"Mire" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... bowed within him, three times he cried out: "Why art thou cast down, O my soul? and why art thou disquieted in me? Hope thou in God: for I shall yet praise Him for the help of His countenance" (Psalm xlii. 5). And Jeremiah, remembering the wormwood and the gall, and the deep mire of the dungeon into which they had plunged him, and from which he had scarcely been delivered, said: "It is good that a man should both hope and quietly wait for the salvation of the ...
— When the Holy Ghost is Come • Col. S. L. Brengle
... we did not go to church because the weather was bad, or there was no preaching within twenty miles of us, or my mother was not well, or the roads were impassable with mire or frost, Mary 'Liza and I learned two questions in the Shorter Catechism, and she learned the references as well. We also committed a hymn to memory, and five verses of a psalm. Beyond this, no religious exercise was ...
— When Grandmamma Was New - The Story of a Virginia Childhood • Marion Harland
... of wealth, I should be the last to question her right to opportunities for self-development, or to deny her the joy of assisting her sorely driven sisters to rise out of the industrial mire, and stand erect in self-reliant independence. But if the League is to grow until it becomes the universal expression of the woman's part in organized labor, then the privilege of assisting with financial help the ordinary activities of the League ...
— The Trade Union Woman • Alice Henry
... are ankle-deep, slush, and mire, that 't is hard to get to the post-office, and cruel to send the maid out. 'Tis a slough of despair, or I should sooner have thanked you for your offer of the "Life," which we shall very much like to have, and will return duly. I do not know when I shall be in town, but in a week or two ...
— The Best Letters of Charles Lamb • Charles Lamb
... she felt; a blank of misery through which her reviving soul— like the shoot of a plant trodden into mire—pushed feebly towards the sunlight that coaxed her eyes to open. Something it sought there . . . a face . . . yes, ...
— Lady Good-for-Nothing • A. T. Quiller-Couch
... sailed north-east two leagues, when we found a cove [39] where vessels can anchor in safety, and which is quarter of a league or thereabouts in circuit. The bottom is all mire, and the surrounding land is bordered by very high rocks. In this place there is a very good silver mine, according to the report of the miner, Master Simon, who accompanied me. Some leagues farther on there is a little stream called river Boulay [40] where the tide rises half a league into ...
— Voyages of Samuel de Champlain, Vol. 2 • Samuel de Champlain
... Deeply he sighed, and with naked sword Out of the coach he leaped in the mire, But Ismen called again the angry lord, And with grave words appeased his foolish ire. The prince content remounted at his sword, Toward a hill on drove the aged sire, And hasting forward up the bank they pass, Till far behind the Christian ...
— Jerusalem Delivered • Torquato Tasso
... Zollicoffer, who was killed at the battle of Mill Springs in Kentucky. The Rebel officers undertook to carry off the immense supplies of food which had been accumulated; but in the panic, barrels of meat and flour, sacks of coffee, hogsheads of sugar were rolled into the streets and trampled into the mire. Millions of dollars' worth were lost to the Confederacy. The farmers in the country feared that they would lose their slaves, and from all the section round they hurried the poor creatures towards the South, hoping to find a place where they ...
— My Days and Nights on the Battle-Field • Charles Carleton Coffin
... proffered honour. "Am not I," he said, "a Count, a Field-Marshal, a man of wealth? all of which I owe to the kindness of my dear, dead mistress. Are not such honours enough for the peasant's son whom she raised from the mire to sit by her side, that I should purchase another bauble by an act of treachery to ...
— Love affairs of the Courts of Europe • Thornton Hall
... whip, and Willie Dart said that he'd come back if he was chased away. Shandon mentioned the police of New York, and Dart asked him reproachfully if he delighted in wounding him in his most sensitive part; wanted to know if his Noble Benefactor was the sort to drive a man back into the mire he had just emerged from, to thwart all effort to lead a pure, sweet, rural existence. Finally Shandon contented himself by forbidding Dart to meddle in the future with anything not in any way a part of his own business; and nourished the secret hope that a few weeks of ...
— The Short Cut • Jackson Gregory
... matter,...why the delicate dish that tempts An o'ergorged epicure to the last morsel That stuffs him to the throat-gates, is no more. If matter be not, but as sages say, Spirit is all, and all things visible Are one, the infinitely modified, Think, Jacob, what that pig is, and the mire Wherein he stands knee-deep! And there! the breeze Pleads with me, and has won thee to a smile That speaks conviction. O'er yon blossom'd field Of beans it came, and thoughts of ...
— The Humourous Poetry of the English Language • James Parton
... from the green things of life, that is without hope, that hath no summer in its fibres, is torn and whirled by the same wind that but caresses its brethren—it hath no bough to cling to—it is dashed from path to path—till the winds fall, and it is crushed into the mire for ever. ...
— The Last Days of Pompeii • Edward George Bulwer-Lytton
... stupidly, but it gave me the fillip needed to pick up the threads. I remembered the tunnel now and the Kansas journalist. Then behind the light I saw a face which pulled my flickering senses out of the mire. ...
— Mr. Standfast • John Buchan
... they daily pass to and from their provision grounds, not an overhanging bough or straggling briar ever seems to be cut, so that you have to brush through a rank vegetation, creep under fallen trees and spiny creepers, and wade through pools of mud and mire, which cannot dry up because the sun is not allowed to penetrate. Their food is almost wholly roots and vegetables, with fish or game only as an occasional luxury, and they are consequently very subject to various skin diseases, the children especially being often miserable-looking objects, ...
— The Malay Archipelago - Volume II. (of II.) • Alfred Russel Wallace
... whispers from the mire of the sea. Or that sigh of the evil, from the dust ascending before thee. Each soul is still weeping—each heart in sorrow alone. Or that mind of the living that fell from ...
— The Secret of the Creation • Howard D. Pollyen
... he came out of his nook to warm himself on a wet day, Toby trotted. Making, with his leaky shoes, a crooked line of slushy footprints in the mire; and blowing on his chilly hands and rubbing them against each other, poorly defended from the searching cold by threadbare mufflers of grey worsted, with a private apartment only for the thumb, and a common room ...
— The Chimes • Charles Dickens
... whither they were going, and in the midst of the plain they fell into a very miry slough, which was called the Slough of Despond. Here they wallowed for a time, and Christian, because of the burden that was on his back, began to sink in the mire. ...
— The Worlds Greatest Books - Vol. II: Fiction • Arthur Mee, J. A. Hammerton, Eds.
... along to St. Klarengasse on the clumsy horses placed at their disposal by the Council in case of fire. He was followed by the millers, with brass fire engines. While their well-fed nags drew on sledges, with little noise, through the mire of the streets now softened by the rain, the heavy wooden water barrels needed in the work of extinguishing the flames, there was a loud rattling and clanking as the carts appeared on which the men from the Public Works building were bringing large ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... refusing the oath of supremacy, were arrested at their firesides: herded together like cattle; driven at the point of the bayonet, amid the gibes, jeers, and scoffs of soldiers, up to this dreary place, and thrust promiscuously into a dark vault in this castle; almost smothered in filth and mire; a prey to pestilent disease, and to every malignity which brutality could inflict, they died here unpitied. A few escaping down the rocks were recaptured, and subjected to ...
— Sunny Memories Of Foreign Lands, Volume 1 (of 2) • Harriet Elizabeth (Beecher) Stowe
... Wales, on the hither side of the river Dee, where the ship was to be launched. Here the train stopped, and absolutely deposited our whole party of excursionists, under a heavy shower, in the midst of a muddy potato-field, whence we were to wade through mud and mire to the ship-yard, almost half a mile off. Some kind Christian, I know not whom, gave me half of his umbrella, and half of his cloak, and thereby I got to a shed near the ship, without being entirely ...
— Passages From the English Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... pause before the wall they fought, While Death exulted o'er them; deadly Strife Shrieked out a long wild cry from host to host. With blood of slain men dust became red mire: Here, there, fast fell ...
— The Fall of Troy • Smyrnaeus Quintus
... unappeased passion. Red—red! The hovels were spattered with the red clay. The man, the skinny, wretched creature who begged for a moment of his gracious mercy at the gate, dripped in ruby filth. The mule sank and wallowed in vermilion mire. ...
— Peter the Brazen - A Mystery Story of Modern China • George F. Worts
... off the bonnet and ran upstairs, and shut the door of her attic. Apparently she meant to improve the bonnet by some touch. After waiting nervously a few moments, the aged Hilda slipped silently downstairs, and through the kitchen, and so by the garden, where with their feet in mire the hare trees were giving signs of hope under the soft blue sky, into the street. Florrie would never know ...
— Hilda Lessways • Arnold Bennett
... wid de people, an' he got 'lected to de legislatur. Den he got a fine house, an' his ole wife warn't good 'nuff for him. Den dere war a young school-teacher, an' he begun cuttin' his eyes at her. But she war as deep in de mud as he war in de mire, an' he jis' gib up his ole wife and married her, a fusty thing. He war a mean ole hypocrit, an' I wouldn't sen' fer him to bury my cat. Robby, I'se down on dese kine ob preachers like a ...
— Iola Leroy - Shadows Uplifted • Frances E.W. Harper
... all ranks, peers and yokels, prize-fighters and Jews, and the last came to plunder, and are now plundering amidst that wild confusion of hail and rain, men and horses, carts and carriages. But all hurry in one direction, through mud and mire; there's a town only three miles distant, which is soon reached, and soon filled, it will not contain one-third of that mighty rabble; but there's another town farther on—the good old city is farther on, only twelve miles; what's that! who'll ...
— Lavengro - The Scholar, The Gypsy, The Priest • George Borrow
... divine truth upon which the love of self and the love of the world is crucified. I am not afraid to repeat in your ears the words of Jesus. He has left them on record, that all who will heed them in the meek and teachable spirit of a little child may be lifted out of the mire and filth and darkness of a sinful life into the glorious liberty ...
— Life and Labors of Elder John Kline, the Martyr Missionary - Collated from his Diary by Benjamin Funk • John Kline
... and then, of our affairs." "I am sure, we shall be worse than brutes, if we fly upon one another, at a time when the floods of Belial are upon us." "The Devil has made us like a troubled sea, and the mire and mud begins now also to heave up apace. Even good and wise men suffer themselves to fall into their paroxysms, and the shake which the Devil is now giving us, fetches up the dirt which before lay still at the bottom ...
— Salem Witchcraft and Cotton Mather - A Reply • Charles W. Upham
... giants? Or what woman could love the bed that genders monsters? Who could be the wife of demons, and know the seed whose fruit is monstrous? Or who would fain share her couch with a barbarous giant? Who caresses thorns with her fingers? Who would mingle honest kisses with mire? Who would unite shaggy limbs to smooth ones which correspond not? Full ease of love cannot be taken when nature cries out against it: nor doth the love customary in the use of women sort ...
— The Danish History, Books I-IX • Saxo Grammaticus ("Saxo the Learned")
... and it was in reference to these that he collected. If the book were the one desired by him, no anxiety and toil, no payable price, was to be grudged for its acquisition. If the book were an inch out of his own line, it might be trampled in the mire for aught he cared, be it as rare or ...
— The Book-Hunter - A New Edition, with a Memoir of the Author • John Hill Burton
... was accompanied in all her wanderings by a fragile infant, which she seemed to carry with especial care and tenderness. Sometimes, too, in the bleak afternoons, she would be seen wending her way through mud and mire, setting her weary face against the bitter east wind, and patiently singing on; and motherly women, coming from the gay shops and stores, where they had been purchasing Christmas toys for their own children, would often stop to look at the baby's pinched, white features with pity, and would say, ...
— Stories By English Authors: London • Various
... rascal that we ride; Let us see the mighty shoulders that will never, never fail. To lift him high, and plant him, on the crooked rail astride. The seven-sided pine rail, the pleasant bed of briar, The little touch of hickory law, with a dipping in the mire. ...
— Guy Rivers: A Tale of Georgia • William Gilmore Simms
... of man is as noble and praiseworthy a science, as the cultivation of cabbage, or the garden sass! Says brother Theodore, "You don't cast garden-seed in the mire, over the rough broken ground, and exhibit your benefits. No, you dig, level, rake, and then sow your seed, you give them sunshine and water, you tear out the weeds that would choke your infant vegetables—why would ...
— The Humors of Falconbridge - A Collection of Humorous and Every Day Scenes • Jonathan F. Kelley
... they wallowed in the bloody mire Of dead and dying thousands,—sometimes gaining A yard or two of ground, which brought them nigher To some odd angle for which all were straining; At other times, repulsed by the close fire, Which really poured as if all Hell were raining Instead of Heaven, they stumbled backwards ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 6 • Lord Byron
... children of the village choir, Your carols on the midnight throw, Oh, bright across the mist and mire, Ye ruddy hearths of Christmas glow! Beat back the dread, beat down the woe, Let's cheerily descend the hill; Be welcome all, to come or go, The ghosts we all ...
— Christmas - Its Origin, Celebration and Significance as Related in Prose and Verse • Various
... Shakespeare, what luminous vapours are to the traveller; he follows it at all adventures it is sure to lead him out of his way, and sure to ingulf him in the mire. It has some malignant power over his mind, and its fascinations are irresistible. Whatever be the dignity or profundity of his disquisitions, whether he be enlarging knowledge or exalting affection, whether he be amusing attention with incidents, or enchaining it in suspense, ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson in Nine Volumes - Volume V: Miscellaneous Pieces • Samuel Johnson
... other before; the same yelling and execrations, sights, sounds, and smells ever the same in horror; the same cheers when the enemy's colours were lowered, followed by the same transient depression; the cleansing of decks from stains of powder and mire of human blood, the casting overboard of human bodies that had done their life's work, broken waste and other rubbish. For weeks Adrian after would taste blood, smell blood, dream blood, till it seemed in his ...
— The Light of Scarthey • Egerton Castle
... her weep before, when it suited her purpose, and he only smiled and answered: "Yes, Agnes, you ruined and trampled it in the mire of sin; but I have rebuilt it, and, by the mercy of God, I hope I have purified it. Look you, woman! when you overturned the temple, you crumbled your own image that was set up there; and I long, long ago swept out and gave to the hungry winds the despised dust of that broken idol, and over my ...
— St. Elmo • Augusta J. Evans
... you, Miss Jennie! how can you say so, when she took you, poor little beggar as you was, all from the mire and dirt to be her ...
— The Elm Tree Tales • F. Irene Burge Smith
... by jocosely suggesting to him as the motto of his new order the word "Paulatim." The same one, no doubt, would have made a like suggestion to the Apostle of the Gentiles. Advocates of "Paulatim" methods have too often left the wheels of Christ's chariot fast in the mire. We rejoice, for its sake, that enthusiasts sometimes appear on the scene. The missions of the early Paulists, into which went Father Hecker's entire heart, aroused the country. To-day, after a lapse of thirty or ...
— Life of Father Hecker • Walter Elliott
... no use here," said the experienced Macko, recollecting his former service under Witold, "because large horses would at once stick in the mire, but the native nag goes everywhere, ...
— The Knights of the Cross • Henryk Sienkiewicz
... over which it happens to shine. But an eternal possibility has no material power. It is only one of an infinity of other things equally possible intrinsically, yet most of them quite unrealisable in this world of blood and mire. The realm of eternal essences rains down no Jovian thunderbolts, but only a ghostly Uranian calm. There is no frown there; rather, a passive and universal welcome to any who may have in them the will and the ...
— Winds Of Doctrine - Studies in Contemporary Opinion • George Santayana
... paternal stoniness on the other. One does not break one's teeth on it as over the torone, which is only to be cajoled into masticability by prolonged suction, and often not then; but the teeth sink into it as the wagoner's wheels into clayey mire, and every now and then receive a shock, as from sunken rocks, from the raisin-stones, indurated almonds, pistachio-nuts, and pine-seeds, which startle the ignorant and innocent eater with frightful doubts. I carried away one ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 27, January, 1860 • Various
... and although the widespread notion that the shock of the war would automatically make a new heaven and a new earth, and that the dog would never go back to his vomit nor the sow to her wallowing in the mire, is already seen to be a delusion, yet we are far more conscious of our condition than we were, and far less disposed to submit to it. Revolution, lately only a sensational chapter in history or a ...
— Heartbreak House • George Bernard Shaw
... was extremely wet; therefore Tommy, in falling, dirtied himself from head to foot; and the sow, who came up at that instant, passed over him, as he attempted to rise, and rolled him back again into the mire. ...
— The History of Sandford and Merton • Thomas Day
... her face, and gave her another note, saying mournfully, 'You see they all, but my mother, think, that if I am dragging our family honour through the mire, I've got something by it. Poor Bryan, he knows no better—he's younger than me by ...
— The Young Step-Mother • Charlotte M. Yonge
... I though deluges down pour Beating earth to mire, Though heaven shattering with the thunder's roar Scorcheth now in fire, Though every planet molten from its place Should trickle ...
— My Beautiful Lady. Nelly Dale • Thomas Woolner
... (when we have persuaded the mass that their wretchedness is an eternal law, that sufferers must give up hope of relief, that it is a crime to sigh for welfare in this world, since the crown of glory on high is the only reward for misery here), then the stupefied people will resignedly wallow in the mire, all their impatient aspirations for better days smothered, and the volcano-blasts blown aside, which made the future of rulers so horrid and so dark? They see not, in truth, that this blind and passive faith ...
— The Wandering Jew, Complete • Eugene Sue
... imitations, which drove his genius to other pursuits, and which filled the public ear with such enormities of octo-syllabic ennui, that it hates poetry ever since. The Helicon of which he drank the gushing and pure stream, was stirred into mire by the slippers of school-girls, city-apprentices, and chambermaid-poetesses of ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 62, No. 384, October 1847 • Various
... weary traveler was put down at a country inn whose bed and board were such as to win little praise. Long before daybreak the next morning a blast from the driver's horn summoned him to the renewal of his journey. If the coach stuck fast in a mire, as it often did, the passengers must alight and ...
— The Greatest Highway in the World • Anonymous
... young and daring; beginning as a mere clerk, he had risen to be a notary; but at this period his face showed, to the eyes of an observer, certain haggard lines, and an expression of weariness in the pursuit of pleasure. When a man plunges into the mire of excesses it is seldom that his face shows no trace of it. In the present instance the lines of the wrinkles and the heat of the complexion were markedly ignoble. Instead of the pure glow which suffuses the tissues of a virtuous man and stamps them, ...
— Rise and Fall of Cesar Birotteau • Honore de Balzac
... a little pony And his name was Dapple Grey; I lent him to a lady, To ride a mile away. She whipped him and she slashed him, She rode him through the mire; I would not lend my pony now For all the ...
— Dramatized Rhythm Plays - Mother Goose and Traditional • John N. Richards
... proved a hopeless trade; it only plunged Derues deeper and deeper into the mire of financial disaster. The noblemen either forgot to pay while they were alive, or on their death were found to be insolvent. Derues was driven to ordering goods and merchandise on credit, and selling them at a lower price for ready money. Victims of this treatment ...
— A Book of Remarkable Criminals • H. B. Irving
... special occasions, the work of the schools went steadily forward. In seven years, more than a hundred such schools were opened, and Lord Shaftesbury was unfailing in his attendance whenever he could help forward the cause. His advice to the managers to 'keep the schools in the mire and the gutter' sounds curious; but he was afraid that, as they throve, boys of more prosperous classes would come in and drive out those for whom they were specially founded. 'So long', he said, 'as the mire and gutter exist, so long as this class exists, you must keep the school adapted ...
— Victorian Worthies - Sixteen Biographies • George Henry Blore
... the hill, Campesino Garcia?' 'I saw beside the milking byre, White with want and black with mire, The little man with eyes afire ...
— Songs of Action • Arthur Conan Doyle
... an ugly little stream, with much mire and some quicksand to be avoided; with deep earth-canyons and sliding avalanches of dirt on steep slopes, and now and then a stone outcrop jagged and difficult, not to say dangerous, to footways, and impossible to stock. It was called Little Wolf because it was narrower than ...
— Winning the Wilderness • Margaret Hill McCarter
... and then I fell to kicking him, and all the while he writhed like a wounded snake and cursed horribly, though he never cried out or asked for mercy. At last I ceased and looked at him, and he was no pretty sight to see—indeed, what with his cuts and bruises and the mire of the roadway, it would have been hard to know him for the gallant cavalier whom I had met not five minutes before. But uglier than all his hurts was the look in his wicked eyes as he lay there on his back in the pathway and glared up ...
— Montezuma's Daughter • H. Rider Haggard
... continued for many a year. John Ferguson, writing in 1788 from Fredericksburg, Bay Quinte, to a friend in Lachine, Lower Canada, says of his journey: 'After a most tedious and fatiguing journey I arrived here, nineteen days on the way, sometimes for whole days up to the waist in water or mire.' But the average time required to ascend the rapids was from ten to twelve days, and three ...
— The Loyalists of America and Their Times, Vol. 2 of 2 - From 1620-1816 • Edgerton Ryerson
... counting the hours lost upon the insignificant little lines. Ah I if I had listened to her, my glorious title of poet, which it has taken me so many years to win, would be now dragged through the black mire of sensational literature. And when I think that to this selfsame woman I had at first opened my heart, confided all my dreams; and when I think that the contempt she now shows me because I do not make money dates from the first days of ...
— Artists' Wives • Alphonse Daudet
... investigation, we are reminded of nothing so much as of the weary traveller who, having patiently pursued an ignis fatuus through half the night, beholds it at last vanish; but not until it has conducted him up to his chin in the mire. ...
— The Last Twelve Verses of the Gospel According to S. Mark • John Burgon
... 23,157; G. Heaton, 23,140; W.H. Greening, 22,881; and W. Warlow, 19,193. This election was fought with all the rancour of a political contest, Tory and Liberal being pitted against one another in the name of religion, the Book of Books being dragged through the mire of party warfare in the most outrageous manner, discreditable to both sides, and especially so to those teachers of the Gospel, who delighted in the almost blasphemous alliterations of "Bible and beer," "gin and Jesus," &c., so freely bandied about. The Liberal party ...
— Showell's Dictionary of Birmingham - A History And Guide Arranged Alphabetically • Thomas T. Harman and Walter Showell
... you hear them howling day and night? Can you possibly say that they are kind or compassionate? Or are they willing to be good and great when one comes? Do you have confidence in a single one of them? Have they not even dragged your good name into the mire? Are any of the things that are sacred to you and to me sacred to them? Can they be moved the one-thousandth part of an inch by your distress or my distress or the distress of any human being? Is not the slime of slander thick upon their tongues? Is not your smile a thorn in their flesh? ...
— The Goose Man • Jacob Wassermann
... and involuntarily raised his hand in salute. He scarcely knew he did it and for a second she seemed not to understand. But the next second she burst out crying and hurriedly took out her handkerchief and hid her face as she passed. One of the boys lying on the blood-wet mire in Flanders, was Donal's bitter thought, but he had had his kind hours to recall at the last moment—and even now ...
— Robin • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... thy Strength, and thou know'st mine, Neither our own, but giv'n; what folly then To boast what Arms can do, since thine no more Than Heav'n permits; nor mine, though doubled now To trample thee as mire: For proof look up, And read thy Lot in yon celestial Sign Where thou art weigh'd, and shewn how light, how weak, If thou resist. The Fiend look'd up, and knew His mounted Scale aloft; nor more, but fled Murm'ring, and with him fled the Shades ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... able to illustrate this most excellent general description by some examples. Chopin said that Beethoven raised him one moment up to the heavens and the next moment precipitated him to the earth, nay, into the very mire. Such a fall Chopin experienced always at the commencement of the last movement of the C minor Symphony. Gutmann, who informed me of this, added that pieces such as the first movement of the Moonlight Sonata ...
— Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician - Volume 1-2, Complete • Frederick Niecks
... it reached the court of AEthelstan, but his appearance there was the signal for a burst of ill-will among the courtiers. Again they drove him from Eadmund's train, threw him from his horse as he passed through the marshes, and with the wild passion of their age trampled him under foot in the mire. The outrage ended in fever, and Dunstan rose from his sick-bed a monk. But the monastic profession was then little more than a vow of celibacy and his devotion took no ascetic turn. His nature in fact was sunny, versatile, artistic; ...
— History of the English People, Volume I (of 8) - Early England, 449-1071; Foreign Kings, 1071-1204; The Charter, 1204-1216 • John Richard Green
... literature, of which more is said in the next book.—TRANS.] had inundated the German world with a true deluge, which threatened to rise up, even over the highest mountains. It takes a long time for such a flood to subside again, for the mire to dry away; and as in any epoch there are numberless aping poets, so the imitation of the flat and watery produced a chaos, of which now scarcely a notion remains. To find out that trash was trash was hence the greatest sport, yea, the triumph, of the critics of those days. Whoever had only ...
— Autobiography • Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
... true. I left Minden two weeks ago, but the impassable condition of the roads compelled me to travel with snail-like slowness. My carriage every day stuck in an ocean of mire, so that I had to send for men from the adjoining villages in order to set it going again. The axle-tree broke twice, and I was obliged to remain several day in the most forsaken little country towns until I succeeded ...
— LOUISA OF PRUSSIA AND HER TIMES • Louise Muhlbach
... Tidings yet of our Brave Adventurers, notwithstanding we despacht men to the likeliest Stations to enquire after them. They were still Scuffleing in the Mire, and could not Possibly forward the Line this whole day more than one Mile and 64 Chains. Every Step of this Day's Work was thro' a cedar Bog, where the Trees were somewhat Smaller and grew more into a Thicket. It was now a great Misfortune to the Men ...
— Southern Literature From 1579-1895 • Louise Manly
... sensible forms, it is covered with corporeal stains, and wholly given to matter, contracts deeply its nature, loses all its original splendour, and almost changes its own species into that of another; just as the pristine beauty of the most lovely form would be destroyed by its total immersion in mire and clay. But the deformity of the first arises from inward filth, of its own contracting; of the second, from the accession of some foreign nature. If such a one then desires to recover his former beauty, it is necessary to cleanse the infected parts, ...
— An Essay on the Beautiful - From the Greek of Plotinus • Plotinus
... dwellers by nature in darkness, and like to the leaves' generations, That are little of might, that are moulded of mire, unenduring and shadowlike nations, Poor plumeless ephemerals, comfortless mortals, as visions of creatures fast fleeing, Lift up your mind unto us that are deathless, and dateless the date of our ...
— Studies in Song • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... of talk about Peter, and swindling, and a lawsuit," said Mrs. George Pye, quilting industriously. "Most of the Newbridge folks think it's all Peter's fault, and that Lige isn't to blame. But you can't tell. I dare say Lige is as deep in the mire as Peter. He was always a little too good to be ...
— Further Chronicles of Avonlea • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... moistly to their overcoats, or, fully dry, colored every part of the uniform with its powder. One saw men that appeared to have rolled over and over in a puddle bath of this whitish mud, and sometimes there was seen a sinister mixture of blood and mire. There is nothing romantic about a wounded soldier, for his condition brings a special emphasis on our human relation to ordinary meat. Dirty, exhausted, unshaven, smelling of the trenches, of his wounds, and of the antiseptics on his wounds, ...
— A Volunteer Poilu • Henry Sheahan
... as I listened, I heard a mutter of rough voices without, a tramp of feet, and the door swung suddenly open to admit two men, or rather three, for between them they dragged one, a short, squat fellow in riding boots and horseman's coat, but all so torn and bedraggled, so foul of blood and mire, as to seem scarce human. His hat was gone and his long, rain-soaked hair clung in black tangles about his bruised face and as he stood, swaying in his bonds, I thought him the ...
— Peregrine's Progress • Jeffery Farnol
... discontent of the demi-gods, who dreamed of the courts of heaven and power over wind and snow; for what better, said the dwarfs, could demi-gods do than nose in the earth for roots and cover their faces with mire, and run with the cheerful goats and be ...
— Tales of Three Hemispheres • Lord Dunsany
... that, off they galloped out on to the bogs, but so great a mire was there that nohow could they get on, and had to drag their horses out, and were wallowing there the more part of the day; and they gave to the devil withal the wandering churl who ...
— The Story of Grettir The Strong • Translated by Eirikr Magnusson and William Morris
... trying to me; it costs me a good deal to break loose from a liaison that force of time has almost converted into a habit. Besides, unfortunately, there exists a bond between us which is impossible to break completely. Destiny has brought forth from the mire of our sin a beautiful blossom, a sweet white lily. Let us remove the stain from her brow, although she is the offspring of an unlawful passion, do not let us corrupt her with our blameworthy conduct. Let us make ourselves worthy of ...
— The Grandee • Armando Palacio Valds
... of exile for a Crown-Prince fallen into such disfavor with Papa! A rugged, compact, by no means handsome little Town, at the meeting of the Warta and the Oder; stands naturally among sedges, willows and drained mire, except that human industry is pleasantly busy upon it, and has long been. So that the neighborhood is populous beyond expectation; studded with rough cottages in white-wash; hamlets in a paved condition; and comfortable signs of labor victoriously wrestling with ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XVIII. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—Seven-Years War Rises to a Height.—1757-1759. • Thomas Carlyle
... may, while his time shall last, make it as hard and difficult for them to go to eternal glory as he can. Oftentimes he abuses them with wrong apprehensions of God, and with wrong apprehensions of Christ. He also casts them into the mire, to the reproach of religion, the shame of their brethren, the derision of the world, ...
— The Jerusalem Sinner Saved • John Bunyan
... sweet repose one day, more than a century ago, by the rumbling of a ponderous coach and six, with four outriders and two equerries kicking up the dust; whilst a small body of heavy dragoons rode solemnly after the huge vehicle. It waded, with inglorious struggles, through a deep mire of mud, between the Palace and Hyde Park, until the cortege entered Kensington Park, as the gardens were then called, and began to track the old road that led to the red-brick structure to which William III. had added a higher ...
— The Wits and Beaux of Society - Volume 1 • Grace Wharton and Philip Wharton
... that of a West African negro is now, in these respects. The modern world is slowly, but surely, shaking off these and other monstrous survivals of savage delusions; and, whatever happens, it will not return to that wallowing in the mire. Until the contrary is proved, I venture to doubt whether, at this present moment, any Protestant theologian, who has a reputation to lose, will say that he believes the ...
— Lectures and Essays • Thomas Henry Huxley
... kings To mould us in their image naught avails, They weave a robe of many-coloured fire To garb the spirits thronging in the deep, And in the upper air its splendours keep Pure and unsullied, but below it trails Darkling and glimmering in our earthly mire. ...
— Poems of To-Day: an Anthology • Various
... characteristic of those who are yearning to rise above their low environment. It is not from external filth alone that a man seeks to cleanse himself, but from inward corruption also. And so he strives, and strives again, for purity—and falls the deeper in the mire. ...
— Maxim Gorki • Hans Ostwald
... has long rejected them with scorn, These human gems from out the mire and dust; A lapidary I would make of you, Whilst I some ...
— Fifteen Years With The Outcast • Mrs. Florence (Mother) Roberts
... as to leave himself free to follow his new bent. Now and then he would become aware of his blameable neglect, and make a feeble struggle to rectify what seemed to be growing into a habit — and one of the worst for a tutor; but he gradually sank back into the mire, for mire it was, comforting himself with the resolution that as soon as he was able to read Italian without absolutely spelling his way, he would let Euphra see what progress he had made, and then return with renewed ...
— David Elginbrod • George MacDonald
... metre into English, and he tried to induce Spenser to adopt it. Nash calls it "that drunken staggering kind of verse which is all vp hill and downe hill, like the way betwixt Stamford and Beechfeild, and goes like a horse plunging through the mire in the deep of winter, now soust vp to the saddle and straight ...
— History of English Humour, Vol. 1 (of 2) - With an Introduction upon Ancient Humour • Alfred Guy Kingan L'Estrange
... explained the astronomer, "and that I'm looking down into the starry heavens, with its Milky Way. I say, though, isn't it jolly up here—soaring above all these moiling mannikins below—wasting their precious lives grubbing in the mire—dead to the glories of the universe—seeking happiness and finding misery. Ugh!—wish I had a packet of dynamite to drop amongst them and ...
— A Trip to Venus • John Munro
... shone down upon a piteous sight—blood dyeing the green of that sodded escarp—blood in great clots upon the rocks and stumps of the rugged hill below—blood poured plenteously upon the dusty road, making it horrible with purple mire—blood staining the bridge and gathering in little pools upon the planks, and dripping slowly down through the cracks between them into the sluggish stream, where it floated with the water in great red clouds, toward which creatures dwelling in slimy depths below came up lazily, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 11, - No. 22, January, 1873 • Various
... not have any divorce trial," said Ishmael firmly. "We will not have your daughter's pure name dragged through the mire of a divorce court; we will have Lord Vincent and his accomplices arrested and tried; the valet for murder, and the viscount and the opera singer for conspiracy and kidnaping. We have proof enough to convict them all; the valet will ...
— Self-Raised • Emma Dorothy Eliza Nevitte Southworth
... "It is just such men as you and Dr. Weissmann who should snatch the pearl of truth from this bucket of mental mire." ...
— The Tyranny of the Dark • Hamlin Garland
... lately engaged, to their sorrow, against him, made up to the conqueror; admiration for him permeated even the French army. "At Paris," wrote D'Alembert to Voltaire, "everybody's head is turned about the King of Prussia; five months ago he was trailed in the mire." ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume VI. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... why I should not read it! A German comedy! That must be fine stuff for the German theatre, the most miserable of all. In Germany, Melpomene has untutored admirers, some walking on stilts, others crawling in the mire, from the altars of the goddess. The Germans will ever be repulsed, as they are rebels to her laws, and understand not the art to move ...
— Old Fritz and the New Era • Louise Muhlbach
... of the flesh; even of that flesh, who, or which also committeth the greatest enormities; for the flesh is but one, though its workings are divers: sometimes in a way most notoriously sensual and devilish, causing the soul to wallow in the mire. ...
— The Pharisee And The Publican • John Bunyan
... its prime malice is to oppose God it has every quality to make it as hideous as Satan himself. It goeth before a fall, but it does not cease to exist after the fall; and no matter how deep down in the mire of iniquity you search, you will find pride nethermost. Other vices excite one's pity; pride ...
— Explanation of Catholic Morals - A Concise, Reasoned, and Popular Exposition of Catholic Morals • John H. Stapleton
... said and done, some inequalities, some inevitable injustices, undoubtedly will remain. There are individuals in our societies whom no great crisis can lift out of the deep mire of egoism in which they are sunk. The question, however, is not whether there will be injustices or no, but rather how to limit the ...
— The Conquest of Bread • Peter Kropotkin
... of the year, every thing is deluged; and the roads, full of deep mudholes and formidable stumps, are now at their worst. The heavy wagons move slowly and laboriously forward, sometimes getting so deep in the mire that it is almost impossible to extricate them, and at times impeded by fallen trees, which the driver has to cut away. They are poorly protected against the searching rains, and for the last two days we ...
— Life at Puget Sound: With Sketches of Travel in Washington Territory, British Columbia, Oregon and California • Caroline C. Leighton
... on you, goodman! The ox and the cat themselves would laugh at you. The cat ate a rat, and it did not set well on her stomach, and the ox slipped in the mire in the yard. ...
— Giles Corey, Yeoman - A Play • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... from Paris, the other staying. Both were links in a long chain of political conspiring. They walked now down the street that was dark and old, underfoot old mire and mica-like glistening of fresher rain. The ...
— Foes • Mary Johnston
... having ascended a steep and thickly wooded hill on the skirts of the Black Forest, we halted and pitched our tents. It was little more than mid-day, but the road had been fearful—as bad as wading through a mire; men and beasts were worn out, and it was thought advisable to recruit well before entering the dreaded precincts of the Black Forest. Fires were lit, supper was cooked, spirits and pipes made their appearance, songs were sung, and ...
— A Lady's Visit to the Gold Diggings of Australia in 1852-53. • Mrs. Charles (Ellen) Clacey
... interest of the two parties is a common one; it must turn its back decidedly upon the Progressive party and oppose it whenever it departs from that interest, and thus force the Progressive party either to develop progressively and to rise above its own level or to sink deeper and deeper into the mire of insignificance and weakness in which it already stands knee deep; these must be the straightforward tactics of the German workingmen's party with ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. X. • Kuno Francke
... the bigger fools ourselves, for he intended to tyrannize over us, so that we must either have spoiled our trick, or else have let ourselves be mauled by the rude yokel, from whose conduct one can learn how haughty and overbearing such people become when they suddenly rise from the mire to a station of worth and honor. If I had, in an unlucky moment, impersonated a secretary myself, I might have got a thrashing, and the whole affair would have been a failure, for people would have laughed more at me than at the peasant. We had better let him ...
— Comedies • Ludvig Holberg
... large heritage of manhood, with its many realms and illimitable interests, for the sordid ease of the hearth and the good word of the unworthy. He fills men with thoughts that shake down the unlovely temple of comfort. This was good, to force whoever was not already too far sunk into the mire, high up to the larger atmosphere, whence they could see how minute an atom is man, how infinite and blind and pitiless the might that encompasses his little life. Many feeble spirits ran back homewards from the horrid solitudes and abysses of Manfred, and the moral terrors ...
— Critical Miscellanies, Vol. I - Essay 3: Byron • John Morley
... was lazy and neglected his work, Ariel (who was invisible to all eyes but Prospero's) would come slily and pinch him, and sometimes tumble him down in the mire; and then Ariel, in the likeness of an ape, would make mouths at him. Then swiftly changing his shape, in the likeness of a hedgehog, he would lie tumbling in Caliban's way, who feared the hedgehog's sharp quills would prick his bare feet. ...
— Tales from Shakespeare • Charles Lamb and Mary Lamb
... world may be upon a woman after she is down in the mire, there is no denying that it is reluctant to tumble her from her eminence and throw her there. A woman will find more champions than detractors in the face of the most serious charge; especially a young and pretty one, or one whose life has been such as to shape sympathy ...
— The Bondboy • George W. (George Washington) Ogden
... through the night-shrouded town, and called the peasants from their well-earned rest to toil onwards in their march. The wind howled fiercely over the moorland; a close, thick, wetting rain descended. Chilled to the bone, worn out with long fatigue, sinking to the knees in mire, onward they marched to destruction. One by one the weary peasants fell off from their ranks to sleep, and die in the rain-soaked moor, or to seek some house by the wayside wherein to hide till daybreak. One by one at first, then in gradually increasing ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. XXII (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... love. If your love was pure and lawful I am sure your angel guardian smiled upon you; and if it was not, I cannot say you have nothing to answer for, and yet I think God may have said: 'She is a quadroone; all the rights of her womanhood trampled in the mire, sin made easy to her—almost compulsory,—charge it to account of whom it ...
— Madame Delphine • George W. Cable
... whoever opposes him." The Egyptians gave no quarter that memorable day. Vengeance had free course: the slain Libyans lay in heaps upon heaps—the chariot wheels passed over them—the horses trampled them in the mire. Hundreds were pushed and forced into the marshes and into the river itself, and, if they escaped the flight of missiles which followed, found for the most part a watery grave in the strong current. Ramesses portrays ...
— Ancient Egypt • George Rawlinson
... sin, suddenly the vision of better things breaks through the cloud and storm. Then the vision strikes clarity into reason, memory and imagination. In these hours the soul scoffs at sordid things. As the flower climbs upward to escape from the slough, as the foot turns away from the mire, as the nostril avoids the filth, as the ear hates discord, so in these hours the soul scoffs at selfishness and sin. Oh, how beautiful seem purity and gentleness, and sympathy and truth! And these hours are big with prophecy. They tell us what the soul shall be when time and God's ...
— A Man's Value to Society - Studies in Self Culture and Character • Newell Dwight Hillis
... I wondred, that since the grounds thereof were so firm and solid, that nothing more sublime had been built thereon. As on the contrary, I compar'd the writings of the Ancient heathen which treated of Manner, to most proud and stately Palaces which were built only on sand and mire, they raise the vertues very high, and make them appear estimable above all the things in the world; but they doe not sufficiently instruct us in the knowledg of them, and often what they call by that fair Name, is but a stupidness, or an act of pride, ...
— A Discourse of a Method for the Well Guiding of Reason - and the Discovery of Truth in the Sciences • Rene Descartes |
