"Dank" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... there existed in two places under the Chicago River—in the first place at La Salle Street, running north and south, and in the second at Washington Street, running east and west—two now soggy and rat-infested tunnels which were never used by anybody—dark, dank, dripping affairs only vaguely lighted with oil-lamp, and oozing with water. Upon investigation he learned that they had been built years before to accommodate this same tide of wagon traffic, which now congested at the bridges, ...
— The Titan • Theodore Dreiser
... Wissenschaft vom Christenthum das Lateinische abgeloest. Es ist mir daher eine grosse Freude, dass mein Lehrbuch der Dogmengeschichte in das Englische uebersetzt worden ist, und ich sage dem Uebersetzer sowie den Verlegern meinen besten Dank. ...
— History of Dogma, Volume 1 (of 7) • Adolph Harnack
... at Blakeney Sea pansies, sedge, and rosemary; Frail fronds thrust forth in dim dank air, A message from those lying there: Wan ...
— The Shrieking Pit • Arthur J. Rees
... Mary, go and call the cattle home, And call the cattle home, And call the cattle home, Across the sands o' Dee;" The western wind was wild and dank wi' foam, And all ...
— Alton Locke, Tailor And Poet • Rev. Charles Kingsley et al
... a ploughed field. The herbage had been literally crushed into mire, and this the innumerable hoofs had churned up with the soft rich soil. The leguminous odors of the trodden clover and the rank masses of wild pease, together with the dank earthy smell of the broken sod, rose offensively in the girl's face. Her course now lay along an upland covered with straggling copses of white oak and poplar. In the dim valley beyond, lying drunken ...
— Annette, The Metis Spy • Joseph Edmund Collins
... It was found necessary to clear the entire pier from the mass of onlookers, or else the fatalities of the night would have increased manifold. To add to the difficulties and dangers of the time, masses of sea-fog came drifting inland. White, wet clouds, which swept by in ghostly fashion, so dank and damp and cold that it needed but little effort of imagination to think that the spirits of those lost at sea were touching their living brethren with the clammy hands of death, and many a one shuddered as the wreaths of sea-mist ...
— Dracula • Bram Stoker
... us that the light was still there, ready to flash out at a moment's notice. To me, with my nerves worked up to a pitch of expectancy, there was something depressing and subduing in the sudden gloom, and in the cold, dank air of ...
— The Boy Scouts Book of Stories • Various
... and cry again, again, again! To Heliodore! And mingle the sweet word ye call in vain With that ye pour! And bring to me her wreath of yesterday That's dank with myrrh; Hesternae Rosae, ah my friends, but they Remember her! Lo the kind roses, loved of lovers, weep As who repine, For if on any breast they see her sleep ...
— Grass of Parnassus • Andrew Lang
... and from the fastnesses of the hill a brook gushes down to the sea through the boulders that bestrew its banks. Obliged to wait until the preceding couple had holed out, our citizen and golfer amused himself by upturning one of the great lichen-stained boulders. He gazed into the dank pit thus disclosed to his eyes, and half drew back dismayed at the extraordinary activity of insect life that was revealed. It was so sudden, so unexpected. Beneath that grey and solemn boulder that Time and man accepted as a freehold tenant of the world, that ...
— Rembrandt • Mortimer Menpes
... a growing perception of a low monotonous lap and wash of water and a slight heaving, lifting sensation, as of my being swayed gently to and fro. It was very cold, not the biting cold we know, but a dank, lifeless, penetrating cold of water and darkness.... The manner of my own form was not clear to me; I was of too low a consciousness to be aware of many exterior particulars. I merely knew I belonged to darkness ...
— Child and Country - A Book of the Younger Generation • Will Levington Comfort
... of it," said the President. "Things have got to such a pass, that in towns the meanest people have tea at the morning's meal, to the discontinuance of the ale which ought to be their diet; and poor women dank this drug also in the afternoons, to the exclusion ...
— The Billow and the Rock • Harriet Martineau
... gone to the spot one morning not long after his arrival. He had climbed down the slippery stairs through that dank couloir or funnel in the rock overhung with drooping maidenhair and ivy and umbrageous carobs. He had rested on the little platform outside the cavern's vineyard far below, and upwards, at the narrow ribbon of sky overhead. Then he had gone within, ...
— South Wind • Norman Douglas
... at last my way opened, the trees thinned a little; presently I beheld a railing, then the house—scarce, by this dim light, distinguishable from the trees; so dank and green were its decaying walls. Entering a portal, fastened only by a latch, I stood amidst a space of enclosed ground, from which the wood swept away in a semicircle. There were no flowers, no garden-beds; only a broad gravel-walk girdling a grass-plat, ...
— Jane Eyre - an Autobiography • Charlotte Bronte
... sweet smell of death. The air that had drunk in their wild words and their last long looks of heavenly love still hung about the dark corners, as the air where a rose has been holds a little while the memory of its breath. Yes! that morning, in that dank but shining tomb, you might draw into you the very breath of love. The air you breathed had passed through the sweet lungs of Juliet, it had been etherealised with her holy passion, and washed clean with her lovely words. And now, for a little ...
— Prose Fancies (Second Series) • Richard Le Gallienne
... shaping, building, the kindergarten child sees life on many sides. Perhaps, finally, other cities following the lead of Cincinnati will introduce the kindergarten spirit and kindergarten activities into the lower grades where they will clarify an atmosphere, fetid and dank with concepts which to the six-year-old ...
— The New Education - A Review of Progressive Educational Movements of the Day (1915) • Scott Nearing
... risen. The way led through mangrove swamps, where the men sank to their knees in rotting grasses or plunged to their waists in slime. Those who have seen a tropical swamp will know how fierce the toil was. They were marching in a dank world belonging to an earlier age than ours. They were in the age of the coal strata, among wet, green things, in a silence only broken by the sound of dropping or by the bellow of an alligator. They were there in the filth, in the heat haze, in ...
— On the Spanish Main - Or, Some English forays on the Isthmus of Darien. • John Masefield
... great pithecanthropus aroused no jarring discord for he was as much a part of it as the trees that grew upon the summit of the cliff or those that hid their feet among the dank ferns in the bottom of ...
— Tarzan the Terrible • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... me with rough hands and dragged me off to a dank, unlighted prison, as empty of furniture as it was full of noisome smells. And there they left me to my ugly thoughts and my deeply despondent mood what time the Governor of Cesena supped with his officers in the hall of ...
— The Shame of Motley • Raphael Sabatini
... to the house," he continued, in the words of a request, but in the tone of a command. "The dew hangs dank and heavy on these branches; and a longer stay would be more dangerous than ...
— Fanshawe • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... was even beyond my hopes. I returned home well satisfied. The sun that was still labouring pale and wan through the sky, obscured by thick mists, seemed an emblem of the good cause; and the cold, dank drops of dew that hung half melted on the beard of the thistle had something genial and refreshing in them; for there was a spirit of hope and youth in all nature that turned everything ...
— A Book of English Prose - Part II, Arranged for Secondary and High Schools • Percy Lubbock
... evermore in the dank and weedy little cemetery that lies on the outskirts of the station where he lived and died. Those golden curls, those soft and rounded limbs, and that laughing mouth, are given up to darkness and the eternal hunger of corruption. Through sunshine and rain, through the long days of summer, ...
— Twenty-One Days in India; and, the Teapot Series • George Robert Aberigh-Mackay
... something. Perhaps he would kill her first and then get her over the wall afterwards. It would be a grand revenge if he could get her into the cemetery alive and thrust her, the living, down amongst the dead, through those little doors which opened like church doors to the cold, dank vault below. ...
— The Daffodil Mystery • Edgar Wallace
... dell ill card veal rank tell bill hard meal sank well fill bark neat hank yell rill dark heat dank belt hill dint bang dime rave cull hint fang lime gave dull lint gang tine lave gull mint hang fine pave hull tint ...
— McGuffey's Eclectic Spelling Book • W. H. McGuffey
... the other could not form a permanent attachment to the Manchu; and Nettie's great difference, together with the romance of her unhappy position, must have a potent effect on the fellow's evident sentimentality. A dank air rose from the water, like the smell of death; and, with an uncontrollable shiver, he turned back ...
— Java Head • Joseph Hergesheimer
... tide of spring seemed to renovate the muddy flats, setting the weeds, that had lain dank and dispirited, a-floating again on the return of the water. No one could quite resist the magic of the season, and Georgie, who had intended out of mere politeness to go to see the earliest of Perdita's stupid flowers (having been warned of its epiphany by telephone ...
— Queen Lucia • E. F. Benson
... For here, at the river level, mist and drizzle took the form of fog. Opaque, chill and dank, it drifted in continuous, just perceptible, undulations past and in at the open casement. Soon the air of the room grew thick and whitish, the dark oak furniture and the floor boards furred with moisture. Yet, her methodical closure of the house complete, ...
— Deadham Hard • Lucas Malet
... when the Russians, in a fiery rank, Panting and fierce, drew up along the shore; (For here the vain pursuing they forbore, Nor cared they to surpass the river's bank,) Then, looking from the rocks and rushes dank, A sight they witnessed never seen before, And which, with its accompaniments glorious, Is writ i' the golden ...
— Ballads • William Makepeace Thackeray
... morning was yet too dark for the curate to perceive more than the outline of his features. Milestone after milestone glided by the wheels, and neither of the travellers broke the silence. It was a cold, raw morning, and the mists rose sullenly from the dank ...
— Alice, or The Mysteries, Book X • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... their death-couches jostling, the hot poison of their breaths mingling together, and spreading a dank miasma ...
— The Old Homestead • Ann S. Stephens
... of the sleigh and went into the shanty. The place had one room, and, though a stove stood in the midst of it and the snow that kept some of the frost out was piled to the windows, it was dank and chill. Only a little dim light crept in, and it was a moment or two before Grant saw the man who sat idle by the stove with a clotted bandage round his leg. He was gaunt, and clad in jean patched with flour-bags, and his ...
— The Cattle-Baron's Daughter • Harold Bindloss
... and the stars sat still A-glintin' doon the sky: And the sauls crept oot o' their mooly graves, A' dank ...
— The Haunted Hour - An Anthology • Various
... by winds without and hurrying fancies within, he wandered on until he came near Colonsay Castle, at sight of which the desire awoke in him to look again on the scene of Lady Florimel's terror. He crossed the head of the little bay and descended into the heart of the rock. Even there the wind blew dank and howling through all the cavernous hollows. As he approached the last chamber, out of the Devil's Window flew, with clanging wing, an arrow barbed seagull, down to the grey veiled tumult below, and the ...
— Malcolm • George MacDonald
... me with a nod and a grin. His hat had gone, and the dank wisps of his hair were being fluttered about like black rags; his narrow slits of eyes were heavily bloodshot; his face was grimy and pale, his hands grimy and red; his clothing was a wreck. He looked very unpleasant, ...
— The Recipe for Diamonds • Charles John Cutcliffe Wright Hyne
... lamp burning on a deal table discovered for all other furnishing broken chairs, coils of tarred rope, a rack of ponderous oars and boat-hooks, a display of shapeless oilskins and sou'westers on pegs. The windows were boarded up from sills to lintels, the air was close and dank with the stale flavour of foul ...
— Red Masquerade • Louis Joseph Vance
... yes," I answered. "When you are near me I have feelings similar to those produced by dank warehouses, gloomy crypts, and deep mines. And as sailors feel the loom of the land on dark nights, so I think I feel the loom of your body. But it is all very vague ...
— Moon-Face and Other Stories • Jack London
... the joint strength of the two captives forced it from its hinges. They now entered a vaulted passage of hewn stone, low and narrow, and with no visible termination. As they advanced, the long pent-up and dank unwholesome vapours made it difficult to breathe, and compelled Ibrahim to pause repeatedly and trim his lamp, which burned so dimly in this oppressive atmosphere as to be nearly extinguished. After a while the path began to slope upwards, and erelong they distinguished moonlight faintly streaming ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. 341, March, 1844, Vol. 55 • Various
... unalloyed by self-complacency. It is a character which is, I believe, rarely found except where there has been toil to undergo and adversity to struggle against: it will only grow to perfection in a poor soil and in the shade; if the soil be too indigent, the shade too dank and thick, of course it dies where it sprung. But I trust this will not be the case with Miss Kavanagh. I trust she will struggle ere long into the sunshine. In you she has a kind friend to direct her, and I hope her mother will live to see the daughter, ...
— Charlotte Bronte and Her Circle • Clement K. Shorter
... short kilts to murder things that will fall in bloody feathery heaps at your feet. Native woodcock, jack snipe, black mallard, grouse, etc., the restless eager setters doing their own retrieving; the soft dank ground daintily overspread with the frond of marvelous fern like my window pane this morning with its delicate tracery in frost; the tall-stemmed alders echoing your shots to skyward; the big dense timber with its springy ground all saturated with the fragrance of the mounting sea: I seem like ...
— Letters of a Dakota Divorcee • Jane Burr
... Designer infinite!— Ah! must Thou char the wood ere Thou canst limn with it? My freshness spent its wavering shower i' the dust; And now my heart is as a broken fount, Wherein tear-drippings stagnate, spilt down ever From the dank thoughts that shiver Upon the sighful branches of my mind. Such is; what is to be? The pulp so bitter, how shall taste the rind? I dimly guess what Time in mists confounds; Yet ever and anon a trumpet sounds From the hid battlements ...
— The Hound of Heaven • Francis Thompson
... Oil-dropping Twickenham did not then detain Thy steps, though tended by the Cambrian maids; 10 Nor the sweet environs of Drury Lane; Nor dusty Pimlico's embowering shades; Nor Whitehall, by the river's bank, Beset with rowers dank; Nor where the Exchange pours forth its tawny sons; Nor where, to mix with offal, soil, and blood, Steep Snowhill rolls the sable flood; Nor where the Mint's contamined kennel runs: Ill doth it now beseem, That thou should'st doze and dream, 20 When Death in mortal armour came, And struck with ...
— Poetical Works of Johnson, Parnell, Gray, and Smollett - With Memoirs, Critical Dissertations, and Explanatory Notes • Samuel Johnson, Thomas Parnell, Thomas Gray, and Tobias Smollett
... clanged behind him, and a scene met The Kid's eyes that caused him to shudder. In the big, dank room were huddled fourteen prisoners. Most of them were miserable, half-naked peons. It was intolerably hot, and the air was so bad as almost to ...
— Kid Wolf of Texas - A Western Story • Ward M. Stevens
... his crucifixes stands deep in the Klamm, in the dank gorge where it is always half-night. The road runs under the rock and the trees, half-way up the one side of the pass. Below, the stream rushes ceaselessly, embroiled among great stones, making an endless loud noise. The rock face opposite rises high overhead, with the ...
— Twilight in Italy • D.H. Lawrence
... rapidity. The venerable and somewhat crazy mansion was distinguished from afar, by a grove of elms and sycamores that seemed to wave a hospitable invitation, while a few weeping willows with their dank, drooping foliage, resembling falling waters, gave an idea of coolness, that rendered it an attractive spot during the heats ...
— Tales of a Traveller • Washington Irving
... soft lays: Others, on silver lakes and rivers, bathed Their downy breasts; the swan with arched neck Between her white wings, mantling proudly, rows Her state with oary feet; yet oft they quit The dank, and, rising on stiff pennons, tower The mid aerial sky: others on ground Walked firm; the crested cock, whose clarion sounds The silent hours; and the other, whose gay train Adorns him, colored with the florid hue Of rainbows and ...
— Voices for the Speechless • Abraham Firth
... at all the pomp and procession of the foxgloves towering amidst the bracken and shining red in the broad sunshine, and beyond them into deep thickets of close undergrowth where springs boil up from the rock and nourish the water-weeds, dank and evil. But in all my wanderings I avoided one part of the wood; it was not till yesterday that I climbed to the summit of the hill, and stood upon the ancient Roman road that threads the highest ridge of the wood. Here ...
— The House of Souls • Arthur Machen
... run to and fro in the dank darkness, beating first upon the door beneath the Convent cloisters, then upon the door, a mile away, leading into ...
— The White Ladies of Worcester - A Romance of the Twelfth Century • Florence L. Barclay
... you receive no further compensation in return," said John, "than, perhaps, the coy turning up of a lamp at an upper casement where the jasmine climbs; or an exasperating patter of invisible palms; or a huge dank wedge of fruit-cake shoved at you by the old man, through a ...
— Complete Works of James Whitcomb Riley • James Whitcomb Riley
... can efface from my mind the picture of it as I saw it when first going to the Caucasus. The sunset illumined it with the hues of romance. All the multiplicity of its dingy buildings shone as if lit up from within, and their dank and mouldy greens and blues and yellows became burning living colours. The town lay spread out upon the high banks of the Don and every segment of it was crowned with a church. The gilt domes blazed ...
— A Tramp's Sketches • Stephen Graham
... heights of Murree, dank boughs dripped and drooped above ill-made houses, that gave free admittance to the moist outer world; tree ferns, springing to sudden life on moss-clad trunks and boughs, showed brilliant as emeralds on velvet. ...
— Captain Desmond, V.C. • Maud Diver
... die Liefde in u die u verblind heeft. Dank God dat gij hebt liefgehad" (No. Thank God rather for the Love within which blinded your eyes. Thank God that you ...
— Woman's Endurance • A.D.L.
... quantity of plums they had eaten. He only answered by a nod. He already seemed quite weary. The orchard, with its green depths and chaos of mossy trunks, disquieted him and suggested to his mind some dark, dank spot, teeming ...
— Abbe Mouret's Transgression - La Faute De L'abbe Mouret • Emile Zola
... meadows, but it rose at intervals, though the clearance was only momentary, and had scarcely become perceptible before reinforcements of dull white vapour, tainted with miasma, rolled up from the marshy ground, bringing dank odours of standing water and weedy vegetation, half decayed, and gradually encroaching on the river, the smooth surface of which glowed with a greasy gleam beneath it, making it look ...
— The Heavenly Twins • Madame Sarah Grand
... multitude of people collected around me from all parts. They requested me to speak; but as I did not understand their language I could not answer them. They repeated often the word Dank, Dank, and supposing them to be Germans, I addressed them in this language, then in Danish, and finally in Latin; but they signified to me, by shaking their heads, that these languages were unknown to them. I tried at last to declare myself in the subterranean tongues, namely, in Nazaric and ...
— Niels Klim's journey under the ground • Baron Ludvig Holberg
... nigh a once frescoed capital, now with dank mould cankering its bloom, central in a plain, stands what, at distance, seems the black mossed stump of some immeasurable pine, fallen, in forgotten days, with ...
— The Piazza Tales • Herman Melville
... to himself. Rising from the books he ran through the cloisters to a certain part, and there, by a dexterous spring, perched himself on to the frame of the open mullioned windows. The gravestones lay pretty thick in the square, enclosed yard, the long, dank grass growing around them; but there appeared to be no trace ...
— The Channings • Mrs. Henry Wood
... laid me down upon a bank, Where Love lay sleeping; I heard among the rushes dank ...
— Poems of William Blake • William Blake
... in the mephitic cellar, with the two long wooden platforms where the subterranean trains land or load their freights. A strangling gas tickled their throats and set them coughing. It was all dank and dark and gloomy. But little youth and love care for that! They were bubbling over with the happiness of this abnormal meeting. Both talked together in their delight, and Maude patted Frank's sleeve with every remark. They could even illuminate all that was around ...
— A Duet • A. Conan Doyle
... level green lawn, with sedate paths marching around it, but no black hooded figures were moving there in ones or twos or in solemn file, as I had been wont to see them. I walked rather uncertainly forward across the grass, across the dank and mossy paths, and into the shadowy length of the corridor. This, too, was empty, and at one end of it a little door, with a grill across it, seemed as effectually to bar me out as the Spanish Woman's ...
— The Other Side of the Door • Lucia Chamberlain
... in torrents so that when it ceased, the trail he had been following was entirely obliterated. Cold and uncomfortable—it was a savage Tarzan who threaded the mazes of the soggy jungle. Manu, the monkey, shivering and chattering in the dank trees, scolded and fled at his approach. Even the panthers and the lions let ...
— Tarzan the Untamed • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... they were crisped and sere, The leaves they were withering and sere; It was night in the lonesome October Of my most immemorial year; 5 It was hard by the dim lake of Auber, In the misty mid region of Weir: It was down by the dank tarn of Auber, In the ghoul-haunted woodland ...
— Selections From Poe • J. Montgomery Gambrill
... shape, built of variously sized logs, and banked over with two or three feet of moss and grass-grown earth, so as to resemble an outdoor cellar. Half of one side had been torn down by storm-besieged travellers for firewood; its earthen floor was dank and wet with slimy tricklings from its leaky roof; the wind and rain drove with a mournful howl down through its chimney-hole; its door was gone, and it presented altogether a dismal picture of neglected dilapidation. Nothing daunted, ...
— Tent Life in Siberia • George Kennan
... was served by a waiter in a spotted apron, whose dank hair fell over a sallow and oily face. Save for himself, there were only four other customers. In a corner partition a slovenly woman in bedraggled finery berated the man who sat with bloated eyes across from her. The waiter looked on sardonically. At another table ...
— Destiny • Charles Neville Buck
... aprons. Then, again, those servi servorum have dependants in the vast, silent, poverty-stricken world outside your comfortable kitchen fire, in the world of darkness, and hunger, and miserable cold, and dank, flagged cellars, and huddled straw, and rags, in which pale children are swarming. It may be your beer (which runs with great volubility) has a pipe or two which communicates with those dark caverns where hopeless anguish ...
— Roundabout Papers • William Makepeace Thackeray
... flat and desolate, dank and dirty-looking. The flat, dull, dirty marsh country seemed to be without life; the very grass seemed blighted. And we were drifting ashore to it, fast drifting ashore to the tune ...
— Jim Davis • John Masefield
... prohibition and her recent fears, the good widow entered, and leaned anxiously over the stranger's form. A tall, gaunt man, clad in threadbare garments, which hung loosely upon the shrunken breast and arms, black hair and beard, mottled with white, ragged, and unshorn, and dank from exposure to the snow and sleet; a chalky-white face, with closed and sunken eyes, sharpened nose, and prominent cheek-bones—this was what they beheld as the candle flamed up steadily in the comparatively still air of the ceiled apartment. ...
— At Last • Marion Harland
... hole was untempting. A dank smell came out of it, like the breath of those old Egyptian tombs in which the bones of horses, buried with their masters, lie all about on shelves. You couldn't see into it more than a yard or two, for the only light came ...
— Jimgrim and Allah's Peace • Talbot Mundy
... help—and who shall help him but his father! The Father is with him all the time, but it may be long ere the child knows himself in his arms. His heart may be long troubled as well as his outer life. The dank mists of doubtful thought may close around his way, and hide from him the Light of the world! cold winds from the desert of foiled endeavour may sorely buffet and for a time baffle his hope; but every now and then the ...
— Hope of the Gospel • George MacDonald
... crowds stood before the seven principal entrances to Hugo's; seven crowds of immortal souls enclosed in the bodies of women. They meant to begin the year well by an honest attempt to get something for nothing. It was a cold, dank, raw, and formidable morning; Hugo's tessellated pavements were covered with moisture, and, moreover, day had not yet conquered night. But the seven crowds, growing larger each moment, recked nothing of these inconveniences. They waited stolidly, silently, in a suppressed ...
— Hugo - A Fantasia on Modern Themes • Arnold Bennett
... have seen, extend in regular order from one extremity of the range to the other; and however dense and somber they may appear in general views, neither on the rocky heights nor down in the leafiest hollows will you find anything to remind you of the dank, malarial selvas of the Amazon and Orinoco, with, their "boundless contiguity of shade," the monotonous uniformity of the Deodar forests of the Himalaya, the Black Forest of Europe, or the dense dark woods of Douglas ...
— The Mountains of California • John Muir
... guide of the dead, brings to Pluto's kingdom their psyches, "that gibber like bats, as they fare down the dank ways, past the streams of Okeanos, past the gates of the sun and the land of dreams, to the meadow of asphodel in the dark realm of Hades, where dwell the souls, the phantoms of men outworn." So begins the twenty-fourth book of the Odyssey. Later poets ...
— Cerberus, The Dog of Hades - The History of an Idea • Maurice Bloomfield
... and foul, By the smoky town in its murky cowl; Foul and dank, foul and dank, By wharf and sewer and slimy bank; Darker and darker the farther I go, Baser and baser the richer I grow; Who dare sport with the sin-defiled? Shrink from me, turn from me, mother ...
— The Water-Babies - A Fairy Tale for a Land-Baby • Charles Kingsley
... Within, the place was dank and musty and cobwebs spread across the openings where the windows had been. Much broken glass and a couple of sash weights fastened to ends of rotten sash cord lay upon the floor. In the corner was a makeshift ...
— Roy Blakeley in the Haunted Camp • Percy Keese Fitzhugh
... in pain, that groped at inconceivable distances from anything lovely or harmonious, seemed to rise dimly up out of the waves of sound that gathered under his hands. Melancholy human love wandered out on distant heaths, or beneath dank and gloomy cypresses, murmuring its unanswered sorrow, or hateful gnomes sported and sang in the stagnant swamps triumphing in unearthly tones over the knight whom they had lured to his death. ...
— Masterpieces of Mystery - Riddle Stories • Various
... door behind him and advanced into the room, his hand extended. Mary took it. It was dank ...
— The Yellow Streak • Williams, Valentine
... played Over dead and dying; Piped and played he well. Sure that flute of his was made Of the dank reed sighing O'er the streams of Hell. There beneath the shadows grey, With the sisters three, Shall he pipe for many a day. May the Frog his butler be! And his wine the water of ...
— Cleopatra • H. Rider Haggard
... the oaths all gnaw, which to Helgi thou didst swear, at the limpid Leiptr's water, and at the cold dank wave-washed rock. ...
— The Elder Eddas of Saemund Sigfusson; and the Younger Eddas of Snorre Sturleson • Saemund Sigfusson and Snorre Sturleson
... was dripping with moisture from a shower that had fallen during the night; and, after a tedious walk, reached the edge of the scrub. It was thicker than anything we had encountered before, the density of the foliage totally excluding the sun, and giving rise to a dank humid odour that struck a chill to the heart directly you entered. We wound along the path, or rather track, that the blacks had made, with the greatest difficulty. It was all very well for the troopers, who had stripped, but our clothes hitched up on a thorn at every other step. One of our ...
— Australian Search Party • Charles Henry Eden
... closed his ear on the voice of the Grig, And his heart it grew heavy as lead As he marked the Baldekin adjusting his wing On the opposite side of his head, And the air it grew chill as the Gryxabodill Raised his dank, dripping fins to the skies, And plead with the Plunk for the use of her bill To pick the tears ...
— The Complete Works • James Whitcomb Riley
... Dank dregs, the scum of pool or clod, God-spawn of lizard-footed clans, And those dog-headed hulks that trod Swart necks of the old Egyptians, Raw draughts of ...
— A Channel Passage and Other Poems - Taken from The Collected Poetical Works of Algernon Charles - Swinburne—Vol VI • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... station. Then, without warning or signal, it slipped off, as though casually, towards an undetermined goal. Often it ran level with the roofs of vague, far-stretching acres of houses— houses vile and frowsy, and smoking like pyres in the dank air. And always it travelled on a platform of brick arches. Now and then the walled road received a tributary that rounded subtly into it, and this tributary could be seen curving away, on innumerable brick arches, through the chimneypots, and losing itself in a dim horizon of gloom. At intervals ...
— Hilda Lessways • Arnold Bennett
... in the mingled noise they had neither heard a low tap, several times repeated, nor the soft opening of the door that followed. When they rose from their knees, it was therefore with astonishment they saw a woman standing motionless in the doorway, without cloak or bonnet, her dank garments clinging to her form ...
— Paul Faber, Surgeon • George MacDonald
... the jaded soul its freshness,—times from which some men have emerged, as if reborn. The crises of life are very silent. Suddenly the scene opened on Randal Leslie's eyes,—the bare desert common, the dilapidated church, the old house, partially seen in the dank dreary hollow, into which it seemed to Randal to have sunken deeper and lowlier than when he saw it last. And on the common were some young men playing at hockey. That old-fashioned game, now very uncommon in England, except at schools, was still ...
— My Novel, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... she slammed the door upon us. We were in absolute darkness. As we took our first breath of the dank, foul air, we heard ...
— Helmet of Navarre • Bertha Runkle
... him along a passage that seemed interminable, then down a narrow winding stair, through a vaulted tunnel, the dank air of which struck so cold and damp that the young man felt sure it was subterranean; lastly up a second winding stair, at the top of which, pushing aside some hanging tapestry, they stood within the noble chamber known as the Wahlzimmer. ...
— The Strong Arm • Robert Barr
... which was at this time one of the most important occupations of a man's whole day, and marked his fashion as much as, in the present time, the tying of a cravat, or the want of one, was dishevelled, uncurled, void of powder, and dank with dew. His clothes were huddled on with a careless negligence, remarkable in a military man, whose real or supposed duties are usually held to include some attention to the toilet; and his looks were haggard and ...
— Waverley Volume XII • Sir Walter Scott
... channel narrowed to a muddy creek, not more than twenty yards wide, with high trees, and thick underwood close to the water's edge. All was silent, the sun shone clown upon us like the concentrated rays of a burning glass, and there was no breeze to dissipate the heavy dank mist that hovered over the surface of the unwholesome canal, nor was there any appearance of a living thing, save and except a few startled waterfowl, and some guanoes on the trees, and now and then an alligator, like a black log of charred wood, would roll off a ...
— Tom Cringle's Log • Michael Scott
... him. Mystery! That was the charm. That speechless tongue, those prisoned features, that heart so freighted with unspoken troubles, and that breast so oppressed with its piteous secret had been here. These dank walls had known the man whose dolorous story is a sealed book forever! There was fascination ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... artist, Utrillo, personal enough, just as Modigliani was handsome enough, to satisfy the exigences of the most romantic melodrama, with a touch of madness and an odd nostalgic passion—expressing itself in an inimitable white—for the dank and dirty whitewash and cheap cast-iron of the Parisian suburbs. Towards the end, when he was already very ill, he began to concoct a formula for dealing with these melancholy scenes which might have been his undoing. His career was of a few years only, but those ...
— Since Cezanne • Clive Bell
... go and call the cattle home, And call the cattle home, And call the cattle home, Across the sands o' Dee!" The western wind was wild and dank with foam, And all alone ...
— McGuffey's Fifth Eclectic Reader • William Holmes McGuffey
... loose kind of dressing-robe more closely round her, the mistress of the house now descended the stairs, rapidly, flittingly, with a step noiseless as a spectre's, and, grasping Losely firmly by the hand, led him into a chill, dank, sunless drawing-room, gazing into his face fixedly all ...
— What Will He Do With It, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... severe with the girl on the indiscretion of gadding in strange places with no better escort than Diccon, and of entering into conversation with unknown persons. Moreover, Cicely's hair, her shoes, and camlet riding skirt were all so dank with dew that she was with difficulty made presentable by the time the horses were ...
— Unknown to History - A Story of the Captivity of Mary of Scotland • Charlotte M. Yonge
... arrow-slit, he saw many strange lights come, dim and blue like the wild lights that dance and flit over the lonely marshes by night; but that which made him marvel was that these lights were two together, as if they were the eyes of evil things. And they came up to him with a breath that was cold and dank, and they seemed to peer into his face, but he could see naught of their bodies. The hair upon his head rose, and his skin went cold. They pressed all about him, and to defend himself he struck at the eyes, but his blows beat only the air. Then ...
— King Arthur's Knights - The Tales Re-told for Boys & Girls • Henry Gilbert
... reed-beds and wastes of osiers they passed, and again by a path through the jungle where the briar-vines caught at them like eager fingers, and a tiger crossed their track, disturbed in his night's rest. At length out of the dank distance they saw the ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... long as hours, and no gleaming rift broke the settled and deepening blackness of my hateful environs. Every thing and every place was full of the wearisome, depressing, beauty-blasting commonplace of Interior China. Stenches rose up on the damp, dank air, and throughout the night, through the opening of a window, I seemed to gaze out to a disconsolate eternity—gaping, empty, unsightly. Waking from my dozing at the hour when judgment sits upon the hearts of men, I sat ...
— Across China on Foot • Edwin Dingle
... a mild state of stupefaction turned away. Clat-clat! sang the little wooden shoes. A plaintive gonk rose as she prodded a laggard from the dank gutter. A piece of gold! Clat-clat! Clat-clat! Surely this had been a day of marvels; two crowns from the grand duke and a piece of gold from this old man in peasant clothes. Instinctively she knew that he was not a peasant. But what could he ...
— The Goose Girl • Harold MacGrath
... Dr. Fooss, and he tottered in his saddle. Lezard, frightfully pale, passed a shaking hand over his brow. As for me my hair became dank with misery, for there directly under my feet, the vast hairy bulk of a mammoth lay dimly visible ...
— Police!!! • Robert W. Chambers
... bold and unscrupulous schemer would have been struck by the pathos of the solitary figure which now appeared in the tiny doorway. The penetrating November drizzle had soaked through the dark cloak and hood which now hung heavy and dank round the young girl's shoulders. Framed by the hood, her face appeared preternaturally pale, her lips were quivering and her eyes, large and dilated, had almost a ...
— The Nest of the Sparrowhawk • Baroness Orczy
... with life as there enjoyed; To brighter world they never had aspired, Had they not felt unfilled an aching void, And heard a whisper of a life attired In sapphire robes, 'midst gleams of golden light, Above their present world, so dank and chill, Where all day long they wing their happy flight From roses sweet to ...
— Gleams of Sunshine - Optimistic Poems • Joseph Horatio Chant
... compressed animal life. Then a dull, hot weight closes round your brows, as if a heavy, fever-stricken hand was always clasping them; there it lies—at night, when the drowsiness which is not sleep overcomes you—in the morning, when you wake, with damp linen and dank hair: plunge your forehead in ice-cold water; before the drops have dried there it is burning—burning again. The distaste for all food grows upon you, till it becomes a loathing not to be driven away by bitters or quinine: there ...
— Border and Bastille • George A. Lawrence |
