"Wrack" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... zigzag rift was passed, and then the rugged stony flooring gave place to dark, deep water, beautifully transparent—so clear that the many-tinted fronds of bladder-wrack and other weeds could be seen swaying to and fro under the influence of the tide which ...
— The Lost Middy - Being the Secret of the Smugglers' Gap • George Manville Fenn
... little River, which being encompassed by the Rocks [63]was sheltered from the Wind, so that we had opportunity to land our selves, (though almost drowned) in all four persons, besides the Negro: when we were got upon the Rock, we could perceive the miserable Wrack to our great terrour, I had in my {{9 }} pocket a little Tinder-box, and Steel, and Flint to strike fire at any time upon occasion, which served now to good Purpose, for its being so close, preserved the Tinder dry, with this, and the help of some old rotten Wood which we got ...
— The Isle Of Pines (1668) - and, An Essay in Bibliography by W. C. Ford • Henry Neville
... brindled loach to bask and sprawl, Tasting the warm sun ere it dipped Into the water; but quick as fear Back his shining brown head slipped To crouch on the gravel of his lair, Where the cooled sunbeams, broke in wrack, Spilt shattered gold about his back. So within that green-veiled air, Within that white-walled quiet, where Innocent water thought aloud,— Childish prattle that must make The wise sunlight with laughter shake On the leafage overbowed,— Often the King and his love-lass Let ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 2 (of 4) • Various
... can the fire-drama of his recital of generations of cruelties and wrongs—his picture of their miserable lot and of the envied aristocrats' pleasures—and then consider the pitch of frenzied republicanism to which this wonderful fraternal climax uplifted them! With crash of thunder and wrack of the elements the Storm must break, directly the popular feeling found immediate object of ...
— Orphans of the Storm • Henry MacMahon
... things are the same, except that the poor old stepmother and her ill-conditioned husband have left it, and are living in Tunbridge. He preaches and prays, and spends her savings, and, let us hope, he is content. The dear old place was going to wrack and ruin, so Sir Robert's orders came that they were ...
— Penshurst Castle - In the Days of Sir Philip Sidney • Emma Marshall
... so much not only of the world around it but also of the doings of previous generations. For since 1870 we have been living in an age as much distinguished for historical research as for natural science. If mankind is now to go down in a wrack of war, starvation, bankruptcy, and ruin, the sunset sky at ...
— Recent Developments in European Thought • Various
... na, for I looked for Jamie back; But hard blew the winds, and his ship was a wrack; His ship was a wrack! Why didna Jamie dee? Or why was I spared to ...
— The World's Best Poetry, Volume 3 - Sorrow and Consolation • Various
... his rest. So lovely-fair was Hero, Venus' nun, As Nature wept, thinking she was undone, Because she took more from her than she left, And of such wondrous beauty her bereft: Therefore, in sign her treasure suffer'd wrack, Since Hero's time hath half the world been black. Amorous Leander, beautiful and young, (Whose tragedy divine Musaeus sung,) Dwelt at Abydos; since him dwelt there none For whom succeeding times make greater moan. His dangling tresses, that were never shorn, Had they been cut, and ...
— Hero and Leander and Other Poems • Christopher Marlowe and George Chapman
... shadow. The pain at her heart seemed to make Jemima's brain grow dull; she laid her head on her arms, which rested on the window-sill, and grew dizzy with the sick weary notion that the earth was wandering lawless and aimless through the heavens, where all seemed one tossed and whirling wrack of clouds. It was a waking nightmare, from the uneasy heaviness of which she was thankful to be roused by ...
— Ruth • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... that which they thinke no crime. As to your third reason, it scarselie merites an answere. For if the deuill their master were not bridled, as the scriptures teacheth vs, suppose there were no men nor women to be his instrumentes, he could finde waies inough without anie helpe of others to wrack al mankinde: wherevnto he employes his whole study, and goeth about like a roaring Lyon (as PETER saith) (M16) to that effect, but the limites of his power were set down before the foundations of the world were laid, which he hath not power in the least jote to ...
— Daemonologie. • King James I
... to those shining palaces, where grass and tree showed vivid green against white walls, and flowers stood still on airless terraces, shedding strange perfumes. And she also saw her new acquaintance coming towards her, balancing himself on the slippery, wrack-grown rocks, in boots and things that were much too good for the purpose; but Alfred and Dicksie never appeared, and were not to be found of her imagination. ...
— The Beth Book - Being a Study of the Life of Elizabeth Caldwell Maclure, a Woman of Genius • Sarah Grand
... for "perfectest motion." After "a-foot." "It hath its tempests like the sea, and as violent, and men are ship-wrack't upon pillars like great rocks." And at the end after "could not"—"ffinally it is used for a church of these two only, sharkes and cut purses, the one comes thither to fast, the ...
— Microcosmography - or, a Piece of the World Discovered; in Essays and Characters • John Earle
... down over the boulders, and plunged off a rock into the clear sea, his white figure being traceable against the olive brown sea-wrack waving far below, as he swam for some distance below the surface, and then rose, shook the water from his eyes, and struck out for the lugger lying becalmed in ...
— A Terrible Coward • George Manville Fenn
... burned itself away. I ask you, Maximus, have you ever seen fire spring up among the stubble, crackling sharply, blazing wide and spreading fast, but soon exhausting its flimsy fuel, dying fast away, leaving not a wrack behind? So they have kindled their accusation with abuse and fanned it with words, but it lacks the fuel of facts and, your verdict once given, is destined to leave not a wrack of calumny behind. The whole of Aemilianus' calumnious accusation was centred in the charge of magic. I should ...
— The Apologia and Florida of Apuleius of Madaura • Lucius Apuleius
... arriv'd! What should be the business? Some falling-out amongst the cardinals. These factions amongst great men, they are like Foxes, when their heads are divided, They carry fire in their tails, and all the country About them goes to wrack for 't. ...
— The Duchess of Malfi • John Webster
... my lovely boy, who in thy power Dost hold Time's fickle glass, his sickle, hour; Who hast by waning grown, and therein show'st Thy lovers withering as thy sweet self grow'st; If Nature, sovereign mistress over wrack, As thou goest onwards, still will pluck thee back, She keeps thee to this purpose, that her skill May time disgrace and wretched minutes kill. Yet fear her, O thou minion of her pleasure! She may detain, but not still keep, her treasure: Her audit, though delay'd, answer'd must be, And ...
— Testimony of the Sonnets as to the Authorship of the Shakespearean Plays and Poems • Jesse Johnson
... by the roadside; then the open post-road with a cypress to the right; afterwards, the rich green fields, and on a bit of rising ground an ancient farmhouse with its brown dependencies; lastly, the blue hills above Fossato, and far away a wrack of tumbling clouds. All this enclosed by the heavy archway of the Porta Romana, where sunlight and shadow chequer the mellow tones of a dim fresco, indistinct ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... eyes to hear his boots crush crackling wrack and shells. You are walking through it howsomever. I am, a stride at a time. A very short space of time through very short times of space. Five, six: the nacheinander. Exactly: and that is the ineluctable modality ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce
... a storm has tossed the barque Since first it had its maiden trip, Full many a conflagration's spark Has scorched and seared the laboring ship; And yet it ploughs a straightway course, Through wrack of billows; wind-tossed, spent, On sails the troubled Ship of State, Steered ...
— Poems Teachers Ask For, Book Two • Various
... seen birds flying westwards and expected to sight land before night. They therefore sailed cautiously lest they should run aground, but all their apprehension ceased when a sounding-line two hundred fathoms long, lowered through the floating sea-wrack, ...
— From Pole to Pole - A Book for Young People • Sven Anders Hedin
... to but himself. So, compass'd by the power of the King, Enforced she was to wed him in her tears, And with a shameful swiftness: afterward, Not many moons, King Uther died himself, Moaning and wailing for an heir to rule After him, lest the realm should go to wrack. And that same night, the night of the new year; By reason of the bitterness and grief That vext his mother, all before his time Was Arthur born, and all as soon as born Deliver'd at a secret postern-gate To Merlin, to be holden far apart Until his hour should come; because the ...
— Famous Tales of Fact and Fancy - Myths and Legends of the Nations of the World Retold for Boys and Girls • Various
... the winds across them and the still pipings of leaf and water, London, the while, kept herself in her smudgy convent, her ear tuned only to the jolting music of her streets, the rough syncope of wheel and voice. Since then what countless winds have blown across the world, and cloud-wrack! And this older century is now but a clamor of the memory. What mystery it is! What were the happenings in that pin-prick of universe called London? Of all the millions of ant hills this side Orion, what about this one? London was so ...
— Journeys to Bagdad • Charles S. Brooks
... owned in New Brunswick, and will pay toll to that province. The capitalists of Nova Scotia treat it like a hired house, they won't keep it in repair; they neither paint it to preserve the boards, nor stop a leak to keep the frame from rottin'; but let it go to wrack sooner than drive a nail or put in a pane of glass. 'It will sarve our ...
— The Clockmaker • Thomas Chandler Haliburton
... cold, seasonable night of March, with a pale moon, lying on her back as though the wind had tilted her, and a flying wrack of the most diaphanous and lawny texture. The wind made talking difficult, and flecked the blood into the face. It ...
— Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde • ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON
... of an early October night. There was a storm brewing, a wicked one, reckoned by the headlong drop of the aneroid. MacRae had a hundred or so salmon aboard for all his Squitty round, and he had yet to pick up those on the boats in the Cove. He cocked his eye at a cloud-wrack streaking above, driving before a wind which had not yet dropped to the level of the Gulf, and he said to himself that it would be wise to stay in the Cove that night. A southeast gale, a beam sea, and the tiny opening of the Jew's Mouth was a bad combination to face in a black night. As he stood ...
— Poor Man's Rock • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... occupied, above all, in ascertaining whether she was not in danger of falling, whether she had sufficient room and whether she could lie down comfortably. Satisfied in this respect, he began to wrack his brains as to how to protect her from the rain. But for this there was no help. It would have been easy to construct during the daytime some kind of roof over her head, but now they were enveloped in such darkness that they could not see each other at all. If the storm ...
— In Desert and Wilderness • Henryk Sienkiewicz
... furnace over field and mead, The rounding noon hangs hard and white; Into the gathering heats recede The hollows of the Chelsea height; But under all to one quiet tune, A spirit in cool depths withdrawn, With logs, and dust, and wrack bestrewn, The stately river ...
— Lyrics of Earth • Archibald Lampman
... ripple where the rock breaks the surface; by the frozen shore where the land-springs lie fast, drawn into icicles or smeared in slippery slabs on the cliff faces, and hoar frost powders the black sea-wrack; on the lawns of gardens, where the winter roses linger and open dew-drenched and rain-washed in the watery sunbeams—there we see, hear, and welcome the birds that stay. Then and there we note their fewness, their lameness, and feel that they are really fellow-countrymen, native to ...
— The Naturalist on the Thames • C. J. Cornish
... at two leagues' distant it was not visible from the look-out, was discovered in latitude 15 degrees 50 minutes, and 148 degrees 10 minutes longitude. The constant recurrence of breakers, trunks of trees in large quantities, fruits and sea wrack, and the smoothness of the sea, all indicated the neighbourhood of extensive land to the south-east. It was New Holland. Bougainville determined to leave these dangerous latitudes, where he was likely to meet with nothing but barren lands, ...
— Celebrated Travels and Travellers - Part 2. The Great Navigators of the Eighteenth Century • Jules Verne
... rubies an' pearls, the wine ye drank last night an' the fancy grub ye et to-day. 'Twas a grand wrack ...
— The Harbor Master • Theodore Goodridge Roberts
... Concepcion Strait, or even weathered Duke of York Island. He nodded to his junior, whose presence on the bridge was a mere matter of form, owing to the powerless condition of the ship and the impenetrable wrack of foam and mist that barred vision ahead, and strode off on a tour of inspection. As wind and sea were now beating more directly on the port side, there was some degree of shelter along the covered-in deck to starboard. He found that two boats had been cleared of their hamper ...
— The Captain of the Kansas • Louis Tracy
... of heat broke from the pillar-stove and spread through the shop, strewing the heavier smells like a wrack behind it. And through it all, with every swing of the great mahogany doors, there stole into his young senses a something delicious and disturbing, ...
— The Divine Fire • May Sinclair
... had made many repairs, and even promised to build a new barn which the General would never consent to. It was a pity for the man! A good gentleman, but he took no interest in farming; the whole place must have gone to wrack and ruin if the General had not agreed to sell it before it was too late. The Freule was sorry, for she liked farming; she had learned to milk, and talked to the cows just as if they were human beings. And horses—yes, Jonker, even the plough horses, before they go out into the field ...
— Major Frank • A. L. G. Bosboom-Toussaint
... all patiently Abiding wrack and scaith! O Faith that meets ten thousand cheats Yet drops no jot of faith! Devil and brute Thou dost transmute To higher, lordlier show, Who art in sooth that lovely Truth The ...
— The Knave of Diamonds • Ethel May Dell
... mildness brings us back, Now th' equinoctial heaven's rage and wrack Hushes at hest of Zephyr's bonny breeze. Far left (Catullus!) be the Phrygian leas And summery Nicaea's fertile downs: 5 Fly we to Asia's fame-illumined towns. Now lust my fluttering thoughts for wayfare ...
— The Carmina of Caius Valerius Catullus • Caius Valerius Catullus
... doors were shut, and I closed the secret one behind me before opening the other and peering out through a wrack of bluish smoke; and there lay Captain Harris, sure enough, breathing his last in the arms of one constable, while another was seated on the table with a very wry face, twisting a tourniquet round his arm, from which the blood was dripping ...
— Dead Men Tell No Tales • E. W. Hornung
... small compass of a lady's ring; Figured by hand divine—there's not a gem Wrought by man's art to be compared to them; Soft, brilliant, tender, through the wave they glow, And make the moonbeam brighter where they flow. Involved in sea-wrack, here you find a race Which science, doubting, knows not where to place; On shell or stone is dropp'd the embryo-seed, And quickly vegetates a vital breed. While thus with pleasing wonder you inspect Treasures the vulgar in their scorn reject, See as they float ...
— The Borough • George Crabbe
... We hear again, Marie, The simple thirds, the waltz refrain, Marie; We only see some drifting wrack, An empty bunk, a battered smack, Alas! ...
— Rhymes of the East and Re-collected Verses • John Kendall (AKA Dum-Dum)
... laid scores of men at my feet. I was sealed up in dungeons. I was snatched out of the deep by the hair of my head. I slew men in hecatombs; and then, when the morning came and I awoke, there was not a shred of intellectual wrack left behind on which my mind could take hold. I had dreamed it all with the cerebellum. It was all organic. Why didn't I dream a novel by Turgenef, or Bjornsen? It takes brains to write "Fathers and Sons" or the "Bankrupt," and it takes ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol II, After-Dinner Speeches E-O • Various
... ain't got no control over her whatsoever. I've been trying to get her to come home for the last fortnight, but she just won't leave off going around with the sailors. The whole beach is ashamed of her. It's general talk down below. What can I do? The little old coral house is going to wrack and ruin and the baby ain't been properly took care of since she left. What am I going to do, madam? What am I going to ...
— Biltmore Oswald - The Diary of a Hapless Recruit • J. Thorne Smith, Jr.
... often spread, And come like opening Hell upon the mind, No "baseless fabric" but "a wrack behind."—[MS.] ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 6 • Lord Byron
... chief of whom is the [Courlividani.] Courlividani. This person beside his entertainment in the Countrey unto which he is sent to Govern under the Dissauva, hath a due revenue, but smaller then that of the Governour. His chief business is to wrack and hale all that may be for his Master, and to see good Government, and if there be any difference or quarrel between one or other, he takes a Fine from both, and carrieth to the Governour, not regarding ...
— An Historical Relation Of The Island Ceylon In The East Indies • Robert Knox
... a hundred yards, he lost his first zest in the adventure. The darkness had thickened; and the vagrant wind-gusts had tightened into a steady gale; a gale which carried before it a blinding wrack of stingingly hard-driven snow. ...
— Further Adventures of Lad • Albert Payson Terhune
... a post of the wagon and a wrack of rainy cloud I saw it, uplifted and withdrawn under all the arching heavens of its history, alone with its benediction and its blasphemy, the city that is set upon a ...
— The New Jerusalem • G. K. Chesterton
... was abating. The sun began to shine out through the driving wrack of clouds. The woodland tracks might be wet, but little reeked the travellers ...
— French and English - A Story of the Struggle in America • Evelyn Everett-Green
... somewhat lest his mind should fail him through grievous wrack of pain of body, but that trouble was set ...
— Penshurst Castle - In the Days of Sir Philip Sidney • Emma Marshall
... their burdens down on the broad plain of al-Ghabit, as a trader from al-Yaman unfolds from the bales his store; And the topmost crest, on the morrow, of al-Mujaimir's cairn, was heaped with the flood-borne wrack, like ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 2 • Charles Dudley Warner
... always some Australian there who will give them a cigarette; a cheery Melbourne youngster or two step down into the crowd and liven them with friendly chaff; the blue sky begins to show through the mist—the early morning aeroplane hums past on its way to the line, low down, half hidden in the wrack. The big bushman from Gippsland at a neighbouring coffee stall—praise heaven for that institution—gives them a drink of the warm stuff. And I verily believe that at that moment they emerge for the first time out ...
— Letters from France • C. E. W. Bean
... However, Herbert, who had gone forward a little more to the left, soon came upon rocks covered with sea-weed, which, some hours later, would be hidden by the high tide. On these rocks, in the midst of slippery wrack, abounded bivalve shell-fish, not to be despised by starving people. Herbert called ...
— The Mysterious Island • Jules Verne
... nest a few evenings ago, I found the young ones had flown, and as there was a cock-nest in some wrack left by the river in a bush a few yards off, I gave it a shake to see if the old ones had taken possession of it for another brood; and I was surprised to see one, and then a second young one come flying out, and a third putting out its head to reconnoitre. Whether the whole brood was there I don't ...
— Essays in Natural History and Agriculture • Thomas Garnett
... her, the moon ran out, and they saw that the woman was fair, and that about her neck was a chaplet of gems that shone in the moon, and they had a longing both for the jewel and the woman: but before they laid hand on her they asked her of whence and whither, and she said: From ruin and wrack to the Well at the World's End, and therewith turned on them with a naked sword in her hand; so that they shrank from ...
— The Well at the World's End • William Morris
... soon after midnight, and before dawn had blown itself out. Day came, filtered slowly through the wrack of it to the south-east; and soon they heard a whistle blown, and there on the cliff above them was George Vyell on horseback, in his red coat, with an arm thrown out and pointing eastward. He turned and galloped ...
— The Ship of Stars • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... sense of man and human ways Is wrecked and quenched for ever, and I drop Into the whirl of time, and without stop Pass downward thus! Again my eyes I raise To thee, dark rock; and through the mist and haze My strength returns when I behold thy prop Gleam stern and steady through the wavering wrack Surely thy strength is human, and like me Thou bearest loads of thunder on thy back! And, lo, a smile upon thy visage black— A breezy tuft of grass which I can see Waving serenely from a ...
— Robert Falconer • George MacDonald
... fight till the Judgment Day, Each night ere the cock should crow, Where the thunders boom and the lightnings play In the wrack of the battle-glow. They swore by Drake and Plymouth Bay, The men of the Good Hope's crew, By the bones that lay in fierce Biscay, And they ...
— New York Times Current History: The European War, Vol 2, No. 1, April, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... being a month or more in the aquarium, acquire the other constituents which are normally present in minute quantities in the natural sea-water. It must derive them from the action of the plants or animals, or both. Bromine may come from sponges, or sea-wrack, perhaps. Thus artificial water ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, No. 47, September, 1861 • Various
... thou hast been so slack To wound her heart whose eyes have wounded me And suffered her to glory in my wrack, Thus to my aid I lastly conjure thee! By hellish Styx, by which the Thund'rer swears, By thy fair mother's unavoided power, By Hecate's names, by Proserpine's sad tears, When she was wrapt to the infernal bower! By thine own loved Psyche, ...
— Elizabethan Sonnet Cycles - Idea, by Michael Drayton; Fidessa, by Bartholomew Griffin; Chloris, by William Smith • Michael Drayton, Bartholomew Griffin, and William Smith
... stormy afternoon in October 1896 Brandon was filled with a great exultation. As he stood, for a moment, at the door of his house in the Precincts before crossing the Green to the Cathedral, he looked up at the sky obscured with flying wrack of cloud, felt the rain drive across his face, heard the elms in the neighbouring garden creaking and groaning, saw the lights of the town far beneath the low wall that bounded the Precincts sway and blink in the storm, his heart beat with such pride and happiness that it threatened ...
— The Cathedral • Hugh Walpole
... it said nay; I looked for Jamie back; But the wind it blew high, and the ship it was a wrack; His ship it was a wrack—Why didna Jamie dee? Or why do I ...
— English Poets of the Eighteenth Century • Selected and Edited with an Introduction by Ernest Bernbaum
... with rage rather than pity. Such wrack and waste of human life, moral and physical! for what? For the protection of a hateful sport which demoralised the rich and their agents, no less than it tempted and provoked ...
— Marcella • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... "A wrack!" gasped Mrs. Trefethen, "and 'im in hit! Save us! but 'twill be worse than down shaft. Shaft be dry land, anyway, but they awful sea that rageth like a lion seeking whom it may ...
— The Copper Princess - A Story of Lake Superior Mines • Kirk Munroe
... flashed the horrible truth upon him that he might, after all, leave France smaller and weaker than he found her. Then the lightnings of his wrath flash forth, and we see the tumult and anguish of that mighty soul: but previously the storm-wrack of passion and the cloud-bank of his clinging will are lit up by few gleams of the earlier piercing intelligence. On January the 4th he had written to Caulaincourt that the policy of England and ...
— The Life of Napoleon I (Volumes, 1 and 2) • John Holland Rose
... the captain peered out through the dense wrack and haze. A great dark cliff loomed out upon the left, jagged, ...
— The Firm of Girdlestone • Arthur Conan Doyle
... he had never found time to wrack his brains for the passages that eluded him. But all that had been merely a subterfuge to soothe his conscience, while he slowly felt his way into his ...
— The Worshippers • Damon Francis Knight
... calm or wrack-wreath, whether by dark or day, I heave them whole to the conger or rip their plates away, First of the scattered legions, under a shrieking sky, Dipping between the rollers, the English Flag ...
— The Works of Rudyard Kipling One Volume Edition • Rudyard Kipling
... cried: "Thou hast thought in thy folly that the Gods have friends and foes, That they wake, and the world wends onward, that they sleep, and the world slips back, That they laugh, and the world's weal waxeth, that they frown and fashion the wrack: Thou hast cast up the curse against me; it shall aback on thine head; Go back to the sons of repentance, with the children of sorrow wed! For the Gods are great unholpen, and their grief ...
— The Influence of Old Norse Literature on English Literature • Conrad Hjalmar Nordby
... handsome chariot, incidentally accompanied by the Bridegroom; and after rolling for a few minutes smoothly over a fair pavement, had begun to jolt through a Slough of Despond, and through a long, long avenue of wrack and ruin. Other nuptial carriages are said to have gone the ...
— Little Dorrit • Charles Dickens
... panting rocked, there took his rest. So lovely fair was Hero, Venus' nun, As Nature wept, thinking she was undone, Because she took more from her than she left, And of such wondrous beauty her bereft. Therefore, in sign her treasure suffered wrack, Since Hero's time hath half ...
— Hero and Leander • Christopher Marlowe
... the ruby-colour'd portal open'd, Which to his speech did honey passage yield, 452 Like a red morn, that ever yet betoken'd Wrack to the seaman, tempest to the field, Sorrow to shepherds, woe unto the birds, Gusts and foul flaws to ...
— Venus and Adonis • William Shakespeare
... river flowing sluggishly beneath us. Beyond lay another dull wilderness of bricks and mortar, its silence broken only by the heavy, regular footfall of the policeman, or the songs and shouts of some belated party of revellers. A dull wrack was drifting slowly across the sky, and a star or two twinkled dimly here and there through the rifts of the clouds. Holmes drove in silence, with his head sunk upon his breast, and the air of a man who is lost in thought, while I sat beside him, curious to learn what this new ...
— The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes • Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
... At the outermost point of a rocky bay. A sandy, tide-pooly, cliff-bound cove, With a red-roofed fishing village above, Of irregular cottages, perched up high Amid pale yellow poppies next to the sky. Shells and pebbles, and wrack below, And shrimpers shrimping all in a row; Tawny sails and tarry boats, Dark brown nets and old cork floats; Nasty smells at the nicest ...
— Verses for Children - and Songs for Music • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... opinion, the shortness of a triennial sitting would have the following ill effects: It would make the member more shamelessly and shockingly corrupt; it would increase his dependence on those who could best support him at his election; it would wrack and tear to pieces the fortunes of those who stood upon their own fortunes and their private interest; it would make the electors infinitely more venal; and it would make the whole body of the people, who are, whether they have votes ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. VII. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... an this were all, 'twere something; but they are the only known enemies to my generation. A fasting-day no sooner comes, but my lineage goes to wrack; poor cobs! they smoak for it, they are made martyrs O' the gridiron, they melt in passion: and your maids to know this, and yet would have me turn Hannibal, and eat my own flesh and blood. My princely coz, [pulls out a red herring] fear nothing; I have not the heart to devour you, an I might be ...
— Every Man In His Humor - (The Anglicized Edition) • Ben Jonson
... clans of the wave With spray and surge and splash appeared: Up from each wrack-strewn, lightless cave ...
— Christmas in Legend and Story - A Book for Boys and Girls • Elva S. Smith
... poison of hatred. The passionate hatreds engendered by the war must be crushed down and they who were foes, seeking to destroy one another, must now work together for the preservation of the civilization that is their common heritage. With the carnage and wrack and ruin of the war still oppressing us, and our hearts still lacerated and bruised, a common peril is compelling us to unite and to seek safety in fellowship and co-operation. Yesterday we relied upon the destructive arts of the warrior; to-day ...
— The Jew and American Ideals • John Spargo
... the net were curious; and as the cork line was drawn back flat on the sands, there was plenty of work for the men to pick off the net the masses of tangled fucus and bladder-wrack which had come up with the tide. Jelly-fish—great transparent discs with their strangely-coloured tentacles—were there by the dozen; pieces of floating wood, scraps of rope and canvas, and a couple of the curious squids with their ...
— Sappers and Miners - The Flood beneath the Sea • George Manville Fenn
... the world has this progress been more marked than in Latin America. Out of the wrack of Indian fighting and race conflicts and civil wars, strong and stable governments have arisen. Peaceful succession in accord with the people's will has replaced the forcible seizure of power permitted ...
— Latin America and the United States - Addresses by Elihu Root • Elihu Root
... have made a lifelong study, without ever asking themselves what is the evidence for them, what is the use of them, how long they will last? They may pass away, like the authors of them, and 'leave not a wrack behind;' or they may survive in fragments. Nor is it only in the Middle Ages, or in the literary desert of China or of India, that such systems have arisen; in our own enlightened age, growing up by the side of Physics, Ethics, and other really ...
— Theaetetus • Plato
... Spanish Armado to wrack, And Travell'd all o'er the old World, and came back, In his old Ship, laden with Gold and old Sack, Like an old ...
— Wit and Mirth: or Pills to Purge Melancholy, Vol. 5 of 6 • Various
... played around the rocks near the camp: a storm came up and seemed to part in two, one half going north and the other south; but just before daybreak we were awakened by a crash of thunder that seemed to split the hills; and we heard the wrack as though the earth and sky would mingle; but only a few drops of rain fell, too little to leave any water, even on the surface of the flat rocks close to the camp. This is certainly an extraordinary climate. I do not believe a week ever passes without ...
— Australia Twice Traversed, The Romance of Exploration • Ernest Giles
... the sea, was no longer a vision of magic, the unsubstantial work of Iris, an illusionary cloud of coral, amber, and amethyst. It was the bare bones of this old earth, as sombre and foreboding as any ruin of granite under the wrack of the bleak north. ...
— Old Junk • H. M. Tomlinson
... SHAKESPEARE'S TEMPEST.—WILLIAM STRACHEY, a contemporary of Shakespeare and secretary of the Virginian colony, wrote at Jamestown and sent to London in 1610 the manuscript of A True Repertory of the Wrack and Redemption of Sir Thomas Gates, Kt., upon and from the Islands of the Bermudas. This is a story of shipwreck on the Bermudas and of escape in small boats. The book is memorable for the description of a storm at sea, and it is possible that it may even have furnished ...
— History of American Literature • Reuben Post Halleck
... away a trifle, and to meet new conditions they developed new qualities with which they have not previously been credited, qualities of stubborn scientific stolidity. They out-Germaned the Germans in the way their organization withstood the shock and wrack of battle. It was the German machine which broke down first. On that field a new France was born. Let no German ever again say that she is effete. It was purely a French victory. This is no aspersion upon the Belgians ...
— The Note-Book of an Attache - Seven Months in the War Zone • Eric Fisher Wood
... apparent; for upon the night of the 11th we fairly entered upon that por- tion of the Atlantic which is known as the Sargasso Sea. An extensive tract of water is this, inclosed by the warm current of the Gulf Stream, and thickly covered with the wrack, called by the Spaniards "sargasso," the abundance of which so seriously impeded the progress of Columbus's vessel on his ...
— The Survivors of the Chancellor • Jules Verne
... at equipoise. A formless moon soared through a white cloud wrack, and broken gold lay in the rising tide. The sonorous steps of the policeman on the bridge startled him, and obeying the impulse of the moment, he gave the officer the letter, asking him to post it. He waited for some minutes, as if stupefied, pursuing the consequences of his act even into distant ...
— Mike Fletcher - A Novel • George (George Augustus) Moore
... maroon heart. In places rocks encroached upon the sand; the beach would be all submerged; and the surf would bubble warmly as high as to my knees, and play with cocoa-nut husks as our more homely ocean plays with wreck and wrack and bottles. As the reflux drew down, marvels of colour and design streamed between my feet; which I would grasp at, miss, or seize: now to find them what they promised, shells to grace a cabinet or be set in gold upon a lady's finger; now to catch only maya of coloured sand, pounded ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 18 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... You must know that on the top of this mountain you will find a ruined house, which was built long ago, time out of mind. The walls are cracked, the foundations crumbling away, the doors worm-eaten, the furniture all worn out—and, in short, everything is gone to wrack and ruin. On one side are seen shattered columns, on another broken statues; and nothing is left in a good state except a coat-of-arms over the door, quartered on which you will see a serpent biting its tail, a stag, a raven, and a phoenix. When you enter, ...
— Stories from Pentamerone • Giambattista Basile
... be so: by heaven there's life in this! The wrack of clouds is driving on the winds, And shews a break of sunshine— Go Grillon, give my orders to Byron, And see your soldiers well disposed within, For safeguard of ...
— The Works Of John Dryden, Vol. 7 (of 18) - The Duke of Guise; Albion and Albanius; Don Sebastian • John Dryden
... dey allus say, Is des' befo' de dawn, But it's moughty ha'd a-waitin' Were de night goes frownin' on; An' it's moughty ha'd a-hopin' When de clouds is big and black, An' all de t'ings you's waited fu' Has failed, er gone to wrack— But des' keep on a joggin' ind a little bit o song. De moon is allus brightah ...
— Leaves of Life - For Daily Inspiration • Margaret Bird Steinmetz
... it, and the other'll make somethin' entirely different. There was Mary Harris and Mandy Crawford. They both lost their husbands the same year; and Mandy set down and cried and worried and wondered what on earth she was goin' to do, and the farm went to wrack and the children turned out bad, and she had to live with her son-in-law in her old age. But Mary, she got up and went to work, and made everybody about her work, too; and she managed the farm better'n it ever had been managed before, and the boys all come up steady, hard-workin' men, and there ...
— Aunt Jane of Kentucky • Eliza Calvert Hall
... likely between one and two; the moon (as I have said) was down; a strongish wind, carrying a heavy wrack of cloud, had set in suddenly from the west; and we began our movement in as black a night as ever a fugitive or a murderer wanted. The whiteness of the path guided us into the sleeping town of Broughton, thence through Picardy, and beside my old acquaintance the gibbet of the ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 11 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... A formless wrack of clouds streams across the awful sky, and the rain sweeps almost parallel with the horizon. Beyond, the heath stretches off into endless blackness, in the extreme of which either fancy or art has conjured up some undefinable shapes that seem riding into space. At the base of ...
— Masterpieces of Mystery - Riddle Stories • Various
... from the sea by the numberless rocks round me engrossed my attention. How white and pellucid was the shallow near me—no shadow but the shadow of my face bending over it—nothing to ripple its surface, but my imperceptible breath! By and by a bunch of knotted wrack floated in from the outside and lodged in a crevice; a minute creature with fringed feet darted from it and swam across it. After the knotted wrack came the fragment of a green and silky substance, delicate enough to have been the remnant of a ...
— The Morgesons • Elizabeth Stoddard
... care we for war and wrack, How kings and heroes rise and fall; Look yonder,* in his coffin black, There lies the greatest ...
— Ballads • William Makepeace Thackeray
... their being used as highways for commerce and Christianity to pass into the vast interior of Africa. When we came within five or six miles of the land, the yellowish-green tinge of the sea in soundings was suddenly succeeded by muddy water with wrack, as of a river in flood. The two colours did not intermingle, but the line of contact was as sharply defined as when the ocean meets the land. It was observed that under the wrack—consisting of reeds, sticks, and leaves,—and even under floating cuttlefish ...
— A Popular Account of Dr. Livingstone's Expedition to the Zambesi and Its Tributaries • David Livingstone
... wind abated its rage and the thunder pealed faint with distance, while ever and anon the gloom gave place to a vague light, where, beyond the flying cloud-wrack, a ...
— Black Bartlemy's Treasure • Jeffrey Farnol
... that I could get on by myself; but still, Edward, you know we cannot tell what a day may bring forth, and I might fall sick, or something happen which might prevent my attending to anything; and then, without you or Pablo, everything might have gone to wrack and ruin. Certainly, when we think how we were left, by the death of old Jacob, to our own resources, we have much to thank God for in ...
— The Children of the New Forest • Captain Marryat
... songs of love. Life was a poem, and love red flowers between. What use to tell me now that the poem was a promise, the red flowers figures on a score that I must pay? Go, and leave me in peace! I cannot pay! You know—you know I have pawned all I had long since—all, to the last wrack!" ...
— The Song Of The Blood-Red Flower • Johannes Linnankoski
... What was she to pray for? To what purpose and end ought she to steel herself? Ought she to hope, or ought she to despair? "O God, help me!" she kept whispering to Jehovah whenever the heavenly vision shone through the wrack of her meditation. "O God, help me!" She had a conscience that, when it was in the mood for severity, could be unspeakably ...
— The Old Wives' Tale • Arnold Bennett
... breathless and pale, With the terror of death upon him; of failure is all his tale: "They have fled while the flag waved o'er them! they've turned to the foe their back! They are scattered, pursued, and slaughtered! the fields are all rout and wrack!" ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XI., April, 1863, No. LXVI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics. • Various
... the islands off the Scotch coasts, sea-wrack (Fucus vesiculosus) forms the chief support of horses and cattle in the winter months. F. serratus is similarly ...
— The Commercial Products of the Vegetable Kingdom • P. L. Simmonds
... SEA-WRACK GRASS. Zostera marina; used in Sweden and Holland for manuring land. At Yarmouth it is thrown on shore in such abundance that mounds are made with it to arrest the encroachments of the sea. It is also used ...
— The Sailor's Word-Book • William Henry Smyth
... hands in a helpless, hopeless gesture. "What's the use, Mr. Carroll? Why, should I wrack myself with the story when you do not even believe the reason upon which it is based? If you only believed me when I tell you that when I got into the taxicab ...
— Midnight • Octavus Roy Cohen
... Dr. Brooke had taken matters in his own hands and ordered an absolute rest, after dwelling at some length on the vicious pace set by modern business and the lack of consideration and knowledge shown by men of affairs for their bodies. There was a limit to the wrack and strain which the human organism could stand. He must of course have suspected the presence of disturbing and disintegrating factors, but he confined himself to telling me that only an exceptional constitution had saved me from a serious illness; he must in a way have comprehended ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... origin, there are many which are most useful, not to say indispensable to the taxidermist. Leaving out the foreign corals, sea-fans, sponges, etc, we shall certainly find the most useful English species to be first: the broad leaved horn-wrack (Flustra foliacia), that mass of thin hand-like leaves, of the colour of brown paper, which is cast up on some shores, often in great quantities. Other useful sorts are those like little trees, such as the common sea fir (Sertularia, abietina ...
— Practical Taxidermy • Montagu Browne
... the melancholy soughing of the wind among the spars. A thick cloud was coming up from the northwest, and the ragged tentacles which it threw out in front of it were drifting across the face of the moon, which only shone now and again through a rift in the wrack. The Captain paced rapidly backwards and forwards, and then seeing me still dogging him, he came across and hinted that he thought I should be better below—which, I need hardly say, had the effect of strengthening my resolution ...
— The Captain of the Pole-Star and Other Tales • Arthur Conan Doyle
... the voice of despair: So the lion-like woman idly wearied the air For a while, and pierced men's hearing in vain, and wounded their hearts. But as when the weather changes at sea, in dangerous parts, And sudden the hurricane wrack unrolls up the front of the sky, At once the ship lies idle, the sails hang silent on high, The breath of the wind that blew is blown out like the flame of a lamp, And the silent armies of death draw near with inaudible tramp: ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 14 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... had for once realised itself. There was not a visible particle of Plattner to be seen; not a drop of blood nor a stitch of clothing to be found. Apparently he had been blown clean out of existence and left not a wrack behind. Not so much as would cover a sixpenny piece, to quote a proverbial expression! The evidence of his absolute disappearance as a consequence ...
— The Country of the Blind, And Other Stories • H. G. Wells
... through the dimly-lighted suburbs of London, and entered upon the open country. A wan, watery line of light lay under the brooding clouds in the west, tinged with a lurid hue; and all the great field of sky stretching above the level landscape was overcast with storm-wrack, fleeing swiftly before the wind. At times the train seemed to shake with the Wast, when it was passing oyer any embankment more than ordinarily exposed; but it sped across the country almost as rapidly as the ...
— The Doctor's Dilemma • Hesba Stretton
... indeed cooler, with a sighing wind, and in the west a thickening wrack of clouds. It was very dark. The restless and multitudinous flicker of the fireflies but emphasized the shadow, and the stars seemed few and dim. It was near midnight, and the wide landscape below the mountain ...
— Lewis Rand • Mary Johnston
... This, this the greatest, and to this one compard All that are past but trifles. Oh that grand maister Of mechall[90] lusts, that bulke of brothelree, That stillary of all infectious sinnes, Hath scapt the wrack, and with his fellowe guest And partner in corruption makes this waye, And with no tarde pace. Where shall I hyde mee! Whether shall I fly to Palestra back And with this sadd relation kill her quite That's scarce recovered! rather, you hy powers, Then to prolonge our griefes, ...
— A Collection Of Old English Plays, Vol. IV. • Editor: A.H. Bullen
... huge and black, She crushed our ribs in her iron grasp! Down went the Cumberland all a wrack, With a sudden shudder of death, And the cannon's ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... the delegates with fair promises; but his real answer was the subsequent passing through Parliament of an Act of Oblivion in favour of the lords, which he urged on the unkingly ground that, if severe measures were taken against them, they would go 'to armes and get forean assistance quhilk might wrack ...
— Andrew Melville - Famous Scots Series • William Morison
... on and on over the salt grass or the old wrack that the sea-spray wet to a new slime, never pausing but for a moment now and then to try and understand what the men on ...
— Gilian The Dreamer - His Fancy, His Love and Adventure • Neil Munro
... dragged out of that house as by a magnet. The sky had cleared and lay far off and cold, and the wrack of the broken clouds was burning itself up in the west when I saw a dory cast ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1919 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... that she has not moved, and impart the fact to Sandy, who looks steadily through his long spy-glass, evidently made up of several others; then, gazing intently over the top, he brings all hands to their feet by the cry of "Wrack!" For Sandy is a ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, October 1885 • Various
... and clear, but a wrack of grey clouds soon covered the sky, and a wind from the east began to whistle. As I stumbled along through the snowy undergrowth I kept longing for bright warm places. I thought of those long days on the veld when the earth was like a great yellow ...
— Greenmantle • John Buchan
... second before the fatal hug. He told of the melting of the snows in forest rivers; of the flood that swept away the lonely traveller's encampment, and bore him, astride on a log of driftwood, five miles amid wrack and boulders on its whirling current; of deliverance through a pious Indian and his canoe, which he entered as by a miracle in mid-stream, and without upsetting any of the three. He told of long wanderings in the ...
— Audrey Craven • May Sinclair
... a mine had been sprung beneath the spot upon which had been dumped her emotions of the last two months, blowing some to atoms, bringing to light others that had lain buried. Out of the wrack, joy, shame, fear fell at her feet—and a sentence out of a letter was ...
— Anthony Lyveden • Dornford Yates
... he sank to the ground overpowered, he caught himself murmuring, "They cannot kill me, until we three say grace together again," even while he longed for death to cut short the agony which was beginning to wrack every limb of his cruelly beaten body. Then out of the mist of red which seemed to swim before his eyes, a merciful black cloud descended and he knew nothing more until he regained consciousness and found himself in "Old Milly's" cabin, with Becky, still calm of ...
— The New Land - Stories of Jews Who Had a Part in the Making of Our Country • Elma Ehrlich Levinger
... either of pine or of pitch trees; a wood not commonly known to our people, nor found growing in England. They have no edge-tools to make them withal; if they have any they are very few, and those, it seems, they had twenty years since, which, as those two men declared, was out of a wrack, which happened upon their coast, of some Christian ship, being beaten that way by some storm and outrageous weather, whereof none of the people were saved, but only the ship, or some part of her, ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 1-20 • Various
... the truant's staff in daisied lanes. For over me burned lustrous the dear eyes Of my beloved; I strove as at a joust To gain at end the guerdon of her smile. And ever, as in the dense melee I dashed, Her name burst from my lips, as lightning breaks Out of the plunging wrack of summer storms. ...
— Pike County Ballads and Other Poems • John Hay
... getting low, but he decided that did not matter either. Even so, Ross got to his feet, moving over to the drifts of storm wrack to gather more. Why should he stay here by a useless beacon? But somehow he could not force himself to move on, as ...
— The Time Traders • Andre Norton
... alike are lost: Not a pillar nor a post In his Croisic keeps alive the feat as it befell; Not a head in white and black On a single fishing smack, In memory of the man but for whom had gone to wrack All that France saved from the fight whence England bore the bell. Go to Paris: rank on rank Search the heroes flung pell-mell On the Louvre, face and flank! You shall look long enough ere you come to Herve Riel. So, for better and for worse, Herve Riel, accept my verse! In my verse, Herve ...
— The Ontario Readers: The High School Reader, 1886 • Ministry of Education
... the sun's warmth so long as we were cruising among the ice-wrack. Some of the passengers, having been forewarned, were provided with heavy overcoats, oilskin hats, waterproofs, woolen socks, and stogies with great nails driven into the soles. They were iron-bound, copper-fastened tourists, thoroughly equipped—Alpine-stock ...
— Over the Rocky Mountains to Alaska • Charles Warren Stoddard
... ways of spelling the name of the blamed thing so as to get the same right wunst any way—is played wid the feet. You slide the sheet wid the holes punched into 'em into the wrack over the keeze and then wurrk the feet up and down like yer husband Tana used to do ...
— The Launch Boys' Adventures in Northern Waters • Edward S. Ellis
... comes flyin' inland, it ain't a case of individyooals nor neighborhoods, but whole counties comes stampedin' to the rescoo. It's no use; the boat bogs right down in the sand; in less than an hour her smoke stack is onder water. All we ever gets from the wrack is the bell, the same now adornin' a Presbyter'an church an' summonin' folks to them services. I tells you, gents, the thoughts of that Willow Run, an' we not able to save so much as a quart of it, puts ...
— Wolfville Days • Alfred Henry Lewis
... have felt something of the same thing for another,—a longing for his welfare, a delight to hear him praised, a charm in his presence,—so strong a feeling for his interest, that were he to go to wrack and ruin, I too, should, after a fashion, be wracked and ruined. But it ...
— Phineas Finn - The Irish Member • Anthony Trollope
... happening visibly before our eyes, is a rarer phenomenon. And it seems to be occurring whenever a string of Laraghmenians come plodding up their winding mountain-path under the burden of heavy creels filled with earth, or oftener with slippery brown sea-wrack and leathery weed. For it is in this way that whatever scanty foothold their starveling crops may find, has been fashioned and maintained in the stony little fields. Year by year, as the blustery days of late autumn darken into winter, the steep-ledged path is wetted all along ...
— Strangers at Lisconnel • Barlow Jane
... more strongly than Eden could do. As by a lightning flash, the purblind politicians of Vienna could now discern the storm-wrack drifting upon them. The weakness of the Piedmontese army, their own unpreparedness in the Milanese, the friendliness of Genoa to France, and the Jacobinical ferment in all parts of Italy, portended a speedy irruption of the Republicans into ...
— William Pitt and the Great War • John Holland Rose |
