"Wrack" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... my feet. I was sealed up in dungeons. I was snatched out of the deep by the hair of my head. I slew men in hecatombs; and then, when the morning came and I awoke, there was not a shred of intellectual wrack left behind on which my mind could take hold. I had dreamed it all with the cerebellum. It was all organic. Why didn't I dream a novel by Turgenef, or Bjornsen? It takes brains to write "Fathers and Sons" or the "Bankrupt," and it takes brains ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol II, After-Dinner Speeches E-O • Various
... thy honour's wrack; Yet for thy honour did I entertain him; Coming from thee, I could not put him back, For it had been dishonour to disdain him: Besides, of weariness he did complain him, And talk'd of virtue: O unlook'd-for evil, When virtue is profaned in such ...
— The Rape of Lucrece • William Shakespeare [Clark edition]
... rip the golden bowels of America. Navarre that cloakes them underneath his wings, Shall feele the house of Lorayne is his foe: Your highnes need not feare mine armies force, Tis for your safetie and your enemies wrack. ...
— Massacre at Paris • Christopher Marlowe
... pillars and porticos, and the huge bulk of the edifice, heaving up its dome from an obscure foundation into yet more shadowy obscurity; and by the time I reached the corner of the churchyard nearest Cheapside, the whole vast cathedral had utterly vanished, leaving "not a wrack behind," unless those thick, dark vapors were the elements of which it had been composed, and into which it had again dissolved. It is good to think, nevertheless,—and I gladly accept the analogy and the moral,—that the cathedral was really there, and as substantial as ever, though those earthly ...
— Passages From the English Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... Parisian toilets, the eddy of trailing robes with its fairy-foam of lace, the ivorine loveliness of glossy shoulders and jewelled throats, the glimmering of satin-slippered feet,—than to watch the raging of the flood without, or the flying of the wrack ... ...
— Chita: A Memory of Last Island • Lafcadio Hearn
... hate to watch the flower set up its face. I loathe the trembling shimmer of the sea, Its heaving roods of intertangled weed And orange sea-wrack with its necklace fruit; The stale, insipid cadence of the dawn, The ringdove, tedious harper on five tones, The eternal havoc of the sodden leaves, Rotting the ...
— Old Familiar Faces • Theodore Watts-Dunton
... a wild, cold, seasonable night of March, with a pale moon, lying on her back as though the wind had tilted her, and a flying wrack of the most diaphanous and lawny texture. The wind made talking difficult, and flecked the blood into the face. It ...
— Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde • ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON
... rouse him, and in January he died on his ship, at Nombre de Dios. His remains were consigned to a sailor's grave—the wide ocean—and as the ship moved on her way, the crew, looking back to the place where the body had gone down, saw the phantom smack rise from the deep, rush like a wind-blown wrack across the spot, and melt into the air as it neared ...
— Myths & Legends of our New Possessions & Protectorate • Charles M. Skinner
... gun still angry-hot, And my lids tingled with the tears held back: 20 This scorn methought was crueller than shot: The manly death-grip in the battle-wrack, Yard-arm to yard-arm, were more friendly ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell
... into the honest pain-wrack of his calf, and in her he could observe no reluctance ...
— On the Makaloa Mat/Island Tales • Jack London
... sailors, gladly enough, and then rowed back, over a bottom of white sand, bedded here and there with the short manati-grass (Thalassia Testudinum), one of the few flowering plants which, like our Zostera, or grass-wrack, grows at the bottom of the sea. But, wherever the bottom was stony, we could see huge prickly sea- urchins, huger brainstone corals, round and gray, and branching corals likewise, such as, when cleaned, may be seen in any curiosity shop. These, and a flock of brown and gray pelicans sailing over ...
— At Last • Charles Kingsley
... of his mind before the time when Caulaincourt's despatch flashed the horrible truth upon him that he might, after all, leave France smaller and weaker than he found her. Then the lightnings of his wrath flash forth, and we see the tumult and anguish of that mighty soul: but previously the storm-wrack of passion and the cloud-bank of his clinging will are lit up by few gleams of the earlier piercing intelligence. On January the 4th he had written to Caulaincourt that the policy of England and the personal rancour of the Czar would drag Austria along. ...
— The Life of Napoleon I (Volumes, 1 and 2) • John Holland Rose
... certainly a distinction between the author he has understood and the author he has not understood. Carlyle believed in himself, but he could not have believed in himself more than Ruskin did; they both believed in God, because they felt that if everything else fell into wrack and ruin, themselves were permanent witnesses to God. Where they both failed was not in belief in God or in belief in themselves; they failed in belief in other people. It is not enough for a prophet to believe in his message; he must believe in its acceptability. Christ, St. Francis, Bunyan, Wesley, ...
— Varied Types • G. K. Chesterton
... granted us peace and plenty, and the quiet we've sought so long; He hath thwarted the wily savage, and kept him from wrack and wrong; And unto our feast the Sachem shall be bidden, that he may know We worship his own Great Spirit, who maketh ...
— The Elson Readers, Book 5 • William H. Elson and Christine M. Keck
... have evil tidings for you. The people of Rome are beginning to murmur against you, because of the change that has come over you. They say that you are bewitched, that they can get no answers or decisions from you, and all the affairs of the empire go to wrack and ruin while you sleep and take no heed. You have ceased to be their emperor, they say, and they will cease to be loyal ...
— Hero-Myths & Legends of the British Race • Maud Isabel Ebbutt
... lives in ev'ry page, And sits archbishop still, to vex the age. Had he foreseen—and who knows but he did?— This fatal wrack, which deep in time lay hid, 'Tis but just to believe, that little hand Which clouded him, but now benights our land, Had never—like Elias—driv'n him hence, A sad retirer for a slight offence. For were he now, like the returning year, Restor'd, to view ...
— Poems of Henry Vaughan, Silurist, Volume II • Henry Vaughan
... if a mine had been sprung beneath the spot upon which had been dumped her emotions of the last two months, blowing some to atoms, bringing to light others that had lain buried. Out of the wrack, joy, shame, fear fell at her feet—and a sentence out of a letter was staring her in ...
— Anthony Lyveden • Dornford Yates
... there is wind and rain; and out of it comes seed harvest. The waters of the sea are poured in thunder wrack upon the hills and run in rivers back into the sea. The winds make weather, and weather profits man. When will man's turmoil cease, when will he find calm? I do not know. I only know that toil and struggle are sweet, and that life well lived is victory. ...
— The Iron Puddler • James J. Davis
... like a kraken huge and black, She crushed our ribs in her iron grasp! Down went the Cumberland all a wrack, With a sudden shudder of death, And the cannon's breath For her ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 62, December, 1862 • Various
... of a man, sir, that he holds the candle. Nor is that the worst of it, for this foreigner and his paramour are suffered to transact the state affairs, while the Prince takes the salary and leaves all things to go to wrack. There will follow upon this some manifest judgment which, though I am old, ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 7 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... at town land till all have gone to wrack, The very straws may wrangle till they've thrown down the stack; The very door-posts bicker till they've pulled in the door, The very ale-jars jostle till the ale is on the floor, But this shall ...
— The Green Helmet and Other Poems • William Butler Yeats
... dimly-lighted suburbs of London, and entered upon the open country. A wan, watery line of light lay under the brooding clouds in the west, tinged with a lurid hue; and all the great field of sky stretching above the level landscape was overcast with storm-wrack, fleeing swiftly before the wind. At times the train seemed to shake with the Wast, when it was passing oyer any embankment more than ordinarily exposed; but it sped across the country almost as rapidly ...
— The Doctor's Dilemma • Hesba Stretton
... believed to be something more than an aggregation of atoms. The body dissolves into its constituent elements and serves in its turn to build up other organisms: but as a human body it all turns to dust nor 'leaves a wrack behind'. Thus Darwinism was made the basis first for a materialistic, and then for a monistic, view of the world, and hence came to be rigorously opposed to every form of Theism. But since, at that time, Darwinism was the only theory of evolution recognized by ...
— At the Deathbed of Darwinism - A Series of Papers • Eberhard Dennert
... was getting low, but he decided that did not matter either. Even so, Ross got to his feet, moving over to the drifts of storm wrack to gather more. Why should he stay here by a useless beacon? But somehow he could not force himself to move on, as futile as ...
— The Time Traders • Andre Norton
... cast their burdens down on the broad plain of al-Ghabit, as a trader from al-Yaman unfolds from the bales his store; And the topmost crest, on the morrow, of al-Mujaimir's cairn, was heaped with the flood-borne wrack, like wool on ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 2 • Charles Dudley Warner
... lovely fair was Hero, Venus' nun, As Nature wept, thinking she was undone, Because she took more from her than she left, And of such wondrous beauty her bereft. Therefore, in sign her treasure suffered wrack, Since Hero's time hath half the world ...
— Hero and Leander • Christopher Marlowe
... churches, castles, palaces and pyramids; of the frightful hurricane of the night when Duncan was murdered; of the blast on which pity rides like a new-born babe, or on which Heaven's cherubim are horsed. There is thus something magnificently appropriate in the cry 'Blow, wind! Come, wrack!' with which Macbeth, turning from the sight of the moving wood of Birnam, bursts from his castle. He was borne to his throne on a whirlwind, and the fate he goes to meet comes ...
— Shakespearean Tragedy - Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth • A. C. Bradley
... mounching jaws and eyes a-stare; Or on a lotus leaf would crawl A brindled loach to bask and sprawl, Tasting the warm sun ere it dipped Into the water; but quick as fear Back his shining brown head slipped To crouch on the gravel of his lair, Where the cooled sunbeams, broke in wrack, Spilt shattered gold about his back. So within that green-veiled air, Within that white-walled quiet, where Innocent water thought aloud,— Childish prattle that must make The wise sunlight with laughter shake On the leafage overbowed,— Often the King and ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 2 (of 4) • Various
... dulse, sea lettuce, confervae, wrack; sargasso; kelp, fucus, rockweed. Associated Words: algology, algous, fucivorous, fucoid, fucoidal, fucosol, laver, ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming
... others have said of them; I mean the Capital Offenders, in their Confessions. We professing law must speak reverently of kings and potentates. I perceive these honourable lords, and the rest of this great assembly, are come to hear what hath been scattered upon the wrack of report. We carry a just mind, to condemn no man, but upon ...
— State Trials, Political and Social - Volume 1 (of 2) • Various
... his countries go to wrack), From bick'ring with his folk, to keep the Britons back, Cast up that mightly mound of eighty miles in length, Athwart from sea ...
— Cameos from English History, from Rollo to Edward II • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... SEA-WRACK GRASS. Zostera marina; used in Sweden and Holland for manuring land. At Yarmouth it is thrown on shore in such abundance that mounds are made with it to arrest the encroachments of the sea. It is also ...
— The Sailor's Word-Book • William Henry Smyth
... pulled sheaves out of the other side to keep it straight. Now, Mr. Morrow, wasn't he an unfortunate man? for whoever would go down to Squire Dickson's hagyard, would see the same Larry's handiwork so beautiful and illegant, though his own was in such brutheen.* Even his barn to wrack; and he was obliged to thrash his oats in the open air when ther would be a frost, and he used to lose one-third of it; and if there came a thaw, 'twould almost ...
— The Ned M'Keown Stories - Traits And Stories Of The Irish Peasantry, The Works of - William Carleton, Volume Three • William Carleton
... of the world, and all its virtue, all its pleasures and all its pains, will have effected nothing. They will all have faded like an unsubstantial pageant, and not left a wrack behind. ...
— Is Life Worth Living? • William Hurrell Mallock
... peace, it keeps our Ancient whole, but s'hart our gaberdines go to wrack. But futra! tis well known since Dick Bowyer came to France he hath shewed himselfe a gentleman and a Cavaliero and sets feare at's heeles. And I could scape (a pox on it) th'other thing, I might haps return safe and sound to England. But what remedy? al flesh ...
— A Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. III • Various
... guide to lead my way, And as I deemed I did pursue her track; Wit lost his aim, and will was fancy's prey; The rebel won, the ruler went to wrack. But now sith fancy did with folly end, Wit, bought with loss — will, ...
— David Elginbrod • George MacDonald
... with her, the moon ran out, and they saw that the woman was fair, and that about her neck was a chaplet of gems that shone in the moon, and they had a longing both for the jewel and the woman: but before they laid hand on her they asked her of whence and whither, and she said: From ruin and wrack to the Well at the World's End, and therewith turned on them with a naked sword in her hand; so that ...
— The Well at the World's End • William Morris
... ways of spelling the name of the blamed thing so as to get the same right wunst any way—is played wid the feet. You slide the sheet wid the holes punched into 'em into the wrack over the keeze and then wurrk the feet up and down like yer husband Tana used to do at home in ...
— The Launch Boys' Adventures in Northern Waters • Edward S. Ellis
... rose swiftly towards the surface of the planet. The cloud-wrack got thinner and thinner, and presently they found themselves floating in a clear atmosphere between two seas of cloud, the one above them being much less dense ...
— A Honeymoon in Space • George Griffith
... Windsor is owned in New Brunswick, and will pay toll to that province. The capitalists of Nova Scotia treat it like a hired house, they won't keep it in repair; they neither paint it to preserve the boards, nor stop a leak to keep the frame from rottin'; but let it go to wrack sooner than drive a nail or put in a pane of glass. 'It will sarve ...
— The Clockmaker • Thomas Chandler Haliburton
... "Properest," for "perfectest motion." After "a-foot." "It hath its tempests like the sea, and as violent, and men are ship-wrack't upon pillars like great rocks." And at the end after "could not"—"ffinally it is used for a church of these two only, sharkes and cut purses, the one comes thither to fast, the other ...
— Microcosmography - or, a Piece of the World Discovered; in Essays and Characters • John Earle
... he has overturned the Russian rule, England comes next for wrack. They say that know!... Look—he has entered by the Royal doors And makes the Palace his.—Now let us ...
— The Dynasts - An Epic-Drama Of The War With Napoleon, In Three Parts, - Nineteen Acts, And One Hundred And Thirty Scenes • Thomas Hardy
... compass'd by the power of the King, Enforced she was to wed him in her tears, And with a shameful swiftness: afterward, Not many moons, King Uther died himself, Moaning and wailing for an heir to rule After him, lest the realm should go to wrack. And that same night, the night of the new year; By reason of the bitterness and grief That vext his mother, all before his time Was Arthur born, and all as soon as born Deliver'd at a secret postern-gate To Merlin, to be holden ...
— Famous Tales of Fact and Fancy - Myths and Legends of the Nations of the World Retold for Boys and Girls • Various
... of loneliness be stronger. The pines drooped and sobbed. Cascades, born somewhere in the dun firmament above, dropped down the mountain sides in ever-growing white threads. The rivers roared and plunged with aimless passion down the ravines. Stray little clouds, left behind when the wrack lifted a little, ran bleating up and down the forlorn hill-sides. More often, the clouds trailed along the valleys, a long procession of shrouded, melancholy figures, seeming to pause, as with an indeterminate, tragic, ...
— Letters from America • Rupert Brooke
... wildly boisterous, but now the wind had dropped, only its rags went fluttering through the night. The rays of the full moon fell in a shower between the branches. Overhead still raced the scud and wrack, shaped like hurrying monsters; but below the earth was quiet. Still and dripping stood the hosts of trees. Their trunks gleamed wet and sparkling where the moon caught them. There was a strong smell of mould and fallen leaves. The air ...
— The Man Whom the Trees Loved • Algernon Blackwood
... wrack of clouds streams across the awful sky, and the rain sweeps almost parallel with the horizon. Beyond, the heath stretches off into endless blackness, in the extreme of which either fancy or art has conjured up some undefinable shapes that seem riding ...
— Masterpieces of Mystery - Riddle Stories • Various
... some time, and, upon looking again, we find that she has not moved, and impart the fact to Sandy, who looks steadily through his long spy-glass, evidently made up of several others; then, gazing intently over the top, he brings all hands to their feet by the cry of "Wrack!" For ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, October 1885 • Various
... Strait, or even weathered Duke of York Island. He nodded to his junior, whose presence on the bridge was a mere matter of form, owing to the powerless condition of the ship and the impenetrable wrack of foam and mist that barred vision ahead, and strode off on a tour of inspection. As wind and sea were now beating more directly on the port side, there was some degree of shelter along the covered-in deck to starboard. He found that two boats had been cleared of their hamper ...
— The Captain of the Kansas • Louis Tracy
... done," replied Humphrey; "although I think now that I could get on by myself; but still, Edward, you know we cannot tell what a day may bring forth, and I might fall sick, or something happen which might prevent my attending to anything; and then, without you or Pablo, everything might have gone to wrack and ruin. Certainly, when we think how we were left, by the death of old Jacob, to our own resources, we have much to thank God for in ...
— The Children of the New Forest • Captain Marryat
... gaunt west-looking bedroom, the one in which Heritage and Dickson had camped the night before, they opened a fold of the shutters and looked out into a world of grey wrack and driving rain. The Tower roof showed mistily beyond the ridge of down, but its environs were not in their prospect. The lower regions of the House had been gloomy enough, but this bleak place with its ...
— Huntingtower • John Buchan
... our difficulties and embarrassments, the weather had again changed for the worse. The sun had set in a wrack of wild, storm-riven cloud painted with the hues of fire and smoke, which, louring threateningly, had overspread the sky with incredible rapidity, completely obscuring the light of the stars; the wind, still icy cold, had breezed up again savagely, kicking up a tremendous sea, ...
— Under the Ensign of the Rising Sun - A Story of the Russo-Japanese War • Harry Collingwood
... of a character to be appreciable only by the eye, escaping altogether the ear: thus it is with 'draft' and 'draught'; 'plain' and 'plane'; 'coign' and 'coin'; 'flower' and 'flour'; 'check' and 'cheque'; 'straight' and 'strait'; 'ton' and 'tun'; 'road' and 'rode'; 'throw' and 'throe'; 'wrack' and 'rack'; 'gait' and 'gate'; 'hoard' and 'horde'{117}; 'knoll' and 'noll'; 'chord' and 'cord'; 'drachm' and 'dram'; 'sergeant' and 'serjeant'; 'mask' and ...
— English Past and Present • Richard Chenevix Trench
... far more strongly than Eden could do. As by a lightning flash, the purblind politicians of Vienna could now discern the storm-wrack drifting upon them. The weakness of the Piedmontese army, their own unpreparedness in the Milanese, the friendliness of Genoa to France, and the Jacobinical ferment in all parts of Italy, portended a speedy irruption of the ...
— William Pitt and the Great War • John Holland Rose
... the storm was abating. The sun began to shine out through the driving wrack of clouds. The woodland tracks might be wet, but little reeked ...
— French and English - A Story of the Struggle in America • Evelyn Everett-Green
... a harbour large and unstirred by the winds' [571-604]entrance; but nigh it Aetna thunders awfully in wrack, and ever and again hurls a black cloud into the sky, smoking with boiling pitch and embers white hot, and heaves balls of flame flickering up to the stars: ever and again vomits out on high crags from the torn entrails of the mountain, tosses up masses of molten rock ...
— The Aeneid of Virgil • Virgil
... heart seemed to make Jemima's brain grow dull; she laid her head on her arms, which rested on the window-sill, and grew dizzy with the sick weary notion that the earth was wandering lawless and aimless through the heavens, where all seemed one tossed and whirling wrack of clouds. It was a waking nightmare, from the uneasy heaviness of which she was thankful to be ...
— Ruth • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... a spreading wall of heavy clouds traveling at seemingly great speed, while below the wrack the water darkened ominously and ...
— The Boy Scouts of the Eagle Patrol • Howard Payson
... reached the sky, and on his crest Sat Horrour plumed; nor wanted in his grasp What seemed both spear and shield: Now dreadful deeds Might have ensued, nor only Paradise In this commotion, but the starry cope Of Heaven perhaps, or all the elements At least had gone to wrack, disturbed and torn With violence of this conflict, had not soon The Eternal, to prevent such horrid fray, Hung forth in Heaven his golden scales, yet seen Betwixt Astrea and the Scorpion sign, Wherein all things created first he weighed, The pendulous round earth with balanced air In counterpoise, ...
— Paradise Lost • John Milton
... endures no perpetual gloom. The sudden ruin of a bright day in deluge and darkness and sonorous thunder, the timid reappearance of faint light, the natural forms strangely emerging from the perplexed wrack infesting the heaven, and at last seen as never before through leagues of pellucid air; the thunder's silence, the final and supreme triumph of light;—these swift yet utter revolutions of the visible world, by very grace of mutability, were rich with instant consolations for ...
— Apologia Diffidentis • W. Compton Leith
... breaking and showing ebon patches and infrequent stars through a wind-harried wrack of cloud. The night had grown sensibly colder, and noisy with the rushing ...
— The Lone Wolf - A Melodrama • Louis Joseph Vance
... below us, the next a mighty billow would toss itself aloft and vanish utterly into space. Everywhere wreaths of mist with ragged fringes were withering away into empty air, and, more remarkable yet, was the conflict of wind which sent the cloud wrack flying ...
— The Dominion of the Air • J. M. Bacon
... Spanish Armado to wrack, And Travell'd all o'er the old World, and came back, In his old Ship, laden with Gold and old Sack, ...
— Wit and Mirth: or Pills to Purge Melancholy, Vol. 5 of 6 • Various
... 'gin to be aweary of the sun, And wish the estate o' the world were now undone.— Ring the alarum bell! Blow wind! Come, wrack! At least we'll die with harness on ...
— The Man Shakespeare • Frank Harris
... boat can safely run to shore; but the little wharf, built there of the largest coral blocks that could be rolled together, has been once and again swept clean off by the hurricane, leaving "not a wrack behind." ...
— The Story of John G. Paton - Or Thirty Years Among South Sea Cannibals • James Paton
... TEMPEST.—WILLIAM STRACHEY, a contemporary of Shakespeare and secretary of the Virginian colony, wrote at Jamestown and sent to London in 1610 the manuscript of A True Repertory of the Wrack and Redemption of Sir Thomas Gates, Kt., upon and from the Islands of the Bermudas. This is a story of shipwreck on the Bermudas and of escape in small boats. The book is memorable for the description of a storm at sea, and it is possible that it may even have furnished suggestions to ...
— History of American Literature • Reuben Post Halleck
... on the seaport towns, The weight of his hand held hard the downs. And the merchants cursed him, bitter and black, For a red flame in the sea-fog's wrack Was all of their ships that ...
— Young Adventure - A Book of Poems • Stephen Vincent Benet
... after effects, as you know, are exceedingly beneficial. I hope that when you visit the London diggings you may find the truth of this; but it will be time enough to speak of that subject when you return from rambling on the glaciers of Switzerland, where, by the way, the dirt, rubbish, and wrack, called moraines, which lie at the foot of the glaciers, will serve to remind you of the gold-fields to which I have referred, for much of what composes those moraines was once solid rock in a fixed position on ...
— Rivers of Ice • R.M. Ballantyne
... were skillful with the pen. William Strachey's "True Reportory of the Wrack of Sir Thomas Gates, Kt., vpon and from the islands of the Bermudas" may or may not have given a hint to Shakespeare for the storm-scene in "The Tempest." In either case it is admirable writing, flexible, sensitive, shrewdly observant. ...
— The American Spirit in Literature, - A Chronicle of Great Interpreters, Volume 34 in The - Chronicles Of America Series • Bliss Perry
... passionate hatreds engendered by the war must be crushed down and they who were foes, seeking to destroy one another, must now work together for the preservation of the civilization that is their common heritage. With the carnage and wrack and ruin of the war still oppressing us, and our hearts still lacerated and bruised, a common peril is compelling us to unite and to seek safety in fellowship and co-operation. Yesterday we relied upon the destructive arts of the warrior; ...
— The Jew and American Ideals • John Spargo
... next morning to put into Falmouth Haven, in Cornwall, where such and so terrible a tempest took us, as few men have seen the like, and was indeed so vehement that all our ships were like to have gone to wrack. But it pleased God to preserve us from that extremity and to afflict us only for that present with these two particulars: the mast of our Admiral, which was the Pelican, was cut overboard for the safeguard of the ...
— Sir Francis Drake's Famous Voyage Round the World • Francis Pretty
... the large island of Europe. Thus, the enlightened French traveller passing to these shores should commune within himself: "I now cross to the Mainland"; and retracing his steps: "I now return to the fragment rent by wrack and earthshock from the Mother-country." And this I say not in the way of paradox, but as the expression of a sober truth. I have in my mind merely the relative depth and extent—the non-insularity, in fact—of the impressions made by the several nations on the world. But this island of Europe ...
— Prince Zaleski • M.P. Shiel
... day passed, and it was not till the evening that the weather moderated. Little by little the great seas began to calm, and the drifts of stinging rain ceased. In their wake the stars struggled through the cloud wrack, and towards morning the wind ...
— Vandrad the Viking - The Feud and the Spell • J. Storer Clouston
... shins to the bone, and a tail of men hauled upon the halliards to mast-head the yard. Nothing availed. We had to be wrecked and wrecked we were, and as I clasped ARAMINTA's trustful head to my breast, the pale luminary sailing through the angry wrack glittered in phantasmal splendour ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 100., Jan. 24, 1891. • Various
... just remember him, standin' at the mill-door, all white with flour, an' rubbin' his hands and laughin', jes' the way Farmer does. He was a good miller, father said, an' made the mill pay well. But his eldest son, that kem after him, warn't no great shakes, an' he let the mill go to wrack and ruin, an' jes' stayed on the farm. An' then he died, an' Cap'n Hartley came (that's the farmer's father, ye know), an' he was kind o' crazy, and didn't care about the mill either, an' so ...
— Queen Hildegarde • Laura Elizabeth Howe Richards
... continually "straightening things out," as she called it. Her temper, like her hair, was somewhat fiery; and when her work did not suit her, she was prone to a gloomy view of life. If she was to be believed, things were always "going to wrack and ruin" about the house; and she had a queer way of taking time by the forelock. In the morning it was "going on to twelve o'clock," and at noon it was ...
— The Wit of Women - Fourth Edition • Kate Sanborn
... He trudged across burning lava on which his feet left their imprint; he had the appearance of a desperately dogged traveller. He penetrated into gloomy caverns into which the water of the ocean oozed drop by drop, and flowed like tears along the sea wrack, forming pools on the uneven ground where countless crustaceans increased and multiplied into hideous shapes. Enormous crabs, crayfish, giant lobsters and sea spiders crackled under the dwarfs feet, then crawled ...
— Honey-Bee - 1911 • Anatole France
... foe—that to dishonour me In privy corners seeks to shame me so, That my discredit might his credit be. And hath my father from his tender youth Vouchsaf'd to bring thee up? did I therefore Believe so earnestly thy perjur'd truth, Advancing still thine honour evermore, That, not contented with a common wrack, Thou shouldst intend the ruin of us all; And when thou seemd'st afraid to turn thy back, To make a glory of our greater fall? Before thou triumph in thy treachery, Before thou 'scape untouched for thy sin, Let never Fates nor Fortune favour me, But wretched let me live and die therein. Few ...
— A Select Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. VI • Robert Dodsley
... and two; the moon (as I have said) was down; a strongish wind, carrying a heavy wrack of cloud, had set in suddenly from the west; and we began our movement in as black a night as ever a fugitive or a murderer wanted. The whiteness of the path guided us into the sleeping town of Broughton, thence through ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 11 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... river, on bright December mornings, when the grayling are lying on the shallows below the ripple where the rock breaks the surface; by the frozen shore where the land-springs lie fast, drawn into icicles or smeared in slippery slabs on the cliff faces, and hoar frost powders the black sea-wrack; on the lawns of gardens, where the winter roses linger and open dew-drenched and rain-washed in the watery sunbeams—there we see, hear, and welcome the birds that stay. Then and there we note their fewness, their lameness, ...
— The Naturalist on the Thames • C. J. Cornish
... remembrance, he lay crying out all one night for fear, and at times he would so tremble, that he would make the very bed shake under him. {143c} But, Oh! how the thoughts of Death, of Hell-fire, and of eternal Judgment, did then wrack his conscience. Fear might be seen in his face, and in his tossings to and fro: It might also be heard in his words, and be understood by his heavy groans. He would often cry, I am undone, I am undone; my vile life ...
— The Life and Death of Mr. Badman • John Bunyan
... troubled somewhat lest his mind should fail him through grievous wrack of pain of body, but that ...
— Penshurst Castle - In the Days of Sir Philip Sidney • Emma Marshall
... saw ye, Grand Prophets old? What pristine years? What advents manifold? When first the glaciers in their icy throes Were grinding thy repasts; and feeding thee with snows? What earthquake shocks? What changes of the sun? While ye laughed down their wrack and builded on! ...
— The California Birthday Book • Various
... the cold clans of the wave With spray and surge and splash appeared: Up from each wrack-strewn, lightless cave Dim ...
— Christmas in Legend and Story - A Book for Boys and Girls • Elva S. Smith
... saw the slanting spars, And if he watched the shifting track, He marked, too, the eternal stars Shine through the wrack. ...
— The Little Book of Modern Verse • Jessie B. Rittenhouse
... an' pearls, the wine ye drank last night an' the fancy grub ye et to-day. 'Twas a grand wrack ...
— The Harbor Master • Theodore Goodridge Roberts
... the explorers sheered away from the fishing fleet of the St. Lawrence and began coasting up the lonely iron shore of Labrador. Ice was met sweeping south in mountainous bergs. Over Isle Demons in the Straits of Belle Isle hung storm wrack and brown fog as in the days when Marguerite Roberval pined there. Then the ships were cutting the tides of Labrador; here through fog; there skimming a coast that was sheer masonry to the very sky; again, scudding from storm to refuge of ...
— Canada: the Empire of the North - Being the Romantic Story of the New Dominion's Growth from Colony to Kingdom • Agnes C. Laut
... only of the world around it but also of the doings of previous generations. For since 1870 we have been living in an age as much distinguished for historical research as for natural science. If mankind is now to go down in a wrack of war, starvation, bankruptcy, and ruin, the sunset sky ...
— Recent Developments in European Thought • Various
... two, Maggie and Aunt Anne. Every one felt it and longed for the storm to burst. Bad enough things outside with Mr. Warlock dead, members leaving right and left, and the Chapel generally going to wrack and ruin, ...
— The Captives • Hugh Walpole
... gracious, Miss Ma'y Anna, you ought to buy that chile a sure-'nough doll-baby while you are in town. It f'yar breaks my heart to see how much store she sets by that po' wrack of a rag thing ...
— When Grandmamma Was New - The Story of a Virginia Childhood • Marion Harland
... and expected to sight land before night. They therefore sailed cautiously lest they should run aground, but all their apprehension ceased when a sounding-line two hundred fathoms long, lowered through the floating sea-wrack, failed ...
— From Pole to Pole - A Book for Young People • Sven Anders Hedin
... braids hung down her back; Within her side she felt a stitch; And once the moon behind the wrack Came out and ...
— The Battle of the Bays • Owen Seaman
... this morning, and I went up on the cliff to sit in the shanty they have made there for the men who watch for wrack. Soon afterwards a boy, who was out minding sheep, came up from the west, and ...
— The Aran Islands • John M. Synge
... with a panting rash that we reached the place, to find it must have been the house of the collector of the district; but it was all one wrack and ruin—glass, tables, and chairs smashed; hangings and carpets burnt or ragged to pieces, and in one or two places, blood-stains on the white floor, told a terrible tale of what had taken ...
— Begumbagh - A Tale of the Indian Mutiny • George Manville Fenn
... down upon us early, and so dark that we could not see as far as the length of the ship, there being no moon, while the light of the stars was completely obscured by the dense canopy of storm-wrack that overshadowed us, the only objects visible outside the bulwarks being the faintly phosphorescent heads of the breaking seas as they swept down menacingly upon us from to windward; the air was raw and chill, although it was only the first week in September; the decks were wet and sloppy ...
— A Middy of the King - A Romance of the Old British Navy • Harry Collingwood
... nearer leafless shrubs swaying in the chill wind, pavement glistening in the flickering light of street lamps. A dismal morning to be setting off to the sea! Portent of head winds and foul weather that we may meet in Channel before the last of Glasgow's grime and smoke-wrack is ...
— The Brassbounder - A Tale of the Sea • David W. Bone
... for I looked for Jamie back; But hard blew the winds, and his ship was a wrack; His ship was a wrack! Why didna Jamie dee? Or why was I spared ...
— The World's Best Poetry, Volume 3 - Sorrow and Consolation • Various
... nay; I look'd for Jamie back; But the wind it blew high, and the ship it was a wrack; His ship it was a wrack—Why didna Jamie dee? Or why do I live to cry, ...
— The Golden Treasury - Of the Best Songs and Lyrical Poems in the English Language • Various
... wit; and is there aught in nature more ridiculous? A poor, dull, heart-broken man, who must needs be merry, or he will be whipped; who must rejoice, lest he starve; who must jest you, jibe you, quip you, crank you, wrack you, riddle you, from hour to hour, from day to day, from year to year, lest he dwindle, perish, starve, pine,and die! Why, when there's naught else to laugh at, I laugh at myself till ...
— The Complete Plays of Gilbert and Sullivan - The 14 Gilbert And Sullivan Plays • William Schwenk Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan
... higher than I had ever seen it before. Our little craft was tossed about on its angry surface lightly as a withered leaf; now rising up as though about to take flight into the midst of the rushing storm-wrack overhead, and anon plunging down the steep sides of the watery hills as though intent on reaching the very ocean's bed itself. It was very exciting, as well, it must be confessed, as somewhat trying to the nerves, to stand on ...
— Under the Meteor Flag - Log of a Midshipman during the French Revolutionary War • Harry Collingwood
... darkness, as the morning spread upon the mountains; a great people and strong; there had not been ever the like, neither should be any more after it: the land was a garden of Eden before them, and behind them a desolate wilderness: Yea, and nothing should escape them.' All things were going to wrack; the country was overrun by foreign invaders; bankruptcy, devastation, massacre, and captivity were for perhaps 100 years the normal state of Gaul, and of most other countries besides. I have little doubt that Salvian was a prudent man, when he thought fit to bring no more ...
— The Roman and the Teuton - A Series of Lectures delivered before the University of Cambridge • Charles Kingsley
... was, and huge, Still rough—like those which men in treeless plains 410 To build them boats fish from the flooded rivers, Hyphasis deg. or Hydaspes, deg. when, high up deg.412 By their dark springs, the wind in winter-time Hath made in Himalayan forests wrack, deg. deg.414 And strewn the channels with torn boughs—so huge 415 The club which Rustum lifted now, and struck One stroke; but again Sohrab sprang aside, Lithe as the glancing deg. snake, and the club came deg.418 Thundering to earth, and leapt from Rustum's hand. And ...
— Matthew Arnold's Sohrab and Rustum and Other Poems • Matthew Arnold
... have told you his right name, I pray you, fair lady, let me go to my lord again, for he will never out of this country until that he have me again. And if he be angry he will do much harm or that he be stint, and work you wrack in this country. As for that threatening, said Sir Gringamore, be it as it be may, we will go to dinner. And so they washed and went to meat, and made them merry and well at ease, and because the Lady Lionesse of the castle was there, they made great joy. Truly, madam, said Linet unto her ...
— Le Morte D'Arthur, Volume I (of II) - King Arthur and of his Noble Knights of the Round Table • Thomas Malory
... come when the beliefs that are nearest to our hearts may be treated as open to contempt or ridicule, and the dogmas to which we most passionately cling will, "like an insubstantial pageant faded, leave not a wrack behind." ...
— Elizabethan Demonology • Thomas Alfred Spalding
... trotted up and down California Street last fall, soliciting campaign contributions for the Republican nominee from the lumber and shipping interests? Wasn't it Alden P. Ricks? Who thought the country was going to wrack and ruin—" ...
— Cappy Ricks Retires • Peter B. Kyne
... took his rest. So lovely-fair was Hero, Venus' nun, As Nature wept, thinking she was undone, Because she took more from her than she left, And of such wondrous beauty her bereft: Therefore, in sign her treasure suffer'd wrack, Since Hero's time hath half the world been black. Amorous Leander, beautiful and young, (Whose tragedy divine Musaeus sung,) Dwelt at Abydos; since him dwelt there none For whom succeeding times make greater moan. His dangling tresses, ...
— Hero and Leander and Other Poems • Christopher Marlowe and George Chapman
... themselves in the tree. Stas was so accustomed to think of Nell in every situation that now he was occupied, above all, in ascertaining whether she was not in danger of falling, whether she had sufficient room and whether she could lie down comfortably. Satisfied in this respect, he began to wrack his brains as to how to protect her from the rain. But for this there was no help. It would have been easy to construct during the daytime some kind of roof over her head, but now they were enveloped in such darkness that they could ...
— In Desert and Wilderness • Henryk Sienkiewicz
... bridge, with the murky river flowing sluggishly beneath us. Beyond lay another dull wilderness of bricks and mortar, its silence broken only by the heavy, regular footfall of the policeman, or the songs and shouts of some belated party of revellers. A dull wrack was drifting slowly across the sky, and a star or two twinkled dimly here and there through the rifts of the clouds. Holmes drove in silence, with his head sunk upon his breast, and the air of a man who is lost ...
— The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes • Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
... for it, and bringing it up in its bill, the canvas-back readily breaks off the long lanceolate leaves, which float off, either to be eaten by another species—the pochard—or to form immense banks of wrack, that are thrown ...
— The Hunters' Feast - Conversations Around the Camp Fire • Mayne Reid
... any other time, a solid foundation for comfort is needed in times of deep grief. Then the hosts of darkness press round the dismayed spirit; clouds of darkness roll across the mental sky; the sun and all light is hidden; in the storm-wrack the fiery darts of the wicked one fall thick as rain. Every long-accepted truth is questioned; the very foundations seem to dissolve. A firm foothold, indeed, must we have on which to stand at such ...
— Old Groans and New Songs - Being Meditations on the Book of Ecclesiastes • F. C. Jennings
... another Wrens' nest a few evenings ago, I found the young ones had flown, and as there was a cock-nest in some wrack left by the river in a bush a few yards off, I gave it a shake to see if the old ones had taken possession of it for another brood; and I was surprised to see one, and then a second young one come flying out, and a third putting ...
— Essays in Natural History and Agriculture • Thomas Garnett
... become almost too gloomy and the moral purpose too obtrusive. Thus it is in the novel The Widower (1911). The folly of a lustful old peasant who in the toils of a scheming hussy supinely looks on while his property goes to wrack and ruin and his son becomes a murderer, is here treated with too harsh a naturalism. The same may be said of the drama Magdalena (1912), in which a rustic Virginius makes of himself the judge of his daughter who has fallen into ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries - Masterpieces of German Literature Vol. 19 • Various |
