"Maelstrom" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Merlin and Mr. Brudenell, as they saw a tremendous sea break in thunder over the wreck, which was instantly whirled violently around as in the vortex of a maelstrom. ...
— Self-Raised • Emma Dorothy Eliza Nevitte Southworth
... that this was more or less true of the American writer up to a date roughly coinciding with that of the Chicago World's Fair in 1892. During the thirty years more or less which have elapsed since that date, there has been an ever widening seething maelstrom of cross currents thrusting into more and more powerful conflict from year to year the contributory elements brought to a new potential American culture by the dynamic creative energies, physical and spiritual, of ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1921 and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... and cataracts, quite without any physical reason for existence, were thought to roar and roll just beyond the horizon. It is only within a few decades that the geographies have abandoned the pleasing fiction of the maelstrom, and a few centuries ago the sudden downpour of the waters at the "end of the world" was a thoroughly accepted tenet of physical geography. Yet men, adventurous and inquisitive, kept ever pushing forward into the unknown, until now there remain no strange seas and few ...
— American Merchant Ships and Sailors • Willis J. Abbot
... talk we had while dodging furious trams and enormous waggons piled with merchandise, in that maelstrom of traffic near the Marseilles docks, which must be passed before we could escape into the country. At last, coasting down a dangerously winding hill with a too suggestively named village at the bottom—L'Assassin—the Aigle turned westward. The ...
— The Motor Maid • Alice Muriel Williamson and Charles Norris Williamson
... some sort and by the force of circumstances the responsible spokesmen of the rights of humanity, and that we cannot remain silent while those rights seem in process of being swept utterly away in the maelstrom of this terrible war. We owe it to a due regard for our own rights as a nation, to our sense of duty as a representative of the rights of neutrals the world over, and to a just conception of the rights of mankind to take this stand now with the ...
— President Wilson's Addresses • Woodrow Wilson
... smoke which forms the canopy—occasionally a gorgeous one—of the more than Babel city. Stretching before me, the troubled breast of the mighty river, and, immediately below, the main whirlpool of the Thames—the Maelstrom of the bulwarks of the middle arch—a grisly pool, which, with its superabundance of horror, fascinated me. Who knows but I should have leapt into its depths?—I have heard of such things—but for a rather startling occurrence ...
— Lavengro - The Scholar, The Gypsy, The Priest • George Borrow
... It was a maelstrom. A tremendous conflict was going on in it. One part of it was urging the body on in its fantastic crawl toward the young woman frozen in terror against the sky. The visitor was aware of the other part, submerged and struggling feebly, trying to get through with a message of reason. But ...
— The Inhabited • Richard Wilson
... who, by chance rather than by reason of any particular fitness for survival, had won safely through a whirlpool. The next few years were a troublous time, a stormy era of transition, for most English people. For many besides myself the period was a veritable maelstrom of confusion, of blind battling with unrecognized forces, of wasted effort, neglected duty, ...
— The Message • Alec John Dawson
... over the gaunt form on my study floor; Gatton's voice shouting orders. Then, we had jumped into the cab and enjoining the man to drive like fury, were speeding off through the busy London streets. Leaving the quietude of one suburb for the maelstrom of central London, we presently emerged into an equally quiet backwater upon the ...
— The Green Eyes of Bast • Sax Rohmer
... appearance of a great opal under the rays of the sun. Again, it blazes like the flames of a great furnace, shooting forth great tongues of fire in this direction and that, rising and falling in great waves of emotional excitement, or passion, or perhaps whirling like a great fiery maelstrom toward its centre, or swirling in an outward movement away from its centre. Again it may be seen as projecting from its depths smaller bodies or centres of mental vibration, which like sparks from a furnace detach themselves from ...
— The Human Aura - Astral Colors and Thought Forms • Swami Panchadasi
... taught to believe That pleasures are pitfalls prepared to deceive By wily old Satan (who constantly tries To catch you by throwing his dust in your eyes, Thus, blinding his victim, securing his prize); That the dance is a maelstrom, where sinners are whirled Around a few times, and then suddenly hurled From daylight to darkness, from pleasure to woe, From terrestrial regions, to regions—below: But now was afforded a fine opportunity For taking some pleasure with perfect impunity;— Ostensibly pleasing a worthy relation, ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 1, July, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... darling," she said at last as youth and beauty whirled by in a maelstrom of modern Terpsichorean liveliness, "she is a great success. I don't know whether it is quite what ...
— The Head of the House of Coombe • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... name. Graduated in a single year from the University of Copenhagen, "at which," his teachers bore witness, "no one need wonder who knows the man," he became at twenty-two pastor of a parish up in the Lofoden Islands, where the fabled maelstrom churns. Eleven years he preached to the poor fisherfolk on Sunday, and on week-days helped his parishioners rebuild the old church. When it was finished and the bishop came to consecrate it, he chided Egede because the altar ...
— Hero Tales of the Far North • Jacob A. Riis
... paramount mystery of all, has broadened me, or benumbed me. I don't know. All I seem to see clearly—to clearly understand—is the dreadful brevity of life, the awful chances against living, the miracle of love in such a maelstrom, the insanity of one who dare not confess it, live for it, love to the uttermost with heart, soul, and body, while ...
— Ailsa Paige • Robert W. Chambers
... time to see the water taking its departure, and Dick's kennel wrecked, down by the gates where the yard was highest, for Old Sam, in spite of the pelting rain, was punching away at the sink-hole with the stump of an old birch broom, and the water was rushing down it like a little maelstrom; while the bits of straw and twigs that floated near, represented the unfortunate vessels that get ...
— Hollowdell Grange - Holiday Hours in a Country Home • George Manville Fenn
... as to lift and fill them with something like the breath of universal nature. His special gift is his magnetic and unconquerable personality, his towering egoism united with such a fund of human sympathy. His power is centripetal, so to speak,—he draws everything into himself like a maelstrom; the centrifugal power of the great dramatic artists, the power to get out of and away from himself, he has not. It was not for Whitman to write the dramas and tragedies of democracy, as Shakespeare wrote those of feudalism, ...
— Whitman - A Study • John Burroughs
... the purple twilight, Blanche waited upon the walk, And beckoned her white hand to me— A lily swayed on its stalk. Soon my jealous pride was foundered In the maelstrom of talk. ...
— Stories in Verse • Henry Abbey
... part appeared to have sunk in, forming a great, funnel-shaped depression, which terminated in the centre in a circular rift or opening about forty feet in diameter. It was a whirlpool—a perfect maelstrom of mud, sloping down on every side to this ...
— The Mystery of Cloomber • Arthur Conan Doyle
... swift maelstrom of the eddying world We hurl our woes, and think they are no more. But round and round by dizzy billows whirled, They reach out sinewy arms and ...
— Yesterdays • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... movement—economic, sociological or military. If the expansion, expulsion and rehabilitation had produced greater degrees of stability and security for individuals and social groups they might have been tolerated and assimilated by the diverse populations caught up in the maelstrom of drastic expansion. But rapid, coercive social transformation produces neither stability nor security. Its normal consequence is chaos, conflict and further change. In the course of these internal conflicts the Roman Republic was gradually phased out. In theory it persisted ...
— Civilization and Beyond - Learning From History • Scott Nearing
... of Our Square as the sparrow flies, on the brink of a maelstrom of traffic, two moving-vans which had belied their name by remaining motionless for five impassioned minutes, disputed the right of way, nose to nose, while the injurious remarks of the respective drivers inflamed the air. A girlish but decided ...
— From a Bench in Our Square • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... into the sea in the Pentland Firth, or off the north-western coast of Norway, making a deep round hole, and the waters, rushing into the vortex and gurgling in the holes in the centre of the stones, produced the great whirlpool which is known as the Maelstrom. As for the salt it soon melted; but such was the immense quantity ground by the giantesses that it permeated all the waters of the sea, which have ever since ...
— Myths of the Norsemen - From the Eddas and Sagas • H. A. Guerber
... result must be a prodigious central body surrounded by systems of solar and planetary worlds in all stages of development. 'In vivid language,' says Professor Huxley,[43] 'he describes the great world-maelstrom widening the margin of its prodigious eddy in the slow progress of millions of ages, gradually reclaiming more and more of the molecular waste, and converting chaos into cosmos.' Then, fixing his attention more particularly ...
— Old-Fashioned Ethics and Common-Sense Metaphysics - With Some of Their Applications • William Thomas Thornton
... different from the animation of the Giaour—a penitential despair arising from a cause undisclosed. The Giaour, though wounded and fettered, and laid in a dungeon, would not have felt as Conrad is supposed to feel in that situation. The following bold and terrific verses, descriptive of the maelstrom agitations of remorse, could not have been appropriately applied to the despair of grief, the predominant source of emotion in ...
— The Life of Lord Byron • John Galt
... down the individual "shovel and de hoe" and with proper zeal and spirit grasp those of some masculine hand, the mercies and the spirits only know. I declare to you that I distrust the power of any woman, even of myself, to withstand the mighty matrimonial maelstrom! ...
— The Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony (Volume 1 of 2) • Ida Husted Harper
... waterfall was split in two, and rushed down in twin streams, bubbling, tumbling, hissing, plunging into the lake, which whirled furiously around the spit of land on which the castle stood, clear of ice for a distance of a hundred feet from the shore, a foaming maelstrom in which no boat that was ever built could have endured an instant, but must have been twisted and flung back like the fantastically shaped ice ...
— Jacqueline of Golden River • H. M. Egbert
... gathered together in excited groups. They discussed the matter in an entirely different way. To them the case was everything, and they fastened upon all the legal difficulties which might arise. More than one wondered, too, whether out of such a maelstrom of events work would not be bound ...
— The Day of Judgment • Joseph Hocking
... the Ypres fighting, and downwards from the coast the surge of battle was also drawn into that maelstrom. The British naval guns had destroyed the attraction of the dunes, and the Germans turned towards the inland marshes along the Yser. On the 23rd they crossed it and advanced to Ramscapelle, but were driven back by the Belgians, while fourteen unsuccessful attacks were made the following ...
— A Short History of the Great War • A.F. Pollard
... slain; See Paris red with riot and noble blood, A king beheaded and a monster throned,— King Drone, flat fool that weather-cocked all winds, Gulped gall and vinegar and smacked it wine, Wig-wagged his way from gilded Oeil de Boeuf Through mob and maelstrom to the guillotine. Chateaus up-blazing torch the doom of France, While human wolves howl ruin round their walls. Contention hisses from a million mouths, And from ten thousand muttering craters smokes The smell of ...
— The Feast of the Virgins and Other Poems • H. L. Gordon
... its trial,' was the favorite theme of democracy-haters in Europe. The indictment against our free institutions was freighted with fearful charges. The government of the Union was a 'delusive Utopia.' 'The people of the North had degenerated into a mob.' 'Society was drifting into the maelstrom of anarchy, and law and order becoming extinct.' A little time, and an apparently unwarlike people had changed into an astonishing organization, disciplined for warfare. Seven hundred thousand bayonets, as if by enchantment, bristled in menace ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. II. July, 1862. No. 1. • Various
... recluse, and call while I am here,' she had said as she was being drawn away from me into a sort of maelstrom of gaily coloured dresses, and laughing, compliment-paying men. And ...
— The Record of Nicholas Freydon - An Autobiography • A. J. (Alec John) Dawson
... the shrill, weird cry, the animal stood at bay. Again came the well-known strident halloo. A maelstrom of memories was awakened by the call. Instinctively obeying the old summons she started toward the train, when from over the hill behind her ...
— Amarilly of Clothes-line Alley • Belle K. Maniates
... continued. "I have prayed night after night to God to relieve my necessities; I have walked the town through and through in the effort to procure work, but my prayers have been unanswered, and my efforts have proven unavailing. At times the thought of the maelstrom of woe into which I am plunged, has well nigh driven me to madness. My brain has seemed on fire, and the shrieks of the maniac would have been heard resounding through the walls of this room, but my children would come before me, and the light of reason would again return. But for their ...
— The Trials of the Soldier's Wife - A Tale of the Second American Revolution • Alex St. Clair Abrams
... as fond of the pleasures of vice as of the practice of cruelty; and it was said there were times when he became humanized amidst his debauchery, laughed at the terror which his furious declamations excited, and might be approached with safety, like the Maelstrom at the turn of tide. His profusion was indulged to an extent hazardous to his popularity, for the populace are jealous of a lavish expenditure, as raising their favourites too much above their own degree; and the charge of peculation finds always ready credit ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 10, Issue 262, July 7, 1827 • Various
... where he alighted half stunned beneath their combined weight and was immediately set upon by the fifty hairy men or as many of them as could swarm upon his person. Instantly the ape-man became the center of a whirling, striking, biting maelstrom of horror. He fought nobly but the odds against him were too great. Slowly they overcame him though there was scarce one of them that did not feel the weight of his mighty fist or the ...
— Tarzan and the Jewels of Opar • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... events the Prince of Orange found his life cast. We may not choose our time to live, not yet our time to die; but some eras are spacious above others, not length, but achievement, making an age illustrious. William the Silent's age was a maelstrom of events, and there were no quiet waters; and this appears certain: The dominant force of those turbulent times was religious, by which I mean that religion is the key of all movements, politics being shaped by theological dogmas and ...
— A Hero and Some Other Folks • William A. Quayle
... the heart of the world! See those sandwich men down there! That third one's hat! Fair treat! You don't see poverty like that in Wimblehurst George! And many of them high Oxford honour men too. Brought down by drink! It's a wonderful place, George—a whirlpool, a maelstrom! whirls you ...
— Tono Bungay • H. G. Wells
... cross and they would find a holy father of the Company.' This, of course, turned out as the saint had foretold, and after a long day's march they encountered the Jesuit and became Christians. *7* This account seems to have been lost, and a careful search has not disinterred it from the Maelstrom of Simancas, that prison-house of so many documents, without whose aid so much of Spanish history ...
— A Vanished Arcadia, • R. B. Cunninghame Graham
... I should feel inclined to attribute your restless impatience to nervous disease were I not assured by your appearance that you are in perfect health. Remember, that quietude of manner constitutes a woman's greatest charm; and, unfortunately, you seem almost a mimic maelstrom. But, pardon me, I did not intend to lecture you; and, hoping all things, I will patiently wait for the future that you seem to have dedicated to some special object. I will try to have faith in my perverse little friend, though she sometimes renders it a difficult task. May I trouble you to ...
— Vashti - or, Until Death Us Do Part • Augusta J. Evans Wilson
... told you—" George plunged again into the maelstrom, and a pretty girl appeared from the firelit room behind to stir him to his highest flights of eloquence. A smell of savoury cooking came also, and out in the street night shut down dark and chill and sinister, as ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, Jan. 29, 1919 • Various
... their track. "Go," said my love, "the storm would whirl me off "As thistle-down. I'll shelter here—but you— "You love no storms!" "Where thou art," I said, "Is all the calm I know—wert thou enthron'd "On the pivot of the winds—or in the maelstrom, "Thou holdest in thy hand my palm of peace; "And, like the eagle, I would break the belts "Of shouting tempests to return to thee, "Were I above the storm on broad wings. "Yet no she-eagle thou! a small, ...
— Old Spookses' Pass • Isabella Valancy Crawford
... were friends of long standing. Theydon was genuinely sorry for this gray-haired woman's plight, and she evidently regarded him as a kind-hearted and eminently trustworthy young man. He stood and watched the cab as it bore her off swiftly into the maelstrom of London. He could not help thinking that seldom had he met one less fitted for the notoriety thrust upon all connected with a ...
— Number Seventeen • Louis Tracy
... and pine-apples selling at the street-corners; till the ten-flounced dress has but three flounces, and it is a felony to drink champagne; wait till these changes show themselves, the signs of deeper wants, the preludes of exhaustion and bankruptcy; then let us talk of the Maelstrom;—but till then, let us not be cowards with our purses, while brave men are emptying their hearts upon the earth for us; let us not whine over our imaginary ruin, while the reversed current of circling events is ...
— The American Union Speaker • John D. Philbrick
... believe that the passion of the American people for learning and for antiquity is a slight and accidental thing? Does any one believe that the taste for imitation old furniture is a pose? It creates an eddy in the Maelstrom of Commerce. It is a power like Niagara, and represents the sincere appreciation of half educated people for second rate things. There is here nothing to be ashamed of. In fact there is everything to be proud of in this progress of the arts, ...
— Emerson and Other Essays • John Jay Chapman
... of feeling as he stood waiting on the first motion of the little drum round which the rope wound. He was cool and clear brained—in fact he wondered why he was so collected. He felt he was standing out of all this maelstrom of suffering and terror. Not that he was impervious to anxiety for the men below, not that he was unmoved by all that it meant to those standing round; but after that first wild throb of terror that had clutched at his heart when his mother had ...
— The Underworld - The Story of Robert Sinclair, Miner • James C. Welsh
... lantern between her teeth, she started across on her hands and knees. The stringers swayed back and forth in the wind, and her frail body, it seemed, would surely be caught up and blown into the mad maelstrom of waters below. No! No! she could not fail now. Away up the road, borne to her anxious ears by the howling wind, she heard two long and two short blasts of the flyer's whistle as she signalled for a crossing. God! would she ever get there. Straining every nerve, at ...
— Danger Signals • John A. Hill and Jasper Ewing Brady
... Mrs. Otway, like almost every one she knew, had not believed that there would or could be a great Continental war, and when that had become, with stunning suddenness, an accomplished fact, she had felt sure that her country would remain out of the awful maelstrom. ...
— Good Old Anna • Marie Belloc Lowndes
... stood valiantly before his attack, but after two had grappled with him and been hurled headlong to the floor they gave up and rushed incontinently out into the maelstrom of the screaming tempest. ...
— The Monster Men • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... be good, one must take it up as a profession. It is quite the most engrossing one in the world. Have you ever been with a good person who is taking a holiday from being good? It is like falling into the Maelstrom. They carry you off your feet. Their enjoyment terrifies the imagination. They are like a Sunday school let loose in the Moulin Rouge, or Mr. Toole when he has made a pun! Sometimes I wish that I could be good too, ...
— The Green Carnation • Robert Smythe Hichens
... rotation, revolution, spinning, gyration, turning about an axis, turning aound an axis, circulation, roll; circumrotation^, circumvolution, circumgyration^; volutation^, circination^, turbination^, pirouette, convolution. verticity^, whir, whirl, eddy, vortex, whirlpool, gurge^; countercurrent; Maelstrom, Charybdis; Ixion. [rotating air] cyclone; tornado, whirlwind; dust devil. [rotation of an automobile] spin-out. axis, axis of rotation, swivel, pivot, pivot point; axle, spindle, pin, hinge, pole, arbor, bobbin, mandrel; axle shaft; gymbal; hub, hub of rotation. [rotation and translation ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... as they shifted nearer and nearer the edge of the ice. Then it dawned upon Annadoah's mind that they were being carried, in the jeopardy of an awful storm, on a floe that was tossed hither and thither in a maelstrom of angry waters. A frantic desire to save Ootah surged up within her. Behind him she saw the swimming blackness of the heaving waves. She attempted to rise. Her head swam; there was loud ringing in her ears. Her hands were not free, her ankles were bound—she struggled ...
— The Eternal Maiden • T. Everett Harre
... administering 'instant relief and speedy cure' to all complainers, stranger or friend, gentle or simple. Alas! it is with a bitter smile, a laugh of gall and bitterness, that I recall this period of unsuspecting delusion, and how I first became aware of the Maelstrom, the fatal whirlpool to which I was drawing, just when the current was beyond my strength to stem. The state of my mind is truly portrayed in the following effusion, for God knows! that from that time I was the victim of pain and terror, nor had I at any time taken the flattering poison ...
— English Men of Letters: Coleridge • H. D. Traill
... demon of Drunkenness finds a ship adrift,—no steady wind in its sails, no thoughtful pilot directing its course,— he steps on board, takes the helm, and steers straight for the maelstrom. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II, No. 8, June 1858 • Various
... current free of rock, and down this—head and shoulders still high out of the water—came the colt! What miracle had saved the little fellow thus far Aldous did not stop to ask. Fifty yards below it would meet the fate of the others. Half that distance in the direction of the maelstrom below was the dead trunk of a fallen spruce overhanging the water for fifteen or twenty feet. In a flash Aldous was racing toward it. He climbed out on it, leaned far over, and reached down. His hand touched ...
— The Hunted Woman • James Oliver Curwood
... of the pleasures of vice as of the practice of cruelty; and it was said there were times when he became humanized amidst his debauchery, laughed at the terror which his furious declamation excited, and might be approached with safety like the Maelstrom at the turn of tide. His profusion was indulged to an extent hazardous to his popularity, for the populace are jealous of a lavish expenditure, as raising their favourites too much above their own degree; and the charge of peculation finds always ready ...
— Fox's Book of Martyrs - Or A History of the Lives, Sufferings, and Triumphant - Deaths of the Primitive Protestant Martyrs • John Fox
... he called. "Wait for me, I'm going down!" But his voice was lost in the maelstrom of sound just as his body was lost in the maelstrom of motion. Besides, an automatic elevator cannot hear. It is merely a mechanism that goes up and down, just like the other mechanisms that go in and out, or around and around, ...
— This Crowded Earth • Robert Bloch
... to swim by being tossed into life's maelstrom and left to make his way ashore. No youth can learn to sail his life-craft in a lake sequestered and sheltered from all the storms, where other vessels never come. Skill comes through sailing one's craft amidst rocks and bars and opposing fleets, amidst ...
— Leaves of Life - For Daily Inspiration • Margaret Bird Steinmetz
... couldn't get along very well without clocks, could it?" commented Christopher, as he looked down upon the maelstrom ...
— Christopher and the Clockmakers • Sara Ware Bassett
... did at this stage, the tremendous import of this novel and comprehensive scheme for giving the world light; and he would not let go, even if busy to the breaking-point. Though plunged in a veritable maelstrom of new and important business interests, and though applying for no fewer than eighty-nine patents in 1881, all of which were granted, he superintended on the spot all this laying of underground conductors for the first district. Nor did he merely stand around and give orders. ...
— Edison, His Life and Inventions • Frank Lewis Dyer and Thomas Commerford Martin
... better chance in his life's journey for the little good we have been able to put into him. When we try a little to resist the evil current and to pull here and there one out, we learn how dreadful is the downward gravitation, the sweep and whirl of the maelstrom. Let us hope all these have a Father, who charges himself with them somewhere further on in their eternal pilgrimage when our ...
— Authors and Friends • Annie Fields
... leaped into the gangway so ferociously that the pirates scrambled over the side, brown men and white, preferring to take their chances in the sea. As he charged on, I lost sight of him in the maelstrom of struggling figures. On my left a Lascar was fighting for his life against one of our new crew. On every side men were ...
— The Mutineers • Charles Boardman Hawes
... that a dear Shaker brother once fell from grace and disappeared in the maelstrom of the carnal world; in a few years he came back as penitent as he was penniless, with strange accounts of how men had fleeced him of all he possessed save the clothes—none too desirable—on his back. Men were so ...
— Two Thousand Miles On An Automobile • Arthur Jerome Eddy
... laws and its own ideals—without courage to enforce them, without conscience to change them, the United States presents the spectacle of a Nation drifting aimlessly, so far as this vital, National problem is concerned, upon the sea of irresolution, toward the maelstrom ...
— The Wife of his Youth and Other Stories of the Color Line, and - Selected Essays • Charles Waddell Chesnutt
... and had been able to catch from them some hint of their outlook on life. They were a disappointment to me in some ways. They seemed like mechanisms. They moved as if drawn by some great magnet whose centre was Dawson City. They appeared to drift on and in toward that human maelstrom going irresolutely to their ruin. They did not seem to me strong men—on the contrary, they seemed weak men—or men strong with one insane purpose. They set their faces toward the golden north, and went on and on through every obstacle like men dreaming, ...
— The Trail of the Goldseekers - A Record of Travel in Prose and Verse • Hamlin Garland
... The Maelstrom! Could a more frightening name have rung in our ears under more frightening circumstances? Were we lying in the dangerous waterways off the Norwegian coast? Was the Nautilus being dragged into this whirlpool just as the skiff was about to ...
— 20000 Leagues Under the Seas • Jules Verne
... of England and the Mansion House rise sheer and awful from, shall we say, this boiling caldron, this 'hell' of angry meeting waters—Threadneedle Street and Cornhill, Queen Victoria Street and Cheapside, each 'running,' again metaphorically, 'like a mill-race'—here in this wild maelstrom of human life and human conveyances, here is the true 'Niagara in London,' here are the most wonderful falls ...
— Prose Fancies (Second Series) • Richard Le Gallienne
... such bestiality. A French gentleman not only washes his filthy hands at table, but, after gulping a mouthful, and using it as a gargle, squirts it into the basin standing before him, and the company, who may see the charybdis or maelstrom he has made in it, and the floating filth he has discharged, and which is now whirling in its vortex. In England this practice is unknown, except to those whose taste and stomach are too strong for offence. It has been stupidly borrowed ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 14, - Issue 401, November 28, 1829 • Various
... of an emotional maelstrom, watched the struggle from the prison of her own horror. At that moment she was physically, mentally and spiritually ill; a human being caught in the midst of forces beyond her knowledge ...
— Ten From Infinity • Paul W. Fairman
... of sinking into the cold deadly mass which surrounded us without the possibility of making an effort for life; too dense to enable one to swim, and yet too liquid to bear the weight of a person, it was as sure to destroy one as the treacherous quicksand or the furious maelstrom. Near us was another boat with an old man and a boy, likewise endeavouring to cross the harbour. We saw that they were exerting all their energies, but were not making better progress than we were. After some ...
— Hurricane Hurry • W.H.G. Kingston
... the land, for youth lusts for life and rushes eagerly to the spot where life is most intense and most exciting. The romance of crowds, of wealth, of art, of concentrated pleasure and concentrated vice, of immense money-power, the very architecture of the world-city, the maelstrom of people, drew the young Fall River woman irresistibly. She did not want the even and smooth future of a little town; she wanted to plunge into the hazardous interweaving of the destinies of millions of people. She wanted to grasp at some of the magic opportunities ...
— The Nine-Tenths • James Oppenheim
... and destroy. The manvantara opens: the Crest-Wave, the great tide of life, rushes in. It finds the world of mind cluttered up and encumbered; there is an acute disparity between the future and the past, which produces a kind of psychic maelstrom. Blessed is that nation then, which has a man at its head who can guide things, so that the good may not go with the bad, the useful with the useless! The very facts that Ts'in Shi Hwangti, when the manvantara ...
— The Crest-Wave of Evolution • Kenneth Morris
... incipient sots, or life-time incapables, or magnificent nothings, or men who before marriage were angelic and afterward diabolic, that they have been alarmed and stood back. They saw so many boats go into the maelstrom that they steered into other waters. Better for a woman to live alone, though she live a thousand years, than to be annexed to one of these masculine failures with which society is surfeited. The patron saint of almost every family circle is some such ...
— The Wedding Ring - A Series of Discourses for Husbands and Wives and Those - Contemplating Matrimony • T. De Witt Talmage
... their cellars and gathered about the priest; the lamp has been lit, the Host uplifted. The Hun is aware of this; with malice aforethought he lands shells into the cathedral every Sunday in an effort to smash the altar. So far he has failed. One finds in this a symbol—that in the heart of the maelstrom of horror, which this war has created, there is a quiet place where the lamp of gentleness and honour is kept burning. The Hun will have to do a lot more shelling before he puts the lamp of kindness out. From the polluted trenches ...
— The Glory of the Trenches • Coningsby Dawson
... of the court of the twelve Kaisers, I would say it is as confused for the present as the infernal regions. Courtiers of forty years' standing, and such I may write myself, are as far to seek in the matter as a minnow in the Maelstrom. Some folk say the king has frowned on the Prince—some that the Prince has looked grave on the duke—some that Lord Glenvarloch will be hanged for high treason—and some that there is matter against Lord Dalgarno that may cost him as ...
— The Fortunes of Nigel • Sir Walter Scott
... thousand hoofs and chorus of thrilling yells, a scream from the women and children in the cellars below, a ringing cheer from the stockade, followed by the resonant bang, bang of the cavalry carbine, and all in an instant a mad, whirling maelstrom of struggle right at the steps, braves and ponies, soldiers and scouts, all crashing together in a rage of battle, and then, bending low to avoid the storm of well-aimed bullets from practised hands ...
— Under Fire • Charles King
... yachtsmen had seen upon it from a distance, through their telescopes, traces of rude carving, and something that looked like the half-effaced letters of an old Runic inscription. But although the whirlpool, like its big brother, the maelstrom, was believed to be passable at certain states of the tide, no one ...
— Golden Days for Boys and Girls, Vol. XIII, Nov. 28, 1891 • Various
... tired." She was so unconscious of everything but the maelstrom realization that she hated David that she did not remember that the hesitating man beside her was under the ban of her displeasure. Her only thought was that she wished he would leave ...
— The Iron Woman • Margaret Deland
... honoured by the reproaches of several private and by the reprobation of several public critics; some correspondents favoured me with their anonymous scurrility, and some bigots relieved me of their acquaintance. On the other hand, there were people who, in the midst of a maelstrom of passion, retained ...
— Greece and the Allies 1914-1922 • G. F. Abbott
... forlore! the souls who feel that blast Which sweeps around that black forbidding coast! Fierce whirling storms and hurricanes here leap, With blasting lightnings maltalent and sweep The furious waves that lash around that shore, As the fierce whirl of some dread maelstrom's power! Above the cavern's arch! see! Ninip[10] stands! He points within the cave with beckoning hands! Ur-Hea cries: "My lord! the tablets[11] say, That we should not attempt that furious way! Those waters of black death ...
— Babylonian and Assyrian Literature • Anonymous
... was voted highly successful. The next day, the 28th, we were creeping towards our harbor through one of those dense fogs which are more dangerous than the old rocks of the sirens, or Scylla and Charybdis, or the much-lied-about maelstrom. ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... allowed it to go on. I am a selfish woman in many ways, but not selfish enough to make a hermit of you at twenty-six. So!—let them all come. In any case, we shall probably be making a move before very long, so we can't be drawn very deeply into the rustic maelstrom!" ...
— The Lady of the Basement Flat • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... 69 degrees. And the same day in the afternoone appeared ouer our heads a rainebow, like a semicircle, with both ends vpwarde. [Sidenote: Malestrand a strange whirle poole.] Note that there is between the said Rost Islands and Lofoot, a whirle poole called Malestrand, [Footnote: Maelstrom.] which from halfe ebbe vntill halfe flood, maketh such a terrible noise, that it shaketh the ringes in the doores of the inhabitants houses of the sayd Islands tenne miles off. Also if there commeth any Whale within the ...
— The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques, • Richard Hakluyt
... on the Woman's Rights Platform. Gentlemen in distant seats were perhaps trembling to think that they had actually got that far into this dangerous place. They might think themselves well off—no, badly off—if the maelstrom did not draw them nearer and nearer and nearer in, as it did him. He began, like them, hesitating and smiling on the back seats; they saw what he had got to now, and he hoped they, too, might get into such ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume I • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... I must explain how I came to be without money in mine, so soon after arriving in Paris, where so much of the article is necessary. My woes all arise from vanity. That is the rock, that is the quicksand, that is the maelstrom. I presume you don't know anybody else who is afflicted with that complaint? If you do, I'll but teach you how to tell my story, and that will cure him; or, at least, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 102, April, 1866 • Various
... scarce realizes that this lovely spot is at the same time the basest. What passions have stormed this cliff! What rage and despair have beaten their hands against these bastions of pleasure! How few who plunge into this maelstrom of chance ever rise again! The lure of gold, there is nothing stronger save death. Fool and rogue, saint and sinner, here they meet and mingle and change. To those who give Monte Carlo but a trifling glance, toss ...
— The Lure of the Mask • Harold MacGrath
... slip away out of the reach of its attentions, and even the slumbering water, whose repose was perpetually being invaded by the insects that swarmed above its surface, while it dreamed, no doubt, of some imaginary maelstrom, intensified the uneasiness which the sight of that floating cork had wrought in me, by appearing to draw it at full speed across the silent reaches of a mirrored firmament; now almost vertical, it seemed on the point of plunging down out of sight, and I had begun to ...
— Swann's Way - (vol. 1 of Remembrance of Things Past) • Marcel Proust
... the Duke of York and brother of King Charles II., came into English hands at a fortunate time, and after a fortunate experience. Owing to Dutch, occupation during half a century of intense agitation, civil war and revolution, New Netherland had escaped being drawn into the maelstrom of English hates and rivalries. Indeed the Dutch settlements, and New Amsterdam in particular, had derived advantage from the troubles of the English colonies, and among the immigrants who sought an asylum ...
— The Land We Live In - The Story of Our Country • Henry Mann
... what fortunes were sacrificed, what treasures were drawn into the maelstrom of this mad enterprise, has already ...
— The Lost Lady of Lone • E.D.E.N. Southworth
... narrowly graze the truth in some of his chamber music, and then fall victim to the fascinations of the word; as if the word, spoken or sung, were other than a clog to the free wings of imaginative music! Illowski noted the struggles of these dreamers, noted Verdi swallowed by the maelstrom of the theatre; noted Richard Strauss and his hesitation at the ...
— Melomaniacs • James Huneker
... resembled a maelstrom, for Wally and Jim were unpacking. Brownie, putting in her head, described it as "a perfick shambles," and affected great horror at the havoc occasioned by having boys in the house—beaming all the while in a manner calculated to destroy ...
— Mates at Billabong • Mary Grant Bruce
... Australian," he said. "Though all countries are alike to me, your nation seems to promise much. It leads the world in justice for the men who toil, and perhaps that is why I would like to see you safely out of this maelstrom of human passions; but our ways ...
— The Sequel - What the Great War will mean to Australia • George A. Taylor
... burst, with an almost tropic vigor, into riotous growth. Flamboyant youth, calculating middle age, doddering senility, all these were there, all treading on one another's heels, to reap and be reaped. To-day a scene of marvelous activity, a maelstrom of bustling commissariat and fretting supply-trains, cut by never-ending counter-currents of hoboes to and from the front, to-morrow it would simmer down into the desuetude of a ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol. 31, No. 1, May 1908 • Various
... lion-like glow. You have seen sudden storms lash the ocean? You know How the cyclone, unheralded, rises in wrath, And leaves devastation and death in its path? So swift, sudden passion may rise in its power, And ruin and blight a whole life in an hour. Two unanchored souls in its maelstrom were whirled, Drawn down by love's undertow, lost to the world. The dark, solemn billows of night shut them in. Like corpses afloat on the ocean of sin They must seem to their true, better selves, when again The tide drifts them back to ...
— Three Women • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... yet stronger proportion. The effect of it was soon apparent in his manner, and his wife but too sadly perceived that in strenuously steering off the rocks of the licensed liquor-tent she had only got into maelstrom ...
— The Mayor of Casterbridge • Thomas Hardy
... out of the great maelstrom of war, can cultivate humane sentiments and abolish the barbarism of dueling, which still holds its ground in France and Germany in the highest ranks ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, August 1887 - Volume 1, Number 7 • Various
... as a ball might be carried on the summit of a waterspout, had been taken into the circling movement of a column of air and had traversed space at the rate of ninety miles an hour, turning round and round as if seized by some aerial maelstrom. ...
— The Mysterious Island • Jules Verne
... different sort of place; for here the waters plunged into a roaring caldron with a din that stunned the ears; and now it was that Lionel discovered Miss Honnor's intention—he was to have the amusement of throwing a fly over this maelstrom from the side of the sheer bank, while the only foothold afforded him was the stump of an out-projecting pine. Well, he was not going to refuse—and ask a young lady to take his place. He dug his ...
— Prince Fortunatus • William Black
... in early sunlight, an aerial island jutting up above a smoky sea. From the terrible, veiled maelstrom roaring below, battle thunder reverberated and the lightning of the guns ...
— Special Messenger • Robert W. Chambers
... tragedies of the seas were appalling. International complications were grave and unending. More than one statesman of prophetic foresight had predicted that a continuance of the war must of necessity draw into the maelstrom the government of the United States. In such an event the country would need soldiers and many of them, and the sooner they could be put into training to meet such a ...
— The Flag • Homer Greene
... passionate, savage, terrible. She hated with an incredible and insane ferocity. In the seclusion of her tent, crouched on her bed, silent, locked, motionless, she yet was the embodiment of all terrible strife and storm in nature. Her heart was a maelstrom and would have whirled and sucked down to hell all the beings that were men. Her soul was a bottomless gulf, filled with the gales and the fires of jealousy, superhuman ...
— The Call of the Canyon • Zane Grey
... nothing in the world for it, however, but to go to bed, and there, with the accession of a slight sea-sickness, my views of the situation underwent a total change. I had gone down into the Maelstrom with the Ancient Mariner—I was a Manuscript Found ...
— Italian Journeys • William Dean Howells
... are afloat concerning this weird maelstrom of mud and bubbling water. At one time it was the custom to hurl animals suspected of being evil spirits into its black depths. Malevolent fiends, it was thought, were wont to materialize in the form of great black dogs, and unfortunate animals of ...
— Legends & Romances of Brittany • Lewis Spence
... tent, With dinner following, and toast and speech By all the wordy magnates of the town; A grand balloon ascension afterwards; And, in the evening, fireworks on the hill. I knew that drink would flow from morn till night In a wild maelstrom, circling slow around The village rim, in bright careering waves, But growing turbulent, and changed to ink Around the village center, till, at last, The whirling, gurgling vortex would engulf A maddened multitude in drunkenness. ...
— Bitter-Sweet • J. G. Holland
... yet some German batteries lived through it. Several times Tom and Jack, by means of their wireless, sent back corrections so that the American pieces might be aimed more effectively. Below them was a maelstrom—an indescribable chaos of death and destruction. They only had glimpses of it—glimpses of a seemingly inextricable mixture of ...
— Air Service Boys in the Big Battle • Charles Amory Beach
... through a little maelstrom of fine dust which a wind circle had picked up, and the sheriff led Bull into the jail. They crossed the tawdry little outer room with its warped floor creaking under the tread of Bull Hunter. Next they came face to face with a cage of steel bars, and ...
— Bull Hunter • Max Brand
... kindly Aunt Polly—very severe in her turban, and with her meeting-house face upon her, but full of a great wealth of bonbons and dried fruits on Saturday afternoons, in I know not what capacious pockets; ample, too, in her jokes and in her laugh; making that day a great maelstrom of ...
— Eighth Reader • James Baldwin
... extinguished now, would be kindled again hereafter. Being and not being came round in endless succession for all save him, into whom all being was resolved, and out of whom it emerged again, as from the vortex of some aeonian Maelstrom. ...
— A Little Book of Stoicism • St George Stock
... instead of the usual notebooks; third-year girls, reviving slowly from the strain of the Tripos, consented languidly to have their hats re-trimmed by second-year admirers, and so, despite themselves, were drawn into the maelstrom. One enterprising Fresher offered items of her wardrobe on hire, by the hour, day, or week, and reaped thereby quite a goodly sum towards her summer holiday. A blue-silk parasol, in particular, was in universal request, and appeared with eclat and in different hands ...
— A College Girl • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... they did not crush it. Foam and spray dashed in our faces; solid fluid below the crest did not overwhelm us. There we were, presently, in water tumultuous, but not frantic. There we were, three men floating in a birch, not floundering in a maelstrom,—on the water, not under it,—sprinkled, not drowned,—and in a wild wonder how we got into it and how we ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 61, November, 1862 • Various
... his bewildered charges to the sidewalk, motioned the traffic to proceed, and beckoned to a patrolman. "Tell your troubles to him," he said, and went back into his private maelstrom. ...
— We Can't Have Everything • Rupert Hughes
... of pale brilliance shot up toward the zenith. Under it whirled a maelstrom of varied radiance, pale with distance, but marvellously beautiful. Forsythe passed them with a troubled face, on his way below to report, as ...
— The Mystery • Stewart Edward White and Samuel Hopkins Adams
... The maelstrom of hurry and bustle surged around Master David Munn, leaving him placid and undisturbed, but to the rest of the gathering the affair was of no small moment. Had the Sawyers been setting out on a polar expedition it is doubtful if Elmbrook could have been more exercised. ...
— Treasure Valley • Marian Keith
... soul's course o'er trackless lands, Swayed oft by adverse winds, or swept along In Fate's wild current with the fluttering throng Towards Sin's engulfing maelstrom, spirit hands Will brace our trembling wings, and through the night Point and upbear in ...
— A Woman's Love Letters • Sophie M. Almon-Hensley
... delight her—as I admit they do my dull self—and she deeply enjoys the blatant crudity of cinematic drama. "It is so entirely unlike life that it transports one to another world," says she. "Here in this strange visionary world of the pictures one lives in a maelstrom of emotions. Boys and girls meet, embrace, and marry all within the space of a few minutes upon the screen and of an hour or two of dramatic action. Children are conceived and born by some lightning process which ...
— The Lost Naval Papers • Bennet Copplestone
... week—a week of many significant things—has ended in the wildest whirl of weather imaginable. The rains have been terrific, blinding, tropical in their almost ceaseless roar and fury. Surely only madmen or fiends would fight in such an elemental maelstrom. We may be both, and perhaps we are, now that the whole world is topsy-turvy; for we are going savagely on at this dread business, half blind and wholly desperate. If the furious sky were to rain red-hot pitchforks the contending armies ...
— Current History, A Monthly Magazine - The European War, March 1915 • New York Times
... flower of all the maelstrom of urban toil, in their detachment seemed only to bring up a visualized picture of Mary. What would he not like to do for her! He wished that he could pick up the Waldorf and set it on the other side of the street as a proof of ...
— Over the Pass • Frederick Palmer
... his exterior, he was suffering not less than Marian; self-tossed with passion, the strong currents and counter-currents of his soul whirled as a moral maelstrom, in which both reason and conscience ...
— The Missing Bride • Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth
... widow; that she had supported herself and two children by needle-work and machine-work. Illness had impoverished her and diminished her connection, other workers having been taken on in her absence. In short she had been caught in that terrible maelstrom of misfortune from which no one can escape without a helping hand. Her sewing machine was seized for rent; one article after another of furniture and clothes went for food; at last nothing was left. ...
— A Crooked Path - A Novel • Mrs. Alexander
... shot over my shoulder and the whistle was dashed from my grasp. Then came a whirl of maelstrom fighting with Smith and myself ever sinking lower amid a whirlpool, as it seemed, of blood-lustful eyes, yellow fangs, and ...
— The Return of Dr. Fu-Manchu • Sax Rohmer
... round with his cousin. He was a good waltzer, but not a graceful one. He steered his way well, and went with a strong swing that covered a great deal of ground; but there was a want of finish. Lady Mabel looked as if she were being carried away by a maelstrom. And now people began to move towards the supper-rooms, of which there were two, luxuriously arranged with numerous round tables in the way that was still a novelty when "Lothair" was written. This gave more room for the dancers. The people for whom a ball meant a surfeit of perigord pie, truffled ...
— Vixen, Volume I. • M. E. Braddon
... twenty-five years. The old America had only one foreign policy, and that was to hold inviolate the Monroe doctrine. European or Asiatic complications scarcely even interested her. Those times have passed, Dicky. Cuba and the Philippines were the start of other things. We are being drawn into the maelstrom. In another ten years we shall be there, whether we ...
— The Illustrious Prince • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... when she discovered this new maelstrom in her sea of troubles; but here was Carmela herself speaking to her, and ...
— The Stowaway Girl • Louis Tracy
... odour of roses to him, and with it a sudden host of memories. His eyes grew wistful. He felt something tugging at his heartstrings. Only a few years ago life here had seemed so wonderful a thing—only a few years, but with all the passions and struggles of a lifetime crowded into them. The maelstrom was there still, but he himself had crept out of it. What was there left? Peace, haunted with memories, rest, troubled by desire. He heard the sound of their voices in the rose-garden, and he turned away with a pain in his heart of which he ...
— A Lost Leader • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... she went into a clean, respectable little restaurant and lunched off a lamb chop and boiled potatoes, regardless of the excellent lunch that awaited her at home. Then, like a restless and unclean spirit, out she blew once more into the howling maelstrom of wind and dust. ...
— Blue Aloes - Stories of South Africa • Cynthia Stockley
... effectively carry his message to the very hearths of the poorest labourers. Courtier and student, tradesman and freeman, thief and prostitute, beggar and loafer, all were alike carried by an indignation which launched them on a maelstrom of enthusiasm. So general became the outcry that, in Coxe's words, "the lords justices refused to issue the orders for the circulation of the coin.... People of all descriptions and parties flocked ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, Vol. VI; The Drapier's Letters • Jonathan Swift
... of the Spring in the west has been the advent of Italy into the maelstrom. But this has not affected the situation up to the present time. Italy has a hard problem on her hands which must be solved before she can make herself felt. She has but one line of advance—the line of the Isonzo. But she dare not advance and leave the passes ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 5, August, 1915 • Various
... hearts instead of their hands. The stupendous wave of sympathy was at its height. It rolled across the land and then across the sea. People were swept along by its mighty rush. Anne Thorpe was caught up in the maelstrom of human energy. ...
— From the Housetops • George Barr McCutcheon
... be the site of constant whirlpools, such as Charybdis, the Maelstrom, and others. It means generally ...
— The Sailor's Word-Book • William Henry Smyth
... of no more troubles in Samoa. That is what we want; a man that knows and likes the natives, qui paye de sa personne, and is not afraid of hanging when necessary. We don't want bland Swedish humbugs, and fussy, footering German barons. That way the maelstrom lies, and we shall soon ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 25 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... Milwall Docks. A curious brick well it resembled, in the centre of which a roadway wound downward, corkscrew fashion, disappearing at the bottom into darkness under a yawning arch. The place possessed the curious property of being ever filled with a ceaseless murmur, as though it were some aerial maelstrom, drawing into its silent vacuum all wandering waves of sound from the restless human ocean flowing round it. No single tone could one ever distinguish: it was a mingling of all voices, heard there like the murmur of a ...
— Paul Kelver • Jerome Klapka, AKA Jerome K. Jerome
... contradiction of the conventional nineteenth-century dress, the black and star and ribbon of court costume, make one half credit the legend that his family was of pure Circassian descent, and had flowed down into the great Russian maelstrom from out a Georgian stronghold. His idiom bears strongly the imprint of that body; suggests strongly that heredity. It is patently the expression of a personality who desired exuberant bright sound and color, needed the brandishing of blades and the shrilling of Tartar fifes and ...
— Musical Portraits - Interpretations of Twenty Modern Composers • Paul Rosenfeld
... been tossed aside into eddies by the maelstrom of action. They were interesting because they were the first British wounded that I had seen; because the war ...
— My Year of the War • Frederick Palmer
... more than ten times the number of neutral persons were engulfed in the maelstrom of war. Millions of these suffered from it during the entire period of the conflict, four years three months and fifteen days, a total of 1,567 days. For almost four years Germany rolled up a record of victories on land and of piracies on ...
— History of the World War - An Authentic Narrative of the World's Greatest War • Francis A. March and Richard J. Beamish
... wholesome rules, followed day after day and month after month, would bring these children out into the light of self-control and concentration. The hurried, crowding, exciting methods of the public schools are disastrous to fully half of the unformed minds sent into the intellectual maelstrom which America provides under the ...
— The Eugenic Marriage, Volume I. (of IV.) - A Personal Guide to the New Science of Better Living and Better Babies • W. Grant Hague, M.D. |
