"Mire" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... howling day and night? Can you possibly say that they are kind or compassionate? Or are they willing to be good and great when one comes? Do you have confidence in a single one of them? Have they not even dragged your good name into the mire? Are any of the things that are sacred to you and to me sacred to them? Can they be moved the one-thousandth part of an inch by your distress or my distress or the distress of any human being? Is not the slime of slander thick upon ...
— The Goose Man • Jacob Wassermann
... the king was not able to do anything against them.(593) 6. So they took Jeremiah and cast him into the cistern of Malchiah the king's son, in the Court of the Guard; and they let down Jeremiah with cords. In the cistern there was no water, only mire, and Jeremiah ...
— Jeremiah • George Adam Smith
... debts to the extent of several thousand more. He was pressed for these debts; his interest was in arrears, and he could raise no money for lack of another indorser. Ruin stared him in the face, unless I again put my shoulder to the wheel, and pried him out of the mire. The turpentine business was not paying as well as formerly, but the new plantation was encumbered with only the original mortgage—less than six thousand dollars—and was then worth, owing to an advance in the value of land, ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. III, No IV, April 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... been compelled to go afoot over that drenched soil," said he, "we should still be dragging along in a pestilential mire. Since our departure from Zanzibar, half our beasts of burden would have died with fatigue. We should be looking like ghosts ourselves, and despair would be seizing on our hearts. We should be in continual squabbles with our guides and porters, and completely exposed to their unbridled brutality. ...
— Five Weeks in a Balloon • Jules Verne
... the mire? Surely, my son, whatever you feel about your mother and sister, you can't wish your poor father to suffer anything more on that ...
— The Quality of Mercy • W. D. Howells
... drew near. After the marriage, the Pig and his bride set out for his home in one of the royal carriages. On the way they passed a great bog, and the Pig ordered the carriage to stop, and got out and rolled about in the mire till he was covered with mud from head to foot; then he got back into the carriage and told his wife to kiss him. What was the poor girl to do? She bethought herself of her father's words, and, pulling out ...
— The Red Fairy Book • Various
... a sheep, nor in some ways as guid's a sheep, A grant ye that, but such as he is was it no ma duty to pull him oot o' the mire o' ...
— To Him That Hath - A Novel Of The West Of Today • Ralph Connor
... Sometimes he has some humour, never wit, And if it rarely, very rarely, hit, 'Tis under so much nasty rubbish laid, To find it out's the cinderwoman's trade; Who for the wretched remnants of a fire, 260 Must toil all day in ashes and in mire. So lewdly dull his idle works appear, The wretched texts deserve no comments here; Where one poor thought sometimes, left all alone, For a whole page of dulness ...
— The Poetical Works of John Dryden, Vol I - With Life, Critical Dissertation, and Explanatory Notes • John Dryden
... of monophysitism made this result inevitable. Extremes meet. Extreme spirituality readily passes into its opposite. It cuts the ground from under its own feet. It soars beyond its powers, and falls into the mire of materialism. Illustrations of this fact can be found in the history of philosophy. The Stoics, for instance, contrived to be both pantheists and materialists. Coming nearer to our own time, we find Hegelianism explained in diametrically opposite ways. After Hegel's death ...
— Monophysitism Past and Present - A Study in Christology • A. A. Luce
... near it now; It's scarce a mile to where the trail strikes off to skirt the slough, And then the dip to Indian Spring, the wooded rise, and—strange! Yet here should stand the blasted pine that marked our farther range; And here—what's this? A ragged swab of ruts and stumps and mire! Sure this is not the sacred grove that ...
— Complete Poetical Works of Bret Harte • Bret Harte
... indissoluble union, and their proper place! Happy, if learning, not debauched by ambition, had been satisfied to continue the instructor, and not aspired to be the master! Along with its natural protectors and guardians, learning will be cast into the mire and trodden down under the hoofs of ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. III. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... West African negro is now, in these respects. The modern world is slowly, but surely, shaking off these and other monstrous survivals of savage delusions; and, whatever happens, it will not return to that wallowing in the mire. Until the contrary is proved, I venture to doubt whether, at this present moment, any Protestant theologian, who has a reputation to lose, will say that he believes the ...
— Lectures and Essays • Thomas Henry Huxley
... progress; the dizzy height, the dazzling array, the craze for more and more and more; then the temptation and fall, millions gone, honor gone, reason gone—the innocent and the gentle, with the guilty, dragged through the mire of the prison, and the court—and we draw back aghast. Yet, if we speak of these things we ...
— Marse Henry, Complete - An Autobiography • Henry Watterson
... led Fatima off the ferry, she sank over her fetlocks in mud, and I had to lead her some distance before I found ground firm enough to warrant my mounting her, lest my weight should make the poor creature flounder hopelessly in the mire. ...
— The Rose of Old St. Louis • Mary Dillon
... that. I hope he won't disgrace the family any more than he has done, in my time, Frank. You young fellows have all your life before you; but when a man comes to my age, and expects a little comfort, it's hard to be dragged into the mire after his children. I did my duty by Jack too—I can say that for myself. He had the same training as Gerald had—the same tutor at the university—everything just the same. How do you account for that, sir, you that are a philosopher?" said Mr Wentworth again, with ...
— The Perpetual Curate • Mrs [Margaret] Oliphant
... ancle deep slush and mire, that 'tis hard to get to the post office, and cruel to send the maid out. 'Tis a slough of despair, or I should sooner have thankd you for your offer of the Life, which we shall very much like to have, and will return duly. I do not know when I shall be in town, ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb (Vol. 6) - Letters 1821-1842 • Charles and Mary Lamb
... strange, and even ridiculous, which is the simplest, the first act of—I will not say every good man—but of every man who is not wicked: to cut his own wood with which his food is cooked, and with which he warms himself; to himself clean those boots with which he has heedlessly stepped in the mire; to himself fetch that water with which he preserves his cleanliness, and to carry out that dirty water in which he ...
— The Moscow Census - From "What to do?" • Lyof N. Tolstoi
... was a confused scrambling, and spattering, and splashing, through the soft mire—a growling on the part of the bear, and the wildest screeching from the throat of the affrighted negro—all of which came to an end by Bruin—whose body was now bedaubed all over with black mud—once more regaining his feet, and shuffling off up the bank, ...
— Bruin - The Grand Bear Hunt • Mayne Reid
... what she saw in him now. Evidently to his noble mind her mystery was only some misfortune, not of her making, and his was to be the part of leading her away from it into the happiness of the open life. He did not doubt her, for he loved, and to doubt is to dip love in the mire. She had been given to him by God, and he was so rich in her possession that the responsibility attached to the gift was not grievous. She was his, and no mortal man could part them. Those who looked askance at her were looking askance at him; ...
— The Little Minister • J.M. Barrie
... along in weary plight, Through heavy jungle-mire, These two came later every night To warm them at the fire, Until the Captain said one day: 'O seaman good and kind, To save thyself now come away And leave the ...
— A Week's Tramp in Dickens-Land • William R. Hughes
... Ambition's fire That shines, Oblivion, above thy mire. The latest mounts his predecessor's trunk, And sinks his brother ere himself is sunk. So die ingloriously Fame's elite, But dams of dunces ...
— Shapes of Clay • Ambrose Bierce
... says the black-coat gent to the female; 'he's a-flounderin' in the mire of sin. Don't you know,' he goes on to Texas, 'my perishin' friend, you are bein' swept downward in the river of your own sinful life till your soul will ...
— Wolfville • Alfred Henry Lewis
... Thirty Mountains had reached the spot where Slavata with his cavalry was attempting the passage of the morass. Some of the Hulans were entangled there from the soft nature of the ground, the horses having sunk in the mire almost up to their saddle-girths. Others, among whom was their ...
— Blackwoods Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 366, April, 1846 • Various
... equipages in old books is likely to mislead us. We attribute to magnificence what was really the effect of a very disagreeable necessity. People, in the time of Charles the Second, travelled with six horses, because with a smaller number there was great danger of sticking fast in the mire. Nor were even six horses always sufficient. Vanbrugh, in the succeeding generation, described with great humour the way in which a country gentleman, newly chosen a member of Parliament, went up to London. On that occasion all the exertions of six beasts, two ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 1 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... "I remember but too well how much your choler was inflamed, in spite of the various remonstrances which I made to you respecting the sacred nature of the place. Alas! alas! you cannot say you leaped into the mire ...
— The Fortunes of Nigel • Sir Walter Scott
... repair the evil; but in France, unfortunately, the remedy was left to the authors of the mischief. The arbitrary will of the Regent, which endeavoured to extricate the country, only plunged it deeper into the mire. All payments were ordered to be made in paper, and between the 1st of February and the end of May, notes were fabricated to the amount of upwards of 1500 millions of livres, or 60,000,000 pounds sterling. But the alarm ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions - Vol. I • Charles Mackay
... yt sd Henry was to haue & had of sd Disbrough so in time they not agreeing sd Henry carried ye cetle to them againe & then sd Dibroughs wife was very angry and many hard words pased & yt som time since about two months he lost a cow which was mired in a swampe and was hanged by one leg in mire op to ye gambrill and her nose in the water and sd cow was in good case & saith he had as he judged about 8 pound of tallow out of sd cow & allso yt he had a thre yr old heifer came home about three weeks since & seemed ...
— The Witchcraft Delusion In Colonial Connecticut (1647-1697) • John M. Taylor
... his recent readings, attained a startling precision. The city of the romancer, the house illumined and warmed, so perfectly tended and isolated, the bottles poured slowly by little Dorrit and Dora Copperfield and Tom Pinch's sister, appeared to him sailing like an ark in a deluge of mire and soot. Idly he wandered through this imaginary London, happy to be sheltered, as he listened to the sinister shrieks of tugs plying up and down the Thames. His glass was empty. Despite the heavy fumes in this cellar, caused by ...
— Against The Grain • Joris-Karl Huysmans
... held her brother, and lo! he changed To a river roaring higher; And she held her brother, and he became A flood of the raging fire; She shrieked and sank, and the wild elves laughed Till the mountain rang and mire. But oh! the fire yet burns in my brain, And the hour is gone, and ...
— Folk-Lore and Legends - Scotland • Anonymous
... My lovers and friends stood aloof from my sore, and my kinsmen stood afar off. I was ready to halt, and my sorrow was continually before me; yet even in my darkest, deepest afflictions, when deep called to deep, and thy waves and billows were passing over me; when my soul seemed sinking in the mire where there was no standing, I groped in the dark; my heart panted, my strength failed, and the light of mine eyes seemed gone out. I was weak with my groaning; in the night I made my bed to swim with my tears; yet even then, by that same covenant by which I was suffering, light ...
— The Power of Faith - Exemplified In The Life And Writings Of The Late Mrs. Isabella Graham. • Isabella Graham
... one of vast responsibility. How distressing the consequences, when the weary traveller is directed in the wrong way! How deeply so, if his way lie through the forest, where he is exposed, if night overtake him, to stumble over precipices, sink in the mire, or be devoured by wild beasts! Yet, what is this, in comparison to leading astray the soul that is inquiring for the way of salvation? "He that winneth souls is wise." I cannot, however, pursue this subject here; but must refer you to a little work, entitled "Friendly Counsel," ...
— A Practical Directory for Young Christian Females - Being a Series of Letters from a Brother to a Younger Sister • Harvey Newcomb
... dear young sir," said Fairthorn, "be his most bitter open enemy, and fall down in the mire, the first hand to help you would be Guy Darrell's; but be his professed friend, and betray him to the worth of a straw, and never try to see his face again if you are wise,—the most forgiving and the least forgiving of ...
— What Will He Do With It, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... followed by more building, more planting, more expense, and more discontent. [66] At present Kensington House is considered as a part of London. It was then a rural mansion, and could not, in those days of highwaymen and scourers, of roads deep in mire and nights without lamps, be the rallying point of ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 3 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... worse with him every day; for every interval of twenty-four hours sinks a man so much the deeper in the mire when renewed accommodation-bills with his name upon them are ripening in the iron safes of Judah. Philip Sheldon found himself sinking gradually and almost imperceptibly into that bottomless pit of difficulty in whose black depths the demon ...
— Birds of Prey • M. E. Braddon
... way, on the ground lay a wounded man. His visor was raised, and his face visible; but his surcoat was slashed and covered with mire and blood, so that the eye could no longer discern the device embroidered on it. A scallop-shell fastened to his helmet, intimated that he had at some past time been a pilgrim to the shrine of Saint ...
— Mistress Margery • Emily Sarah Holt
... only one way by which, out of the mire and clay of earth, there can be formed a fair image of holiness, and that is, that Jacob's experience, in deeper, more inward, more wonderful form, should be repeated in each one of us; and that thus, penitent and yet hopeful, we should behold the glory ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Isaiah and Jeremiah • Alexander Maclaren
... house, Mavis could not help thinking that these deserted women were indeed human sparrows, who needed no small share of their heavenly Father's loving kindness to prevent them from falling and being utterly lost in the mire of London. Once or twice during Mavis's stay, the house was so full that three would sleep in one room, each of whom would go downstairs to the parlour, which was the front room on the ground floor, for the dreaded ordeal, to ...
— Sparrows - The Story of an Unprotected Girl • Horace W. C. Newte
... more about it," Sommers answered, closing his lips firmly. "It is part of the mire; we must avert our ...
— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick
... MacLean, "This quarrel's mine by virtue of my making it so. Mistress Truelove, you shall have no further annoyance. Now, you Lowland cowards that cannot see a flower bloom but you wish to trample it in the mire, come taste the ground yourself, and be taught that the flower is ...
— Audrey • Mary Johnston
... daughter. It was not a question of precise justice. It was a plain issue between God and the devil. But Mary had pursued the policy of throwing dust in his eyes, and led him blindly along the road where he was bound to sink deeper and deeper into the mire. ...
— The Scarlet Feather • Houghton Townley
... the Fiend. Satan, I know thy strength, and thou knowst mine, Neither our own but giv'n; what follie then To boast what Arms can doe, since thine no more Then Heav'n permits, nor mine, though doubld now To trample thee as mire: for proof look up, 1010 And read thy Lot in yon celestial Sign Where thou art weigh'd, & shown how light, how weak, If thou resist. The Fiend lookt up and knew His mounted scale aloft: nor more; but fled Murmuring, and with him fled the ...
— The Poetical Works of John Milton • John Milton
... neighbors give, it might be remarked, an original hypothesis of their own, regarding the death of the man; viz: that in passing along over this spot he was either drowned or swallowed up in the mire and suffocated ...
— The American Goliah • Anon.
... lazy and neglected his work, Ariel (who was invisible to all eyes but Prospero's) would come slyly and pinch him, and sometimes tumble him down in the mire; and then Ariel, in the likeness of an ape, would make mouths at him. Then swiftly changing his shape, in the likeness of a hedgehog he would lie tumbling in Caliban's way, who feared the hedgehog's sharp quills would prick his bare feet. With a variety of such like vexatious tricks Ariel would ...
— The Children's Hour, v 5. Stories From Seven Old Favorites • Eva March Tappan
... It is not a straight game to fit me out with a pair of hip rubber boots miles too large for me and then sit and howl when you see me losing my life in them. Well, you needn't come into the mire if you don't want to, but you can at least be gentleman enough to pass me the end of that pole that is lying ...
— The Story of Sugar • Sara Ware Bassett
... the use of doing that which he did—picking up the little ones, succouring the parents, prolonging the sufferings of the aged? The very foundations of the social edifice were rotten; all would soon collapse amid mire and blood. A great act of justice alone could sweep the old world away in order that the new world might be built. And at that moment he realised so keenly how irreparable was the breach, how irremediable the evil, how deathly the ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... with foam; a cariole bespattered with mud; a dashing fine girl behind, with flaunting hair, a short petticoat, and a flaming pair of red stockings; myself in the body of the cariole, covered from head to foot with mire, my beard flying out in every direction, and my hair still standing on end from the effects of recent fright—a very singular spectacle to meet in the middle of a public highway, even in Norway. The road was very narrow at the point of meeting. It became ...
— The Land of Thor • J. Ross Browne
... declared against the rebels had displeased even moderate men. The friends of Rome exulted; all were against him, and he bore the heavy anger of his times. But his greatest affliction was to behold the work of heaven thus dragged in the mire and classed with the most fanatical projects. Here he felt was his Gethsemane: he saw the bitter cup that was presented to him; and, foreboding that he would be forsaken by all, he exclaimed: "Soon, perhaps, I shall also be able to say, 'All ye shall be offended ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 9 • Various
... with our baggage, to New York." Colonel Douglas writes: "I received orders to call in my guard all, and march immediately with the utmost silence." Hitchcock's Rhode Islanders carried their baggage and camp equipage to the boats on their shoulders "through mud and mire and not a ray of light visible." The embarkation was made from the ferry—the present Fulton Ferry—where General McDougall superintended the movements. Between seven and eight o'clock the boats were manned by Glover's and Hutchinson's men, and they went to work with sailor-like ...
— The Campaign of 1776 around New York and Brooklyn • Henry P. Johnston
... of sex had sunk, called for a revulsion; and it came in the idea of asceticism—an instance where the remedy was worse than the disease. The mental attitude that resulted in asceticism was not one in which the sex function was lifted from the mire of licentiousness in which it lay; rather it was abandoned altogether as something vile and unclean; and that too, unhappily, by those who ...
— Sex=The Unknown Quantity - The Spiritual Function of Sex • Ali Nomad
... lot of detectives he had. But he knew, according to my analysis of the workings of his superheated brain, that the few times he had been real mad in his life and had trusted to his impulses, he had gone deep into the mire of expense or ridicule. Some of the skeletons of these experiences were beginning to rattle in opposition to the oft-repeated easy solution of Smith, who had been stoking that inflamed head since 2 P. M. with the kind of gore which kept it ablaze. Tescheron was ...
— Cupid's Middleman • Edward B. Lent
... returning to my wallowing in the mire. When I was a child, and indeed until I was nearly a man, I consistently read Covenanting books. Now that I am a grey-beard—or would be, if I could raise the beard—I have returned, and for weeks back have read ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 25 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... giving to the dead whitened trees on the little island a peculiar ghostly appearance. The canoes soon grounded in the marsh grass, and, fastening them to paddles, stuck down in the mud, our hunters shouldered their fowling-pieces and trudged ahead through the mire. They had prepared themselves well for the trip and each wore a pair of rubber boots reaching to the hip drawn on over their rawhide ...
— The Boy Chums in the Forest - or Hunting for Plume Birds in the Florida Everglades • Wilmer M. Ely
... in the darkness and the mire Walk with rebellious feet, Loose trailing, Lo, their soiled attire For heavenly ...
— The Poetical Works of George MacDonald in Two Volumes, Volume I • George MacDonald
... sanctuaries of God, and shed the blood of the saints round about the altar. They have laid waste the dwelling-place of our hope; they have trodden down the bodies of the saints in the temple of God like mire in the street. What can I say? I can only lament in my heart with you before the altar of Christ, and say: Spare, Lord, spare Thy people, and give not Thy heritage to the heathen, lest the pagans say, Where is the God of the Christians? What confidence is ...
— Anglo-Saxon Literature • John Earle
... be for one of the least of these. There flashed into her mind an old Indian proverb she had read. "I met a hundred men on the road to Delhi, and they were all my brothers." Yes! None were too deep sunk in the mire to be brothers and sisters to ...
— The Vision Spendid • William MacLeod Raine
... mirage will depart when real water comes, dust and sand-pillars will be no longer to be seen, and all the nine horses and mules of the diligence-team, floundering, splashing, and kicking, will hardly keep the heavy coach from settling down inextricably in the mire. And so on until October, and then the season of water, "la estacion de las aguas," will cease, and things will be again ...
— Anahuac • Edward Burnett Tylor
... his wild way, "hath sent His angel and shut the lions' mouths that they have not hurt me. He raiseth the poor out of the dust, and lifteth the needy out of the mire." ...
— The Lost Hunter - A Tale of Early Times • John Turvill Adams
... relinquish the struggle at that point would have been the act of a stoic, but not of a woman, particularly when she considered the children, the hopes of her mother for them, and her own condition—though this was least—under the ironical cheers which would greet a slip back into the mire. ...
— The Hand of Ethelberta • Thomas Hardy
... Sanchez, seeing that these reflections threw a gloom upon us, turned to me, sitting next him, and asked if I would give him some account of my history, whereupon I briefly told him how three years ago Jack Dawson had lifted me out of the mire, and how since then we had lived in brotherhood. "And," says I in conclusion, "we will continue with the favour of Providence to live so, sharing good and ill fortune alike to the end, so much we ...
— A Set of Rogues • Frank Barrett
... it tenderly by as a souvenir of the dead year, to lie among the gathered blossoms of some dear one's grave, with bitter tears of sad remembrance and grief to bathe it, as its evening dew. And is not this life! How many golden leaves are hurled into the mire of sin, and upon how much marvellous beauty the heavy foot of worldly scorn is stamped forever! How many pretty little amber leaves drift on through the cold wide world, until their beauty is spent, and until wrecked and faded they lay themselves ...
— Honor Edgeworth • Vera
... somethin' mirthful," thought the cowboy, "I noticed it particular, when I was flounderin' up to my neck in the mire of deception. The old ...
— The Texan - A Story of the Cattle Country • James B. Hendryx
... voice sounded, Friar Ange, with wallet dangling on his shoulder, holding Catherine the lacemaker round the waist, walking in the shadow with a wavering and triumphal step, spouting the gutter water under his sandals in a magnificent spirit of mire which seemed to celebrate his drunken glory, as the basins of Versailles make their fountains play in honour of the king. I put myself out of the way against the post in the corner of a house door, so as not to be seen by them, which was a needless ...
— The Queen Pedauque • Anatole France
... compelled to turn our attention seriously to the question whether prevention is not better than cure. It is easier and cheaper, and in every way better, to prevent the loss of home than to have to re-create that home. It is better to keep a man out of the mire than to let him fall in first and then risk the chance of plucking him out. Any Scheme, therefore, that attempts to deal with the reclamation of the lost must tend to develop into an endless variety of ameliorative ...
— "In Darkest England and The Way Out" • General William Booth
... of meditation, the colossal pillars of the audience chamber of the Deity! The Mount of Contemplation rises far above the mists of partial opinion and the mire of conflict, the discords of jangling interests and the refractions of divided policies, girt by a serene and sublime horizon, and within hearing ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. 5, Issue 2, February, 1864 • Various
... scarcely spoken since his fall, so furious was he at having been outwitted by a boy, and having not only allowed him to escape, but being himself rolled in the mire—raised his voice in a tremendous shout. All listened intently, but no answering ...
— Wulf the Saxon - A Story of the Norman Conquest • G. A. Henty
... into the place, pale, bleeding, bruised, covered with mire. The Prussians, he told them, had forced him to be their guide, had knotted him tight to a trooper's saddle, and had dragged him with them until he was half dead with fatigue and pain. At night he had broken from them and had fled. They were close at hand, he said, ...
— Stories By English Authors: France • Various
... intrinsically a good woman—one of the truest, frankest, and most right-minded of whom the history of such women has anything to tell. All that external circumstances could do to push her down into the mire was done; yet she was not pushed down, but emerged as one of those rare souls who have in their natures an uncontaminated spring of goodness and honesty. Unlike Barbara Villiers or Lucy Walters or Louise de Keroualle, she was neither a harpy nor ...
— Famous Affinities of History, Vol 1-4, Complete - The Romance of Devotion • Lyndon Orr
... the church bells.... The carillon was ringing.... Church bells were chiming through the night. To Bobinette, the abject creature grovelling in the mire of the roadway, the bells sounded vaguely ...
— A Nest of Spies • Pierre Souvestre
... could live with them. He had hoped to serve Art, to keep his service pure; but, having one day let his acid temperament out of hand to revel in an orgy of personal retaliation, he had since never known when she would slip her chain and come home smothered in mire. Moreover, he no longer chastised her when she came. His ideals had left him, one by one; he now lived alone, immune from dignity and shame, soothing himself with whisky. A man of rancour, meet for pity, and, in his cups, ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... said the old bull, "for the herds are their food and their clothes and their housing. It is the Way Things Are that the Buffalo People should make the trails and men should ride in them. They go up along the watersheds where the floods cannot mire, where the snow is lightest, and there are ...
— The Trail Book • Mary Austin et al
... thorn, What his attire? 'Lo! it was torn, Marred with the mire, And but the eyes ...
— Dead Man's Rock • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... labourers; but once or twice he noticed, as he went by the Camp, that some one had been digging and grubbing in the mire. Sometimes for an hour or two his terrors would leave him, till he thought that he was wholly cured; but it was like a cat with a mouse, for he suffered the worse for his respite, till at last he fell ...
— Paul the Minstrel and Other Stories - Reprinted from The Hill of Trouble and The Isles of Sunset • Arthur Christopher Benson
... who had trampled it in the mire, this dagger scene was sneered at as a stage trick; but Burke was above all pantomime. The dagger was one which had been sent from France to a Birmingham manufacturer, with an order for a large number of the same pattern: and Burke had received it only on that day—and ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 378, April, 1847 • Various
... ointments or garlands on my stony tomb, nor make the fire blaze up; the expense is in vain. While I live be kind to me if thou wilt; but drenching my ashes with wine thou wilt make mire, and the dead ...
— Select Epigrams from the Greek Anthology • J. W. Mackail
... mire too deeply, and he was too far gone now to help himself. The bear had rolled off the back of the bull and after a few faint struggles ceased to live. But Bruin's presence made it very difficult for the girls to force their ponies closer to ...
— Ruth Fielding in the Great Northwest - Or, The Indian Girl Star of the Movies • Alice B. Emerson
... reckoning you have a standard that is immutable. What shall a man give in exchange for his own soul? Will he sell that? Will he consent to see another man sell his soul? Will he consent to see the conditions of his community such that men's souls are debauched and trodden underfoot in the mire? What shall he give in exchange for his own soul, or any other man's soul? And since the world, the world of affairs, the world of society, is nothing less and nothing more than all of us put together, it is a great enterprise for the salvation of the soul in this world ...
— President Wilson's Addresses • Woodrow Wilson
... general, and for the Count de Toumeville in particular, and the freethinkers would be triumphant. The evilly disposed newspapers would sing songs of victory for six months; my mother's name would be dragged through the mire and brought into the prose of Socialistic journals, and my father's would be bespattered. It was impossible that such a thing ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Vol. 1 (of 8) - Boule de Suif and Other Stories • Guy de Maupassant
... of calumny and lies: Men gloat on evil—even woman's hand Will dabble in the mire, nor heed the cries Of the poor victim whom she seeks to brand In thy sweet name, Religion, through the land! Like the keen tempest she doth strip her prey, Tossing him bare and wrecked upon the strand, While vaunting ...
— Strange Visitors • Henry J. Horn
... still asleep when Angus forked him. Without seeming to wake up much he at once traded ends, poured Angus out of the saddle, and stacked him up in some mud that was providentially there—mud soft enough to mire your shadow. Angus got promptly up, landed a strong kick in the ribs of the outlaw which had gone to sleep again before he lit, shook hands warmly with Everett and says: 'What does a man need ...
— Somewhere in Red Gap • Harry Leon Wilson
... are either 'being saved' or you are 'perishing.' No man becomes a devil all at once, and no man becomes an angel all at once. Trust yourself to Christ, and He will lift you to Himself; turn your back upon Him, as some of you are doing, and you will settle down, down, down in the muck and the mire of your own sensuality and selfishness, until at last the foul ooze spreads over your head, and you are lost ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: The Acts • Alexander Maclaren
... will go. What has become of my patience? my sunny mildness? Then, as the recollection of the velvet-gown and mob-cap episode recurs to me, I repent me, and, crossing the road, pick up again my harmless catkins and snow-drops, and rearrange them. I have hardly finished wiping the mire from the tender, lilac-veined snow-drop petals, before I hear his voice in the distance, in conversation with some one. Clearly, Delilah is coming to see the last of him! I expect that she mostly escorts them to the gate. In my present frame of mind, it would be physically impossible ...
— Nancy - A Novel • Rhoda Broughton
... Marshall took his seat as Chief Justice at the opening of the first term of Court in Washington, the new capital, on Wednesday, February 4, 1801. The most beautiful of capital cities was then little more than a swamp, athwart which ran a streak of mire named by solemn congressional enactment "Pennsylvania Avenue." At one end of this difficult thoroughfare stood the President's mansion—still in the hands of the builders but already sagging and leaking through ...
— John Marshall and the Constitution - A Chronicle of the Supreme Court, Volume 16 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Edward S. Corwin
... entirely different person—a low, vulgar creature proud of the brutal strength and coarseness of her man. I seem to be a part of this human beast! When I wake up I feel as if my soul had been stained, dragged in the mire, almost lost. It seems as if I could never again feel any self-respect. Oh, doctor," Penelope's voice broke and the tears filled her eyes, "you must help me! I cannot bear this torture any longer! What can I do to escape ...
— Possessed • Cleveland Moffett
... from shire to shire, And he must till the crack of doom; He takes the road in the dust and mire, And he sleeps in the windy broom; He's no address and he's no abode, And his jacket's the worse o' wear; And I've met him once on the Portsmouth Road, And once at ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, April 8, 1914 • Various
... whose boiling waters overflow and form a stream, they follow the latter's downward course to the marsh called Styx, where hundreds of naked creatures wallow in the mire, madly clutching and striking each other. Virgil explains that these are those "whom anger overcame," and adds that the sullen are buried beneath the slimy waters, where their presence is betrayed by bubbles caused by their ...
— The Book of the Epic • Helene A. Guerber
... pleasant, nor was there mingled with it any disagreeable smell of cooking. Outside were no lamps; the road was unlighted save by the few rays that here and there crept from a window, casting a doubtful glimmer on the mire. ...
— What's Mine's Mine • George MacDonald
... excluding from the philosopher's vocabulary the word 'inconceivable.' But he is too well satisfied with his own system ever to consider the effect of what is unknown on the element which is known. To the Hegelian all things are plain and clear, while he who is outside the charmed circle is in the mire of ignorance and 'logical impurity': he who is within is omniscient, or at least has all the elements of knowledge under ...
— Sophist • Plato
... with neither courage nor rapture. Damn it, couldn't he be freed from one without falling into the other? Lee told himself that it must be possible to leave permanently the fenced roads of Eastlake for the high hills; it wasn't necessary to go down into the bottoms, the mire. ...
— Cytherea • Joseph Hergesheimer
... clearness what it would be like: the home-coming of the half-imbecile criminal, and the staring eyes, the pointing fingers of all Brookville leveled at him. She would be overborne by the shame of it all—trampled like a flower in the mire. ...
— An Alabaster Box • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman and Florence Morse Kingsley
... the water there was a deep bed of clay, in which the boys were forced to stand while they caught their fish. Here they dabbled in mud and mire like a flock ...
— Biographical Stories - (From: "True Stories of History and Biography") • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... ladder based on earth, Yet reaching to the cloud-crowned height, where the true Light has birth. The beautiful angels passing up, with all our prayers to God, Our tears and moans, our fading flowers, all stained with mire and sod— And coming down; ah, many a time I have blessed the Lord above, For His pure descending angels, bringing Faith, and Hope, and Love. There was a time when all this wealth of glory was lost on me, And I was like a rudderless ship, far out on the rocking sea, ...
— Victor Roy, A Masonic Poem • Harriet Annie Wilkins
... between Haddon Wood and Countisbury Cliff, with good Mr. Palk Collyns to show you the way, and mend your bones as fast as you smash them. Only when that jolly day comes, please don't break your neck; stogged in a mire you never will be, I trust; for you are a heath-cropper bred ...
— The Water-Babies - A Fairy Tale for a Land-Baby • Charles Kingsley
... by being shallow, but the bottom sloped down into a deep hollow, and was besides covered several feet deep with heavy cattle-trodden mire and weeds, in which it was almost impossible to gain a footing, or to move. By the time Emily and Miss Reynolds had come to the brink, Ellen and Martyn were standing up in the water, leaning against one another, and holding poor little Anne's head up- ...
— Chantry House • Charlotte M. Yonge
... snake; Now o'er the violet's azure flush He skips along in lightsome mood; And now he thrids the bramble bush, Till its points are dyed in fairy blood. He has leapt the bog, he has pierced the briar, He has swum the brook, and waded the mire, Till his spirits sank, and his limbs grew weak, And the red waxed fainter in his cheek. He had fallen to the ground outright, For rugged and dim was his onward track, But there came a spotted toad in sight, And he laughed as he jumped upon her back; He bridled her mouth with a silk-weed ...
— The Culprit Fay - and Other Poems • Joseph Rodman Drake
... the rudder that steers the ship of fate. I was alive to my finger tips, back there on Dover Street, and all my girlish purposes served one main purpose. It would have been amazing if I had stuck in the mire of the slum. By every law of my nature I was bound to soar above it, to attain the fairer places that wait for every ...
— The Promised Land • Mary Antin
... that time like the other little children of the country,—that is, in drinking, eating, and sleeping; in eating, sleeping, and drinking; and in sleeping, drinking, and eating. Still he wallowed in the mire, blackened his face, trod down his shoes at heel; at the flies he did oftentimes yawn, and willingly run after the butterflies, the empire whereof belonged to his father. He sharpened his teeth with a slipper, ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. VII (of X)—Continental Europe I • Various
... after the letter came, Eve was obliged to find a wet-nurse; her milk had dried up. She had made a god of her brother; now, in her eyes, he was depraved through the exercise of his noblest faculties; he was wallowing in the mire. She, noble creature that she was, was incapable of swerving from honesty and scrupulous delicacy, from all the pious traditions of the hearth, which still burns so clearly and sheds its light abroad ...
— Eve and David • Honore de Balzac
... infantry. Where should "the spirit that quickeneth" dwell if not with the aviators? No weary legs hamper him; he does not have to crawl over the dead or hide in shell-craters or stand up to his knees in mire. He is the pampered aristocrat of war, ...
— My Second Year of the War • Frederick Palmer
... bluntness in the present crisis. At a later stage in his career as a husband he might have been equally blunt; yet never again, perhaps, would he have been so emotional in his opposition to woman polluting herself with the mire of politics. ...
— The Sturdy Oak - A Composite Novel of American Politics by Fourteen American Authors • Samuel Merwin, et al.
... brune Italie, Et la Grce, ma mre, o le miel est si doux, Argos, et Ptlon, ville des hcatombes, Et Messa, la divine, agrable aux colombes; Et le front chevelu du Plion changeant; Et le bleu Titarse, et le golfe d'argent Qui montre dans ses eaux, o le cygne se mire, La blanche Oloossone la blanche Camyre. Dis-moi, quel songe d'or nos chants vont-ils bercer? D'o vont venir les pleurs que nous allons verser? Ce matin, quand le jour a frapp ta paupire, Quel sraphin pensif, courb sur ton chevet, Secouait ...
— French Lyrics • Arthur Graves Canfield
... home dat night tell 'way late, an' ef he'd been fox-huntin' it mus' ha' been de ole red whar lives down in de greenscum mashes he'd been chasin'. De way de sorrel wuz gormed up wid sweat an' mire sut'n'y did hu't me. He walked up to de stable wid he head down all de way, an' I'se seen 'im go eighty miles of a winter day, an' prance into de stable at night ez fresh ez ef he hed jes' cantered over to ole Cun'l Chahmb'lin's to supper. I nuvver seen ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 9 • Various
... himself a lost sinner, and never knew his need of the Saviour, may reason gravely of the impropriety of 'excitement,' and the man who has never experienced the liberty of deliverance from the 'horrible pit, and the mire and clay,' may seem to be wise on the subject of Christian joy; but he knows it not. The outburst of joy in the newly born child of God, is as undiscriminating as the joyous mirth of children. But it becomes more subdued as the child grows on to 'the conquering young man,' ...
— From Death into Life - or, twenty years of my ministry • William Haslam
... the flicker of the blaze and the discouraged daylight from the open door, for the batten shutters of the unglazed window were closed. The puncheon floor was grimy—the feet that curiosity had led hither brought much red clay mire upon them. The poultry, all wet and dispirited, ventured within and stood about the door, now scuttling in sudden panic and with peevish squawks upon the unexpected approach of a heavy foot. Loralinda, sitting at her spinning wheel, was paler than ever, all ...
— A Chilhowee Lily - 1911 • Charles Egbert Craddock (AKA Mary Noailles Murfree)
... the yoke, ran away, and as he is near the Barna, his countrymen, he will be hidden. He told his plan to our guide, and asked to accompany him back to Tanganyika, but he is eager to deliver him up for a reward: all are eager to press each other down in the mire into which they ...
— The Last Journals of David Livingstone, in Central Africa, from 1865 to His Death, Volume II (of 2), 1869-1873 • David Livingstone
... his whole substance, he must never give way to annoyance. Money must be so subservient to gentility as never to be worth a thought. Of course, the SUPREMELY aristocratic thing is to be entirely oblivious of the mire of rabble, with its setting; but sometimes a reverse course may be aristocratic to remark, to scan, and even to gape at, the mob (for preference, through a lorgnette), even as though one were taking the crowd and its squalor for a sort of raree show which ...
— The Gambler • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... the dissipations which he could not resist, he sank, utterly exhausted in body, heart, and mind, into a collapsed condition bordering upon imbecility. Such a character will drag a man down into the mire if he is left to himself, or bring him to the highest heights of political power if he has some stern friend to keep him in hand. Neither Chesnel, nor the lad's father, nor Aunt Armande had fathomed the depths of a nature ...
— The Jealousies of a Country Town • Honore de Balzac
... column; there a courier had met him—so at least runs the tradition—with urgent orders to hasten up the reenforcements: the enemy were pressing hard for the Landing. Unmindful of all impediments—trees and fallen logs, shallow ponds and slippery mire shoetop deep; now again moderating our pace to the route step to recover breath and strength; even halting impatiently for a few minutes now and then, while the advance cleared itself from some entanglement of the way—so the remainder of our march ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No 4, October, 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... legend to frighten some of us, who had no Latin," said Sir John; "but we put his bumpkin greencoats to the rout, and trampled that insolent flag in the mire." ...
— London Pride - Or When the World Was Younger • M. E. Braddon
... spruce-shrouded mountains drew close together in the Dyea Canyon, and the feet of men churned the wet sunless earth into mire and bog-hole. And when they had done this they sought new paths, till there were many paths. And on such a path Frona came upon a man spread carelessly in the mud. He lay on his side, legs apart and one arm buried ...
— A Daughter of the Snows • Jack London
... literature, art, archaeology, and science, but in the public history of my own country, in its evolution as a nation. I had disgraced that name eternally. I had made it a low by-word among low people. I had dragged it through the very mire. I had given it to brutes that they might make it brutal, and to fools that they might turn it into a synonym for folly. What I suffered then, and still suffer, is not for pen to write or paper to record. My wife, always kind and gentle ...
— De Profundis • Oscar Wilde
... McGillivray did his work we know from the bloody annals of the years which followed the British-American peace, when the men of the Cumberland and of Franklin were on the defensive continually. How cleverly Mire played his personal role we discover in the letters addressed to him by Sevier and Robertson. These letters show that, as far as words go at any rate, the founders of Tennessee were willing to negotiate with Spain. In a letter dated September 12, 1788, Sevier offered himself and his tottering State ...
— Pioneers of the Old Southwest - A Chronicle of the Dark and Bloody Ground • Constance Lindsay Skinner
... of righteous indignation throughout the parish; nor without reason. Tell me that doctors and graduates must have the dead; but tell it not to Mansie Wauch, that our hearts must be trampled in the mire of scorn, and our best feelings laughed at, in order that a bruise may be properly plaistered up, or a sore head cured. Verily, the remedy is worse ...
— The Life of Mansie Wauch - Tailor in Dalkeith, written by himself • David Macbeth Moir
... of the Gridiron one thought alone occupied him. Murray McTavish had lied. He had lied deliberately to Bill Brudenell. He had made no attempt to save the boy from the mire into which he had helped to fling him. On the contrary, he had thrust him deeper and deeper into it. Why? What—what was the meaning of it all? Where were things heading? What purpose ...
— The Triumph of John Kars - A Story of the Yukon • Ridgwell Cullum
... place." He adds: "There is no such thing on record. It is shifting the ground from one field of observation to another to make this statement, and when the assertions go so far as to exclude from the domain of science those who will not be dragged into this mire of mere assertion, then ...
— Evolution - An Investigation and a Critique • Theodore Graebner
... religions, therefore truly of none. Thus by naturalising himself some would think him a very dangerous fellow to the State; but he is not greatly to be feared, for this dejection of his is only like a rogue that goes on his knees and elbows in the mire to further ...
— Character Writings of the 17th Century • Various
... goes wailing through the swaying shades, And violent rain gushes in every hollow. The doe runs free, triumphantly evades Those straining eyes; the ghastly shadows swallow Her flying form; the frightened horses wallow Deep in the mire. ...
— The Five Books of Youth • Robert Hillyer
... to please a speculative architect; bits of wayside hedge still shivered in fog and wind, amid hoardings variegated with placards and scaffoldings black against the sky. The very earth had lost its wholesome odour; trampled into mire, fouled with builders' refuse and the noisome drift from adjacent streets, it sent forth, under the sooty rain, a smell of corruption, of all the town's uncleanliness. On this rising locality had been bestowed the title of "Park." Mrs. ...
— The House of Cobwebs and Other Stories • George Gissing
... rules, and the majority only thinks of its own interests and those of its servile supporters. But even in this community of ours there is a minority that bears the burden of its affairs and represents its honour; and we will never consent to be dragged down into the mire of this "equality" into which you want to plunge each and every one ...
— Three Dramas - The Editor—The Bankrupt—The King • Bjornstjerne M. Bjornson
... again, I have little comfort of this which is said, it concerns me not: Inanis poenitentia quam sequens culpa coinquinat, 'tis to no purpose for me to repent, and to do worse than ever I did before, to persevere in sin, and to return to my lusts as a dog to his vomit, or a swine to the mire: [6765]to what end is it to ask forgiveness of my sins, and yet daily to sin again and again, to do evil out of a habit? I daily and hourly offend in thought, word, and deed, in a relapse by mine own weakness and wilfulness: my bonus genius, my good protecting angel ...
— The Anatomy of Melancholy • Democritus Junior
... ourselves to setting out on foot. We went about two kilometres as bravely as possible, and then I stopped, quite exhausted. The mud which clung to our shoes made these very heavy. The effort we had to make at every step to get our feet out of the mire tired us out. I sat down on a milestone, and declared that I ...
— My Double Life - The Memoirs of Sarah Bernhardt • Sarah Bernhardt
... dark, no father was there, The child was wet with dew; The mire was deep, and the child did weep, ...
— Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience • William Blake
... go, Lady, without one thought, one base desire To tarnish that clear vision I gained by fire, One stain in me I would not have thee know. That is great might indeed that moves me so To look upon thy Form, and yet aspire To look not there, rather than I should mire That winged Spirit that haunts and ...
— Helen Redeemed and Other Poems • Maurice Hewlett
... . . it's unclean! If you've such a longing for insolence and cynicism, you might have picked a sow out of the mire and have devoured her alive. It would have been cheaper, anyway! Instead ...
— The Duel and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... face down in the mire, And prayed that darkness might become my pall; The rabble rout roared round me like some quire Of filthy animals primordial; My heart seemed like a toad eternally Prisoned in stone, ugly and sad as he; Sweet sunlight seemed a dream, a mythic thing, ...
— English Poems • Richard Le Gallienne
... unfortunate a time it was to divert this money from its destination; and how, by so doing, we must lose the profit of our past economies, and plunge back the estate into the mire. I even took the liberty to plead with him; and when he still opposed me with a shake of the head and a bitter dogged smile, my zeal quite carried me beyond my place. "This is midsummer madness," cried I; "and I for one will ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition, Vol. XII (of 25) - The Master of Ballantrae • Robert Louis Stevenson
... loneliness. How could she ever drop it all—all this wild freedom, this boundless health, this great outdoors, this life, life, how could she drop it all and go back into the little circle where convention fenced out the tiniest alien streamlet, although the circle itself might lie deep in mire? And how would she give up this boy who had grown so imperceptibly but so intimately into the very soul of her being; give him up with all his strength, and virility, and—yes, and coarseness, if you will—but sincerity too; an essential ...
— The Cow Puncher • Robert J. C. Stead |
