Online dictionaryOnline dictionary
Synonyms, antonyms, pronunciation

  Home
English Dictionary      examples: 'day', 'get rid of', 'New York Bay'




Maelstrom   Listen
noun
Maelstrom  n.  
1.
A celebrated whirlpool on the coast of Norway. Hence: Any large or powerful whirlpool.
Synonyms: whirlpool, vortex.
2.
Also (Fig.) An uncontrollable agitated or confusedly disordered state or situation; as, a maelstrom of vice.






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








Advanced search
     Find words:
Starting with
Ending with
Containing
Matching a pattern  

Synonyms
Antonyms
Quotes
Words linked to  

only single words



Share |
Add this dictionary
to your browser search bar





"Maelstrom" Quotes from Famous Books



... projected the waterfall was split in two, and rushed down in twin streams, bubbling, tumbling, hissing, plunging into the lake, which whirled furiously around the spit of land on which the castle stood, clear of ice for a distance of a hundred feet from the shore, a foaming maelstrom in which no boat that was ever built could have endured an instant, but must have been twisted and flung back like the fantastically shaped ice ...
— Jacqueline of Golden River • H. M. Egbert

... it inevitably must—to women, and the unalterable and uncharted mystery of their mental currents: the jagged and cruelly unsuspected reefs that rear suddenly under rippling shoal-water, the maelstrom that boils just beyond the soft curve ...
— The Strange Cases of Dr. Stanchon • Josephine Daskam Bacon

... chief part of these latter-day Methodists' creed. Hell was the theme of sermon and hymn—a hell of concrete terrors enough to scare children in their beds at night. Thanks to the Parson, Ishmael had hitherto been kept out of this maelstrom of gloomy fears, but now that Annie, with the vicarious piety of so many women, had set her mind on his "conversion," he too was to run the gamut of religious emotion, in which it has been said there ...
— Secret Bread • F. Tennyson Jesse

... gaunt, old, bent, looked up at the maelstrom of clouds, and he said, softly, "Shore we'll get in the hosses, an' pack light, an' hit the trail, ...
— Desert Gold • Zane Grey

... former in the town of West Egede, whence the name. Graduated in a single year from the University of Copenhagen, "at which," his teachers bore witness, "no one need wonder who knows the man," he became at twenty-two pastor of a parish up in the Lofoden Islands, where the fabled maelstrom churns. Eleven years he preached to the poor fisherfolk on Sunday, and on week-days helped his parishioners rebuild the old church. When it was finished and the bishop came to consecrate it, he chided Egede because the altar was too fine; ...
— Hero Tales of the Far North • Jacob A. Riis

... swaying mass moved inch by inch, first forward, then backward, the Robinson left tackle refusing to believe that their famous play was for once a failure and so clinging desperately to the ball, the center of a veritable maelstrom of panting, struggling players. Then the whistle sounded and the dust of battle cleared away. Robinson had gained half ...
— Behind the Line • Ralph Henry Barbour

... ocean of exception large enough to float any number of battleships for which pride and ambition may be willing to pay! Honor? No, a finical and foolish reservation that at any moment may become a maelstrom of suspicion and rage and hatred and destruction and death! Honor? No, a mountainous barrier to peace that must be leveled before there can be progress! Honor? No, the incarnation of selfishness, the cloak of shrewd ...
— Prize Orations of the Intercollegiate Peace Association • Intercollegiate Peace Association

... of lethargic indifference—bought and sold, sowed and reaped, as usual—little realizing that the temporary lull, the perfect calm, was treacherous as the glassy green expanse of waters which, it is said, sometimes covers the location of the all-destroying maelstrom of Moskoe. Having taken an active and prominent part in the presidential campaign, and made frequent speeches, Russell found himself again opposed by Mr. Huntingdon, who was equally indefatigable during the exciting contest. The old feud received, if possible, additional acrimony, and there ...
— Macaria • Augusta Jane Evans Wilson

... sill into whistling flight. Amid a whirlwind of wings she fought them toward the open window; whizzing, flitting, circling they sped in widening spirals to escape her blows, where she stood half blinded in the vortex of the ghostly maelstrom. ...
— Barbarians • Robert W. Chambers

... ourselves across and into them with the force of a wedge, flinging them to right and to left as we crashed through with hideous slaughter. The bridge swung up again when the last of Giacomo's mercenaries was across, and we were shut out, in the midst of that fierce human maelstrom. ...
— The Shame of Motley • Raphael Sabatini

... adjusted, he stepped once more into the moonlight.... And then, suddenly, there was no moonlight at all, or just the faintest glimmer of it, like light seen through milky water. Instead, he had stepped into a swirling vapor that in an instant lost him completely from the door he had just left; a maelstrom of fog, that choked him, half blinded him, twisted about him like wet, coiling ropes, and in a dreadful moment he saw that through the fog were thrust out toward him arms of a famine thinness, the extended fingers of which groped ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1919 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various

... twilight, Blanche waited upon the walk, And beckoned her white hand to me— A lily swayed on its stalk. Soon my jealous pride was foundered In the maelstrom of talk. ...
— Stories in Verse • Henry Abbey

... devotion and self-sacrifice. Her Camille seemed a victim of remorseless destiny, a pure soul struggling amid inexorable circumstances that racked and cajoled a diseased and suffering body into the maelstrom of sin. ...
— Eugene Field, A Study In Heredity And Contradictions - Vol. I • Slason Thompson

... very well without clocks, could it?" commented Christopher, as he looked down upon the maelstrom ...
— Christopher and the Clockmakers • Sara Ware Bassett

... himself over the fence and piled into the fans. Then followed the roar of many voices, the tramping of many feet, the pressing forward of line after line of shirt-sleeved men and boys. That bleacher stand suddenly assumed the maelstrom appearance of a surging mob round an agitated center. In a moment all the players rushed down ...
— The Redheaded Outfield and Other Baseball Stories • Zane Grey

... a ball might be carried on the summit of a waterspout, had been taken into the circling movement of a column of air and had traversed space at the rate of ninety miles an hour, turning round and round as if seized by some aerial maelstrom. ...
— The Mysterious Island • Jules Verne

... attraction to be somewhere therein set up, he endeavours to show that the result must be a prodigious central body surrounded by systems of solar and planetary worlds in all stages of development. 'In vivid language,' says Professor Huxley,[43] 'he describes the great world-maelstrom widening the margin of its prodigious eddy in the slow progress of millions of ages, gradually reclaiming more and more of the molecular waste, and converting chaos into cosmos.' Then, fixing his attention more particularly on ...
— Old-Fashioned Ethics and Common-Sense Metaphysics - With Some of Their Applications • William Thomas Thornton

... of the trail for thirsty cowboys who gave vent to their pent-up feelings without restraint. Calvin Morgan was not concerned with its wickedness until Seth Craddock's malevolence directed itself against him. He did not emerge from the maelstrom until he had obliterated every vestige of lawlessness, and assured himself of the safety of ...
— Captain Scraggs - or, The Green-Pea Pirates • Peter B. Kyne

... had while dodging furious trams and enormous waggons piled with merchandise, in that maelstrom of traffic near the Marseilles docks, which must be passed before we could escape into the country. At last, coasting down a dangerously winding hill with a too suggestively named village at the bottom—L'Assassin—the Aigle turned westward. The chauffeur let her spread her wings ...
— The Motor Maid • Alice Muriel Williamson and Charles Norris Williamson

... of hope and courage came to Welch, and as his treacherous craft shot, crushing and grinding, into the maelstrom, he found his feet for a moment, and threw his arms above his head, his fingers clutching hungrily at the empty air. Then a corner of the ice fragment struck against the left-hand pillar and he lost his balance. But in that brief moment Jerry's left hand had grasped one ...
— The New Boy at Hilltop • Ralph Henry Barbour

... outside ring is a bit over 160,000 miles across, and it revolves in less than eleven hours. In other words we might find the ring a sort of celestial maelstrom, and if we once got into the whirl, and Saturn exerted his full pull on us, we might become a satellite, too, and go on swinging round with the rest for a good ...
— A Honeymoon in Space • George Griffith

... she stands with eyes wandering over that grassy wilderness, she can almost imagine it a maelstrom or some voracious monster, that swallows up all who venture upon it. As the purple of twilight assumes the darker shade of night, it seems to her as though some unearthly and invisible hand were spreading a pall ...
— Gaspar the Gaucho - A Story of the Gran Chaco • Mayne Reid

... mill is only another form of the fire-churn, or chark. According to another version the quern is still grinding away and keeping the sea salt, and over the place where it lies there is a prodigious whirlpool or maelstrom which sucks ...
— Myths and Myth-Makers - Old Tales and Superstitions Interpreted by Comparative Mythology • John Fiske

... in the outer eddies of that human maelstrom, found himself beside Juana Briones. "The jury's out," she told him. "Jury's out!" the word swept onward. Then there came a long and silent wait. Once again the messenger appeared. "Still out," he bellowed, "having trouble." "What's the matter with them?" a score ...
— Port O' Gold • Louis John Stellman

... strive as a floodtide to move them from the anchorage and peace of self-restraint. Beware of the deceitful stream of temporary gratification, whose eddying current drifts towards license, shame, disease and death. Remember how quickly moral power declines, how rapidly the edge of the fatal maelstrom is reached, how near the vortex, how terrible the penalty, how fearful the ...
— Searchlights on Health: Light on Dark Corners • B.G. Jefferis

... to be just in time to see the water taking its departure, and Dick's kennel wrecked, down by the gates where the yard was highest, for Old Sam, in spite of the pelting rain, was punching away at the sink-hole with the stump of an old birch broom, and the water was rushing down it like a little maelstrom; while the bits of straw and twigs that floated near, represented the unfortunate vessels that get caught ...
— Hollowdell Grange - Holiday Hours in a Country Home • George Manville Fenn

... what then?—the remedy was at hand and infallible. Alas! it is with a bitter smile, a laugh of gall and bitterness, that I recall this period of unsuspecting delusion, and how I first became aware of the Maelstrom, the fatal whirlpool, to which I was drawing just when the current was already beyond my strength to stem. The state of my mind is truly portrayed in the following effusion, for God knows! that from that moment I was the victim of pain and terror, ...
— The Life of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - 1838 • James Gillman

... practice of cruelty; and it was said there were times when he became humanized amidst his debauchery, laughed at the terror which his furious declamations excited, and might be approached with safety, like the Maelstrom at the turn of tide. His profusion was indulged to an extent hazardous to his popularity, for the populace are jealous of a lavish expenditure, as raising their favourites too much above their own degree; and the charge of peculation finds always ready ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 10, Issue 262, July 7, 1827 • Various

... needle and thread, was busied with some minor repairing of garments roughly used the day before. Other boarders and lodgers of the house had already eaten and gone, to resume their swirl in the maelstrom ...
— The Furnace of Gold • Philip Verrill Mighels

... thunder seemed to break around me, and as I closed my eyes before its shock, I felt myself whirling around and falling at the same time as though into a maelstrom, just as I had done before. The awful falling sensation ceased in a moment and the sound subsided. I opened my eyes. I was on the ground at the center of the familiar field from which I had vanished hours before, upon the morning of that day. It was night now, though, for that day I had ...
— The Man Who Saw the Future • Edmond Hamilton

... has deified and damned every statesman by turn. It has been on every possible side of every public question, and wept bitter tears of regret because further change of policy were impossible. It is a perfect maelstrom of misinformation, the avatar of impudence, the incarnation of infamy—a social cesspool whose malodor spreads contagion like the rank breath of the gila-monster or the shade of a upas tree. Yet its editor, I am told, aspires to the lieutenant-governorship ...
— Volume 1 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann

... lord then, as Pythagoras held? Was this great earth, so 'stablished, so secure, A planet also? Did it also move Around the sun? If this were true, my friends, No revolution in this world's affairs, Not that blind maelstrom where imperial Rome Went down into the dark, could so engulf All that we thought we knew. We who believed In our own majesty, we who walked with gods As younger sons on this proud central stage, Round which the whole bright firmament revolved For our especial glory, ...
— Watchers of the Sky • Alfred Noyes

... one permanent center, one community, which had steadily increased during the years, and had fanatically endured the scorn and the persecution of those above and below, until it at last possessed several thousand of members. It stood fast in the maelstrom and obstinately affirmed that its doctrines were those of the future. And now the wind seemed to be filling its sails; it replied after its own fashion to the impatient demands for a heaven to be enjoyed here on earth and an ...
— Pelle the Conqueror, Complete • Martin Andersen Nexo

... to which he belongs from plunging into riotous and blind commotions, to keep his own judgment and emotions as free as possible from a power that seizes all it can reach, draws them into its current, and sweeps them round and round like the Maelstrom, until they are overwhelmed and buried in its devouring vortex. When others are heated, the only wisdom is to determine to keep cool; whenever a people or an individual is rushing headlong, it is the duty of patriotism and of friendship to check ...
— Salem Witchcraft, Volumes I and II • Charles Upham

... The conversation was not taking the turn that was congenial to him. The ball seemed to him a kind of maelstrom in which all his hopes were likely to be wrecked. And here was his old friend, the keenest-sighted woman he knew, looking upon it simply as literary material—a ridiculous social event. He had ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner

... his visit was an interesting experience and a novel one. For months he had been feeling that he lived in the whirl of a maelstrom of schemes and jobberies, the inevitable result of the policy of a Government which had promised to recoup those it had involuntarily wronged during a national convulsion. Upon every side there had sprung up claimants—many an honest one, and hordes of ...
— In Connection with the De Willoughby Claim • Frances Hodgson Burnett

... many Richard Roes, of whom nothing more will ever be known than that they were found, which is on the whole, perhaps, best—for them certainly. The others, the lost, drift from the tenements and back, a host of thousands year by year. The two I am thinking of were of these, typical of the maelstrom. ...
— Children of the Tenements • Jacob A. Riis

... Richard's engagement, however, which gave to his life the effect of strangeness. It was, rather, his work, which swept him into a maelstrom of new activities. Austin needed rest and he knew it. Richard was young and strong. The older man, using his assistant as a buffer between himself and a demanding public, felt no compunction. His ...
— Mistress Anne • Temple Bailey

... and violet breasts, The hawk-like storm swooping on their track. "Go," said my love, "the storm would whirl me off "As thistle-down. I'll shelter here—but you— "You love no storms!" "Where thou art," I said, "Is all the calm I know—wert thou enthron'd "On the pivot of the winds—or in the maelstrom, "Thou holdest in thy hand my palm of peace; "And, like the eagle, I would break the belts "Of shouting tempests to return to thee, "Were I above the storm on broad wings. "Yet no she-eagle thou! ...
— Old Spookses' Pass • Isabella Valancy Crawford

... about the priest; the lamp has been lit, the Host uplifted. The Hun is aware of this; with malice aforethought he lands shells into the cathedral every Sunday in an effort to smash the altar. So far he has failed. One finds in this a symbol—that in the heart of the maelstrom of horror, which this war has created, there is a quiet place where the lamp of gentleness and honour is kept burning. The Hun will have to do a lot more shelling before he puts the lamp of kindness out. From the polluted trenches of ...
— The Glory of the Trenches • Coningsby Dawson

... Paris and London, into the hands of censors and propagandists. They were for a long time subject to no check of any kind. Until they had made themselves ridiculous they created, let us admit, out of some genuine aspects of the huge Russian maelstrom, a set of stereotypes so evocative of hate and fear, that the very best instinct of journalism, its desire to go and see and tell, was for a long time crushed. [Footnote: Cf. A Test of the News, by Walter ...
— Public Opinion • Walter Lippmann

... demon of Drunkenness finds a ship adrift,— no steady wind in its sails, no thoughtful pilot directing its course,—he steps on board, takes the helm, and steers straight for the maelstrom. ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes

... Street hoardings, ash barrels and sandwich men were plastered with flamboyant multi-colored show bills. The play, and nothing but the play was certainly the thing; the hapless stranger was buffetted in a maelstrom of theatrical activity. The very air reeked of calcium ...
— The Easiest Way - A Story of Metropolitan Life • Eugene Walter and Arthur Hornblow

... half-naked bodies bounding toward me, long hair streaming, copper faces aglow, weapons glittering in the light. Yes, I saw more—the meaning of that fierce rush; the instrument of destruction they brought with them. It was there in the center of the maelstrom of leaping figures, protected by the grouped bodies, half hidden by gesticulating red arms—a huge log, borne irresistibly forward on the shoulders of twenty warriors, gripped by other hands, and hurled toward us as though swept on ...
— The Devil's Own - A Romance of the Black Hawk War • Randall Parrish

... buried in the swirling maelstrom, and then as the Halfmoon rose again, shaking the watery enemy from her back, the two men were disclosed—Theriere half over the ship's side—the mucker clinging to him with one hand, the other clutching desperately at a huge ...
— The Mucker • Edgar Rice Burroughs

... once he was himself the recipient of blows, some severe and others of a glancing nature. For a brief period of time there was a constant maelstrom of hands flying back and forth, accompanied with ...
— The Boys of Columbia High on the Gridiron • Graham B. Forbes

... of feeling as he stood waiting on the first motion of the little drum round which the rope wound. He was cool and clear brained—in fact he wondered why he was so collected. He felt he was standing out of all this maelstrom of suffering and terror. Not that he was impervious to anxiety for the men below, not that he was unmoved by all that it meant to those standing round; but after that first wild throb of terror that had clutched at his heart when his mother had told ...
— The Underworld - The Story of Robert Sinclair, Miner • James C. Welsh

... much earlier into the midst of the maelstrom of events at the Gladwin mansion had not Fate in the ...
— Officer 666 • Barton W. Currie

... Allied enemies. Half of Europe was in arms. The tragedies of the seas were appalling. International complications were grave and unending. More than one statesman of prophetic foresight had predicted that a continuance of the war must of necessity draw into the maelstrom the government of the United States. In such an event the country would need soldiers and many of them, and the sooner they could be put into training to meet such ...
— The Flag • Homer Greene

... with his college mates Tazewell, Randolph, Cabell, Thompson, and James Barbour, and hailed with rapture the progress of the French revolution; but, shocked by the barbarities which disgraced the later stages of that moral and political maelstrom, and indignant at the unprecedented conduct of the diplomatic agents of France in our own country, he determined to separate from his early friends, and to uphold with all his influence the administration of Washington and that of his successor. It is said that he read with unmixed ...
— Discourse of the Life and Character of the Hon. Littleton Waller Tazewell • Hugh Blair Grigsby

... that none of them will equal those now in favor, something very fine and superior may be obtained. Be this as it may, if these simple natural interests prevent boys and girls from being drawn into the maelstrom of city life until character is formed, each plant will have a ...
— Success With Small Fruits • E. P. Roe

... altogether a different sort of place; for here the waters plunged into a roaring caldron with a din that stunned the ears; and now it was that Lionel discovered Miss Honnor's intention—he was to have the amusement of throwing a fly over this maelstrom from the side of the sheer bank, while the only foothold afforded him was the stump of an out-projecting pine. Well, he was not going to refuse—and ask a young lady to take his place. He dug his feet into the soft herbage about the roots of the tree; old Robert handed him the rod; he got out some ...
— Prince Fortunatus • William Black

... first place, I must explain how I came to be without money in mine, so soon after arriving in Paris, where so much of the article is necessary. My woes all arise from vanity. That is the rock, that is the quicksand, that is the maelstrom. I presume you don't know anybody else who is afflicted with that complaint? If you do, I'll but teach you how to tell my story, and that will cure him; or, at least, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 102, April, 1866 • Various

... midst of this musical Maelstrom I send you a voice, which, if heard instead of read, would be lamentable enough. We are lifted off our feet by the perfect torrent of engagements, of visits, of going out and receiving; our house is full, from morning till night, of people coming to sing with or listen to my sister. How ...
— Records of Later Life • Frances Anne Kemble

... genius in the same person), to which Stevenson was indebted in his Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Next are the tales of pseudo-science and adventure, such as "Hans Pfaall" and the "Descent into the Maelstrom," which represent a type of popular fiction developed by Jules Verne, H. G. Wells and many others, all of whom were more or less influenced by Poe. A third group may be called the ingenious-mystery stories. One of the most typical of these is "The Gold Bug," a tale of ...
— Outlines of English and American Literature • William J. Long

... her hot agitation left her, and she became cold and still. She was in a maelstrom of feeling a minute before, though she could not have said what the feeling meant; now she was dominated by a haunting sense of injury, roused by resentment, not against him, but against everything and everybody, himself included. All the work of ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker

... began with volume eighteen, being the addition of the ten volumes of Atkinson's Casket, and the seven volumes of Burton's Gentleman's Magazine. This first volume, 1841, contained Poe's "Descent into a Maelstrom" and his "Murders in the ...
— The Philadelphia Magazines and their Contributors 1741-1850 • Albert Smyth

... of poems which may be characterized as the effort of a star-gazer to find satisfaction in the things of the earth; "The Breaking of Bonds," a Shelleyan drama of social unrest, where he has tried to formulate a hope for our final emergence from the maelstrom of class-conflict; and "Twelve Japanese Painters," a group of poems expressive of the peculiar and alluring charm of the great Japanese painters and their world ...
— Mr. Faust • Arthur Davison Ficke

... long as you can, sez I!" she hastily whispered into the ear of Le, as he whirled her around in the giddy maelstrom of that ...
— Her Mother's Secret • Emma D. E. N. Southworth

... conventionalities of Anglo-Saxon propriety. The Short-story should not be void or without form, but its form may be whatever the author please. He has an absolute liberty of choice. It may be a personal narrative, like Poe's "Descent into the Maelstrom" or Hale's "My Double, and How he Undid me;" it may be impersonal, like Mr. F.B. Perkins's "Devil-Puzzlers" or Colonel De Forest's "Brigade Commander;" it may be a conundrum, like Mr. Stockton's insoluble query, "The Lady or the Tiger?" it may be "A Bundle of Letters," ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, October 1885 • Various

... of an emotional maelstrom, watched the struggle from the prison of her own horror. At that moment she was physically, mentally and spiritually ill; a human being caught in the midst of forces beyond her knowledge ...
— Ten From Infinity • Paul W. Fairman

... the street through a little maelstrom of fine dust which a wind circle had picked up, and the sheriff led Bull into the jail. They crossed the tawdry little outer room with its warped floor creaking under the tread of Bull Hunter. Next they came face to face with a cage of steel bars, and ...
— Bull Hunter • Max Brand

... vomiting forth huge wreaths of that black smoke which forms the canopy—occasionally a gorgeous one—of the more than Babel city. Stretching before me, the troubled breast of the mighty river, and, immediately below, the main whirlpool of the Thames—the Maelstrom of the bulwarks of the middle arch—a grisly pool, which, with its superabundance of horror, fascinated me. Who knows but I should have leapt into its depths?—I have heard of such things—but for a rather startling occurrence which broke the spell. As I stood upon the bridge, ...
— Lavengro - The Scholar, The Gypsy, The Priest • George Borrow

... there to be amused nor instructed—they have not stopped at the box-office and paid good money to have their senses alternately lulled and titillated. No! The question is that of liberty or bondage, life or death—passion is in the saddle—hate and prejudice are sweeping events into a maelstrom—and now is the time for oratory! Such occasions are as rare as the birth of stars. A man stands before you—it is no time for fine phrasing—no time for pose or platitude. Self-consciousness is swallowed up in purpose. He is as calm as the waters above the Rapids of Niagara, as composed ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 7 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Orators • Elbert Hubbard

... in a local paper, but in reality my thoughts were a maelstrom. Suppose he had already ...
— The House by the Lock • C. N. Williamson

... The crime of attending a party or ball. For, early in life, I was taught to believe That pleasures are pitfalls prepared to deceive By wily old Satan (who constantly tries To catch you by throwing his dust in your eyes, Thus, blinding his victim, securing his prize); That the dance is a maelstrom, where sinners are whirled Around a few times, and then suddenly hurled From daylight to darkness, from pleasure to woe, From terrestrial regions, to regions—below: But now was afforded a fine opportunity For taking ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 1, July, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various

... a hot maelstrom of pain, but it was quieting as his breathing returned to normal. As long as his opponents were slower or less ruthless, he could take care ...
— Police Your Planet • Lester del Rey

... for the souls that come unwelcomed into birth, I'm sorry for the unloved old who cumber up the earth, I'm sorry for the suffering poor in life's great maelstrom hurled - In truth, I'm sorry for them all ...
— Poems of Power • Ella Wheeler Wilcox

... On the swift maelstrom of the eddying world We hurl our woes, and think they are no more. But round and round by dizzy billows whirled, They reach out sinewy ...
— Yesterdays • Ella Wheeler Wilcox

... delightful sense of their own wisdom and virtue; and of the 'progress' of things in general:—in smooth sea and fair weather,—and with no need either of helm touch, or oar toil: as when once one is well within the edge of Maelstrom. ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin

... tired." She was so unconscious of everything but the maelstrom realization that she hated David that she did not remember that the hesitating man beside her was under the ban of her displeasure. Her only thought was that she wished he would ...
— The Iron Woman • Margaret Deland

... The Maelstrom! Could a more frightening name have rung in our ears under more frightening circumstances? Were we lying in the dangerous waterways off the Norwegian coast? Was the Nautilus being dragged into this whirlpool just as the skiff was about to ...
— 20000 Leagues Under the Seas • Jules Verne

... the Maelstrom, on the 26th of April, the ship, putting for the cape, by reason of bad weather and south-west winds, perceived signals of distress made by a schooner to the leeward. This schooner, deprived of its mizzen-mast, was running towards the whirlpool, under bare poles. Captain Louis Cornbutte, seeing that ...
— A Winter Amid the Ice - and Other Thrilling Stories • Jules Verne

... not altogether a suitable resort for British visitors. The political atmosphere was distinctly ruffled. Revolution was in the air. Sir Jasper sniffed the coming changes; and was tactician enough to avoid being engulfed in the threatened maelstrom by slipping back to England with his young charges in the nick of time. Others of his compatriots, not so fortunate or so discreet, found themselves clapped ...
— The Magnificent Montez - From Courtesan to Convert • Horace Wyndham

... last beam closed down a roar arose from the workers clustered about the lip of the vertical pump bore. A wall of water came surging down from the upstream end of the cavern and smashed into the bore hole wall in a muddy, seething maelstrom. The strata-borne water had found the hole and were pouring down into the cavern and catch basin. The water began rising in the walls of the hole, sealed into a shining shaft of fused rock and ...
— The Thirst Quenchers • Rick Raphael

... small boat-mast still stood, though its sail had blown to a thousand flapping streamers. Glaucon laid his axe at the foot of the spar. Two fierce strokes weakened so that the next lurch sent it crashing overboard. It swung in the maelstrom by its stays and the halyards of the sail. Tossing to and fro like a bubble, it was a fearful hope, but a louder rumbling from the hold warned how other hope had fled. The Barbarian recoiled as ...
— A Victor of Salamis • William Stearns Davis

... maelstrom Old Man Curry encountered the Bald-faced Kid plying his vocation. He was earnestly endeavouring to persuade a whiskered rustic to bet more money than he owned on Cornflower at 3 to 1. Though very busy, the young man was abreast of the situation and fully informed of events, as indeed he usually ...
— Old Man Curry - Race Track Stories • Charles E. (Charles Emmett) Van Loan

... detail more closely the work of these departments, especially as much has yet to be said before plunging into the maelstrom of war. A sufficient indication of the colossal nature of the work they were called upon to perform will be found in a moment's reflection of what the administration and control of such a large and nondescript fleet, spread over the world—from the White Sea to the East Indies—must have meant ...
— Submarine Warfare of To-day • Charles W. Domville-Fife

... dragged himself down to the street level a turbo-truck had slammed to a stop in front of the loading platform. Two Pyrrans were rolling out drums of napalm with reckless disregard for their own safety. Jason didn't dare enter that maelstrom of rolling metal. He found he could be of use tugging the heavy drums into position on the truck while the others rolled them up. They accepted his aid ...
— Deathworld • Harry Harrison

... up early, and his energy and interest were as keen as a boy's. We had our meals together, sometimes in the crowded and rather smart Bastasini's, but more often in the maelstrom of humanity that nightly packed the Olympos Palace restaurant. Davis, Shepherd, Hare, and I, with sometimes Mr. and Mrs. John Bass, made up these parties, which, for a period of about two weeks or so, were the most enjoyable daily ...
— The Lost Road • Richard Harding Davis

... rush—a thud of bodies against bodies—gaspings of breaths, the cracking of muscles and sinews. Andy felt himself in a maelstrom of pushing, striving, hauling and toppling flesh. Then, in an instant, there came an opening, and he saw before him but one player—Mortimer—with ...
— Andy at Yale - The Great Quadrangle Mystery • Roy Eliot Stokes

... fortresses, exhausted the revenues of a kingdom in which the masses of the people were so miserably poor that they were scarcely elevated above the beasts of the field, and where the finances had long been in almost irreparable disorder. The years of peace, however, were very few. War, a maelstrom which ingulfs uncounted millions, seems to have been the normal state of Germany. But the treasury of Charles was so constantly drained that he could never, even in his greatest straits, raise more than one hundred and sixty thousand men; ...
— The Empire of Austria; Its Rise and Present Power • John S. C. Abbott

... his musket, he leaped into the gangway so ferociously that the pirates scrambled over the side, brown men and white, preferring to take their chances in the sea. As he charged on, I lost sight of him in the maelstrom of struggling figures. On my left a Lascar was fighting for his life against one of our new crew. On every side men were ...
— The Mutineers • Charles Boardman Hawes

... Committee on Reconstruction as "the maelstrom committee, which swallows up every thing that is good and gives out ...
— History of the Thirty-Ninth Congress of the United States • Wiliam H. Barnes

... blasphemy under such provocation, the Recording Angel's office was hard worked these days. One would be reading a letter, already wretched enough with heat and flies, and suddenly you would be fighting for breath and sight in a maelstrom of dirt, indescribably filthy dirt, whilst your papers flew up twenty feet and your rifle hit you cruelly over the head. As a Marian martyr observed to an enthusiast who thrust a blazing furze-bush into his face, 'Friend, ...
— The Leicestershires beyond Baghdad • Edward John Thompson

... craze in Holland, the Hooley excitement, and the Barney Barnato South African mining furor in England, the Secretan copper corner, and the tremendous bonanza delirium in California; but none of these, save the first, is comparable with the magnitude of the copper maelstrom of 1899. The tulip craze could have been thrust in and withdrawn again without diverting one of its currents; the Barney Barnato affair was little more than an eddy on the surface of English finance in contrast. We were dealing in hundreds and five hundreds of millions; shares ...
— Frenzied Finance - Vol. 1: The Crime of Amalgamated • Thomas W. Lawson

... the souls who feel that blast Which sweeps around that black forbidding coast! Fierce whirling storms and hurricanes here leap, With blasting lightnings maltalent and sweep The furious waves that lash around that shore, As the fierce whirl of some dread maelstrom's power! Above the cavern's arch! see! Ninip[10] stands! He points within the cave with beckoning hands! Ur-Hea cries: "My lord! the tablets[11] say, That we should not attempt that furious way! Those waters of black death will smite ...
— Babylonian and Assyrian Literature • Anonymous

... of Budge Street after his triumph over Billy Goodge, and the boy obeyed meekly. Paul believed in himself; the boy didn't. Almost from the beginning he usurped an ascendancy over the little household. For all their having lived in the great maelstrom of London, he found his superficial experience of life larger than that of mother and daughter. They had never seen machinery at work, did not know the difference between an elm and a beech and had never read Sir Walter Scott. Mrs. Seddon, thin, careworn and slackly good-natured, ever lamented the ...
— The Fortunate Youth • William J. Locke

... A feeling of delightful content surged through me. Approaching New York. Above the haze, out of all the hustle and bustle of the human maelstrom. That look of absolute futility I had seen on the faces in the subway, on the streets, in the early hours of 5 morning—these receded from memory. Life was good, after all. It was a wonderful thing if you viewed it correctly. And this was ...
— Story Hour Readings: Seventh Year • E.C. Hartwell

... by dying, you'll only go from one gale of wind to another; mind that, you Irish cockney! Yes, you'll be bolted down like one of your own pills: and I should like to see the whole ship swallowed down in the Norway maelstrom, like a box on 'em. That would be a dose of salts for ye!" And so saying, he went off, holding his hands to his chest, and coughing, as if his ...
— Redburn. His First Voyage • Herman Melville

... realizes that this lovely spot is at the same time the basest. What passions have stormed this cliff! What rage and despair have beaten their hands against these bastions of pleasure! How few who plunge into this maelstrom of chance ever rise again! The lure of gold, there is nothing stronger save death. Fool and rogue, saint and sinner, here they meet and mingle and change. To those who give Monte Carlo but a trifling glance, toss a coin or two on the tables, ...
— The Lure of the Mask • Harold MacGrath

... time, the middle of the fifth century, the province of Noricum (Austria, as we should now call it) was the very highway of invading barbarians, the centre of the human Maelstrom in which Huns, Alemanni, Rugi, and a dozen wild tribes more, wrestled up and down and round the starving and beleaguered towns of what had once been a happy and fertile province, each tribe striving to trample the other under ...
— The Hermits • Charles Kingsley

... truth in some of his chamber music, and then fall victim to the fascinations of the word; as if the word, spoken or sung, were other than a clog to the free wings of imaginative music! Illowski noted the struggles of these dreamers, noted Verdi swallowed by the maelstrom of the theatre; noted Richard Strauss and his hesitation at the ...
— Melomaniacs • James Huneker

... the bluff. He reeled up to the dry sand and let the body of the girl slip from his shoulder. As he did so he heard a shout. Boreland and his wife were running down from the cabin trail. He did not pause but plunged back again through the drenching maelstrom. ...
— Where the Sun Swings North • Barrett Willoughby

... drive under In the maelstrom of the sun, While you only, for a wonder, Rode the wash ...
— Behind the Arras - A Book of the Unseen • Bliss Carman

... remaining tangles of the other lines; by so doing, irresistibly dragged the more involved boats of Stubb and Flack towards his flukes; dashed them together like two rolling husks on a surf-beaten beach, and then, diving down into the sea, disappeared in a boiling maelstrom, in which, for a space, the odorous cedar chips of the wrecks danced round and round, like grated nutmeg in a swiftly stirred ...
— Great Sea Stories • Various

... enough; but, whether the leviathan of the deep had been caught in the maelstrom of the waterspout, or had gone towards it from choice, they could not tell. There he was, however, at all events, circling round in the eddy of the sea at the foot of the cloud, and sending up columns of spray every now and then with the flukes ...
— Picked up at Sea - The Gold Miners of Minturne Creek • J.C. Hutcheson

... that her multitudinous store— The garnered fruit of measureless desire— Sank in the maelstrom of abysmal fire, To be of man beheld on earth no more? Her loyal children, cheery to the core. Quailed not, nor blenched, while she, above the ire Of elemental ragings, dared aspire On victory's wings resplendently ...
— The California Birthday Book • Various

... with the "copious and excellent vocabulary" of his ambitious reporter, who was, even then, he says, "determined upon a high and useful career." In a letter to Colonel Irish, in 1913, Lane wrote, "That simple little card of yours was a good thing for me. It took me for a minute out of the maelstrom of pressing business and carried me back, about thirty years, to the time when I was a boy working for you—an unbaked, ambitious chap, who did not know where he was going, but was trying to ...
— The Letters of Franklin K. Lane • Franklin K. Lane

... hitched up the growling dogs, Donald made the pack, and fastened it on the sledge. But, before they were ready to scatter the fire and plunge into the maelstrom of the storm, the Scotchman ...
— The Wilderness Trail • Frank Williams

... rebelled with sick fear against the mere mention of them. They had worked as he had worked, they had been stricken with the delirium of accumulation—accumulation—as he had been. They had been caught in the rush and swirl of the great maelstrom, and had been borne round and round in it, until having grasped every coveted thing tossing upon its circling waters, they themselves had been flung upon the shore with both hands full, the rocks about them strewn with rich ...
— The Dawn of a To-morrow • Frances Hodgson Burnett

... who could lift the veil of the awful past. On this eventful night Fritz Braun hid, within his heart, an awful resolve, born of the fear of the disguised felon, floating uneasily in the maelstrom of a great city. "If she should betray me, and women are women, after all," he mused in his cowardly ferocity. "If she pulls this off for me, I'll"—he ceased, with an inward shudder, for he dared not give the awful thought its ...
— The Midnight Passenger • Richard Henry Savage

... sufferers had been reached. People were fighting for the Belgians, but with their hearts instead of their hands. The stupendous wave of sympathy was at its height. It rolled across the land and then across the sea. People were swept along by its mighty rush. Anne Thorpe was caught up in the maelstrom of human energy. ...
— From the Housetops • George Barr McCutcheon

... entered the famed East Room, which was filled with the talent, beauty, and fashion of the metropolis. Hundreds of either sex occupied the middle of the room or congregated around its walls, which enshrined a maelstrom of beauty, circling and ever changing, like the figures in a kaleidoscope. A prominent figure in these scenes was Edward Everett, cold-blooded and impassible, bright and lonely as the gilt weather-cock over the church in which he officiated ere he became a politician. John Van ...
— Perley's Reminiscences, Vol. 1-2 - of Sixty Years in the National Metropolis • Benjamin Perley Poore

... him, and with it a sudden host of memories. His eyes grew wistful. He felt something tugging at his heartstrings. Only a few years ago life here had seemed so wonderful a thing—only a few years, but with all the passions and struggles of a lifetime crowded into them. The maelstrom was there still, but he himself had crept out of it. What was there left? Peace, haunted with memories, rest, troubled by desire. He heard the sound of their voices in the rose-garden, and he turned away with a pain in his heart ...
— A Lost Leader • E. Phillips Oppenheim

... two men wrestling as they shifted nearer and nearer the edge of the ice. Then it dawned upon Annadoah's mind that they were being carried, in the jeopardy of an awful storm, on a floe that was tossed hither and thither in a maelstrom of angry waters. A frantic desire to save Ootah surged up within her. Behind him she saw the swimming blackness of the heaving waves. She attempted to rise. Her head swam; there was loud ringing in her ears. Her hands were not free, her ankles were bound—she struggled ...
— The Eternal Maiden • T. Everett Harre

... and, by strict deductions from admitted dynamical principles, shows how this must result in the development of a prodigious central body, surrounded by systems of solar and planetary worlds in all stages of development. In vivid language he depicts the great world-maelstrom, widening the margins of its prodigious eddy in the slow progress of millions of ages, gradually reclaiming more and more of the molecular waste, and converting chaos into cosmos. But what is gained at the margin is lost in the centre; the attractions of the ...
— Lay Sermons, Addresses and Reviews • Thomas Henry Huxley

... boots, and no discharge from war,"— That is the Empire's anthem. Brass it out, Ye Orchestras! But oh, leave not in doubt Its import, Kipling,—that 'tis maelstrom roar— 'Tis England's streams of home-life, world about And down a gulf, for Greed and ...
— Freedom, Truth and Beauty • Edward Doyle



Words linked to "Maelstrom" :   vortex, stream, current



Copyright © 2024 Dictionary One.com