"Dank" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... superintend the choice of that home. A man, certainly one of the nicest kind, has not what may be called a domestic eye. If he is artistic he will choose a dwelling for its picturesqueness, regardless of drains and dank ditches near the house. An inert man will value his home for its proximity to the station. Another considers the garden the most important feature. The stay-at-home will be influenced by the place which ...
— The Etiquette of Engagement and Marriage • G. R. M. Devereux
... fall, which is split into two, is thundering beside you; foam, foam, foam is flying all about you; the basin or cauldron is boiling frightfully below you; hirsute rocks are frowning terribly above you, and above them forest trees, dank and wet with spray and mist, are distilling drops in ...
— Wild Wales - Its People, Language and Scenery • George Borrow
... in the clutches of a porter, I obediently preceded my escort down two flights, first having bowed to the hippopotamus and said "Merci"—to which courtesy the Hippo paid no attention. As we went along the dank hall on the ground floor, I regretted that no whispers and titters had greeted my descent. Probably the furious planton had seen to it that les femmes kept their rooms in silence. We ascended the three flights at the ...
— The Enormous Room • Edward Estlin Cummings
... door revealed the gloom of the dank rooms and twisting staircase, then fell to behind ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... more. And years drew on and on Till no sun came, dank fogs the house enfolding; And she saw inside, when the form in the flesh had gone, As a vision what she had missed ...
— Late Lyrics and Earlier • Thomas Hardy
... realized, as, with his head on the dank, fishy pillow, he looked up in the glory above him, the stars were always there. Blurred sometimes by earthly mists and vapors, lost in the dazzling gleam of jewelled lights, darkened by the shadows of crooked ...
— Killykinick • Mary T. Waggaman
... something. Perhaps he would kill her first and then get her over the wall afterwards. It would be a grand revenge if he could get her into the cemetery alive and thrust her, the living, down amongst the dead, through those little doors which opened like church doors to the cold, dank vault below. ...
— The Daffodil Mystery • Edgar Wallace
... one afternoon, months before, at Abbazia, when they had come up from sea-bathing in the Adriatic. He had leaned down over her, to help her up the Angiolina bath steps, wet and slippery with sea-water. The mingled gold and chestnut of her thick hair was dank and sodden with brine, the wistful face that she turned up to him was pinched and colorless and blue about the lips. She seemed, of a sudden, as she leaned heavily on his arm, a presaging apparition out of the dim future, an adumbration of her own body grown ...
— Phantom Wires - A Novel • Arthur Stringer
... not attempt to describe a conscious reprobate, "passed by" and "ordained from eternity" to all eternity a lost soul! Such was the dark, dank night that settled down upon Elizabeth as she sank under her burdens, her temptations, and cruel, wicked unbelief. In this dismal, hopeless "hell upon earth" she pined away for weeks and months, utterly shrinking from Bible reading, prayer, song, or religious conversation, and ...
— Elizabeth: The Disinherited Daugheter • E. Ben Ez-er
... Dank dregs, the scum of pool or clod, God-spawn of lizard-footed clans, And those dog-headed hulks that trod Swart necks of the old Egyptians, Raw ...
— A Channel Passage and Other Poems - Taken from The Collected Poetical Works of Algernon Charles - Swinburne—Vol VI • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... everything that had to do with outdoor life. The dank odor of the woods filled him with a sense of delight that he could never find words to describe. He believed it must have come down to him from some long line of ancestors, this love for Nature, and a desire ...
— Phil Bradley's Mountain Boys - The Birch Bark Lodge • Silas K. Boone
... coming in. When I were walking. When I were thinking. When I - ' It seized him again; and he stood up, holding by the mantel-shelf, as he pressed his dank cold hair down with a hand that shook as if ...
— Hard Times • Charles Dickens*
... been at the wash-tubs all day long, and are coming home with two shillings hardly earned. They call in at the dirty general shop, where margarine, cheese, bread, tinned meat and firewood are closely commingled in the dank air. ...
— London's Underworld • Thomas Holmes
... leg, knee deep, dreaming of their enchanted home. Truly it is a perfect paradise, but it is almost as inaccessible as the Paradise which we all seek. What long-lost civilizations have ruled these now deserted solitudes? Penetrate into the dark, dank forest, as I have done, and ask the question. The only answer is the howling of the monkeys and the screaming of the cockatoos. You may start when you distinctly hear a bell tolling, but it is no call to worship in some stately old Inca temple with ...
— Through Five Republics on Horseback • G. Whitfield Ray
... feeling very courageous. As we sped along the ridge in the afternoon I seemed to myself like a midge lost in a monstrous net. The dank, dripping trees and the misty hills seemed to muffle and deaden the world. I could not believe that they ever would end; that anywhere there was a clear sky and open country. And I had always the feeling that in those banks of vapour lurked deadly enemies who any moment might steal ...
— Salute to Adventurers • John Buchan
... rails, slime-covered, beneath their rubber boots, glowed a vivid red as they inspected the timbering above, and saw that the sparse stulls, caps, and columns were still holding their own, and that the heavy porphyritic formation would scarcely have given had the timbers rotted away. Dank, glistening walls and a tremulous waving blackness were ahead of them as they cautiously invaded the long-deserted precincts, scraping and striking here and there with their prospector's picks in search of the ...
— The Plunderer • Roy Norton
... I have striven in dark glens With parched throat and dim eyes, Where the red crags choke the stream And dank thickets hide the spear. I have spilled the blood of my foes And their wolves have torn my flanks. I am faint, O Mother, Faint and aweary. I have longed for thy cool winds And thy kind grey eyes And ...
— The Moon Endureth—Tales and Fancies • John Buchan
... the curtain closes; a ruder hand than hers has shut her from his sight! It has all vanished; the stars seem dim, the autumnal air is dank and harsh; and where he had gazed on heaven, a bat flits wild and fleet. Poor Ferdinand, unhappy Ferdinand, how dull and depressed our brave gallant has become! Was it her father who had closed the curtain? Could he himself, thought ...
— Henrietta Temple - A Love Story • Benjamin Disraeli
... night before, had unanimously agreed to cover every brake and brier with gossamer-cradles, and never a fly to be caught in them; like Manchester cotton-spinners madly glutting the markets in the teeth of 'no demand.' The steam crawled out of the dank turf, and reeked off the flanks and nostrils of the shivering horses, and clung with clammy paws to frosted hats and dripping boughs. A soulless, skyless, catarrhal day, as if that bustling dowager, old mother Earth—what with match-making in spring, and fetes champetres in summer, and dinner-giving ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 2, May, 1851 • Various
... that the air should continue so dank and depressing at our high altitude, and several times a most extraordinary stench, as of decaying carcasses, would assail our nostrils and cause us to grow faint and sickly. Soon we began to notice that these poisonous vapours ...
— Adventures in Many Lands • Various
... turning with his cold-blue prow, From bench and gangway thrusts the shades aside, And takes the great AEneas and his guide. The stitched bark, groaning with the load it bore, Gapes at each seam, and drinks the plenteous tide, Till Prince and Prophetess, borne safely o'er, Stand on the dank, grey ooze and grim, ...
— The Aeneid of Virgil - Translated into English Verse by E. Fairfax Taylor • Virgil
... but night ahead for each. The Grey Angel with the unfathomable eyes approaches slowly, with no sound save the hushed murmur of wings. The dread white poppies are in his outstretched hand—the great, nodding white poppies which have come from the dank places and have never ...
— A Spinner in the Sun • Myrtle Reed
... straight young woman, as Beautiful as an Angel), were continually bringing me Comforts and Needments, both in Raiment and Food. It churns my Old Heart now to think of that Beautiful Girl, sitting beside me in my dank Prison Room, the tears streaming from her mild eyes, calling me by Endearing names, and ever and anon taking my hand in hers, and sinking on her knees to the sodden floor (with no thought of soiling her kirtle), while with profound Fervour she prayed for the conversion ...
— The Strange Adventures of Captain Dangerous, Vol. 1 of 3 • George Augustus Sala
... their gaunt and melancholy abundance. The actual houses, of course, we could not drag to our fires, but we brought all their ill-fitting deal doors, their dreadful window sashes, their servant-tormenting staircases, their dank, dark cupboards, the verminous papers from their scaly walls, their dust and dirt-sodden carpets, their ill-designed and yet pretentious tables and chairs, sideboards and chests of drawers, the old dirt-saturated books, their ornaments—their dirty, decayed, and altogether painful ...
— In the Days of the Comet • H. G. Wells
... For love I struggled with her—and I won! Mine she became.—Her father cursed his child; But mine she was, whether I would or no. 'Twas she that won me that mysterious Fleece; She was my guide to that dank horror-cave Where dwelt the dragon, guardian of the prize, The which I slew, and bore the Fleece away. Since then I see, each time I search her eyes, That hideous serpent blinking back at me, And shudder when I ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VI. • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... with life as there enjoyed; To brighter world they never had aspired, Had they not felt unfilled an aching void, And heard a whisper of a life attired In sapphire robes, 'midst gleams of golden light, Above their present world, so dank and chill, Where all day long they wing their happy flight From roses sweet to ...
— Gleams of Sunshine - Optimistic Poems • Joseph Horatio Chant
... out for evermore in the dank and weedy little cemetery that lies on the outskirts of the station where he lived and died. Those golden curls, those soft and rounded limbs, and that laughing mouth, are given up to darkness and the eternal hunger of corruption. Through sunshine and rain, through the long days ...
— Twenty-One Days in India; and, the Teapot Series • George Robert Aberigh-Mackay
... dank on brown, The branches on grey cloud a web, The long green roller of the down, An image ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... breathing the air of a different world as she walked along the broad clean sidewalk with the handsome old houses on either side, with carriages and automobiles speeding past, with clean, happy-faced, well dressed human beings in sight everywhere. It was like coming out of the dank darkness of Dismal Swamp into smiling fields with a pure, star-spangled sky above. She was free—free! It might be for but a moment; still it was freedom, infinitely sweet because of past slavery ...
— Susan Lenox: Her Fall and Rise • David Graham Phillips
... in a dungeon grew Unfed by rain, uncheer'd by dew; Its pallid leaflets only drank Cave-moistures foul, and odours dank. ...
— The Illustrated London Reading Book • Various
... come some twelve miles from my starting-place, and it was midnight. The plain, the level road (which often rose a little), and the dank air of the river began to oppress me with fatigue. I was not disturbed by this, for I had intended to break these nights of marching by occasional repose, and while I was in the comfort of cities—especially in the false hopes that ...
— The Path to Rome • Hilaire Belloc
... corruption. I stood at the edges of the wood, gazing at all the pomp and procession of the foxgloves towering amidst the bracken and shining red in the broad sunshine, and beyond them into deep thickets of close undergrowth where springs boil up from the rock and nourish the water-weeds, dank and evil. But in all my wanderings I avoided one part of the wood; it was not till yesterday that I climbed to the summit of the hill, and stood upon the ancient Roman road that threads the highest ridge of the wood. Here they had walked, Helen and Rachel, along this ...
— The House of Souls • Arthur Machen
... merely the outer, but the upper world. For he craved, as all true artists crave, for light and colour; and had the sky above been one perpetual blue, he might have been content with it, and left his glass transparent. But in that dark dank northern clime, rain and snowstorm, black cloud and grey mist, were all that he was like to see outside for nine months in the year. So he took such light and colour as nature gave in her few gayer moods; and set ...
— Health and Education • Charles Kingsley
... silent for a minute while a picture rose before me: a dank, gray dawn; a firing-squad, and Franz von Blenheim's dark, grim face. No doubt he had died bravely; but I could not pity him; I had too clear a recollection of ...
— The Firefly Of France • Marion Polk Angellotti
... garden and serene. The leaning reeds in quiet state About the pool, merged in the green Of misty leaves and hanging vines. The fireflies spun their silver lines Across the deeper atmosphere, And through the silence came the clear Persistent tuning of the frogs From dank recesses of ...
— The Five Books of Youth • Robert Hillyer
... down, and with the lightest of fingers untied the collar of her son's doublet and linen shirt, before bending lower, with her long curls drooping round his face, till she could kiss his brow, no longer dank and ...
— The Young Castellan - A Tale of the English Civil War • George Manville Fenn
... and dank: and the walls were encrusted here and there with what seemed cobwebs; but proved to be saltpetre that had oozed out of ...
— The Cloister and the Hearth • Charles Reade
... It was a curious, gruesome place, and the dank air was stifling. He climbed the stone steps upward until he came to a small room. The walls were bare but there were a bed and chairs and tables, all of oak, an iron ring in the wall, a rusty chain, and a padlock of huge size lay on the stone floor, unlocked. The slit in the wall gave ...
— The Rider in Khaki - A Novel • Nat Gould
... philology has not yet reported on them. Mention is made of another people, called Waiknas or Caribs, and conjecture sees in them remains of the aboriginal barbarians termed Chichimecs. They dwelt chiefly in the "dense, dank forests" found growing on the low alluvion of the Atlantic coast. So far as is known, their speech had no affinity with that of any other native community. People of this race constitute a chief element in the mixed population of ...
— Ancient America, in Notes on American Archaeology • John D. Baldwin
... lately in my "Funny," as I'm wont, beneath the bank, Listening to Cam's rippling murmurs thro' the weeds and willows dank, As I chewed the Cud of fancy, from the water there appeared An old man, fierce-eyed, and filthy, with a long and tangled beard; To the oozy shore he paddled, clinging to my Funny's nose, Till, in all his mud majestic, Cam's ...
— Sagittulae, Random Verses • E. W. Bowling
... the stones had sunk or been displaced; and picking their way the tough little horses and the panting bullocks floundered to their knees. The trail seemed to be climbing; it also was growing rougher. It crossed dank, dark ravines; skirted their sides; and wound along the rim of precipices so deep that the ...
— Gold Seekers of '49 • Edwin L. Sabin
... declivitous, with baleful yew Dark shaded, leads, a dreary silent road, Down to th' infernal regions: sluggish Styx Dank mists exhales: here travel new-made ghosts, With rites funereal blest: pale winter's gloom Wide rules the squalid place: the stranger shades Wander, unknowing which the path to tread, Straight to the infernal ...
— The Metamorphoses of Publius Ovidus Naso in English blank verse Vols. I & II • Ovid
... an adverb is very rarely elided (except in the expression "dank' al", which occurs in prose as well ...
— A Complete Grammar of Esperanto • Ivy Kellerman
... the dusky forest. His heart cried aloud in forlorn protest against the surging emotions that beset him. His eyes stung. And he fought against that inarticulate misery, against the melancholy that settled upon him like a dank mist. ...
— Burned Bridges • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... break of day, and, leaving the postillion fast asleep, stepped out of the tent. The dingle was dank and dripping. I lighted a fire of coals, and got my forge in readiness. I then ascended to the field, where the chaise was standing as we had left it on the previous evening. After looking at the cloud-stone near it, now cold, and split into three pieces, I set about prying narrowly ...
— The Romany Rye - A Sequel to 'Lavengro' • George Borrow
... broad, dry space with a lofty, salt-icicled roof. The green, translucent sea, as it rolled back and forth at their feet, gave to their brown faces a ghastly white glare. The scavenger crabs scrambled away over the dank and dripping stones, and the loathsome biting eel, slowly reached out its well-toothed, wide-gaping jaw to tear the tender feet that roused it from its horrid lair, where the dread ...
— Hawaiian Folk Tales - A Collection of Native Legends • Various
... captain, whose name was Achmet, took him as his own slave, swearing that he would bring down his proud spirit, and tame him as he would a wild beast-by hunger. Accordingly, Ranadar was placed in a dungeon, whose moist floor, and dank, slimy walls showed it to be beneath the surface of the ...
— The Duke's Prize - A Story of Art and Heart in Florence • Maturin Murray
... his ear on the voice of the Grig, And his heart it grew heavy as lead As he marked the Baldekin adjusting his wing On the opposite side of his head, And the air it grew chill as the Gryxabodill Raised his dank, dripping fins to the skies, And plead with the Plunk for the use of her bill To pick the tears ...
— The Complete Works • James Whitcomb Riley
... scenes, where the untrodden and the unknown invite to fresh discoveries in the world of vegetation. Wandering on with eager eyes, scanning with scrutiny every leaf and flower—toiling over hill and dale—climbing the steep cliff— wading the dank morass or the rapid river—threading his path through thorny thicket, through "chapparal" and "jungle"—sleeping in the open air—hungering, thirsting, risking life amidst wild beasts, and wilder men,—such are a few of the trials ...
— The Plant Hunters - Adventures Among the Himalaya Mountains • Mayne Reid
... roi, demain rien. Yestreen I gaped away the hours in a vile hole waiting for my craig (neck) to be raxed (twisted); the night I drink old claret in the best of company before a cheery fire. The warm glow of it goes to my heart after that dank cell in the prison. By heaven, the memory of that dungeon sends a ...
— A Daughter of Raasay - A Tale of the '45 • William MacLeod Raine
... a hateful-looking land, flat and desolate, dank and dirty-looking. The flat, dull, dirty marsh country seemed to be without life; the very grass seemed blighted. And we were drifting ashore to it, fast drifting ashore to the tune of the ...
— Jim Davis • John Masefield
... no gleaming rift broke the settled and deepening blackness of my hateful environs. Every thing and every place was full of the wearisome, depressing, beauty-blasting commonplace of Interior China. Stenches rose up on the damp, dank air, and throughout the night, through the opening of a window, I seemed to gaze out to a disconsolate eternity—gaping, empty, unsightly. Waking from my dozing at the hour when judgment sits upon the hearts of men, I sat in ponderous judgment upon all to whom ...
— Across China on Foot • Edwin Dingle
... could not form a permanent attachment to the Manchu; and Nettie's great difference, together with the romance of her unhappy position, must have a potent effect on the fellow's evident sentimentality. A dank air rose from the water, like the smell of death; and, with an uncontrollable shiver, he turned back ...
— Java Head • Joseph Hergesheimer
... open the door as he spoke, and pulled me violently into the opening. A great waft of the cold, dank air came at us, and ...
— At a Winter's Fire • Bernard Edward J. Capes
... an hour Suvaroff rose and went out. He found a squalid wine-shop in the quarter just below the Barbary Coast. He went in and sat alone at a table. The floors had not been freshly sanded for weeks; a dank mildew covered the green wall-paper. He called for brandy, and a fat, greasy-haired man placed a bottle of villainous stuff before him. Suvaroff poured out a drink and swallowed it greedily. He drank another and another. The room began to fill. The lights were dim, and the arrival and departure ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1917 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... knee and peered into the well, to see, far down, a glistening round of what looked like a mirror with my face in it, but in a blurred indistinct way, for there was a musical splashing of water falling from the sides, and as I bent lower the air seemed cold and dank, while above ...
— Brownsmith's Boy - A Romance in a Garden • George Manville Fenn
... his crucifixes stands deep in the Klamm, in the dank gorge where it is always half-night. The road runs under the rock and the trees, half-way up the one side of the pass. Below, the stream rushes ceaselessly, embroiled among great stones, making an endless loud noise. The rock face opposite rises high overhead, ...
— Twilight in Italy • D.H. Lawrence
... thank thee, Adelaide! 'twas sweet, though mournful. But why thy brow o'ercast, thy cheek so wan? Thou look'st as a lorn maid beside some stream, That sighs away the soul in fond despairing, While sorrow sad, like the dank willow near her, Hangs o'er the troubled ...
— Literary Remains (1) • Coleridge
... appeared to have suddenly assumed the temperature of midwinter. In a short time, my extremities were benumbed, and my limbs shivered and ached as if I had been seized by an ague. My bed likewise was dank and uneven, and the posture I was obliged to assume, unnatural and painful. It was evident that my purpose could not ...
— Edgar Huntley • Charles Brockden Brown
... has not), and did that bully messenger—whatever his name was—turn back because the Cuban jungle was too much for him? He delivered the message to Garcia, that was the point. There were swamps, and dank, tangled, poisonous vines, and venomous snakes, and the sickening breath of fever. But he ...
— Tom Slade Motorcycle Dispatch Bearer • Percy Keese Fitzhugh
... land with milk and honey flowing, The promise of our God, our fancy's theme? Here over shattered walls dank weeds are growing, And blood and fire have run in mingled stream; Like oaks and cedars all around The giant corses strew the ground, And haughty Jericho's cloud-piercing wall Lies where it sank at Joshua's ...
— The Christian Year • Rev. John Keble
... Cardinal-Flower is best seen by itself, and, indeed, needs the surroundings of its native haunts to display its fullest beauty. Its favorite abode is along the dank mossy stones of some black and winding brook, shaded with overarching bushes, and running one long stream of scarlet with these superb occupants. It seems amazing how anything so brilliant can mature in such a darkness. When a ray of sunlight strays ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 62, December, 1862 • Various
... like flame, and an atmosphere of sulphur. No breath of air, not a single ruffle in the great, drooping leaves of the African trees and dense, prickly shrubs. All around the dank, nauseous odour of poison flowers, the ceaseless dripping of poisonous moisture. From the face of the man who stood erect, unvanquished as yet in the struggle for life, the fierce sweat poured like rain—his older companion had sunk to the ground and the spasms of an ...
— A Millionaire of Yesterday • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... Over dead and dying; Piped and played he well. Sure that flute of his was made Of the dank reed sighing O'er the streams of Hell. There beneath the shadows grey, With the sisters three, Shall he pipe for many a day. May the Frog his butler be! And his wine the water of that countrie— ...
— Cleopatra • H. Rider Haggard
... from the fire escapes Or sprawl over the stoops... Upturned faces glimmer pallidly— Herring-yellow faces, spotted as with a mold, And moist faces of girls Like dank white lilies, And infants' faces with open parched mouths that suck at the air ...
— The Ghetto and Other Poems • Lola Ridge
... for All are worthless found, Man must aye take man to task for Faults while earth goes round. On this dank soil thistles muster, Thorns are broadcast sown; Seek not figs where thistles cluster, Grapes where thorns ...
— Poems • Adam Lindsay Gordon
... leaves they were crisped and sere, The leaves they were withering and sere; It was night in the lonesome October Of my most immemorial year; 5 It was hard by the dim lake of Auber, In the misty mid region of Weir: It was down by the dank tarn of Auber, In the ...
— Selections From Poe • J. Montgomery Gambrill
... their minds. In a week's time, the unworthiness of Little Jule as a sea vessel, always a subject of jest, now became more so than ever. In the forecastle, Flash Jack, with his knife, often dug into the dank, rotten planks ribbed between us and death, and flung away the ...
— Omoo: Adventures in the South Seas • Herman Melville
... with heaven fraught Into a sterile plain, Whose atmosphere is dank and drear— A ...
— Our Profession and Other Poems • Jared Barhite
... in the sod and dines on clay; he makes no after-dinner speeches; he never responds to a toast; but silently revels on in his dark banquet halls under the dank violets or in the rich mould by the river. But the red worm never reaches the goal of his visions and dreams until he is triumphantly impaled on the fishhook ...
— Gov. Bob. Taylor's Tales • Robert L. Taylor
... the tall dank weeds And I lay my oars in silence by, And lean, and draw the slippery reeds ...
— Poems • Sophia M. Almon
... ship he pass'd, Where was the Council and the Justice-seat, And where were built the altars of the Gods, There met him, halting from the battle-field, Shot through the thigh, Euaemon's Heav'n-born son, Eurypylus; his head and shoulders dank With clammy sweat, while from his grievous wound Stream'd the dark blood; yet firm was still his soul. Menoetius' noble son with pity saw, And deeply sorrowing thus ...
— The Iliad • Homer
... way opened, the trees thinned a little; presently I beheld a railing, then the house—scarce, by this dim light, distinguishable from the trees; so dank and green were its decaying walls. Entering a portal, fastened only by a latch, I stood amidst a space of enclosed ground, from which the wood swept away in a semicircle. There were no flowers, no garden-beds; only a broad gravel-walk girdling ...
— Jane Eyre - an Autobiography • Charlotte Bronte
... to mean them all!— The peach-dyed morn; cold stars in colder blue Gazing across upon the sun-dyed west, While the dank wind is running o'er the graves; Green buds, red flowers, brown leaves, and ghostly snow; The grassy hills, breeze-haunted on the brow; And sandy deserts hung with stinging stars! Half-vanished hangs the moon, with daylight sick, Wan-faced and lost and ...
— The Poetical Works of George MacDonald in Two Volumes, Volume I • George MacDonald
... tonight—early to bed and tomorrow morning you'll all start out in your natty knickers and short kilts to murder things that will fall in bloody feathery heaps at your feet. Native woodcock, jack snipe, black mallard, grouse, etc., the restless eager setters doing their own retrieving; the soft dank ground daintily overspread with the frond of marvelous fern like my window pane this morning with its delicate tracery in frost; the tall-stemmed alders echoing your shots to skyward; the big dense timber with its springy ground all saturated with the fragrance ...
— Letters of a Dakota Divorcee • Jane Burr
... weed, Suffering no flowers except its own to mount? Ah! must— Designer infinite!— Ah! must Thou char the wood ere Thou canst limn with it? My freshness spent its wavering shower i' the dust; And now my heart is as a broken fount, Wherein tear-drippings stagnate, spilt down ever From the dank thoughts that shiver Upon the sighful branches of my mind. Such is; what is to be? The pulp so bitter, how shall taste the rind? I dimly guess what Time in mists confounds; Yet ever and anon a trumpet sounds From the hid battlements of Eternity: Those shaken mists a space unsettle, ...
— The Hound of Heaven • Francis Thompson
... of sluggish, stagnant water on the one hand, thick and turbid, and somewhat resembling in form and colour a broad muddy highway, lined by low walls; not a tuft of vegetation is to be seen on its tame rectilinear sides: all is slimy and brown, with here and there dank, muddy recesses, as if for the frog and the rat; while on the damp flat above, there lie, somewhat in the style of the grouping in a Dutch painting, the rotting fragments of canal passage-boats and coal-barges, with here and there ...
— Leading Articles on Various Subjects • Hugh Miller
... the great bare walls of her own ancestral home, the ghostly hand of memory had conjured up pictures of long ago:—her own, her husband's and her brother's arrest here in this very room, the weeping servants, the rough, half-naked soldiery—then the agony of a nine days' imprisonment in a dark, dank prison-cell filled to overflowing with poor wretches in the same pitiable plight as herself—the hasty trial, the insults, the mockery:—her husband's death in prison and her own thoughts ...
— The Bronze Eagle - A Story of the Hundred Days • Emmuska Orczy, Baroness Orczy
... and wept like weeds On her pearly shoulders bare; And the clear pale drops ran down like beads, Down her arms, to her fingers fair; And her limbs shine through, like thin-filmed seeds, Her dank white robe's despair. ...
— A Hidden Life and Other Poems • George MacDonald
... again, again! To Heliodore! And mingle the sweet word ye call in vain With that ye pour! And bring to me her wreath of yesterday That's dank with myrrh; Hesternae Rosae, ah my friends, but they Remember her! Lo the kind roses, loved of lovers, weep As who repine, For if on any breast they see her sleep ...
— Grass of Parnassus • Andrew Lang
... deg. north and longitude 5 deg. west, which a reference to any modern atlas will show to lie on the Ashanti coast of to-day. It was a hot, moist country, where huge antediluvian animals lived in reedy swamps and dank forests. The fossil remains of such plants are to-day found in the coal measures. The Rmoahals were a dark race—their complexion being a sort of mahogany black. Their height in these early days was about ten or twelve feet—truly a race of giants—but through ...
— The Story of Atlantis and the Lost Lemuria • W. Scott-Elliot
... 'the merry winds go Away from every horn; And those shall clear the mildew dank From the blind old ...
— Journeys Through Bookland V2 • Charles H. Sylvester
... bring deluge and periodic tornadoes play havoc. The dry seasons give partial relief, but they bring occasional blasts from the desert so dry and burning that all nature droops and is grateful at the return of the rains. The general dank heat stimulates vegetable growth in every scale from mildew to mahogany trees, and multiplies the members of the animal kingdom, be they mosquitoes, elephants or boa constrictors. There would be abundant food but for the superabundant creatures that struggle for it and prey upon ...
— American Negro Slavery - A Survey of the Supply, Employment and Control of Negro Labor as Determined by the Plantation Regime • Ulrich Bonnell Phillips
... the Jungle! I knew the place, a spot of dank pestilence and mystery. "You never could have gone there," ...
— New Burlesques • Bret Harte
... hand-gate, and toiled up the steep path, threading their way among a wilderness of overgrown box shrubs, long dank grass and strange weeds. Helen, with her eyes fixed upon an open window on the right wing of the cottage, fell a little behind. The others came to a halt before the ...
— The New Tenant • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... which is, I believe, rarely found except where there has been toil to undergo and adversity to struggle against: it will only grow to perfection in a poor soil and in the shade; if the soil be too indigent, the shade too dank and thick, of course it dies where it sprung. But I trust this will not be the case with Miss Kavanagh. I trust she will struggle ere long into the sunshine. In you she has a kind friend to direct her, and I hope her mother will live to see the daughter, ...
— Charlotte Bronte and Her Circle • Clement K. Shorter
... Nacht denket an euch mein Lied, Wo mein ewiger Gram jeglichen Stundenschlag, Welcher naeher mich bringt dem Trauten Grabe, mit Dank begruesst.[56] ...
— Types of Weltschmerz in German Poetry • Wilhelm Alfred Braun
... sucked through the ravine grew colder as they descended. Then the dank atmosphere became strongly permeated with the odor of fish. Gregory felt a hand upon ...
— El Diablo • Brayton Norton
... was untempting. A dank smell came out of it, like the breath of those old Egyptian tombs in which the bones of horses, buried with their masters, lie all about on shelves. You couldn't see into it more than a yard or two, for the only light came through the doorway of the windowless ...
— Jimgrim and Allah's Peace • Talbot Mundy
... filled with vague and highly colored notions of a smugglers' cave, his narrow lungs filled with air, Bubbles dove, swam between two slimy barnacled piles, and came up presently in a dark, dank, stale, gurgling region, wonderfully cool after the blazing sunlight which he ...
— The Penalty • Gouverneur Morris
... alone, to put his thoughts in order, to resume his experiences during this strange hour. An extreme weariness was possessing him, as though he had been straining his intellect in attention to some difficult subject. And all at once the dank, cold atmosphere of the room struck into his blood; he had ...
— The Nether World • George Gissing
... wrists, which done, one came with a lanthorn, who presently led the way along other gloomy passageways where I beheld many narrow, evil-looking doorways. At last my silent guide halted, I heard the rattle of iron, the creak of bolts and a door opened suddenly before me upon a dank and noisome darkness. Into this evil place I was led, and the door clapped to upon me and locked and bolted forthwith. But to my wonder they had left me the lanthorn, and by its flickering beam I stared about me and saw I was in a large dungeon, ...
— Martin Conisby's Vengeance • Jeffery Farnol
... and opened the door, and Mrs. Babcock entered, panting. She had a green umbrella, which she furled with difficulty at the door, and a palm-leaf fan. Her face, in the depths of her scooping green barege bonnet, was dank with perspiration, and scowling with indignant misery. She sank into a chair, and fanned herself ...
— Jane Field - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... very picture of an old-fashioned English dairy— green-shadowy, dark, dank, and cool—floored with great irregular slabs, mostly of green serpentine, polished into smooth hollows by the feet of generations of mistresses and dairy-maids. Its only light came through a small window shaded with shrubs and ivy, which stood open, and let in the scents of bud and blossom, ...
— Mary Marston • George MacDonald
... and eels could be seen writhing shadowy, in pools. The brawling of the ocean came smothered, faint, but portentous, and in the green light that mounted through the submerged door the grotto seemed a place of dreams,—a dank nightmare. ...
— Myths & Legends of our New Possessions & Protectorate • Charles M. Skinner
... forth, splashing warily through the rich mud and the dank mist of Trafalgar Road, past all those strange little Indian-red houses, and ragged empty spaces, and poster-hoardings, and rounded kilns, and high, smoking chimneys, up hill, down hill, and up hill again, encountering and overtaking many electric trams ...
— The Matador of the Five Towns and Other Stories • Arnold Bennett
... and saw that it was a fallen tree. The wound in the earth caused by its torn-up roots formed a sort of cavern where the slenderer tentacles hung limp like tropical foliage. If there was a means of entrance to this dank little shelter it must be from the farther side. Even where Gilbert stood the atmosphere was redolent of the damp earth of this crazy little retreat. For retreat it certainly was, because there was a light in it. Gilbert could only see the reflection of the light but he knew whence that ...
— Tom Slade's Double Dare • Percy Keese Fitzhugh
... neither heard a low tap, several times repeated, nor the soft opening of the door that followed. When they rose from their knees, it was therefore with astonishment they saw a woman standing motionless in the doorway, without cloak or bonnet, her dank garments clinging to her form ...
— Paul Faber, Surgeon • George MacDonald
... Mary go and call the cattle home, And call the cattle home, And call the cattle home, Across the sands o' Dee!" The western wind was wild and dank wi' foam, And ...
— Standard Selections • Various
... card veal rank tell bill hard meal sank well fill bark neat hank yell rill dark heat dank belt hill dint bang dime rave cull hint fang lime gave dull lint gang tine lave gull mint hang fine pave hull tint ...
— McGuffey's Eclectic Spelling Book • W. H. McGuffey
... Russians, in a fiery rank, Panting and fierce, drew up along the shore; (For here the vain pursuing they forbore, Nor cared they to surpass the river's bank,) Then, looking from the rocks and rushes dank, A sight they witnessed never seen before, And which, with its accompaniments glorious, Is writ i' the golden ...
— Ballads • William Makepeace Thackeray
... midwinter!—what new freak has taken possession of that eccentric man? The morning broke dank and drear, for the December air had chilled the moisture into a fog. The wide verandas that opened on the court-yard in rear were dripping with the rain, and the broad flag-stones covered with a greasy slime. The diminutive grass-plot was brown and soggy, but the ...
— Trifles for the Christmas Holidays • H. S. Armstrong
... sat in the dusky corner with his head in his hands, the picture of dejection. But, as Dennis entered, he rose and came forward. He tried to speak, but for a moment could not. At last he said, hoarsely: "Mr. Vleet, you haf done me and mine a great kindness. No matter vat the result is, I dank you as I never danked any living being. I believe Gott sent you, but I fear too late. You see before you a miserable wreck. For months and years I haf been a brute, a devil. Dot picture dere show you vat I vas, vat I might haf been. You see vat I am," ...
— Barriers Burned Away • E. P. Roe
... bones; his face was shrunk and nipped with hunger; a ragged beard hung from his chin. His attire was the same as he had worn when last I saw him, but so tattered and dirty and threadbare that it was a marvel to me it did not fall to pieces before my eyes. The great ruff drooped brown and dank upon his shoulders. The gay shirt and doublet hung like grey sackcloth on his limbs. His shoes flapped in fragments about his feet, and the empty scabbard at his belt swung like the shreds of a ...
— Sir Ludar - A Story of the Days of the Great Queen Bess • Talbot Baines Reed
... desolate the glaciers and the avalanches in gleams of light that struggle through the mist! There is a leaden glare peculiar to clouds, which makes the snow and ice more lurid. Not far from the house where I am writing, the avalanche that swept away the bridge last winter is lying now, dripping away, dank and dirty, like a rotting whale. I can see it from my window, green beech-boughs nodding over it, forlorn larches bending their tattered branches by its side, splinters of broken pine protruding from its muddy ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece • John Addington Symonds
... pleasures that he had chosen except smoking (and the days of that I know in my heart ought to be over), I forgot eating, which I still enjoy, and who sees the circle of impotence closing very slowly but quite steadily around him? In my view, one dank, dispirited word is harmful, a crime of LESE- HUMANITE, a piece of acquired evil; every gay, every bright word or picture, like every pleasant air of music, is a piece of pleasure set afloat; the reader catches it, and, if he be ...
— The Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson - Volume 1 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... of them lived there together, because it was a convenient, roomy hollow. No one knows how it started—perhaps the wood-peckers could tell you—but rain had certainly finished its excavation. The entrance was some thirty feet above the ground—dank, noisome, and forbidding; the end ...
— "Wee Tim'rous Beasties" - Studies of Animal life and Character • Douglas English
... there no more, And thick dank moss creeps over thy gray stone Thy path is lost that skirted the low shore, With willow-grass and speedwell overgrown; Thine eye has closed for ever, and thine ear Drinks in no more ...
— Poems by Jean Ingelow, In Two Volumes, Volume II. • Jean Ingelow
... well present upon my table that other diabolic cabbage of the New England swamps,—in old legend said to have been conjured up out of the ground by the Indian pow-wows, to beautify and perfume the dank and gloomy resorts where Satan was wont to drill them in their hellish exercises,—as its grandchild, the big booby of the garden. For is it not deservedly, if disrespectfully, named a cabbage-head? That is because ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 108, October, 1866 • Various
... Sea pansies, sedge, and rosemary; Frail fronds thrust forth in dim dank air, A message from those lying there: ...
— The Shrieking Pit • Arthur J. Rees
... funereal robes and huge Hack caps, with cruel lips and hard, steely eyes, sitting in solemn state in a gloomy hall and dispensing death, disgrace, or long terms of prison, at the very least, to all comers. For her, the police-station was a dungeon, and she fancied the Count chained to a dank and slimy wall in a painful position, chilled to the marrow by the touch of the dripping stone, his teeth chattering, his face distorted with suffering. Of course he was in a solitary cell, behind a heavy door, braced with clamps and bolts and locks and studded with great ...
— A Cigarette-Maker's Romance • F. Marion Crawford
... The sick man himself had wasted greatly. All the life in him seemed to have taken refuge in the still brilliant eyes. The livid whiteness of his face was something horrible to see, enhanced as it was by the long dank locks of hair that straggled along his cheeks, for he would never suffer them to cut it. He looked like some religious fanatic in the desert. Mental suffering was extinguishing all human instincts in this man of scarce fifty years of age, whom all Paris had known ...
— Gobseck • Honore de Balzac
... through the worst of ways? Oil-dropping Twickenham did not then detain Thy steps, though tended by the Cambrian maids; 10 Nor the sweet environs of Drury Lane; Nor dusty Pimlico's embowering shades; Nor Whitehall, by the river's bank, Beset with rowers dank; Nor where the Exchange pours forth its tawny sons; Nor where, to mix with offal, soil, and blood, Steep Snowhill rolls the sable flood; Nor where the Mint's contamined kennel runs: Ill doth it now beseem, That thou should'st ...
— Poetical Works of Johnson, Parnell, Gray, and Smollett - With Memoirs, Critical Dissertations, and Explanatory Notes • Samuel Johnson, Thomas Parnell, Thomas Gray, and Tobias Smollett
... the Unseen Thing that lived in the Pit. The Pit itself is real joy. It was covered always by the tide, but could be distinguished by a darker shadow on the surface of the sluggish stream, a shadow streaked at times by wavering bands of greyish slime, strangely agitated.... There were smells, too, dank, sodden, drowned smells that came in upon the sea mist. Moreover, Deeping Castle I can only describe as an eligible residence for the immortal Fat Boy. It was built right upon the water, within convenient distance, as the auctioneers say, of the Pit; and between the two of them your flesh ...
— Punch or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, November 11, 1914 • Various
... two rather pale-faced girls when the party of explorers again stood in the sunlit halls above. Across their shrinking faces cobwebs were lashed, plastered with the dank moisture of ages; in their eyes gleamed relief and from their lips came long breaths of thankfulness. Turk, out of sight and hearing, was roundly cursing the luck that had given him such a disagreeable task as the one just ...
— Castle Craneycrow • George Barr McCutcheon
... as I pushed onward through the mire. For presently it had come on to rain—a thick, dank rain, which wetted through all covering, yet fell soft as ...
— Red Axe • Samuel Rutherford Crockett
... will von Herzen gern der Thor der Thoren seyn; Jngst that ich ernst: gleich hielt die Narrheit mich beym Rocke. Wo, rief sie, willst du hin,—Du! weisst du unsern Bund. Ist das der Dank? Du ...
— Laurence Sterne in Germany • Harvey Waterman Thayer
... solemn nightingale Ceased warbling, but all night tun'd her soft lays: Others, on silver lakes and rivers, bathed Their downy breast; the swan with arched neck, Between her white wings mantling proudly, rows Her state with oary feet; yet oft they quit The dank, and, rising on stiff pennons, tower The mid aereal sky: Others on ground Walked firm; the crested cock whose clarion sounds The silent hours, and the other whose gay train Adorns him, coloured with the florid hue Of rainbows and starry eyes. The waters ...
— Paradise Lost • John Milton
... youths of Columbia, with hearts glowing warm, Embarked on the billows far distant to rove, To bear to the nations all wrapped in thick gloom The lamp of the gospel—the message of love. But Wheelook now slumbers beneath the cold wave; And Coleman lies low in the dank, ...
— Daughters of the Cross: or Woman's Mission • Daniel C. Eddy
... perceive more than the outline of his features. Milestone after milestone glided by the wheels, and neither of the travellers broke the silence. It was a cold, raw morning, and the mists rose sullenly from the dank hedges and comfortless fields. ...
— Alice, or The Mysteries, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... that there existed in two places under the Chicago River—in the first place at La Salle Street, running north and south, and in the second at Washington Street, running east and west—two now soggy and rat-infested tunnels which were never used by anybody—dark, dank, dripping affairs only vaguely lighted with oil-lamp, and oozing with water. Upon investigation he learned that they had been built years before to accommodate this same tide of wagon traffic, which now congested at the bridges, ...
— The Titan • Theodore Dreiser
... of pity came to me—a pity distinct from the harrowing sensations of his miserable end. He had been evil in the obscurity of his life, as there are plants growing harmful and deadly in the shade, drawing poison from the dank soil on which they flourish. He was as unconscious of his evil as they—but he had a man's right to ...
— Romance • Joseph Conrad and F.M. Hueffer
... think it was The Shadow, barred my way. He seemed to have a helmet upon his head, but as I drew closer I perceived it was the head itself I saw—so distorted as to bear but a doubtful resemblance to the human. A cold wind smote me, dank and sickening—repulsive as the air of a charnel-house; firmness forsook my joints, and my limbs trembled as if they would drop in a helpless heap. I seemed to pass through him, but I think now that he passed through ...
— Lilith • George MacDonald
... starboard. Fighting men in the breeches and leggings of the American Navy; blackened and bandaged stokers, sailors and landsmen comprised the motley company that stood ready to drag the occupants of the boats up into the dank, smoke-scented ...
— West Wind Drift • George Barr McCutcheon
... and remote cabins which sent their smoke curling into the dank morning air of the region thereabouts, there was not one in which disease was not already raging with fearful malignity. Doctors or hired nurses there were none; each stricken household was forced to battle single-handed with the destroyer who dealt his blows stealthily, suddenly, and ...
— Woman on the American Frontier • William Worthington Fowler
... unbroken weal? I could a tale unfold of toiling oars, Ill rest, scant landings on a shore rock-strewn, All pains, all sorrows, for our daily doom. And worse and hatefuller our woes on land; For where we couched, close by the foeman's wall, The river-plain was ever dank with dews, Dropped from the sky, exuded from the earth, A curse that clung unto our sodden garb, And hair as horrent as a wild beast's fell. Why tell the woes of winter, when the birds Lay stark and stiff, so stern was Ida's snow? Or summer's scorch, what time the stirless wave Sank to its ...
— The House of Atreus • AEschylus
... proclaim that "Here once dwelt" the gentle Master of all that is flippant and fine in Art, some anxious student, reading, fall out with Providence in his vain effort to reconcile such joyous reputation with the dank and hopeless appearance of this "model lodging," bequeathed to the people by the ...
— The Gentle Art of Making Enemies • James McNeill Whistler
... nod and a grin. His hat had gone, and the dank wisps of his hair were being fluttered about like black rags; his narrow slits of eyes were heavily bloodshot; his face was grimy and pale, his hands grimy and red; his clothing was a wreck. He looked ...
— The Recipe for Diamonds • Charles John Cutcliffe Wright Hyne
... and out upon a bench that bordered the lofty red wall of rock. From there we went down into heavy forest again, dim and gray, with its dank, penetrating odor, and oppressive stillness. The forest primeval! When we rode out of that into open slopes the afternoon was far advanced, and long shadows lay across the distant ranges. When we reached camp, supper and a fire to warm cold wet feet were exceedingly ...
— Tales of lonely trails • Zane Grey
... would tug and strain with her comb, accompanying her work with her misplaced pieties. And when finally she was through with her triple job she always fired up and exploded her thanks toward the sky, where they belonged, in this form: "Gott sei Dank ich bin fertig mit'm Gott verdammtes Haar!" (I believe I am not quite brave enough ...
— Chapters from My Autobiography • Mark Twain
... of ascent, and a vantage-ground of some sort is gained. It is only the crest of the outer rampart. Immediately within this a chasm gapes; its bottom is imperceptible, but the counterscarp slopes not too steeply to admit of a sliding descent if cautiously performed. The shady bottom, dank and chilly, is thus gained, and reveals itself as a kind of winding lane, wide enough for a waggon to pass along, floored with rank herbage, and trending away, right and left, into obscurity, between the concentric walls of earth. The towering closeness of these ...
— A Changed Man and Other Tales • Thomas Hardy
... always got under way slowly, as though fore-resolved not to stampede.] Echo demands, "Retreat?—The Iron Brigade in retreat?" 'Twas true. Rallied once again, but under another flag than the Bars, the Missourians rode all that dank, wet night lest they meet and have to fight their new friends, the guerrillas under Rodrigo Galan. It was a weird predicament. Two days before, they were peaceful settlers in the land—omne solum forti ...
— The Missourian • Eugene P. (Eugene Percy) Lyle
... them, fresh tears starting at their presence. There he lay, their bright agile boy, with eyes half closed and fixed, and circled half way down his cheeks with livid purple, like bruises, the purple lips emitting a heavy breath, his crest of sunny hair hanging dank with the melting of the ice ...
— The Pillars of the House, V1 • Charlotte M. Yonge
... himself. Rising from the books he ran through the cloisters to a certain part, and there, by a dexterous spring, perched himself on to the frame of the open mullioned windows. The gravestones lay pretty thick in the square, enclosed yard, the long, dank grass growing around them; but there appeared to be no ...
— The Channings • Mrs. Henry Wood
... basking nature become dark, cold and ungenial, when the sleeping wind has awoke in the east? Or, when the dun clouds thickly veil the sky, while exhaustless stores of rain are poured down, until, the dank earth refusing to imbibe the superabundant moisture, it lies in pools on the surface; when the torch of day seems like a meteor, to be quenched; who has not seen the cloud-stirring north arise, the streaked blue appear, and soon an opening made in the vapours in the eye of the wind, ...
— The Last Man • Mary Shelley
... great tank, with a little artificial island in its centre, full of slimy water that looked almost black because of the shadow of the high walls, and round it ran a narrow stone path. At one spot in this path, however, where grew some dank-looking trees and bushes, was a slope, also of stone, and on the slope with its prow resting in the water a little boat, and in the boat, oars. But of the crocodile there was nothing to ...
— Morning Star • H. Rider Haggard
... in Enoshima. High before us slopes the single street, a street of broad steps, a street shadowy, full of multi-coloured flags and dank blue drapery dashed with white fantasticalities, which are words, fluttered by the sea wind. It is lined with taverns and miniature shops. At every one I must pause to look; and to dare to look at anything in Japan is to want to buy it. So I ...
— Glimpses of an Unfamiliar Japan - First Series • Lafcadio Hearn
... Hugh, looking up idly, "but did you say two years, Dick? Nay, surely 'tis a score. Why," he added in a changed voice, "who may that be in the hollow?" and he pointed to a tall figure which stood beneath them at a distance, half-hidden by the dank snow-mists. ...
— Red Eve • H. Rider Haggard
... dwellings, and which only seemed the more shrouded and lonely for the warehouses and granaries which at some little distance backward turned their shoulders to the river. There was a sloping width of long grass and rushes made all the more dank by broad gutters which here and there emptied ...
— Romola • George Eliot
... die Liefde in u die u verblind heeft. Dank God dat gij hebt liefgehad" (No. Thank God rather for the Love within which blinded your eyes. Thank God that ...
— Woman's Endurance • A.D.L.
... veritable monarchs of the ages, hoary with time, grim guardians of such forest solitudes; climbed long hills roughened by innumerable boulders with sharp edges hidden beneath the fallen leaves, that lamed our horses; or descended into dark and gloomy ravines, dank with decaying vegetation, finally halting for a brief meal upon the southern edge of a small lake, the water of which was as clear and blue as the cloudless August sky that arched it. The sand of the shore where we rested was white as snow, yet De Croix had his man spread ...
— When Wilderness Was King - A Tale of the Illinois Country • Randall Parrish
... cheering pipe, nor Bird's shrill note 15 Around thy dreary paths shall float; Their boding songs shall scritch-owls pour To fright the guilty shepherds sore, Led by the wandering fires astray Thro' the dank horrors of thy way! 20 While they their mud-lost sandals hunt May all the curses, which they grunt In raging moan like goaded hog, ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... hook-nosed bright-eyed fellow In a thin brown cape and a cap of yellow That perched on his dripping coal-black hair. A red scarf set off his throat and bound him, Crossing his breast, and, winding round him, Flapped at his flank In a red streak dank; And his hose were red, with a purple sheen From his tunic's blue, and his shoes were green. He was most outlandishly patched together With ribbons of silk and tags of leather, And chains of silver and buttons ...
— The Vagabond and Other Poems from Punch • R. C. Lehmann
... The mists hang dank, on front and flank, My straining eye can naught discover; But well I know that many a foe Around ...
— Old Groans and New Songs - Being Meditations on the Book of Ecclesiastes • F. C. Jennings
... comfortable a seat as one of the school forms, but the satisfaction was to find anything at all that would serve for a chair. He sat there, still panting after the climb and his struggle through the dank and jungle-like thicket, and he felt as if he were growing hotter and hotter; the sting of the nettle was burning his hand, and the tingling fire seemed to spread all ...
— The Hill of Dreams • Arthur Machen
... the hoot of the owl, the caw of the crow, the scream of the eagle, the infrequent twitter of small birds, the mighty but subdued roar of insects, the rush of water over the rocks and the sigh and sough of the wind among the pines, the lonely wanderer has no sign of aught but the rank and dank vegetation and a gloomy, oppressive plodding on and on, without an instant's relief in the sights and sounds of human life. We entered upon the descent of the rapids in no very ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 26, September 1880 • Various
... could strangers see of it? The foreshore to them is the unending monotony of grey streets, sometimes grim, often decayed, and always reticent and sullen, that might never have seen the stars nor heard of good luck; and the light would be, when closely looked at, merely a high gas bracket on a dank wall in solitude, its glass broken, and the flame within it fluttering to extinction like an imprisoned and crippled moth trying to evade the squeeze of giant darkness and the wind. The narrow and forbidding by-path under that glim, a path intermittent and depending on the weight of ...
— London River • H. M. Tomlinson
... pools and placid stretches and swift dashing rapids; that the dark green sluggish flow in the canon-bed has disintegrated into a noble forest with great pine-trees, and shaded aisles, and deep dank thickets, and brush openings where the sun is warm and the birds are cheerful, and groves of cottonwoods where all day long softly, like snow, the flakes of cotton float down through the air. Moreover there are meadows, spacious lawns, opening out, closing in, winding here and there through ...
— The Mountains • Stewart Edward White
... was still unbroken as Mr. Wicker advanced toward him, and Chris shuddered again as he stood waiting and watching, but whether it was with cold or with fear—and the room was indeed very dank and unaired—it would have been ...
— Mr. Wicker's Window • Carley Dawson
... severe with the girl on the indiscretion of gadding in strange places with no better escort than Diccon, and of entering into conversation with unknown persons. Moreover, Cicely's hair, her shoes, and camlet riding skirt were all so dank with dew that she was with difficulty made presentable by the time ...
— Unknown to History - A Story of the Captivity of Mary of Scotland • Charlotte M. Yonge
... has it that Rossetti withheld his blessing and sought to drown his sorrow in fomentation's, with dark, dank hints in baritone to the effect that the Thames only ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 5 (of 14) • Elbert Hubbard
... the lead as before, followed by Roger and Tom, and Connel brought up the rear. They moved directly to the spot where they had last seen the tyrannosaurus, found the trampled underbrush and massive tracks, and moved purposefully into the dank, suffocating green world. ...
— The Revolt on Venus • Carey Rockwell
... that climbed over the verandah of the Crow's Nest had shed its first crop of blossoms. The border below was strewn with bright petals of storm-scattered flowers; while above the dank pines dripped and drooped beneath the dead weight of universal moisture. The far-off glory of the mountains was blotted out, as though it had never been; and the doll's house, with its subsidiary group of native huts, had the aspect of a dwelling in Cloudland. From within came the plash ...
— The Great Amulet • Maud Diver
... Dank and fetid boxes and barrows, to say naught of the more ambitious shops, fill the Whitechapel Road and Petticoat Lane (now changed to Middlesex Street, but some measure of the old activities may still be ...
— Dickens' London • Francis Miltoun
... (so my sister Harriet warned me) serpents swarmed, eager to bite runaway boys. "And if you step in the mud between the tufts of grass," she said, "you will surely sink out of sight."—At night this teeming bog became a place of dank and horrid mystery. Bears and wolves and wildcats were reported as ruling the dark woods just beyond—only the door yard and the road seemed safe for little men—and even there I wished my mother to be within ...
— A Son of the Middle Border • Hamlin Garland
... city of Chicago—who shall portray it! This vast ruck of life that had sprung suddenly into existence upon the dank marshes of a ...
— A Book of Prefaces • H. L. Mencken
... throat was cold, My garments all were dank; Sure I had drunken in my dreams, And ...
— English Songs and Ballads • Various
... these heaps of stones had been that they were tombs; and this opinion remains unaltered, though we found no bones in the mound, only a great deal of fine mould having a damp dank smell. The antiquity of the central part of the one we opened appeared to be very great, I should say two or three hundred years; but the stones above were much more modern, the outer ones having been very recently placed; this was also ...
— Journals Of Two Expeditions Of Discovery In North-West And Western Australia, Vol. 1 (of 2) • George Grey
... remote part of DOCTOR WANGEL'S garden. It is boggy and overshadowed by large old trees. To the right is seen the margin of a dank pond. A low, open fence separates the garden from the footpath, and the fjord in the background. Beyond is the range of mountains, with its peaks. It is afternoon, almost evening. BOLETTE sits on ...
— The Lady From The Sea • Henrik Ibsen |
