"Welter" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... ready to surrender the Republic to the aristocrats, the money-jobbers and the Generals. If men like Tallien and Foucher, monsters gorged with blood and rapine, triumph, France is overwhelmed in a welter of crime and infamy ... Robespierre, awake; when criminals, drunken with fury and affright, plan your death and the death of freedom! Couthon, Saint-Just, make haste; why tarry ye ...
— The Gods are Athirst • Anatole France
... blotted out the sky and the world. Through the wild whiteness a few desolate people ploughed their way, buffeted, blown, hanging on to their hats, and quite unable to see ahead. Sally shoved her red little hands into her coat pockets, and stood, a careless soul, in the white welter. ...
— The Nine-Tenths • James Oppenheim
... letter from my good friends, Wallace and Tillie Heckman, and though I was but a clumsy farmer in all affairs of the heart, I perceived enough of hidden meaning in their invitation to visit Eagle's Nest, to give me pause even in the welter of my plumbing. I replied at once accepting their hospitality, and on Saturday took the train for Oregon to stay over ...
— A Daughter of the Middle Border • Hamlin Garland
... moralist of the Main." The first book which brought him great popularity, 'The Innocents Abroad', exhibited qualities of serious ethical import which, while escaping the attention of the readers of that day, emerge for the moderns from the welter of hilarious humour. How unforgettable is his righteous indignation over that "benefit" performance he ...
— Mark Twain • Archibald Henderson
... eyes sheepishly as they stopped where a sheer cliff of basalt above caught and held the warmth of the sun's rays. Behind them it rose a straight hundred feet, and before stretched a vast panorama. The sun was mounting now in the sky. It brought into strong relief the welter of volcanic waste that extended in bold detail through the clear air far out to the horizon, where, misty and dim, the first vaporous clouds were ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, June, 1930 • Various
... night of pouring rain. Great drops beat on the little window, a gargoyle poured a noisy stream of water, and a loud sea cried off the land and broke upon the outer edge of the rock of Doom. A loud sea and ominous, and it was hard for Count Victor, in that welter of midnight voices, to hear the call of an owl, yet it came to him by and by, as he expected, with its repetition. And then the flageolet, with its familiar and baffling melody, floating on a current of the wind that piped about the castle vents and sobbed upon the stairs. ...
— Doom Castle • Neil Munro
... other's century, if they had the gift of tongues, than in most of those which have intervened. It is neither necessary nor possible to go deeply into the resemblance here [Footnote: Some words of Sir Leslie Stephen's may be given, however, describing the welter of religious opinions that prevailed at both epochs: 'The analogy between the present age and that which witnessed the introduction of Christianity is too striking to have been missed by very many observers. The most superficial acquaintance with the general ...
— Works, V1 • Lucian of Samosata
... In the welter of evidence conflicting with apparent fact which was given before the commission and in the trials of the Great Oyer, in the mass of writing both contemporary and of later days round the Overbury mystery, it is hard indeed to land upon ...
— She Stands Accused • Victor MacClure
... of the third year a sniper got him. He was wounded so badly that at first it was thought a leg would have to be amputated. But even in that hideous welter of the nations, Peter Champneys wasn't unknown. Overburdened and busy as they were, doctors and nurses fought for the life of the American artist. He came to to hear a poilu in his ward praising the saints that it was his hand and not the painter's that had gone, and another say philosophically ...
— The Purple Heights • Marie Conway Oemler
... asked herself, hearing a man inquire, with great determination, for her number. The unfamiliar voice now asked for Miss Hilbery. Out of all the welter of voices which crowd round the far end of the telephone, out of the enormous range of possibilities, whose voice, what possibility, was this? A pause gave her time to ask herself this question. It was solved ...
— Night and Day • Virginia Woolf
... Golden Bough—God! she was madhouse and purgatory rolled into one! My own agility and knowledge saved me from ill usage for the moment, since the mates had plenty of ignorant, clumsy material to work upon. Such material! I never before or after saw such a welter of human misery as on that bright morning, such a crowd of sick, suffering, terrified men. Most of them knew not one rope from another, some of them knew not a word of English, half of them were still drunk, and stumbled and fell ...
— The Blood Ship • Norman Springer
... space in which to take place, there could be no motion. So all things were really perfectly compact and at rest, and all our impressions of change were the illusions of the thoughtless and the simple-minded. Since one of the chief satisfactions of the metaphysicians is to get away from the welter of our mutable world into a realm of assurance, this doctrine exercised a great fascination over many minds. The Eleatic conviction of unchanging stability received a new form in Plato's doctrine of eternal "ideas", and later developed ...
— The Mind in the Making - The Relation of Intelligence to Social Reform • James Harvey Robinson
... ears, setting up vibrations and oscillations in the basilar membranes. Nerve cells triggered impulses that sped along neural pathways to the withered cortex, where they lost themselves in the welter of atrophy and disintegration. They emerged into his consciousness as part ...
— Life Sentence • James McConnell
... after dinner. He was half drunk by supper time, too drunk to take the sail off her, so we drove on down Channel, trusting to the goodness of the gear. There would have been a pretty smash-up if we had had to alter our course hurriedly. As it was we were jumping like a young colt, in a welter of foam, with two men at the tiller, besides a gang on the tackles. I never knew any ship to bound about so wildly. I passed the evening after supper on deck, enjoying the splendour of that savage leaping rush down Channel, yet just a little nervous at the sight of our ...
— Martin Hyde, The Duke's Messenger • John Masefield
... elsewhere, which are fighting for something very much worse. For I take it that the worst enemy of the Wellsian God is the Superman, who has quite a sporting chance of coming out on top, if not actually in this War, at least in the welter that will ...
— God and Mr. Wells - A Critical Examination of 'God the Invisible King' • William Archer
... of food, but in the haze which filled the room they sat forever, talking, talking, while he agonized, "Darn fool to be eating all this—not 'nother mouthful," and discovered that he was again tasting the sickly welter of melted ice cream on his plate. There was no magic in his friends; he was not uplifted when Howard Littlefield produced from his treasure-house of scholarship the information that the chemical symbol for raw rubber is C10H16, which turns into isoprene, or 2C5H8. Suddenly, without precedent, ...
— Babbitt • Sinclair Lewis
... afraid of Montgomery, but still more afraid of my cracking red whip-lash; and after some fumbling and hesitation, some whip-cracking and shouting, they lifted him gingerly, carried him down to the beach, and went splashing into the dazzling welter of ...
— The Island of Doctor Moreau • H. G. Wells
... Wando Binannie; a good deal cracked and bad travelling. From thence through low sandhills, flooded box flats, steep sandhills; crossed Narro Dhaerrie swamp; crossed creek at east end of main water; this drying up fast. Crossed creek twice and camped on south side of lower end of Tac Welter. ...
— McKinlay's Journal of Exploration in the Interior of Australia • John McKinlay
... magnificence of Pandemonium; the ineffable welter of Chaos; proudly eminent over all like a tower, the colossal personality of Satan. The description of Paradise and the story of Creation, if making less demand on the poet's creative power, required greater resources of knowledge, and more consummate skill in combination. Nature must yield ...
— Life of John Milton • Richard Garnett
... mightiest!" answered Lancelot, with a groan; "O King!"—and when he paused, methought I spied A dying fire of madness in his eyes— "O King, my friend, if friend of thine I be, Happier are those that welter in their sin, Swine in the mud, that cannot see for slime, Slime of the ditch: but in me lived a sin So strange, of such a kind, that all of pure, Noble, and knightly in me twined and clung Round that one sin, until the wholesome flower And poisonous grew together, each as each, ...
— Idylls of the King • Alfred, Lord Tennyson
... serve not God, But live in sin, averse to good, Rejecting Christ's atoning blood, Midst hellish shoals, Shall welter in that fiery flood, Which ...
— Cottage Poems • Patrick Bronte
... affection at any rate, or perhaps only some pet vice, that must be left behind for a year or more. I remember only one man who walked his deck with a springy step, and gave the first course of the passage in an elated voice. But he, as I learned afterwards, was leaving nothing behind him, except a welter of debts and threats of ...
— The Mirror of the Sea • Joseph Conrad
... into this reek, with naught of comfort on any hand, nor even the dimmest ray of hope visible from any fixed thing on ahead, in like travail of going, in like groaning to the very soul, the bark of my life now lay in the welter, helpless, reft of storm and strife, blind, counseled by no fixed ray ahead. I know not what purpose remained in me, that, like the ship which bore us, I still, dumbly and without conscious purpose, forged onward to some point fixed ...
— The Lady and the Pirate - Being the Plain Tale of a Diligent Pirate and a Fair Captive • Emerson Hough
... buoyant bulbs brushing each other. The islets joined and parted; once he saw open water and plunged for it—and over his shoulders there surged a soft coverlet. He turned and beat it; he churned his bed into a furious welter, ...
— O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1921 • Various
... measure of courage and discipline which is now displayed in war, might achieve a far more perfect protection for what is good in national life than armies and navies can ever achieve, without demanding the carnage and waste and welter of brutality ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 5, August, 1915 • Various
... infantry officers saw a high ledge of rocks, under shelter of which a few men could form up. Wolfe, directing every movement with his cane, like Gordon in China a century later, shouted to the others to follow them; and then, amid the crash of artillery and the wild welter of the surf, though many boats were smashed and others upset, though some men were shot and others drowned, the landing was securely made. 'Who were the first ashore?' asked Wolfe, as the men were forming up under the ledge. Two Highlanders were pointed ...
— The Winning of Canada: A Chronicle of Wolf • William Wood
... Babylon or Samarcand, it was customary at the festival of the Incarnation to forego our enmities for a little and allow freer play to the spiritual in our being. Since 1914 all things in the world and with us, too, in Ireland have existed in a welter of hate, but the rhythm of ancient habit cannot altogether have passed away, and now if at any time, it should be possible to blow the bugles of Heaven and recall men to that old allegiance. I do not think it would help now ...
— Imaginations and Reveries • (A.E.) George William Russell
... a hot June day, and out of the welter of din and rumble the cool plash of falling water came to his straining ears refreshingly. At once he considered the dog and, thankful for the distraction, stepped beneath the portico of a provision store and indicated the marble basin with a ...
— Anthony Lyveden • Dornford Yates
... peasantry as represented in Burns's Cotter's Saturday Night or Scott's Heart of Midlothian, when the poor man was part of a social, political, and ecclesiastical order, disciplined, trained, and self-respecting, not a loose waif and stray in a chaotic welter of separate atoms. These were the facts which really suggested his theory of the 'excrescent' population, produced by the over-speculation of capitalists. The paupers of Glasgow were 'excrescent,' and ...
— The English Utilitarians, Volume II (of 3) - James Mill • Leslie Stephen
... passing, at that suggestive cinquante-septieme mille indicating how many others besides ourselves have, in the midst of earthquakes and terrors, assuaged their thirst at this pure fount, one recognises once more that the thing that we miss in this modern welter of poetising is simply music—music, the first and last necessity, music, the only authentic seal of the ...
— Suspended Judgments - Essays on Books and Sensations • John Cowper Powys
... children, too, of a dead author, an author seldom lauded by critics, who, possibly, have as many living friends as any modern characters can claim. A very large company of Christian people are fond of Lord Welter, Charles Ravenshoe, Flora and Gus, Lady Ascot, the boy who played fives with a brass button, and a dozen others of Henry Kingsley's men, women, and children, whom we have laughed with often, and very nearly cried with. For Henry Kingsley had humour, and his children are dear to us; ...
— Old Friends - Essays in Epistolary Parody • Andrew Lang
... a welter of intrigue, of land speculation, and of more or less piratical aggression, there was immanent danger that the West would relapse into anarchy unless a firm government were established, and unless the boundaries ...
— The Winning of the West, Volume Four - Louisiana and the Northwest, 1791-1807 • Theodore Roosevelt
... instinctively picked out the lines of a set purpose from among the welter of promptings in his mind, he found it delayed ...
— The Woman in Black • Edmund Clerihew Bentley
... asked to mention one especially striking item out of all that welter, I should think of many things—things having to do with vastness, with gigantic movements and mutations, with Niagara-like noises, with great bursts of flame suggesting fallen fragments from the sun itself—but above all I think that I should speak of the apparent absence ...
— American Adventures - A Second Trip 'Abroad at home' • Julian Street
... of history went into the welter of religious wars which gradually merge into dynastic wars and confuse the record of the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth century. At the end of the last of these divisions ...
— Hilaire Belloc - The Man and His Work • C. Creighton Mandell
... a woman ought to have a good time—" she laughed. "Thanks for the hint. But I'm not taking any. Seriously, however, as you all seem to take such an interest in me, what s a woman like me to do in this welter? Oh, give me the good old ...
— The Mountebank • William J. Locke
... Captains and the Kings depart— It may be so, but not lieutenants; Dawn after weary dawn I start The never-ending round of penance; One rock amid the welter stands On which my gaze is fixed intently— An after-life in quiet lands ...
— The Sunny Side • A. A. Milne
... hear the sound of public worship—will yield to nothing but that sadly forgotten law which enjoins personal contact with the sinful and the suffering, as one chief condition of raising them from the black mire in which they welter. ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Mark • Alexander Maclaren
... assented. "The regular Railway-Ghosts—I mean the Ghosts of ordinary Railway-literature—are very poor affairs. I feel inclined to say, with Alexander Selkirk, 'Their tameness is shocking to me'! And they never do any Midnight Murders. They couldn't 'welter in ...
— Sylvie and Bruno • Lewis Carroll
... the moral expurgation was deepened by a failure in the attempt to bring intellectual order into the welter of primitive gods. The only satisfactory end of that effort would have been monotheism. If Zeus had only gone further and become completely, once and for all, the father of all life, the scandalous stories would have lost ...
— Five Stages of Greek Religion • Gilbert Murray
... the welter of sobs, came faint articulations, and little by little he learnt the entire story of her difficulties, her misfortunes, her struggles, and her defeats. He listened to a frank confession of guilt. But what could she do? She had meant well. But what could she do? She had been driven into ...
— The Card, A Story Of Adventure In The Five Towns • Arnold Bennett
... laving of their forces All the pathway shakes and trembles. Brutes, in hungry anger raving, Prowl from dens, and caves, and caverns, Mingle with the ghosts and spectres, Lusting for a bloody surfeit. Reptiles, subtle and obnoxious, Crawl, and welter, and recoil them On the path in slimy matters, Reeking with a poisoned odor, Darting poisons to molest him. Arrows from the towers are flying, Shafts of flame and showers of fire, Sweeping on through clouds and vapors, Like unto ...
— A Leaf from the Old Forest • J. D. Cossar
... from the welter of selfishness and brutishness and cruelty into which it is now plunged will be a costly undertaking. The church is here, as Christ's representative, to take up this work; and it must not expect to accomplish ...
— The Church and Modern Life • Washington Gladden
... but vanity back of him and a welter of cost ahead. He could see no hope of ever catching up, of ever resting. His only rest would come when ...
— In a Little Town • Rupert Hughes
... appeal to the passions and prejudices of English parties had led to the further postponement of all Irish endeavour to deal rationally and practically with her own problems at home. But during the welter of contention which prevailed after the fall of Parnell, there grew up in Ireland a wholly new spirit, born of the bitter lesson which was at last being learned. The Irish still clung undaunted ...
— Ireland In The New Century • Horace Plunkett
... put up a fight like a welter-weight cinnamon bear; but, at last, we got him down in the bottom of the buggy and drove away. We took him up to the cave and I hitched the horse in the cedar brake. After dark I drove the buggy to the little village, three miles away, where we had hired it, and walked ...
— Whirligigs • O. Henry
... side; far away you can see the low heights of Brandon, the Newmarket Downs, the Gogmagogs behind Cambridge, the low wolds of Huntingdon. To the north the interminable plain, through which the rivers welter and the great levels run, stretches up to the Wash. So slight is the fall of the land towards the sea, that the tide steals past me in the huge Hundred-foot cut, and makes itself felt as far south as Earith Bridge, where the Ouse comes leisurely down with its clear pools and ...
— At Large • Arthur Christopher Benson
... little respite to Europe and a peaceful interlude for American shipmasters, but France and England came to grips again in 1803. For two years thereafter the United States was almost the only important neutral nation not involved in the welter of conflict on land and sea, and trade everywhere sought the protection of the Stars and Stripes. England had swept her own rivals, men-of-war and merchantmen, from the face of the waters. France and Holland ceased to carry cargoes ...
— The Old Merchant Marine - A Chronicle of American Ships and Sailors, Volume 36 in - the Chronicles Of America Series • Ralph D. Paine
... there was a curious mixture of efficiency and ineffectiveness; a wealth of information upon the topics under discussion and an inability to concentrate that information. Important decisions were made and forgotten in the welter ...
— Woodrow Wilson and the World War - A Chronicle of Our Own Times. • Charles Seymour
... with the fair, thin skin that the Southern sun and tropical environment are ruthless with. They've no shield against nature's relentless desire down here, tropical nature's desire for a welter of life. And when they're too young to have developed the hard outer shell of experience, why, their womanhood is just naked to the searching, smirching tropical sun, and they go plumb crazy. Develop dual personalities. Lose their civilization. Want to go into the jungle, ...
— The Plunderer • Henry Oyen
... virtues. I think of this last war and of the share our women and the women of other lands have played in it. No one caviled nor complained at the one-ideaness of womankind while the world was in a welter of woe and slaughter. Of all that they had, worth having, our women gave and gave and gave and gave. They gave their sons and their brothers, their husbands and their fathers, to their country; they gave of their time and of their energies and of their ...
— 'Oh, Well, You Know How Women Are!' AND 'Isn't That Just Like a Man!' • Irvin Shrewsbury Cobb
... the engines made speech impossible, and vision when sitting in the little glass-screened well, or conning-tower, was limited by the great waves of greenish-white water which curved upwards from either bow, and rolled astern in a welter of foam. There was an awe-inspiring fury in the thunder of the 700 h.p. engines revolving at 1350 per minute, and a feeling of ecstasy in the stiff breeze of passage and the atomised spray. When waves came the slap-slap-slap ...
— Submarine Warfare of To-day • Charles W. Domville-Fife
... like this," he answered, picking up both the telegrams; "one of our groom fellows at home has a brother who knows everything about Blackmore's stable, and he has just wired to me that Dainty Dick will win the Flying Welter at Hurst Park to-day, and I was off to back it when I get a wire from my tipster, Tom Webb, that The Philosopher can't lose the same race. It is Tom's 'double nap' and I am in a hole what ...
— Godfrey Marten, Undergraduate • Charles Turley
... to write "finis" to it, there is no doubt as to what its end will be. And the manner of the pilgrimage is quite plain. The starting point is the creation by the befogged ignorance of primitive man of that welter of ghosts and gods which make so much of early existence a veritable nightmare. The journey commences in a world in which the "supernatural" is omnipresent, in which man's chief endeavours is given to ...
— Theism or Atheism - The Great Alternative • Chapman Cohen
... the little hamlet dreaming in the sun, a welter of scrambled habitations. There was the little ship's cabin, called Kent Hall, where dwelt that genial spirit, Nathan Spear, his father's friend. Nearby was the dwelling, carpenter and blacksmith shop of Calvert Davis; the homes of Victor Pruden, French ...
— Port O' Gold • Louis John Stellman
... and the happiness and benefit he brought to tens of thousands of readers by the fire, pathos, fun, sweetness, and—dramatic animation of his stories, and by the nobility and lovableness of many of the characters drawn in them, are immeasurable, and will touch us and abide with us again when the welter of the present transition state has passed. His devotion to the drama injured his style as a novelist, and also led him to adopt a sort of staccato manner of construction and statement which sometimes makes us smile. But upon the ground proper ...
— Hawthorne and His Circle • Julian Hawthorne
... so tumbled up and down this autumn that I am in a queer state of mingled melancholy and exaltation. You know how much I live in and for books. Well, I have a curious feeling, a kind of premonition that there are great books coming out of this welter of human hopes and anguishes, perhaps A book in which the tempest-shaken soul of the race will speak out as it never has before. The Bible, you know, is rather a disappointment: it has never done for ...
— The Haunted Bookshop • Christopher Morley
... Niblungs, and man toppled over man, And leapt and struggled to tear them; as whiles amidst the sea The doomed ship strives its utmost with mid-ocean's mastery, And the tall masts whip the cordage, while the welter whirls and leaps, And they rise and reel and waver, and sink amid the deeps: So before the little-hearted in King Atli's murder-hall Did the glorious sons of Giuki 'neath the shielded onrush fall: Sore wounded, bound and helpless, but living yet, they lie Till the afternoon and ...
— Lyra Heroica - A Book of Verse for Boys • Various
... I hit the road and had time to think, I knew that my half-formed intention was a sort of martyrdom; I was going to renounce myself in a fine welter of tears and then go staggering off into the setting sun to die of my mental wounds. I took careful stock of myself and faced the fact that my half-baked idea was a sort of suicide-wish; walking into any Mekstrom way station now was just asking for capture and a fast trip to their reorientation ...
— Highways in Hiding • George Oliver Smith
... the clothes from one side of my body, and sent me, sprawling and breathless, into the welter of sagging weeds. ...
— The Terror from the Depths • Sewell Peaslee Wright
... dusk came on him again; a dusk old as the world. About them brooded the welter of passion and romance that Marseilles is. Once it was a Phocaean village, and hook-nosed Afric folk had stepped through on long, thin feet. And then had come the Greeks, with their broad, clear brows, their gray eyes. And further back ...
— The Wind Bloweth • Brian Oswald Donn-Byrne
... besieging of Glogau at this point of time; that the Reserve, Half of the Reserve, must be left to "mask" it; to hold it in strict blockade, with starvation daily advancing as an ally to us, and with capture by bombarding possible when we like. That is the ultimate decision;—arrived at through a welter of dubieties, counterpoisings and perilous considerations, which we now take no account of. A most busy week; Friedrich incessantly in motion, now here now there; and a great deal of heavy work got well and rapidly done. The details of which, in these exuberant Manuscripts, ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XII. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... so, in place of simplicity we are introducing complexity, very largely by selection and combination of simple elements evolved in former times to fit earlier conditions. Whether organic relations can be established among these elements, so that there shall one day issue from the welter something well-rounded, something American, fitting American conditions and leading American aspirations forward and upward, is yet on the knees of the gods. We, the men and women of America, ...
— A Librarian's Open Shelf • Arthur E. Bostwick
... messenger, sent to stop him, the arrival of Lord St. Aldobrand is announced. Bertram's ruffian band now enter, and range themselves across the stage, giving fresh cause for Imogine's screams and madness. St. Aldobrand, having received his mortal wound behind the scenes, totters in to welter in his blood, and to die at the ...
— Biographia Literaria • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... some creeping fungus stuff, and on one side of the city the wall was overwhelmed by a triumphant tide of green. There the jungle had crawled over the ramparts and surged into the city. Three of the towers had their bases in the welter of growing things, and creepers had climbed incredibly and were still climbing to enter and ...
— The Fifth-Dimension Tube • William Fitzgerald Jenkins
... Farnham. (What would befall me I left to Providence!) But some two or three of the enemy must have raced ahead and cut off that retreat; for when I came to it the way to the right lay open indeed, but the whole welter was pounding down the road to the left, straight for Alton. Again I followed, and in less than two hundred yards was pressing close upon three or four of the rearmost riders. This seemed to me good opportunity for another call on my trumpet, and I blew, ...
— Corporal Sam and Other Stories • A. T. Quiller-Couch
... time, I'd give you the personal history of half the light-weights in this room. Look at that black crow in the corner there. He's a Jew parson from Essex—as rich as bottled beer and always stops here. Last time I rode a welter down his way they told me his favorite text was "Blessed are the poor." He's a pretty figurehead for a bean-feast, isn't he? That chirpy barrister next door has a practice of fifteen thou. The blighter once cross-examined me in a card-sharping case and made me look the biggest damned ...
— Aladdin of London - or Lodestar • Sir Max Pemberton
... with the defile at her back, her hands clasped over her knee. In this position, as in every position which she naturally took, she had a pliant and personal grace. The welter of light of the low sun was ablaze in her face. Her profile had a luminous wistfulness. Her lashes were half closed, at once retaining the vision of the panorama at her feet as a thing of atmospheric enjoyment and shutting it out from the intimacy ...
— Over the Pass • Frederick Palmer
... Peter, at this moment of a whole welter of doubt and confusion and misunderstanding of people's motives and positions, to explain a great deal. Was that the reason why he'd been so happy in old Zachary Tan's shop years ago? Why he'd been happy through all that existence at the bookshop, those absurd unreal conspirators—happy, ...
— Fortitude • Hugh Walpole
... soon as the other had shut after him the door of the landing, the colonel leaped out with a fling of both feet in an avalanche of woollen coverings. His spurs having become entangled in a perfect welter of ponchos he nearly pitched on his head, and did not recover his balance till the middle of the room. Concealed behind the half-closed jalousies he listened to what ...
— Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard • Joseph Conrad
... Now doomed by Fate with dying eyes to gaze On Troy in flames and ruin all around, And Pergamus laid level with the ground. Lo, he to whom once Asia bowed the knee, Proud lord of many peoples, far-renowned, Now left to welter by the rolling sea, A huge and headless trunk, ...
— The Aeneid of Virgil - Translated into English Verse by E. Fairfax Taylor • Virgil
... comes back, and lifts one corner of the tarpaulin for the Doctor to pass in. A pack of ravening wolves tussling over an unusually small baby might distantly reproduce the scene Saxham leaves behind him. The trestle-table and benches are upset, and men and benches, draughts and dominoes, welter in horrible confusion over the earthen floor, when the scandalised orderly-corporal rushes in to quell the riot, and thenceforward joins ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves
... itself out on the bottom of the lighter when the hatches overhead were being nailed down. Yet by an odd chance the young Capuchin and Leroy, who had been companions in the chain, were not separated even now. Amid the human welter in that agitated place of darkness, the cries and wails that rang around him, Leroy recognized the voice of the young friar exhorting ...
— The Historical Nights' Entertainment • Rafael Sabatini
... ignorance of other men's minds they have so often displayed, that America meant to keep out of the war at all costs, or were merely careless of consequences so long as the immediate end was attained, is now immaterial. From the welter of Teutonic misdeeds and lies arises the vital, the soul-inspiring spectacle of a union of all ...
— Defenders of Democracy • Militia of Mercy
... a stout heart, a clear head, and a sure hand, to hold his own in a welter of interests and antagonisms such as beset me. The eternal instinct in a full man is to get through, to achieve, to live, aye, and to love, thus making life a great, clamorous thing not a mere existence. ...
— The Black Colonel • James Milne
... and world-mastering demi-gods listened, however, to no low tongues of ours, even when we pointed silently to their feet of clay. Perhaps we, as folk of simpler soul and more primitive type, have been most struck in the welter of recent years by the utter failure of white religion. We have curled our lips in something like contempt as we have witnessed glib apology and weary explanation. Nothing of the sort deceived us. A nation's religion is its life, and as such white ...
— Darkwater - Voices From Within The Veil • W. E. B. Du Bois
... even thin designin' him f'r th' Prisidincy. Bein' unable to complete a coorse at th' rayform school, he wint to wurruk; but soon, tired iv this, he started a saloon. Fr'm thince he dhrifted into politics, an' become noted as th' boy welter-weight iv th' South Branch. He was ilicted aldherman at a time whin comparatively nawthin' was doin' in th' council. Subsequent he become a sinitor, an' later enthered into partnership with th' Hon. Jawn Powers in th' retail liquor traffic. ...
— Mr. Dooley: In the Hearts of His Countrymen • Finley Peter Dunne
... should be turned into a bear garden on account of this exploded superstition of Christmas is one of the anomalies of modern civilization. Look at this insensate welter of fools travelling in wild herds to disgusting ...
— A Christmas Mystery - The Story of Three Wise Men • William J. Locke
... am also on the quinine flask. I have been re-casting the beginning of the Hanging Judge or Weir of Hermiston; then I have been cobbling on my Grandfather, whose last chapter (there are only to be four) is in the form of pieces of paper, a huge welter of inconsequence, and that glimmer of faith (or hope) which one learns at this trade, that somehow and some time, by perpetual staring and glowering and re-writing, order will emerge. It is indeed a queer hope; there is one piece for instance that I want in—I cannot put it one place ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 25 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... "Out-heroding Herod" bears witness to that. One must conceive the development of the Elizabethan age as something so rapid in its accessibility to new impressions and new manners and learning and modes of thought that for years the old and new subsisted side by side. Think of modern Japan, a welter of old faiths and crafts and ideals and inrushing Western civilization all mixed up and side by side in the strangest contrasts and you will understand what it was. The miracle plays stayed on beside Marlowe and Shakespeare till Puritanism frowned upon them. But when the ...
— English Literature: Modern - Home University Library Of Modern Knowledge • G. H. Mair
... from the calendar; they obliterated themselves as quietly as our ship's wake to the north, as we planed over the smooth waters toward the equator. Gradually the passengers took on character, and out of the first welter of contacts came those definite impressions which are almost always right and which, though we modify them or reverse them by acquaintance, we return ...
— Mystic Isles of the South Seas. • Frederick O'Brien
... State exists for Man. Other forms of society seek the interest or welfare of an individual, a group or a class, democracy aims at the welfare, that is, the liberty, happiness, growth, intelligence, helpfulness of all the people. Under all the welter of this world struggle, it is therefore these great contrasting ideas that are being tested out, perhaps for all time. What is their relative value for efficiency, initiative, invention, endurance, permanence; beneath all, what is their final value for the happiness ...
— The Soul of Democracy - The Philosophy Of The World War In Relation To Human Liberty • Edward Howard Griggs
... welter of homely phrase (how foreign to these classic pages!) did Mrs. Batch utter her pain. The Duke answered her tersely but kindly. He apologised for going so abruptly, and said he would be very happy to write for her future use a testimonial to the excellence of her rooms and ...
— Zuleika Dobson - or, An Oxford Love Story • Max Beerbohm
... of an astounding letter, pages and pages, to Rosalie from Miss Salmon. Pages and pages, having the appearance, each one, of a battlefield or of a riot: a welter of thick, black underscores strewn about like coffins or like corpses, and a bristling pin-cushionful (black pins) of notes of exclamation leaping about like war-dancing Zulus or staggering about like drunken or like wounded men. A welter you had to pick your way through with epithets rushing ...
— This Freedom • A. S. M. Hutchinson
... was such that his mind turned from it instinctively as from a thing unspeakable. He closed his eyes, he hid his face in his hands, as if the two had been there with him in the room. And still he saw things. There rose before him a sort of welter of gray slime and darkness in which were things visible, things white and vivid, yet vague, broken and unfinished, because his mind refused to join or finish them; things that were faceless and deformed, like white bodies that tumble and toss in the twilight of evil dreams. ...
— The Combined Maze • May Sinclair
... The significance of all these illustrations is that no great speaker has come by his ability without careful and persistent training. No molder of the world's destinies springs fully equipped from the welter of promiscuous events. He has been training for a long time. On the other hand the much more practical lesson to be derived from these biographical excerpts is that these men started from ordinary conditions to make themselves into ...
— Public Speaking • Clarence Stratton
... home in better spirits than they had been in since that welter of gold had lain on the ...
— The Magnetic North • Elizabeth Robins (C. E. Raimond)
... Amidst this welter of proposals and counter-proposals there emerged, sometime during 1852 a scheme, propounded by Mr. Bethell, of Westminster for constructing a railway connecting the existing line at Shrewsbury with Aberystwyth. It was ...
— The Story of the Cambrian - A Biography of a Railway • C. P. Gasquoine
... as that day's sun declined amid a portentous welter of crimson and purple and gold, the moorings were cast off and the Assyrian warped out into mid-channel and anchored there ...
— The False Faces • Vance, Louis Joseph
... general thing obtuse, but because the picture of Aunt Jane embarking for some wild, lone isle of the Pacific as the head of a treasure-seeking expedition was enough to shake the strongest intellect. And yet, amid the welter of ink and eloquence which filled those fateful pages, there was the cold hard fact confronting you. Aunt Jane was going to look for buried treasure, in company with one Violet Higglesby-Browne, ...
— Spanish Doubloons • Camilla Kenyon
... northwards along the African continent, over a welter of tribal peoples, we need merely note the cry for national recognition which ascends to us from the lower valley of the Nile. The descendants of the ancient Egyptians, mixed with a conglomeration of racial stocks drawn from Africa, Asia, and Europe, are ...
— Nationality and Race from an Anthropologist's Point of View • Arthur Keith
... overt or covert Hindu ascendancy. Some may say that it would be an equally evil day for the British Raj if the Mahomedans came to believe in the futility of unrequited loyalty and joined hands with its enemies in the confident anticipation that, whatever welter might follow the collapse of British rule, they could not fail sooner or later to fight their way once more to the front. Certainly at no time since we have ruled India has greater circumspection been needed in holding the balance between the ...
— Indian Unrest • Valentine Chirol
... fellow—Parry—an Australian, a statistician and a sporting encyclopaedia. Ask him the grain output of Paraguay for 1903, or the English importation of sheetings into China for 1890, or at what weight Jimmy Britt fought Battling Nelson, or who was welter-weight champion of the United States in '68, and you'll get the correct answer with the automatic celerity of a slot-machine. And there's Andy, a stone- mason, has ideas on everything, a good chess-player; and another fellow, Harry, a baker, red hot socialist ...
— Martin Eden • Jack London
... walked slowly to the station. Joy was within me as I boarded the train, but this was Jitendra's day for tears. My affectionate farewell to Pratap had been punctuated by stifled sobs from both my companions. The journey once more found Jitendra in a welter of grief. Not for himself this ...
— Autobiography of a YOGI • Paramhansa Yogananda
... finally went down-stairs to see how the dining and reception rooms looked, and Fadette began putting away the welter of discarded garments—she was a radiant vision—a splendid greenish-gold figure, with gorgeous hair, smooth, soft, shapely ivory arms, a splendid neck and bust, and a swelling form. She felt beautiful, ...
— The Titan • Theodore Dreiser
... think that His bed was the hard knotty tree, and instead of a pillow He had a crown of thorns. And say then, with sore sighing, till thy desire cool, "My dear-worthy Lord hanged on the Rood for me; and I lie in this soft bed, and welter me in sin, like a foul swine that loves but filth." Rise then quickly, and hold thee with prayers, love-sighings and tears. Of three points beware. The first, that the devotions thou hast through grace stirring, be not known of ...
— The Form of Perfect Living and Other Prose Treatises • Richard Rolle of Hampole
... we have for long been so debilitated by pastorals, by graceful presentation of the Arthurian legend for drawing-rooms, by idylls, not robust and Theocritean, by verse directly didactic, that a rude blast of air from the outside welter of human realities is apt to give a shock, that might well show in what simpleton's paradise we have been living. The ethics of the rectory parlour set to sweet music, the respectable aspirations of the sentimental curate married to exquisite verse, the everlasting ...
— Studies in Literature • John Morley
... strange irony that even the aristocracy should end by falling victim to its own environment. Exploited by miracle-mongers, thrown off its balance by paroxysms of so-called mysticism, it disappeared from view in a welter of practices and beliefs that were perverse and childish even ...
— Modern Saints and Seers • Jean Finot
... These confidential talks seemed to promote our intimacy and to enhance the security of the welcome I found in his house. A great immigrant city like New York or Chicago is full of men and women who are alone amid a welter of human life. For these nothing has a greater glamour than a family in whose house they might be made to feel at home. I was one of these desolate souls. I still missed my mother. The anniversary of her death was still a feast of longing agony and spiritual ...
— The Rise of David Levinsky • Abraham Cahan
... wheel, whirl, revolve, rotate, turn, gyrate, spin, trundle, circumgyrate; inwrap, infold, convolve; wallow, welter; rock, sway, ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming
... that welter of blood, not a single Saracen was left, and those of the Frankish rearguard who still lived were very ...
— A Book of Myths • Jean Lang
... some time before either of them spoke. The damsel seemed preoccupied, and Agravaine's mind was a welter of confused thoughts, the most prominent of which and the one to which he kept returning being the startling reflection that he, who had pined for romance so long, had got it ...
— The Man Upstairs and Other Stories • P. G. Wodehouse
... indication of life or movement about it; it seemed to be floating idly to the run of the seas. Just at this moment the sun's upper limb flashed into view over the edge of the cloud-bank, darting a long gleam of golden radiance athwart the heaving welter to the schooner, and I looked again, half expecting to catch the answering flash of wet oar-blades; but there was nothing of the kind to be seen. Undoubtedly, however, there was something out there,—something that might prove to ...
— A Pirate of the Caribbees • Harry Collingwood
... cheer answered the man's words—while Thorn stared at the packet of papers with unbelieving eyes. It had never occurred to him that the Ziegler plans might be in that very room, on the table with the rest of the welter of letters, thumbed documents, and cups and saucers. And there they were—the vital projector plans—not in a safe or hidden in some fantastic place, but ...
— The Radiant Shell • Paul Ernst
... treble interest. It discusses sex-problems with unusual candour ... it gives a vivid picture of Russian life ... and it reflects the welter of thoughts and aspirations which are common to the whole contemporary ...
— Sanine • Michael Artzibashef
... of March, 44 B.C., plunged the political situation into a worse chaos than had ever been reached during the Civil wars. For several months it was not at all plain how things were tending, or what fresh combinations were to rise out of the welter in which a vacillating and incapable senate formed the only constitutional rallying-point. In spite of all his long-cherished delusions, Cicero must have known that this way no hope lay; when at last he flung himself into the conflict, and broke away from his literary seclusion ...
— Latin Literature • J. W. Mackail
... down, our information had come and we set off through a welter of transport trains, artillery, ambulances, marching troops, and goodness knows what else, in the direction of X——. When we got within a couple of kilometers of the place, an officer stopped us and asked if we knew where ...
— A Journal From Our Legation in Belgium • Hugh Gibson
... desirous to see iustice executed, and aboue all thinges loued peace & quietnesse; but as yeares increased with him, so his vertues began to diminish, in so much that abandoning the care for the bodie of the commonwealth, he suffered his owne bodie to welter in all vice and voluptuousnesse, and so procuring the hatred of his subiects, caused malice and discord to rise amongst them, which during his life he was neuer able to appease. But leauing them so at variance, he departed this life, & was buried at Carleil, ...
— Chronicles (1 of 6): The Historie of England (2 of 8) - The Second Booke Of The Historie Of England • Raphael Holinshed
... up in the air, And it went abroad by the windows and the doors of the feast-hall fair, It went through street and market; o'er meadow and acre it went, And over the wind-stirred forest and the dearth of the sea-beat bent, And over the sea-flood's welter, till the folk of the fishers heard, And the hearts of the isle-abiders on the sun-scorched ...
— The Story of Sigurd the Volsung • William Morris
... light on one of the most interesting personalities in the history of the English monarchy. We see EDWARD as a young man, wild, reckless and brutal; then, grown to his full powers and sobered by responsibility, making by sheer force of character something abiding and coherent out of the strange welter of warring factions from which Great Britain emerged as a united kingdom. Wales was a hot-bed of rebellion, Scotland the "plague-spot of the North," the Cinque Ports on the verge of going over to France. Only a strong man, with strong men under him, could have saved England then. Morlac of Gascony ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 150, January 26, 1916 • Various
... comfort the sick and sorry, and to whisper in their ears that cosmic secret—"Bon Espoir y gist au fond!" "Good Hope lies at the Bottom!" "Good Hope" for all; for the best and the worst—for the whole miserable welter of ...
— Visions and Revisions - A Book of Literary Devotions • John Cowper Powys
... a boys' school in view. In fact, boxing was this young man's diversion, and the Coster on several occasions expressed great regret that writing and politics had robbed the ring of one who showed promise of being the cleverest welter-weight of his time. ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 5 (of 14) • Elbert Hubbard
... welter of interrogation categorically, and endeavour to frame such answers as would occur ...
— Getting Together • Ian Hay
... to pay for his general cheerful activity in lump sums of bitter sorrow. There were nights—and especially after seasons of exceptional excitement and nervous activity—when the reckoning would be presented and Mr. Britling would welter prostrate and groaning under a stormy sky of unhappiness—active insatiable unhappiness—a ...
— Mr. Britling Sees It Through • H. G. Wells
... welter of emotion deeper still in Alan Massey's heart lay the tragic conviction that he would never win Tony, that his own sins would somehow rise to strike at him like a snake out of the grass. He had lost faith in his luck, had lost it ...
— Wild Wings - A Romance of Youth • Margaret Rebecca Piper
... a needle slid into his arm. Giving in. A dizzying welter of thoughts spun suddenly in his mind. Briscoe. Raynor One and Raynor Three. The net between the stars. Ringg, ...
— The Colors of Space • Marion Zimmer Bradley
... interest and all sense of dignity. He was simply a man betrayed by a passion, which had fevered him just because his life had been so orderly and pure. He was not strong enough even to cut himself adrift from it all. He must just welter on, a figure visibly touched by depression and ill-fortune, and hammering out the old grammar-grind. Had any writer, any poet, ever agonised thus? The people who discoursed glibly about love, and wove their sorrows into elegies, what sort of prurient curs were they? It was all too bad to think ...
— Watersprings • Arthur Christopher Benson
... to the banks of the dark-rolling Danube, Fair Adelaide hied when the battle was o'er. "O, whither," she cried, "hast thou wander'd, my lover, Or here dost thou welter ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume II. - The Songs of Scotland of the past half century • Various
... narrow gravelled walk. On the benches on either side arrayed a mass of miserable and distorted humanity, the sight of which would have impelled Dore to more diabolical flights of fancy than he ever succeeded in achieving. It was a welter of rags and filth, of all manner of loathsome skin diseases, open sores, bruises, grossness, indecency, leering monstrosities, and bestial faces. A chill, raw wind was blowing, and these creatures huddled there in their rags, sleeping for the most part, or trying to ...
— The People of the Abyss • Jack London
... was descending gradually widened after the fashion of any normal valley; but, at the lower end, it pinched narrowly between high precipitous walls and abruptly stopped in a cross wall. At the base of this, in a welter of broken rock, the streamlet disappeared, evidently finding its way out underground. Climbing the cross wall, from the top Smoke saw the lake beneath him. Unlike any mountain lake he had ever seen, it was not blue. Instead, its intense peacock-green tokened its shallowness. ...
— Smoke Bellew • Jack London
... but persuades her parents to hand over her fortune to Edmond, and with it he marries Constance. "Hide, blushing honour! hide that wedding-day." But, you see, the Paul-de-Kockian hero was not like Lord Welter. There was hardly anything that ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 2 - To the Close of the 19th Century • George Saintsbury
... along the slippery ledge. Through the driving mists he peered with agonized eyes. Where was the yawl now? Where the girl? Down there in that insane welter of the mad torrent—swept away long since to annihilation? ...
— Darkness and Dawn • George Allan England
... ephemeral, leaving alone the essential facts, such as, for instance, that we were, say, a civil engineer. I think it would be well for each of us occasionally to visualise his obituary "note." This should have the effect of clarifying our outlook. Amid the welter of existence what is it that we are above all to do? To thine own self be true. You are a husband, a father, and a civil engineer. That is all that matters in ...
— Walking-Stick Papers • Robert Cortes Holliday
... given moment, when arising, as it were, from the tripod, can be more radiantly just to those from whom he differs; but then the tenor of his thoughts is even calumnious; while Athelred, slower to forge excuses, is yet slower to condemn, and sits over the welter of the world, vacillating but still judicial, and still faithfully contending ...
— English Prose - A Series of Related Essays for the Discussion and Practice • Frederick William Roe (edit. and select.)
... excelled; as a bag-puncher also. But in an incautious hour for himself and his backer, Flash Purdy, owner of Purdy's Dixieland Bar, he had permitted himself to be entered for a match before an athletic club at Louisville against one Max Schorrer, a welter-weight appearing professionally under the nom de puge of Slugging Fogarty. It was to have been a match of twelve rounds, but early in the second round Mr. Ditto suddenly lost all conscious interest ...
— Sundry Accounts • Irvin S. Cobb
... of jagged rocks, exposed at low tide. Under the incessant flashes their black heads appeared and disappeared in a welter of frothy white. It was an ominous spectacle for ...
— Jim Spurling, Fisherman - or Making Good • Albert Walter Tolman
... swing-horse from their feet. The off leader, unable to forge ahead, made a wild leap for the off swing horse, and fairly crushed him to earth with his feet, himself tripping on the harness and rolling at random in the welter, his snapping hoofs flashing in every direction. The wheel team, in the meantime, was doing what Packard later described as "a vaudeville turn of its own." The near wheeler was bucking as though there were no other horse within a hundred miles; the off wheeler had broken his ...
— Roosevelt in the Bad Lands • Hermann Hagedorn
... glimmering sandbars, reaches of moon-white shoals, patches of half-made land with pines struggling knee-deep in the tide; here and there a mile of mangroves, and delusive channels of blue water; beauty everywhere spreading out her sweeping laces of foam—a welter of a world still in its making, with no clear passages for any craft drawing more than a canoe. Loveliness everywhere—again the waving purple fans, and the heraldic fish, and the branching coral mysteriously making the world. Loveliness everywhere!—in fact a labyrinth of ...
— Pieces of Eight • Richard le Gallienne |
