Philip Verrill Mighels
... atmosphere the actions of loading and aiming take the shape of huge writhing, convulsing, monstrous, grappling—come quick-moving lines of help. They rush through them, over them. The thirteen cannon behind the struggling hydra of gray seem one vortex—sulphurous, flaming, spitting, as from one vast mouth, scorching fire, huge mouthfuls of granite venom. Back—back, the gray masses break in sinuous, definite, ...
— The Iron Game - A Tale of the War • Henry Francis Keenan
... his quarrel with his natural enemy, Arethas, who acknowledged the suzerainty of Rome; but Chosroes is not even accused of instigating his proceedings; and the war between the vassals was carried on without dragging either of the two lords-paramount into its vortex. Thus far, then, neither side had any cause of complaint against the other. If we were bound to accept the Roman story of a project formed by Chosroes for the surprise and seizure of Daras, we should have to admit that circumstances rather than his own will saved the Persian monarch ...
— The Seven Great Monarchies Of The Ancient Eastern World, Vol 7. (of 7): The Sassanian or New Persian Empire • George Rawlinson
... worse. My feelings and imagination did not remain unkindled in this general conflagration (the French Revolution) and I confess I should be more inclined to be ashamed than proud of myself if they had. I was a sharer in the general vortex, though my little world described the path of its revolution in an orbit of its own. What I dared not expect from constitutions of Government and whole nations, I hoped from religion, and a small company of chosen individuals, ...
— Reminiscences of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Robert Southey • Joseph Cottle
... literary work from having been so long idle, and I have a famishing appetite for reading. All that we saw in London, I am sure I enjoyed while it was passing as much as possible, but I should be very sorry to live in that whirling vortex, and I find my taste and conviction confirmed on my return to my natural friends and ...
— The Life And Letters Of Maria Edgeworth, Vol. 1 • Maria Edgeworth
... life, which was extinguished now, would be kindled again hereafter. Being and not being came round in endless succession for all save him, into whom all being was resolved, and out of whom it emerged again, as from the vortex of some aeonian Maelstrom. ...
— A Little Book of Stoicism • St George Stock
... philosophise, perhaps his father had done breakfast; perhaps he would not come back at all; if he came back, he would not miss one corner of the muffin; and if he did miss it, why should Tom be supposed to have taken it? As he thus communed with himself, he drew nearer into the fatal vortex, and at last with a desperate plunge, he seized ...
— Night and Morning, Volume 2 • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... a mile off, posting in a narrow lane directly towards him, at that monstrous rate,—splashing and plunging like a devil thro' thick and thin, as he approached, would not such a phaenomenon, with such a vortex of mud and water moving along with it, round its axis,—have been a subject of juster apprehension to Dr. Slop in his situation, than the worst of Whiston's comets?—To say nothing of the Nucleus; that is, of Obadiah and the coach-horse.—In my idea, ...
— The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman • Laurence Sterne
... the cumbersome cordelle. Pole, nor oar, nor rudder could save the Buckeye from the fury of the eddy. The slender craft, sixty feet in length, was whirled round and round with dizzy rapidity. The violence of the down-pull at the vortex broke her in the middle. All on board fled aft, to the highest deck, an elevation peculiar to barges. There remained the forlorn hope that the men in the skiff might approach the sinking wreck. This they did. They pulled alongside the half-hull, and with great difficulty and risk ...
— A Dream of Empire - Or, The House of Blennerhassett • William Henry Venable
... American majority. For such an aberration there is but a single and efficient remedy: absorption in our own affairs, the discriminating study of efficient methods to prevent our being caught up by a whirlwind, even the outer edges of which may snatch us into the vortex. ...
— The New York Times Current History of the European War, Vol. 1, January 9, 1915 - What Americans Say to Europe • Various
... sometimes two or three together, they seemed omnipresent. In all sorts of disguises, feigning all sorts of employments and characters, sometimes on horseback and again driving an old cart or a hack, they pressed with the most imperturbable effrontery into the very vortex of danger. Ever on the watch, and accustomed to notice every expression of the countenance, they would discover at a single glance when they were suspected, and remove the suspicion at once by some clever device. Sometimes one of them, seeing himself watched, would quietly ascend the steps of ...
— The Great Riots of New York 1712 to 1873 • J.T. Headley
... incentive to excessive expenditure. They may be men of moderate means; they may even be poor; but not many of them moving in general society have the moral courage to seem to be so. To maintain their social position, they think it necessary to live as others do. They are thus drawn into the vortex of debt, and into all the troubles, annoyances, shabby shifts, and dishonesties, which ...
— Thrift • Samuel Smiles
... lordship, and we regret that we cannot see it in its normal condition of quiet; the hotels are full, and it is impossible to escape the festive feeling that is abroad. It ill accords with our desires, as tranquil travelers, to be plunged into such a vortex of slow dissipation. These people take their pleasures more gravely than we do, and probably will last the longer for their moderation. Having ascertained that we can get no more information about Baddeck here than in St. John, we go to bed early, for we are to depart from ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... he had begun there and felt confident of victory. Valentine, on her side, after a period of terror followed by great relief, had set about making up for lost time, throwing herself more wildly than ever into the vortex of fashionable life. She had recovered her good looks and youthfulness, and had never before experienced such a desire to divert herself, leaving her children more and more to the care of servants, and going about, hither and thither, ...
— Fruitfulness - Fecondite • Emile Zola
... the rocks with its wild surge; of a sudden, after she has been permitted to finish her soliloquy, a white cloud rising rapidly and unnoticed—the sudden vacuum—the rush of mighty winds through the majestic and alpine scenery—the vortex gathering round her—first admiring the vast efforts of nature; then astonished; and, lastly, alarmed, as she finds herself compelled to perform involuntary gyrations, till at length she spins round like a well-whipped top, nearing the dangerous edge of the precipice. ...
— Olla Podrida • Frederick Marryat (AKA Captain Marryat)
... metaphors, that kept the audience from the Folly just awake enough to watch for them. The hearer was proud who could repeat by heart such phrases as "let us not, beloved brethren, as gaudy insects, flutter out life's little day, bound to the chariot wheels of vanity, whirling in the vortex of dissipation, until at length we lie moaning over the bitter dregs of the intoxicating draught." Some of these became household proverbs at "the Folly," under the title of "Rigdum Funnidoses," and might well be an extreme distress to the good, ...
— Magnum Bonum • Charlotte M. Yonge
... seems to have been realised by the author of the Etymological Compendium (see p. 188, n. 2), who tells us that the "term swallow is derived from the French hirondelle, signifying indiscriminately voracious, literally a marshy place, that absorbs or swallows what comes within its vortex." ...
— The Romance of Words (4th ed.) • Ernest Weekley
... to keep his own judgment and emotions as free as possible from a power that seizes all it can reach, draws them into its current, and sweeps them round and round like the Maelstrom, until they are overwhelmed and buried in its devouring vortex. When others are heated, the only wisdom is to determine to keep cool; whenever a people or an individual is rushing headlong, it is the duty of patriotism and of friendship to check ...
— Salem Witchcraft, Volumes I and II • Charles Upham
... accompanied her to the castle. At dusk, concealed by the cypresses, I discerned on the platform a face that seemed to have been transported from another epoch just in order to pierce my heart with an intolerable longing. I fell in love as one slips into a vortex, and instantly the rational world was lost beyond a whorl of ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1920 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... him, pale-faced, with appealing eyes. He knew how uncontrollably she shrank from the thought of losing him in this wild vortex of savagery. ...
— The Flag • Homer Greene
... half metamorphosed into fifty thousand francs, at the rate of five sous a line—urges numerous families who might advantageously employ their members in the retirement of the provinces, to thrust them into the vortex of Paris. ...
— Analytical Studies • Honore de Balzac
... possibly have in the good government of any country except the one which he serves. So far as the choice of those who carry on the management on the spot devolves upon this body, their appointment is kept out of the vortex of party and Parliamentary jobbing, and freed from the influence of those motives to the abuse of patronage for the reward of adherents, or to buy off those who would otherwise be opponents, which are always stronger ...
— Considerations on Representative Government • John Stuart Mill
... I should require foot-notes. All this was new stuff to me. I had stayed at Brinkley Court quite a lot in my time, but I had no idea the larder was such a social vortex. More like a snack bar on a race-course than anything else, ...
— Right Ho, Jeeves • P. G. Wodehouse
... not seem to see is that his pseudo-scientific reduction of the integral soul-monad into a wavering and fitful series of compounded vortex-consciousness is really a falling back from the empirical data of human reality into the thin abstracted air of conceptual truth. The concrete substantial soul, just because it is the permanent basis of personality ...
— The Complex Vision • John Cowper Powys
... giving you a full account of this last revolutionary commotion, that your prudence may still keep you at a distance from the vortex. Continue where you are, and tell your man servant how much I am obliged to him, and, at the same time, how much I am grieved at his being wounded! I knew nothing of the affair but from your letter and your faithful messenger. He is an old pensioner of mine, ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... the mother a moment later, in a delirium of joy. "See! they are safe! Great God, I thank Thee!" And sure enough they emerged unharmed from the boiling vortex, and in a few minutes reached a low place in the bank and were drawn up by their friends, the boy senseless, but still alive, and the youth almost exhausted. "God will give you a reward," solemnly ...
— Architects of Fate - or, Steps to Success and Power • Orison Swett Marden
... could put in his pocket whenever he liked to exercise his personality. Nelson never shirked responsibility when his country's interests were being endangered by a dignified snob. Discipline, so far as he was concerned until his object was gained, was pushed aside, and the great spirit swept into the vortex of the danger and extinguished all opposition. He said on one occasion, "I hate your pen-and-ink men. A fleet of British warships are the best negotiators ...
— Drake, Nelson and Napoleon • Walter Runciman
... be divided—the question of the Queen's marriage. Popular sentiment was flatly opposed to her union with any one who, being a foreigner, might subordinate England's interests to those of his own country, and drag her into the vortex of continental broils. On these two points anxiety was concentrated when ...
— England Under the Tudors • Arthur D. Innes
... give in detail the particulars of Cissie Wilson's career; suffice it to say, that the brilliant triumph at the Oddfellows' ball was too much for her weak nature. She plunged headlong into the vortex of worldly pleasure and excitement, and, having little time or inclination for reflection, became in time quite habituated to this peculiar mode of life, always maintaining outwardly, however, a moral ...
— The Mysteries of Montreal - Being Recollections of a Female Physician • Charlotte Fuhrer
... save such as the resources of his own strong character might afford him, he was plunged instantly into the great political maelstrom in which he was to remain for four long years, and whose wild vortex might well have bewildered an eye less sure, a will less resolute, and a brain less cool than his. As Emerson put it, "The new pilot was hurried to the helm in ...
— The Every-day Life of Abraham Lincoln • Francis Fisher Browne
... the pretty Sally Pendleton—plunged into the vortex of pleasure, and if her greed for admiration was not satisfied with the attention she received, ...
— Jolly Sally Pendleton - The Wife Who Was Not a Wife • Laura Jean Libbey
... carry him into the pool below, to the edge of which the girls rushed, and found that he was floating round and round in a state of insensibility, every moment passing near to the vortex of the rapid that flowed out of it. Hilda at once rushed in waist-deep and caught him by the collar. She would have been swept away along with him, but Ada also sprang forward and grasped Hilda by the mantle. She could not, however, drag her back; neither could ...
— Erling the Bold • R.M. Ballantyne
... fascinating, tantalising dream. Larmor suggested in 1900 that the electron is a tiny whirlpool, or "vortex," in ether; and, as such a vortex may turn in either of two opposite ways, we seem to see a possibility of explaining positive and negative electricity. But the difficulties have proved very serious, and the nature of the electron ...
— The Outline of Science, Vol. 1 (of 4) - A Plain Story Simply Told • J. Arthur Thomson
... possible to settle the pending questions and to fix the boundaries of States. Otherwise, if war once becomes general, it will spread over Germany, reach Belgium, and finally sweep England into its vortex. Should our efforts for peace succeed, Europe may begin a new career with more or less of hope and of concord; should they fail, we must keep our sword in the scabbard as long as we can, but we cannot hope to be neutral in a great European war. England cannot be indifferent ...
— Lord John Russell • Stuart J. Reid
... dawn, We lie face down, we dream, We cry aloud with terror, half rise, or seem To stare at the ceiling or walls . . . Midnight . . . the last of shattering bell-notes falls. A rush of silence whirls over the cloud-high towers, A vortex of soundless hours. ...
— The House of Dust - A Symphony • Conrad Aiken
... signboard at the head of the stairs. When he paused and hesitated there, not seeming at all anxious to go down till he saw the pretty girl and the child following after—a sudden intuition flashed across me. Could it be possible that Billy was caught in that vortex which whirled me down at ten ...
— Masterpieces Of American Wit And Humor • Thomas L. Masson (Editor)
... brushed, these being the first processes of the filature. Instead of first softening the gum of the cocoons and then attacking the floss with the points of a brush, Mr. Serrell places the cocoons in a receptacle full of boiling water, in which by various means violent reciprocating or vortex currents are produced. The result is that by the action of the water itself and the rubbing of the cocoons one against the other the floss is removed, carrying with it the end of the continuous filament without unduly softening the cocoon or exposing any of the more delicate ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 620, November 19,1887 • Various
... and the oppression which engendered strife. A feeling of fierce anger succeeded his day dream. The sun shone around him, the fields were fair to see. Life ought to be like the sun and the fields—simple and good and beautiful. Instead it was difficult and cruel. He was being dragged into a vortex of hate and battle. He loathed the very thought of it. He wanted peace and love. And yet, what escape was there for him? Did he even want to escape if he could? The wrong and tyranny he was to resist were real, insistent, ...
— The Northern Iron - 1907 • George A. Birmingham
... that the theory broke down here—though they passed the other two defects unnoticed—have attempted to supply the deficiency in this point. Some have attempted to account for this motion by analogy. It has been suggested that it was of the same nature, and produced by the same causes, as the vortex which is formed when a vessel full of fluid is emptied through an orifice in its bottom. Pontecoulant, in his account of the theory, enters more into detail. He assumes that in the process of agglomeration large bodies of matter impinged obliquely on the already ...
— The Story of Creation as told by Theology and by Science • T. S. Ackland
... because it has no competition abroad. Wheat has been extraordinarily high from other causes. When these cease, it must fall to its ancient nominal price, notwithstanding the depreciation of that, because it must contend in market with foreign wheats. Lands have risen within the vortex of the paper, and as far out as that can influence. They have not risen at all here. On the contrary, they are lower than they were twenty years ago. Those I had mentioned to you, to wit, Carter's and Colle, were sold before your letter came. Colle at two dollars the acre. Carter's had been offered ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson
... her antecedents got out, and they got notice to leave. The same fate met them in Charleston, to which city they removed. Her antecedents seemed to follow her wherever she went, like haunting spirits seeking her betrayal. She was homeless; and without a home there was nothing open to her but that vortex of licentiousness the world seemed pointing her to. Back she went to the house in Mercer street-was glad to get back; was at least free from the finger of scorn. Henceforward she associated with various friends, ...
— Justice in the By-Ways - A Tale of Life • F. Colburn Adams
... chair; not for long, however, for the black birds seemed to fill the whole room, describing swift, interminable spirals round her head. She could not hear them, but she could see them, and the whirling vortex fascinated her; she could not help turning her head to follow their flight; she grew giddy and she was forced to try to recover ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... order to arms and the rush of students to obey their country's call caught Froebel in the patriotic vortex, and he ...
— Little Journeys To The Homes Of Great Teachers • Elbert Hubbard
... distinguished from our ideas of them, are at first compacted of all the impressions, feelings, and memories, which offer themselves for association and fall within the vortex of the amalgamating imagination. Every sensation we get from a thing is originally treated as one of its qualities. Experiment, however, and the practical need of a simpler conception of the structure of objects lead us gradually to reduce the qualities ...
— The Sense of Beauty - Being the Outlines of Aesthetic Theory • George Santayana
... Miss Christie, one up and t'other down," said Dick lightly. "Work being slack at present at Devil's Ford, I reck'ned I'd take a pasear down to 'Frisco, and dip into the vortex o' fash'nable society and out again." He lightly waved a new handkerchief to illustrate his swallow-like intrusion. "This yer minglin' with the bo-tong is apt to be wearisome, ez you and me knows, unless combined ...
— Devil's Ford • Bret Harte
... fired the unhappy brains that rush into the vortex of public confusion, like ships into the whirlpool. All the practical laws would be passed (and at a date earlier than that at which the public finally accept them in reality) without the sacrifices of the man who proudly calls himself a "horrible example" of ...
— The Golden Censer - The duties of to-day, the hopes of the future • John McGovern
... At his feet the turbid current rolled ponderously against the solid wall of rock and, turning back upon itself, swung round in an ever-lessening circle until it sucked down suddenly into a spiral vortex that spewed up all it caught in the boiling channel below. There in years past the lambs and weaklings from the herds above had drifted to their death, but never before had ...
— Hidden Water • Dane Coolidge
... nothing there," I said in a very small voice that I could scarcely recognize as my own. "Oh, I mean that we are all floundering, and where can we get the lifeline? Where did you get the line that you think will pull you out of the vortex?" ...
— The Heart's Kingdom • Maria Thompson Daviess
... the "vortex" arrangement with fluent outlines, the portrait(10) by Mr. Whistler expresses the same principles in an outline almost rectangular, but is to be placed in the same category as the other two. The chair-back, the curtain, the framed etching, ...
— Pictorial Composition and the Critical Judgment of Pictures • Henry Rankin Poore
... of the valiant efforts of isolated Catholic reformers in Germany, to stem the tide of corruption which threatened to sweep the Church into a vortex of ruin, for a long time little impression was made on the vast sea of abuses, and but little permanent good was effected. It almost seemed as though the Poor Clares of Nuremburg, the brave Dominicanesses of Strassburg, Johannes Busch, Johannes Geiler, Cardinal Nicholas ...
— Studies from Court and Cloister • J.M. Stone
... Professor Flint's theistic argument drawn from recent scientific speculations as to the vortex-ring construction of matter. If these speculations are sound, their only influence on Theism would be that of supplying a scientific demonstration of the substantial identity of Force and Matter, and so of supplying a still more valid basis for the theory as to the natural ...
— A Candid Examination of Theism • George John Romanes
... a host of the most abandoned profligates he joined in the ribaldry and obscene jests with a zeal that betrayed the utter depravity of his habits, and also shewed that he had taken a headlong plunge into the vortex and must soon become a hopeless wreck. And yet a short time ago, so fair to look upon, Hubert Tracy had been indeed prepossessing in appearance. His neat, well built figure, graceful but manly carriage, agreeable address and fine manners gave him a significant tone ...
— Marguerite Verne • Agatha Armour
... splendid: the bells proclaimed a festival: a vast procession of a mixed composition, religious and military, was streaming towards the cathedral; and by a moral compulsion, rather than by any physical pressure of the crowd, I was swept along into the general vortex. Suddenly an angle of the road brought me into such a position with respect to all who were in advance of my station, that I could see the whole vast line bent into the form of a crescent, and with its head entering at the great-doors of ...
— Walladmor: - And Now Freely Translated from the German into English. - In Two Volumes. Vol. I. • Thomas De Quincey
... leaped into that vortex of mad waters, how they vanished in that thunderous welter, rose, sank, fought, strangled, rose again and caught the air, and once more were whirled down and buried in that crushing avalanche; how they clung to the ...
— Darkness and Dawn • George Allan England
... island may sink any minute," added Mr. Parker. "If it does, even a raft will be little good, as it may be swamped in the vortex. I think it would be a good plan to make one, then anchor it some distance out from the island. Then we can make a small raft, and paddle out to the big one in ...
— Tom Swift and his Wireless Message • Victor Appleton
... for employment, women shrieking in agony of soul, little children wailing with hunger and cold. And the winds wax ever stronger, the waves run higher and higher, the wreck and wraith grow ever more pitiful, more appalling. And church and state pause in this made vortex of chaos to prate of the ills of pugilism; to legislate and perorate anent bloodless boxing bouts; to prosecute a brace of harmless pugs. The people ask bread of the church and it gives them a stone; they ask of the state protection of their lives and liberties, and it gives ...
— Volume 12 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... deputed, Provost Pawkie," replied my friend, somewhat puzzled by what I had said; "it's no to be deputed, that we live in a gigantic vortex, and that every man is bound to make an energetic dispensation for the good of his country; but I could not have thought that our means had come to sic an alteration and extremity, as that the reverent homage of the Michaelmas dinners could ...
— The Provost • John Galt
... If he had stopped to analyze the impulse, he would have seen how absurd, unreasonable and uncalled for his words were. But he had no time to analyze; like a diver who plunges suddenly, on some mad impulse, into a whirlpool, he had cast himself into the vortex. ...
— A Man and His Money • Frederic Stewart Isham
... vortex, the Paris photographs depicted a series of nebulous bars on either side of Merope, and a curious streak extending like a finger-post from Electra towards Alcyone . . . Streamers and fleecy masses of cosmical fog seem almost ...
— The Astronomy of the Bible - An Elementary Commentary on the Astronomical References - of Holy Scripture • E. Walter Maunder
... were constantly drawn inward, while by some counter-current others were, frequently cast outward to continue in drifting circles until again brought back to the gently agitated center. On the very edge of this vortex—the heart of which was the long table beneath the tent—sat a goodly sized lady. Her appearance might have been offered by a necromancer as the proof of a successfully accomplished trick, for the small camp stool on which she ...
— Ainslee's, Vol. 15, No. 5, June 1905 • Various
... sentiment, and the community as a whole had sincerely desired that the Union might be preserved. Yet a society based upon slavery had such community of interest with the States further south that it was soon dragged into the secession vortex. When once war had begun, the growth of hostility against what was regarded as their public enemy was rapid, and in every State a war party in time of war has a great advantage over the opposition. The charge of "giving ...
— Military Reminiscences of the Civil War V2 • Jacob Dolson Cox
... to extract money from the bankrupt Government. It was a season of disillusionment in more senses than one; for there he saw for himself the seamy side of Parisian life, and drifted for a brief space about the giddy vortex of the Palais Royal. What a contrast to the limpid life of Corsica was that turbid frothy existence—already swirling ...
— The Life of Napoleon I (Volumes, 1 and 2) • John Holland Rose |
