"Quagmire" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... pursuit—beyond the scent of savage hounds, and the trailing of men almost as savage as they; for the place cannot be approached by water-craft, and is equally unapproachable by land. Even a dog could not make way through the quagmire of mud, stretching immediately around it to a distance of several hundred yards. If one tried, it would soon be snapped up by the great saurian, master of this darksome domain. Still is there a way to traverse the treacherous ground, for one knowing it, as does Darke's runaway ...
— The Death Shot - A Story Retold • Mayne Reid
... brought up amidst in his native county, or had noticed in his tinker's wanderings. "Born and bred," writes Kingsley, "in the monotonous Midland, he had no natural images beyond the pastures and brooks, the town and country houses, he saw about him." The Slough of Despond, with its treacherous quagmire in the midst of the plain, into which a wayfarer might heedlessly fall, with its stepping-stones half drowned in mire; Byepathmeadow, promising so fair, with its stile and footpath on the other side of the fence; the pleasant river fringed with ...
— The Life of John Bunyan • Edmund Venables
... to his religion. It was the religion of the seer, the hero, the patriot, and the lover of his race and time. Amid the political idiocy of the times, the corruption in high places, the dilettante culture, the vaporings of wild and helpless theorists, in this swamp of political quagmire, O Lincoln, it is refreshing to ...
— Our American Holidays: Lincoln's Birthday • Various
... sheet-iron, with its surface flowing with water. When the weather was too bad, he retreated under the tiny porch, and, standing close against the door, looked at his spade left planted in the middle of the yard. The ground was so much dug up all over, that as the season advanced it turned to a quagmire. When it froze hard, he was disconsolate. What would Harry say? And as he could not have so much of Bessie's company at that time of the year, the roars of old Carvil, that came muffled through the closed windows, calling her indoors, ...
— To-morrow • Joseph Conrad
... that those ill words must have returned to the bosoms which vented them, and have flown no further, no Board could ever have been so terribly curse-laden. To find oneself at last utterly stopped, after proceeding with great strain to one's horse for half a mile through an artificial quagmire of slush up to the wheelbox, is harassing to the customary traveller; and men at that crisis did not bethink themselves quite so frequently as they should have done, that a people perishing from ...
— Castle Richmond • Anthony Trollope
... Ranch there were only three or four families of poor emigrants. Nothing could be done toward relieving those at Donner Lake until help could arrive from Sutter's Fort. A rainy winter had flooded Bear River, and rendered the Sacramento plains a vast quagmire. Yet one man volunteered to go to Sacramento with the tale of horror, and get men and provisions. This man was John Rhodes. Lashing two pine logs together with rawhides, and forming a raft, John Rhodes was ferried over Bear River. Taking his shoes in his hands, and rolling his pants up above his ...
— History of the Donner Party • C.F. McGlashan
... the effort to get breath, and his head was singing like a tea-urn. The gold boxes were there, and if they were not brought to the surface, and carried honestly to Suez, the matter would have to be fought out above in God's open air, and not in that horrible choking quagmire of slime and cruel water. And so, still guarding himself cannily, he got back again to the boat, and almost had it in him to shake hands with the men who eased ...
— A Master of Fortune • Cutcliffe Hyne
... built wooden forts which are now stone towns. They fought much and prevalently; galloped desperately to and fro, ever on the alert. In peaceabler ulterior times, they fenced in the Nogat and the Weichsel with dams, whereby unlimited quagmire might become grassy meadow—as it continues to this day. Marienburg (Mary's Burg), with its grand stone Schloss still visible and even habitable: this was at length their headquarter. But how many Burgs of wood and stone they built, in different parts; what revolts, ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin
... pickets and branches and hurried through the birch grove into the dense fir woods, where he had not gone far before he discovered what was amiss. Up there was a big, treacherous marsh. A cow belonging to the Falla folk had gone down in a quagmire and Jan saw at once that it was the best cow they had on the farm, one for which Lars Gunnarson had been offered two hundred rix-dollars. She had sunk deep in the mire and was now so terrified that she lay quite still and sent forth only feeble and intermittant ...
— The Emperor of Portugalia • Selma Lagerlof
... knee-deep in slush and catch at a tree-bole to prevent yourself going farther, cling, sweating at every pore and shivering like a dog, feeling for firmer ground and finding it, only to be led on to another quagmire. The bush pig avoids this place, the leopard shuns it; it is bad in the dry season when the sun gives some light by day, and the moon a gauzy green glimmer by night, but in the rains it is terrific. Night, then, ...
— The Pools of Silence • H. de Vere Stacpoole
... to do with a secret which I am pledged to keep. I will not allow your father to lead me into any quagmire of speculation, believe me, ...
— Charlotte's Inheritance • M. E. Braddon
... comes to every one when he sees bodies of British troops moving along the roads. He is glad when his motorcar gets held up by some old wagons slithering axle-deep in the quagmire on the side of the paved highway, so that he can put his head out and shout a "Hullo, boys! How's it going? And who are you?" After all the thrill of the recruiting days, ill the excitement of the send-off, all the enthusiasm with which they sang Tipperary ...
— The Soul of the War • Philip Gibbs
... had not made me grave. Till the campaign is ended, I shall be in no humour to smile. For the war, when it will be over, I have no idea. The peace is a jack o' lanthorn that dances before one's eyes, is never approached, and at best seems ready to lead some follies into a woful quagmire. ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole Volume 3 • Horace Walpole
... continuing Mr. Blunt's article, I find the later Pantheists a hundredfold more perplexing than the earlier ones. With Kant, Schelling, Fichte, and Hegel, we feel that we are with men who have been decoyed into a hopeless quagmire; we understand nothing of their language-we doubt whether they understand themselves, and feel that we can do nothing with them but look at them and pass ...
— God the Known and God the Unknown • Samuel Butler
... back by the shore, a good deal longer; now over rough, rocky stretches where he stumbled in the darkness, now through marshy, sodden ground where he sank as in a quagmire time and again over his ankles. It was even longer than he had counted on, and time, with the Weasel on one hand and the return of the police on the other, was a factor to be reckoned with again, as, a half hour later, Jimmie Dale stole across the lawn of Mittel's house for the second time that night, ...
— The Adventures of Jimmie Dale • Frank L. Packard
... beds breaking into dingy pools, clumps of rotting willows, narrow winding water lanes and sinking paths. The tules grow inconceivably thick in places, standing man-high above the water; cattle, no, not any fish nor fowl can penetrate them. Old stalks succumb slowly; the bed soil is quagmire, settling with the weight as it fills and fills. Too slowly for counting they raise little islands from the bog and reclaim the land. The waters pushed out cut deeper channels, gnaw off the edges of ...
— The Land of Little Rain • Mary Austin
... Governor did not like to be bawled at. He was sufficiently embarrassed already by the quagmire into which ...
— The Wheel O' Fortune • Louis Tracy
... entirely in the hands of local, county, and state Granges. These thereupon proceeded to "gang their ain gait" through the unfamiliar paths of business operations and too frequently brought up in a quagmire. "This purchasing business," said Kelley in 1867, "commenced with buying jackasses; the prospects are that many will be SOLD." But the Grangers went on with their plans for business cooperation with ardor undampened by such forebodings. Sometimes a local ...
— The Agrarian Crusade - A Chronicle of the Farmer in Politics • Solon J. Buck
... abyss. Then the head also disappeared. The soldier raised his hands to heaven as he sank. A moment later only one of his iron gauntlets was to be seen convulsively quivering above the sand. Presently nothing was to be seen—nothing except some bubbles of air on the surface of the quagmire. ...
— The Brass Bell - or, The Chariot of Death • Eugene Sue
... right, and proper, and honourable, or is it contemptibly mean and selfish? I don't profess to decide. I simply am going to act by instinct, and let principles take care of themselves. If a person who has blindly walked into a quagmire cries for help, I am inclined to ...
— Jude the Obscure • Thomas Hardy
... a quagmire in the red clay of the road. It was an ancient trap left over from the rains of winter, strewn with twigs and small branches so that light wheels might skim, with luck, over ...
— The Happy Foreigner • Enid Bagnold
... chaste. By properly adjusting it, a railroad conductor can easily lift a recalcitrant passenger, and project him through one of the windows of the car, (provided said window is large enough to admit of such exit,) into any selected pool, or pond, or quagmire, or any other sort of mire, of the miasmatic salt meadows, with the produce of which Morris and Essex stock is so satisfactorily ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 16, July 16, 1870 • Various
... Rollo. "We once lost a fine brindle cow, because she wandered into a swamp and sank in a quagmire. But, hello—what is this?" As he spoke Rollo pulled from his ...
— Rollo in Society - A Guide for Youth • George S. Chappell
... heart probably fell to its lowest depth of ingratitude and sin when poor Judas changed sides and sold his Lord. What a change it was! Alas, alas, what a quagmire of uncertainties and shifting sand unsanctified human nature must be! ...
— Our Master • Bramwell Booth
... rode on through the endless forest of palms, and waded through a quagmire at least eight miles in extent, where the green slime reached up to the saddle-flaps. On that day we came to a sluggish stream, bearing the name of "Aptikpangmakthlaingwainkyapaimpangkya" (The Place Where the Pots Were Struck When They Were About to Feast). There a punt was moored, ...
— Through Five Republics on Horseback • G. Whitfield Ray
... guessed that she was in monetary difficulties on her own account. Denry, as a chivalrous lover, had assisted her out of the fearful quagmire of her rent; but she owed much beyond rent. Yet, when some of her quarterly fees had come in, her thoughts had instantly run to Llandudno, joy, and frocks. She did not know what money was, and she never would. This was, perhaps, part of her superior splendour. The gentle, ...
— The Card, A Story Of Adventure In The Five Towns • Arnold Bennett
... broken-hearted by his debts. His troubles were becoming almost too many for him; and Mr Gazebee, though no doubt he was an excellent man of business, did not seem to lessen them. Mr Gazebee, indeed, was continually pointing out how much he owed, and in what a quagmire of difficulties he had entangled himself. Now, to do Mr Yates Umbleby justice, he had never made ...
— Doctor Thorne • Anthony Trollope
... evening. It was during the black rains of February—Dean and I with our chairs to the fire, waiting for the Eastern mail. The night watchman's orders were to stop for it if the trains were anywhere near on time. At this storm season the Westbound was frequently behind and the road to town a quagmire. We never looked for Fahey—he was the man I found there as night watchman—before eight o'clock. It had rained and snowed off and on since the month began. In the dark, low rooms the fire burned ...
— The Spinner's Book of Fiction • Various
... time the other fair woman had drawn near, and she now spoke to the lad. "I have nothing to promise you," said she, "save that which you shall win with your own strength. The road upon which I would lead you is uneven and hard, and climbs many a hill, and descends into many a valley and quagmire. The views which you will sometimes get from the hilltops are grand and glorious, but the deep valleys are dark, and the ascent from them is toilsome. Nevertheless, the road leads to the blue mountains of endless fame, which you see far away on the horizon. They cannot be reached without ...
— Hero Tales • James Baldwin
... Neisse, and do other necessary things. And go in upon Baronay next morning, at the due rate, fiery men both of them; sweep poor Baronay away, MINUS the meal; who finds even his road blocked (bridge bursting into cannon-shot upon him, at one point), instead of bridge, a stream, or slow current of quagmire for him,—and is in imminent hazard. Ziethen's behavior was superlative (details of it unintelligible off the ground); and Baronay fled totally in wreck;—his own horse shot, and at the moment no other to be ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XII. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... General Barrett paraded for the attack the bulk of his force. After a trying march through a veritable quagmire, the troops sometimes up to their waists in slush, the division at about 9 A.M. came within range of the Turkish position, and the leading brigade, the Belgaum, (Major ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 5, August, 1915 • Various
... began a long rambling speech, in which he pretended not to know what things are and what are not wonderful. The Boy Hunters young gentleman fell headlong into the quagmire of definitions, but the oldest sister, who had her own ideas about ...
— Miscellanea • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... would have done at a new novel. In writing a novel you want a live place and live people; and these being provided, your book is as good as finished when you are half-way through with it. But I shall never forget in what a quagmire I landed myself when I began to write 'Chums' upon this principle. I have always, since I can remember, been a student of the acted drama. I acted for some years as dramatic critic in the provinces and in London. I knew as much about the exigencies of stage ...
— The Making Of A Novelist - An Experiment In Autobiography • David Christie Murray
... thought myself that the council were wrong when they refused all the offers of the towns to send bodies of footmen to fight beside us; had they been there, they might have faced those terrible archers of yours, for they at least would have been free to fight when we were all but helpless in that quagmire. I see that you have knightly spurs on, and I ...
— At Agincourt • G. A. Henty
... civic pride but from the pressure of stern necessity. The new city now had eleven wharves, for example, up to seventeen hundred feet in length. It had done no little grading of its sand-hills. The quagmire of its streets had been filled and in some places planked. Sewers had been installed. Flimsy buildings were being replaced by substantial structures, for which the stones in some instances ...
— The Forty-Niners - A Chronicle of the California Trail and El Dorado • Stewart Edward White
... hidden him from view. With a rapid glance at the darkening flat, he then seized his gun, and springing to the spongy bank, half crouching half crawling through reeds and tussocks, he made his way to the brush. A foot and eye less experienced would have plunged its owner helpless in the black quagmire. At one edge of the thicket he heard hoofs trampling the dried twigs. Calvert's horse was already there, tied to a ...
— The Heritage of Dedlow Marsh and Other Tales • Bret Harte
... Audacious, the Astute; Eagle to grip the field; to work his craftiest, fox. From his brief signal, straight the stroke of the leveller falls; From him those opal puffs, those arcs with the clouded balls: He waves and the voluble scene is a quagmire shifting blocks; They clash, they are knotted, and now 'tis the deed of the axe on the log; Here away moves a spiky woodland, and yon away sweep Rivers of horse torrent-mad to the shock, and the heap over ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... of musketry drowned out the words, and immediately Ben's company found itself all but surrounded. To go into this quagmire had certainly been a grave error, but all leaders make mistakes sometimes; and Major Morris was suffering ...
— The Campaign of the Jungle - or, Under Lawton through Luzon • Edward Stratemeyer
... thought so. It's foul work floundering in that sort of quagmire. I wonder now if you will allow me to have a look into your affairs, or if you prefer to go to the devil ...
— The Rocks of Valpre • Ethel May Dell
... wet yet for either," decreed Geraldine. "How could we tramp over the fells when everything's a quagmire? And if you think you can light a bonfire with damp wood, you're jolly well mistaken. We'll collect sticks, and have one when they're dry. I plump for a flag-hunt. There must be some ...
— A harum-scarum schoolgirl • Angela Brazil
... Fielding, and who appears in literary history scribbling for pay in a sack arranged to represent a shirt. Fielding never let go his hold of the firm land, though he must have felt through life like one whose feet are always plunging into a hopeless quagmire. To describe him as a mere reckless Bohemian, is to overlook the main facts of his story. He was manly to the last, not in the sense in which man means animal; but with the manliness of one who struggles bravely to redeem early errors, and who knows the value ...
— Hours in a Library - New Edition, with Additions. Vol. II (of 3) • Leslie Stephen
... enough. I take good care of myself nowadays since the little machine episode on the road. I expected when I first went up to the trenches to find them smelling of dead men, and to find No Man's Land a sort of quagmire covered with dead bodies, but in front of us it is a nice green field with no dead bodies on it; the only excitement is right on the right of our line, where there is one dead German in the middle. I believe ...
— Letters from France • Isaac Alexander Mack
... in the forests or in the deep morass which girded the road, pounced upon the traveller on the causeway, eased him of his luggage if he carried any, and if there was no further occasion for his services, they either let him down easily into the next quagmire, or if they were, for those days, gentlemanly thieves, left him standing, as Justice Shallow has it, like a "forked radish," to enjoy the summer's heat or the winter's cold. The cross and escallop shell of the pilgrim were no protection: ...
— Old Roads and New Roads • William Bodham Donne
... indistinguishably in the mangled mass of horse and man, themselves scarcely to be disintegrated in the fall from so stupendous a height. The big white beaver hat of the child was found floating on the surface of a deep pool hard by, half quagmire, half quicksand, and would in itself have sufficed to dispel any doubts of his fate, had doubt been entertained. The burial was accomplished as best might be, and the dolorous incident seemed at an end. But throughout the dry, soft Indian summer ...
— The Ordeal - A Mountain Romance of Tennessee • Charles Egbert Craddock
... little for what he found. All the way from Balaclava his horse struggled knee-deep in mud: a very quagmire of black, sticky slush. Yet this was the great highway—the only road between the base of supply and an army engaged eight miles distant in an arduous siege. Along it the whole of the food, ammunition, and material had to be carried on pony-back, or in a few ponderous carts drawn by gaunt, over-worked ...
— The Thin Red Line; and Blue Blood • Arthur Griffiths
... in San Francisco during the first week of January, 1854, that a certain quagmire in the roadway of Long Wharf had become impassable, and a plank was thrown over its dangerous depth. Indeed, so treacherous was the spot that it was alleged, on good authority, that a hastily embarking traveler had once hopelessly lost his portmanteau, and was fain ...
— By Shore and Sedge • Bret Harte
... blazed with hatred. "My lady, the lads of the village drove her there, and the poor hunted beast floundered into a quagmire. I cursed them well for it, but that does not bring back the good cow. And Howel will do nothing for me because the child is ...
— Masters of the Guild • L. Lamprey
... experienced the horror of a somnambulist who wakes up from a complacent dream of activity to find himself walking on a quagmire. A profound disgust of the ground on which he was making his way overcame him. Even the image of the charming girl was swept from his view in the flood of moral distress. Everything he had ever been or hoped to be would taste ...
— A Set of Six • Joseph Conrad
... better in a second charge led by himself bearing the standard; and, in a third disastrous rush, Bonaparte, who had caught up the standard and planted it on the bridge with his own hand, was himself swept back into a quagmire, where he would have perished but for a fourth return of the grenadiers, who drove back the pursuing Austrians, and pulled their commander from the swamp. Fired by his undaunted courage, the gallant lines were formed once more. At that moment another French corps passed ...
— The Life of Napoleon Bonaparte - Vol. I. (of IV.) • William Milligan Sloane
... of the long log. Stepping down, she found that the quagmire was not so deep. But for some minutes they continued to plow through it, but walking ...
— Ruth Fielding at the War Front - or, The Hunt for the Lost Soldier • Alice B. Emerson
... strings of bells, mules and men, lanterns, torches, sacks, provender, barrels, cheeses, kegs of honey and butter, straw bundles and packages of many shapes, were crowded confusedly together in this thawed quagmire and about the steps. Up here in the clouds, everything was seen through cloud, and seemed dissolving into cloud. The breath of the men was cloud, the breath of the mules was cloud, the lights were encircled by cloud, speakers close at ...
— Little Dorrit • Charles Dickens
... as dirty and rapacious as the dogs. The inns are such hobgoblin places, that they are infinitely more attractive and amusing than the best hotels in Paris. Here is one near Valmontone (that is Valmontone the round, walled town on the mount opposite), which is approached by a quagmire almost knee-deep. There is a wild colonnade below, and a dark yard full of empty stables and lofts, and a great long kitchen with a great long bench and a great long form, where a party of travellers, with ...
— Pictures from Italy • Charles Dickens
... anything to poor Tom? whom the foul fiend hath led through fire and through flame, and through ford and whirlpool, o'er bog and quagmire; that hath laid knives under his pillow, and halters in his pew; set ratsbane by ...
— Elizabethan Demonology • Thomas Alfred Spalding
... glimmered in a second window. Entering the courtyard, the britchka halted before a moderate-sized mansion. The darkness did not permit of very accurate observation being made, but, apparently, the windows only of one-half of the building were illuminated, while a quagmire in front of the door reflected the beams from the same. Meanwhile the rain continued to beat sonorously down upon the wooden roof, and could be heard trickling into a water butt; nor for a single moment did the dogs cease to bark with all the strength of their lungs. One of ...
— Dead Souls • Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol
... for the key to this mysterious thing we call life? Modern biochemistry will not listen to the old notion of a vital force—that is only a metaphysical will-o'-the-wisp that leaves us floundering in the quagmire. If I question the forces about me, what answer do I get? Molecular attraction and repulsion seem to say, "It is not in us; we are as active in the clod as in the flower." The four principal elements—oxygen, nitrogen, hydrogen, and carbon—say, "It is ...
— The Breath of Life • John Burroughs
... river, when our helmsman run us plump against one of Johnny's huge impalers. The shock of the blow threw the mate into an immense basket of fresh eggs. He fell with a squelch past all power of forgetting, and lay wriggling in a very quagmire of yolk and white and fragments of shells. We pulled him out blind and streaming with eggs. His aspect was so preposterously absurd that the helmsman, rendered almost imbecile by laughter, let the boat drive into a second ...
— The Honour of the Flag • W. Clark Russell
... too truly, O my knights? Was I too dark a prophet when I said To those who went upon the Holy Quest, That most of them would follow wandering fires, Lost in the quagmire?—lost to me and gone, And left me gazing at a barren board, And a lean Order—scarce return'd a tithe - And out of those to whom the vision came My greatest hardly will believe he saw; Another hath beheld it afar off, And leaving human wrongs to right ...
— Alfred Tennyson • Andrew Lang
... at all, all trace of the original traders' paths now being lost. Many persons, mostly engineers or prospecting adventurers, had passed here, each taking his own way, and the sum of their selections served only to make bad very much worse. In the level places the trail was a quagmire, on some of the steeper slopes simply a zigzag of scrambling ...
— The Young Alaskans in the Rockies • Emerson Hough
... person with dried red mud on his boots was the spy who had followed Mr. Richard Bartholomew East and was engaged by Montagne Lewis to interfere with any attempt the president of the H. & P. A. might make to pull his railroad out of the financial quagmire into which it was rapidly sinking, Tom would have preferred to have the spy not suspect that he had been identified after his ...
— Tom Swift and his Electric Locomotive - or, Two Miles a Minute on the Rails • Victor Appleton
... look upon thy glory and thy glorious creatures forever!" What an awful anomaly in our being were it, if that prayer were to be denied! And what would the memory of friends be, so sweet and solemn now,—what would it be, but as the taper which the angel of death extinguishes in this earthly quagmire? ...
— Autobiography and Letters of Orville Dewey, D.D. - Edited by his Daughter • Orville Dewey
... restored, and holy mass and psalm now ascend daily from it. The wretched hovels around the gates, where miserable peasants herded like swine in their sties, have been cleared away, and places fit for human habitation have been erected in their stead. That fearful quagmire, in which so many wretched travellers have lost their lives, has been drained, and a causeway built across it. Basildene is becoming a blessing to all around it; and so long as thou art lord here, my Raymond, it will remain ...
— In the Days of Chivalry • Evelyn Everett-Green
... of their ancient garrison were still existent in the middle of the pass; while, by marsh and morass, to render the place yet more impassable, they had suffered the hot-springs to empty themselves along the plain, on the Thessalian side, and the quagmire was still sodden and unsteady. The country on either side the Thermopylae was so contracted, that before, near the river Phoenix, and behind, near the village of Alpeni, was at that time space only for a single chariot. In such a pass the numbers and the cavalry of the Mede were rendered unavailable; ...
— Athens: Its Rise and Fall, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... forward autumn, which were just before spread over the face of that fertile and beautiful country, it now presented the dreary aspect of an arctic winter. The soil was changed into a morass; the standing corn beaten into a quagmire; the vines were broken to pieces, and their branches bruised in the same manner; the fruit-trees of every kind were demolished, and the hail lay unmelted in heaps like rocks of solid ice. Even the robust forest trees were incapable of withstanding ...
— The Rain Cloud - or, An Account of the Nature, Properties, Dangers and Uses of Rain • Anonymous
... and gravel surface, now a neglected stretch full of dangerous holes; and worst of all, running through the great forests, long pieces of road from which the stumps had been only partly extracted, and where the sunlight barely penetrated. Here the soaked earth became little less than a quagmire. ...
— Painted Windows • Elia W. Peattie
... and disappointment to God," said he, "but thou hast deceived the Saviour also, for thou hast gone as it were to a quagmire which has poisoned thy soul with its miasma. Thou mightst have offered it to Christ as a costly vessel, and said to Him, 'Fill it with grace, O Lord!' but thou hast preferred to offer it to the servant of the evil one. May God forgive thee and ...
— Quo Vadis - A Narrative of the Time of Nero • Henryk Sienkiewicz
... this uninviting quagmire for four solid hours. The interpreters were pestered unmercifully to secure us something to eat and to drink, but they were as helpless as ourselves. They were well-nigh distracted at the ugly turn which things were taking. Matters were certainly becoming alarming among the weaker ...
— Sixteen Months in Four German Prisons - Wesel, Sennelager, Klingelputz, Ruhleben • Henry Charles Mahoney
... and speckled teals; Ye fisher herons, watching eels; Ye duck and drake, wi' airy wheels Circling the lake; Ye bitterns, till the quagmire reels, ...
— Robert Burns - How To Know Him • William Allan Neilson
... Village, eight or ten miles off, and itself two miles long,—where he understands the Saxons are. Miller lad guides us, over height and hollow, with his best skill, at a brisk pace;—through one hollow, where he has known the cattle pasture in summer time; but which proves impassable, and mere quagmire, at this season. No getting through it, you unfortunate miller lad (GARCON DE MEUNIER). Nevertheless, we did find passage through the skirts of it: nay this quagmire proved the luck of us; for the enemy, trusting to it, had no ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XV. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... that he had ample time to reduce Knodsenburg before Prince Maurice could return to its assistance. Two great rivers barred the prince's return, and he would have to traverse the dangerous district called the Foul Meadow, and the great quagmire known as the Rouvenian Morass. But Prince Maurice had now an opportunity of showing the excellence of the army he had ...
— By England's Aid • G. A. Henty
... residence for the Peruvian nobles, and the sides of the hills were dotted with their villas, which afforded them a grateful retreat in the heats of summer.20 Yet the centre of the valley was disfigured by a quagmire of some extent, occasioned by the frequent overflowing of the waters; but the industry of the Indian architects had constructed a solid causeway, faced with heavy stone, and connected with the great road, which traversed the whole breadth of ...
— History Of The Conquest Of Peru • William Hickling Prescott
... have been the hurricanes of steel which have swept these slopes, that the surface of the earth has been literally blasted away, leaving a treacherous and incredibly tenacious quagmire in which horses and even soldiers have lost their lives. General Dubois told me that, only a few days before my visit to Verdun, one of his staff-officers, returning alone and afoot from an errand to Vaux, had fallen into a shell-crater and had drowned in ...
— Italy at War and the Allies in the West • E. Alexander Powell
... three or four feet below the surface. It also flowed over the Public Garden, across the southern portion of the parade-ground, to the foot of the hill, upon which stands the Soldiers' Monument. A son of H.G. Otis was drowned, about seventy years ago, in a quagmire which existed at that spot. It also flowed across the westerly portion of Boylston Street and Tremont Street, and Shawmut Avenue, to the corner of Washington Street and Groton Street, where stood the fortifications during the American Revolution, across the Neck, ...
— The Bay State Monthly, Volume I. No. VI. June, 1884 - A Massachusetts Magazine • Various
... these dull failures which seem not the outgrowth of anyone's fierce longing or wilful passion, but of everyone's laziness and greediness and stupidity, how is one to face them? It is the helpless death of the quagmire, not the death of the fight or the mountain-top. Is there, we ask ourselves, anything in the mind of God which corresponds to comfort-loving vulgarity, if so strong and yet so stagnant a stream can overflow the world? The bourgeois ideal! One would rather have tyranny or savagery ...
— Where No Fear Was - A Book About Fear • Arthur Christopher Benson
... had ventured on a sort of quagmire, and had disappeared half-way in the sticky mud. They stretched out their hands, and he rose, covered with slime, but quite satisfied at not having injured his precious entomologist's box. Acteon went beside him, and made it his duty to preserve the unlucky, ...
— Dick Sand - A Captain at Fifteen • Jules Verne
... discovery would result in a pecuniary loss to the town, and that consideration induces the officials, the good citizens, and soul reformers, to stifle the voice of truth. He finds them all a compact majority, unscrupulous enough to be willing to build up the prosperity of the town on a quagmire of lies and fraud. He is accused of trying to ruin the community. But to his mind "it does not matter if a lying community is ruined. It must be levelled to the ground. All men who live upon lies must be exterminated like vermin. You'll bring it to such a ...
— Anarchism and Other Essays • Emma Goldman
... the Somme, which will be remembered by our soldiers long after they have forgotten the shelling, was worse at Thiepval than elsewhere, or, at least, could not have been worse elsewhere. The road through Thiepval was a bog, the village was a quagmire. Near the chateau there were bits where one sank to the knee. In the great battle for Thiepval, on the 26th of last September, one of our Tanks charged an enemy trench here. It plunged and stuck fast and remained in the mud, like a great animal stricken ...
— The Old Front Line • John Masefield
... "My future is black—confused—a chaos. My life is like to one of these paths upon the fells. You have seen them, Monsieur Upperton. They are smooth and straight and clear where they begin; but soon they wind to left and wind to right, and so mid rocks and crags until they lose themselves in some quagmire. At Brussels my path was straight; but now, mon Dieu! who is there can tell me ...
— Danger! and Other Stories • Arthur Conan Doyle
... shortlived mortals to feel a reasonable assurance that whether the origin of the An was a tadpole or not, he is no more likely to become a tadpole again than the institutions of the Vril-ya are likely to relapse into the heaving quagmire and certain ...
— The Coming Race • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... poor girl's opposition? Here are the tracks of our friends, broader and deeper than ever: here they wind down into the hollow; and there, you may see where they have floundered through that vile pool, that is still turbid, where they crossed it. A horrible quagmire! But courage, my fair cousin: it is only such difficulties as these which the road can ...
— Nick of the Woods • Robert M. Bird
... getting a little desperate, and against Tchagan Hou's advice I decided to try bullying the weather, and when the rain came on again I refused to stop. As a result we were all soaked through, and after getting nearly bogged, all hands of us in a quagmire, I gave it up and we camped on the drenched ground, and there we stayed till the middle of the next day—spending most of our time trying to get dry. The argols were too wet to burn, but we made a little blaze with the wood of my soda-water box. For two days we had tried in ...
— A Wayfarer in China - Impressions of a trip across West China and Mongolia • Elizabeth Kendall
... sovereign may be a man of good intentions, but if he is weak, and allows himself to fall into the hands of despotic Ministers, he is a worse affliction than the cruellest tyrant. Think well, your Majesty! A throne may be a quagmire, and a man may be buried in it, and ...
— The Eternal City • Hall Caine
... but the delicate playfulness of Irving's humor and the lightness and grace of his exuberant style? Has there ever been a final "Don Quixote"? Certainly not in the recent monumental editions with their quagmire of footnotes. Moreover, if we had a final edition of the great romance it would not remain final for our children's children. Every age will make its own interpretations of the classics and will demand that they be embodied in contemporary design. Thus every age in its book design mirrors ...
— The Booklover and His Books • Harry Lyman Koopman
... road which he knew led up the hill to Woodbine Villa. But all landmarks were gone; houses, trees, hedges, all swept away; roads covered three feet thick with rocks, and stones, and bricks, and carcasses. The pleasant valley was one horrid quagmire, in which he could take few steps, burdened as he was, without sticking, or stumbling against some sure sign of destruction and death: within the compass of fifty yards he found a steam-boiler and its appurtenances ...
— Put Yourself in His Place • Charles Reade
... adventures hereafter—we may as well add that herein lies one of the pitfalls of crime; for the simple-minded burglar or embezzler may blithely make way with a silver service or bundle of bank notes only to find himself floundering, horse, foot and dragoons, in a quagmire of phraseology from which he cannot escape, wriggle as he will. Many such a one has thrown up his hands—and with them silver service, bank notes and all—in horror at what the grand jury has alleged ...
— By Advice of Counsel • Arthur Train
... the Normans! Onward through bush or brake, or copse, or quagmire. Onward, till the clearing is reached, where the English Lords of Aescendune ...
— The Rival Heirs being the Third and Last Chronicle of Aescendune • A. D. Crake
... pushed their march through forest and quagmire, through swollen streams and inundated savannas, toiling knee-deep through mud, rushes, and the rank, tangled grass,—hacking their way through thickets of the yucca or Spanish bayonet, with its clumps of dagger-like leaves, or defiling in gloomy procession through the drenched forest, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 12, No. 73, November, 1863 • Various
... running high, and the plain between it and Sutter's Fort seemed a vast quagmire, but John Rhodes volunteered to deliver the letter. He was ferried over the river on a raft formed of two logs lashed together with strips of rawhide. Then he rolled his trousers above the knee and with his shoes in his hand, started on ...
— The Expedition of the Donner Party and its Tragic Fate • Eliza Poor Donner Houghton
... the Eighty-sixth will forget with what difficulty it got its position in this battle, having to wade through creeks and swamps up to one's armpits. There was no chance to make a deflection to the right or left to shun a quagmire, right ahead being the only chance. The Eighty-sixth skirmishers in this engagement experienced a hard time; but the main body of the regiment ...
— History of the Eighty-sixth Regiment, Illinois Volunteer Infantry, during its term of service • John R. Kinnear
... his temper; he was of too humble a frame of mind to do that, but he got into a hopeless quagmire of mixed recollections, and he too left the witness-box quite unprepared to swear as to the day of the interview with the lady with the ...
— The Old Man in the Corner • Baroness Orczy
... this place which the horse can see, but which the rider fails to detect. They are in the midst of a swamp where one false step would mean a horrible death in the quagmire on the verge of which the horse has pulled up. The man uses whip and spur, but the horse refuses to move. Finally the rider leaves the horse to himself to find a way round which ...
— A Horse Book • Mary Tourtel
... the spot where the crumbling adobe walls of the casa had returned to the parent soil that gave it. The channel was deepened, the lagoon was drained, until one evening the magic mirror that had so long reflected the weary waiting of the Blue Grass Penelope lay dull, dead, lusterless, an opaque quagmire of noisome corruption and decay to be put away from the sight of man forever. On this spot the crows, the titular tenants of Los Cuervos, assembled in tumultuous congress, coming and going in mysterious clouds, or laboring in thick ...
— Frontier Stories • Bret Harte
... of the king's party, and put them to flight. And I had performed great things that day, if a certain fate had not been my hinderance; for the horse on which I rode, and upon whose back I fought, fell into a quagmire, and threw me on the ground, and I was bruised on my wrist, and carried into a village named Cepharnome, or Capernaum. When my soldiers heard of this, they were afraid I had been worse hurt than I was; and so ...
— The Life of Flavius Josephus • Flavius Josephus
... victory, will forsake you, and you will not be aware of it, for conquerors and tyrants are always blind. You will conquer and dominate. And you will plunge into injustice, and you will not feel the quagmire under your feet.... Every tyrant thinks he stands on firm ground so long as he has not ...
— Mother Earth, Vol. 1 No. 2, April 1906 - Monthly Magazine Devoted to Social Science and Literature • Various
... with lips tight shut like a vise, with a muddy complexion and thin arms, treat themselves to the malicious pleasure of promenading their Adolphe through the quagmire of falsehood and contradiction: they question him (see Troubles within Troubles), like a magistrate examining a criminal, reserving the spiteful enjoyment of crushing his denials by positive proof at a decisive moment. Generally, in this supreme ...
— Petty Troubles of Married Life, Second Part • Honore de Balzac
... how dying Salisbury doth groan! It irks his heart he cannot be revenged. Frenchmen, I 'll be a Salisbury to you: Pucelle or puzzel, dolphin or dogfish, Your hearts I 'll stamp out with my horse's heels, And make a quagmire of your mingled brains. Convey me Salisbury into his tent, And then we 'll try what these dastard ...
— King Henry VI, First Part • William Shakespeare [Aldus edition]
... Jesuits to explain away the old action of the Church, see Lecky, vol. ii, pp 256, 257. For the action of Benedict XIV, see Reusch, Der Index der Vorbotenen Bucher, Bonn, 1885, vol. ii, pp 847, 848. For a comical picture of the "quagmire' into which the hierarchy brought itself in the squaring of its practice with its theory, see Dollinger, as above, pp. 227, 228. For cunningly vague statements of the action of Benedict XIV, see Mastrofini, ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... sympathy in him? She would show that she had, at any rate. So she quite declined the part, which he had hoped she would have taken, of respondent, and possible questioner; and his work became more and more like that of a man walking in a quagmire. Once the squire roused himself to speak to the butler; he felt the need of outward stimulus—of ...
— Wives and Daughters • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... that.' 'To be sure y' are, Craig,' says he—he's not a bad fellow, Mills isn't, for a butler, but weak i' the head. 'Well,' says I, 'you talk o' Bony's cliverness; would it be any use my being a first-rate gardener if I'd got nought but a quagmire to work on?' 'No,' says he. 'Well,' I says, 'that's just what it is wi' Bony. I'll not deny but he may be a bit cliver—he's no Frenchman born, as I understand—but what's he got at's ...
— Adam Bede • George Eliot
... dry season, are said to be connected by an extremely good road; but, when we passed, the two places were separated by a quagmire into which the horses sank up ...
— The Former Philippines thru Foreign Eyes • Fedor Jagor; Tomas de Comyn; Chas. Wilkes; Rudolf Virchow.
... stale appeared her existence now! With a lump in her throat and a pang in her heart, she recklessly wiped her eyes upon the best parlor curtains, when Barnes mounted to the box, as robust a stage-driver as ever extricated a coach from a quagmire. The team, playful through long confinement, tugged at the reins, and Sandy, who was at the bits, occasionally shot through space like an ...
— The Strollers • Frederic S. Isham
... carefully. She was obliged to put one foot cautiously forth to see if the earth ahead were firm enough to bear the weight of her body. On she went, with Phyllis close behind her. In spite of the difficulty the girls were plainly making headway. "Hurrah!" called Madge, "we are almost out of this quagmire. There is dry land ahead!" With one long leap she made the solid ground which stretched just ahead of her. Phyllis was not so fortunate. She lunged blindly after Madge, struck an unusually bad part of the marsh and sank knee deep ...
— Madge Morton, Captain of the Merry Maid • Amy D. V. Chalmers
... had wandered in a darkness so thick that she could not see her hand before her. She had lost her way and knew not whither she had strayed, and with every step she had been afraid of sinking into a quagmire or stumbling headlong into an abyss. Now some one had called to her not to go any farther, but to sit down and wait for the break of day. She was glad that she would not have to continue her perilous wanderings; now she sat quietly waiting for ...
— Jerusalem • Selma Lagerlof
... almost every one: one day in my house he called Grote's 'History' "a fetid quagmire, with nothing spiritual about it." I always thought, until his 'Reminiscences' appeared, that his sneers were partly jokes, but this now seems rather doubtful. His expression was that of a depressed, almost ...
— The Autobiography of Charles Darwin - From The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin • Charles Darwin
... fortunately about his own size. Rolling up his own clothing in as small a bundle as possible, he concealed it in the bog, at some distance from the place where the picket had fallen. Dragging the corpse to a quagmire, he sunk it beneath the muddy waters, and it passed from his view. After taking the precaution to straighten up the long grass, which might have betrayed his movements, he advanced ...
— The Young Lieutenant - or, The Adventures of an Army Officer • Oliver Optic
... moose. Upon these paths the moose-calf tries his wobbly legs, and one day finds himself gazing out upon a plain where grass is. He has no use for grass—does not even know what grass is for. Only he sees no paths out there. The grass covers a quagmire, but of quagmires the moose-calf knows nothing, having been born upon ...
— The Gun-Brand • James B. Hendryx
... deplorable," he says, "that the intense scientific production of Russia is almost totally ignored by the West.... A great nation like Russia is not a negligible quantity affected by an intellectual quagmire (p. 671). The Russian Ecclesiastical literature is rich in monographs on particular subjects, and above all in Patristic theology. In this sphere of research, Russian Orthodoxy can even outrival the German science." ...
— Hymns from the Morningland - Being Translations, Centos and Suggestions from the Service - Books of the Holy Eastern Church • Various
... Lick located in what today is Boone County, Kentucky, was one of the greatest and oldest animal rendezvous in North America, geologists claim. It took its name doubtless from the variety of bones of prehistoric and later fauna found imbedded in the salty quagmire. ...
— Blue Ridge Country • Jean Thomas
... but as I was little likely to be encumbered in this way, it was a matter of no consideration, but it certainly annoyed me to find that every now and then I was liable to get my sermon moistened in a quagmire. ...
— Confessions of an Etonian • I. E. M.
... great fox-cover; a flat wilderness of low leafless oaks fortified by a long, dreary, thorn capped clay ditch, with sour red water oozing out at every yard; a broken gate leading into a straight wood ride, ragged with dead grasses and black with fallen leaves, the centre mashed into a quagmire by innumerable horsehoofs; some forty red coats and some four black; a sprinkling of young- farmers, resplendent in gold buttons and green; a pair of sleek drab stable-keepers, showing off horses for sale; the surgeon of the union, in Mackintosh and antigropelos; two holiday schoolboys ...
— Yeast: A Problem • Charles Kingsley
... and soaked it full; when it reached a comfortable bed between the roots of trees, it almost decided to stay and be a pond, and it dallied so long before it found a tiny opening and straggled out, that if it did not result in a pond, it did accomplish a treacherous quagmire. In fact that undecided, feeble-minded streamlet totally "demoralized" the whole hillside, and with its vagaries I had to contend at ...
— Little Brothers of the Air • Olive Thorne Miller
... covered was about two hundred and thirty miles. Under favorable circumstances, the trip could have been made in five or six days and with little hardship. The rainy season, however, was now at its height, and the country was one vast quagmire, overrun by swollen streams which could be crossed only at great risk. Ten days of wearisome marching brought the expedition to the forks of the Little Wabash. The entire region between the two channels was under water, and for a little time ...
— The Old Northwest - A Chronicle of the Ohio Valley and Beyond, Volume 19 In - The Chronicles Of America Series • Frederic Austin Ogg
... stretch out my hand to seize the hindermost boy of the enemy, when, not being acquainted with the miry and difficult paths of the Nor Loch, and in my eagerness taking no heed of my footing, I plunged into a quagmire, into which I sank as far as my shoulders. Our adversaries no sooner perceived this disaster, than, setting up a shout, they wheeled round and attacked us most vehemently. Had my comrades now deserted me, ...
— Lavengro - The Scholar, The Gypsy, The Priest • George Borrow
... circumstances combined to render it merely ridiculous, as reflected in the mirror of memory. The rain still fell heavily, lying in places to the depth of nearly a foot, and converting all the ground that was not rocky into a slippery quagmire. So profound was the darkness, that it was literally impossible to see any object six inches from one's eyes, and it was only by the occasional flashes from the firelocks of the persevering enemy and the forked lightning that we could realise the surrounding scene. ...
— Herzegovina - Or, Omer Pacha and the Christian Rebels • George Arbuthnot
... Three Weeks Observation of the Vices and Virtues of the Inhabitants, written by Owen Felltham, and printed Lond. 1659, 12mo. we find them epitomized as a general sea-land—the great bog of Europe—an universal quagmire—in short a green cheese in pickle. The sailors (in which denomination the author appears to include all the natives,) he describes as being able to "drink, rail, swear, niggle, steal, and be lowsie alike. ...
— Microcosmography - or, a Piece of the World Discovered; in Essays and Characters • John Earle
... as openly treated with mockery and contempt. Bunyan justly says, "The text calls for sharpness, so do the times." "With those whose religion lieth in some circumstantials, the kingdom swarms at this day." When they stand at the gate, they will "shake like a quagmire—their feigned faith, pretended love, shows of gravity, and holiday words, will stand them in little stead; some professors do with religion just as people do with their best apparel—hang it on the wall all the week, and put it on on Sundays; ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... the Valley of the Shadow of Death. On the right hand of this valley was a very deep ditch; it was the ditch into which the blind have led the blind in all ages, and have there miserably perished. And on the left hand was a dangerous quagmire, into which, if even a good man falls, he finds no bottom for his foot to stand on. The pathway here was exceeding narrow and very dark, and Christian was hard put to it to get through safely. And right by the wayside, in the midst of the valley, was the mouth of ...
— The Worlds Greatest Books - Vol. II: Fiction • Arthur Mee, J. A. Hammerton, Eds.
... here: one is called Theory, the other Practice. It is well to have them both, for one is nothing without the other; but still the latter is the better. Now the former means, to understand the cause and principle of a work; the latter, to be able to perform it: as, for instance, in regard to a quagmire; for there are many who know what should be done with a quagmire and yet do it wrong, because they are not able to put their knowledge into practice. Many, on the other hand, are skillful in doing, but do not know what ought to ...
— A Happy Boy • Bjornstjerne Bjornson
... occupies an area of about seventy-five miles in length and about thirty miles in width, almost a dead flat, and practically at sea-level. Here and there are open spaces of water or clusters of trees, but most of it is bog and quagmire and dense mangrove thickets. Along the coast are numerous harbors, large and small, that are or, by dredging, could be made available for commercial purposes. Among these, on the north coast, from west to east, are Bahia Honda, Mariel, Havana, Matanzas, ...
— Cuba, Old and New • Albert Gardner Robinson
... the place,—a fortunate circumstance for the besiegers, who were worn out with fatigue; and destitute of means, on account of the wretched weather which still continued, and which had turned the whole country round into a quagmire. Even the horses of the King lived upon leaves, and not a horse of all our numerous cavalry ever thoroughly recovered from the effects of such sorry fare. It is certain that without the presence of the King the ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre |
