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Welter   /wˈɛltər/   Listen
Welter

noun
1.
A confused multitude of things.  Synonyms: clutter, fuddle, jumble, mare's nest, muddle, smother.






WordNet 3.0 © 2010 Princeton University








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"Welter" Quotes from Famous Books



... I hit the road and had time to think, I knew that my half-formed intention was a sort of martyrdom; I was going to renounce myself in a fine welter of tears and then go staggering off into the setting sun to die of my mental wounds. I took careful stock of myself and faced the fact that my half-baked idea was a sort of suicide-wish; walking into any Mekstrom way station now was just asking for capture and a fast ...
— Highways in Hiding • George Oliver Smith

... 15th of March, 44 B.C., plunged the political situation into a worse chaos than had ever been reached during the Civil wars. For several months it was not at all plain how things were tending, or what fresh combinations were to rise out of the welter in which a vacillating and incapable senate formed the only constitutional rallying-point. In spite of all his long-cherished delusions, Cicero must have known that this way no hope lay; when at last he flung himself into the conflict, and broke away from his literary seclusion ...
— Latin Literature • J. W. Mackail

... Moscow has in its teaching body several strong men, and some of these were present. One of them, whose department was philosophy, especially interested and encouraged me by assurances that the movement of Russian philosophy is "back to Kant." In the strange welter of whims and dreams which one finds in Russia, this was to me an unexpected evidence ...
— Autobiography of Andrew Dickson White Volume II • Andrew Dickson White

... we must not acknowledge; nay, we must resist unto death their malign influence and power. But alas, what are we doing to-day? Instead of looking up to the pure and lofty souls of Europe for guidance, we welter in the mud with the lowest and most degenerate. We are beginning to know and appreciate English whiskey, but not English freedom; we know the French grisettes, but not the French sages; we guzzle German beer, but of German wisdom we taste not ...
— The Book of Khalid • Ameen Rihani

... said to register the opinion that the new State of Bohemia is very promising, and that it is a redeeming case in the welter of New Europe. As far as Prague is concerned it leaves behind its provincial recent-past, recovers its ancient-past, and looks towards a great future. New buildings will arise worthy of a capital, new administrative offices and a new Parliament House are to be built. Around the Parliament House it ...
— Europe—Whither Bound? - Being Letters of Travel from the Capitals of Europe in the Year 1921 • Stephen Graham

... the spell of such a master, might indeed be able to comfort the sick and sorry, and to whisper in their ears that cosmic secret—"Bon Espoir y gist au fond!" "Good Hope lies at the Bottom!" "Good Hope" for all; for the best and the worst—for the whole miserable welter ...
— Visions and Revisions - A Book of Literary Devotions • John Cowper Powys

... is not confined to that of the political state. Even in the narrower confine of the latter, the fires of revolution are either violently burning, or, at least, smouldering. Two of the oldest empires in the world, which, together, have more than half of its population (China and Russia) are in a welter of anarchy; while many lesser nations are in a stage of submerged revolt. If the revolt were confined to autocratic governments, we might see in it merely a reaction against tyranny; but even in the most stable ...
— The Constitution of the United States - A Brief Study of the Genesis, Formulation and Political Philosophy of the Constitution • James M. Beck

... It opened easily, and the official plunged into a welter of articles of personal use; but no parcels or dutiable goods ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, January 21st, 1920 • Various

... Amidst this welter of proposals and counter-proposals there emerged, sometime during 1852 a scheme, propounded by Mr. Bethell, of Westminster for constructing a railway connecting the existing line at Shrewsbury with Aberystwyth. It was ...
— The Story of the Cambrian - A Biography of a Railway • C. P. Gasquoine

... are the changes of the bay. The southwest wind sweeps rain over it in slanting drifts. The islands show dimly grey amid a welter of grey water, breaking angrily in short, petulant seas, which buffet boats confusedly and put the helmsmen's skill to a high test. Or chilly, curling mists wrap islands and promontories from sight. Terns, ...
— Priscilla's Spies 1912 • George A. Birmingham

... conforming to the same monotonous type; so that, except for name and cover, it is impossible to tell one magazine from another. Happily one or two—rari nantes in gurgito vasto—survive amid the democratic welter; and all who have at heart not only the interests of literature, but the true interests of the public taste, will pray that they will have the courage to maintain their distinction, unseduced by the moneyed ...
— Vanishing Roads and Other Essays • Richard Le Gallienne

... scarcely knew why such and such a one had been chosen—men, for instance, like Cecil Reeve and Arthur Ensart—perhaps even such a man as James Allys, 3rd. Captain Dane, of course, had been a foregone conclusion, and John Lyndhurst was logical enough; also W. Grismer, and the jaunty, obese Mr. Welter, known in sporting circles as Helter Skelter Welter, and more briefly and profanely as Hel. His running mate, Harry Ferris had been included. And there was a number of others privileged to drift into the rooms of Athalie Greensleeve when she chose ...
— Athalie • Robert W. Chambers

... it is like this," he answered, picking up both the telegrams; "one of our groom fellows at home has a brother who knows everything about Blackmore's stable, and he has just wired to me that Dainty Dick will win the Flying Welter at Hurst Park to-day, and I was off to back it when I get a wire from my tipster, Tom Webb, that The Philosopher can't lose the same race. It is Tom's 'double nap' and I am in a hole what ...
— Godfrey Marten, Undergraduate • Charles Turley

... no doubt but that I should come through somehow. And as this idea of fulfilling Wolf Larsen's order persisted in my dazed consciousness, I seemed to see him standing at the wheel in the midst of the wild welter, pitting his will against the will of ...
— The Sea-Wolf • Jack London

... four powers who were not directly concerned—Germany, France, Italy, and ourselves. If that proposal had been accepted actual controversy would have been settled with honor to everybody, and the whole of this terrible welter would have been avoided. ...
— New York Times Current History: The European War from the Beginning to March 1915, Vol 1, No. 2 - Who Began the War, and Why? • Various

... Doctor to pass in. A pack of ravening wolves tussling over an unusually small baby might distantly reproduce the scene Saxham leaves behind him. The trestle-table and benches are upset, and men and benches, draughts and dominoes, welter in horrible confusion over the earthen floor, when the scandalised orderly-corporal rushes in to quell the riot, and ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves

... Union prison of detention, where their fathers and grandfathers had been wont to send their disorderly and insubordinate niggers. They were packed away, as the miserable slaves had been, to taste something of the bitterness of the negro's lot. So came Bert Russell to welter in a low room whose walls gave out the stench of years. How you cooked for them, and schemed for them, and cried for them, you devoted women of the South! You spent the long hot summer in town, and every day you went with your baskets to Gratiot Street, where the infected old house ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill

... and the Plural Voting Bill. It was terrific. The newspapers could scarcely print it—or anything—terrifically enough. Adjectives and epithets became exhausted with overwork and burst. The word crisis lost all meaning. There was such a welter of crises that the explosions of those that came to a head were unnoticed and pushed away into the obscurest corners of the newspapers, before the alarming swelling of those freshly rushing to a head. ...
— If Winter Comes • A.S.M. Hutchinson

... everything and be seen everywhere. If I had time, I'd give you the personal history of half the light-weights in this room. Look at that black crow in the corner there. He's a Jew parson from Essex—as rich as bottled beer and always stops here. Last time I rode a welter down his way they told me his favorite text was "Blessed are the poor." He's a pretty figurehead for a bean-feast, isn't he? That chirpy barrister next door has a practice of fifteen thou. The blighter once cross-examined me in a card-sharping case and made me ...
— Aladdin of London - or Lodestar • Sir Max Pemberton

... hopeless war with adepts in killing, with appetites that longed to feast upon my bowels and to quaff my heart's blood. From these likewise was I rescued, but merely to perish in the gulfs of the river, to welter on unvisited shores, or to be washed far away from ...
— Edgar Huntley • Charles Brockden Brown

... Neptune's angry Trident, Poets fear. Had now grim BEN bin breathing, 'with what rage, And high-swolne fury had Hee lash'd this age, SHAKESPEARE with CHAPMAN had grown madd, and torn Their gentle Sock, and lofty Buskins worne, To make their Muse welter up to the chin In blood; of faigned Scenes no need had bin, England like Lucians Eagle with an Arrow Of her owne Plumes piercing her heart quite thorow, Had bin a Theater and subject fit To exercise in real truth's their wit: Tet none like ...
— The Works of Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher in Ten Volumes - Volume I. • Beaumont and Fletcher

... lay there in a helpless welter, his lip feebly lifting and writhing to the snarl he had not the strength to utter. Leclere kicked him, and the tired jaws closed on the ankle, but could ...
— The Faith of Men • Jack London

... place, unsapped yet by decadent delights, would have loosed his five thousand on the countryside—butchered any who opposed him—pressed into service those who merely lagged—and would have plunged India in a welter of blood before the priests had time to mature their plans and arrange to keep all the power and plunder to themselves. But Jaimihr had to stalk lesser game and content himself with pricking at the ever-growing hate that gradually rendered the Maharajah decisionless and sorry only ...
— Rung Ho! • Talbot Mundy

... thee; think on His five wounds that streamed down of blood: think that His bed was the hard knotty tree, and instead of a pillow He had a crown of thorns. And say then, with sore sighing, till thy desire cool, "My dear-worthy Lord hanged on the Rood for me; and I lie in this soft bed, and welter me in sin, like a foul swine that loves but filth." Rise then quickly, and hold thee with prayers, love-sighings and tears. Of three points beware. The first, that the devotions thou hast through grace stirring, be not known of others: hide them, so far as thou mayest ...
— The Form of Perfect Living and Other Prose Treatises • Richard Rolle of Hampole

... car. He didn't question the patrolman; he hardly even heard him. His mind raced in a welter of confusion, trying desperately to refute the brilliant picture in his mind from that split-second that the spotlight had rested on the driver of the black car, trying to fit the impossible pieces into their places. For the second man ...
— Infinite Intruder • Alan Edward Nourse

... black rocks below,—now hidden by the rushing fury of the surges, now outstanding gaunt and grim, with creamy cascades pouring back into the roaring welter below,—showed him how impossible it would have been for ...
— Pearl of Pearl Island • John Oxenham

... were times when Mr. Britling was called upon to pay for his general cheerful activity in lump sums of bitter sorrow. There were nights—and especially after seasons of exceptional excitement and nervous activity—when the reckoning would be presented and Mr. Britling would welter prostrate and groaning under a stormy sky of unhappiness—active ...
— Mr. Britling Sees It Through • H. G. Wells

... mean is he a heavy or a middle or a welter or what? It makes a kind o' difference, ...
— The Coming of Bill • P. G. Wodehouse

... bought three dozen of that little lot! The old hunting or "Rake's Progress" prints in the old inns were worth looking at—but this sentimental stuff—well, Victorianism had gone! "Tell them to hold on!" old Timothy had said. But to what were they to hold on in this modern welter of the "democratic principle"? Why, even privacy was threatened! And at the thought that privacy might perish, Soames pushed back his teacup and went to the window. Fancy owning no more of Nature ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy

... "factories." At home too it was not dominion, but the profits derived from the Indian trade that occupied the mind of the nation. Not till the disintegration of the Moghul Empire in the eighteenth century plunged India into a welter of anarchy which endangered not only our trade but the safety of our settlements, which, like the foreign settlements in the Chinese Treaty Ports to-day, attracted in increasing numbers an indigenous population in search of security for life and property, did the Directors of the East India Company ...
— India, Old and New • Sir Valentine Chirol

... out of the henhouse together in silence. Maurice was saying to himself, "I might not be able to get a job in New York... I'll fight." Yet certain traditional decencies, slowly emerging from the welter of his rage and terror, made him add, "If it was mine, I'd have to give her something... But it isn't. ...
— The Vehement Flame • Margaret Wade Campbell Deland

... the Isonzo suddenly lay spread out way below him like a huge map such as he had often seen in illustrated papers. The silver ribbon of the river wound in and out among hills and coppices, and Lieutenant Kadar soared high above the welter down below without motor or aeroplane, but borne along merely by his own outspread arms. And everywhere he looked, on every hill and in every hollow, he saw the horns of innumerable talking-machines growing out of the ground. Thousands ...
— Men in War • Andreas Latzko

... had the gift of tongues, than in most of those which have intervened. It is neither necessary nor possible to go deeply into the resemblance here [Footnote: Some words of Sir Leslie Stephen's may be given, however, describing the welter of religious opinions that prevailed at both epochs: 'The analogy between the present age and that which witnessed the introduction of Christianity is too striking to have been missed by very many observers. The most superficial ...
— Works, V1 • Lucian of Samosata

... the divine and to the orders Of universal and harmonious life, All interfused with Universal love, Which love is God, lest blindness, atheism, Which sees no order, reason, no intent Beat down the race to welter in the mire When storms, and floods come. And the sons of God, The leaders of the race from age to age Are chosen for their separate work, each work Fits in the given order. All who suffer The martyrdom of thought, whether they think Themselves as servants of my Father, or even Mock at the ...
— Toward the Gulf • Edgar Lee Masters

... the British and Prussian Turks will never see it—like the Bourbons, they learn not. Here is a typically military system, the work of "born fighters" which has gone down in welter before the assaults of much less military States, the chief of which, indeed, has grown up in what Captain von Herbert has called, with some contempt, "stagnant and enfeebling peace conditions," formed by the people whom the Turks regarded as quite unfit to be made ...
— Peace Theories and the Balkan War • Norman Angell

... who serve not God, But live in sin, averse to good, Rejecting Christ's atoning blood, Midst hellish shoals, Shall welter in that ...
— Cottage Poems • Patrick Bronte

... answered not, and the words of the wind were unintelligible. The sun dropped lower; the plain appeared to move, to roll and welter in the heated air and yellow light. Tall starvelings, the cacti spread their arms; from a mimosa wood arose a cloud of vultures; it was the hour of the Angelus, but no bells rang in the churches of the town. The town sat in fear, shrinking into ...
— Sir Mortimer • Mary Johnston

... "Welter upon the waters, mighty one— And stretch thee in the ocean's trough of brine; Turn thy wet scales up to the wind and sun, And toss the billow from thy flashing fin; Heave thy deep breathing to the ocean's din, And bound upon its ridges in thy pride, Or dive down to its lowest depths, and in ...
— The Crater • James Fenimore Cooper

... whole land should be turned into a bear garden on account of this exploded superstition of Christmas is one of the anomalies of modern civilization. Look at this insensate welter of fools travelling in wild herds to disgusting places ...
— A Christmas Mystery - The Story of Three Wise Men • William J. Locke

... wealth, had, like Kubla Khan in Xanadu, a stately pleasure dome decreed, and in this new architectural triumph, where water lilies and swans floated on the surface of a deep black pool, Warble restlessly tossed in a welter of golden cushions, changing her ...
— Ptomaine Street • Carolyn Wells

... unhappy tonight, darling mother, and selfishly crying out to you. I feel almost like leaving Bernd, and starting for Glion tomorrow. And then when I think of him without me—He's as spiritually alone in this welter as I am. I'm the only one he has, the only human being who understands. Today he said, holding me in his arms—you should see how we cling to each other now as if we were drowning—"When this is over, Chris, when I've paid off my bill of duty and settled with ...
— Christine • Alice Cholmondeley

... this love of the ocean finds expression in all their poetry. In Beowulf alone there are fifteen names for the sea, from the holm, that is, the horizon sea, the "upmounding," to the brim, which is the ocean flinging its welter of sand and creamy foam upon the beach at your feet. And the figures used to describe or glorify it—"the swan road, the whale path, the heaving battle plain"—are almost as numerous. In all their poetry there is a magnificent sense ...
— English Literature - Its History and Its Significance for the Life of the English Speaking World • William J. Long

... But as atmosphere and zone Of Thy loving heart alone. Man, who walketh in a show, Sees before him, to and fro, Shadow and illusion go; All things flow and fluctuate, Now contract and now dilate. In the welter of this sea, Nothing stable is but Thee; In this whirl of swooning trance, Thou alone art permanence; All without Thee only seems, All beside is choice of dreams. Never yet in darkest mood Doubted I that Thou wast good, Nor mistook ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 11, No. 63, January, 1863 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various

... handed it to me, saying, "I do not add an address, for I shall be moving about. But I will write you a line very soon, and fix a day for my visit." Just then the train stopped at the foot of the Hill, and, as I was fighting my way through the welter of boys and luggage on the platform, I caught sight of a smiling face and a waved hand at the window of the carriage which I had ...
— Prime Ministers and Some Others - A Book of Reminiscences • George W. E. Russell

... always sins in his own sight; he could then only sin when he did some act against his clear conviction; the light that he walked by was obscure, but it was single. Now, when two people of any grit and spirit put their fortunes into one, there succeeds to this comparative certainty a huge welter of competing jurisdictions. It no longer matters so much how life appears to one; one must consult another: one, who may be strong, must not offend the other, who is weak. The only weak brother I am willing to consider is (to make a bull for once) my wife. For her, and for her only, ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 2 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson

... parts of the Union arose to extricate the convention from this welter, but generally, when they resumed their seats, left the matter more ...
— Volume I • Andrew Dickson White

... country:—all which proceed from this Battle of Muhldorf. [Rentsch, p. 313; Pauli; &c.] Battle fought on the 28th of September, 1322:—eight years after BABBOCKBURN; while our poor Edward II. and England with him were in such a welter with their Spencers and their Gavestons: eight years after Bannockburn, and four-and-twenty before Crecy. That will ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol, II. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—Of Brandenburg And The Hohenzollerns—928-1417 • Thomas Carlyle

... amplest significance—walls of slightly overhanging rock, through which aided by grinding boulders and scoring shingle, the river has widened as well as deepened its channel a little every century, while between the white welter at their feet lies a breadth of troubled green where the stream flows heaped up, as it were, ...
— Lorimer of the Northwest • Harold Bindloss

... painlessly, a needle slid into his arm. Giving in. A dizzying welter of thoughts spun suddenly in his mind. Briscoe. Raynor One and Raynor Three. The net between the stars. ...
— The Colors of Space • Marion Zimmer Bradley

... hold this eyrie. Sometimes, in winter storms, the Atlantic is heaved aloft and tossed and tumbled under an evil heaven till all its wilderness is hideous. This hill-top is exactly as though some such welter of water had suddenly become mud. It is all heaped and tossed and tumbled as though the earth there had been a cross-sea. In one place some great earth wave of a trench has been bitten into and beaten back and turned blind into an eddy by great pits and chasms and running heaps. Then in another ...
— The Old Front Line • John Masefield

... up to an orgy of sentimentality. He seemed to be alone in the world which had paired itself off into a sort of seething welter of happy couples. Taxicabs full of happy couples rolled by every minute. Passing omnibuses creaked beneath the weight of happy couples. The very policeman across the Street had just grinned at a flitting shop girl, and she had smiled back at him. The only female in London ...
— A Damsel in Distress • Pelham Grenville Wodehouse

... that through these years past Oliver had ever showered upon him; and he cursed the rottenness of a mind that could even admit such thoughts as those which he had been entertaining. So wrought upon was he by the welter of his emotions, by that fierce strife between his conscience and his egotism, that he came abruptly to his feet, ...
— The Sea-Hawk • Raphael Sabatini

... Vague and unsatisfactory as is our knowledge of it, it is, unfortunately, clearness and precision itself when contrasted with the welter of confusion and fog which covers our ideas about the chronic variety. The catholicity of the term is something incredible. Every chronic pain and twinge, from corns to locomotor ataxia, and from stone-in-the-kidney to tic-douloureux, has been put down as "rheumatism." It ...
— Preventable Diseases • Woods Hutchinson

... right interval, we gain power. When one interrupts another, we lose. Weakness is merely the thrust of one impulse against another, instead of their combined thrust against the world. When I came here, feeling like a criminal, I was obeying the one right instinct in a welter of emotions. It was like the faintest of heart beats in a sick body. I listened to that. Then I learned physical hunger, then sleep, and so on. It's incredible how stupid I was about the elemental art of living! I had to begin all over ...
— Read-Aloud Plays • Horace Holley

... the astounding opening of an astounding letter, pages and pages, to Rosalie from Miss Salmon. Pages and pages, having the appearance, each one, of a battlefield or of a riot: a welter of thick, black underscores strewn about like coffins or like corpses, and a bristling pin-cushionful (black pins) of notes of exclamation leaping about like war-dancing Zulus or staggering about like drunken or like wounded men. ...
— This Freedom • A. S. M. Hutchinson

... day, De Quincey, Wilson, Macaulay, and Carlyle set the fashion, it may possibly seem tame to those who are not satisfied with proportion in form and harmony in tint; it will certainly not seem so to those who are more fortunately gifted. Indeed, compared either with Wilson's welter of words, now bombastic, now gushing, now horse-playful, or with the endless and heartbreaking antitheses of what Brougham ill-naturedly but truly called "Tom's snip-snap," it is infinitely preferable. ...
— Essays in English Literature, 1780-1860 • George Saintsbury

... outdoors and walked off the intoxication of food, but in the haze which filled the room they sat forever, talking, talking, while he agonized, "Darn fool to be eating all this—not 'nother mouthful," and discovered that he was again tasting the sickly welter of melted ice cream on his plate. There was no magic in his friends; he was not uplifted when Howard Littlefield produced from his treasure-house of scholarship the information that the chemical symbol for raw rubber is C10H16, which ...
— Babbitt • Sinclair Lewis

... there where a big smoker lifts skyward, rising like a sea-god from out of the welter of spume and churning white, on the giddy, toppling, overhanging and downfalling, precarious crest appears the dark head of a man. Swiftly he rises through the rushing white. His black shoulders, his chest, his loins, his limbs—all is abruptly projected ...
— The Cruise of the Snark • Jack London

... for Mrs. Tams; but not for Rachel, the mistress, the omniscient, the all-powerful, the giver of good, who could make and unmake with a nod. Rachel sitting gorgeous on the Chesterfield amid an enormous twilit welter and litter of disarranged chairs and tables; empty teapots, cups, jugs, and glasses; dishes of fragmentary remains of cake and chocolate; plates smeared with roseate ham, sticky teaspoons, loaded ash-trays, ...
— The Price of Love • Arnold Bennett

... which delighted in motiveless murder for the sake of murder, were the order of the day. The revolution was strong enough neither to crush the reactionaries nor to control the revolutionaries themselves. The foundations of the social structure seemed to be dissolving in a welter of blood and crime, and public opinion, which in its hatred of bureaucracy had hitherto sided with the revolution, suddenly drew back in horror from the abyss which opened out in front of it. Stolypin, the Strafford of modern ...
— The War and Democracy • R.W. Seton-Watson, J. Dover Wilson, Alfred E. Zimmern,

... pathetically certain of itself and of its ultimate power to hold to its ideals, ignorant of the overpowering influences which may develop to push a man or woman this way or that, or of the pain that may turn clear, definite thought into a welter of blind anguish, when the soul in its agony snatches at any anodyne, true or false, which may seem to ...
— The Hermit of Far End • Margaret Pedler

... light smote radiance in blinding, coruscant welter. Here was nothing but diamond ...
— The Lone Wolf - A Melodrama • Louis Joseph Vance

... hot June day, and out of the welter of din and rumble the cool plash of falling water came to his straining ears refreshingly. At once he considered the dog and, thankful for the distraction, stepped beneath the portico of a provision store and indicated the marble basin ...
— Anthony Lyveden • Dornford Yates

... station. Joy was within me as I boarded the train, but this was Jitendra's day for tears. My affectionate farewell to Pratap had been punctuated by stifled sobs from both my companions. The journey once more found Jitendra in a welter of grief. Not for himself this time, ...
— Autobiography of a YOGI • Paramhansa Yogananda

... incidents of my story in their proper sequence. I am writing by the light of an imperfect memory; and the work is complicated by the fact that the early days of my sojourn at Sanstead House are a blur, a confused welter like a Futurist picture, from which emerge haphazard the figures of boys—boys working, boys eating, boys playing football, boys whispering, shouting, asking questions, banging doors, jumping on beds, and clattering upstairs and ...
— The Little Nugget • P.G. Wodehouse

... because, forsooth, its symbolism was understood! In the extreme allegorists, whom Philo attacks for their shallowness, one may discern the prototypes of the Cainites, Ophites, Melchizedecians, and the rest of the heretical parties that produced the religious chaos of the next centuries. From that welter of opinions there at last emerged dogmatic Christianity. The Christian reformers came to free man from the yoke of the law; but their successors imposed on the mind the fetters of dogma, and, in order to check the ...
— Philo-Judaeus of Alexandria • Norman Bentwich

... am in a land where Time has lagged, where simple people timorously hug the Past. How far away now seems the welter and swelter of the city, the hectic sophistication of the streets. The sense of wonder is strong in me again, the joy of looking at familiar things as if one were seeing them ...
— Ballads of a Bohemian • Robert W. Service

... Out of the welter of mendacity, evasions and intrigue, for a parallel to which the records of this or indeed of any civilised country might be searched in vain, one fact has at last emerged clear and indisputable. The nation will learn ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, April 8, 1914 • Various

... and welter of the pit, He flounders off the duck-boards; only he knows Each flash and spouting crash,—each instant lit When gloom reveals the streaming rain. He goes Heavily, blindly on. And, while he blunders, "Could anything be worse than this?"—he wonders, Remembering how he saw those Germans ...
— The War Poems of Siegfried Sassoon • Siegfried Sassoon

... intolerable. Everybody turned in their seats—gazing through the dimness to a point in the Promenade near to where I was. The ghosts on the screen were forgotten. The faked patriotism of the songs we had listened to had become a thing of naught. Through the welter of bombast, excitement and emotion we had grounded ...
— The Glory of the Trenches • Coningsby Dawson

... with a groan; "O King!"—and when he paused, methought I spied A dying fire of madness in his eyes— "O King, my friend, if friend of thine I be, Happier are those that welter in their sin, Swine in the mud, that cannot see for slime, Slime of the ditch: but in me lived a sin So strange, of such a kind, that all of pure, Noble, and knightly in me twined and clung Round that one sin, until the wholesome flower And poisonous grew together, ...
— Idylls of the King • Alfred, Lord Tennyson

... he said, 'but think what folly it is. However, that's a long story, and will bore you. To cut matters short, for we ought to be turning in, I got to Borkum—that's the first of the German islands.' He pointed at a round bare lozenge lying in the midst of a welter of sandbanks. 'Rottum—this queer little one—it has only one house on it—is the most easterly Dutch island, and the mainland of Holland ends here, opposite it, at the Ems River'—indicating a dismal cavity ...
— Riddle of the Sands • Erskine Childers

... Beauty I have mentioned has opened me to that receptiveness which is aware of subtlety and owns to sharp surprise. The thrill is of its very essence. It is unexpected. Out of the welter of prolific detail Nature here glories in, a delicate hint of wonder and surprise comes stealing. The change, of course, is in myself, not otherwise. And on the particular "crude" occasion I will briefly mention, it reached me from ...
— The Garden of Survival • Algernon Blackwood

... as Boanerges and Hallelujah Sal—not much of a recommendation to anybody except Mr. JEREMY. His own performances are worse than contemptible. As a two-year old, he was placed second at eight stone to Candlestick in the Warmington Open Welter Handicap. After that he sprang a curb in the middle of his back, and the fools who train him actually brought him out to run in the All-aged Selling Plate at Ballymacwhacket. He won the race easily enough of course, but only an impostor, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 98, May 3, 1890. • Various

... ribs. Again the fantastic incalculableness of life struck him as so remarkable. An occasion, a condition such as this he had scarcely hoped to reach in weeks, or even months, certainly not in the wild welter of New York. From the noise of the steamer and the city, from the rushing and roaring of the Atlantic Ocean, he was suddenly plunged into the silence of the grave. It affected him with a sense of desertion and oblivion. In that city of four million inhabitants, each man was strenuously ...
— Atlantis • Gerhart Hauptmann

... heart and dims mine eye. I dreamt I saw the king my sire Sink headlong in a lake of mire Down from a mountain high in air, His body soiled, and loose his hair. Upon the miry lake he seemed To lie and welter, as I dreamed; With hollowed hands full many a draught Of oil he took, and loudly laughed. With head cast down I saw him make A meal on sesamum and cake; The oil from every member dripped, And in its clammy flood he dipped. The ocean's bed ...
— The Ramayana • VALMIKI

... behaved to its inhabitants with the disinterested zeal for their progress that our people have shown in the Philippines. To leave the islands at this time would mean that they would fall into a welter of murderous anarchy. Such desertion of duty on our part would be a crime against humanity. The character of Governor Taft and of his associates and subordinates is a proof, if such be needed, of the sincerity of our effort to give the islanders a constantly increasing measure of ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various

... Who is there that shall tell The purport of the tribe of Israel?— In the wild welter of races on that earth Which spins in space where thousand other spin— The casual offspring of the Cosmic Mirth Perhaps—what is there any man can win, Or any nation? Ultimates aside, Men have their aims, and Israel her pride. She stands ...
— The Menorah Journal, Volume 1, 1915 • Various

... crossed the ocean's wave To seek this shore; They left behind the coward slave To welter in his living grave;— With hearts unbent, and spirits brave, They sternly bore Such toils as meaner souls had quelled; But souls like these, such toils ...
— The American Union Speaker • John D. Philbrick

... him all about, And all the forces of embattled wrong, There are so many devils to cast out— Save God be with him, how shall Man be strong? With his own heart at war, to weakness prone, And all the honeyed ways of joyous sinning, How in this welter shall he hold his own, And, single-handed, e'er have hopes of winning? How shall he fight God's ...
— A Jongleur Strayed - Verses on Love and Other Matters Sacred and Profane • Richard Le Gallienne

... was not to be treated as other girls. Her Scotch ancestry showed itself early. The girl did not, and could not, see the curious life about her; it was simply a myopia that her mother fostered. Thus, through all the welter and confusion of an opera-singer's life, Hilda walked serenely. She knew there were disagreeable things in the world but refused herself even the thought of them. It was not the barrier of innocence but ...
— Melomaniacs • James Huneker

... window in a welter of flying glass. The heavy thud of a recoilless .75 came from the room behind him and a foot-long section of metal window frame leaped outward. Another slug screamed by the robot's head as he scrambled toward the rear door ...
— The Velvet Glove • Harry Harrison

... nothing to Hazel of Reddin's visit. He forgot it himself when she came home; it slipped into the weary welter of life as he saw it now—all life, that is, other than Hazel's. Brutality, lust, cruelty—these summed up the world of good people and bad people. He rather preferred the bad ones; their eyes were less awful, and had ...
— Gone to Earth • Mary Webb

... this sad Ninevah where the throngs weave Their jostling ways by day, their paths by night; Where darkness is not—where the streets burn bright With hectic fevers, eloquent of death! I gasp for breath.... Visions have I, visions! So sweet they seem That from this welter of men and things I turn, to dream Of the dim Wood-world, calling out to me. Where forest-virgins I half glimpse, half see With cool mysterious fingers beckoning! Where vine-wreathed woodland altars sunlit burn, Or Dryads dance their mystic rounds ...
— The Air Trust • George Allan England

... hit, squarely on top of him. Something ripped and splattered and blacked out in an unbearable welter ...
— The Sky Is Falling • Lester del Rey

... something as ancient as the Iliad. This poem of Wordsworth's—the Senior class have it in their entrance work—I've been glancing over it. Its classic calm and repose and the beauty of the lines seem to belong to another planet, and to have as little to do with the present world-welter as the evening star." ...
— Rilla of Ingleside • Lucy Maud Montgomery

... snow blocks we had heaved up on to the canvas roof kept it weighted down. But it seemed that they were being gradually moved off by the hurricane. The tension became well-nigh unendurable: the waiting in all that welter of noise was maddening. Minute after minute, hour after hour—those snow blocks were off now anyway, and the roof was smashed up and down—no canvas ever made could stand ...
— The Worst Journey in the World, Volumes 1 and 2 - Antarctic 1910-1913 • Apsley Cherry-Garrard

... him moored to one of the floor-beams with an ox-chain around his nigh hind foot. He wasn't as big as all out doors, nor he wasn't any vest-pocket edition either. As elephants go, he wouldn't have made the welter-weight class by about a ton. He was what I'd call just a handy size, about two bureaus high by one wide. His iv'ry stoop rails had been sawed off close to his jaw, so he didn't look any more wicked than ...
— Shorty McCabe • Sewell Ford

... great society of the world, the high society of distinguished men and women who exist no more, but who touched history with a light hand, and left their mark upon it in a host of memoirs and letters that we read to-day with a starved and home-sick longing in the midst of our sullen welter of democracy. With its silent houses and gardens, its silent streets, its silent vistas of the blue water in the sunshine, this beautiful, sad place was winning my heart and making it ache. Nowhere else in America such charm, such character, such true elegance as here—and ...
— Lady Baltimore • Owen Wister

... I went to the weather side and stood looking out of the window. Not that there was much to see. It was growing dark, and the Seven Brothers looked like the mane of a running horse, a great, vast, white horse running into the wind. The air was a-welter with it. I caught one peep of a fisherman, lying down flat trying to weather the ledge, and I said, "God help them all to-night," and then I went hot ...
— Famous Modern Ghost Stories • Various

... a bag-puncher also. But in an incautious hour for himself and his backer, Flash Purdy, owner of Purdy's Dixieland Bar, he had permitted himself to be entered for a match before an athletic club at Louisville against one Max Schorrer, a welter-weight appearing professionally under the nom de puge of Slugging Fogarty. It was to have been a match of twelve rounds, but early in the second round Mr. Ditto suddenly lost all conscious interest in ...
— Sundry Accounts • Irvin S. Cobb

... which late years have encompassed with a proletarian suburb, its once noble domain narrowed to the bare acres of a stinted breathing ground, Aston Hall looks forth upon joyless streets and fuming chimneys, a wide welter of squalid strife. Its walls, which bear the dints of Roundhead cannonade, are blackened with ever-driving smoke; its crumbling gateway, opening aforetime upon a stately avenue of chestnuts, shakes as the steam-tram rushes ...
— Eve's Ransom • George Gissing

... the darting horn-fish; we hear the creaking of the ropes and the roaring of the waves.[2] Every mention of the sea is dwelt upon with lingering affection, and described with vivid metaphor. It is now the "bosom of the flood," now the "whale-road" or the "fish's bath." Again it is the "welter of the waves," or its more angry mood is personified as the "Terror of the waters." In the first 500 lines alone there are no less than 43 different words and phrases denoting ...
— Andreas: The Legend of St. Andrew • Unknown

... moment, that scene—the three great ships going over like stricken whales, men slipping down their slimy flanks into the sea, boats overturned and smashed, in the thick of it the wet nose of the German submarine coming up for a look round, and then, out of that hideous welter, the voice of a sailor, the unalterable Briton in the face of all this modern science and sea magic, grabbing an anchor or whatever it was he saw first, ...
— Antwerp to Gallipoli - A Year of the War on Many Fronts—and Behind Them • Arthur Ruhl

... Laisser-faire: in short, on 'doing the other fellow down' with impunity, all interference by a guiding government, all organization except police organization to protect legalized fraud against fisticuffs, all attempt to introduce human purpose and design and forethought into the industrial welter, being 'contrary to the laws of political economy.' Even the proletariat sympathized, though to them Capitalist liberty meant only wage slavery without the legal safeguards of chattel slavery. People were tired of governments and kings and priests ...
— Back to Methuselah • George Bernard Shaw

... Germany thought, in that crass ignorance of other men's minds they have so often displayed, that America meant to keep out of the war at all costs, or were merely careless of consequences so long as the immediate end was attained, is now immaterial. From the welter of Teutonic misdeeds and lies arises the vital, the soul-inspiring spectacle of a union of all democracies against ...
— Defenders of Democracy • Militia of Mercy

... of the welter of sobs, came faint articulations, and little by little he learnt the entire story of her difficulties, her misfortunes, her struggles, and her defeats. He listened to a frank confession of guilt. But what could she do? She had meant well. But what could she do? She had been driven into a ...
— The Card, A Story Of Adventure In The Five Towns • Arnold Bennett

... welter of this surging tide Move like the mystic lamps, the Spirits Seven, Their burning love runs kindling far and wide, That fire they needed not to steal from heaven, 'Twas a free gift flung down with them to bide, And be a comfort for the hearts bereaven, ...
— Poems by Jean Ingelow, In Two Volumes, Volume II. • Jean Ingelow

... so; for to add irrelevant matter is not to lengthen but to bury. Let him not mind if he miss a thousand qualities, so that he keeps unflaggingly in pursuit of the one he has chosen." And earlier in the same essay, he says of the novel: "For the welter of impressions, all forcible but all discreet, which life presents, it substitutes a certain artificial series of impressions, all indeed most feebly represented, but all aiming at the same effect, all eloquent of the same idea, all chiming together like consonant notes in music or like the ...
— A Manual of the Art of Fiction • Clayton Hamilton

... fancy to die in the Grey Friars, as ye may readily conceive, and the least fancy to die in John Shipman's tarry jacket; and that for two excellent good reasons: first, that the death might take a man suddenly; and second, for the horror of that great salt smother and welter under my foot here"—and Lawless stamped with his foot. "Howbeit," he went on, "an I die not a sailor's death, and that this night, I shall owe a ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 8 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson

... good women always get up early. Bad women, on the other hand, invariably rise late. To prize a man out of bed at some absurd hour like nine-thirty is to court disaster. To take my own case, when I first wake in the morning my mind is one welter of unkindly thoughts. I think of all the men who owe me money, and hate them. I review the regiment of women who have refused to marry me, and loathe them. I meditate on my faithful dog, Ponto, and wish that I had kicked him overnight. To introduce ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, April 22, 1914 • Various

... he obeyed with alacrity; and in the warmth of the smoking-room revelled in the picture of his tame capitalist pacing a cold deck, lost to the sea's welter in thoughts of ...
— Winnie Childs - The Shop Girl • C. N. Williamson

... waked me, I bid you be wary Lest my sword yet should reach you; ye wot in your northland What hatred he winneth who waketh the shipman From the sweet rest of death mid the welter of waves; So with us may it fare; though I know thee full faithful, Bold in field and in council, most fit for a king. —Bear with me. I pray you that to none may be meted Such a measure of pain as my soul is oppressed with. Depart all for a little, till my spirit grows lighter, Then come ye with ...
— Poems By The Way & Love Is Enough • William Morris

... cheer answered the man's words—while Thorn stared at the packet of papers with unbelieving eyes. It had never occurred to him that the Ziegler plans might be in that very room, on the table with the rest of the welter of letters, thumbed documents, and cups and saucers. And there they were—the vital projector plans—not in a safe or hidden in some fantastic place, but right ...
— The Radiant Shell • Paul Ernst

... and unreal beauty melted away to the oncoming of the dusk; and when the sun was gone and the twilight had put a new quality of bleakness into the air, when the sea rolled in a welter of dark shadows, one sombre fold shouldering another—a very swarming of restless giant phantoms—when the shining of the stars low down in the unfathomable obscurity of the north and south quarters gave to the ocean in those directions ...
— The Frozen Pirate • W. Clark Russell

... the blasts as they rush up across the layers of rock below, like hounds leaping up at their prey; and far beneath, the horrible confused battle-roar of that great leaguer of waves. He cannot see them, as he strains his eyes over the wall into the blank depth,—nothing but a confused welter and quiver of mingled air, and rain, and spray, as if the very atmosphere were writhing in the clutches of the gale: but he can hear,—what can he not hear? It would have needed a less vivid brain than Elsley's to fancy another Badajos beneath. There ...
— Two Years Ago, Volume I • Charles Kingsley

... hope of understanding the welter of life in which we are immersed, as in a swift and muddy river, is in ascending as near to its pure source as we can. That source is in consciousness and consciousness is in ourselves. This is the ...
— Architecture and Democracy • Claude Fayette Bragdon

... the great round sun Weakened towards the waves. The whole expanse Suddenly in the half-light of the dusk Glimmered and waned. The last rays of the sun Lit but the tops of trees and mountain-peaks With tarnished glory; and the water's sheen, Once blue and bright, grew lustreless, and soon A welter of red clouds alone betrayed The passing of the sun. The scattered isles Uprose, black-looming o'er the tranquil deeps, Where the reflected heavens wanly showed A lingering gleam. Already wood and hill ...
— A Lute of Jade/Being Selections from the Classical Poets of China • L. Cranmer-Byng

... drifting down the tide-river in the rain and darkness—once the supporting tension of Faircloth's presence removed, chaos would close in on her. It only waited due opportunity. That granted, as a tempest-driven sea it would submerge her. In the welter of the present, she clutched at the high dignities and distinctions of the past as at a lifebelt. Not vulgarly, in a spirit of self-aggrandizement; but in the simple interests of self-preservation, as a means of keeping endangered sanity ...
— Deadham Hard • Lucas Malet

... disfigurement you have brought on the land of England these last five generations! The natural loveliness in this Heritage is no greater than the loveliness that used to be in a thousand places which you have blotted out of the book of beauty, with your smuts and wheels, your wires and welter. And to what end? To manufacture crippled children, and pale, peaky little Cockneys whose nerves are gone; (and, to be sure, the railways and motor cars which will bring you here to see them coming to life once more in sane and natural surroundings!) ...
— Tatterdemalion • John Galsworthy

... done, but the house was already crowded to suffocation. Great lines of washing in the back yards, and groups dirty children splashing in the spring mud, bore testimony to the congestion. The March sun was beating down with astonishing fierceness and the unside-walked streets were a welter of slush. In two hours Harris, notwithstanding his stout frame and his young enthusiasm, dragged himself somewhat disconsolately back to the immigration building with the information that his search ...
— The Homesteaders - A Novel of the Canadian West • Robert J. C. Stead

... he were one with the raw-boned bay he bestrode, he jumped his mount into the waiting pond. Still threshing about in the welter of flying water, he glanced back and raised a hand in ...
— Ride Proud, Rebel! • Andre Alice Norton

... scabrous with some creeping fungus stuff, and on one side of the city the wall was overwhelmed by a triumphant tide of green. There the jungle had crawled over the ramparts and surged into the city. Three of the towers had their bases in the welter of growing things, and creepers had climbed incredibly and were still climbing to enter and then destroy ...
— The Fifth-Dimension Tube • William Fitzgerald Jenkins

... hung like an ornate curtain between Margaret and the welter of London. Her thoughts turned sadly to house-hunting. Wickham Place had been so safe. She feared, fantastically, that her own little flock might be moving into turmoil and squalor, into nearer contact with ...
— Howards End • E. M. Forster

... time. The receding tide of fashion and wealth had withdrawn far off to another section of the rapidly growing city ... and, below and above, the Steel Mills, with their great, flaring furnaces, rose, it seemed, over night, one after one ... and a welter of strange people we then called the "low Irish" came to work in them, and our Mansion Avenue became "Kilkenny Row." And a gang of tough kids sprang up called the "Kilkenny Cats," with which ...
— Tramping on Life - An Autobiographical Narrative • Harry Kemp

... just quoted. Is this the only cause we can give, Shelley might ask, why the poet should not reverence his gift as something apart from himself and truly divine? If, after the fashion of modern psychology, we denote by the subconscious mind only the welter of myriad forgotten details of our daily life, what is there here to account for poesy? The remote, inaccessible chambers of our mind may, to be sure, be more replete with curious lumber than those continually swept and garnished for everyday use, yet, ...
— The Poet's Poet • Elizabeth Atkins

... and with an undefended back, amidst a crowd of these Selenites, but never quite so vividly. It is, of course, as absolutely irrational a feeling as one could well have, and I hope gradually to subdue it. But just for a moment, as I swept forward into the welter of the vast crowd, it was only by gripping my litter tightly and summoning all my will-power that I succeeded in avoiding an outcry or some such manifestation. It lasted perhaps three minutes; then I had myself ...
— The First Men In The Moon • H. G. Wells

... asked herself, hearing a man inquire, with great determination, for her number. The unfamiliar voice now asked for Miss Hilbery. Out of all the welter of voices which crowd round the far end of the telephone, out of the enormous range of possibilities, whose voice, what possibility, was this? A pause gave her time to ask herself this question. It ...
— Night and Day • Virginia Woolf

... chapter headed, with a delightful little wood engraving of 'Fair Russell,' looking pre-eminently sensible, at her desk, to prepare the reader for the imminent welter of rules for 'decorous composition.' Not that pedantry is approved. 'Ease and simplicity, an even flow of unlaboured diction, and an artless arrangement of obvious sentiments' is the ideal to be ...
— Yet Again • Max Beerbohm

... soon as they had captured the first line of trenches, in order to let the Royal Irish Rifles and the Rifle Brigade through to the village. The Germans left alive in the trenches, half demented with fright, surrounded by a welter of dead and dying men, mostly surrendered. The Berkshires were opposed with the utmost gallantry by two German officers who had remained alone in a trench serving a machine gun. But the lads from Berkshire ...
— History of the World War - An Authentic Narrative of the World's Greatest War • Francis A. March and Richard J. Beamish

... John came from beyond the canvas hood and David's urgent cries filled the air. The mules, necks outstretched, almost squatting in the agony of their endeavor, held their ground, but could do no more. Bess and Ben began to plunge in a welter of slapping harness as the wheels ...
— The Emigrant Trail • Geraldine Bonner

... brought a little respite to Europe and a peaceful interlude for American shipmasters, but France and England came to grips again in 1803. For two years thereafter the United States was almost the only important neutral nation not involved in the welter of conflict on land and sea, and trade everywhere sought the protection of the Stars and Stripes. England had swept her own rivals, men-of-war and merchantmen, from the face of the waters. France and Holland ceased to carry cargoes ...
— The Old Merchant Marine - A Chronicle of American Ships and Sailors, Volume 36 in - the Chronicles Of America Series • Ralph D. Paine

... hear the sound of public worship—will yield to nothing but that sadly forgotten law which enjoins personal contact with the sinful and the suffering, as one chief condition of raising them from the black mire in which they welter. ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Mark • Alexander Maclaren

... against an English sovereign, she'll not be sedately and patiently dining at second-table and murmuring "Yes, me Lady" in that meek and obedient manner. But it fairly took my breath, the adroit and expeditious manner in which Struthers had that welter of luggage unstrapped and unbuckled and warped into place and things stowed away, even down to her ladyship's rather ridiculous folding canvas bathtub. In little more than two shakes she had a shimmering litter of toilet things out on the dresser tops, and even ...
— The Prairie Mother • Arthur Stringer

... it seems, the old enthusiasm caught him, and with him, therefore, caught Miriam, too. That savage and dominant curiosity to know clutched him, overpowering even the assaults of a terror that fairly battered him. Through all the chaos and welter of his dazed mind he sought feverishly for the "note" he had to utter, yet found it not, for he was too horribly confused. Fiddles, sand-patterns, colored robes, gongs, giant tuning-forks, wax-sheeted walls, ...
— The Human Chord • Algernon Blackwood

... laving of their forces All the pathway shakes and trembles. Brutes, in hungry anger raving, Prowl from dens, and caves, and caverns, Mingle with the ghosts and spectres, Lusting for a bloody surfeit. Reptiles, subtle and obnoxious, Crawl, and welter, and recoil them On the path in slimy matters, Reeking with a poisoned odor, Darting poisons to molest him. Arrows from the towers are flying, Shafts of flame and showers of fire, Sweeping on through clouds and vapors, Like unto a storm of hailstones Driven by a mighty tempest. Sadder and more bitter ...
— A Leaf from the Old Forest • J. D. Cossar

... other had shut after him the door of the landing, the colonel leaped out with a fling of both feet in an avalanche of woollen coverings. His spurs having become entangled in a perfect welter of ponchos he nearly pitched on his head, and did not recover his balance till the middle of the room. Concealed behind the half-closed jalousies he listened to ...
— Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard • Joseph Conrad

... royal or popular vengeance, and for once in English history, at any rate, the lords vindicated their independence. The church was the only other body which profited by the strife; within its portals and its courts there was some law and order, some peace and refuge from the worldly welter; and it seized the opportunity to broaden its jurisdiction, magnify its law, exalt its privileges, and assert that to it belonged principally the right to elect and to depose sovereigns. Greater still would have been its services to civilization, had it been able to assert a power of putting ...
— The History of England - A Study in Political Evolution • A. F. Pollard

... be a cowboy an' rope the Texas steer! I'd like to be a sleuth-houn' or a bloody buccaneer! An' leave the foe to welter where their blood had made a pool; But how can I git famous? 'cause I got to go ...
— Poems Teachers Ask For, Book Two • Various

... which Gideon had sprung—the underworld where welters the overwhelming mass of the human race—there are three main types. There are the hopeless and spiritless—the mass—who welter passively on, breeding and dying. There are the spirited who also possess both shrewdness and calculation; they push upward by hook and by crook, always mindful of the futility of the struggle of the petty criminal ...
— Susan Lenox: Her Fall and Rise • David Graham Phillips

... Anyhow it was gone, and the history of the next twenty-nine years is a confused and distracting medley of petty outbreaks—that in 1803 of which Robert Emmett was the leader being the most important—and of recurrent acts of repression, out of the monotonous welter of which one great figure presently rises like a colossus, till it comes to dominate ...
— The Story Of Ireland • Emily Lawless

... obviously nearing its eyrie—dropping lower and lower, losing speed and altitude; and also threatening each moment to tumble down out of control into the smothering welter of olive-green below, with a dead, unseen body ...
— Raiders Invisible • Desmond Winter Hall

... with the paper-box factory girls came as a refining influence and as an efficient screen. For sometimes the tip went 'round, and if you were among the elect that tiptoed up the dark back stairway you might see as neat and satisfying a little welter-weight affair to a finish as ...
— The Four Million • O. Henry

... intellect, was bound to fall under the sway of Alexandrian influence while he studied in Alexandria as the pupil of Heraclianus. The methods of the contemporary school of philosophy fascinated him; and, in his endeavour to bring Medicine out of the chaotic welter in which he found it, he attempted—unhappily for the future of science—to use the hyper-idealistic Platonism then dominant in Alexandria, rather than the gradual and orderly induction of Hippocrates, as a bond of union between professional and scientific medicine; a false step for ...
— Jerome Cardan - A Biographical Study • William George Waters

... to see how the dining and reception rooms looked, and Fadette began putting away the welter of discarded garments—she was a radiant vision—a splendid greenish-gold figure, with gorgeous hair, smooth, soft, shapely ivory arms, a splendid neck and bust, and a swelling form. She felt beautiful, and yet she was a little nervous—truly. Frank himself would be critical. ...
— The Titan • Theodore Dreiser

... backwards, with eyes dilated and a warmth in her cheeks, the rod bending above her, and the line ripping its way towards the welter at the head of the pool. There it curved inwards a trifle, and ...
— Alton of Somasco • Harold Bindloss

... is proving in Ireland to-day, and the conduct of that unhappy country's affairs is now plunged in a chaos so profoundly chaotic that it has become a gross misuse of language to call them affairs at all. Out of all this welter and confusion two salient ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 159, October 13, 1920 • Various

... this welter of preposterous theories there is but one thing constant—one thing on which all these theorists are agreed. It is that all this strange stuff is symbolic and shadows forth the impressions and emotions of the artist: represents not nature ...
— Artist and Public - And Other Essays On Art Subjects • Kenyon Cox

... course of history went into the welter of religious wars which gradually merge into dynastic wars and confuse the record of the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth century. At the end of the last of these divisions ...
— Hilaire Belloc - The Man and His Work • C. Creighton Mandell

... in the water, Thorogood had no very clear recollection; but by instinct he struck out through the welter of gasping, bobbing heads till he was clear of the clutching menace of the drowning. The Commander, clad simply in his wrist-watch and uniform cap, was standing on the balsa raft, with scores of men hanging to its support. "Get away from the ship!" he was bawling ...
— A Tall Ship - On Other Naval Occasions • Sir Lewis Anselm da Costa Ritchie

... the water, dark as it is. Now both pressure and noise get worse and worse; the ship shakes, and I feel as if I myself were being gently lifted with the stern-rail, where I stand gazing out at the welter of ice-masses that resemble giant snakes writhing and twisting their great bodies out there under the quiet, starry sky, whose peace is only broken by one aurora serpent waving and flickering restlessly in the northeast. I once more think what a comfort it is to be safe on board the Fram, ...
— Farthest North - Being the Record of a Voyage of Exploration of the Ship 'Fram' 1893-1896 • Fridtjof Nansen

... tract inside the inner line, the settled districts of the North-West Frontier Province, inhabited for the most part by sturdy and somewhat turbulent Pathans; second, the tract between the two lines, that welter of mountains where dwell the hardy brigand hillmen: the tribes of the Black Mountain, of Swat and Bajur, the Mohmands, the Afridis, the Orakzais, the Wazirs, the Mahsuds, and a host of others, whose names from time to time become familiar according as the outrageousness ...
— Essays in Liberalism - Being the Lectures and Papers Which Were Delivered at the - Liberal Summer School at Oxford, 1922 • Various

... the clothes from one side of my body, and sent me, sprawling and breathless, into the welter of ...
— The Terror from the Depths • Sewell Peaslee Wright

... we have for long been so debilitated by pastorals, by graceful presentation of the Arthurian legend for drawing-rooms, by idylls, not robust and Theocritean, by verse directly didactic, that a rude blast of air from the outside welter of human realities is apt to give a shock, that might well show in what simpleton's paradise we have been living. The ethics of the rectory parlour set to sweet music, the respectable aspirations of the sentimental curate married to exquisite verse, the everlasting glorification of domestic sentiment ...
— Studies in Literature • John Morley

... of society from the welter of selfishness and brutishness and cruelty into which it is now plunged will be a costly undertaking. The church is here, as Christ's representative, to take up this work; and it must not expect to accomplish it without ...
— The Church and Modern Life • Washington Gladden

... beloved young English Queen of Spain is bringing into reluctant favor with women immemorially accustomed to immobility. The road was badly kept, like most things in Spain, where when a thing is done it is expected to stay done. Every afternoon it is a cloud of dust and every evening a welter of mud, for the Iberian idea of watering a street is to soak it into a slough. But nothing can spoil the Paseo, and that evening we had it mostly to ourselves, though there were two or three carriages with ladies in hats, and at one place other ladies dismounted ...
— Familiar Spanish Travels • W. D. Howells

... froth, driven on the wind's breath, filled his mouth and nostrils and beat into his eyes, stinging and blinding him. In the struggle to breathe he, all unlearned in the ways of the sea, lifted his muzzle high in the air to get out of the suffocating welter. As a result, off the horizontal, the churning of his legs no longer sustained him, and he went down and under perpendicularly. Again he emerged, strangling with more salt water in his windpipe. This time, without reasoning ...
— Jerry of the Islands • Jack London

... inboard and filled the space forward of the break of the main-deck. The swirling water touched the sides of the long-boat and then receded when the stricken schooner struggled up from the welter. A scuttle-butt was torn from its lashings and went by the board, ...
— Blow The Man Down - A Romance Of The Coast - 1916 • Holman Day

... a helpless welter of half-hitched trousers. "So dam' bad, too, for innocent boys like us! Wonder what they'd say at 'St. Winifred's, or the World of School.'—By gum! That reminds me we owe the Lower Third one for assaultin' Beetle when he ...
— Stalky & Co. • Rudyard Kipling

... had absorbed most of the shock and apart from a welter of broken glass, the damage ...
— A Filbert Is a Nut • Rick Raphael

... claim any great antiquity: and as is the case with Italian, and to a less degree with French also, the processes by which it came into existence out of Latin are hid from us to a degree surprising, even when we remember the political and social welter in which Europe lay between the fifth and the eleventh centuries. It is, of course, a most natural and constant consideration that the formation of literary languages was delayed in the Romance-speaking countries by the fact that everybody ...
— The Flourishing of Romance and the Rise of Allegory - (Periods of European Literature, vol. II) • George Saintsbury

... older countries, the principle of noblesse oblige still has weight with the public as well as with the individual; here, the welter of democracy, which has not evolved into distinct human form, uniformly ignores it; leveling down, not up, it is quick to see a scoundrel in any man. Meanwhile, instead of taking thought to abate the public mania for success ...
— The Subterranean Brotherhood • Julian Hawthorne

... and down on the long, green swells, the moving boat drew nearer and nearer to the foaming lines of surf. Presently they were in the welter of white. Once when the little craft went completely out of sight behind a monster swell, Loll, watching from the cabin top, shouted in alarm, but yelled again in delight as it rose ...
— Where the Sun Swings North • Barrett Willoughby

... should be foolish indeed if we did not take stock of them with an anxious eye to the future. The main and startling fact is that with every apparent desire for the re-establishment of Europe on better lines, Europe, as a matter of fact, drifted back into the old welter of conflicting nationalities, while the very instrument of peace—the Holy Alliance—was used by autocratic governments for the subjection of smaller nationalities and the destruction of popular freedom. It ...
— Armageddon—And After • W. L. Courtney

... the main floor were holding the slaans partially in check. Bodies were lying in a welter—I shall not describe it. Then abruptly, upon a table a huge slaan leaped—his garments blood-stained from his victims, a blade of dripping steel in his hands. He shouted above the tumult—words not in the universal language, but ...
— Tarrano the Conqueror • Raymond King Cummings

... been plentiful—green things Chiu-Ming might lack for his cooking, but meat never. About us was a welter of mighty summits. We were, I knew, somewhere within the blending of the ...
— The Metal Monster • A. Merritt

... world-mastering demi-gods listened, however, to no low tongues of ours, even when we pointed silently to their feet of clay. Perhaps we, as folk of simpler soul and more primitive type, have been most struck in the welter of recent years by the utter failure of white religion. We have curled our lips in something like contempt as we have witnessed glib apology and weary explanation. Nothing of the sort deceived us. A nation's ...
— Darkwater - Voices From Within The Veil • W. E. B. Du Bois

... Peter, at this moment of a whole welter of doubt and confusion and misunderstanding of people's motives and positions, to explain a great deal. Was that the reason why he'd been so happy in old Zachary Tan's shop years ago? Why he'd been happy through all that ...
— Fortitude • Hugh Walpole

... one side alone the hill gave shelter, So vast that phalanx of unconquered men, 2435 And there the living in the blood did welter Of the dead and dying, which in that green glen, Like stifled torrents, made a plashy fen Under the feet—thus was the butchery waged While the sun clomb Heaven's eastern steep—but when 2440 It 'gan to sink—a fiercer combat raged, For in more ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley Volume I • Percy Bysshe Shelley

... the consequences of one's acts and come through; about the intention to sacrifice for love just what has to be sacrificed. What's the use of it otherwise? That's one real advance the modern mind has made, anyhow, despite all the rest of the welter and uncertainty." ...
— O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1920 • Various

... hamlet dreaming in the sun, a welter of scrambled habitations. There was the little ship's cabin, called Kent Hall, where dwelt that genial spirit, Nathan Spear, his father's friend. Nearby was the dwelling, carpenter and blacksmith shop of Calvert Davis; the homes of Victor Pruden, French savant and secretary to Governor ...
— Port O' Gold • Louis John Stellman

... of the Ida under his knees, the eager welter of the whirlpool, the sting of the icy Colorado dragging him under, the flash of Diana's face and his winning ...
— The Enchanted Canyon • Honore Willsie Morrow

... salient points; outlines are blurred in an unpoetic haze. The history of Tacitus has been described as history 'seen by lightning flashes'. Such should be the history of historical epic. In its stead Silius presents us with a confused welter of archaistic battle, learned allusion, ...
— Post-Augustan Poetry - From Seneca to Juvenal • H.E. Butler



Words linked to "Welter" :   rummage, disorderliness, disorder, move, roll over



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