"Slough" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... how the appearance of characters will change, whilst the root that produces them remains the same. The Washington faction having waded through the slough of negociation, and whilst it amused France with professions of friendship contrived to injure her, immediately throws off the hypocrite, and assumes the swaggering air of a bravado. The party papers of that imbecile administration were on this occasion filled with paragraphs about Sovereignty. ...
— The Writings Of Thomas Paine, Complete - With Index to Volumes I - IV • Thomas Paine
... clanging ... that I ought to wait, say a week at least having killed all your mules for you, before I shot down your dogs—but not being exactly Phoibos Apollon, you are to know further that when I did think I might go modestly on, ... [Greek: omoi], let me get out of this slough of a simile, never mind with what dislocation of ancles! Plainly, from waiting and turning my eyes away (not from you, but from you in your special capacity of being written-to, not spoken-to) when I turned again you had grown formidable somehow—though ...
— The Letters of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett, Vol. 1 (of 2) 1845-1846 • Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett
... love are superfluities, intended only for the rich, who live at ease, and have no need to take thought for the morrow; or desperations—the last and reckless joy of the deeply wretched, who never hope to rise out of the slough ...
— Shirley • Charlotte Bronte
... old person of Slough, Who danced at the end of a bough; But they said, "If you sneeze, you might damage the trees, You ...
— Nonsense Books • Edward Lear
... the Yallabusha enters, the river then taking the name of Yazoo; so that the works erected across the neck were said to be between the Tallahatchie and Yazoo, though the stream is one. The fort, which was called Pemberton, was built of cotton and earth; in front of it was a deep slough, and on its right flank the river was barricaded by a raft and the hull of the ocean steamer Star of the West, which, after drawing the first shots fired in the war, when the batteries in Charleston stopped her from reinforcing Fort Sumter in January, 1861, had passed by some chance ...
— The Gulf and Inland Waters - The Navy in the Civil War. Volume 3. • A. T. Mahan
... fungous was nearly removed; the wound presented an appearance of slough over its surface.—The caustic was applied to ...
— An Essay on the Application of the Lunar Caustic in the Cure of Certain Wounds and Ulcers • John Higginbottom
... such parts of it as really bear flowers at all. For most races and nations during the most of their life are not progressive but simply stagnant, sometimes just managing to preserve their standard customs, sometimes slipping back to the slough. That is why history has nothing to say about them. The history of the world consists mostly in the memory of those ages, quite few in number, in which some part of the world has risen above itself and ...
— The Legacy of Greece • Various
... shall this slough of sense be cast, This dust of thoughts be laid at last, The man of flesh and soul be slain And the man ...
— A Shropshire Lad • A. E. Housman
... I will understand. Your financial affairs are in desperate condition but the case is not hopeless. You are young and healthy but you lack a definite plan of life. If someone will throw you a line while you are floundering in this slough you will come out all right. Now what's this thing you are to do ...
— David Lannarck, Midget - An Adventure Story • George S. Harney
... you may readily conceive, was sunk in the Slough of Despond deeper than ever plummet sounded. Margaret thought this very nice of him; it was a delicate tribute to her that he ate nothing; and the fact that Hugh Van Orden and Petheridge Jukesbury—as she believed—acted in precisely the same way for precisely the same reason, merely ...
— The Eagle's Shadow • James Branch Cabell
... own children to take them away from the South, as he might have done, or to provide for them handsomely, as he perhaps meant to do,—I violated the traditions of my class and stepped from the beaten path to help the misbegotten son of my old friend out of the slough of despond, in which he had learned, in some strange way, that he was floundering. Ten years later, the ghost of my good deed returns to haunt me, and makes me doubt whether I have wrought more evil than good. I wonder," he mused, "if ...
— The House Behind the Cedars • Charles W. Chesnutt
... "unwinding" would be the destiny of the person—a destiny determined, necessarily, by past action. This concept gives a new and more eloquent meaning to the phrase "Character is destiny." If we carry our thought no further, we are plunged into the slough of determinism—sheer fatality. But in each reincarnation, however predetermined every act and event, their reaction upon consciousness remains a matter of determination—is therefore self-determined. We may ...
— Four-Dimensional Vistas • Claude Fayette Bragdon
... personally, and they are to be appealed to and asked patriotically to banish all party and "sectional" feelings from their minds, while discussing the best mode of helping "our neighbor" out of the Slough of Despond, so that she may be enabled to meet the demands we have upon her,—not in money, for that she has not, and we purpose giving her a round sum, but in land, of which she has a vast supply, and all of it susceptible of yielding good returns to servile industry. ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 30, April, 1860 • Various
... to get it. And you know I could not have explained all this before him and you. You would have thrown up the stall in disgust." Would that he had! That was Mark's wish now,—his futile wish. In what a slough of despond had he come to wallow in consequence of his folly on that night at Gatherum Castle! He had then done a silly thing, and was he now to rue it by almost total ruin? He was sickened also with all these lies. His very soul was dismayed by the dirt through which he was forced to wade. ...
— Framley Parsonage • Anthony Trollope
... moment, in a wretched slough of helplessness, Dorothy found her conviction wavering. Could it really be possible that he was speaking the truth; that he did not know? But with the dreadful thought came also the realization that she must not let him fathom her mind. She told herself ...
— Hidden Gold • Wilder Anthony
... up in the second canal, the river rose several feet and was booming as we came out into it, and the strong current carried our boat against a drift on a small overflowed island, and came near sinking or capsizing it. Then the only way we could get off was down over a rough, shoaly slough, where she went like a bucking broncho. The next boat after us was manned by Alabamians, and they went over the lower rock dam that turned the water into the canal; being good swimmers, they got out, but lost ...
— The Southern Soldier Boy - A Thousand Shots for the Confederacy • James Carson Elliott
... a circuit,—came by the old trail around the head of the slough. We haven't passed anybody, have we, Tony?" he asked of the ...
— Foes in Ambush • Charles King
... abandoned to die, in the swamps, by his timid companions, He prayed to the Virgin on high, and she led him forth from the forest; For angels she sent him as men —in the forms of the tawny Dakotas, And they led his feet from the fen, —from the slough of despond and the desert. Half-dead in a dismal morass, as they followed the red-deer they found him, In the midst of the mire and the grass, and mumbling "Te Deum laudamus." "Unktomee [72]—Ho!" muttered the braves, for they deemed him the ...
— Legends of the Northwest • Hanford Lennox Gordon
... that Battle of Jutland, it seems nothing short of criminal that the English censor should have permitted the world to hold Great Britain in contempt for twenty-four hours and sink poor France in the slough of despond. However, he is used to abuse, and ...
— The Living Present • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... experience that 'the wages of sin is death.' As a rule, God does not interpose to pick a man out of the mud into which he has been plunged by his own faults and follies, until he has learned the lessons which he can find in plenty down in the slough, if he will only look for them! And the fact that some great calamity or some great joy affects a wide circle of people, does not make its having a special lesson and meaning for each of them at all doubtful. There is one of the great depths of all-moving ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: Romans Corinthians (To II Corinthians, Chap. V) • Alexander Maclaren
... wild, unmeaning fables. It was woman, charming woman, that led unpolished man forth from the forests and the dens, and taught him to bend before thy shrine, humanity! See how the face of nature changes! Where late the slough mantled, or the serpent hissed among the briars and the reeds, all is pasture and fertility. The cottages arise. The shepherds assume the guise of gentleness and simplicity. They attire themselves with care, they braid the garland, and they tune the pipe. Wherefore do they braid the garland? Why ...
— Imogen - A Pastoral Romance • William Godwin
... were earth's troubles to that? One vision of unseen things, rushing in, made small all the things that are seen. The poor old cripple, deformed and diseased, whose days must have been long a burden to her, was going even now to drop the slough of her mortality and to take on her the robes of light and the life that is all glory. What if my own life were barren for a while; then comes the end! What if I must be alone in my journey; I may do the Master's work all ...
— Daisy in the Field • Elizabeth Wetherell
... the wily parson succeeded in getting to the stormy heart of this enraged and unhappy father, and portrayed in glowing colors the clearness of Miss Elizabeth's "effectual call" and "blessed hope," and managed to bridge over "that awful slough of Methodism" by descanting gravely upon some of the "mysterious leadings of sovereign grace." "And now, if our dear lamb of the Saviour can be rescued from those deluded people and carefully instructed in 'the doctrines of ...
— Elizabeth: The Disinherited Daugheter • E. Ben Ez-er
... gladder that he is alive, and ready to fight the devil himself in a good cause. Upon his friends R. H. D. had the same effect. And it was not only in proximity that he could distribute energy, but from afar, by letter and cable. He had some intuitive way of knowing just when you were slipping into a slough of laziness and discouragement. And at such times he either appeared suddenly upon the scene, or there came a boy on a bicycle, with a yellow envelope and a book to sign, or the postman in his buggy, or the telephone ...
— Appreciations of Richard Harding Davis • Various
... still on her knees: "It is a common thing to say that suspense is worse to bear than certainty, but the certainty that destroys hope and makes the future a blank is very like a millstone hanged round a man's neck to sink him in a slough of despondency. I never really believed it until Dr. Courteney told me that if I wish to save my life it must be at the cost of my ambition; that I can never be an advocate, a teacher, a preacher; that I shall have to go softly all my days, ...
— The Vicissitudes of Bessie Fairfax • Harriet Parr
... her when he had her. Heaven knows why it is; it isn't because of anything he's done or has, it's just because it's HIM, I suppose, but I know my chance is gone for good! THAT leaves me free to act for her; no one can accuse me of doing it for myself. And I swear she sha'n't go through that slough of despond again while I have breath ...
— The Guest of Quesnay • Booth Tarkington
... in his hands, as he clings desperately to the smooth white-oak trunk. A strange, wild strain, like a detached chord of a vesper melody, sounds above him! It is the whippoorwill—steadily, continuously, entrancingly the dulcet measure is taken up and echoed, until the slough of despond seems transformed into a varying diapason of melancholy minstrelsy. He dares not raise his head. It will vanish if he moves. He crouches, panting, almost exultant, in the sense of recovered faculties, or rather the suspension ...
— The Iron Game - A Tale of the War • Henry Francis Keenan
... with feathers new she sings; The turtle to her make hath told her tale. Summer is come, for every spray now springs: The hart hath hung his old head on the pale; The buck in brake his winter coat he flings; The fishes flete with new repaired scale. The adder all her slough away she slings; The swift swallow pursueth the flies smale; The busy bee her honey now she mings; Winter is worn ...
— Book of English Verse • Bulchevy
... thatch of the sheds was all worn away, mossgrown, and bored by the sparrows. Those in which the cows were placed at calving time were mere dark holes. The floor of the yard was often soft, so that the hoofs of the cattle trod deep into it—a perfect slough in wet weather. The cows themselves were of a poor character, and in truth as poorly treated, for the hay was made badly—carelessly harvested, and the grass itself not of good quality—nor were the men always very humane, thinking little ...
— Hodge and His Masters • Richard Jefferies
... a feeling of general sickness, chilliness and some fever. The skin over the sore part is hot and painful. The several dead parts may run together until the entire mass separates in a slough. In favorable cases it proceeds to heal kindly, but in severe cases it may spread to the surrounding tissues and end fatally, sometimes by the absorption of putrid materials, or by the resulting weakness. It runs usually from ...
— Mother's Remedies - Over One Thousand Tried and Tested Remedies from Mothers - of the United States and Canada • T. J. Ritter
... diploma was a sure passport. When the girls worked they worked hard, and when playtime came it was enjoyed to the full. Naturally, with so many dispositions surrounding her, Miss Preston often in secret floundered in a "slough of despond," for that which could influence one girl for her good might prove a complete failure when brought to bear upon another. Never was the old adage, "What is one man's meat is another man's poison," more ...
— Caps and Capers - A Story of Boarding-School Life • Gabrielle E. Jackson
... that she must get him somehow back into his slough of despond. His freedom paralyzed her. And he returned with a pathetic change ...
— The Pool in the Desert • Sara Jeannette Duncan
... think that Sir Charles Dilke owed a great deal to the Liberal party, but we certainly think that the Liberal party owed a very great deal to Sir Charles Dilke. In the dark days of 1874, when the party was deeper in the slough of despond than it has ever been before or since in our time, it was from the initiative and courage of Sir Charles Dilke that salvation came. His work in organizing the Liberal forces, especially in the Metropolis, ...
— The Life of the Rt. Hon. Sir Charles W. Dilke V1 • Stephen Gwynn
... a load of from 800 to 1,000 pounds. These vehicles were admirably adapted to the country, which was in a perfectly natural state, without roads of any kind, except the trail worn by the carts. They could easily pass over a slough that would obstruct any other forms of wheeled carriage, and one man could drive four or five of them, each being hitched behind the other. They were readily constructed on the border, by the unskilled half-breeds, where iron was unobtainable. This trade, with an occasional ...
— The History of Minnesota and Tales of the Frontier • Charles E. Flandrau
... is no meaner than a fay, Redeem'd from sleepy death, for beauty's sake, By old ordainment:—silent as she lay, Touched by a moonlight wand I saw her wake, And cut her leafy slough, and so forsake The verdant prison of her lily peers, That slept amidst the stars upon the lake— A breathing shape—restored to human fears, And new-born love and grief—self-conscious of ...
— The Poetical Works of Thomas Hood • Thomas Hood
... porch they also stopped, distributing alms. One of the beggars, with a red, cicatrized slough instead of a nose, approached Katiousha. She produced some coins from her handkerchief, gave them to him, and without the slightest expression of disgust, but, on the contrary, her eyes beaming with delight, kissed him three ...
— The Awakening - The Resurrection • Leo Nikoleyevich Tolstoy
... hurtling into sight, huge, unbelievably swift, roaring upon its whistle, tore a great, gray-painted motor lorry, packed with khaki-clad infantrymen. It was going at a hideous speed, leaping its tons of weight insanely from rock ridge to traffic-churned slough in the road; there was only time to note its immensity and uproar and the ranked faces of the men swaying in their places, and it was by, and another was bounding into sight behind it. A hundred and odd of them, each with thirty men on board—three battalions ...
— The New York Times Current History of the European War, Vol 1, Issue 4, January 23, 1915 • Various
... duke lost more. His mind was jaded. He floundered—he made desperate efforts, but plunged deeper in the slough. Feeling that, to regain his ground, each card must tell, he acted on each as if it must win, and the consequences of this insanity (for a gamester at such a crisis is really insane) were, that his ...
— The Gaming Table: Its Votaries and Victims - Volume II (of II) • Andrew Steinmetz
... a child; but he did as she bid, and so came safely through, while McFarlane set to work to blaze a new route which should avoid the slough which was already a bottomless ...
— The Forester's Daughter - A Romance of the Bear-Tooth Range • Hamlin Garland
... public places, and to see for himself, if possible, whether Cuckoo's accusation against Valentine were true. That a frightful change had taken place in Julian's life, and that he was rapidly sinking in a slough of wholly inordinate dissipation was clear enough. But did Valentine, this new, strange Valentine, lead him, or merely go with him, or stand aloof smiling at him and letting him take his own way like a foolish boy? That question the doctor must decide for himself. He could ...
— Flames • Robert Smythe Hichens
... our purity to the Lord that called us. One may well wonder where a Galilean fisherman got the impulse that lifted him to such a height; one may well wonder that he ventured to address such wide, absolute commandments to the handful of people just dragged from the very slough and filth of heathenism to whom he spoke. But he had dwelt with Christ, and they had Christ in their hearts. So for him to command and for them to obey, and to aim after even so wide and wonderful an attainment as perfecting like God's was the most natural thing in ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ephesians; Epistles of St. Peter and St. John • Alexander Maclaren
... contribution of one dollar, he did nothing else but cavil and deplore. He inveighed against the low standards of the masses, and went on his way sadly, making all the money he could at his private calling, and keeping his hands clean from the slime of the political slough. He was a censor and a gentleman; a well-set-up, agreeable, quick-witted fellow, whom his men companions liked, whom women termed interesting. He was apt to impress the latter as earnest and at the same time ...
— The Law-Breakers and Other Stories • Robert Grant
... the camp were in a deplorable condition. They were merely tracks trodden down by our feet and carts, heavily rutted, uneven, and either a slough of mud and water, or a desert of dust, according to the weather. We persistently urged the German authorities to improve these roads, but they turned a deaf ear to all ...
— Sixteen Months in Four German Prisons - Wesel, Sennelager, Klingelputz, Ruhleben • Henry Charles Mahoney
... original? For myself, I would above all things urge him to study how to reproduce, and not how to represent—to imitate no past perfection, but to create for himself another, as beautiful, wise, and true. I would say to him, "build not on old ground, profaned, polluted, trod into slough by filthy animals; but break new ground—virgin ground—ground that thought has never imagined or eye seen, and dig into our hearts a foundation, deep and broad as our humanity. Let it not be a temple formed of hands only, but built up of us—us of ...
— The Germ - Thoughts towards Nature in Poetry, Literature and Art • Various
... in that cruelly false position in which I have already suffered so much both for myself and for you—for I, too, am proud. Your daughter shall be such as she ought to be; shall do what she ought to do; shall suffer what she ought to suffer. To-morrow all will know from what a slough you have rescued me; in seeing the repentant at the foot of the cross, they will, perhaps, pardon the past in consideration of my present humility. It would not be so, my dear father, if they saw me, as a few months ago, shining in the ...
— Mysteries of Paris, V3 • Eugene Sue
... that the settler would fence off the hunter's game preserve into farms and cities. A rare glamour lay over the plains {58} that June, not the less rare because hope beckoned the travellers. The unfenced prairie billowed to the horizon a sea of green, diversified by the sky-blue waters of slough and lake, and decked with the hues of gorgeous flowers—the prairie rose, fragrant, tender, elusive, and fragile as the English primrose; the blood-red tiger-lily; the brown windflower with its corn-tassel; the heavy wax ...
— The Cariboo Trail - A Chronicle of the Gold-fields of British Columbia • Agnes C. Laut
... season of drought and scarcity ask not the distressed dervish, saying: "How are you?" Unless on the condition that you apply a balm to his wound, and supply him with the means of subsistence:—The ass which thou seest stuck in the slough with his rider, compassionate from thy heart, otherwise do not go near him. Now that thou went and asked him how he fell, like a sturdy fellow bind up thy loins, and take ...
— Persian Literature, Volume 2, Comprising The Shah Nameh, The - Rubaiyat, The Divan, and The Gulistan • Anonymous
... the bonds of sin and despair, as bound with them. Hence his power as a preacher; hence the wonderful adaptation of his great allegory to all the variety of spiritual conditions. Like Fearing, he had lain a month in the Slough of Despond, and had played, like him, the long melancholy bass of spiritual heaviness. With Feeble-mind, he had fallen into the hands of Slay-good, of the nature of Man-eaters: and had limped along his difficult way upon the crutches of Ready-to-halt. Who better than himself could ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... enterprise; on every hand, and in every line, were men fully as active and unprincipled as he. Nearly all of these men, and scores of competitors in his own sphere—dominant capitalists in their day—have become well-nigh lost in the records of time; their descendants are in the slough of poverty, genteel or otherwise. Those times were marked by the intensest commercial competition; business was a labyrinth of sharp tricks and low cunning; the man who managed to project his head far above the rest not only had to practice the methods of ...
— Great Fortunes from Railroads • Gustavus Myers
... taking a favorite walk through the Presidio toward the Beach. From a hill-top they saw the Exposition buildings rising from what once had been a slough. ...
— Port O' Gold • Louis John Stellman
... could not help surmising what had been his condition the previous day. Indeed Stanton, with a contemptuous shrug, had the same as said on Sabbath evening, that his uncle had "dropped into the old slough." Although neither of the young men knew how great an impetus Ida had given her father towards such degradation, they both felt that if his wife and daughter had had the tact to detect and appreciate his better mood, produced by the morning ramble, they ...
— A Face Illumined • E. P. Roe
... Mantua territory half is slough, Half pine-tree forest: maples, scarlet oaks Breed o'er the river-beds; even Mincio chokes With sand the summer through: but 'tis morass In winter up to Mantua's walls. There was, Some thirty years before this evening's coil, One spot reclaimed ...
— The Poetry Of Robert Browning • Stopford A. Brooke
... its endeavour to vindicate the spirituality of man against the materialist, idealism tumbles into the slough of solipsism and needs to be fetched out by the doctrine of the Trinity, it fares much the same way in its attempted defence of free-will against necessity. That freedom from determination by the "not-self" which idealism vindicates, can belong only ...
— The Faith of the Millions (2nd series) • George Tyrrell
... back for many miles from the heart of an ugly city to the cabbage gardens that gave the maker of the seal his opportunity to call the city "urbs in horto." Somewhere between the two—that is to say, forninst th' gas-house and beyant Healey's slough and not far from the polis station—lives ...
— Mr. Dooley in Peace and in War • Finley Peter Dunne
... earnings, though she insisted that Schumann was assured of one thousand thalers a year, and she could earn an equal sum with one concert a winter in Dresden, where prices were so high. But just then the prosperity of Schumann's paper began to slough off. It occurred to the lovers that they would prefer to live in Vienna, and that the Zeitschrift could prosper there. There were endless difficulties, a censorship to pacify, and many commercial schemes to arrange, but nothing must be left untried. The scheme was put under way. Meanwhile, as ...
— The Love Affairs of Great Musicians, Volume 2 • Rupert Hughes
... was seized with an attack of gout in his stomach, which resisted all the powers of medicine, and proved fatal in less than a week. He died on the 30th of July, 1771, and was buried, according to his own desire, beside the remains of his mother at Stoke-Pogis, near Slough, in Buckinghamshire, in a beautiful sequestered village churchyard that is supposed to have furnished the scene of his elegy.[1] The literary habits and personal peculiarities of Gray are familiar to us ...
— Select Poems of Thomas Gray • Thomas Gray
... flounder for the rest of our existence, wandering farther and farther from the beauty and freshness and from the kindly gushing springs of clear gladness that made all around us green in our youth! One wanders and gropes in a slough of stock-jobbing, one sinks or rises in a storm of politics, and in either case it is as good to fall as to rise—to mount a bubble on the crest of the wave, as to sink ...
— George Cruikshank • William Makepeace Thackeray
... but of her body and soul as well! And it is me, me whom you ask to be a party to this shameful transaction. Her dead father left her to my care, and I am to sell her to you, that her money may redeem our name from the slough into which you have flung it? Is innocence to be sacrificed that vice may ride abroad again? Look here," says the professor, his face deadly white, "you have come to the wrong man. I shall warn Miss Wynter ...
— A Little Rebel - A Novel • Margaret Wolfe Hungerford
... have been exerted, from the highest quarters, to bring her into subjection to material interests and unheroic maxims, to sap the chivalry and enthusiasm of her youth. But it is not too late, Let her slough this all off in her hour of trial! Let her cast off her disguises and her rags together, and stand forth in the garb and attitude of a hero! This work must be done. If the men of scholarship and accomplishments and wealth who have heretofore enjoyed prominence, do not feel themselves up ...
— The American Union Speaker • John D. Philbrick
... at Slough, and a wave of freshness, with an odour of verdure and sap, blew into their faces. The dog leaped and barked, and Glory skipped along with it, breaking every moment into enthusiastic exclamations. There was hardly any wind, and ...
— The Christian - A Story • Hall Caine
... that they direct the chase, bag the game, inebriate some of the sportsmen, and leave the rest behind in the slough. May I ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXIX. - March, 1843, Vol. LIII. • Various
... proved the up-looking of her better nature; and her charity was unbounded. Shall we—reared and instructed in all righteous ways—shall we show less charity to the memory of one who in her latter days rose out of the slough into which circumstance—not vice—had plunged her? Shall we be less charitable than the bishop who honored her memory and his own character by recording her benevolence, her penitence, her exemplary end? The good bishop's testimony renders ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 1, April, 1851 • Various
... kept the two drumsticks as well as the wings of the gobbler. Possibly he might many a time feel a queer little sensation creeping up and down his spinal column as memory carried him back again to that slough, where the treacherous black mud was slowly but ...
— Chums in Dixie - or The Strange Cruise of a Motorboat • St. George Rathborne
... speak. That night the major, calling at Captain Dade's, was concerned to hear that Mrs. Dade was not at home. "Gone over to the hospital with Mrs. Blake and the doctor," was the explanation, and these gentle-hearted women, it seems, were striving to do something to rouse the lad from the slough of despond which had engulfed him. That night "Pink" Marble, Hay's faithful book-keeper and clerk for many a year, a one-armed veteran of the civil war, calling, as was his invariable custom when ...
— A Daughter of the Sioux - A Tale of the Indian frontier • Charles King
... what treatment to use to cover all cases. It cannot be taught by correspondence, and, simple though it sounds to hear it, it cannot be learned by attendance at a few clinics. It is delicate in this sense, that if it is not rightly performed in the individual case the glands will slough. That means loss of time, loss of temper, and the waste of a perfectly good pair of young goat-glands. Another very important thing which his experiments have taught Dr. Brinkley is this: the glands on being removed ...
— The Goat-gland Transplantation • Sydney B. Flower
... elixir, and sunk to their grave, grey before their time. Legends tell you that the fiend rent them into fragments. Yes; the fiend of their own unholy desires and criminal designs! What they coveted, thou covetest; and if thou hadst the wings of a seraph thou couldst soar not from the slough of thy mortality. Thy desire for knowledge, but petulant presumption; thy thirst for happiness, but the diseased longing for the unclean and muddied waters of corporeal pleasure; thy very love, which usually elevates ...
— Zanoni • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... her own accord—one unbetrothed to another, one desirous of thy grace!' Although she spoke in this strain, Salwa, however, O chief of the Bharatas, rejected that daughter of the ruler of Kasi, like a snake casting off his slough. Indeed, although that king was earnestly solicited with diverse expressions such as these, the lord of the Salwas still did not, O bull of the Bharata race, manifest any inclination for accepting the girl. Then the eldest daughter of the ruler of Kasi, filled with anger, and ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 2 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... only did their two guests think so, but the whole country, far and wide around, entertained precisely the same opinion. It is not, therefore, surprising that two young men like Frank and Vernon should be well pleased with their quarters, or that, having so early gotten into the slough of love, they should daily continue to sink deeper into the mire. The young poet's lame leg, though not a very serious affair, was still sufficient to keep him for several days a close prisoner to the house; ...
— Blackwoods Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 365, March, 1846 • Various
... to amputate, it is important to avoid having bruised, torn, or separated tissues in the flaps, as these are liable to slough or to become the seat of infection. In this connection it should be borne in mind that the damage to soft tissues is always wider in extent than appears ...
— Manual of Surgery Volume Second: Extremities—Head—Neck. Sixth Edition. • Alexander Miles
... children," established in his palace. To Mrs. Hunt he was positively brutal; nor could he tolerate her self-complacent husband, who, while he had voyaged far and wide in literature, had never wholly cast the slough of Cockneyism. Hunt was himself hardly powerful enough to understand the true magnitude of Shelley, though he loved him; and the tender solicitude of the great, unselfish Shelley, for the smaller, harmlessly conceited Hunt, is pathetic. They spent a pleasant day or two together, Shelley showing ...
— Percy Bysshe Shelley • John Addington Symonds
... white, drawn face, and staring eyes, dumb with an agony of fear. Her life was bidding fair to be knit with his,— what Upas tree of horror was rooted in his very bones? The thought that her sweet purity was likely to be engulfed in a devil's slough in which he was swallowing was not to be endured. As I realised that the man was more than my match at the game which I was playing—in which such vital interests were at stake!—my hands itched to clutch him by the throat, and try ...
— The Beetle - A Mystery • Richard Marsh
... possibilities of organization and found himself possessed of unlimited political rights, should seek a speedy salvation in the ballot box. He took, by impulse, the partisan shortcut and soon found himself lost in the slough of party intrigue. On the other hand, it should not be concluded that these intermittent attempts to form labor parties were without political significance. The politician is usually blind to every need except the need of his party; and the one permanent need of his party is votes. A demand backed ...
— The Armies of Labor - Volume 40 in The Chronicles Of America Series • Samuel P. Orth
... could not help calling to mind Miss Edgeworth's admirable tale of Murad the Unlucky, and his friend the lucky Saladin. Like the former, Wheelwright seemed destined but to fall from one calamity into another, and effort to retrieve his affairs, did but plunge him deeper into the slough of misery. I could not but perceive, however, that as in the case of the persecuted Mussulman, the misfortunes of my poor friend had their origin in his own bad management, and to speak the honest truth, ...
— Ups and Downs in the Life of a Distressed Gentleman • William L. Stone
... grape-vines,—where the air is sweet with woodland odors, and vocal with the song of birds. Then the deep cypress-swamp, where dark trunks rise like the columns of some vast sepulchre. Above, the impervious canopy of leaves; beneath, a black and root-encumbered slough. Perpetual moisture trickles down the clammy bark, while trunk and limb, distorted with strange shapes of vegetable disease, wear in the gloom a semblance grotesque and startling. Lifeless forms lean propped ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, August, 1863, No. 70 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various
... abandoned to die, in the swamps, by his timid companions, He prayed to the Virgin on high, and she led him forth from the forest; For angels she sent him as men— in the forms of the tawny Dakotas, And they led his feet from the fen, from the slough of despond and the desert, Half dead in a dismal morass, as they followed the red-deer they found him, In the midst of the mire and the grass, and mumbling "Te Deum laudamus." "Unktomee[72]—Ho!" muttered the braves, for they deemed him the black Spider-Spirit That ...
— The Feast of the Virgins and Other Poems • H. L. Gordon
... lay encamped, separated from the Indians by a slough. In the morning a deputation of Indians came to ask the meaning of the martial appearance of the whites when all they desired was a council. This suggestion of a council was quickly assented to, but the Indians approached ...
— Old Fort Snelling - 1819-1858 • Marcus L. Hansen
... Suisun Bay, to the confluence of the San Joaquin and Sacramento rivers, is sixty-three square miles. The total bay area is therefore four hundred and eighty square miles; and there are hundreds of miles of slough, river, and creek. A yachtsman, starting from Alviso, at the southern end of the bay, may sail in one general direction one hundred and fifty-four miles to Sacramento, before turning. All of this, of course, in ...
— The California Birthday Book • Various
... typical case of sniffles, with running at eyes and nose, and Bouvais laughed. "The only cold we have up here is when the lungs get touched by frost," he said, "and then you die—the following spring. Always then. The lungs slough away." And then he asked: ...
— The Courage of Marge O'Doone • James Oliver Curwood
... they got after her in the daytime. She had always outran them at night. She ran to the cabin and got her quarter which she had hid. She put the quarter in her mouth. The white folks didn't allow the slaves to handle no money. The quarter got stuck in her throat, and she went on down to the slough and drowned herself rather than let them beat her, and mark her up. Then patrollers sure would get you and beat you up. If they couldn't catch you when you were running away from them, they would come on your master's place and get you and beat you. The master ...
— Slave Narratives: a Folk History of Slavery in the United States From Interviews with Former Slaves - Arkansas Narratives Part 3 • Works Projects Administration
... and treated with the utmost rigour of the law? WINSER, the cabman, who gave his false evidence so gaily in the Thirkettle Case, has been had up, and sentenced. Having dealt with WINSER, it is only a short step from WINSER to SLOUGH—but perhaps such a slough of muck, that it wants the pluck of a Hercules in the Augaean stable to commence operations, and a deus ex-machina—that is, the Public Prosecutor from the Treasury—to see that the proceedings are not abortive. Oh, where, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 98, January 25th, 1890 • Various
... is highly dramatic and picturesque. It is, to be sure, an allegory, but one of those allegories which seem inherent in the human mind and hence more natural than the most direct narrative. For all men life is indeed a journey, and the Slough of Despond, Doubting Castle, Vanity Fair, and the Valley of Humiliation are places where in one sense or another every human soul has often struggled and suffered; so that every reader goes hand in ...
— A History of English Literature • Robert Huntington Fletcher
... always grasped the plan and intention, and really seemed to be inside the mind of the contriver. He would say; "I think the theme is weak here—and you can't make a weak place strong by filling it with details, however good in themselves. That is like trying to mend the Slough of Despond with cartloads of texts. The thing is not to fall in, or, if you fall in, to get out." His three divisions of a subject were "what you say, what you wanted to say, what you ought to have wanted to say." Sometimes he would listen in silence, and then say: "I can't criticise ...
— Father Payne • Arthur Christopher Benson
... himself. For what, after all, was he here for save to let in light and combat evil, to bring home the sense of sin to the inhabitants of this place, convincing them of the hatefulness of the moral slough in which they so revoltingly wallowed. He must slay and spare not. He saw himself as David, squaring up to Goliath, as Christian fighting single-handed against the emissaries of Satan who essayed to defeat his pilgrimage. ...
— Deadham Hard • Lucas Malet
... well,—very well," muttered Harley, when the door had closed upon the parson. "The viper and the viper's brood! So it was this man's son that I led from the dire Slough of Despond; and the son unconsciously imitates the father's gratitude and honour—Ha, ha!" Suddenly the bitter laugh was arrested; a flash of almost celestial joy darted through the warring elements of storm and darkness. If Helen returned Leonard's affection, Harley L'Estrange ...
— My Novel, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... suggested Hal, with a mischievous light in her eyes. "Well, then, dear Miss Walton, how fortunate for me that some one clever and briljant is willing to give me her friendship and help to lift me out of my slough ...
— Winding Paths • Gertrude Page
... rode home beside Happy Jack and tried to lift him out of the slough of despond. But Happy refused to budge, mentally, an inch. He rode humped in the saddle like a calf in its first blizzard, and he was discouragingly unresponsive; except once, when Weary reminded him that the tableau would need no rehearsing ...
— The Lonesome Trail and Other Stories • B. M. Bower
... September 18th, and kept in vilest durance and imminent danger of being put to death till October 8th, when, after the capture of the Summer Palace, both the prisoners were released.] is safe. We have been very uneasy about him, and not without cause. The China war is a slough of despond: the further we advance the more we shall flounder, until we are half ...
— Memoirs of the Life and Correspondence of Henry Reeve, C.B., D.C.L. - In Two Volumes. VOL. II. • John Knox Laughton
... back, back part of the limbs, and under the arms. Their presence is evidence of a depressed condition of vitality. These tumors vary in size from one-half an inch to six inches in diameter, and rapidly proceed to a gangrenous condition, a grayish slough being detached ...
— The People's Common Sense Medical Adviser in Plain English • R. V. Pierce
... might brand with his own straight running-iron, as it were, writing over again the brand he wished to change; but this was clumsy and apt to be detected, for the new wound would slough and look suspicious. A piece of red-hot hay wire or telegraph wire was a better tool, for this could be twisted into the shape of almost any registered brand, and it would so cunningly connect the edges of both that the whole mark would seem to be one scar of the same date. ...
— The Story of the Outlaw - A Study of the Western Desperado • Emerson Hough
... Bournemouth, Bracknell Forest, Brighton and Hove, Bury, Calderdale, Darlington, Doncaster, Dudley, Gateshead, Halton, Hartlepool, Kirklees, Knowsley, Luton, Medway, Middlesbrough, Milton Keynes, North Tyneside, Oldham, Poole, Reading, Redcar and Cleveland, Rochdale, Rotherham, Sandwell, Sefton, Slough, Solihull, Southend-on-Sea, South Tyneside, St. Helens, Stockport, Stockton-on-Tees, Swindon, Tameside, Thurrock, Torbay, Trafford, Walsall, Warrington, Wigan, Wirral, Wolverhampton : counties: Bedfordshire, Buckinghamshire, Cambridgeshire, Cheshire, Cornwall, Cumbria, ...
— The 2004 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency
... with it; here, in spite of absence of all suppuration, the track may remain patent for many weeks. This may point to infection, but the tardiness in actual consolidation corresponds with what we are well acquainted with in the case of all aseptic wounds when a slough has to separate or become absorbed, and it is therefore only what might be reasonably expected when we remember that every such bullet track is lined by a thin layer of ...
— Surgical Experiences in South Africa, 1899-1900 • George Henry Makins
... a fine boat, one of my children was taken with croup. Dr. N——, a Universalist minister, got off at Dubuque and bought medicine for me. This saved the child, but he was sick all the way. We were stuck in Beef Slough for several days. I never left the cabin as my child needed me, but some time during the first day a boat from St. Paul was stuck there too, so near us that passengers passed from one boat to the other all day. It was only when I got to Hastings, where I had thought to meet my husband that I found ...
— Old Rail Fence Corners - The A. B. C's. of Minnesota History • Various
... women, cities, landscapes. It is the simplest, the most transparent of allegories. Unlike the Faery Queene, the story of Pilgrim's Progress has no reason for existing apart from its inner meaning, and yet its reality is so vivid that children read of Vanity Fair and the Slough of Despond and Doubting Castle and the Valley of the Shadow of Death with the same belief with which they read of ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... of knowledge. Beholding, therefore, thyself with thy own self, cease to regard thy body as thyself and attain thou to omniscience. Cleansed of all sins, like unto a snake that has cast off its slough, one attains to high intelligence here and becomes free from every anxiety and the obligation of acquiring a new body (in a subsequent birth). Its current spreading in diverse directions, frightful is this river of life bearing the world onward in its course. The five senses are its ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 3 - Books 8, 9, 10, 11 and 12 • Unknown
... at us as we passed, and people crowded their windows to look. We crossed a slough upon a bridge of quaint and ancient architecture on the thither side of which were a grassy plaza and the stern lines of the church. The wedding bells broke forth in a furious joy and flung their notes to the distant hill ...
— A Woman's Impression of the Philippines • Mary Helen Fee
... ethical or otherwise, can be attached to that bondage of manhood which was thrust upon the soul (or was it voluntarily assumed?)? This part of deity called individual soul certainly cannot be improved by its human conditions; and the question is not—"How soon can I pass through this slough of despond," but, "why was I thrust into it at all? Was it a mere sacred whim (tiruvileiadal) ...
— India's Problem Krishna or Christ • John P. Jones
... common-room Christianity—belief in a dead God. There, I have never said it to anyone but you, but that is the slough we have to get out of. Don't think that I despair for us. We shall do it yet; but it will be sore work, stripping off the comfortable wine-party religion in which we are wrapped up—work for our ...
— Tom Brown at Oxford • Thomas Hughes
... is of the genus bufo, he is by no means a buffo genius. He may be styled the solemn organist of the swamp; slough music being his specialty. Like other out-door performers on wind instruments, he is chiefly heard in pleasant weather, and during the summer his organ is without stops. Being a Democrat, he appreciates the dignity of labor, and ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 8, May 21, 1870 • Various
... international affairs, have increased greatly in the past decade. Consequently, the Government is larger than it was before the war, and its general operating costs are higher. We cannot shrink the Government to prewar dimensions unless we slough off these new responsibilities—and we cannot do that without paying an excessive price in terms of our national welfare. We can, however, enhance its operating efficiency through improved organization. I ...
— State of the Union Addresses of Harry S. Truman • Harry S. Truman
... feel myself justified in leaving our child longer in her hands, even tender as are his years. I shall take steps for having him removed. What further I shall do to vindicate myself, and extricate myself as far as may be possible from the slough of despond in which I have been submerged, she and you will learn in ...
— He Knew He Was Right • Anthony Trollope
... country about Melbourne, and far inland, was boggy, the soil being volcanic, and abounding in mud which appears to have no bottom. The road to the mines was all the worse for having been ploughed up by bullock teams, and worked into a slough which proved the discouragement of mining parties. Some were even months in traversing the comparatively small distance across the country to the goal they sought. But the attraction of money, which is said to make ...
— In A New World - or, Among The Gold Fields Of Australia • Horatio Alger
... of cypress and groups of palmettos that dotted the prairie before him. A little to the north and extending into the Glades was a row of willows which Johnny visited and found that it marked the course of a slough that crossed the prairie and extended far out ...
— Dick in the Everglades • A. W. Dimock
... went. Opinions differ as to swearing. One Captain strictly forbade it on board his lugger; but he, also continuing to get no fish, called out, 'Swear away, lads, and see what that'll do.' Perhaps he only meant as Menage's French Bishop did; who going one day to Court, his carriage stuck fast in a slough. The Coachman swore; the Bishop, putting his head out of the window, bid him not do that; the Coachman declared that unless he did, his horses would never get the carriage out of the mud. 'Well then, says the Bishop, just for ...
— Two Suffolk Friends • Francis Hindes Groome
... us from such a war! Let not the mad anger of such a people be aroused. And, gentlemen, if war comes it must be long and terrible. You will see both parties rise in their majesty at both ends of the line. They will slough off every other consideration and devote themselves, with terrible energy, to the work of death. Oh ye! who bring such a calamity as this upon this once happy country! Pause, gentlemen, before you do it, and think of the fearful accountability that ...
— A Report of the Debates and Proceedings in the Secret Sessions of the Conference Convention • Lucius Eugene Chittenden
... a steaming slough in which the mud and water were tepid and which grew rank with yellow reeds and thick grasses—grasses that were almost flesh-like, it seemed to me, as if swollen and about to burst from some dreadful disease, Perhaps your scientists can ...
— Back to God's Country and Other Stories • James Oliver Curwood
... at her task nearly ten minutes, when she was interrupted by the appearance in the quadrangular slough without of a large figure in the uniform of ...
— The Trumpet-Major • Thomas Hardy
... the knoll, it was found that the line crossed a slough,—or "slew," as the old man termed it,—which lay in a long, winding hollow of the hills. This morass was partly filled with stagnant water; and the old man ...
— The Young Surveyor; - or Jack on the Prairies • J. T. Trowbridge
... money. They had but one child, a son, afterwards Sir John Herschel, almost as great an astronomer as his father had been before him. In 1785, the family moved to Clay Hall, in Old Windsor, and in 1786 to Slough, where Herschel lived for the remainder of his long life. How completely his whole soul was bound up in his work is shown in the curious fact recorded for us by Carolina Herschel. The last night at Clay Hall was spent in sweeping the sky with the great glass ...
— Biographies of Working Men • Grant Allen
... packs of straw, loomed up out of the darkness as we passed, until the last of the column was reached and the frieze of ghostly figures was swallowed up into the night. We drew a long breath, for we knew now from the colonel of the battalion whose men had delivered us from that Slough of Despond that we had been within 150 yards of the German lines. We had mistaken Richebourg l'Avoue ...
— Leaves from a Field Note-Book • J. H. Morgan
... present-day standards, for in a fourteen-hour working day John Cardigan and his men could not cut more than twenty thousand feet of lumber. Nevertheless, when Cardigan looked at his mill, his great heart would swell with pride. Built on tidewater and at the mouth of a large slough in the waters of which he stored the logs his woods-crew cut and peeled for the bull- whackers to haul with ox-teams down a mile-long skid-road, vessels could come to Cardigan's mill dock to load and lie safely in twenty feet of water at low tide. ...
— The Valley of the Giants • Peter B. Kyne
... accomplish. He at one stroke freed himself from all distractions; his pupils and concerts, his whole connection at Bath, were immediately renounced; he accepted the King's offer with alacrity, and after one or two changes settled permanently at Slough, near Windsor. ...
— The Story of the Heavens • Robert Stawell Ball
... proceeded, and said: But when Christiana came up to the Slough of Despond, she began to be at a stand; for, said she, this is the place in which my dear husband had like to have been smothered with mud. She perceived, also, that notwithstanding the command of the King to make this ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... system prevails do we find a code of political and social ethics which recognizes the rights and claims of the individual. The condition of woman is that of the basest slave, a slave to the caprice and tyranny of her master. Communism raises her from the slough of slavery, but subjects her to the level of prostitution. An inevitable sequence of polygamy is a decline of literature and science. The natural tendency of each system is to sensualism., The blood is diverted from its normal channels and ...
— The People's Common Sense Medical Adviser in Plain English • R. V. Pierce
... judge, deems best, and be careless about the whimsies of such a half-baked notionist as I am. We are here in a most pleasant country, full of walks, and idle to our heart's desire. Taylor has dropped the "London." It was indeed a dead weight. It had got in the Slough of Despond. I shuffle off my part of the pack, and stand, like Christian, with light and merry shoulders. It had got silly, indecorous, pert, and everything that is bad. Both our kind remembrances to Mrs. K. and yourself, and strangers'-greeting to Lucy,—is it Lucy, or Ruth?—that ...
— The Best Letters of Charles Lamb • Charles Lamb
... the position by the light of a smoky lamp and over the ashes of a dead fire; counting possible votes, making unconvincing calculations based on supposition, wading hand-in-hand ever deeper into the Slough of Despond. ...
— Mount Music • E. Oe. Somerville and Martin Ross
... learn to appreciate the liberty of law;—to know that license is the foe of freedom; and, though the sophistry of Passion in these books disgusted me, flowers of purest hue seemed to grow upon the dark and dirty ground. I thought she had cast aside the slough of her past life, and begun a new existence beneath the sun of a ...
— Woman in the Ninteenth Century - and Kindred Papers Relating to the Sphere, Condition - and Duties, of Woman. • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... of the coffee men's discontent. Floundering about in a veritable slough of cereal slush, without secure foothold or a true sense of direction, coffee advertising went miserably astray when its writers began to assure the public that their brands were guiltless of the crimes charged in the cereal ...
— All About Coffee • William H. Ukers
... about Slough, which is still the favourite cry of Lord Inverforth's critics, who have held their peace about the "dumps" since the publication of the White Paper ...
— The Mirrors of Downing Street - Some Political Reflections by a Gentleman with a Duster • Harold Begbie
... true, quite true, his carelessness (but then he had been so worn out with watching), his fatal mistake, his heartless mistake (and yet he would almost have given his own life for his children) had brought him down to this slough of despond. There was no hope, the doctors never told him of any, and he knew he could not bear ...
— Fated to Be Free • Jean Ingelow
... Astronomy: it was he who first discovered the seventh primary planet, which he named, in honor of King George the Third, the Georgium Sidus. George the Third took him under his especial patronage, and constituted him his astronomer, with a handsome pension. He resided at Slough, near Windsor, where he ...
— A Catechism of Familiar Things; Their History, and the Events Which Led to Their Discovery • Benziger Brothers
... in very truth then travelling towards the town. We therefore hove-about and returned to Palanquillo, a village that we had passed through that very morning, leaving the hussar and his horse sticking fast in a slough. We arrived about nightfall, and as the village was almost entirely deserted, we were driven to take up our quarters in an old house, that seemed formerly to have been used as a distillery. Here we found a Spanish lieutenant and several soldiers quartered, all of them suffering more or less ...
— Tom Cringle's Log • Michael Scott
... of gneiss varies; it is either hor. 3.4, dipping to the north-west or hor. 8.2, dipping to the south-east.) A clayey soil mixed with spangles of mica covered the rock, to the depth of three feet. Travellers suffer from the dust in winter, while in the rainy season the place is changed into a slough. On descending the table-land of Buenavista, about fifty toises to the south-east, an abundant spring, gushing from the gneiss, forms several cascades surrounded with thick vegetation. The path leading to the spring is so steep that we could touch with our ...
— Equinoctial Regions of America • Alexander von Humboldt
... their willingness to slough off even their children, in an adolescent impatience with any barrier to an immediate desire. So contrary is this to nature that regret follows closely their decision. The children, however, are laden with a burden put on ...
— The Good Housekeeping Marriage Book • Various
... bed that night, listening to the snoring of the half-breeds on the floor, to the faint murmur of a wind that stirred the drooping boughs of the spruce, he reviewed his enthusiasms and his tenuous plans—and slipped so far into the slough of despond as to call himself a misguided fool for rearing so fine a structure of dreams upon so slender a foundation as this appointment to a mission in the outlying places. He blamed the Board of Missions. Obviously that august circle of middle-aged ...
— Burned Bridges • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... a feeling of self-respect dawned upon me, I was not so altogether ignorant as I had thought myself, I had some available knowledge; and with that feeling came the determination to raise myself out of that slough of despond into which I had ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 76, February, 1864 • Various
... entered the city he found it situated in a slough. It was generally supposed that the ground upon which the city was built was a natural swamp, and when Palmer, among others, advocated the idea of raising the streets they were ridiculed. But subsequent tests proved that beneath the ...
— Hidden Treasures - Why Some Succeed While Others Fail • Harry A. Lewis
... out of his slough of despond, and climbing the hills of hope again with something of his old gallant air. The rapidity of his convalescence was astonishing. By the end of July he was well enough to ...
— Sisters • Ada Cambridge
... under Breaden's charge; and he and Warri camped with them a few miles from the town whilst I completed preparations. Rain was falling at the time, the wet weather lasting nearly a fortnight; the whole country around Coolgardie was transformed from a sea of dust into a "Slough of Despond," and, seeing that five out of the nine camels were bulling, Breaden had anything but a pleasant time. Amongst camels, it is the male which comes on season, when, for a period of about six weeks annually, he is mad ...
— Spinifex and Sand - Five Years' Pioneering and Exploration in Western Australia • David W Carnegie
... Thou gentle, virtuous maid, as fair in soul As body, with a heart as white and pure As are thy snowy draperies! Like a dove, A pure, white dove with shining, outspread wings, Thou hoverest o'er this life, nor yet so much As dipp'st thy wing in this vile, noisome slough Wherein we wallow, struggling to get free, Each from himself. Send down one kindly beam From out thy shining heaven, to fall in pity Upon my bleeding breast, distraught with pain; And all those ugly scars that grief and hate And evil fortune e'er ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VI. • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... Ben Cohen's body was more completely his than one might have imagined. Jenny could, and indeed did, slough off her disguise on Sundays or rare summer days; but Ben and that self which was apart from music—that wildly-beating heart, pulsing blood, flooding warmth, grateful as the watchman's fire in the fog-sodden yard, that little fire over which he used to hang, warming his stiffened hands—were, ...
— The Best British Short Stories of 1922 • Various
... have gone right through that slough, and come out sheer on the other side. For sweeping the last lingering taint of it out of me, I have to thank, not sulphur and exorcisms, but your soldiers and their morning's work. Philosophy is superfluous in a world where ...
— Hypatia - or, New Foes with an Old Face • Charles Kingsley
... gunner with one only pip. No doubt 'twas destined for some lofty soul Who in a deck-chair lolls, and marks the map And says, "Push here," while I and all my kind Scrabble and slaughter in the appointed slough. But I, presumptuous, wore it, till the gods Called for my ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, October 31, 1917 • Various
... it won't be that long before we have any good news," said Betty, trying to speak lightly. This would never do, she thought. They simply had to find some way out of this terrible slough of despondency before it mastered ...
— The Outdoor Girls at Bluff Point - Or a Wreck and a Rescue • Laura Lee Hope
... has an argumentative prose-style and a distaste for highfalutin, and, where the unenlightened intellectualism of Macaulay and Leslie Stephen, and the incorrigible common sense of Johnson, might have pitched these eminent men into the slough of desperate absurdity, it often happens that Mr. Brock, whose less powerful mind is sweetened by a sense of ...
— Pot-Boilers • Clive Bell |
