"Drift" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... o'er me, Like a shroud around me cast, As I sank upon the snow-drift Where the shadow ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, No. 19, May, 1859 • Various
... too; one can but drift, happily, sleepily, forgetting every care. From Abydos to Denderah one drifts, and from Denderah to Karnak, to Luxor, to all the marvels on the western shore; and on to Edfu, to Kom Ombos, to Assuan, and perhaps even into Nubia, to Abu-Simbel, and to Wadi-Halfa. ...
— The Spell of Egypt • Robert Hichens
... Day as though the drift of trouble, which had set her way with the announcement by her father of his unfortunate situation among the Yaqui Indians, had now risen to ...
— How Janice Day Won • Helen Beecher Long
... suppose I am; a sort of guardian. In fact, I am, of course," he said, altogether perplexed as to her drift. ...
— The Return of the Native • Thomas Hardy
... recesses crossed the way. Here lay half-decayed tree-trunks; there heaps of rocks lifted their mossy tops in the path. And ever, as they went, the roar of the rapids followed, while through the foliage could be seen the hurrying waters, pouring over rocks, stealing amid drift-logs, eddying in chasms, and shooting in white lines of foam along every ...
— Historic Tales, Vol. 1 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris
... Indians know that the spirit blends with the Greater Spirit, and I myself have seen every atom that was mortal lift again and again to new life, out of the desert's atom drift." ...
— Still Jim • Honore Willsie Morrow
... I loved you and you loved me!' Alas, 't is a joy we shall never see! You are too fair—I am too cold;— We shall drift along till we both grow old, Till we reach the grave, and gasping, die, Looking back on the days that have passed us by, When 'what might have been,' can no longer be,— When I lost you, ...
— Temporal Power • Marie Corelli
... is like a man crazy, shoots him with a pistol through the head, and we all see him fall without life in the bottom of his boat. He is so very dead that he does not even move, and so is let go to drift, him and his boat, ...
— The Copper Princess - A Story of Lake Superior Mines • Kirk Munroe
... building. The place was desolate with the desolation of autumn. Through the funereal arch he saw the sunset barred by a network of naked branches, while about him the darkening lawn was veiled with the melancholy drift of the leaves. The only sound of life came from a brood of turkeys settling to ...
— The Voice of the People • Ellen Glasgow
... perhaps enough to indicate the political drift of the "Telemachus." That drift is, indeed, observable everywhere ...
— Classic French Course in English • William Cleaver Wilkinson
... space-fitness cards. Quite a few nations were represented. Joe would have to turn in the cards to the respective authorities. Noting its drift course, Nelsen left the wreckage, and hurried back to Post Seven, before other Jolly Lads could catch up ...
— The Planet Strappers • Raymond Zinke Gallun
... saw her, gazing at him. Old tenderness awoke in her, old angers also. She remembered how he had made her suffer in the obstinate course of his own will, and how free she had felt when at last she had broken their engagement and seen him drift under Ardelia's charm. But he would always mean something to her more than other men, in a fashion quite peculiar to himself. She had agonized too much over him. She had protected him too long against the faults of his own nature, and now she could not be content unless, for his sake, she ...
— Country Neighbors • Alice Brown
... found their two little vessels lashed together, and wearing an air of more stability than was common to them. Le Bourdon's sail was first spread, and it produced an immediate relief from the washing of the waves. The drift of a bark canoe, in a smart blow, is considerable, it having no hold on the water to resist it; but our adventurers fairly flew as soon as the cotton cloth was opened. The wind being exactly south, by steering due north, or dead before it, it was found possible to carry the ...
— Oak Openings • James Fenimore Cooper
... those who, piercing not the drift Of answer made them, stand as if expos'd In mockery, nor know what to reply, When Virgil thus admonish'd: "Tell him quick, I am not he, not ...
— The Divine Comedy, Complete - The Vision of Paradise, Purgatory and Hell • Dante Alighieri
... with her chin on her hand, red-lit and saying little, and Miss Miniver discoursed. As she talked, the drift and significance of what she was saying shaped itself slowly to Ann Veronica's apprehension. It presented itself in the likeness of a great, gray, dull world—a brutal, superstitious, confused, and wrong-headed world, that hurt people and limited people unaccountably. In remote times and countries ...
— Ann Veronica • H. G. Wells
... is a poetic interpreter of the thought of the Victorian age. Huxley called him "the first poet since Lucretius who understood the drift of science." In these four lines from The Princess, Tennyson gives the evolutionary history of the world, from nebula ...
— Halleck's New English Literature • Reuben P. Halleck
... when we meet; and I don't think any the less of him because he was called "Bumble" at school and afterwards made Governor of Bombay. Men drift unconsciously into these things. But when I happen to be near him he has a nervous way of lunging with his stick that I can't quite get over. They say he once dreamt that I had poked fun at him in a newspaper; and the hallucination continues ...
— Twenty-One Days in India; and, the Teapot Series • George Robert Aberigh-Mackay
... begin to feel I have not been so prudent as I might have been; and, if Mr. Henley were to leave England, the father might attribute it to us, and—[Sir Arthur hesitated]—I have received some extraordinary letters from Abimelech, of which I did not at first see the full drift; but it is now clear; every thing corresponds, and my conversation with young Mr. Henley has confirmed all I had supposed. However he is a very good a very extraordinary young gentleman, and I could wish he would not go. I don't know ...
— Anna St. Ives • Thomas Holcroft
... into silence while the latter returned to his measuring, and then out of the drift of thought came this from the ...
— Twelve Men • Theodore Dreiser
... is no strange thing that happens to us, if God takes us at our word, and strips us for a while of all that made life beautiful. It may be outward things—bodily comfort, leisure, culture, reputation, friendships—that have to drift away as our hands refuse to clasp on anything but God's will for us. Or it may be on our inner life that the stripping falls, and we have to leave the sunny lands of spiritual enjoyment for one after another of temptation's battlefields, where every inch of our foothold has ...
— Parables of the Cross • I. Lilias Trotter
... Trenchard, and was careful not to ask her how she came by her knowledge. "The letter, no doubt, was in an outer wrapper, on which there would be a superscription—the name of the person to whom the letter was addressed?" he half questioned, and Luttrell, who saw the drift ...
— Mistress Wilding • Rafael Sabatini
... it were, to drift away from me. But I was more and more beset by the thought of the higher duties that laid ...
— Little Eyolf • Henrik Ibsen
... of each train. A large exhausting fan has been designed by Mr. John Ramsbottom for this purpose, which works in a chamber situated near the middle of the length of the tunnel, and draws the air in from the tunnel, through a cross drift; discharging it up a tapering chimney that extends to a considerable hight above the surface of the ground over the tunnel. The fan is about thirty feet diameter, and is made with straight radial vanes; ...
— Scientific American, Volume XXIV., No. 12, March 18, 1871 • Various
... wet black glass, Like moths about a lanthorn ... I lay and watched, Till the pains were on me ... And they buzzed like bees, The snowflakes in my head—hot, stinging bees ... It snowed again, the night he went.... In the smother I lost him, in a drift down Bloodysyke ... I couldn't follow further: the snow closed in— Dry flakes that stung my face like swarming bees, And blinded me ... and buzzing, till my head Was all ahum; and I was fair betwattled ... I've not ...
— Krindlesyke • Wilfrid Wilson Gibson
... fine fellow, quiet now," said Charley, in a soothing tone, patting the horse's neck. "It's a comfort to know you can't go far in that direction, anyhow!" he added, as he glanced over his shoulder, and saw an immense drift behind. ...
— The Young Fur Traders • R.M. Ballantyne
... a movement, or simply a drift, a trend; what had it done for literature? In the way of stimulus and preparation, a good deal. It had relaxed the classical bandages, widened the range of sympathy, roused a curiosity as to novel and diverse forms of art, and brought the literary mind ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... is possible to talk of it in terms of evolution or inevitable progress. A perpetual tendency to touch fewer and fewer things might—one feels, be a mere brute unconscious tendency, like that of a species to produce fewer and fewer children. This drift may be really evolutionary, ...
— Orthodoxy • G. K. Chesterton
... out, if you please. Jackson never wastes a candle to drink or sleep by, and at this time of the year there will be no fire. If he speaks to his wife he does not expect her, from her wooden deafness, to answer him. Do you begin to perceive my drift?" ...
— The International Monthly Magazine, Volume 5, No. 1, January, 1852 • Various
... understand—the way that this place, this life that he contemplated, pulled him. The slackness of it, the lack of discipline in it, the absence of struggle in it. All the strength, the fighting that had been in him during these past years, was driven out of him now. He just wanted to let things drift—to wander about the fields and roads, to find his clothes growing shabby upon him, to grow old without knowing even that he was alive—all this had come ...
— Fortitude • Hugh Walpole
... of genius. Without it, genius would drift hither and thither upon the restless, ever-changing waves of circumstance, never casting anchor in a secure haven. Upon opportunity, too, depends the success of institutions. By opportunity we mean a real and ...
— The People's Common Sense Medical Adviser in Plain English • R. V. Pierce
... a tinted ghost that was blown into my bungalow that night—only a twist of shredded marsh mist without substance, without being, without soul?—to be blown away into the shadows with the next and stronger wind—and again to drift out across the waste places of the world? I thought I knew a sweet, impulsive comrade of flesh and blood; warm, quick, generous, intelligent—and very, very young—too young and spirited, perhaps, to endure the harness ...
— The Younger Set • Robert W. Chambers
... and she remained at her door looking up at the summer blue sky that held a few soft white clouds, such as might have overhung the same place at the same hour thousands of years before, and such as would lazily drift over it in a thousand years to come. The morning had an immeasurable vastness, through which some crows flying across the pasture above the house sent their voices on the spacious stillness. A perception of the ...
— Annie Kilburn - A Novel • W. D. Howells
... long leagues on snowshoes with much trouble, because the snow was soft and made our snowshoes very heavy. At the end of five leagues, we found ourselves on a lake four or five leagues long all frozen over, on which the wind caused great quantities of snow to drift, obscuring the air and preventing us from seeing where we are going. After walking another league and a half with great difficulty our strength began to fail. The wind, cold, and snow were so intolerable that they compelled us to retrace our steps a little, to cut some branches of fir which ...
— Pioneers in Canada • Sir Harry Johnston
... the road they saw a short distance from them an object in the snow and as they drew nearer it proved to be a little fellow, deep in a snow drift. His hands were blue with the cold and as Father Brown picked him up in his arms he tried to ...
— Christmas Holidays at Merryvale - The Merryvale Boys • Alice Hale Burnett
... him because then he lets himself drift and the one who wants him collars him and then of course she always turns out to be the one he didn't want. My observations are as full of wants as an advertisement column. But the thing to do in all relations of life is to make up your mind what it is that you do want, and then to jolly ...
— The Incomplete Amorist • E. Nesbit
... must have had very incorrect notions of the Trinity, if, as Garcilasso states, the interpreter Felipillo explained it by saying, that "the Christians believed in three Gods and one God, and that made four." *17 But there is no doubt he perfectly comprehended that the drift of the discourse was to persuade him to resign his sceptre and acknowledge the supremacy ...
— The History Of The Conquest Of Peru • William H. Prescott
... knee-deep in a drift, shook himself much after the manner of his master; perhaps he, also, wished himself back at the Horseshoe Bar. He turned his head to look back, blinking at the snow which beat insistently in his eyes; he could not hold them open ...
— Rowdy of the Cross L • B.M. Sinclair, AKA B.M. Bower
... case of Violin-making, the number of those willing to encourage artistic workmanship is so minute as to fail even to support one maker of excellence, and thus, when deprived suddenly of its legitimate protection, the art, with other similar handicrafts, must drift into decadence. If we look around the Violin world, it is everywhere much the same. In Italy there is no Stradivari in embryo, in France no coming Lupot, in Germany no Jacob Stainer, and in England no future Banks or Forster. Why so? The answer is twofold. Partly there is fault in the demand, ...
— The Violin - Its Famous Makers and Their Imitators • George Hart
... or to repudiate a principle (even when it is proved to be false and pernicious) involves a political upheaval akin to a revolution. It is easier to continue to stand on an obsolete platform and watch a nation drift to disaster than to abandon the platform and endanger the party organization—euphemistically termed for the occasion "national unity." An excellent case in point is the pathetic devotion of successive Governments to the voluntary ...
— Freedom In Service - Six Essays on Matters Concerning Britain's Safety and Good Government • Fossey John Cobb Hearnshaw
... third Memorial Hall. The outlandish and the beautiful in Nature and in art take chief hold of our interest. It wanders elsewhere, but reverts to what typifies the novel and the charming. From the Mongols and the palms it will drift to the granite portals that are flanked by the winged Viennese horses and the colossal figures of Minerva in the act of bridling them. Pegasus is not very worthily represented by these bronzes. The horses, however, are the better ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XVII. No. 101. May, 1876. • Various
... into all sorts of trouble, and unless you call out no one will assist you. They will suppose that if you require help you will soon ask for it. You could drift all the way from Bhamo to Rangoon on a log, and I am sure no one would try to pick you up unless you shouted for help. Let anyone try to drift down from Oxford to Richmond, and he will be forcibly saved every mile ...
— The Soul of a People • H. Fielding
... diminishing sounds, that he was drifting further and further away from Tankred and his crowded fore-deck. But he was still within the area of that ever-betraying searchlight. Some time, he knew, he must drift beyond it. But until that moment came he dare make no ...
— Never-Fail Blake • Arthur Stringer
... I had all the answers I began to get the drift of things. They were a little frightening, too. The manager of the spaceyard that was building the ship had no ...
— The Misplaced Battleship • Harry Harrison (AKA Henry Maxwell Dempsey)
... discover my drift," said Anton. "I know, as I before said, that the papers are still extant, and I have reason to believe that you may discover their possessor. You can gain any information you may still want respecting ...
— Debit and Credit - Translated from the German of Gustav Freytag • Gustav Freytag
... the bowsprit, and he pushed with the boat-hook, while the wind veered round a little as if on purpose and helped with the sail; so presently the boat was free and began to drift ...
— The Country of the Pointed Firs • Sarah Orne Jewett
... love with him!" he exclaimed, and beneath the coldness of his manner, his heart suffered an incomprehensible pang. Undoubtedly he had permitted himself to drift into a feeling for Molly, which, had he been wise, he would have strangled speedily in the beginning. The obstacles which had appeared to make for his safety, had, he realized now, merely afforded shelter to the flame until it had grown strong enough to overleap them. While he stood there, with ...
— The Miller Of Old Church • Ellen Glasgow
... realisation of such a work on our stage literally appalled me. I must confess that it required all the despair which I then felt of ever having the chance of doing anything more for our theatre, to give me the necessary courage to begin upon this new work. Until that time I simply allowed myself to drift, while I meditated listlessly upon the possibility of things pursuing their course further under the existing circumstances. In regard to Lohengrin, I had got to that point when I hoped for nothing more than the best possible production of it at the Dresden theatre, ...
— My Life, Volume I • Richard Wagner
... philosophers, novelists, historians—they had all found man out, just as he had done. Discovering an echo of his beliefs, he thrilled with hot delight. He met allies amongst the poets, and adored them. It is strange how sympathetic books drift to the hand of a reader possessed with a consuming idea; how they gather around him, fall open to his eye, and give up the thing he yearns to feed on. Without the knowledge necessary to selection, Jim had an affinity for books of pessimistic doctrine, and though both means and opportunities ...
— In the Roaring Fifties • Edward Dyson
... "One side!" but, obstinate and angry, Apian tries to force the steamer to give way. The result is disastrous. The steamer catches in the towing cables and drags the horses into the water. The boats drift back and are hurled against a bridge. William and the Anglore are thrown into the river and are lost. All the others escape with their lives. Jean Roche is not sure but that he was the Drac after all, who, foreseeing the shipwreck, had thus followed the boats, to carry the Anglore at last ...
— Frederic Mistral - Poet and Leader in Provence • Charles Alfred Downer
... excitement by the criticisms on his Vienna performances that appeared in German papers. He does not weary of telling his friend about them, transcribing portions of them, and complaining of Polish papers which had misrepresented the drift and mistranslated the words of them. I do not wonder at the incorrectness of the Polish reports, for some of these criticisms are written in as uncouth, confused, and vague German as I ever had the misfortune to turn into English. One cannot help thinking, in reading what Chopin ...
— Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician - Volume 1-2, Complete • Frederick Niecks
... twenty-four hours the wind was from the south, blowing fresh breezes, accompanied with showers of snow. In the morning the snow showers were so thick that it was with difficulty the landing-master, who always steered the leading boat, could make his way to the rock through the drift. But at the Bell Rock neither snow nor rain, nor fog nor wind, retarded the progress of the work, if unaccompanied by a heavy swell or breach ...
— Records of a Family of Engineers • Robert Louis Stevenson
... not been for the snowdrops they would never have gone near Castle Magee; but at the right time of year the churchyard was a white drift of these flowers, and the sexton had often given them leave to pick as many as they pleased. With a big bunch of snowdrops Jane felt she could go straight home. Dinner would be over, of course, by ...
— The Weans at Rowallan • Kathleen Fitzpatrick
... and twig beamed in the sun like a lamp. A downy woodpecker below me kept up a great fuss and clatter,—all for my benefit, I suspected. All about me were great, soft mounds, where the rocks lay buried. It was a cemetery of drift boulders. There! that is the hound. Does his voice come across the valley from the spur off against us, or is it on our side down under the mountain? After an interval, just as I am thinking the dog is going away from us along the opposite range, his voice comes up astonishingly near. A mass of snow ...
— The Writings of John Burroughs • John Burroughs
... Bolt, "the Powers above: Thus could our speech the sturdiest foe remove." Exulting now, he gain'd new strength of fame, And lost all feelings of defeat and shame. "He dared not strive, you witness'd—dared not lift His voice, nor drive at his accursed drift: So all shall tremble, wretches who oppose Our Church or State—thus be it to our foes." He spoke, and, seated with his former air, Look'd his full self, and fill'd his ample chair; Took one full bumper to each favourite cause, And dwelt all ...
— Tales • George Crabbe
... grooves. These lands grip the bullet as it passes through the bore and rotate it to the right about the longer axis. This rotation serves to prevent tumbling and keeps the bullet accurately on its course. This spinning of the bullet also causes it to drift slightly to the right as it passes through the air. The same effect is produced by throwing ...
— The Plattsburg Manual - A Handbook for Military Training • O.O. Ellis and E.B. Garey
... condition. 'You will be soon weary of all contentious books,' he wrote to CASPER LINDERN, 'if you entertain and get The Threefold Life of Man into your mind and heart.' 'The subject of regeneration,' says Christopher Walton, 'is the pith and drift of all Behmen's writings, and the student may here be directed to begin his course of study by mastering the first eight chapters of The Threefold Life, which appear to have been in great ...
— Jacob Behmen - an appreciation • Alexander Whyte
... wheels in the sky, drops to the roofs, settles with a clatter, sails up into the sky again. Black-headed gulls, in their winter suits of dove-colour and white, walk about the muddy edge of the rising tide, drift on the stream like torn paper, soar and hang in the wind above the bridge, peering this way and that for the fish and bread the Londoners give them; or late in the afternoon wing quiet journeys into unknown spaces of ...
— Highways and Byways in Surrey • Eric Parker
... reached the Vaal River, where we stopped and took all our superfluous kit off the horses, which left us with one blanket per man; were provided with four biscuits each, rations for two days, and so with light hearts and saddles, we forded Viljoen's Drift; into the Transvaal—at last! We had a long march to catch Roberts, but this country provides one with heaps of things to break any monotony that might otherwise exist, for it is ever "'Ware wire," "'Ware hole," "'Ware rock," or "'Ware ant hill," and now and again in the thick, blinding cloud ...
— A Yeoman's Letters - Third Edition • P. T. Ross
... alone could surpass its terrors. Down I went, and down, till at length I seemed to reach a rock which alone saved me from disappearing for ever. Now I felt the snow closing above me and with it came darkness and a sense of suffocation. So soft was the drift, however, that before I was overcome I contrived with my arms to thrust away the powdery dust from about my head, thus forming a little hollow into which air filtered slowly. Getting my hands upon the stone, I strove to rise, ...
— Ayesha - The Further History of She-Who-Must-Be-Obeyed • H. Rider Haggard
... the girl who jilted Richard Harrington, and hence his love for Eloise, for she knew he did love her from his manner when speaking of her and the pains he had taken to find her. He had not answered her last question yet, for he did not understand its drift, and when at last he spoke ...
— Darkness and Daylight • Mary J. Holmes
... Mr. Dart easily, "I ain't sure it was ninety-six. Might have been ninety-seven. Funny he ain't ever told you about me. Never mentioned, did he, how we got into a snow drift one time and had to eat our dogs and I got him ...
— The Short Cut • Jackson Gregory
... cases the diver rarely escaped without injury of some kind. With regard to the ordinary shark, however, our divers actually sought them. Their method of capturing them was almost incredible in its simplicity and daring. Three or four of our divers would go out in a boat and allow themselves to drift into a big school of sharks. Then one man, possessed of more nerve than the rest, would bend over the side and smartly prick the first one he came across with a spear taken out for the purpose. The moment he had succeeded in this the other occupants of the ...
— The Adventures of Louis de Rougemont - as told by Himself • Louis de Rougemont
... careless—might easily suppose that Arianism had the best of such passages as 'The Lord created me,'[3] or 'The Father is greater than I.'[4] Athanasius constantly complains of the Arian habit of relying on isolated passages like these without regard to their context or to the general scope and drift of Scripture. ...
— The Arian Controversy • H. M. Gwatkin
... took the other boy in the chest, and in his effort to dodge he went over head first into a drift near the gutter. Hal burst out laughing, and then ran back and helped ...
— The Missing Tin Box - or, The Stolen Railroad Bonds • Arthur M. Winfield
... of organised Christianity.—For a generation or more in every part of Christendom there has been a steady drift away from organised religion as represented by the churches, and the question is being seriously asked whether Christianity can much longer hold its own. Protestant controversialists frequently draw attention to the decline of church-going in Latin countries as evidence of the decay of ...
— The New Theology • R. J. Campbell
... log-jam was about half-a-mile above the falls, and a slightly lesser distance below Imbrie's shack. It was nearer his side of the river than the other; say, fifty yards of torn white water lay between the drift-pile and the beach. To wade or swim out was out of the question. On the other hand, the strongest flow of water, the channel such as it was, set directly for the obstruction, and it might be possible to drop down on it from above—if one provided some means for ...
— The Woman from Outside - [on Swan River] • Hulbert Footner
... three women of Pastor Lucus's church, standing on the front steps of Aunt Alphie Newberry's house, saw Abbie struggling through a drift. ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1917 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... Sir Joseph, who did not clearly catch the drift of these observations. 'It appears to me that a field for action is exactly what Sidonia wants. There is no vent for his abilities and intelligence. He wastes his energy in travelling from capital to capital like a King's messenger. ...
— Coningsby • Benjamin Disraeli
... ethics by making choice and moral action impossible. Man has no distinct and separate personality. He is for a little while detached in appearance from the soul of the universe (anima mundi), but in reality no more detached from it than is a boulder or a log of drift-wood from the surface on which it rests. He still remains a part of the universal soul, the multiform, all-embracing God, who is himself not a self-conscious, freely willing being, but impelled by necessity in all his parts and members, and, no less than in all else, ...
— A Manual of Moral Philosophy • Andrew Preston Peabody
... tame her sufficiently to afford us milk. We spent our time in improving our habitation, in hunting a goat when we wanted one, and in collecting sorrel, which enabled us to make some tolerable broth. Salt we got in abundance from the crevices of the rocks, and manufactured spoons out of drift-wood, and wooden platters and cups. We also brought materials from the other huts to improve our own. I think you'll say, when you see it, that it is a very respectable abode for a couple of bachelors. I own that very often I longed for a loaf of soft tack and a glass of something stronger ...
— The Three Admirals • W.H.G. Kingston
... celebrate the Feast of the Supreme Being. Moved by the same sense of vast reality Of life and death, and burdened as they were With the fate of a race, How was I, a little blasphemer, Caught in the drift of a nation's unloosened flood, To remain a blasphemer, And ...
— Spoon River Anthology • Edgar Lee Masters
... nowhere was she to be discovered. He saw, meantime, that the wreck was drifting to the southward down the coast, and at no great distance from it. He calculated the distance, and thought to himself that he could swim on shore. If he delayed, the vessel might drift farther out to sea, and the ...
— The Three Midshipmen • W.H.G. Kingston
... Helper in every time of need. He quoted mainly from the Bible, his one source of all knowledge, and his words had the splendid vagueness of the Hebrew, and lifted the mind into the illimitable. And as they talked, the fog enveloped them, one drift after another passing by in dim majesty, till the whole world seemed a spectacle of desolation, and a breath of deadly chillness forced them to rise and wrap their plaids closely round them. So they ...
— A Knight of the Nets • Amelia E. Barr
... it that Eumaeus was made to have come from Syracuse because the writer thought she rather ought to have made something happen at Syracuse during her account of the voyages of Ulysses. She could not, however, break his long drift from Charybdis to the island of Pantellaria; she therefore resolved to make it up to Syracuse in ...
— The Odyssey • Homer
... what it meant for a girl to be lost in the snow on such a night as I had just closed the shack door on, even with Charliet beside her; how Collins and I might tramp, search—yes, and call, too—uselessly, beside the very drift where she lay smothered. And then I realized I was a fool. Macartney would not give Paulette a chance to get lost. He had her somewhere, her and Charliet, and Collins and I had to take her from him. But something inexplicable stopped me dead as I turned for the shack door. ...
— The La Chance Mine Mystery • Susan Carleton Jones
... this was said so quietly that she did not quite see the drift of it. She had intended staying in London to the end of the season, not because she enjoyed it, but because she was determined to face Frank's marriage at every quarter, and have it over, once for all, so far as herself was concerned. But now, taken slightly aback, ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... unless we have something to hold to, in these troublesome times, we shall drift. That ...
— The King's Achievement • Robert Hugh Benson
... her lips moved so that I knew she was making soft little whispered prayers for her best loved son. But Laddie, plowing through the drift, never dreamed that all of us were with him. He was always better looking than any other man I ever had seen, but when, two hours later, he stamped into the kitchen he was so much handsomer than usual, that I knew from the flush on his cheek and the light in his eye, that ...
— Laddie • Gene Stratton Porter
... whose lives, in all probability, depended upon it. To replace it was impossible, as no line had been retained for the purpose; should the ship's speed be slackened, and thus take off the strain, both vessels must drift back, and perhaps share a common fate. All now depended upon the single hawser. Hope was not abandoned; the day was drawing on; for more than three hours the steamer had been tugging away at the brig, and if the hawser would hold, Jack determined to tug on till the storm ...
— The Three Commanders • W.H.G. Kingston
... with complaints about this alliance; very similar ones were received from the authorities of the Austrian Government at Ensisheim and Inspruck, and still a fourth one from the captains of the Swabian League. "Constance," such was their general drift, "is not at all competent to conclude a treaty of this kind without the consent of the Emperor, nor have the Confederate Cities any right to enter into it. It is not impossible that it may yet be the occasion of war, and the damage resulting may be ascribed to their own folly by the Confederates." ...
— The Life and Times of Ulric Zwingli • Johann Hottinger
... as that?" The Duke was beginning to catch the drift of what Margaret was saying. She had no intention of telling him any more, however. Bitterly as she felt towards Barker, she would not allow herself the triumph of telling her friend she had refused to ...
— Doctor Claudius, A True Story • F. Marion Crawford
... had two miles to travel before they could reach the nearest rising ground. The river Glenelg was at this time overflowing its banks, and, to the natural alarm of men wandering in its rich valley, drift-wood, reeds, grass, &c. were seen lodged in the trees above their heads, fifteen feet beyond the present level of the water, affording a proof of what floods in that country had been, and, of course, might be again. However, ...
— Australia, its history and present condition • William Pridden
... application as we may well resent. The Roman Catholics do the same, and with limitations that are still more uncompromising. We of the Free Churches must not be astonished if, as a result of definite and positive teaching within other walls and a lack of such teaching within our own, the people drift away from us. To build up the Church we must preach the Church. She needs ...
— The Message and the Man: - Some Essentials of Effective Preaching • J. Dodd Jackson
... many curious things about law, and custom, and usage, and all that sort of thing, when you come to look at it; yes, and about the drift and progress of human opinion and movement, too. There are written laws—they perish; but there are also unwritten laws—they are eternal. Take the unwritten law of wages: it says they've got to advance, little ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... became the scene of a profligacy unparalleled in her history. The Palace, instead of being a hall of justice, was the abode of debauchery and gambling; and the mad revellers, whom a cynical fate had placed at the head of affairs, allowed the ship of state to drift upon the rocks. Even the fine palace within the city gave too little scope for the diversion of the Intendant and his confederates, and, accordingly, a rustic chateau was built near the high hill of Charlesbourg. Here they ...
— Old Quebec - The Fortress of New France • Sir Gilbert Parker and Claude Glennon Bryan
... inhale the impalpable breezes that set in upon me, As the ocean so mysterious rolls toward me closer and closer, At once I find, the least thing that belongs to me, or that I see or touch, I know not; I, too, but signify a little washed-up drift,—a few sands and dead leaves to gather, Gather, and merge myself as part of the ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 30, April, 1860 • Various
... evenings the Knickerbocker River Queen, spangled with light and full of pride, moves up-stream with her bow toward Albany. And from her window and over the waves of intervening roofs Mae Munroe cupped her hands blinker fashion about her eyes and followed its gay excursional passage, even caught a drift of music from ...
— Every Soul Hath Its Song • Fannie Hurst
... repeatedly protested to me, in our conversations, that he would lose the last drop of his blood in support of it; and he did this the oftener and with the more earnestness, because he knew my suspicions of Hamilton's designs against it, and wished to quiet them. For he was not aware of the drift, or of the effect of Hamilton's schemes. Unversed in financial projects and calculations and budgets, his approbation of them was bottomed on ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson
... Magazine, with whom he had previously corresponded, and contributed to the pages of the magazine, earning thereby a meagre livelihood, eking out his means by reporting Parliamentary debates in terms which expressed the drift of them, but in his own pompous language; in 1740 he published a poem entitled the "Vanity of Human Wishes," and about the same time commenced his world-famous Dictionary, which was Published in 1755, "a great, solid, square-built edifice, finished, symmetrically complete, the best of all dictionaries"; ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... this tawdrification of trade unionism which is called Syndicalism, and the ideals of that Great State, that great commonweal, towards which the constructive forces in our civilisation tend. Are we to drift on to a disastrous intensification of our present specialisation of labour as labour, or are we to set to work steadfastly upon a vast social reconstruction which will close this widening breach and rescue our community from its present dependence upon the reluctant ...
— An Englishman Looks at the World • H. G. Wells
... in clude' a larm' ex change' a maze' ad jure' a far' in flame' a brade' de pute' re mark' ob late' cru sade' re fuse' de bark' par take' de base' ma nure' em bark' ad dress' re gret' in ject' ac quit' re flex' ex cept' in vent' a drift' ar rest' ex pect' mo lest' re miss' con test' ex pend' op press' be fit' de press' ex press' re ...
— McGuffey's Eclectic Spelling Book • W. H. McGuffey
... little that did not accord with that progress. They saw the expansion of cities, but not the accretion of slums; they cheered the census statistics, but refused to consider overcrowding; they pointed with pride to their growth, but would not see the drift from the land, or the unassimilated immigration. They expanded industry furiously at reckless cost to their natural resources; they built up gigantic corporations without arranging for industrial relations. They grew to be one of the most powerful nations ...
— Public Opinion • Walter Lippmann
... on the Malthusian League, and stray lectures during the week, my time was fairly well filled. But I found that in my reading I developed a tendency to let my thoughts wander from the subject in hand, and that they would drift after my lost little one, so I resolved to fill up the gaps in my scientific education, and to amuse myself by reading up for some examinations; I thought it would serve as an absorbing form of recreation from my other work, and would at the same time, by making my knowledge exact, ...
— Annie Besant - An Autobiography • Annie Besant
... 'm wand'ring wide this wintry night, I 'm wand'ring wide and late, And ridgy wreaths afore me rise, As if to bar my gate; Around me swirls the sleety drift, The frost bites dour an' keen; But breathings warm, frae lovin' lips, ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume V. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... then scarcely making way in the teeth of the strong north-easter. To the north and north-east the fog banks hung low on the sea. So light was the wind, that the sails scarcely filled. The schooner seemed merely to drift.... Toward night we entered among the fog-banks. The whole face of the sea steamed like a boiling kettle. The mist rose thin and gauze-like. We could scarcely see the length of the deck. It was blind work sailing ...
— Left on Labrador - or, The cruise of the Schooner-yacht 'Curlew.' as Recorded by 'Wash.' • Charles Asbury Stephens
... Vidura had finished what he had to say, Pritha's son Arjuna, well skilled in the science of Profit, and conversant also with the truths of both Virtue and Profit, urged on (by the drift of ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 3 - Books 8, 9, 10, 11 and 12 • Unknown
... illegal conspiracy against law and individual liberty," might be "in many cases justified by the magnitude of the legalised crime against which it was directed," it was obvious to me that he could not long remain blind to the true drift of things in an organisation condemned, by the conditions it has created for itself, to deal with the thinkers of Ireland as it deals with the tenants of Ireland. His recent pamphlet on "Boycotting" proves that I was right. What he said to me the other day in a letter about the pamphlet may ...
— Ireland Under Coercion (2nd ed.) (2 of 2) (1888) • William Henry Hurlbert
... will probably be up near the crater. Once we get her up there we ain't responsible. But there ain't no telling how soon the snow'll drift. I'm thinkin' one of us ought to mosey back to the ranch and bring in webs ...
— Louisiana Lou • William West Winter
... attached, so that those who clung to this refuge might support themselves with comparative safety, or rather have a chance for life, when our "floating grave" should hang suspended perpendicularly on the steep side of a mountain-billow, or drift ...
— Miriam Monfort - A Novel • Catherine A. Warfield
... what is called the Theban recension. But in all the text is exceedingly corrupt, and translation is often no more than a guess. Owing to the number of proper names and technical terms which we have no means of understanding, it is often quite impossible to know the drift of large paragraphs, and even of whole chapters. Since many of the chapters were treated merely as having a magical efficacy either when recited or when inscribed on something buried with the body, it was of small consequence whether or not the words were understood. The bare recital ...
— The Worlds Greatest Books, Volume XIII. - Religion and Philosophy • Various
... especially excellent. Irresolute in thought, impotent in will, and only occasionally fretted by circumstances into a feeble activity, he is an almost painfully accurate representation of a class of men who drift through life without any power of self-direction. Mrs. Westervelt has equal moral feebleness with less brain, and her character is a study in practical psychology. Somerville, the villain of the piece, who unites the ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 21, July, 1859 • Various
... gale; where the lonely and frozen desolation is peopled only by the haunting shape of fear that next morning a wan and feeble sun may find you staggering still blindly on, hopelessly lost, or fallen beside a drift where the winter's snows must melt before your ...
— The Boy With the U.S. Census • Francis Rolt-Wheeler
... not understand their value; notwithstanding this, he swears by Bacchus, the while offering him libations, that none ever heard better comic verses. 'Tis a disgrace to you not to have caught their drift at once; as for the poet, he is none the less appreciated by the enlightened judges. He shivered his oars in rushing boldly forward to board his foe.[116] But in future, my dear fellow-citizens, love and honour more those of your poets who seek to imagine and ...
— The Eleven Comedies - Vol. I • Aristophanes et al
... name for the other's benefit, and assisted understandingly. The bunk was built against a side and end of the cabin. It was a rude affair, the bottom being composed of drift-wood logs overlaid with moss. At the foot the rough ends of these timbers projected in an uneven row. From the side next the wall Uri ripped back the moss and removed three of the logs. The jagged ends he sawed off and replaced so that the projecting row remained ...
— The God of His Fathers • Jack London
... alighted from her carriage, and, entering the shop, asked the librarian for a certain book. The polite man of books replied that he was sorry he had not a copy at present. "But," said Roger, slily, "you have the Barber of Seville, have you not?" "O yes," said the bookseller, not seeing the poet's drift, "I have the Barber of Seville, very much at your ladyship's service." The lady drove away, evidently much offended, but the beard afterwards disappeared. Talking of barbers—but they deserve a whole paper to themselves, ...
— Flowers from a Persian Garden and Other Papers • W. A. Clouston
... all," said major, "in chapter thirty-one you make the lovers resolve upon suicide, and you put them in a boat and drift them over Niagara Falls. Twelve chapters farther on you suddenly introduce them walking in the twilight in a leafy lane, and although afterward she goes into a nunnery and takes the black veil because he has been killed by ...
— Elbow-Room - A Novel Without a Plot • Charles Heber Clark (AKA Max Adeler)
... a moment she let herself drift into it. And knowing she was drifting, and not knowing it was for just the moment, he rose and bent over ...
— The Visioning • Susan Glaspell
... persuaded that it was morally impossible that I could by any means divine the deep purpose of his visit, and that it must be hidden from all human ken. Therefore, although I was rejoiced to think that I had anticipated his drift, I feigned to be quite ignorant of it, and after a brief consideration shook my ...
— Master Humphrey's Clock • Charles Dickens
... the men begin to gather together the pieces of drift-wood that the peaceful waves throw up on to the shore. They are evidently planning to make a raft; but as one of them casts his lazy eyes in the direction in which ours were at first thrown, he exclaims with evident joy, in his native French "Voila ...
— The Junior Classics • Various
... remained fixed on the door through which he had passed. "Villain—double-dyed villain!" she said, "I see thy drift; thou wouldst betray Tippoo, in policy alike and in love. But me thou canst betray.—Ho, there, who waits? Let a trusty messenger be ready to set off instantly with letters, which I will presently make ...
— The Surgeon's Daughter • Sir Walter Scott
... bell-tower with its fantastically shaped and ornamented stories and dome-top of deep cobalt blue. The land to either side is barely visible, and the green foliage flooded with pale sunshine seems to drift in the sun-mist on the grayish yellow waters. It is a dreamy little town, that once in Holland's prime had a short-lived illusion of worldly grandeur. Then gaily-rigged vessels embellished with gilded carvings ...
— The Bride of Dreams • Frederik van Eeden
... How should we get on in the ordinary intercourse of life, and how would commerce get on, if we disregarded men's testimony? Things social and commercial would come to a dead-lock within forty-eight hours! This is the drift of the apostle's argument here. "If we receive the witness of men, the witness of God is greater." God has borne witness to Jesus Christ. And if man can believe his fellow men who are frequently telling untruths and whom we are constantly finding unfaithful, why should we not take God at His ...
— The Way to God and How to Find It • Dwight Moody
... a broad belt of silver. Beyond it, like a cloud, was France. Dover had vanished even to the crest of the castle on the hill. But Josiah knew where it was by the mist that lay over it and shone white in the rays of the sun. Save for this patch of mist, which seemed to drift with the voyagers far below the car, there was nothing to obscure the range of vision. Josiah could not at any time make out forms of people. The white highways that ran like threads among the fields, ...
— Tales from Many Sources - Vol. V • Various
... alone. Beneath them, on the shore, squatted the cub, watching its northern home drift slowly away; once it made as if it would have plunged into the waves and followed it, but, seeming to change its mind, paused ...
— Marguerite De Roberval - A Romance of the Days of Jacques Cartier • T. G. Marquis
... fro. We searched among that drift of lumber—wood and iron, nails and rails, and sleepers and the wheels of trucks. We gazed up the cleft into the bosom of the mountain. We sat by the margin of the dump and saw, far below us, the green treetops standing still ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 2 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... increasing Fauna be for a long period confined? Of course, to classes of which individuals, or their germs, are most liable to be carried far away from their native shores by floating sea-weed or drift-wood; to classes which are also least likely to perish in transit, or from change of climate; and to those which can best subsist around coasts comparatively bare of life. Evidently then, corals, annelids, inferior molluscs, and crustaceans of low grade, will chiefly constitute the early Fauna. ...
— Essays: Scientific, Political, & Speculative, Vol. I • Herbert Spencer
... has melted and sunk in the snow perhaps," said Fanny, digging into the drift where it ...
— An Old-fashioned Girl • Louisa May Alcott
... in finding any satisfactory anti-submarine device, although many brains were at work on the subject, and therefore the earliest successes against enemy submarines were principally achieved by ramming tactics. Gradually other devices were thought out and adopted; these comprised drift and stationary nets fitted with mines, the depth charge, decoy ships of various natures, gunfire from patrol craft and gunfire from armed merchant ships, as well as the numerous devices ...
— The Crisis of the Naval War • John Rushworth Jellicoe
... old man, what is your drift? Prince Koltsoff! Old boy, this is serious! It is nothing to smile about. Say, do ...
— Prince or Chauffeur? - A Story of Newport • Lawrence Perry
... the affirmative, he replies he is right glad of it, not liking to see a shipmate in a drift. And he gives his quid a lurch aside, throws his hat carelessly upon the floor, shrugs his shoulders, and as he styles it, nimbly brings himself to a mooring, at Tom's side. "It's a hard comforter, this state. I don't begrudge your mother the satisfaction she gets of sending you here. In her eyes, ...
— Justice in the By-Ways - A Tale of Life • F. Colburn Adams
... The drift of Milton's argument, leads him to employ language which would appear, at first sight, to verge upon their doctrine; but it will be seen immediately, that he guards himself against the charge of having adopted one of the most ignorant errors of the dark ages of the church.—Dr. ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 5 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... assembled nation, stood an Elk of wondrous stature, the great chief, or as my brother would call it, the King of the Valley. He was so large, that the biggest of his people seemed but musquitoes by the side of a buffalo. His legs were so long, that the deepest snow-drift was no impediment to his running his blithest race; and his skin, which was covered with red and grey hair, was proof against the utmost fury of the Ottawa bender of the bow. From each of his shoulders proceeded an arm, which well supplied the ...
— Traditions of the North American Indians, Vol. 3 (of 3) • James Athearn Jones
... the hope of success. In developing as it has done, the Library in the United States of America has not been simply obeying some law of its own being; it has been following the whole stream of American development. You can call it a drift if you like; but the Library has not been simply drifting. The swimmer in a rapid stream may give up all effort and submit to be borne along by the current, or he may try to get somewhere. In so doing, he may battle with the current and achieve nothing but ...
— A Librarian's Open Shelf • Arthur E. Bostwick
... overgrown with mallow and bramble shoots, there was standing a cart which, lacking wheels, had its axle-points dark with mildew. Presently a herd of cattle was driven past the hut, and over the hamlet there seemed to arise, drift, and float, a perfect wave of sound. Also, as evening descended, I could see an ever-increasing number of grey shadows come creeping forth from the forecourt's recesses, and overlaying and ...
— Through Russia • Maxim Gorky
... chin down to my shoulder, and let myself drift out of painful consciousness almost as easily as a sort of woman can call up tears at will. When I waked again, it was without a start or moving, without confusion, and I was bitterly hungry. Beside my couch, with his hands on his hips and his feet ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... by lord Somers and the leaders of the tory party, who proposed that, previous to every measure, they should consider the state of the nation. The design of Wharton and Somers was to raise the earl of Orford once more to the head of the admiralty; and the tories, who did not perceive their drift, hoped, in the course of the inquiry, to fix the blame of all mismanagement upon the whig ministers. A day being fixed for this examination, the house received a petition from the sheriffs and merchants of London, complaining ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.II. - From William and Mary to George II. • Tobias Smollett
... 1840, drew heavily upon her eastern neighbors; Pennsylvania, of more steady habits, drew less from New England than her immediate neighbors, though both New York and Pennsylvania gave freely to the West. There was thus a steady drift of the people from their Eastern homes to the better opportunities of the Middle States, while from these, in turn, large numbers joined the more courageous who were never content until they built their cabins along the river borders or on ...
— Expansion and Conflict • William E. Dodd
... and I'll bring it to you in a minute," replied Godfrey. "You stay here till I come back. As fur gettin' acrosst the bayou, that's easy done. Thar's plenty of drift wood at the upper end of the island, an' you kin get on a log an' pole yourself over. When you get home, Dannie, make friends with Dave the fust thing you do, an' tell him you was only foolin' when you said you was goin' agin him. Help him every way you kin, an' when he gits the money we'll ...
— The Boy Trapper • Harry Castlemon
... I done. And more. In brief, I have lived the dashing and reckless life of a dozen Londoners. But—and here is the point!—I have lived it in the daytime. When the shadows began to drift into the fogs and the twilight settled over the grey masonry of the city, I would generally fly to the theatre and afterward to my garish rooms in Adams Street; or, as was often the case, I would merely fly to my flat, giving up my evenings to the low humour of Rabelais, or to ...
— Europe After 8:15 • H. L. Mencken, George Jean Nathan and Willard Huntington Wright
... The treaty! The open navigation of the Mississippi!" she cried impatiently. "The last news is that the treaty will certainly be concluded and the open navigation of the Mississippi assured to us forever. The major will load his flatboats, drift down to New Orleans, sell those Spanish fops his tobacco for its weight in gems, buy a mustang to ride home on, and if not robbed and murdered by the land-pirates on the way, come back to you like an enormous bumblebee ...
— The Choir Invisible • James Lane Allen
... developing is not subject to absolute proof. It may be said, however, that no greater menace to democracy could have arisen than the one we seem barely to have escaped—the control of politics and government by the capitalistic interests of the nation. What seems very clear is that an evolutionary drift toward the national control of industry has for many years been going on, and that the war has tremendously speeded up the tendency. Government has stepped in to protect the consumer of necessities from the profiteer, and is beginning to set a limit upon ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... she asked flatly. "Those men from the castle are still hunting drift out there. I don't think anyone knows ...
— Key Out of Time • Andre Alice Norton
... post in Labrador, came word from the Company that I might go to Quebec, there to be given my choice of posts. I went. By this time I had again vague ideas that sometime I should come here, but how or why I couldn't tell; I was drifting, and for her sake willing to drift. I was glad to take her to Quebec, for I guessed she would get ideas, and it didn't strike me that she would be out of place. So we went. But she was out of place in many ways. It did not suit at ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... Mrs. Phlaccus, at Professor Channing-Cheetah's He laughed like an irresponsible foetus. His laughter was submarine and profound Like the old man of the seats Hidden under coral islands Where worried bodies of drowned men drift down in the green silence, Dropping from fingers of surf. I looked for the head of Mr. Apollinax rolling under a chair, Or grinning over a screen With seaweed in its hair. I heard the beat of centaurs' hoofs over the ...
— Prufrock and Other Observations • T. S. Eliot
... transposition of the events of the allegory as time might produce after the important truths were forgotten, the drift of the fable seems to be this: Man, at his creation, was endowed with the gift of perpetual youth, that is, he was not formed to be a sickly, suffering creature, as we now see him, but to enjoy health, and to sink by ...
— Vegetable Diet: As Sanctioned by Medical Men, and by Experience in All Ages • William Andrus Alcott
... with her outgrown standard for her sex, could not but find a trifle vulgar. The elder sister had been born to a different heritage —to one of restricted views and mincing manners for a woman—and, despite herself, she could but drift aimlessly on the widening current ...
— The Deliverance; A Romance of the Virginia Tobacco Fields • Ellen Glasgow |
