"Whirlpool" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... and gaud, instead of glory, surround, rejoice, and flatter thee to the last. There rise thy buildings; there lie, secret but gorgeous, the tabernacles of thine ease; and the earnings of thy friends, and the riches of the people whom they plunder, are waters to thine imperial whirlpool. Thou art lapped in ease, as is a silkworm; and profusion flows from thy high and unseen asylum as the rain poureth from a cloud.—Much didst thou do to beautify chimney-tops, much to adorn the snuggeries where thou didst dwell. Thieving with thee took a substantial shape; ...
— Paul Clifford, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... I can explain it to you," the weather expert replied. "You know that when water is running down a hole at the bottom of a basin, if it is in motion it doesn't go down straight but with a circular movement, finally making a whirlpool?" ...
— The Boy with the U. S. Weather Men • Francis William Rolt-Wheeler
... of fear The battle's tide was poured; Vanished the Saxon's struggling spear, Vanished the mountain-sword. As Bracklinn's chasm, so black and steep, Receives her roaring linn As the dark caverns of the deep Suck the wild whirlpool in, So did the deep and darksome pass Devour the battle's mingled mass; None linger now upon the plain Save those who ne'er shall ...
— The Lady of the Lake • Sir Walter Scott
... forms with it the two Barents Islands.[135] At the west end of these two running waters, that is, where they come together to the east of these islands, they make, with the rocks and reefs, such a frightful eddy and whirlpool that it is exceedingly dangerous to pass through them, especially with small boats, of which there are some lost every now and then, and the persons in them drowned; but experience has taught men the way of passing through them with less danger. Large vessels have always less ...
— Journal of Jasper Danckaerts, 1679-1680 • Jasper Danckaerts
... for I tell you beforehand, I do not wish to be convinced; I have gone so far I cannot recede; I have suffered so much, death itself would be a boon. I no longer love to madness, Raoul, I am being engulfed by a whirlpool ...
— Ten Years Later - Chapters 1-104 • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... many more ships the enemy have got than we have?" answered, "How many do you make me equal to then?" This Homer also seems to have noticed. For he has represented Odysseus, when his comrades were dreadfully afraid of the noise and whirlpool of Charybdis, reminding them of his former cleverness ...
— Plutarch's Morals • Plutarch
... way for his original conception of an unfortunate, innocent child, the victim of imprudence and exaggerated sensibility. To what extent, at this time, was she really a victim? Whose prisoner was she? Into what whirlpool had she been dragged? He asked himself these questions with a cruel anguish; but even this pain seemed endurable beside the frenzy into which he was thrown at the thought of a lying and deceitful Christine. What had happened? ...
— The Phantom of the Opera • Gaston Leroux
... not altogether safe; it might even prove disastrous, but it might become a plank of rescue from that African whirlpool. Stas in the end began to wonder why the possibility of meeting with Smain should have frightened him at first and, as he was anxious for quick relief for Nell, he determined ...
— In Desert and Wilderness • Henryk Sienkiewicz
... arithmetical teaching astounded me, yet I could not follow it into its larger applications and wider extent. The mechanical rules of this branch of instruction seemed to whirl me round and round as in a whirlpool. The teacher was Kruesi. The teaching, in spite of the brilliant results within its own circle, and in spite of the sharpness of the quickened powers of perception and comprehension in the children by which it attained those results, yet, to my personal taste, had something too positive in ...
— Autobiography of Friedrich Froebel • Friedrich Froebel
... within reach. The other terror, Charybdis, was a gulf, nearly on a level with the water. Thrice each day the water rushed into a frightful chasm, and thrice was disgorged. Any vessel coming near the whirlpool when the tide was rushing in must inevitably be ingulfed; not Neptune himself ...
— Bulfinch's Mythology • Thomas Bulfinch
... the urchins had selected as their bathing-place. A little slope, or watering-ground in the bank, brought them to the edge of the stream, where the bottom fell away into the fearful depths of the whirlpool, under the hanging oak on the other bank. Well do I remember the first time I ventured to swim across it, and even yet do I see, in imagination, the two bunches of water flaggons on which the inexperienced swimmers trusted themselves ...
— The Hedge School; The Midnight Mass; The Donagh • William Carleton
... Impediments in the River. Return of the boats. An Alligator. Stokes' Bay. Narrow escape of an Officer. Change of Landscape. Pheasant-Cuckoos. A new Vine. Compass Hill. Port Usborne. Explore the eastern shore of King's Sound. Cone Bay. Native Fires. Whirlpool Channel. Group of Islands. Sterile aspect of the Coast. Visited by a Native. Bathurst Island. Native Hut and Raft. Return to Port Usborne. Native Spears. Cascade Bay. Result of Explorations in King's Sound. Interview with Natives. Coral Reefs. Discover Beagle Bank. Arrival at ...
— Discoveries in Australia, Volume 1. • J Lort Stokes
... work that she had finally been sent home to Cape Town. She had seemed to be far from well, when she had left Johannesburg; nevertheless, she had no sooner reached home than she had plunged into the midst of the whirlpool of social life where she was said to be the ...
— On the Firing Line • Anna Chapin Ray and Hamilton Brock Fuller
... audible at one spot only. The acoustic properties of the veranda condensed and concentrated it within a narrow area, beyond which was silence. Chance had selected this aerial whirlpool for ...
— My Tropic Isle • E J Banfield
... cool, flexible palm against his mouth. "Life," she continued, "is so dreadfully in the dark. One is lost at the beginning. There are maps to take you safely to the Guianas, but none for souls. Perhaps religions are——Again I don't know. I have found nothing secure—only a whirlpool into which I will not ...
— Wild Oranges • Joseph Hergesheimer
... accelerated its speed frightfully and was up-flung into huge waves, white and wrathful. This was the dread Mane of the White Horse, and here an even heavier toll of dead had been exacted. On one side of the Mane was a corkscrew curl-over and suck-under, and on the opposite side was the big whirlpool. To go through, the Mane itself ...
— Smoke Bellew • Jack London
... into the air and came down in splinters, scattered to the four winds of heaven. The deck was rent and open up with a great, yawning scam, through which the ocean rushed, driving the craft below the waves as though it had been drawn down by some mighty whirlpool. A minute later, where had been one of Germany's most terrible fighters, there was only a seething flood of water covered with ...
— The Boy Allies Under Two Flags • Ensign Robert L. Drake
... and they followed each other in senseless, ceaseless manoeuvers, towed by the currents which swept through from the cataract at its upper end. They formed long battle-lines, they assembled into flotillas, they filed about the circumference of a devil's whirlpool at the foot of the rapids, gyrating, bobbing, bowing until crowded out by the pressure of their rivals. Some of them were grounded, like hulks defeated in previous encounters, and along the guardian bar which imprisoned them at the outlet of the lake ...
— The Iron Trail • Rex Beach
... went on, two little lads of her own came to increase her happiness—Rob, named for Grandpa, and Teddy, a happy-go-lucky baby, who seemed to have inherited his papa's sunshiny temper as well as his mother's lively spirit. How they ever grew up alive in that whirlpool of boys was a mystery to their grandma and aunts, but they flourished like dandelions in spring, and their rough nurses loved and served ...
— Little Women • Louisa May Alcott
... feelings had been his salvation. Had he been absolutely heroic, he would have considered it a duty, for his courage and his name's sake, to carry the struggle on to the bitter end, and to perish in the whirlpool he had raised. He showed that he desired to act thus, but in his children's interests he refrained, and this was, we believe, the only influence of importance which made him give way. It is true that there was not much difference between a throne crumbling ...
— History Of Egypt From 330 B.C. To The Present Time, Volume 12 (of 12) • S. Rappoport
... months, yes, years, passed by, ere those troubled waters became clear and still. But I held firmly on my way, and the full reward came at last. By degrees I had created within and around me a new world of interest and activity, in which this little whirlpool of morbid feeling became an insignificant point. I was conscious of the birth of new energies, of a bolder and steadier sweep of thought, of fuller sympathies, of that settled quiet and harmony of soul which are to be gained only ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 1, Issue 2, December, 1857 • Various
... the brink of the Golden River, and its waves were as clear as crystal, and as brilliant as the sun. And, when he cast the three drops of dew into the stream, there opened where they fell a small circular whirlpool, into which the waters descended with a ...
— Famous Stories Every Child Should Know • Various
... the situation excitement, and Madeline became absorbed. The great mass of cattle seemed to be eddying like a whirlpool, and from that Madeline understood the significance of the range word "milling." But when Madeline looked at one end of the herd she saw cattle standing still, facing outward, and calves cringing ...
— The Light of Western Stars • Zane Grey
... had in their unproved champion. The brawl of voices drew newcomers from far and near. The chariot race had just ended in the adjoining hippodrome; and the idle crowd, intent on a new excitement, came surging up like waves. In such a whirlpool of tossing arms and shoving elbows, he who was small of stature and short of breath stood a scanty chance of getting close enough to the crier's stand to have his wager recorded. Such, at least, was the fate of a gray but dignified little man, who struggled vainly—even ...
— A Victor of Salamis • William Stearns Davis
... be an honest and true friend to him, were I to let him be swallowed up by this whirlpool!" said Otto to himself, when he was alone. "At present he is innocent and good but at his age, with his gay disposition!—I must warn Eva! soon! soon! The snow which has once been trodden is no longer pure! Wilhelm will scarcely forgive me! But ...
— O. T. - A Danish Romance • Hans Christian Andersen
... hear, my lad?" laughed Mr. Lindsey. "Aye, but your mother forgets that in affairs of this sort a lot of people are drawn in where they aren't concerned! It's like being on the edge of a whirlpool—you're dragged into it before you're aware. And now we'll go and see this Mr. Smeaton; but first, where's the telegraph office in this station? I want to wire to Murray, to ask him to keep me posted up during today if any news ...
— Dead Men's Money • J. S. Fletcher
... scooped out as it were from the very bowels of the earth, with its steep sides rent open in dreadful chasms, and far down in its fearful depths a boiling whirlpool of black waters. ...
— Capitola the Madcap • Emma D. E. N. Southworth
... the whirlpool of Issy's thoughts with a familiar sound. In the chapter of "Vivian" that he had just finished, the beautiful shopgirl was imprisoned on board the yacht of the millionaire kidnaper, while the hero, in his own yacht, was miles astern. But the hero's faithful friend, ...
— The Depot Master • Joseph C. Lincoln
... racing current, were seized, and spun around and around. Above the drone of the waters he heard the roar of a whirlpool, coming rapidly nearer. The firm clutch of Miss Vost's hand on his collar was not loosened. Occasionally he heard her gasp and sputter as a wave washed ...
— Peter the Brazen - A Mystery Story of Modern China • George F. Worts
... much. But there was a bridge there by which the army essayed to cross a river, and when half of the army had passed, that bridge fell down in irreparable ruin, nor could any one either go forward or return. For that place is said to be girt round with a whirlpool, shut in with quivering morasses, and thus by her confusion of the two elements, land and water, Nature has rendered it inaccessible. But in truth, even to this day, if you may trust the evidence ...
— Bulgaria • Frank Fox
... cowherd, Greatly vexed, and greatly angry, Through the open door went quickly, Through the yard to open country, Ran to Tuonela's deep river, To the dreadful river's whirlpool, 500 Waited there for Kaukomieli, Waited there for Lemminkainen, Till on his return from Pohja, He should make ...
— Kalevala, Volume I (of 2) - The Land of the Heroes • Anonymous
... his situation instantly. He was caught in the whirlpool which some of the farmers had spoken about in a vague manner, as though they doubted its existence. There was no doubt about it now. The whirlpool was a stern reality, and he was fast ...
— Canoe Boys and Campfires - Adventures on Winding Waters • William Murray Graydon
... silent Wild, with pain and bloody sweat, he toiled for them. Sooner or later must he come within reach of their talons to be fleeced, flouted and despoiled. It was an organised system of sharpers, thugs, harpies, and birds of prey of every kind. It was a blot on the map. It was a great whirlpool, and the eddy of it encircled the furthest outpost of the golden valley. It was a vortex of destruction, of ruin and shame. And here was I, hovering on its brink, likely to be soon sucked down into ...
— The Trail of '98 - A Northland Romance • Robert W. Service
... meaning of which I did not understand when I left Talagouga. We sorted ourselves out hastily and sent her at it again. Smash went a sorely tried pole and a paddle. Round and round we spun in an exultant whirlpool, which, in a light-hearted, maliciously joking way, hurled us tail first out of it into the current. Now the grand point in these canoes of having both ends alike declared itself; for at this juncture ...
— Travels in West Africa • Mary H. Kingsley
... enumerated in the most veracious manner. In one of his papers he describes the Mahlstrom or what he chooses to imagine the Mahlstrom may be, and by dint of this careful and De Foe-like painting, the horrid whirlpool is so placed before the mind, that we feel as if we had seen, and been ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, Number 385. November, 1847. • Various
... like a mill-race, and there was no spot on either bank where any one could land, or even grasp with his hand, except one. It was a narrow, sharp rock, that jutted out about two feet from the bank, quite close to the vortex of the whirlpool. This rock was Martin's only hope. To miss it would be certain destruction. But if he should gain a footing on it he knew that he could climb by a narrow fissure into a wild, cavernous spot, which it was exceedingly difficult to reach from any other point. A bend ...
— Martin Rattler • Robert Michael Ballantyne
... somewhat attaining, 145 Never an oath they fear, shall spare no promise to promise. Yet no sooner they sate all lewdness and lecherous fancy, Nothing remember of words and reck they naught of fore-swearing. Certes, thee did I snatch from midmost whirlpool of ruin Deadly, and held it cheap loss of a brother to suffer 150 Rather than fail thy need (O false!) at hour the supremest. Therefor my limbs are doomed to be torn of birds, and of ferals Prey, nor shall upheapt Earth ...
— The Carmina of Caius Valerius Catullus • Caius Valerius Catullus
... the talk fell on the congenial topic of illness, doctors and patients, nurses and nuns, all spinning in the many-coloured whirlpool of talk, now one and now another cresting the changing wave. The fact that Larry was of their own religion, counterbalanced his belonging to an alien class, and if their consciences sometimes hinted at a lack of discretion, they quieted them with the assurance that ...
— Mount Music • E. Oe. Somerville and Martin Ross
... growing worse. As old Jack had said, the schooner had actually been caught in the very vortex of it, but the whirling motion, imparted by the meeting of two different wind currents, had been the saving of the craft. She had been shunted to the outer edge, as a cork, going around in a whirlpool, is sometimes tossed to safety by the very violence ...
— The Moving Picture Girls at Sea - or, A Pictured Shipwreck That Became Real • Laura Lee Hope
... any description, had ever been made anywhere in the neighboring region. It was generally supposed that it had no visible outlet; but, among the trappers, including those in my own camp, were many who believed that somewhere on its surface was a terrible whirlpool, through which its waters found their way to the ocean by some subterranean communication. All these things had made a frequent subject of discussion in our desultory conversations around the fires at night; and my own mind had become tolerably well filled with their indefinite pictures, and ...
— The Life and Adventures of Kit Carson, the Nestor of the Rocky Mountains, from Facts Narrated by Himself • De Witt C. Peters
... that you are so poorly, and wish I could help you to sit down and work quietly at pure science. You have got into a whirlpool, and should stroke vigorously at the proper angle, not attempt to breast the whole force of the current, nor yet give in to it. Do take the counsel of a quiet looker on and withdraw to your books and studies in pure Natural History; let ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 1 • Leonard Huxley
... view of all this activity of strife, and from many men in its whirlpool details of their own adventure and of general progress or disaster on one sector of the battle-front. Then in divisional headquarters we saw the reports of the battle as they came in by telephone, or aircraft, or ...
— Now It Can Be Told • Philip Gibbs
... have lived such a beautiful life in the whirlpool of action; nobody has died a more noble death in the peace of ...
— Simon Bolivar, the Liberator • Guillermo A. Sherwell
... with the deed inside it, returned in three steps to the perilous shelf, and with one strong hurl sent forth the load, which cleft the white mist, and sank forever in the waves of the whirlpool. ...
— Mary Anerley • R. D. Blackmore
... further talk, even had the boys been in any position to consider conversation. The trunk was rapidly nearing the whirlpool—and death. ...
— The Boy Aviators in Africa • Captain Wilbur Lawton
... to gain—don't forget that, Mr. Hamilton. Men of different caliber, I grant you, but all three in the same whirlpool of crime, bound by thieves' law to sink or swim together. It is because they are astute and far-seeing that they must inevitably have considered the possibility of exposure and safeguarded themselves against ...
— The Crevice • William John Burns and Isabel Ostrander
... as they met. They were the centre of the crowd, the centre of observation, the centre of an unseen whirlpool of emotions ...
— The Knave of Diamonds • Ethel May Dell
... froth will be produced by the stirring of the waters which are moving in some places with whirlpool rapidity. There is considerable sound and fury, no doubt, in the discussions and in the things attempted in these uplifting movements. There is a considerable amount of smoke in proportion to the fire beneath. But, even with the froth, the noise, and the smoke, there is some ...
— Rural Life and the Rural School • Joseph Kennedy
... read, now, and he was unaware of the pain of the action. It was the White Mouse that was offering him forty dollars, and the story was "The Whirlpool," another of his early horror stories. He read the letter through again and again. The editor told him plainly that he had not handled the idea properly, but that it was the idea they were buying because it was original. If they could cut the story down one-third, they would take ...
— Martin Eden • Jack London
... Yauli there are upwards of twenty mineral springs, all situated within a circuit of a quarter of a mile. Several of them contain saline properties. One is called the Hervidero (the whirlpool). It is in the form of a funnel, and at its upper part is between ten and twelve feet diameter. Its surface is covered with foam. The temperature of the water is only 7 deg. C. higher than the atmosphere. Some of these springs are tepid and ...
— Travels in Peru, on the Coast, in the Sierra, Across the Cordilleras and the Andes, into the Primeval Forests • J. J. von Tschudi
... on July 24 in attempting to swim through the whirlpool and rapids at the foot of the Falls of Niagara, was born at Irongate, near Dawley, in Shropshire, January 18, 1848. He was 5 feet 8 inches in height, measured 43 inches round the chest, and weighed about 141/2 stone. He learnt to swim when about seven years old, and was trained as a sailor ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 401, September 8, 1883 • Various
... right the whirlpool Making a horrible crashing under us; Whence I thrust out my head with eyes ...
— Divine Comedy, Longfellow's Translation, Hell • Dante Alighieri
... I was on the point of shipwreck, I lifted up my voice, and earnestly entreated and called upon the strangers to save me and the youth from the whirlpool of the argument; they were our Castor and Pollux, I said, and they should be serious, and show us in sober earnest what that knowledge was which would enable us to pass the rest ...
— Euthydemus • Plato
... the individual, and a prodigal expenditure of the wealth of the church, which has souls for her hire. It is true that a few persons become centers of attraction to new churches that grow up around them; but very many are lost in the great whirlpool of this world's strife. ...
— Personal Recollections of Pardee Butler • Pardee Butler
... outside, of the dim wild whirlpool of London, I was much afraid, but I was now ready to be willing to leave the narrow Devonshire circle, to see the last of the red mud, of the dreary village street, of the plethoric elders, to hear the last of the drawling voices of the 'Saints'. ...
— Father and Son • Edmund Gosse
... the sea; the cannonade, and the occasional sorties of the garrison, the danger came nearer and nearer. Bucquoy on the other side was pursuing the same system, but his task was immeasurably more difficult. The Gullet, or new eastern entrance, was a whirlpool at high tide, deep, broad, and swift as a millrace. Yet along its outer verge he too laid his sausages, protecting his men at their work as well as he could with gabions, and essayed to build a dyke of wicker-work upon which he might ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... whatever of safety. The water came aboard, wave after wave, as they raced down. They reached the bottom with the canoe upright, but so full as barely to float, and the paddlers urged her toward the shore. They had nearly reached the bank when another whirlpool or whirling eddy tore them away and hurried them back to midstream, where the dugout filled and turned over. Joao, seizing the rope, started to swim ashore; the rope was pulled from his hand, but he reached the bank. Poor Simplicio must have been pulled under at once and his ...
— Through the Brazilian Wilderness • Theodore Roosevelt
... we begin with the inward world of thought and feeling, the whirlpool is still more rapid, the flame more eager and devouring. There it is no longer the gradual darkening of the eye and fading of colour from the wall,—the movement of the shore-side, where the water flows down indeed, though in apparent rest,—but ...
— The Renaissance - Studies in Art and Poetry • Walter Pater
... to think themselves out of danger in such a place. At the same time a great number of boats and small vessels, anchored near it, all likewise full of people, who had retired thither for the same purpose, were all swallowed up, as in a whirlpool, and never more appeared. ...
— Complete Story of the San Francisco Horror • Richard Linthicum
... terrible Paris—there's my excuse. What, pray, is yours? Oh! what a whirlpool is society! Didn't I tell you once that in Paris one must be as the Parisians? Society there drives out all sentiment; it lays en embargo on your time; and unless you are very careful, soon eats away your heart ...
— Letters of Two Brides • Honore de Balzac
... expedition, which he already meditated against the continent of Africa. The Straits of Rhegium and Messina [128] are twelve miles in length, and, in the narrowest passage, about one mile and a half broad; and the fabulous monsters of the deep, the rocks of Scylla, and the whirlpool of Charybdis, could terrify none but the most timid and unskilful mariners. Yet as soon as the first division of the Goths had embarked, a sudden tempest arose, which sunk, or scattered, many of the transports; their courage was daunted by the ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 3 • Edward Gibbon
... your affections may meet with, do you never lose courage; above all, do not think that, love's happiness having passed by you, you will never, right up to the end, know the great joy of human life. For though happiness appear in the form of a torrent, or a river that flows underground, of a whirlpool or tranquil lake, its source still is ever the same that lies deep down in our heart; and the unhappiest man of all men can conceive an idea of great joy. It is true that in love there is ecstasy ...
— Wisdom and Destiny • Maurice Maeterlinck
... the world in search of pleasure and excitement. There were sight-seers and "country customers" from forty-five states; ranchers from Texas, and lumber kings from Maine, and mining men from Nevada. At home they had reputations, and perhaps families to consider; but once plunged into the whirlpool of the Tenderloin, they were hidden from all the world. They came with their pockets full of money; and hotels and restaurants, gambling-places and pool-rooms and brothels—all were lying in wait for them! So eager had the competition become that ...
— The Metropolis • Upton Sinclair
... debts, gaslight, supper-parties, morning light, coaching; a fabulous Bohemianism; a Bohemianism of eternal hard-upishness and eternal squandering of money,—money that rose at no discoverable well-head and flowed into a sea of boudoirs and restaurants, a sort of whirlpool of sovereigns in which we were caught, and sent eddying through music halls, bright shoulders, tresses of hair, and slang; and I joined in the adorable game of Bohemianism that was played round and about Piccadilly Circus, with Curzon Street ...
— Confessions of a Young Man • George Moore
... came from near here, poor little soul! I can never get rid of the impression that her death was hurried, not only by trouble, but sheer homesickness. You cannot fit these slow, quiet natures into the city's whirlpool. I was a young fellow, down for the summer. I was ensnared by her beauty, and hadn't sense enough to see the danger. She followed me to the city,—took a place in a shop, and was about as wretched as a sea gull in a desert. I was fool enough to think it a noble act to befriend her and so ...
— Janet of the Dunes • Harriet T. Comstock
... threatening as they advanced, and actually seemed to be driven by more urgent winds than certain other clouds. They were, no doubt, more in the line of the storm influence. All our general storms are cyclonic in their character, that is, rotary and progressive. Their type may be seen in every little whirlpool that goes down the swollen current of the river; and in our hemisphere they revolve in the same direction, namely, from right to left, or in opposition to the hands of a watch. When the water finds an outlet ...
— Locusts and Wild Honey • John Burroughs
... track, was compelled to run into the rear end of the passenger train so as to get out of the way of the flood. A young man who was on the rear end of the train grabbed a young lady who was floating by and thus saved her life. The house of an old man, eighty-two years of age, was caught in the whirlpool, and he and his aged wife climbed on the roof for safety. They were floating down the railroad track to certain death, when their son-in-law, from the roof of the Pennsylvania Railroad station-house, pulled them off and ...
— The Johnstown Horror • James Herbert Walker
... colour and movement?—say on a May night, with people going to the theatres, the sky steely blue and ruddy over the house-tops, the Pavilion and Criterion lights orange and green glinting on the polished road and flickering on the flying hansom wheels—or The Circus in a wet night, a whirlpool of moving lights and shadows and wavering reflections! What a contrast to the quiet effects in some side street; for example this street seen half in moonlight, beneath my window in the Coburg; the only sound the click clack of the busy horse's feet on the wood pavement, as hansoms and carriages ...
— From Edinburgh to India & Burmah • William G. Burn Murdoch
... from their berths. Officers rushed on deck to be swept from their feet by blasts of salt spray, and just ahead, through the moonlight, could be seen the sharp edge of a long reef where the beach combers ran with the tide-rip of a whirlpool. There is something inexpressibly terrifying even from a point of safety in these beach combers, clutching their long arms hungrily for prey. The confusion of orders and {40} counter-orders, which no man had strength to carry out, of terrified cries and prayers and oaths—was ...
— Vikings of the Pacific - The Adventures of the Explorers who Came from the West, Eastward • Agnes C. Laut
... Thou ray of light to those who, lightless, grope. Thou house of God, thou garden of sweet shades, Rest without ceasing, refuge of the sad, Bliss without mourning, flow'r that never fades, Alien to death, and shelter in the mad Whirlpool of life, to all who seek thy port. Lady of Heaven, in whom all hearts rejoice, Thou roseate dawn and light ...
— The Evolution of Love • Emil Lucka
... the hole and went back to the cleft. I lit a candle and looked down at the pool. It was no longer stagnant now, but seething and eddying like a whirlpool. I beckoned to Tupac, who was standing a little way behind me, and as he came and looked over my shoulder I pointed down into the dark gulf, out of which the bottom was rapidly falling, ...
— The Romance of Golden Star ... • George Chetwynd Griffith
... night. Worse than Mel could ever remember it. As always, it was a dream of space, black empty space, and he was floating alone in the immense depths of it. There was no direction. He was caught in a whirlpool of vertigo from which he reached out with agonized yearning for ...
— The Memory of Mars • Raymond F. Jones
... her. He went away, wishing he hadn't said it. Had he but known it, the Old Lady had forgotten the existence of all and any egg pedlars. He had blotted himself and his insignificance out of her consciousness by his last sentence. All her thoughts, feelings, and wishes were submerged in a very whirlpool of desire to hear Sylvia sing that solo. She went into the house in a tumult and tried to conquer that desire. She could not do it, even thought she summoned all her pride ...
— Chronicles of Avonlea • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... sigh, he rested his elbows on the sill of the window and looked out at the moving wheel under the gauzy shadows. The sound of the water as it rushed through the mill-race into the buckets and then fell from the buckets into the whirlpool beneath, was loud in his ears while his quick glance, passing over the drifting yellow leaves of the sycamore, discerned a spot of vivid red in the cornlands beyond. The throbbing of his pulses rather than the assurance of his eyes told him that Molly was approaching; ...
— The Miller Of Old Church • Ellen Glasgow
... darkness are the patrol boats, manned by the Englishmen who are seeking my life. Seeking it, not to gratify their private emotions, but because we are all in the whirlpool of War and ...
— The Diary of a U-boat Commander • Anon
... Ryan with the whirlpool of Big Finance. He ruled New York traction and he recast the tobacco world. Yet nothing appealed to his imagination and enthusiasm like the Congo. He saw it in very much the same way that Rhodes viewed Rhodesia. Every great American master of capital has had his particular ...
— An African Adventure • Isaac F. Marcosson
... so pressingly as for quiet. Ah me! I often swear I will be buried at least in free breezy Scotland, out of this insane hubbub ... if ever the smallest competence of worldly means be mine, I will fly this whirlpool as I would the ...
— Thomas Carlyle - Biography • John Nichol
... the year.—From June 28th to Aug. 5th he was in Scotland (chiefly in the Western Highlands) with his wife and his sons Hubert and Osmund. In the course of this journey he visited the Corryvreckan whirlpool near the island of Scarba, and the following paragraph relating to this expedition is extracted from his journal: "Landed in Black Mile Bay, island of Luing, at 10.30. Here by previous arrangement with Mr A. Brown, agent of the steam-boat ...
— Autobiography of Sir George Biddell Airy • George Biddell Airy
... obligations towards the Transvaal by virtue of the political alliance existing between the two republics,' showed how impossible it was that this country, formed by ourselves and without a shadow of a cause of quarrel with us, could be saved from being drawn into the whirlpool. Everywhere, from over both borders, came the news of martial preparations. Already at the end of September troops and armed burghers were gathering upon the frontier, and the most incredulous were beginning at last to understand that the shadow of a great war was ...
— The Great Boer War • Arthur Conan Doyle
... time I used to see Borrow often at Roehampton, sometimes at Putney, and sometimes, but not often, in London. I could have seen much more of him than I did had not the whirlpool of London, into which I plunged for a time, borne me away from this most original of men; and this is what I so greatly lament now: for of Borrow it may be said, as it was said of a greater man still, that “after Nature ...
— Old Familiar Faces • Theodore Watts-Dunton
... alternative," cried he. "Sooner than pretend I admire sixteen plowed fields and a hill as much as I do a lawn and flower-beds, I elect to be flirted, and my what do ye call 'em?—my stagnant current—turned into a whirlpool." Ere the laugh had well subsided, caused by this imitation of Hercules and his choice, he struck up again, "Good news for you, young gentleman; I smell a ball; here is a fiddle-case making for ...
— Love Me Little, Love Me Long • Charles Reade
... since conceived the notion of some great, some resistless force within the Board of Trade Building that held the tide of the streets within its grip, alternately drawing it in and throwing it forth. Within there, a great whirlpool, a pit of roaring waters spun and thundered, sucking in the life tides of the city, sucking them in as into the mouth of some tremendous cloaca, the maw of some colossal sewer; then vomiting them forth again, spewing them ...
— The Pit • Frank Norris
... was in 1833, when Dickens had just attained his majority, that he first made the plunge into the literary whirlpool. He himself has related how one evening at twilight he "had stealthily entered a dim court" (Johnson's Court, Fleet Street, not, as is popularly supposed, named for Doctor Johnson, though inhabited by him in 1766, from whence he removed in the same year to Bolt Court, still keeping to his ...
— Dickens' London • Francis Miltoun
... the blue-grass fields of Kentucky were spinning outside of the window in a vast green whirlpool. The distant trees and houses moved forward with the train, while the foreground, with its telegraph poles, its culverts, section-houses, and shrubbery, rushed backward in a blur. Now and then into the Jim Crow window whipped a blast of coal smoke and ...
— Birthright - A Novel • T.S. Stribling
... extraordinarily fashioned. But poor Geoffrey Hudson's laces, embroideries, and the rest of his finery, were sorely worn and tarnished by the time which he had spent in jail, under the vague and malicious accusation that he was somehow or other an accomplice in this all-involving, all-devouring whirlpool of a Popish conspiracy—an impeachment which, if pronounced by a mouth the foulest and most malicious, was at that time sufficiently predominant to sully the fairest reputation. It will presently appear, that in ...
— Peveril of the Peak • Sir Walter Scott
... circle about in the outer edge of the whirlpool that sucks in its victims so relentlessly and ...
— The Evolution of Dodd • William Hawley Smith
... make a shift if we can repair the broken rudder. We must have struck a powerful cross current, or maybe a whirlpool, that tore the main rudder loose. We've rammed a sand bank, or stuck her nose into the bottom in some shallow place, I'm afraid. We can't go ...
— Tom Swift and his Undersea Search - or, The Treasure on the Floor of the Atlantic • Victor Appleton
... she had trodden the stars in press, Till the gold wine spurted over her dress, Till the gold wine gushed out round her feet; Spouted over her stained wear, And bubbled in golden froth at her feet, And hung like a whirlpool's mist round her. Still, mighty Season, do I see't, Thy sway is still majestical! Thou hold'st of God, by title sure, Thine indefeasible investiture, And that right round thy locks are native to; The heavens upon thy brow imperial, This huge terrene thy ball, And o'er thy shoulders ...
— Poems • Francis Thompson
... "The Whirlpool" is seated on the ground smoking; gazing as earnestly at the bright coals as if in them he could read the future or recall the past; and his young wife, whose face, now merry, now sad, bright with smiles at one moment, and lost in thought the next, gained for her the name of "The ...
— Dahcotah - Life and Legends of the Sioux Around Fort Snelling • Mary Eastman
... and lay floating on their surface, flung this way and that by the eddy of the whirlpool just where the moonlight beat most brightly. All who could of the multitude bent forward to see her end, and overcome by a fearful fascination, Leonard threw himself on his face, and, craning his head over the stone of the idol's hand, watched also, ...
— The People Of The Mist • H. Rider Haggard
... their pleasure. As men are sometimes lured toward dangerous perils on land, or mountains, or by sea, and from thence to deeds, discoveries, and crimes unforeseen and unpremeditated, so she seemed borne along into a whirlpool of feelings which chilled the better impulses of her nature and accentuated, with acid and fire, every elementary instinct. Animal powers and spiritual tendencies alike were concentrated into one absorbing passion which reasoned only in delirium, incoherently, ...
— Robert Orange - Being a Continuation of the History of Robert Orange • John Oliver Hobbes
... season of pancakes, which was all Lent was to me at the time of which I speak, the Carnival had rushed upon my sight, carrying all our friends through its whirlpool. Every gay cloth, shawl, and mat that could be brought into service I had rejoiced to see displayed upon the balconies. A narrow, winding street the Corso seemed, being so full, and the houses so high; and a merry blue strip of heaven far ...
— Memories of Hawthorne • Rose Hawthorne Lathrop
... the voyage to the south that, coming to the surface one day, the adventurers saw a strange island in the Atlantic Ocean, far from the coast of South America. On it was a great whirlpool, into which the Porpoise, their submarine boat, was nearly drawn by the ...
— Lost on the Moon - or In Quest Of The Field of Diamonds • Roy Rockwood
... twenty times in twenty different ways! And Dora! Dora! Dora! What did she see in him? What could she see? Love her? He knows nothing of love—such love as tortures me." Backwards and forwards he paced the floor to such imprecations and ejaculations as welled up from the whirlpool of rage in his heart, hour following hour, till in the blackness of his misery he could no longer speak. His brain had become stupefied by the iteration of inevitable loss, and so refused any longer to voice a woe beyond remedy. Then he stood ...
— The Man Between • Amelia E. Barr
... in muslin and ribbons, their vanity kindled by injudicious admiration, the sweet child—unconsciousness withering away in the glare of indiscriminate gazing, the innocence and simplicity and naturalness and child-likeness swallowed up in a seething whirlpool of artificialness, all the fine, golden butterfly-dust of modesty and delicacy and retiring girlhood ruthlessly rubbed off forever before girlhood had even reddened from the dim dawn of infancy. Oh! it is cruel to sacrifice children so. What can atone for ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XII. July, 1863, No. LXIX. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... aloud, but most women smile aloud. And the fact that in so doing we unveil all our artifice, all the whirlpool of our inmost being to each other, proves the extraordinary solidarity ...
— The Dangerous Age • Karin Michaelis
... scene is this for me to look back upon. I might be said to have got into the whirlpool, into the very vortex of endless dissipation and folly! I saw and felt my error, but I knew not how to retreat. My wife, too, entered into the very marrow of this round of pleasure and gay society. The ...
— Memoirs of Henry Hunt, Esq. Volume 1 • Henry Hunt
... lagoon, we approach the mouth, the surf breaking over the rocks on either side with great violence. There is a narrow lane of clear water; we pull in; a strong current carries the boat along with fearful speed, and several seas break into her. It seems as if we were in a whirlpool. The rudder has lost its power, and we are spun round and round helplessly; about every moment it seems to be hove on the rocks. She violently rises and falls, and then we are cast, as it were, into the smooth water of the lagoon, though still carried upward for some distance. ...
— The Cruise of the Mary Rose - Here and There in the Pacific • William H. G. Kingston
... word, and seemed not to hear. Albinia felt as if she had fallen into a whirlpool of gossip; she looked towards him, and hoped to let the conversation drop, but Sophy answered her sister, and, at last, when it came to something about what Jane heard from Mrs. Osborn's Susan, Albinia gently whispered, 'I do not think this entertains your papa, my dear,' and silence ...
— The Young Step-Mother • Charlotte M. Yonge
... made of the dust, to this present time, but what Satan has endeavored, by lies and machinations to turn him away from God. Thousands of millions have gone down the rapids of negligence and carelessness, and been lost in the whirlpool ...
— The Gospel Day • Charles Ebert Orr
... hold fellowship with God, to live in union with Him, to have His thoughts for my thoughts, and His love wrapping my heart, and His will enshrined in my will; to carry Him about with me into all the pettinesses of daily life, and, amidst the whirlpool of duties and changing circumstances, to sit in the centre, as it were the eye of the whirlpool where there is a dead calm, that lifts a man on high. Communion with God secures elevation of spirit, raising us ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Isaiah and Jeremiah • Alexander Maclaren
... that alone had power to break their close-packed ranks. Then came an opening, a falling apart; slight as it was, we plunged into it with joy. Thereafter we were buffeted like chips in the swirling maw of a whirlpool; we fought our way rod by rod. Here an opening, and we shot through; there a solid wall of flesh for whose passing we halted, lashing out with quirts and spurring desperately to hold our own—a war for the open road against ...
— Raw Gold - A Novel • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... the bridge, it went almost southerly for half a mile, then made an abrupt turn at right angles, pursued its way westward for another quarter of a mile, and then met the swash channel, which cut diagonally through the big marsh. At this junction of the two streams a whirlpool called the Devil's Elbow had been formed, a treacherous spot for small craft, and requiring rare ...
— The Fifth String, The Conspirators • John Philip Sousa
... gurgled about him. Miniature whirlpools tugged at his legs, pulling him under. He fought nobly, setting his teeth and swearing inwardly that he would make it, he would not give up, he would not drown. But the edge of the tide rip was a long way off, and he was growing tired already. Another whirlpool sucked him down, and when he rose he shouted for help. It was an instinctive, unreasoning appeal, almost sure to be useless, for who could ...
— The Woman-Haters • Joseph C. Lincoln
... that for ten who can stand adversity there is but one who can stand prosperity. Sandy, alas! was no exception to any rule which went to prove the frailty of human nature. The sudden acquisition of ten dollars cast him into a whirlpool of temptation from which he made little ...
— Sandy • Alice Hegan Rice
... accepted the Enchanter. Soon I shall never see you again, for Dragondel will come and take me to his awful castle which lies on an island in the dark ocean. Nor will you ever be able to save me, for Dragondel has so bewitched the waves that a terrible whirlpool forms on the sea when a boat approaches the enchanted castle, and ...
— The Firelight Fairy Book • Henry Beston
... off the cliff into the force; the priest saw the soles of his feet, and knew not afterwards what was become of him. But Grettir dived under the force, and hard work it was, because the whirlpool was strong, and he had to dive down to the bottom, before he might come up under the force. But thereby was a rock jutting out, and thereon he gat; a great cave was under the force, and the river fell over it ...
— The Story of Grettir The Strong • Translated by Eirikr Magnusson and William Morris
... Robert had been a ship-builder. When shipping went down in the whirlpool of 1857, Robert Kincaid's building had gone; and afterward he had died leaving his children little beside their education, which he thanked God was secured, and a good repute that belonged to their name, but was easily forgotten in the ...
— Real Folks • Mrs. A. D. T. Whitney
... slashed out for himself his place in the world of London and Paris finance, from his humble beginning as a clerk in a Montreal broker's office. It ministered to her pride to be the wife of a man who had plucked success from the whirlpool of life. As to the methods by which he had amassed his money, with these she was not concerned. She knew, of course, that there were many who had bitter things to say ...
— Swirling Waters • Max Rittenberg
... and tittle-tattle. It needs only one of these talkative dames or men to take away all the pleasure there is for me in visiting the lady on whom I happen to have called. Sometimes when I am anchored perforce upon my seat, I feel lost; I do not know how to get away. I have to take part in the whirlpool of foolish chatter. I know all the set questions and answers better than I do the catechism itself, and it bores me to have to remain until the very end and hear the very last opinion of some fool upon the comedy, or the book, or the divorce, or the marriage, or the death that is being discussed. ...
— A Comedy of Marriage & Other Tales • Guy De Maupassant
... by which they are distinguished from not living matter. Each individual living organism is formed by their temporary combination. They stand to it in the relation of the particles of water to a cascade, or a whirlpool; or to a mould, into which the water is poured. The form of the organism is thus determined by the reaction between external conditions and the inherent activities of the organic molecules of which it is composed; and, as the stoppage of a whirlpool destroys nothing but a form, ...
— Discourses - Biological and Geological Essays • Thomas H. Huxley
... your heart's so set upon it. I'll try to bear up and find a diversion of some kind and not rust out any more than I can help. I might dig in the sand or make mud pies or play mumbly-peg. But I draw the line at plunging into that whirlpool across the street. My bed here is nearly as comfortable as the one at ...
— Affairs of State • Burton E. Stevenson
... noble Roman blood, who took his station on the Rhine, under the cliffs of that Lurlei so famous in legend and ballad as haunted by some fair fiend, whose treacherous song lured the boatmen into the whirlpool at their foot. To rescue the shipwrecked boatmen, to lodge, feed, and if need be clothe, the travellers along the Rhine bank, was St. Goar's especial work; and Wandelbert, the monk of Prum, in the Eifel, ...
— The Hermits • Charles Kingsley
... in height as she folded her arms in their flowing black sleeves, and looked down upon him silently. The boiling whirlpool in her breast mounted as it spun, stifling her. But she was outwardly calm. He went smoothly on, with an occasional display of red mouth and grinning teeth in the big beard, and always that baleful glitter ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves
... was saved by a merciful inefficiency of temperament from attaining the vortex of her whirlpool of charity. To be in the vortex is, I believe, almost always to see less. The bull's ...
— Living Alone • Stella Benson
... leaving an extensive bulge standing out in the river, and connected with the mainland by an isthmus. The river striking in this arm, and not having sufficient scope to rebound toward the other bank, is thrown into a rotary motion, forming almost a whirlpool. The action of this motion upon the banks soon reduces the connecting neck, which separates and blocks the waters, until, at last, no longer able to cope with the great weight resting against it, it gives way, and the river divides ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol. 5, No. 6, June, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... northwards to a river which flows into Lake Tanganyika. The caravan was carried over in small frail boats, and the asses which still survived had to swim. When the foremost of them came to the middle of the river he was seen to stop a moment, apparently struggling, and then he went down, a whirlpool forming above his head. He had been seized by ...
— From Pole to Pole - A Book for Young People • Sven Anders Hedin
... relatively, not very far off, and situated practically in American waters. But thereabouts the regular currents diverging to the north and south have formed a kind of lake of calms, which is sometimes known as the "Whirlpool of Fleurieu." ...
— Godfrey Morgan - A Californian Mystery • Jules Verne
... and more threatening; the guides began to murmur at the length of the way—their river homes seemed so far behind them. Savage faces peered out from bush and rock upon the company of wearied, ragged, dispirited men. One soldier went mad, raved of gold and jewels, and jumped into a whirlpool to seek both. Two others—one a Cornish squire who had sold his little all to join the expedition—were stricken by the sun, and dropped dead as they were pulling at the boat ropes. A jaguar pounced upon another man as he stooped to get water from a stream. An Indian arrow ...
— Sea-Dogs All! - A Tale of Forest and Sea • Tom Bevan
... on her ears as she stood in the big Union depot, helpless, bewildered, and as lost as a stray kitten in the midst of that noisy, pushing crowd. Sharp elbows jostled her this way and that; strange faces streamed past her by thousands, it seemed. How could anybody find anybody else in such a whirlpool of people? Hunting for a needle in a haystack seemed nothing in comparison to finding her godmother in such ...
— The Little Colonel's House Party • Annie Fellows Johnston
... where all is unstable, and nought can endure, but is swept onwards at once in the hurrying whirlpool of change; where a man, if he is to keep erect at all, must always be advancing and moving, like an acrobat on a rope—in such a world, happiness in inconceivable. How can it dwell where, as Plato says, continual Becoming and never ...
— The Essays of Arthur Schopenhauer; Studies in Pessimism • Arthur Schopenhauer
... while,' he says, 'I was rushing into the whirlpool of Tractarianism; was very much noticed by Newman—in fact fanaticism was laying its deadly grip around me.' He had come up from Yorkshire with what he calls his 'home Puritan religion almost narrowed to two points—fear ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 3 of 3) - Essay 5: On Pattison's Memoirs • John Morley
... stopped automatically. Pratteler manipulated the crane which seized the iron bars and laid them at the feet of the idol. Then a claw would project itself and draw the bar toward the revolving teeth. The bar cried out like a beast. Behind the disk a whirlpool of fire was set free. The idol screamed and screeched. At the end it whistled, and when it was done, it rang a bell. Then the fragments that had dropped behind were automatically removed and the claw reached out for its next work. Around the idol iron stairs ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries - Masterpieces of German Literature Vol. 19 • Various
... their heels into the cafe of Delmonico. I felt then for a brief moment that I was "seeing life," the life of a great metropolis, and in company with the young swells who made it the rushing, delightful whirlpool it appeared ...
— Captain Macklin • Richard Harding Davis |
