"Dank" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... the Olympian height; Then terror seized the monarch of the dead, And springing from his throne he cried aloud With fearful voice, lest the earth, rent asunder By Neptune's mighty arm, forthwith reveal To mortal and immortal eyes those halls So drear and dank, which e'en ...
— On the Sublime • Longinus
... the word, and they moved slowly forward through the darkness, now and then feeling dank walls ...
— Frank Merriwell Down South • Burt L. Standish
... my shore-going trunk, and quadrant, cocked-hat, etcetera, to the midshipmen's berth in the hulk. One of the after-guard performed for me the office of gentleman-usher. It was a gloomy, foggy, chilly day, and the damp of the atmosphere was mingled with the reeking, dank, animal effluvia that came up, thick and almost tangible, from the filthy receptacle ...
— Rattlin the Reefer • Edward Howard
... went 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 that dipped ...
— The Matador of the Five Towns and Other Stories • Arnold Bennett
... tradition 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 ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 5 (of 14) • Elbert Hubbard
... saw the inert figures of the girl, and Tom Franklin. They were lying uninjured on two other small couches against the room's metal wall. The girl stirred a little as he touched her dank forehead. Her dyed blonde hair had fallen disheveled to her shoulders. Franklin lay sprawled, his stiff white shirt bosom dirty and rumpled, his thin sandy hair dangling over his flushed face. His slack mouth was open. ...
— The World Beyond • Raymond King Cummings
... 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 ...
— Tales of lonely trails • Zane Grey
... definite purpose, he walked on and on, for the most part absorbed in thought. He passed through the long grotta of Posillipo, gloomy, chilly, and dank; then out again into the sunshine, and along the road to Bagnoli. On walls and stone-heaps the little lizards darted about, innumerable; in vineyards men were at work dismantling the vine-props, often singing at their task. From Bagnoli, still walking merely ...
— The Emancipated • George Gissing
... I resolved to reside in this hovel until something should occur which might alter my determination. It was indeed a paradise compared to the bleak forest, my former residence, the rain-dropping branches, and dank earth. I ate my breakfast with pleasure and was about to remove a plank to procure myself a little water when I heard a step, and looking through a small chink, I beheld a young creature, with a pail on her head, passing before my hovel. The girl was young and ...
— Frankenstein - or The Modern Prometheus • Mary Wollstonecraft (Godwin) Shelley
... prevailing, I determined to let him sleep awhile, and then to arouse him, and administer a suitable reproof for such a forgetfulness of duty. Now and then I walked the rounds among the silent horses, to see that all was right. The night was chill, damp, and dark, the dank grass bending under the icy dewdrops. At the distance of a rod or two the tents were invisible, and nothing could be seen but the obscure figures of the horses, deeply breathing, and restlessly starting as they slept, or still slowly champing the grass. Far off, beyond the black outline ...
— The Oregon Trail • Francis Parkman, Jr.
... expects to see him shrivel ups like a fat angle-worm on a sea-coal fire. He's a modern Balaam, peddling God's blessings and curses—for the long green. He imagines that an eager multitude sit up every night to catch the first dank copy of his little matutinal mistake—to see what he's got to SAY. He's garrulous as a toothless gran dam at a sewing circle, as busy as a canine eunuch when his kind do congregate. He discourses of everything, from the creation of the universe to Farmer ...
— Volume 10 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... while we were traversing solid ground and had no special need to pick our footsteps; how would it be, I wondered, when it came to our re-crossing the belt of mangroves and mud that lay between us and the gig? Then, to add still further to our difficulties, the dank, heavy, pestilential fog that rises from the tropical African rivers at nightfall began to gather about us, and in a few minutes, from being bathed in perspiration from our exertions, we were chilled to the bone, with our teeth chattering to such an extent that we could scarcely ...
— A Middy of the Slave Squadron - A West African Story • Harry Collingwood
... to and fro in the dank darkness, beating first upon the door beneath the Convent cloisters, then upon the door, a mile away, leading into the ...
— The White Ladies of Worcester - A Romance of the Twelfth Century • Florence L. Barclay
... roads would discern without surprise, that it was a shaggy-haired man, of almost barbarian aspect, tall, in wooden shoes that were clumsy even to the eyes of a mender of roads, grim, rough, swart, steeped in the mud and dust of many highways, dank with the marshy moisture of many low grounds, sprinkled with the thorns and leaves and moss of many ...
— A Tale of Two Cities - A Story of the French Revolution • Charles Dickens
... of those patent American threshing machines, brought the cob out perfectly clear of grain, and took another. After the supper was over, we had another long grace ending with: "voor spijze en drunk de Heer ik dank" (for food and drink the ...
— Cetywayo and his White Neighbours - Remarks on Recent Events in Zululand, Natal, and the Transvaal • H. Rider Haggard
... settled down on them, denser and denser; the chill mists rose from the stream and enshrouded everything in a dank, noisome fog. ...
— The Downfall • Emile Zola
... glad to be out of it. No more fighting for them, Gott sei Dank! War was no good, at least not for the ...
— Combed Out • Fritz August Voigt
... well beside the first. Clym came forward and looked down. Strange humid leaves, which knew nothing of the seasons of the year, and quaint-natured mosses were revealed on the wellside as the lantern descended; till its rays fell upon a confused mass of rope and bucket dangling in the dank, dark air. ...
— The Return of the Native • Thomas Hardy
... a mild state of stupefaction turned away. Clat-clat! sang the little wooden shoes. A plaintive gonk rose as she prodded a laggard from the dank gutter. A piece of gold! Clat-clat! Clat-clat! Surely this had been a day of marvels; two crowns from the grand duke and a piece of gold from this old man in peasant clothes. Instinctively she knew that he was not a peasant. But what could ...
— The Goose Girl • Harold MacGrath
... Katharine; and after they had stared at each other for a long while, he rode away in silence. It was through a dank and tear-flawed world that she stumbled conventward, while out of the east the sun came bathed in mists, a watery sun no ...
— Chivalry • James Branch Cabell
... and perhaps ages back, to members of my race; and when I was a child I tried in vain to invent appropriate games for them, as I still try, just as vainly, to fit them with the proper story. Some places speak distinctly. Certain dank gardens cry aloud for a murder; certain old houses demand to be haunted; certain coasts are set apart for shipwreck. Other spots again seem to abide their destiny, suggestive and impenetrable, "miching mallecho." The inn ...
— Memories and Portraits • Robert Louis Stevenson
... breath of the whirlwind—the entire orb of the satellite burst at once upon my sight—my brain reeled as I saw the mighty walls rushing asunder—there was a long tumultuous shouting sound like the voice of a thousand waters—and the deep and dank tarn at my feet closed sullenly and silently over the fragments of ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 2 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... swim in golden mist, and luminous floods fill the Coliseum as it stands with its thousand arches looking out into the city like so many sightless eye-holes in the skull of the past. The tender light pours up streets dank and ill-paved,—into noisome and cavernous dens called houses, where the peasantry of to-day vegetate in contented subservience. It illuminates many a dingy court-yard, where the moss is green on the walls, and gurgling fountains fall into quaint old sculptured basins. It lights up the ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IX., March, 1862., No. LIII. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics, • Various
... bushes, breaking through the wild grape vines that slapped him in the face and caught his pole; and, creeping and ducking under them, at last he struck the little path to the Cherry Brook, that gurgled its way along Farmer Brown's meadow. Underneath the cool trees it was dank and mossy, and he flung himself down to rest, first carefully setting his precious pail ...
— The Adventures of Joel Pepper • Margaret Sidney
... riding down into the swale where Blake lived. The cottonwoods were almost bare. Only a few yellow leaves clung to the branches, and every moment a leaf fluttered down. Here in this swale Pan caught the autumn smells, dank and woody. ...
— Valley of Wild Horses • Zane Grey
... rushy-fringed bank, 890 Where grows the Willow and the Osier dank, My sliding Chariot stayes, Thick set with Agat, and the azurn sheen Of Turkis blew, and Emrauld green That in the channell strayes, Whilst from off the waters fleet Thus I set my printless feet O're the Cowslips Velvet head, That bends not as ...
— The Poetical Works of John Milton • John Milton
... foul, dark place, and full of evil smells. Drops of water stood on the cold stone walls, and a green mould crept along the floor. The air was heavy and dank, and it began to be hard for Nick to breathe. The men in the dungeons were singing a horrible song, and in the corner was a half-naked fellow shackled to the floor. "Give me a penny," he said, "or I will curse ...
— Master Skylark • John Bennett
... at the 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 New Tenant • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... up behind us, that we owned the world; as Carl wrote in another letter: "We'll stick this out [this being the separation of his last trip to London, whence he was to start for Heidelberg and his examination, without another visit with us], for, Gott sei dank! the time isn't so fearful, fearful long, it isn't really, is it? Gee! I'm glad I married you. And I want more babies and more you, and then the whole gang together for about ninety-two years. But life is so fine to us and we are getting so ...
— An American Idyll - The Life of Carleton H. Parker • Cornelia Stratton Parker
... thou'lt sing! for well thy magic muse Can to the topmost heaven of grandeur soar; Or stoop to wail the swain that is no more! Ah, homely swains! your homeward steps ne'er lose; 90 Let not dank Will[46] mislead you to the heath; Dancing in mirky night, o'er fen and lake, He glows, to draw you downward to your death, In his bewitch'd, low, marshy, willow brake! What though far off, from some dark dell espied, 95 His ...
— The Poetical Works of William Collins - With a Memoir • William Collins
... indignation. For each cell door as it was unbarred and thrown open revealed the same piteous scene, the deliverers starting back, or standing quite transfixed before the ghastly and withered figures which rose up before them from dank pallets of putrid straw. The faces of these dismal apparitions expressed the terror and apprehension which the tumult and uproar about the jail had created in minds no longer capable of ...
— The Duke of Stockbridge • Edward Bellamy
... individual; the organ was unusually large, the skin of the penis thick, and it was only by keeping the bladder empty that prevented a state of engorgement that would have effectually interfered with further catheterization. As it was, the penis was often dank, livid, and discolored ...
— History of Circumcision from the Earliest Times to the Present - Moral and Physical Reasons for its Performance • Peter Charles Remondino
... To the rice-swamp, dank and lone; There no mother's eye is near them, There no mother's ear can hear them; Never, when the torturing lash Seams their backs with many a gash, Shall a mother's kindness bless them, Or a mother's arms ...
— Lands of the Slave and the Free - Cuba, The United States, and Canada • Henry A. Murray
... peregrinations, 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, and which even then had been rapidly ...
— The Titan • Theodore Dreiser
... matter of indifference!" said the little Baroff sagely, her knowing eyes on Billy's grim young face. "So I am to be the sister to you—the Platonic friend—h'm?" she observed with droll resignation. "Never mind—I will help you get her out as you got me—Gott sei dank! There is a way, I think—if you are not too particular about that neck. I will tell you all and draw you a plan when we ...
— The Palace of Darkened Windows • Mary Hastings Bradley
... without and hurrying fancies within, he wandered on until he came near Colonsay Castle, at sight of which the desire awoke in him to look again on the scene of Lady Florimel's terror. He crossed the head of the little bay and descended into the heart of the rock. Even there the wind blew dank and howling through all the cavernous hollows. As he approached the last chamber, out of the Devil's Window flew, with clanging wing, an arrow barbed seagull, down to the grey veiled tumult below, ...
— Malcolm • George MacDonald
... twentieth-century Trade Unionism, was a veritable Gothic arch, bricked up to the height of a tall man's waist, but open at the tympanum. Alban hoisted himself to the aperture and, slipping through, his feet discovered the reeking floor of a dank and dripping subway; and guiding himself now by hands outstretched and fingers touching the fungi of the walls, he went on with confidence until the roof lifted above him and the watch-fires of the confraternity were disclosed. He had ...
— Aladdin of London - or Lodestar • Sir Max Pemberton
... the same source, and really represent a single race, but comparative 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 ...
— Ancient America, in Notes on American Archaeology • John D. Baldwin
... Of malisons and curses fell, Which steeped that soil with venom dank, Of which the ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 25, November, 1859 • Various
... himself immured in a dank and noisome dungeon, and knew that all the grim darkness of a medieval fortress lay between him and the outer world of sunshine and well-metalled high roads where he had lately been so happy, disporting himself ...
— The Wind in the Willows • Kenneth Grahame
... 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
... roots to bind its particles together, a new carpeting of turf to shield it from wind and sun and scouring rain. Gradually it becomes altogether barren. The washing of the soil from the mountains leaves bare ridges of sterile rock, and the rich organic mould which covered them, now swept down into the dank low grounds, promotes a luxuriance of aquatic vegetation, that breeds fever, and more insidious forms of mortal disease, by its decay, and thus the earth is rendered no longer fit for the habitation of man. [Footnote: Almost every narrative of travel ...
— The Earth as Modified by Human Action • George P. Marsh
... the captain, "to start with, the name of my hero is Shavings. Of course he had another name, but that's the one he was always known by, and I've forgotten the right one. He was a long-legged, lanky Vermont farmer, with dank strings of yellow hair hanging about his mild face. This hair gave him his nickname aboard the sealing schooner, Janet Barry, on which he signed as a boat man. How Shavings came to St. Johns, from which port the Janet Barry sailed, or why he picked ...
— The Ocean Wireless Boys And The Naval Code • John Henry Goldfrap, AKA Captain Wilbur Lawton
... while Winter went to the station to make sure of Siddle's departure and destination. Yes, the chemist had taken a return ticket to Epsom, where a strip of dank meadow-land on the road to Esher marks the last resting-place of many of London's epileptics. On returning to the high-street, Winter lighted a cigar, a somewhat common occurrence in his everyday life, where-upon Furneaux walked swiftly up the hill. A farmer, living near the center of ...
— The Postmaster's Daughter • Louis Tracy
... turning from the main road, we entered a grass-grown by-path, which, in half an hour, nearly lost itself in a dense forest, clothing the base of a mountain. Through this dank and gloomy wood we rode some two miles, when the Maison de Sante came in view. It was a fantastic chateau, much dilapidated, and indeed scarcely tenantable through age and neglect. Its aspect inspired me with absolute dread, and, checking ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 4 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... at the first 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 ...
— The Romany Rye • George Borrow
... clattering over the stones, and rays 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
... cloak Was dwarfish shrubs of birch and oak, 45 With shingles bare, and cliffs between, And patches bright of bracken green, And heather black, that waved so high, It held the copse in rivalry. But where the lake slept deep and still, 50 Dank osiers fringed the swamp and hill; And oft both path and hill were torn, Where wintry torrents down had borne, And heaped upon the cumbered land Its wreck of gravel, rocks and sand. 55 So toilsome was the road to trace, The guide, abating of his pace, Led slowly through ...
— Lady of the Lake • Sir Walter Scott
... which had been suffered to dry itself up, though still the little stream which used to fill it when the dams were in repair, murmured and meandered at the bottom of the hollow, and fed the roots of many a water plant and many a tree whose nature delights in dank and swampy soils. The verdure, however, which encircled this ancient edifice, added greatly to the beauty, when seen over the extent of waste and wild in which it stood. There can be no doubt but that the ancient possessors of this castle, which, from the single remaining ...
— Shanty the Blacksmith; A Tale of Other Times • Mrs. Sherwood [AKA: Mrs. Mary Martha Sherwood]
... day for there (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 ...
— A Son of the Middle Border • Hamlin Garland
... forest a century ago. While his horizon was still bounded by the clearing that his ax had made, the pioneer dreamed of continental conquests. The vastness of the wilderness kindled his imagination. His vision saw beyond the dank swamp at the edge of the great lake to the lofty buildings and the jostling multitudes of a mighty city; beyond the rank, grass-clad prairie to the seas of golden grain; beyond the harsh life of the log hut and the ...
— The Frontier in American History • Frederick Jackson Turner
... next he looked up his moment of gentleness had passed. His easier moods were never of long duration. One swift glance again at the distant hill, and then he turned from it and sat gazing at the dank, oozy prospect of the low-lying flat he was just entering with no sort of friendliness. The sharp hoofs of his team were flinging mud in every direction, and the rattle of the wheels had deadened to a thick sucking as they sank into the black mud. It ...
— The Twins of Suffering Creek • Ridgwell Cullum
... would pluck from out the dank, rich mould, Thick-shaded from the sun of noon, the long Lithe stalks of barley, topped with ruddy gold, And braid them in the meshes of my song; And with them I would tangle wheat and rye, And wisps ...
— Green Fields and Running Brooks, and Other Poems • James Whitcomb Riley
... of the roughest and most difficult kind, is seldom conscious of fatigue, until he returns to the upper air; and then it seems to him, at least in the summer season, that he has exchanged the atmosphere of paradise for that of a charnel warmed by steam—all without is so heavy, so dank, so dead, so mephitic. Awe and even apprehension, if that has been felt, soon yield to the influence of the delicious air of the Cave; and after a time a certain jocund feeling is found mingled with the deepest impressions of sublimity, which there are so ...
— Rambles in the Mammoth Cave, during the Year 1844 - By a Visiter • Alexander Clark Bullitt
... lunch, Sally helped Gaga to undress and left him in bed with the curtains again closed and the bedroom, thus darkened, smelling close and dank, as if it were the haunt of blackbeetles. When the curtains were drawn the whole room faded to a uniformity of grey-brown, and the pictures and ornaments became dim shadows, and the mirror upon the dressing-table took upon itself a ...
— Coquette • Frank Swinnerton
... soon secured a semblance of order. Maida's girls were here, with wet veils and long dank tresses clinging to their sleek bodies. Lips painted alluring red. But eyes which now were solemn and grim. Their demeanor alert and business-like. Unconscious of themselves they moved about the palace, ...
— Tarrano the Conqueror • Raymond King Cummings
... a pale sky and the little fire beneath where the entrails of traitors were burned—a nightmare which had long ridden him—nerved him to the next step. "His life or mine," he told himself, as he groped his way into a lane as steep, dank, and black as the ...
— The Path of the King • John Buchan
... 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
... half-heard utterances of spirits in pain, that groped at inconceivable distances from anything lovely or harmonious, seemed to rise dimly up out of the waves of sound that gathered under his hands. Melancholy human love wandered out on distant heaths, or beneath dank and gloomy cypresses, murmuring its unanswered sorrow, or hateful gnomes sported and sang in the stagnant swamps triumphing in unearthly tones over the knight whom they had lured to his death. Such was Blokeeta's night's entertainment; and when ...
— Masterpieces of Mystery - Riddle Stories • Various
... curate to 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 ...
— Alice, or The Mysteries, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... shoulder of a hill, and from the fastnesses of the hill a brook gushes down to the sea through the boulders that bestrew its banks. Obliged to wait until the preceding couple had holed out, our citizen and golfer amused himself by upturning one of the great lichen-stained boulders. He gazed into the dank pit thus disclosed to his eyes, and half drew back dismayed at the extraordinary activity of insect life that was revealed. It was so sudden, so unexpected. Beneath that grey and solemn boulder that Time and man accepted as a freehold tenant of the world, that our citizen ...
— Rembrandt • Mortimer Menpes
... I hear that he excels, And he insures Immediate cures Of weird, uncanny spells; The most unruly patient Gets docile as a lamb And is freed from ill by the potent skill Of Hoodoo-Doctor Sam; Feathers of strangled chickens, Moss from the dank lagoon, And plasters wet With spider sweat In the ...
— Songs and Other Verse • Eugene Field
... of people collected around me from all parts. They requested me to speak; but as I did not understand their language I could not answer them. They repeated often the word Dank, Dank, and supposing them to be Germans, I addressed them in this language, then in Danish, and finally in Latin; but they signified to me, by shaking their heads, that these languages were unknown to them. I tried ...
— Niels Klim's journey under the ground • Baron Ludvig Holberg
... earth and dank ere yet he reached That spot; and lo! where lamb had lain, and dove Had mourned, and child had raced, there stood indeed High-raised, the Cross of Christ. Before it long He prayed, and kneeling, marked that on a tomb That Cross was raised. ...
— The Legends of Saint Patrick • Aubrey de Vere
... 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 ...
— A Cigarette-Maker's Romance • F. Marion Crawford
... anything else in the world. Although Mrs. Craven made no movement yet he felt that she encouraged him come to her, that she wanted him. The room was very dark and bare, and although a large fire blazed in the hearth, it was cold. Beyond the window a misty world, dank, with dripping trees, stretched to a dim horizon. Mrs. Craven did not turn her eyes from the fire when she heard him enter. He felt as though she were watching him and knew that he had drawn a chair beside the sofa. Suddenly she moved her hand towards him and he took it and ...
— The Prelude to Adventure • Hugh Walpole
... other changes find, And open still and vary still the mind. The countless clans that tread these dank abodes, Who glean spontaneous fruits and range the woods, Fixt here for ages, in their swarthy face Display the wild complexion of the place. Yet when the hordes to happy nations rise, And earth By culture warms the genial skies, A fairer tint ...
— The Columbiad • Joel Barlow
... my 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 a grass-plat, and this set in the ...
— Jane Eyre - an Autobiography • Charlotte Bronte
... handsome man of early middle age, who might indeed have passed for a young man, had he not looked very tired and care-worn and exhibited a bald patch at the back of his head, rendered the more apparent because the brown-gold curls round it were dank with perspiration. He rose to his feet, clicked his heels together and saluted. "An English young lady, I am told, rather ... a ... surprise ... on ... the ... outskirts ... of Brussels..." (His English was excellent, if rather ...
— Mrs. Warren's Daughter - A Story of the Woman's Movement • Sir Harry Johnston
... 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
... and did not extend beyond the meadows, but it rose at intervals, though the clearance was only momentary, and had scarcely become perceptible before reinforcements of dull white vapour, tainted with miasma, rolled up from the marshy ground, bringing dank odours of standing water and weedy vegetation, half decayed, and gradually encroaching on the river, the smooth surface of which glowed with a greasy gleam beneath it, making it look like ...
— The Heavenly Twins • Madame Sarah Grand
... many other gigantic parasites. In the underwood you meet thorny aloes, the "pita" plant, and wild mezcal; various Cactacese, and flora of singular forms, scarcely known to the botanist. There are swamps, dark and dank, overshadowed by the tall cypress, with its pendent streamers of silvery moss (Tillandsia usneoides). From these arise the miasma—the ...
— The Rifle Rangers • Captain Mayne Reid
... permanent citizen. And when he was landed, he found that his dancing place was only a barren rock where the seagulls mourned. Past the glamour of the sun and sea mists, there were only cold, searching winds and dank stone.... ...
— The Wind Bloweth • Brian Oswald Donn-Byrne
... "Dank 'oo, I'm so dirsty," lisped the little man in affable acquiescence; and, the next moment, Jupp had spirited out a rough basket from under the seat in the corner, when extracting a tin can with a cork stopper therefrom, he put it on the fire to ...
— Teddy - The Story of a Little Pickle • J. C. Hutcheson
... winds were whispering through the wood, The rolling rill ran 'round the ragged rock; The shepherd, with his sunny, smiling face, Was far away to feed his flitting flock. Deep in the dingle, dank ...
— The Rover Boys at College • Edward Stratemeyer
... tropical daybreak was chilly. The Malay quartermaster, coming up to get something from the lockers on the bridge, shivered visibly. The forests above and below and on the opposite bank looked black and dank; wet dripped from the rigging upon the tightly stretched deck awnings, and it was in the middle of a shuddering yawn that I caught sight of Almayer. He was moving across a patch of burned grass, ...
— A Personal Record • Joseph Conrad
... Hankinson have listened to more had there been more to hear, for simultaneously with the moan he became uncomfortably conscious of a presence. In trying to describe it afterwards, Hankinson said that at first he thought a cold draught from a dank cavern filled with a million eels, and a rattlesnake or two thrown in for luck, was blowing over him, and he avowed that it was anything but pleasant; and then it seemed to change into a mist drawn largely from a stagnant pool in a malarial country, floating through which were great quantities ...
— The Water Ghost and Others • John Kendrick Bangs
... the 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 book, or ...
— Ballads • William Makepeace Thackeray
... 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, ...
— The House of Souls • Arthur Machen
... to the jaded soul its freshness—times from which some men have emerged, as if reborn. The crises of life are very silent. Suddenly the scene opened on Randal Leslie's eyes. The bare desert common—the dilapidated church—the old house, partially seen in the dank dreary hollow, into which it seemed to Randal to have sunken deeper and lowlier than when he saw it last. And on the common were some young men playing at hockey. That old-fashioned game, now very uncommon in England, except at schools, was still preserved ...
— The International Monthly Magazine, Volume 5, No. 1, January, 1852 • Various
... the dismal chamber. 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 ...
— Gobseck • Honore de Balzac
... inside. 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 ...
— The Rider in Khaki - A Novel • Nat Gould
... struck up the western shore of Wollaston Lake. The first golden tints were ripening in the canoe-birch leaves, and the tremulous whisper of autumn was in the rustle of the aspen trees. The poplars were yellowing, the ash were blood red with fruit, and in cool, dank thickets wild currants were glossy black and lusciously ripe. It was the season which Jolly Roger loved most of all, and it was the beginning of Peter's first September. The days were still hot, but at night there was a bracing something in the air that stirred the blood, and Peter found a sharp, ...
— The Country Beyond - A Romance of the Wilderness • James Oliver Curwood
... were leaden and the dead atmosphere pressed his very soul to the dank earth, Weary would hoist his umbrella and walk and walk and walk, till the streets grew empty around him and his footsteps sounded hollow on the pavements. One Sunday when it was not actually raining he hired a horse and rode into the country—and he came back draggled and ...
— The Lonesome Trail and Other Stories • B. M. Bower
... door, and D'ri flung our "duds" into the darkness that lay beyond it. Then he made down the ladder, and I after him. It was pitch-dark in the cellar—a deep, dank place with a rank odor of rotting potatoes. We groped our way to a corner, and stood listening. We heard the tramp of horses in the dooryard and the clinic of ...
— D'Ri and I • Irving Bacheller
... wonder—it is laden with compressed animal life. Then a dull, hot weight closes round your brows, as if a heavy, fever-stricken hand was always clasping them; there it lies—at night, when the drowsiness which is not sleep overcomes you—in the morning, when you wake, with damp linen and dank hair: plunge your forehead in ice-cold water; before the drops have dried there it is burning—burning again. The distaste for all food grows upon you, till it becomes a loathing not to be driven away by bitters or quinine: there is no ...
— Border and Bastille • George A. Lawrence
... or agents have been already summoned. These three are, the Athens estate, Monsieur Dank; the Breda estate, the attorney ...
— The Hour and the Man - An Historical Romance • Harriet Martineau
... the cloaca which had so long been fed by the residual waters escaped from the abattoirs of Tiffauges and Machecoul. He had sobbed in despair of ever draining this stagnant pool. And thunder-smitten by grace, in a cry of horror and joy, he had suddenly seen his soul overflow and sweep away the dank fen before a torrential current of prayer and ecstasy. The butcher of Sodom had destroyed himself, the companion of Jeanne d'Arc had reappeared, the mystic whose soul poured out to God, in bursts of ...
— La-bas • J. K. Huysmans
... lone; the grass was dank With night-dews on the briery bank Whereon a weary reaper sank. His garb was old,—his visage tanned; The rusty sickle in his hand Could find no work ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 79, May, 1864 • Various
... sing'st of ravishment, Make thy sad grove in my dishevell'd hair: As the dank earth weeps at thy languishment, So I at each sad strain will strain a tear, And with deep groans the diapason bear: For burthen-wise I'll hum on Tarquin still, While thou ...
— The Rape of Lucrece • William Shakespeare [Collins edition]
... He held only a club as a means of defense. He was in rags. His black hair hung in dank locks about ...
— Doubloons—and the Girl • John Maxwell Forbes
... dense assemblage of dull, flowerless trees pervaded by a hot, dank atmosphere, with no change of seasons, with no movement but the flying of large and primitive insects among the trees and the stirring of the ferns below by some passing giant salamander, with no song of bird and no single streak of white or ...
— The Story of Evolution • Joseph McCabe
... hair was wet, 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
... him, and a scene met The Kid's eyes that caused him to shudder. In the big, dank room were huddled fourteen prisoners. Most of them were miserable, half-naked peons. It was intolerably hot, and the air was so bad ...
— Kid Wolf of Texas - A Western Story • Ward M. Stevens
... cease—generally some time in May —through the six-months' period of their cessation, the programme for the day is, with but few exceptions, unvaried. Fog in the morning —chilling, penetrating fog, which obscures the rays of the morning sun completely, and, dank and "clinging like cerements," swathes every thing with its soft, gray folds. On the bay it hangs, heavy and chill, blotting out everything but the nearest objects, and at a little distance hardly distinguishable from the water itself. At such times ...
— California Sketches, Second Series • O. P. Fitzgerald
... of light, rich in the harvest of good deeds, and full of the joy of angels; whilst, to the left, the road descends to the molehills of vice, toward a dark cavern, full of poisonous droppings, stinging serpents, and dank and steaming mists. ...
— Golden Steps to Respectability, Usefulness and Happiness • John Mather Austin
... during the heat of the day, to paddle along the shallows or sit and enjoy the cool air. There was always a breeze at the mouth of Corkscrew Gorge, and when it drew down, as it did on this day, it carried the odors of dank caverns. In the dark and gloomy depths of this gash through the hills the rocks were always damp and cold; and beneath the great waterfalls, where the cloudbursts had scooped out pot-holes, there was a delicious mist and spray. She dawdled by the willows, then splashed on up the slippery ...
— Wunpost • Dane Coolidge
... our ragged Duke, our barefoot Earl, By right of birth exonerate from toil, Who levies rent from us his tenants all, And serves the state by merely being. Here The Scissors-grinder, pausing, doffs his hat, And lets the kind breeze, with its delicate fan, Winnow the heat from out his dank gray hair,— A grimy Ulysses, a much-wandered man, 230 Whose feet are known to all the populous ways, And many men and manners he hath seen, Not without fruit of solitary thought. He, as the habit is of lonely men,— Unused to try the temper of their mind In fence with others,—positive ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell
... father virtuous son, Now that the fields are dank, and ways are mire, Where shall we sometimes meet, and by the fire Help waste a sullen day, what may be won From the hard season gaining? Time will run On smoother, till Favonius re-inspire The frozen earth, and ...
— Life of John Milton • Richard Garnett
... . "Und 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 lachtest dich gesund." ...
— Laurence Sterne in Germany • Harvey Waterman Thayer
... his knees; and, in the silence that followed was heard the drip, drip, drip, from the sodden rags on the beaten earth floor. The people without, staring, open-mouthed and silent, saw the Friar look up; his hand hastily outstretched touched the dank, muddy hair; then he knew all, and fell on his face with an exceeding bitter cry. It was answered by another cry—the glad cry of a ...
— The Gathering of Brother Hilarius • Michael Fairless
... softly of the sweet-voiced, tender-eyed woman from whose fairy bower it came in rosy wrappings. And this Nemophila, 'blue as my brother's eyes,'—the brave young brother whose heroism and manhood have outstripped his years, and who looks forth from the dank leafiness of far Australia lovingly and longingly over the blue waters, as if, floating above them, he might catch the flutter of white garments and the smile on a ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 55, May, 1862 • Various
... Charles the First Rose like the equinoctial sun,... By vapours, through whose threatening ominous veil Darting his altered influence he has gained This height of noon—from which he must decline 50 Amid the darkness of conflicting storms, To dank extinction and to latest night... There goes The apostate Strafford; he whose titles whispered aphorisms 55 From Machiavel and Bacon: and, if Judas Had been as brazen and ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley Volume I • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... middle of the island. But the fogs melted away as the morning rose, and ere our breakfast was satisfactorily discussed, the last thin wreath had disappeared from around the columned front of the rock-tower of Eigg, and a powerful sun looked down on moist slopes and dank hollows, from which there arose in the calm a hazy vapor, that, while it softened the lower features of the landscape, left the bold outline relieved against a clear sky. Accompanied by our attendant of the previous day, bearing bag and hammer, we set out a little before eleven for ...
— The Cruise of the Betsey • Hugh Miller
... 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 ...
— The House of Atreus • AEschylus
... was left bare, and the apertures stretched away into galleries—not wholly dark, but dimly lighted by wandering and erratic fires, that, meteor-like, now crept (as the snake creeps) along the rugged and dank soil; and now leaped fiercely to and fro, darting across the vast gloom in wild gambols—suddenly disappearing, and as suddenly bursting into tenfold brilliancy and power. And while he gazed wonderingly upon the gallery to the ...
— The Last Days of Pompeii • Edward George Bulwer-Lytton
... in the wave, gleam in the mud — The dark fire leaps along his blood; Dateless and deathless, blind and still, The intricate impulse works its will; His woven world drops back; and he, Sans providence, sans memory, Unconscious and directly driven, Fades to some dank sufficient heaven. ...
— The Collected Poems of Rupert Brooke • Rupert Brooke
... one grasped what had happened, only there was Norton who seemed to grope strangely among the graves. Black spots danced before his eyes, the little group by the church merged into the distance—always receding, always more remote, as he, stumbled helplessly over the moss and the thick dank myrtle and among the round graves that gave him a treacherous footing; and then he heard Betty's agonized cry. He had fallen now, and his strength went from him, but he kept his face turned on the group before the church ...
— The Prodigal Judge • Vaughan Kester
... forlorn and empty part of the huge, resounding ochreish station. Then, without warning or signal, it slipped off, as though casually, towards an undetermined goal. Often it ran level with the roofs of vague, far-stretching acres of houses— houses vile and frowsy, and smoking like pyres in the dank air. And always it travelled on a platform of brick arches. Now and then the walled road received a tributary that rounded subtly into it, and this tributary could be seen curving away, on innumerable brick ...
— Hilda Lessways • Arnold Bennett
... valleys its progress was followed by an opalescent gossamer presence that was like the overflowing fulness, the surplusage, of light rather than mist. The shadows of the great trees were interlaced with dazzling silver gleams. The night was almost as bright as the day, but cool and dank, full of sylvan fragrance and restful silence and a ...
— The Riddle Of The Rocks - 1895 • Charles Egbert Craddock (AKA Mary Noailles Murfree)
... in truth a strange and terrible place — the dank walls, down which the damp moisture slowly trickled, hung round with instruments of various forms, all designed with a terrible purpose, and from their ...
— In the Days of Chivalry • Evelyn Everett-Green
... moor-birds protested against this invasion of their haunts. The moon came slowly up over the eastern end of the moor, flinging a silver radiance abroad, and softening the shadows cast by the hills. A strange, dank smell rose from the mossy ground—the scent of rotting heather and withered grass, mixed with the beautiful perfume from beds ...
— The Underworld - The Story of Robert Sinclair, Miner • James C. Welsh
... here and there a touch of silvery light upon its clouded surface. The cottonwoods and willows, on the opposite shore, were mere dreams of trees,—gray, formless, and weird. The air was filled with the dank earth-smell. The heavy thundering roar of the never-ending war of the waters at Elbow Rock came louder and more menacing, but strangely unreal, as if the mist itself were ...
— The Re-Creation of Brian Kent • Harold Bell Wright
... surrounded by a vestibule—a mere projection from the roof supported on a few rough beams—but never a garden, scarcely a tree to cast a cooling shade on hot summer afternoons, or clump of lilies or mimosa to sweeten the air that came dank and fetid from over the marshes ...
— "Unto Caesar" • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... themselves up into the warm glow of the sun, inviting Noozak and Neewa to the feast. All these things Noozak smelled with the experience and the knowledge of twenty years of life behind her—the delicious aroma of the spruce and the jackpine; the dank, sweet scent of water-lily roots and swelling bulbs that came from a thawed-out fen at the foot of the ridge; and over all these things, overwhelming their individual sweetnesses in a still greater thrill of life, the smell ...
— Nomads of the North - A Story of Romance and Adventure under the Open Stars • James Oliver Curwood
... touching words of our Dutch translator with whom I'm sure you'll heartily agree: Toch ben ik er mijn landgenooten dank baar voor, die mijn arbeid steeds zoo welwillend outvangen en wier genegenheid ik voortdurend ...
— Hans Brinker - or The Silver Skates • Mary Mapes Dodge
... suddenly, to 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 frail and old, looking up to him ...
— Phantom Wires - A Novel • Arthur Stringer
... Roughly it may be located at latitude 7 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 ...
— The Story of Atlantis and the Lost Lemuria • W. Scott-Elliot
... in a dungeon grew, Unfed by rain, uncheered by dew; Its pallid leaflets only drank Cave-moistures foul, and odours dank. ...
— Words of Cheer for the Tempted, the Toiling, and the Sorrowing • T. S. Arthur
... 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
... throat was cold, My garments all were dank; Sure I had drunken in my dreams, And still my ...
— English Songs and Ballads • Various
... strike the diadem from his impious brows, "Tear from his murderous hand the bloody rod, 290 "And teach the trembling nations, "THOU ART GOD!"— —SYLPHS! in what dread array with pennons broad Onward ye floated o'er the ethereal road, Call'd each dank steam the reeking marsh exhales, Contagious vapours, and volcanic gales, 295 Gave the soft South with poisonous breath to blow, And rolled the dreadful whirlwind on the foe!— Hark! o'er the camp the venom'd tempest sings, Man falls on Man, on buckler buckler rings; Groan answers ...
— The Botanic Garden - A Poem in Two Parts. Part 1: The Economy of Vegetation • Erasmus Darwin
... after a while. On the one hand, it is necessary to be extremely keen; on the other, to be sure of your own self-control, not to fire uselessly. The bramble-bushes on the shore of the ditch ahead might cover a hare. Through the dank and dark-green aftermath a rabbit might suddenly come bounding, disturbed from the furrow where he had been feeding. On the sandy paths which the rabbits have made aslant up the mound, and on their terraces, where they sit and look out ...
— The Open Air • Richard Jefferies
... heavy peacefulness; Who lov'st to see the hamadryads dress Their ruffled locks where meeting hazels darken; And through whole solemn hours dost sit, and hearken The dreary melody of bedded reeds— In desolate places, where dank moisture breeds 240 The pipy hemlock to strange overgrowth; Bethinking thee, how melancholy loth Thou wast to lose fair Syrinx—do thou now, By thy love's milky brow! By all the trembling mazes that she ...
— Endymion - A Poetic Romance • John Keats
... 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 ...
— The Hound of Heaven • Francis Thompson
... this dank rain from the northeast, and on this high ground, not a passage in the house could be got above forty-six; and the sitting-rooms ...
— The Mating of Lydia • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... smiling back at us, and waving his adieux to his mistress! Beside the Vidame he had the air of being slight, even short. The face which I had known so bright and winning, was now white and set. His fair, curling hair—scarce darker than Croisette's—hung dank, bedabbled with blood which flowed from a wound in his head. His sword was gone; his dress was torn and disordered and covered with dust. His lips moved. But he held up his head, he bore himself bravely ...
— The House of the Wolf - A Romance • Stanley Weyman
... 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
... 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 ...
— Hawaiian Folk Tales - A Collection of Native Legends • Various
... than the ellipses arched by the boughs from its taper stem. Few contrivances more umbrageous than the combination of its long, feathery foliations into its perfection of a parasol. But there are times in the dank, hot nights of midsummer, when the ailantus is but a diluted upas-antiar of Macassar, tainting, albeit with no deadly essence, the muggy air that rocks its slumbering branches and rolls away thence along the parapets and in at the windows ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume V, Number 29, March, 1860 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... 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 ...
— Chapters from My Autobiography • Mark Twain
... returned no answer, but rose at once to his feet, and submitted to be led away. I took him the shortest road to my house through the shrubbery, brought him into the study, made him sit down in my easy-chair, and rang for lights and wine; for the dew had been falling heavily, and his clothes were quite dank. But when the wine came, he refused ...
— Annals of a Quiet Neighbourhood • George MacDonald
... and call the cattle home, And call the cattle home, And call the cattle home Across the sands of Dee!" The western wind was wild and dank with foam, ...
— Children's Literature - A Textbook of Sources for Teachers and Teacher-Training Classes • Charles Madison Curry
... garden beyond. There was a level green lawn, with sedate paths marching around it, but no black hooded figures were moving there in ones or twos or in solemn file, as I had been wont to see them. I walked rather uncertainly forward across the grass, across the dank and mossy paths, and into the shadowy length of the corridor. This, too, was empty, and at one end of it a little door, with a grill across it, seemed as effectually to bar me out as the Spanish Woman's house ...
— The Other Side of the Door • Lucia Chamberlain
... shadows of the evening glow one seemed to see at the end of every street mysterious clusters of masts, and to hear the clank of chains and the creak of restless boards. There were few people about and a great silence everywhere. The air was damp and thick, and smelt of rotten soil, as though dank grass was everywhere pushing its way up through the cobbles ...
— The Secret City • Hugh Walpole
... send. It is well, yea! best: A lily hangs dead on its stalk, ah me! A dream hangs dead on a life it blest. Shall it flaunt its death where sad eyes may see In the cold dank wind of our memory? Shall we watch it rot like an empty nest? Love's ghost, poor pitiful mockery— Bury these shreds and behold ...
— English Poems • Richard Le Gallienne
... metal remained to assure us that the light was still there, ready to flash out at a moment's notice. To me, with my nerves worked up to a pitch of expectancy, there was something depressing and subduing in the sudden gloom, and in the cold, dank air ...
— The Boy Scouts Book of Stories • Various
... the isle of Thorney, (amidst the brakes and briars of which were then rising fast and fair the Hall and Abbey of Westminster;) many a wood lay dark in the starlight, along the higher ground that sloped from the dank Strand, with its numerous canals or dykes;—and on either side of the great road into Kent:—flutes and horns sounded far and near through the green places, and laughter and song, and the ...
— Harold, Complete - The Last Of The Saxon Kings • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... swim we, the moon shines bright, There's a golden gleam on the distant height; There's a silver shower on the alders dank. And the drooping willows that wave on the bank. I see the abbey, both turret and tower, It is all astir for the vesper hour; The monks for the chapel are leaving each cell. But Where's Father Philip, should toll ...
— The Monastery • Sir Walter Scott
... the cane-brake, green and dank, That girdled his home by the Dacca tank. He thought of his wife and his High School son, He thought—but abandoned the thought—of a gun. His sleep was broken by visions dread Of a shining Boh ...
— The Works of Rudyard Kipling One Volume Edition • Rudyard Kipling
... a full day's length amid the columned aisles of the forest temple through lush green glades dank and steaming in the August heat, or over hillsides slippery with the fallen leaves of the pine-trees. Anon it traced the crooked windings of some brawling mountain stream through thicket tangles where, you would think, ...
— The Master of Appleby • Francis Lynde
... at sunrise our company mustered; And here was the huntsman bidding unkennel, And there 'neath his bonnet the pricker blustered, With feather dank as a bough of wet fennel; 335 For the courtyard walls were filled with fog You might have cut as an ax chops a log— Like so much wool for color and bulkiness; And out rode the Duke in a perfect sulkiness, Since, before breakfast, a man feels but queasily, 340 And a sinking at the lower abdomen ...
— Selections from the Poems and Plays of Robert Browning • Robert Browning
... Humfrey's special glory. The thought of such pleasures did not seem out of keeping. The lane was overhung with bushes; the banks, a whole wealth of ferns, climbing plants, tall grasses, and nettles, had not yet felt the sun and were dank and dreary, so she hurried on, and arriving at the clerk's door, knocked and opened. He was gone to his work, and sounds above showed the wife to be engaged on the toilette of the younger branches. She called ...
— Hopes and Fears - scenes from the life of a spinster • Charlotte M. Yonge
... Mondays he returned at midday to a house filled with steam and the dank odour of soap-suds, and to the worst of the week's meagre meals. A hundred times he had reproached himself that he did ungratefully to let this affect him, for his wife (poor soul) had been living in it all day, whereas his morning ...
— Brother Copas • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... 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 ...
— Letters of a Dakota Divorcee • Jane Burr
... "When you are near me I have feelings similar to those produced by dank warehouses, gloomy crypts, and deep mines. And as sailors feel the loom of the land on dark nights, so I think I feel the loom of your body. But it is ...
— Moon-Face and Other Stories • Jack London
... the dank woods and where the meadows gleam, The lowliest flower that smiled To wisdom's vigil or to fancy's dream ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 85, November, 1864 • Various
... with a 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 very unpleasant, but he was undoubtedly ...
— The Recipe for Diamonds • Charles John Cutcliffe Wright Hyne
... seven, she was as tall as most children of ten, immensely fat, with pendulous red cheeks that in spite of cold cream and soft water always looked as though they had just been rubbed with a grater. Her hair, long and fair, was dank, hanging in two emaciated pig-tails nearly to her waist, and her nails—another ineradicable trick—bitten to the deepest ...
— The Halo • Bettina von Hutten
... the 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 ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 2, May, 1851 • Various
... rushy-fringed bank, Where grows the willow and the osier dank, My sliding chariot stays, Thick set with agate, and the azurn sheen Of turkis blue, and emerald green, That in the channel strays; Whilst from off the waters fleet Thus I set my printless feet O'er the cowslip's velvet head, That bends not as I tread. Gentle swain, ...
— L'Allegro, Il Penseroso, Comus, and Lycidas • John Milton
... path 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 city, where is held Black Pluto's savage court. A thousand gates, Wide ope, surround ...
— The Metamorphoses of Publius Ovidus Naso in English blank verse Vols. I & II • Ovid
... when the vernal rain Warmed the chill heart of earth again, Tilled the dull plot of sterile ground, Within the dank and narrow round That compassed his obscure domain; With earnest zeal, thro' heat and cold, He wrought and turned the sluggish mold, And all in furrows straight and fair He sowed the yellow seed with care, Trusting ...
— The Poets and Poetry of Cecil County, Maryland • Various
... see the ink-bottle there?" quoth Charles to 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 ...
— The Channings • Mrs. Henry Wood
... may say so, round the top of the valley, beyond the head waters of the dark river, and was kept on the high level until he got to the other side. You and I have to go down the hill, out of the sunshine, in among the dank weeds, to stumble over the black rocks, and wade through the deep water; but we shall get over to the same place where he stands, and He that took him round by the top will 'take' us through the river; and so shall we 'ever ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus and Numbers • Alexander Maclaren
... 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 ...
— Paradise Lost • John Milton
... been pulling against slack water all day, water so slack you could dip your hand down and fail to tell which way the current ran. Where the high banks dropped suddenly to such a dank tangle of reeds, brush wood, windfall and timbers drifted fifteen hundred miles down from the forests of the Rocky Mountains—such a tangle as I have never seen in any swamp of the South—the skeleton ...
— The Canadian Commonwealth • Agnes C. Laut
... as in the interior of the great Pyramid of Gizeh—though the place smelled dank and close and stifling—time seemed to have lost much of its destructive power. He chose one boiler that looked sound, and began ...
— Darkness and Dawn • George Allan England
... respect we must have seen Verona under a disadvantage: there was no sunshine during our short stay. The beautiful, lordly gardens of the Palazzo Giusti on the declivity of a hillside on the left bank of the Adige were dank and dripping; there was no temptation to linger near their chilly statues and gloomy cypresses; even the view from their noble terraces, formed partly by the wall of the town, was cold and colorless under the November sky. Out-of-door life is so large ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 20, August 1877 • Various
... down to breakfast, but Aunt Jane appeared, fresh and glowing, just in time for prayers, having been with Gillian and Harry to survey the scene of operations, and to judge of the day, which threatened showers, the grass being dank and sparkling with ...
— The Two Sides of the Shield • Charlotte M. Yonge
... furnishing broken chairs, coils of tarred rope, a rack of ponderous oars and boat-hooks, a display of shapeless oilskins and sou'westers on pegs. The windows were boarded up from sills to lintels, the air was close and dank with the stale flavour ...
— Red Masquerade • Louis Joseph Vance
... tome is musty with dank superstition From which we shrink recoiling, to th' extreme Of an unfaith that with material vision, Accounts as myth ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 11, No. 24, March, 1873 • Various
... forward with his arms around her drooping body and her wet cheek upon his breast. A sorry sight this for the gaunt abbess, an ill lesson too for the stainless two-and-twenty who have ever been taught that the way of nature is the way of sin. But Maude and Alleyne care little for this. A dank, cold air comes out from the black arch before them. Without, the sun shines bright and the birds are singing amid the ivy on the drooping beeches. Their choice is made, and they turn away hand-in-hand, ...
— The White Company • Arthur Conan Doyle
... proceeded to a door on the further side, where the kitchen angle partly enclosed a flagging of broad stones. Inside, the house, empty of furnishing, was a place of echoes muffled in dust; the insidious, dank odours of corrupting wood and plaster; walls with melancholy, superimposed, stripping papers; older, sombrely blistered paint and panelled wainscoting varnished in an imitation, yellow graining. It was without a relic of past dignity. Mariana was unable to discover a souvenir of the generations ...
— The Three Black Pennys - A Novel • Joseph Hergesheimer
... trembles. Venus in Furs is jealous of her slave. She snatches the whip from its hook and strikes me in the face; then she calls her black servants, who bind me, and carry me down into the cellar, where they throw me into a dark, dank, subterranean compartment, ...
— Venus in Furs • Leopold von Sacher-Masoch
... general air of gloom—hopeless gloom—was depressing. Such mawkish sentimentality and despair; such inane and mortifying confessions; such longings for a lover to come; such sighings over a lover departed; such cravings for "only"—"only" a grave in some dark, dank solitude. As Mrs. Dodge puts it, "Pegasus generally feels inclined to pace toward a graveyard the moment he feels a side-saddle on ...
— The Wit of Women - Fourth Edition • Kate Sanborn
... inevitable blue disc, imbedded in the walls, shall 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 arrogance ...
— The Gentle Art of Making Enemies • James McNeill Whistler
... forest and the lake had been out all night. For seventy miles of Canadian wilderness only the mountains and the forest and the lake stood actually convicted of having been out all night. Dank and white with its vaporous vigil the listless lake kindled wanly to the new day's breeze. Blue with cold a precipitous mountain peak lurched craggedly home through a rift in the fog. Drenched with mist, bedraggled with dew, a green-feathered pine tree lay guzzling insatiably ...
— The White Linen Nurse • Eleanor Hallowell Abbott |
