"Morass" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Here we surveyed its rock-hewn seats, capable of accommodating an audience larger than that of all the theaters of New York; but there was no longer a voice to cry, "Great is Diana of the Ephesians!" The sea has forsaken the harbor, which is now a pestilential morass. We passed through the ruins of the custom-house, now miles inland, and found a single Turkish soldier on guard. The peasants who cultivate some parts of the plain come from distant villages, and fever, filth, ...
— Fables of Infidelity and Facts of Faith - Being an Examination of the Evidences of Infidelity • Robert Patterson
... this passage, one would have thought that, in the days of Tiberius, Germany was almost as bare of roads as the present interior of Arabia and Chinese Tartary; and that each tribe in that enormous wilderness of wood and morass was approached, as the present people of Dahomey, Ashantee and Timbucto, by a single path; and that it was only, after the lapse of centuries, when, in the due course of things, Germany had assumed a more civilised character, that there were two, three, or more roads; so that we can quite understand ...
— Tacitus and Bracciolini - The Annals Forged in the XVth Century • John Wilson Ross
... miles up the mountains ere discovering my mistake. Retracing my way, the right road is finally taken; but the gale increases in violence, the cold is numbing to unprotected hands and ears, and the wind and driving snow difficult to face. At one point the trail leads through a morass, in which are two dead horses, swamped in attempting to cross, and near by lies an abandoned camel, lying in the mud and wearily munching at a heap of kali (cut barley-straw) placed before him by his owners before leaving him to his kismet; perchance with a forlorn ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle Volume II. - From Teheran To Yokohama • Thomas Stevens
... illuminated the landscape as far as the eye could see. Ahead of us a flying shape, hair lank and glistening in the downpour, followed a faint path skirting that green tongue of morass which we had noted from the upland. It was Kegan Van Roon. He glanced over his shoulder, showing a yellow, terror-stricken face. We were gaining upon him. Darkness fell, and the thunder cracked and boomed as though the very ...
— The Return of Dr. Fu-Manchu • Sax Rohmer
... arrived within a few miles of Northfield, they came to a wide morass, where it was necessary to dismount and lead their horses. They were also thrown into confusion in their endeavors to transport their baggage through the swamp. Here the Indians had formed an ambuscade. The surprise was sudden, and disastrous in the extreme. The Indians, several hundred in ...
— King Philip - Makers of History • John S. C. (John Stevens Cabot) Abbott
... remembered—had Ches Mason; and, being one of those tenacious souls who cling to friendship and to a resilient faith in the good that is in the worst of us, he had thrown out a tentative life-line, as it were, and hoped that Ford might clutch it before he became quite submerged in the sodden morass of inebriety. ...
— The Uphill Climb • B. M. Bower
... post, and gird him with fire and sword. From land to land, from hill to hill, from Hereford to Caerleon, from Caerleon to Milford, from Milford to Snowdon, through Snowdon to yonder fort, built, they say, by the fiends or the giants,—through defile and through forest, over rock, through morass, we have pressed on his heels. Battle and foray alike have drawn the blood from his heart; and thou wilt have seen the drops yet red on the way, where the stone tells that ...
— Harold, Complete - The Last Of The Saxon Kings • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... hardly a human foot would pass, Or an honest heart would dare The quaking mud of the foul morass, With rank weed choked, and with clotted grass, Fit ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 101, September 5, 1891 • Various
... dries after rain. Those who have experienced the discomfort of walking the fells of Cumberland and Westmoreland, which at most seasons of the year resemble an enormous wet sponge, often combined with the real danger of bog and morass, will appreciate the better conditions met with in Sussex hill rambling. Where the chalk is uncovered it becomes exceedingly slippery after a shower, but there is rarely a ...
— Seaward Sussex - The South Downs from End to End • Edric Holmes
... left, and on the right a long stretch of black, funereal marshes. Seating herself on a ruinous little bridge of unpainted and wormeaten timbers, she looked down into a narrow, sluggish rivulet, of the color of ink, which oozed noiselessly from the morass into the ocean. Her strength was gone: for the present farther flight was impossible, unless she fled from earth—fled into ...
— Not Pretty, But Precious • John Hay, et al.
... marvellous groupings of genius since the Athens of Pericles. The revolution of 1848 called from the mud the sewermen. Flaubert, his face to the past, gazed sorrowfully at Carthage and wrote an epic of the French bourgeois. Zola and his crowd delved into a moral morass, and the world grew weary of them. And then the faint, fading flowers of romanticism were put into albums where their purple harmonies and subtle sayings are pressed into sweet twilight forgetfulness. Berlioz, mad Hector of the flaming locks, whose orchestral ozone vivified the scores of Wagnerand ...
— Chopin: The Man and His Music • James Huneker
... they did. Deep down in the jungle, where no bright sun could pierce the darkness, nor human voice be heard, far from any habitation of man or means of supporting life, on the edge of a dank, stagnant morass that was shunned by all but noisome reptiles and wandering beasts of prey, they set them down and left them, the dead husband and the living wife, alone to meet the horrors of the coming night—alone, without a chance ...
— Tales of Wonder Every Child Should Know • Various
... Artemisium, and here the fleet was mustered, to co-operate with the land forces, and oppose, in a narrow strait, the progress of the Persian fleet. The defile of Thermopylae itself, at the south of Thessaly, was between Mount OEta and an impassable morass on the Maliac Gulf. Nature had thus provided a double position of defense—a narrow defile on the land, and a narrow strait on the water, through which the army and the fleet must need pass if ...
— Ancient States and Empires • John Lord
... 'from this time forth the Great Khan began to keep numbers of elephants.' It is obvious that cavalry could not manoeuvre in a morass such as fronts the city. Let us refer to the account ...
— The Travels of Marco Polo, Volume 2 • Marco Polo and Rustichello of Pisa
... thither; and privately has his eye upon them, on Friedrich's part!—For the rest, this upland platform, insensibly sloping two ways, and as yet undrained, is of scraggy boggy nature in many places; much of it damp ground, or sheer morass; better parts of it covered, at this season, with rank June grass, or greener luxuriance of oats and barley. A humble peaceable scene; peaceable till this afternoon; dotted, too, with six or seven poor Hamlets, ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XV. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... of some benighted traveller who had lost his way. After listening intently, and firing several rifles to guide the wanderer or apprize him that assistance was at hand, the party crossed the creek in a canoe, and moved along the skirts of the morass, hallooing loudly all the time; the cries, however, heard only at intervals at the commencement, became gradually indistinct, and at last ceased altogether. After an ineffectual search for an hour or more, the party again turned towards Huron, strongly impressed with the belief, ...
— An Englishman's Travels in America - His Observations Of Life And Manners In The Free And Slave States • John Benwell
... up which Urga is located. The road was strewn with the overcoats, shirts, boots, caps and kettles which the Chinese had thrown away in their flight; and marked by many of their dead. Further on the road crossed a morass, where on either side lay great mounds of the dead bodies of men, horses and camels with broken carts and military debris of every sort. Here the Tibetans of Baron Ungern had cut up the escaping Chinese baggage transport; and it was a strange and ...
— Beasts, Men and Gods • Ferdinand Ossendowski
... of this contrivance to facilitate the passage of a morass. But I confess, that in my confusion I had entirely forgotten it, and probably should have continued to do so until too ...
— A Complete Account of the Settlement at Port Jackson • Watkin Tench
... This had been the great stumbling-block in the minds of the committee of the House of Commons; but Mr. Stephenson has succeeded in overcoming it. A foundation of hurdles, or, as he called it, basket-work, was thrown over the morass, and the interstices were filled with moss and other elastic matter. Upon this the clay and soil were laid down, and the road does float, for we passed over it at the rate of five and twenty miles an hour, and saw the stagnant swamp water trembling on the surface of the soil on either side ...
— Records of a Girlhood • Frances Anne Kemble
... of the enemy; the British rifles drove their infantry before them. Warrener's Horse and the irregular cavalry moved on the flank, the infantry marched straight the swamps, and while some of the guns kept on the solid road, others had to be dragged and pushed with immense labor through the morass. As the British advanced the enemy fell back, abandoning gun after gun. The general of the Sepoy force was on an elephant, on rising ground in the rear of his troops, and Captain Maude, who commanded the artillery, by a well-aimed shot knocked the elephant over, to the great ...
— In Times of Peril • G. A. Henty
... of the shore, extended forward for probably fifty feet, crowned along its ridge with numerous stunted trees. Trusting thus to obtain a firmer foothold and more extended view, I breasted the steep ascent and found the summit a narrow plateau, only a few yards in width, with a still more extensive morass upon the opposite side, which stretched away some distance in a desolate sea of cane and drooping grass. Fortunately it proved easy travelling along the ridge, which appeared of stone formation, probably ...
— Prisoners of Chance - The Story of What Befell Geoffrey Benteen, Borderman, - through His Love for a Lady of France • Randall Parrish
... trees and shrubs; yet, strange to say, instead of being lower than the level of the surrounding country, it is in the centre higher than towards its margin; indeed, from three sides of the swamp the waters actually flow into different rivers at a considerable rate. Probably the centre of the morass is not less than twelve feet above the flat country around it. Here and there some ridges of dry land appear, like low islands, above the general surface. On the west, however, the ground is higher, and streams flow into the swamp, ...
— The Western World - Picturesque Sketches of Nature and Natural History in North - and South America • W.H.G. Kingston
... far upon the sodden moor, full of dark imaginings, the rain beating upon my face and the wind whistling about my ears. God help those who wander into the great mire now, for even the firm uplands are becoming a morass. I found the black tor upon which I had seen the solitary watcher, and from its craggy summit I looked out myself across the melancholy downs. Rain squalls drifted across their russet face, and the heavy, slate-coloured clouds hung low over the landscape, trailing in gray wreaths down the sides of ...
— Hound of the Baskervilles • Authur Conan Doyle
... sand drinks in every drop of rain that falls on the surface. This percolates through it till it reaches the clay, which refuses to absorb it, or let it sink through to other beds. Thereupon the accumulated water breaks forth in springs at the base of the hills, and forms a wide tract of morass, interspersed with lagoons that teem with fish and wild fowl. This region is locally known as "Moor," in contradistinction to the commons or downs, which are the ...
— The Broom-Squire • S. (Sabine) Baring-Gould
... a gigantic Dismal Swamp, or Everglade. I need hardly say that it was Edmund who first drew this inference, and when its full meaning burst upon my mind I shuddered at the hellish design which Ingra evidently entertained. Plainly, he meant to throw us into the morass, either to drown in the foul water, whose miasma now assailed our nostrils, or to starve amidst the fens! But his real intention, as you will perceive in a little while, was ...
— A Columbus of Space • Garrett P. Serviss
... the north of Venice, the banks of sand, which near the city rise little above low-water mark, attain by degrees a higher level, and knit themselves at last into fields of salt morass, raised here and there into shapeless mounds, and intercepted by narrow creeks of sea. One of the feeblest of these inlets, after winding for some time among buried fragments of masonry, and knots of sunburnt weeds whitened with webs of fucus, stays itself in an utterly stagnant pool ...
— The Stones of Venice, Volume II (of 3) • John Ruskin
... fellows seldom leave any thing to be gleaned after them. What became of my escort I did not return to enquire; but I heard a prodigious galloping through the village, and found the advantage of the flame in guiding me through as perplexing a maze of thicket and morass as I ever attempted at midnight. The sound of the engagement which followed directed me to the camp; and I remain, a living example to my friend, of the advantage of twelve hours ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 349, November, 1844 • Various
... name for an outwork erected beyond the ditch of a fortress. It was, in all respects, capable of a prolonged defence. In form it was an irregular parallelogram, about eight hundred yards in length and six hundred yards wide, and on the walls were eleven strong bastions. The morass which surrounded it was of from three to eighteen feet ...
— With Clive in India - Or, The Beginnings of an Empire • G. A. Henty
... be taken in summer, after Berlin and Potsdam have been visited, than to the wild and beautiful Spreewald,—a combination of forest and morass not yet wholly redeemed to the civilization of Europe, but holding in its remoter depths a genuine relic of the old barbarism. The Goerlitz Railway skirts this forest for twenty-five miles before reaching Luebben, some two hours from Berlin ...
— In and Around Berlin • Minerva Brace Norton
... a democrat at heart, was cheered by the knowledge that so long as the world recognizes the divine right of Kings, no monarch by descent could lay better claim to a throne than he. And he was young, and in love, and ready to believe that youth and love can level mountains, make firm the morass, bridge the ocean. ...
— A Son of the Immortals • Louis Tracy
... to Salisbury is all straight road with moor, morass, and fenland on either side, broken only by the single hamlet of Aldersbury, just over the Wiltshire border. Our horses, refreshed by the short rest, stepped out gallantly, and the brisk motion, with the sunlight and the beauty of the morning, combined to raise our spirits and cheer us after the ...
— Micah Clarke - His Statement as made to his three Grandchildren Joseph, - Gervas and Reuben During the Hard Winter of 1734 • Arthur Conan Doyle
... already established a connection with the strange yacht!" he said, laughing—"The owner, according to your Highland fellow, has the same blossoms on board,—probably gathered from the same morass!—surely this is quite ...
— The Life Everlasting: A Reality of Romance • Marie Corelli
... prayers with singular energy, his head uncovered notwithstanding the severity of the night, and the rain pouring in torrents upon him, when he found it necessary to cross a level of rough land, at all times damp and marshy, but in consequence of the rains of the season, now a perfect morass. Over this he had advanced about half a mile, and got beyond the frightful noises of the woods, when some large object rose into the air from a clump of plashy rushes before him, and shot along the blast, uttering a booming sound, so loud and stunning that he stood riveted to the ...
— The Black Prophet: A Tale Of Irish Famine • William Carleton
... truth is, that the law which God gave, and which from the essential holiness of his nature it is impossible he should not have given, man deprived himself of the ability to obey. And was the law of God therefore to be annulled? Must the sun cease to shine because the earth has become a morass, so that even that very glory of the sun hath become a new cause of its steaming up clouds and vapors that strangle the rays? God forbid! 'But for the law I had not sinned'. But had I not been sinful the law would not have occasioned me to sin, but would have ...
— The Literary Remains Of Samuel Taylor Coleridge • Edited By Henry Nelson Coleridge
... hurdles and fascines being made; which, as I hear, are to be employed in one of two different plans. The first plan is, To attack the French retrenchment generally; the ditch which is before it, and the morass which lies on our left wing, to be made passable with these fascines. The other plan is, To amuse the Enemy by a false attack, and throw succor into the Town.—One thing is certain, in a few days we shall have a stroke of work here. ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. IX. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... Ferdinand. Soliman kept his promise. At the head of 100,000 men and 300 pieces of artillery, he commenced this memorable campaign. On the fatal field of Mohacs the fate of Hungary was decided in an unequal fight. King Lewis, as he fled from the Turkish sabres, was drowned in a morass. The next day the sultan received in state the compliments of his officers. The heads of 2,000 of the slain, including those of seven bishops and many of the nobility, were piled up as a trophy before his tent. Seven ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 13, No. 374 • Various
... over into the novel a good deal of the windy moralizing of the pulpit. All of these German naturalists—and they are the only German novelists worth considering—share the weakness of Zola, their Stammvater. They, too, fall into the morass that engulfed "Fecondite," and ...
— A Book of Prefaces • H. L. Mencken
... came on, and the earth itself shook and trembled as if about to swallow up those whom the waters or their falling habitations had spared. The smaller vessels at anchor in the bay were driven on shore and dashed to pieces, and the largest were torn from their anchors and carried up far into the morass, whence they could never be removed. One ship, the Princess Royal, was hove on her beam-ends, but again righted by the earthquake or by the force of the wind, and was left ...
— Hurricane Hurry • W.H.G. Kingston
... expression, through its services and their still transparent meaning, it rendered visible "the kingdom of God." It finally sets up an ideal world at the end of the present one, like a magnificent golden pavilion at the end of a miry morass.[1108] The saddened heart, athirst for tenderness and serenity, takes refuge in this divine and gentle world. Persecutors there, about to strike, are arrested by an invisible hand; wild beasts become docile; the stags of ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 1 (of 6) - The Ancient Regime • Hippolyte A. Taine
... way over the morass and entered the thick undergrowth. Now and then George flashed his electric, but he did not keep it burning steadily for the reason that he did not care to have Pierre trailing them ...
— Boy Scouts in Northern Wilds • Archibald Lee Fletcher
... they cried, "Buy him, and feed him on the tenderest grass; Thou canst not do too much for one so tried As to be twice transformed into an ass." So simple Gilbert bought him, and untied His halter, and o'er mountain and morass He led him homeward, talking as he went Of good behavior and a ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... is but one hundred and ten wersts from Malo-Yaroslawetz; four days would have been sufficient to go that distance; we took six. The army, laden with provisions and pillage, was heavy, and the roads were deep. A whole day had been sacrificed to the passage of the Nara and its morass, as also to the rallying of the different corps. It is true that in defiling so near the enemy it was necessary to march close, that we might not present to him too long a flank. Be this as it may, we may date all our calamities ...
— History of the Expedition to Russia - Undertaken by the Emperor Napoleon in the Year 1812 • Count Philip de Segur
... so secret Thrive terror and theft set free; Treason and shame shall come to pass While one weed flowers in a morass; And like the stillness of stiff grass The ...
— The Ballad of the White Horse • G.K. Chesterton
... Wharton had full time for preparation, and led a competent force of horse, which, near Arthuret, charged on the right flank of the Scots, who slowly retreated, till they were entangled between the Esk and a morass, and lost their formation and their artillery, with 1200 men: a few were slain, most were drowned or were taken prisoners. The raid was no secret of the king and the priests, as Knox absurdly states; nobles of the Reforming no less than of the Catholic ...
— A Short History of Scotland • Andrew Lang
... dead, and that the tale of his resurrection, if it were not a fabrication, was the elaboration of a myth. But neither of these alternatives will bear investigation. On the one hand, it is absurd to suppose that the temple of truth could be erected on the quagmire and morass of falsehood—impossible to believe that the one system in the world of mind which has attracted the true to its allegiance, and been the stimulus of truth-seeking throughout the ages, can have originated in a tissue of deliberate falsehoods. On the other hand, it is a demonstrated impossibility ...
— John the Baptist • F. B. Meyer
... the wretched footpath, slipping on the slimy mud, and either tumbling over each other or else side-slipping into the morass, which was a jolly sight worse. To make a long story short, we took up our position, which was in the middle of a circular clump of furze within 50 yards of the butts, ...
— The Submarine Hunters - A Story of the Naval Patrol Work in the Great War • Percy F. Westerman
... a voice—and ere that voice did pass, The night grew damp and dim, and, through a rent 2615 Of the ruin where we sate, from the morass A wandering Meteor by some wild wind sent, Hung high in the green dome, to which it lent A faint and pallid lustre; while the song Of blasts, in which its blue hair quivering bent, 2620 Strewed strangest sounds the moving leaves among; A wondrous light, ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley Volume I • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... day, week after week, for more than a month, and much of the time in winter weather, they toiled on, part of the way by boat, the remainder of the journey on foot, crossing snow-clogged forest, and tangled thicket and frozen morass, yet daring not to drop out for rest, since to lag might mean to die. It was as though after some frightful nightmare of suffering and despair that at length they reached the villages of the Five Nations, located far to the east, at the foot of the great waterway ...
— The Mississippi Bubble • Emerson Hough
... we rose at two, and had started on our jaguar-hunt at three. Colonel Rondon, Kermit, and I, with the two trailers or jaguar- hunters, made up the party, each on a weedy, undersized marsh pony, accustomed to traversing the vast stretches of morass; and we were accompanied by a brown boy, with saddle-bags holding our lunch, who rode a long-horned trotting steer which he managed by a string through its nostril and lip. The two trailers carried each a long, clumsy spear. We had a rather poor pack. Besides our own two dogs, neither ...
— Through the Brazilian Wilderness • Theodore Roosevelt
... forgotten the affair of Madras. On the 30th of August, 1748, Admiral Boscawen went and laid siege to Pondicherry; stopped at the outset by the fort of Ariocapang, of the existence of which they were ignorant, the disembarked troops could not push their trenches beyond an impassable morass which protected the town. The fire of the siege-artillery scarcely reached the ramparts; the sallies of the besieged intercepted the communications between the camp and the squadron, which, on its side, was bombarding the walls of Pondicherry without any serious result. ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume VI. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... you may know me when you see me struggling through these pages, as one might struggle through a morass on a dark night, I shall take the liberty of describing myself in the best light possible under ...
— A Fool and His Money • George Barr McCutcheon
... when the great morass lay in white and sinister tangle under the wild spring moon, when the dark and dreadful swamps were rife with horrible croaks and snaps, the whirring of the wings of waterfowl or the noise of a disturbed puff adder, Philip ...
— Diane of the Green Van • Leona Dalrymple
... exultation at his escape from their enemies had given way to a settled despair. From descriptions he had heard, he recognized this mighty floating forest as the fringe which surrounds that greatest of all mysterious, trackless swamps, the Everglades. Before him lay the mighty unknown, unexplored morass, reeking with fever, and infested with serpents; behind him waited sure death at the ...
— The Boy Chums in the Forest - or Hunting for Plume Birds in the Florida Everglades • Wilmer M. Ely
... dry land again was the unspoken thought of the six friends. Once on dry surfaces and out of the level treacherous monotony of the bog, they felt they might be equal to anything. For nearly two hours they worked their way through the morass without making any apparent progress toward the mountain. And now the sun was sinking behind the Western range. Ben watched the lessening rays with feelings ...
— The Motor Maids at Sunrise Camp • Katherine Stokes
... south-west for about three miles, through a very tortuous channel, dry in many parts at low-water, thickly studded with mangrove bushes, over and through which the tide made its way at high-water, giving to that part of the country the appearance of an extensive morass. A slightly elevated table-topped range of land was seen from time to time, some eight or nine miles to the south-east, but in its highest elevation did not reach 200 feet. The apparent width of the inlet in no way diminished so far as the exploring party examined it; and ...
— Discoveries in Australia, Volume 1. • J Lort Stokes
... Ascog Mere with a superstitious dread, for the people of Bute believed that it was a place of punishment for unhappy spirits, who might often be heard wailing in the dismal morass about its margin. She heard such a wailing even now, though perhaps it was but the whistling of the wintry wind among the frozen reeds, or the tinkling of the ice that was gathering in a film ...
— The Thirsty Sword • Robert Leighton
... loam, which, in drying, splits into deep and narrow chasms, forming a sort of network, from which, in warm weather, noxious exhalations rise, filling the atmosphere with a dense fog. The Squatter, shouldering his rifle, makes his way through the morass in search of his lost stock, to drive the survivors home and save the skins of the drowned. New fences have everywhere to be formed, and new houses erected; to save which from a like disaster, the settler places them on a raised platform, supported by pillars made of ...
— The Rain Cloud - or, An Account of the Nature, Properties, Dangers and Uses of Rain • Anonymous
... and guns. On the left flowed the dark and sluggish Teche. On the right lay the swamp, thickly overgrown and nearly impassable, whence the waters of the Choupique begin to ooze toward the Gulf. Along the southern border of this morass ran a great transverse ditch that carried off the gathered seepage of the lesser drains. In front, on the western edge of the cane-field, stood Nerson's woods, where, as yet unseen, the Confederates ...
— History of the Nineteenth Army Corps • Richard Biddle Irwin
... the idea of reclaiming the Great Dismal Swamp, and actually explored it with reference to that ultimate purpose. Through his agency, the incorporated company known as the Dismal Swamp Company was organized. "This vast morass was about thirty miles long and ten miles wide, and its interior but little known" until Washington explored it, and found a lake six miles long and three miles wide ...
— From Farm House to the White House • William M. Thayer
... into which they penetrated was of vast extent; spreading over plain, mountain, and morass in every direction for hundreds of miles, for we must remind the reader that the island of Borneo is considerably larger than all the British islands put together, while its inhabitants are comparatively few. Verkimier had been absolutely revelling in this forest for several ...
— Blown to Bits - The Lonely Man of Rakata, the Malay Archipelago • R.M. Ballantyne
... jealousy? I hear the tragic note." The certainty of her ground became as morass again. In his turn ...
— The Place of Honeymoons • Harold MacGrath
... an adjective, merisc, from mer, mere. The doublet Marris has usually become Morris. The compounds Tidmarsh and Titchmarsh contain the Anglo-Saxon names Tidda and Ticca. Moor also originally had the meaning morass (e.g. in Sedgemoor), as Ger. Moor still has, so that Fenimore is pleonastic. The northern form is Muir, as in Muirhead. Moss was similarly used in the north; cf. moss-trooper and Solway Moss, but the surname Moss is generally for ...
— The Romance of Names • Ernest Weekley
... water was neither broad nor deep, and the soldiers found no difficulty in gaining a landing, as the enemy's horse was prevented by the marshy ground from approaching the borders. But, as they worked their way across the morass, the heavy guns of Orgonez played with effect on the leading files, and threw them into disorder. Gonzalo and Valdivia threw themselves into the midst of their followers, menacing some, encouraging others, and at length led them gallantly forward to the firm ground. Here ...
— The History Of The Conquest Of Peru • William H. Prescott
... right was a deep black chasm, with a white foaming waterfall pouring into the darkness below. In front was the same wide chasm, only less wide, and beyond it, on the other side of the great yawning cleft in the earth, was a wild spread of morass country—a gloomy, terrible-looking place. To the left was a steep slope of small rocks and stones, leading downwards to the hollow of sedgy land that fringed the cliffs of the chasm. The only retreat possible was to pass down ...
— Dot and the Kangaroo • Ethel C. Pedley
... ground and whose branches are so long, so weary with age, that they bend downward and touch the earth with their elbows—to rest, as it were—and then rise up again, refreshed. These salines are about three miles from Tozeur and an uncommonly simple establishment; they dig a ditch in the morass which promptly fills with water; the liquid evaporates, leaving the salt, which impregnates it, to be piled up in heaps on dry land. Next, they stow the mineral in sacks and transport it to Tozeur on donkeys. It undergoes ...
— Fountains In The Sand - Rambles Among The Oases Of Tunisia • Norman Douglas
... I have every reason to trust you most fully. Have you any plan for extricating us from this dreadful morass of failure and difficulty ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 152, January 10, 1917 • Various
... somewhat more than a hundred yards north of the toll-gate, was the abode of a farmer named Mark Stolliver. Half a mile further up was John Calder's house, which was the only one until you came to Squire Harrington's. To the rear of the Squire's farm was a huge morass about fifty acres in extent, where cranberries grew in great abundance, from which circumstance it was known ...
— The Gerrard Street Mystery and Other Weird Tales • John Charles Dent
... said. 'It turns out for nothing. It crosses a morass to avoid going around. When you reach the high ground you are covered with mud and slime. You need to be washed and disinfected, and perhaps you've caught a fever that will last as long as you live. Many a boy and girl have got mired in ...
— 'Charge It' - Keeping Up With Harry • Irving Bacheller
... find him engaged, with other men of enterprise, in a project to drain the great Dismal Swamp, and render it capable of cultivation. This vast morass was about thirty miles long, and ten miles wide, and its interior but little known. With his usual zeal and hardihood he explored it on horseback and on foot. In many parts it was covered with dark and gloomy woods of cedar, cypress, and hemlock, or deciduous trees, the branches ...
— The Life of George Washington, Volume I • Washington Irving
... spent two years. This was a quiet, stagnant place, where, according to his own account, he "was buried alive," and "walked in a morass covered with low thorny shrubs which lacerated his feet;" he "thought of Yorick and the imprisoned starling;" and he should have given way to despair had not the bitter experiences which he was made to drain to ...
— Weird Tales, Vol. II. • E. T. A. Hoffmann
... arms immortal Brindley leads His long canals, and parts the velvet meads; Winding in lucid lines, the watery mass Mines the firm rock, or loads the deep morass;'[152] ...
— Evolution, Old & New - Or, the Theories of Buffon, Dr. Erasmus Darwin and Lamarck, - as compared with that of Charles Darwin • Samuel Butler
... Parana and Uruguay, the latter forming the boundary on the south-east. The rolling plains and woods alternate with great marshes called 'esteros', which in some districts, as of that of Neembucu, cover large tracts of land, forming in winter an almost impenetrable morass, and in the spring and early summer excellent feeding-ground for sheep. Throughout the territory the climate is healthy, except towards the woody northern hills. With this rich territory and the false reports of mines, which even unsuccessful exploration ...
— A Vanished Arcadia, • R. B. Cunninghame Graham
... are within"—the propriety of this dramatic means can scarce be gainsaid. The swift complicated mental machinery can thus be exhibited infinitely more coherently and comprehensibly than by the most electric succinct dialogue. Again and again Browning has nigh foundered in the morass of monologue, but, broadly speaking, he transcends ...
— Life of Robert Browning • William Sharp
... one. The regular course of nature is in itself a series of accidental influences; that is, the particular occasion is subservient to a general law with which it does not seem at first sight to have any connection. A severe winter may be sufficient to kill the quails, just as the ancient morass was sufficient to drown the mastodon. But the question is, why these causes began to operate just at these times. We may as well stop with the evident fact, that the unresting circulation is forever going on ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 1, Issue 2, December, 1857 • Various
... their flight, the English troops took possession of it, and by means of a well directed fire from it, seriously damaged the town. The main body of the army now commenced the siege. For fourteen nights they were occupied in drawing cannon towards the town, over a morass, in which oxen and horses could not be used. The toil was incredible, but men accustomed to draw the pines of the forests, for masts, could accomplish anything. By the 20th of May, several fascine batteries had been erected, one of which mounted five forty-pounders. ...
— The Rise of Canada, from Barbarism to Wealth and Civilisation - Volume 1 • Charles Roger
... the red fox hath its dens And the gods their crystal fountains; Up runnel and leaping cataract, Boulder and ledge, I climbed and tracked, Till I came to the top of the world and the fen That drinks up the clouds and cisterns the rain, And down through the floors of the deep morass The procreant woodland essences drain— The thunder's home, where the eagles scream And the centaurs pass; But, where it was born, ...
— A Jongleur Strayed - Verses on Love and Other Matters Sacred and Profane • Richard Le Gallienne
... and the attacking troops, as an additional protection, they had the river, now swollen to many times its usual dimensions by the recent rains, which had also made the ground on either bank little better than a morass. Also, what fords there were had been rendered impassable by the floods, and it was only after prolonged and searching examination, which had always to be undertaken at night and by swimming the river many times, that fairly ...
— With Our Army in Palestine • Antony Bluett
... the Maurya dynasty,—that one seemingly firm patch to set your feet on in the whole morass of the Indian past,—occupy the thirteen decades from 320 to 190 B.C., (or we thought we did); now the question is, from that pied-a-terre whither shall we jump? If you could be sure that the ebb of the wave would be equal in length to its inrush,—the night to ...
— The Crest-Wave of Evolution • Kenneth Morris
... bringing away the captured gun in perfect order, also some waggons. Unfortunately the cart with the projectiles or shell, stuck in the morass and had ...
— My Reminiscences of the Anglo-Boer War • Ben Viljoen
... on the edge of a morass, and spring back to firmer ground. Our Bible, as we have it, is a translation, made by forty-seven men and published in the year 1611. The original—and I am still on firm ground because I am quoting now from "The Cambridge History of English ...
— On The Art of Reading • Arthur Quiller-Couch
... circuitous, hugging the fringe of jungle. The gweels traveled it every day. But Latham had a better plan. By cutting directly through the morass, he might just arrive there ahead ...
— One Purple Hope! • Henry Hasse
... could answer "Whither are we drifting?" Or hope to wallow out of the morass— I might continue boosting and uplifting; But as it ...
— The So-called Human Race • Bert Leston Taylor
... always blundering deeper and deeper into this horrible bog, until I began to think that my first night in France was destined also to be my last, and that the heir of the de Lavals was destined to perish of cold and misery in the depths of this obscene morass. ...
— Uncle Bernac - A Memory of the Empire • Arthur Conan Doyle
... because you are looked upon as a man without spot or blemish; your home is regarded as a model home, and your conduct as a model of conduct. But all this grandeur, and you with it, is founded on a treacherous morass. A moment may come and a word may be spoken, when you and all your grandeur will be engulfed in the morass, if you do ...
— Pillars of Society • Henrik Ibsen
... of shouting and whipping to get the poor brutes to take to this treacherous morass, but one after the other they were driven in, until at length the whole dozen of the pack-train were distributed, half-submerged, over the hundred yards of the mucky trail. Uncle Dick, not stopping to think of his clothes, followed Moise in; and Rob, pluckily as either of the ...
— The Young Alaskans in the Rockies • Emerson Hough
... Opened the great morass, shot every side With flashing water through and through; a-shine, Thick-steaming, all-alive. Whose shape divine Quivered i' the farthest rainbow-vapour, glanced Athwart the flying herons? He advanced, But warily; though ...
— The Poetry Of Robert Browning • Stopford A. Brooke
... feet and led the way down into a spongy morass. The brush slapped her face. It caught in the meshes of her shoes and flung her down. The miry earth, oozing over the edges of the frames, clogged her feet and ...
— Man Size • William MacLeod Raine
... on no physical battlefield that we stand beside our men, and on no march through no external forest or morass that we have to lead; it is yet the old spirit which, undimmed by two thousand years, stirs within us in deeper and subtler ways; it is yet the cry of the old, free Northern woman which makes the world today. Though the battlefield be now for us all, in the laboratory or the workshop, in the forum ...
— Woman and Labour • Olive Schreiner
... grange or lonely fold, Or low morass and whispering reed, Or simple style from mead to mead, Or sheep walk up the ...
— The Early Poems of Alfred Lord Tennyson • Tennyson
... cottage-light; Gleam then, like the lightning-bug, Tempt him to the den that's dug For the foul and famished brood Of the she wolf, gaunt for blood; Or, unto the dangerous pass O'er the deep and dark morass, Where the trembling Indian brings Belts of porcelain, pipes, and rings, Tributes, to be hung in air, ...
— The Complete Poems of Sir Thomas Moore • Thomas Moore et al
... almost thick here, the ground like a morass, with inches of clayey mud, which stuck to everything, whilst the sparse lanterns, hung to the prison walls and beneath the portico, threw practically no light ...
— I Will Repay • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... for the great struggle, which was to determine the fate of Scotland, the Bruce carefully avoided the errors which had led to Wallace's defeat at Falkirk. He selected a position which was covered, on one side by the Bannock Burn and a morass, and, on the other side, by the New Park or Forest. His front was protected by the stream and by the famous series of "pottes", or holes, covered over so as to deceive the English cavalry. The choice of this narrow position not only prevented the ...
— An Outline of the Relations between England and Scotland (500-1707) • Robert S. Rait
... daughter, a gentle-looking maiden of fifteen or sixteen, came and spoke to him, and entertained him so well, that he did not think much more of his offended dignity.—When they set off on their journey again, the Baron and several of his followers came with them to show the only safe way across the morass, and a very slippery, treacherous, quaking road it was, where the horses' feet left pools of water wherever they trod. The King and the Baron rode together, and the other French Nobles closed round them; Richard was left quite in the background, and ...
— The Little Duke - Richard the Fearless • Charlotte M. Yonge
... I greet. In what hard mountain pass Striv'st thou? In what importunate morass Sink ...
— New Poems • Robert Louis Stevenson
... Army had now reached the marshes, but the Weather was fighting for Russia. Just at this time, a sudden and unexpected thaw set in, making the marsh a morass. The Russians, well-provisioned, circled around the French army, and again came in front of them at a river called the Beresina. Waist-deep in that icy current, with masses of floating ice being carried down by the sudden thaw, with a huge Russian army on the opposite bank, the French soldiers ...
— The Boy with the U. S. Weather Men • Francis William Rolt-Wheeler
... conduct, had been made a subaltern officer, marched with that division of the army which Arnold, with almost unequalled energy and fortitude, and amidst privation and suffering untold, led through the snow-clad wilderness of morass and mountain, to the distant Quebec. And there, in the onset, in which the high-souled Montgomery fell, they were together cut off from their company and made prisoners; when, after having, for nearly a year and ...
— The Rangers - [Subtitle: The Tory's Daughter] • D. P. Thompson
... left). The hour of morn, before the sun is up, When all the branches in the lifeless light Hang dead and dull, is terrible. I feel As if I saw the whole world in a frightful And vacant glass, as dreary as my mind's eye. O would all flowers might wither! Would my garden Were poisonous morass, filled to the full With rotted corpses of these blooming trees, And ...
— The German Classics, v. 20 - Masterpieces of German Literature • Various
... bed over which our impedimenta might travel. Hour after hour went by amidst incessant labour. An ammunition waggon containing only half its proper load required the efforts of a dozen horses to pull it over that morass, whilst, as for the guns, each of the 12's required even more horses. It was three o'clock on the afternoon of the 18th when the last gun was got across. Three gun-carriages were broken during those efforts, but our men managed to save the pieces. Late ...
— My Days of Adventure - The Fall of France, 1870-71 • Ernest Alfred Vizetelly
... indeed, Oswald, on one of the hardy little horses, had ridden over the country in company with one or other of the men; and had become familiar with every morass, moor, fell, and pass, down to the old Roman wall to the south, and as far north as Wooler, being frequently absent for three or four days at a time. He had several times ridden into Scotland, to visit the ...
— Both Sides the Border - A Tale of Hotspur and Glendower • G. A. Henty
... him, and drawn his sword, when, without awaiting his order, all these ardent youths, preceded by Cinq-Mars and his friends, whose horses were urged on by the squadrons behind, had thrown themselves into the morass, wherein, to their great astonishment and to that of the Spaniards, who had counted too much upon its depth, the horses were in the water only up to their hams; and in spite of a discharge of grape-shot from the two largest pieces, all reached ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... preceded cautiously over the tract, making sure that no guards lay hidden in the ditches. The trails left by the departing men were easily followed. They led, not to the river or toward Garman's as might have been expected, but scattered and lost themselves to the southward in the tangle morass of the cypress swamp. Here and there articles had been left behind in what savored of a flight; unopened canned goods, a deer carcass, a frying pan, a rifle and a pair of shoes. Roger studied the tracks leading into the swamp ...
— The Plunderer • Henry Oyen
... choosing to engage without some superiority of circumstances, and both watchful to prevent that superiority. At length the Sultan observing a weakness in the left wing of Hobaddan's army, caused by sickness, as they were encamped near a morass, gave orders for a furious attack upon the front, but directed the main effort to be made against ...
— Eastern Tales by Many Story Tellers • Various
... struck bottom!" Very likely he would have done as he said. I have never seen a man with a swifter temper and resolution than poor, brave, choleric, handsome Arnold had; and into a hideously hopeless morass of infamy they landed him, too! No doubt it will seem to my readers, as well, that in nature I ought upon the instant to have grappled ...
— In the Valley • Harold Frederic
... we have above observed, no regular army, nor a town, nor a garrison which could defend itself by arms; but the people were scattered in all directions. Where either a hidden valley, or a woody spot, or a difficult morass furnished any hope of protection or of security to any one, there he had fixed himself. These places were known to those that dwelt in the neighbourhood, and the matter demanded great attention, not so much in protecting the main body of the army ...
— "De Bello Gallico" and Other Commentaries • Caius Julius Caesar
... extremities. For, it seems, he sat once a whole night, not warm in his true love's bower (who indeed was by law another's), but sunken to the middle in a cold peat-bog, being hunted out; quaking for his life, in the cold quaking morass; (Dumouriez, ii. 370.) and goes now on crutches to the end. Cambon likewise, in whom slumbers undeveloped such a finance-talent for printing of Assignats; Father of Paper-money; who, in the hour of menace, shall utter this stern sentence, 'War to the Manorhouse, peace to the Hut, Guerre aux ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle
... Africa; the Egyptian ports with their traditional corruption that at sunset was beginning to tremble and steam like a fetid morass; Alexandria in whose low coffee houses were imitation Oriental dancers with no more clothes than a pocket handkerchief, every woman of a different nation and shrieking in chorus all the languages of ...
— Mare Nostrum (Our Sea) - A Novel • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... in trouble came into sight. Nan and her cousin saw him immediately. He was in the middle of the shaking morass waist deep in the mire, and clinging to one of the small hanging ...
— Nan Sherwood at Pine Camp - or, The Old Lumberman's Secret • Annie Roe Carr
... translate his answer to Beorn, when there was a sudden shout. At the moment that Osgod was making a long step from one tuft to another the boy stooped and caught his foot, and with a roar of surprise and fury Osgod fell head-foremost into the morass. At the same moment the lad darted away with a yell of defiance, leaping from tuft to tuft with the agility of a hare. Several of the men started after him, but unaccustomed to the treacherous bog four or five were immersed ...
— Wulf the Saxon - A Story of the Norman Conquest • G. A. Henty
... relief to Denis; it was like a piece of solid ground to a man laboring in a morass; his mind seized upon it with avidity; and he stood staring at it and trying to piece together some logical conception of his surroundings. Plainly there was a flight of steps ascending from his own level to that of this illuminated doorway, and indeed he thought he could make out another thread ...
— Short-Stories • Various
... ordered her hot milk and, with a flutter, awaited it. This was life. And to-morrow she must telegraph to her step-father, and everything would end in the old round of parish duties; all her hopes and dreams would be submerged in the heavy morass of meeting mothers. The thought leapt up.—Betty hid her eyes and would not look at it. Instead, she looked at the other people seated at the tables—the women. They were laughing and talking among themselves. ...
— The Incomplete Amorist • E. Nesbit
... I then returned toward my right flank, and as I reached the Nineteenth Corps the enemy was contesting the ground in its front with great obstinacy; but Emory's dogged persistence was at length rewarded with success, just as Crook's command emerged from the morass of Red Bud Run, and swept around Gordon, toward the right of Breckenridge, who, with two of Wharton's brigades, was holding a line at right angles with the Valley pike for the protection of the Confederate rear. Early had ordered these two brigades back ...
— The Memoirs of General P. H. Sheridan, Complete • General Philip Henry Sheridan
... hold on you. I am sure you cannot long be content to pass your leisure in solitude, and to devote your working hours to a monotonous labour wholly void of stimulus: any more than I can be content," he added, with emphasis, "to live here buried in morass, pent in with mountains—my nature, that God gave me, contravened; my faculties, heaven-bestowed, paralysed—made useless. You hear now how I contradict myself. I, who preached contentment with a humble lot, and justified the vocation even of hewers of wood and drawers of water in God's ...
— Jane Eyre - an Autobiography • Charlotte Bronte
... to get near enough to beat down the hostile fire by a multitude of projectiles. The bomb-vessel Thunder anchored in the situation assigned her; but her shells, though well aimed, were ineffective. "Most of them fell within the fort," Moultrie reported, "but we had a morass in the middle, which swallowed them instantly, and those that fell in the sand were immediately buried." During the action the mortar bed broke, disabling ...
— The Major Operations of the Navies in the War of American Independence • A. T. Mahan
... British soldier trembles When Marion's name is told. Our fortress is the good greenwood, Our tent the cypress tree; We know the forest round us, As seamen know the sea. We know its walls of thorny vines, Its glades of reedy grass, Its safe and silent islands Within the dark morass. ...
— America First - Patriotic Readings • Various
... persons of such delicate taste laugh." He was not disappointed in his expectations, for the Romance had a great run. In the year 1638, he was attending the Carnival at Mons, of which he was a canon. Having put on the dress of a savage, he was followed by a troop of boys into a morass, where he was kept so long, that the cold penetrated his debilitated limbs, which became contracted in such a manner, that he used to compare his body to the shape of a Z. He died in 1660, at the age ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 13, - Issue 352, January 17, 1829 • Various
... fifty men into the neighboring forest to cut timber for that purpose. Captain Little, with fifty British regulars, was deputized to protect these men at their labors. This supporting party was posted on a narrow ridge leading to the fort, with a morass on one side, a creek on the other, and the ...
— Historic Tales, Vol. 1 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris |
