"Morass" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... sheet-lightning frequently illumed the black sky and flung a momentary glare over our path. No sound interrupted the stillness of the night save the slow tramp of the horses' hoofs, and occasionally the croaking of frogs from some pool or morass. I now bethought me that I was in Spain, the chosen land of the two fiends, assassination and plunder, and how easily two tired unarmed wanderers might become their victims. We at last cleared the woodlands, and after proceeding a short distance ...
— Letters of George Borrow - to the British and Foreign Bible Society • George Borrow
... to cut timber for that purpose. Captain Little, with fifty British regulars, was deputized to protect these men at their labors. This supporting party was posted on a narrow ridge leading to the fort, with a morass on one side, a creek on the other, and the ...
— Historic Tales, Vol. 1 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris
... The Mondega annually overflows its banks, changes its course and buries thousands of once fertile acres under sand and stones; the Vonga has converted the once productive land between Aveiro and Ovar into a vast morass; the Douro is periodically converted into a frightful and resistless torrent which sweeps ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 17, - No. 97, January, 1876 • Various
... tied. Speed, Malise, speed! such cause of haste Thine active sinews never braced. Bend 'gainst the steepy hill thy breast, Burst down like torrent from its crest; With short and springing footstep pass The trembling bog and false morass; Across the brook like roebuck bound, And thread the brake like questing hound; The crag is high, the scaur is deep, Yet shrink not from the desperate leap: Parched are thy burning lips and brow, Yet by the fountain pause not now; Herald of battle, fate, and ...
— The Lady of the Lake • Sir Walter Scott
... bank, the noble charger, who had borne his master bravely through the flood, fell back upon his rider, and the dead body of the king was afterward picked up by the Turks, covered with the mud of the morass. All Hungary would now have fallen into the hands of the Turks had not Solyman been recalled by a rebellion in ...
— The Empire of Austria; Its Rise and Present Power • John S. C. Abbott
... on no physical battlefield that we stand beside our men, and on no march through no external forest or morass that we have to lead; it is yet the old spirit which, undimmed by two thousand years, stirs within us in deeper and subtler ways; it is yet the cry of the old, free Northern woman which makes the world today. Though the battlefield be now for us all, in the laboratory or the workshop, ...
— Woman and Labour • Olive Schreiner
... sudden death, adhered sanguinarily to the side of his aristocratic nose, while heat and mental distress had drawn damp stripes down his countenance. His hands were scratched and inclined to bleed, and one leg had apparently been in a morass. Added to these physical drawbacks there was no visible sign of success, which was probably the worst part ...
— With Edged Tools • Henry Seton Merriman
... human foot could pass, Or a human heart would dare, On the quaking turf of the green morass He crouched in the rank and tangled grass, Like a wild ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... exultation at his escape from their enemies had given way to a settled despair. From descriptions he had heard, he recognized this mighty floating forest as the fringe which surrounds that greatest of all mysterious, trackless swamps, the Everglades. Before him lay the mighty unknown, unexplored morass, reeking with fever, and infested with serpents; behind him waited sure death at the hands ...
— The Boy Chums in the Forest - or Hunting for Plume Birds in the Florida Everglades • Wilmer M. Ely
... man my father is, Tends goats in the morass; Kragelill I myself am called, Can I ...
— Tord of Hafsborough - and Other Ballads • Anonymous
... the great struggle, which was to determine the fate of Scotland, the Bruce carefully avoided the errors which had led to Wallace's defeat at Falkirk. He selected a position which was covered, on one side by the Bannock Burn and a morass, and, on the other side, by the New Park or Forest. His front was protected by the stream and by the famous series of "pottes", or holes, covered over so as to deceive the English cavalry. The choice of this narrow position not only prevented the possibility ...
— An Outline of the Relations between England and Scotland (500-1707) • Robert S. Rait
... that 'from this time forth the Great Khan began to keep numbers of elephants.' It is obvious that cavalry could not manoeuvre in a morass such as fronts the city. Let us refer to the account ...
— The Travels of Marco Polo, Volume 2 • Marco Polo and Rustichello of Pisa
... every reason to trust you most fully. Have you any plan for extricating us from this dreadful morass of failure and difficulty into which we ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 152, January 10, 1917 • Various
... to me: "Across the turbid waves What is expected thou canst now discern, If reek of the morass conceal it not." ...
— Divine Comedy, Longfellow's Translation, Hell • Dante Alighieri
... I must ask you what there could be to make me leave such a paradise and return to the morass where I (in a lowered voice) spent twenty-five years of my life. What could I possibly expect out of the theater anyhow? I am not made for elderly parts. The heroic mother, the shrewish dame and ...
— The Lonely Way—Intermezzo—Countess Mizzie - Three Plays • Arthur Schnitzler
... essay to find whether they can be twisted as pliantly as their tales." A little below, but scarcely visible, was another gloomy dungeon-cell, wherein was what had once been men, but now with the faces of wolf-hounds, up to their lips in a morass, madly howling blasphemy and lies as often as they got their tongues clear of the mire. Just then a legion of devils passed by, and some attempted to bite the heels of ten or twelve of the devils that had brought them there: "Woe and ruin take you, ye ...
— The Visions of the Sleeping Bard • Ellis Wynne
... but caught, when a river saved them. For they crossed a bridge, of which, in order to delay the pursuer, they first cut the timbers down to the middle, thus making it not only unequal to a burden, but ready to come down; then they retreated into a dense morass. ...
— The Danish History, Books I-IX • Saxo Grammaticus ("Saxo the Learned")
... Oxford and found two villages, Upper and Lower Hinksey, and between them there lay a great swamp, so that the villagers could not pass from one to the other without many miles of a round. And when we came back in winter he asked us to help him to make a road across this morass for these village people to use. So out we went, day after day, and learned how to lay levels and to break stones, and to wheel barrows along a plank—a very difficult thing to do. And Ruskin worked with us in the mist and rain and mud ...
— Miscellanies • Oscar Wilde
... great morass, shot every side With flashing water through and through; a-shine, Thick-steaming, all-alive. Whose shape divine Quivered i' the farthest rainbow-vapour, glanced Athwart the flying herons? He advanced, But warily; though Mincio leaped no more, Each footfall burst up ...
— The Poetry Of Robert Browning • Stopford A. Brooke
... darkness? In the evening I put on my waterproof and I walked far upon the sodden moor, full of dark imaginings, the rain beating upon my face and the wind whistling about my ears. God help those who wander into the great mire now, for even the firm uplands are becoming a morass. I found the black tor upon which I had seen the solitary watcher, and from its craggy summit I looked out myself across the melancholy downs. Rain squalls drifted across their russet face, and the heavy, slate-coloured clouds hung low over the landscape, trailing ...
— Hound of the Baskervilles • Authur Conan Doyle
... he wanted, I doubt not, on his present path, even as I shall on mine. "Se tu segui la tua stella" is my motto. . . . Let it be his too, wherever the star may guide him. If it be a will-o'-the- wisp, and lead to the morass, he will only learn how to avoid ...
— Yeast: A Problem • Charles Kingsley
... his feet, went a step closer, gazing intently. This was real flesh and blood. It was in every way kin to the Limberlost, for no bird of its branches swung with easier grace than this dainty young thing rocked on the bit of morass on which she stood. A sapling beside her was not straighter or rounder than her slender form. Her soft, waving hair clung around her face from the heat, and curled over her shoulders. It was all of one piece with the gold of the sun that ...
— Freckles • Gene Stratton-Porter
... you may know me when you see me struggling through these pages, as one might struggle through a morass on a dark night, I shall take the liberty of describing myself in the best ...
— A Fool and His Money • George Barr McCutcheon
... in actual life conversation is generally so smeared and blurred with stupidities, so invaded and dominated by the spirit of dulness, so liable to swoon into meaninglessness, that to turn to Stevenson's books is like an escape into mountain air from the stagnant vapours of a morass. The exact reproduction of conversation as it occurs in life can only be undertaken by one whose natural dulness feels itself incommoded by wit and fancy as by a grit in the eye. Conversation is often no more than a nervous habit of body, like twiddling the thumbs, and ...
— Robert Louis Stevenson • Walter Raleigh
... way. Past the solitary lakes they went, past the long stretches of undulating morass, past the lonely sheilings perched far up on the hills; and the rough and blustering wind blew about them, and the gray clouds hurried by, and the old, strong-bearded man who shook the reins and gave the horses their heads could have laughed aloud ...
— Lippincott's Magazine. Vol. XII, No. 33. December, 1873. • Various
... monomaniac way whatever significance might lurk in them. And some certain significance lurks in all things, else all things are little worth, and the round world itself but an empty cipher, except to sell by the cartload, as they do hills about Boston, to fill up some morass in the ...
— Moby Dick; or The Whale • Herman Melville
... result? Is the American people as well educated or as well informed or as well cultivated as the English? To endeavour to make a comparison between the two is to traverse a very morass, full of holes, swamps, sloughs, creeks, inlets, quicksands, and pitfalls of divers and terrifying natures. If it is to be threaded at all, it must be only with the greatest ...
— The Twentieth Century American - Being a Comparative Study of the Peoples of the Two Great - Anglo-Saxon Nations • H. Perry Robinson
... Europe wherever that road system has departed from the old Roman scheme. It was in the Dark Ages with the gradual break-down of expensive causeways over marshes; with the gradual decline of certain centres; with bridges left unrepaired; culverts choked and making a morass against the dam of the roads, that you got the deflection of the great ways. In almost every broad river valley in England, where an old Roman road crosses the stream and its low-lying banks, you may see something which the Dark Ages left to us in our road system: you may see the ...
— Europe and the Faith - "Sine auctoritate nulla vita" • Hilaire Belloc
... the outlet of the bridge, on the other side, a morass, into which many horses and carriages had sunk, a circumstance which greatly embarrassed and retarded the entrance. Then it was that, in that infuriated column, crowded together, on a single plank of safety, there arose a terrible struggle, in which the weakest ...
— The Two Great Retreats of History • George Grote
... of material achievement—in America with the riot of young strength. England, like old King Amfortas, is now bleeding from the sins of her youth and calling in vain for some Parsifal to deliver her from their penalty. She has built her rich civilization on a morass of exploited millions, and her Nemesis is that in her hour of peril her sodden millions strike and drink and feel no imperative urge to give their lives for an England that sucked her prosperity from their veins. ...
— The World Decision • Robert Herrick
... was the capture of Charlemont, midway between Armagh and Dungannon. It was one of the strongest forts in the north of Ireland. It overlooked the Blackwater, and commanded an important pass. It was surrounded by a morass, and approachable only by two narrow causeways. When Teague O'Regan, who commanded the fort, was summoned to surrender, he replied, "Schomberg is an old rogue, and shall not have this castle!" But Caillemotte, with his Huguenot regiments, sat down before the fortress, ...
— The Huguenots in France • Samuel Smiles
... here and there about the edge shook their heads, especially when they came over to Hickathrift's, and said it would all be swept away one of these fine nights—it being the new river stretching week by week farther into the morass; but the flood did not seem to have that effect when it did come. On the contrary, short as was the distance which the great drain had penetrated, its effect was wonderful, for it carried off water in a few days which would otherwise have stayed ...
— Dick o' the Fens - A Tale of the Great East Swamp • George Manville Fenn
... could he lie, and still know that he was not lying? His sluggish mind wrestled, trying to choke back the incredible doubt. Somewhere in the morass, the picture of Martin Drengo came through—Drengo, the traitor, who was trying to kill his son—but the conviction swept through again, overpowering, the certain knowledge that Drengo was not a traitor, that he must trust Drengo. Drengo ...
— Infinite Intruder • Alan Edward Nourse
... clothes, old boards, old fragments of blanket and paper, are stuffed into the broken glass; and their air is misery and desolation. It pains the eye to see the stumps of great trees thickly strewn in every field of wheat; and never to lose the eternal swamp and dull morass, with hundreds of rotten trunks, of elm and pine and sycamore and logwood, steeped in its unwholesome water; where the frogs so croak at night that after dark there is an incessant sound as if millions of phantom teams, with ...
— The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete • John Forster
... disagreeable things to do, and I can't be idle with you." Then I go into jagged up-hill and down-hill streets, where I am in the pastrycook's shop at one moment, and next moment in savage fastnesses of moor and morass, beyond the confines of civilisation, and I say to those murky and black-dusty streets, "Will YOU come and be idle with me?" To which they reply, "No, we can't, indeed, for we haven't the spirits, and we are startled by the echo of your feet on the ...
— The Lazy Tour of Two Idle Apprentices • Charles Dickens
... was not disappointed in his expectations, for the Romance had a great run. In the year 1638, he was attending the Carnival at Mons, of which he was a canon. Having put on the dress of a savage, he was followed by a troop of boys into a morass, where he was kept so long, that the cold penetrated his debilitated limbs, which became contracted in such a manner, that he used to compare his body to the shape of a Z. He died in 1660, at the age of fifty; he said to his friends who surrounded his dying bed, "I shall never make you weep so much ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 13, - Issue 352, January 17, 1829 • Various
... a relief to Denis; it was like a piece of solid ground to a man laboring in a morass; his mind seized upon it with avidity; and he stood staring at it and trying to piece together some logical conception of his surroundings. Plainly there was a flight of steps ascending from his own level to that of this illuminated doorway, and indeed he thought he could make ...
— Short-Stories • Various
... of Venice the banks of sand which nearer the city rise little above low-water mark attain by degrees a higher level, and knit themselves at last into fields of salt morass, raised here and there into shapeless mounds, and intercepted by narrow creeks ...
— Howards End • E. M. Forster
... which from the essential holiness of his nature it is impossible he should not have given, man deprived himself of the ability to obey. And was the law of God therefore to be annulled? Must the sun cease to shine because the earth has become a morass, so that even that very glory of the sun hath become a new cause of its steaming up clouds and vapors that strangle the rays? God forbid! 'But for the law I had not sinned'. But had I not been sinful the law would not have occasioned me ...
— The Literary Remains Of Samuel Taylor Coleridge • Edited By Henry Nelson Coleridge
... tremendous, but tamed; and many, especially in our great cultured centres, regard every bull as presumably a mad bull. In the same way we think of most garden trees and plants as fierce creatures of the forest or morass taught at last ...
— Alarms and Discursions • G. K. Chesterton
... horses to the carts, in order to leave the place, each of them boasted and bragged of his bridal present. But when the uproar was at the highest, and they were all speaking together, a maiden dressed in green, and with a bulrush plaited over her head, came from a neighbouring morass, and going up to the fellow who was noisiest and bragged most of his bridal gift, she said, 'What will you give to Lady Boe?' The boor, who was half intoxicated from the brandy and ale he had swallowed, seized a whip, and answered, ...
— George Borrow - The Man and His Books • Edward Thomas
... detachments sent to meet them. Lewis of Nassau was at first more successful. Entering Groningen at the head of eight or nine thousand undisciplined troops he was attacked, May 23, in a strong position behind a morass by a Spanish force under the Count of Aremberg, Stadholder of Friesland, at Heiligerlee. He gained a complete victory. Aremberg himself was slain, as was also the younger brother of Lewis, Adolphus of Nassau. The triumph of the invaders was of short duration. Alva himself took ...
— History of Holland • George Edmundson
... this contrivance to facilitate the passage of a morass. But I confess, that in my confusion I had entirely forgotten it, and probably should have continued to do so until too late to be ...
— A Complete Account of the Settlement at Port Jackson • Watkin Tench
... hiding-place of Alfred the Great, at the time when the fortunes of England lay trembling in the balance, is a slightly elevated plot of land where the river Parret joins the Tone. In Alfred's days it was a small island surrounded by an impenetrable morass, and thickly grown with alders. Here tradition places the hut in which the king, deep in thought, allowed the good wife's cakes to burn. Soon a little band of faithful followers joined Alfred, and together they ...
— What to See in England • Gordon Home
... killing men, ravishing women and plundering their neighbours' lands—though occasional flashes of bravery and chivalry had glanced over their annals in history like the light from a wandering will o' the wisp flickering over a morass. Gifted in his art, but wholly undisciplined in his nature, he had lived a life of selfish aims to selfish ends, and in the course of it had made love to many women,—one especially, on whose devoted affections he had preyed like an insect that ungratefully poisons the flower ...
— Innocent - Her Fancy and His Fact • Marie Corelli
... a little lower down, the stream is so shallow that the coffles frequently cross it on foot. On the south side of the river, opposite to this place, is a large plain of clayey ground, called Toombi Toorila. It is a sort of morass, in which people are frequently lost, it being more than a day's journey across it. In the afternoon we met a man and two women, with bundles of cotton-cloth upon their heads. They were going, they said, for Dentila, to purchase iron, there ...
— Life and Travels of Mungo Park in Central Africa • Mungo Park
... long line at the end of what she had written; below, that is, a great black morass of scratches that represented significantly the "Slough of Despond" she had got into over the winding up, ...
— Real Folks • Mrs. A. D. T. Whitney
... all the evils of foreign invasion with none of its benefits. In England the great rivers and the Roman roads had been so many highways by which the Scandinavians had penetrated into the heart of the country. But in Ireland no road and no great river had guided the invader onwards past morass and bog and forest. While the great host of the Danish invaders swooped down over England and Gaul, the pirates that sailed to Ireland had only force to dash themselves on the coast, and there ...
— Henry the Second • Mrs. J. R. Green
... is all straight road with moor, morass, and fenland on either side, broken only by the single hamlet of Aldersbury, just over the Wiltshire border. Our horses, refreshed by the short rest, stepped out gallantly, and the brisk motion, with the sunlight and the beauty of the morning, combined to raise our spirits and cheer ...
— Micah Clarke - His Statement as made to his three Grandchildren Joseph, - Gervas and Reuben During the Hard Winter of 1734 • Arthur Conan Doyle
... through the camp. Day then appearing, he gave the word (still, of course, in that bruised and aching state) Forward! and led his army on to near Falkirk, where the Scottish forces were seen drawn up on some stony ground, behind a morass. Here, he defeated Wallace, and killed fifteen thousand of his men. With the shattered remainder, Wallace drew back to Stirling; but, being pursued, set fire to the town that it might give no help to the English, and escaped. The inhabitants of Perth afterwards set fire to their houses ...
— A Child's History of England • Charles Dickens
... ditch of a fortress. It was, in all respects, capable of a prolonged defence. In form it was an irregular parallelogram, about eight hundred yards in length and six hundred yards wide, and on the walls were eleven strong bastions. The morass which surrounded it was of from three to eighteen feet ...
— With Clive in India - Or, The Beginnings of an Empire • G. A. Henty
... saved Bill. He clutched at it and it supported him. He was thus enabled to keep the Good Sport from falling and to assist Heinrich to rise from the morass of glasses, knives, and pats of butter in which he was wallowing. Then, the dance having been abandoned by mutual consent, he helped his now somewhat hysterical partner back ...
— Uneasy Money • P.G. Wodehouse
... could answer "Whither are we drifting?" Or hope to wallow out of the morass— I might continue boosting and uplifting; But as it is, ...
— The So-called Human Race • Bert Leston Taylor
... traveller approaches St. Petersburg, unless he goes thither by sea, he must traverse several hundred miles of forest and morass, presenting few traces of human habitation or agriculture. This fact adds powerfully to the first impression which the city makes on his mind. In the midst of a waste howling wilderness, he suddenly comes on a ...
— Russia • Donald Mackenzie Wallace
... species of irritation, that the girl was discoursing volubly about the offending chair merely in order to extricate an apparently shy and tongue-tied young man from a morass ...
— Number Seventeen • Louis Tracy
... hand a cornucopia filled with the ears of rice, of millet, and of the capsule or seed-vessel of the Nelumbium, these being articles of food which fall to the share of the poorest peasant. This very beautiful water lilly grows spontaneously in almost every lake and morass, from the middle of Tartary to the province of Canton; a curious circumstance, when we consider the very great difficulty with which it can be preserved, even by artificial means, in climates of Europe, whose temperature are less warm and less cold than many of those where, in China, ...
— Travels in China, Containing Descriptions, Observations, and Comparisons, Made and Collected in the Course of a Short Residence at the Imperial Palace of Yuen-Min-Yuen, and on a Subsequent Journey thr • John Barrow
... a great deal of shouting and whipping to get the poor brutes to take to this treacherous morass, but one after the other they were driven in, until at length the whole dozen of the pack-train were distributed, half-submerged, over the hundred yards of the mucky trail. Uncle Dick, not stopping to think of his clothes, followed Moise in; and Rob, pluckily as either ...
— The Young Alaskans in the Rockies • Emerson Hough
... have it ready in advance. What was his horror, on returning to School at the appointed date, to find that they were going to throw Demosthenes over altogether, and patronize Plato. Threats, entreaties, prayers—all were accounted nothing by the master who had led him into this morass of troubles. It is believed that the shock destroyed his reason. At any rate, the fact remains that that term (the summer term, mark you) he won two prizes. In the following term he won three. ...
— Tales of St. Austin's • P. G. Wodehouse
... of curses and prayers from his soldiery; and they reached the shore just in time to see between them and the water a long black smouldering writhing line; the morass to right and left, which had been a minute before deep reed, an open smutty pool, dotted with boatsful of shrieking and cursing men; and at the causeway-end the tower, with the flame climbing up its posts, and the witch of Brandon throwing herself desperately from the top, and falling dead ...
— Hereward, The Last of the English • Charles Kingsley
... been Steve's plan to span that mile or so of swamp and bridge the river before the cold weather set in. Nor was his altered order of campaign due in any way to the storm which had raised the river and made of the alder-dotted stretch of flat bog-meadow an oozing, quaking morass. It no longer represented merely a positive not too alluring problem in engineering—that strip of swamp and open water. It had taken on a newer, strategic importance. And the change in Steve's plans, ...
— Then I'll Come Back to You • Larry Evans
... was a Hessian boot. The soil of the amphitheater was so worked, mixed, and sieved by the explosive action and the effects of the melting snow that it was almost impassable. A staff officer, among others, who went up to help, had to be pulled out of the morass as he was carrying away one of the wounded. There is no fighting so terrible and so condensed as crater fighting. The struggle is a veritable graveyard, a perfect target for bomb and grenade and the slower attack of the enemy's mine. The British ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume V (of 8) • Francis J. (Francis Joseph) Reynolds, Allen L. (Allen Leon)
... bodies of water—in short, a gigantic Dismal Swamp, or Everglade. I need hardly say that it was Edmund who first drew this inference, and when its full meaning burst upon my mind I shuddered at the hellish design which Ingra evidently entertained. Plainly, he meant to throw us into the morass, either to drown in the foul water, whose miasma now assailed our nostrils, or to starve amidst the fens! But his real intention, as you will perceive in a little ...
— A Columbus of Space • Garrett P. Serviss
... on march thither; and privately has his eye upon them, on Friedrich's part!—For the rest, this upland platform, insensibly sloping two ways, and as yet undrained, is of scraggy boggy nature in many places; much of it damp ground, or sheer morass; better parts of it covered, at this season, with rank June grass, or greener luxuriance of oats and barley. A humble peaceable scene; peaceable till this afternoon; dotted, too, with six or seven poor Hamlets, with ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XV. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... were in difficulties, ventured nearer. Caesar surveyed his position. It had been well chosen behind a deep morass. The legions clamored to be allowed to advance and attack him, but a victory, he saw, would be dearly purchased. No condemnation could be too severe for him, he said, if he did not hold the lives of his soldiers dearer than his own interest,[4] ...
— Caesar: A Sketch • James Anthony Froude
... had not drank up the dew-drops that sparkled like gems on herb and foliage before the young hunter had again resumed his march. He followed with unerring precision the trail of the fugitives through thorny thicket and quaking morass, and ere the evening sun had dropped behind the hills, he came upon the encampment of his foe. The party had flung themselves upon the soft turf, beneath the drooping branches of a grove of cedars, and were enjoying their ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 5, No. 3, March, 1852 • Various
... flood? To be able to reconnoitre the defences of a fortress was surely the a b c of the trade of war. Captains and soldiers of fortune never risked advancing against a fortification without knowing first whether there were water, morass or briars, and arming themselves accordingly with siege train suitable to the occasion. When the water of the moat was deep they launched leather boats carried on horses' backs.[1779] The men-at-arms of the Marechal de Rais and my Lord of Alencon ...
— The Life of Joan of Arc, Vol. 1 and 2 (of 2) • Anatole France
... whose fountains are within"—the propriety of this dramatic means can scarce be gainsaid. The swift complicated mental machinery can thus be exhibited infinitely more coherently and comprehensibly than by the most electric succinct dialogue. Again and again Browning has nigh foundered in the morass of monologue, but, broadly speaking, he transcends in this ...
— Life of Robert Browning • William Sharp
... circuitous, hugging the fringe of jungle. The gweels traveled it every day. But Latham had a better plan. By cutting directly through the morass, he might just arrive ...
— One Purple Hope! • Henry Hasse
... one must not be particular. Leaving our baggage in the care of one "Hassan," a bright-eyed, intelligent-looking lad, and instructing him to prepare a meal, we made for the bazaar, a hundred yards away, through a morass, knee deep in mud and abomination of all ...
— A Ride to India across Persia and Baluchistan • Harry De Windt
... upon the grass beside him, Ab heaped it with the dirt until there had accumulated as much as he could carry, when, gathering the corners together, he struggled with the enclosed load manfully to the bank and spilled it down into the morass. The digging went on rapidly until Ab, out of breath and tired, threw down the skin and climbed into the treetop and became the watchman, while Oak assumed his labor. So they worked alternately in treetop and upon the ground until the sun's rays shot red and slanting ...
— The Story of Ab - A Tale of the Time of the Cave Man • Stanley Waterloo
... lake stretching up to the north, between us and the opposite mountains. The river was bordered with a fringe of willows and canes, among which were interspersed a few plants; and scattered about on the marsh was a species of uniola, closely allied to U. spicata of our sea- coast. The whole morass was animated with multitudes of water-fowl, which appeared to be very wild—rising for the space of a mile round about at the sound of a gun, with a noise like distant thunder. Several of the people waded out into ...
— The Exploring Expedition to the Rocky Mountains, Oregon and California • Brevet Col. J.C. Fremont
... wave, that the giant turbot might flap its snowy flakes on the emperor's table broader than its broad dish of gold. Many a swelling hill, clad in the dark oak coppice, had echoed to ringing shout of hunter and deep-mouthed bay of hound, ere the wild boar yielded his grim life by the morass, and the dark, grisly carcass was drawn off to provide a standing dish that was only meant to gratify the eye. Even the peacock roasted in its feathers was too gross a dainty for epicures who studied ...
— Historic Tales, Volume 11 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris
... repose. Moscow is but one hundred and ten wersts from Malo-Yaroslawetz; four days would have been sufficient to go that distance; we took six. The army, laden with provisions and pillage, was heavy, and the roads were deep. A whole day had been sacrificed to the passage of the Nara and its morass, as also to the rallying of the different corps. It is true that in defiling so near the enemy it was necessary to march close, that we might not present to him too long a flank. Be this as it may, we may date all our calamities ...
— History of the Expedition to Russia - Undertaken by the Emperor Napoleon in the Year 1812 • Count Philip de Segur
... good greenwood, Our tent the cypress tree; We know the forest round us As seamen know the sea. We know its walls of thorny vines, Its glades of reedy grass, Its safe and silent islands Within the dark morass. —Bryant. ...
— Hero Tales From American History • Henry Cabot Lodge, and Theodore Roosevelt
... and make Descents at one and the same Time in different Parts of the Island. They ask'd the two Prisoners how the Country lay, and what the Soil was on the North Side the Island; and they answer'd it was morass, and the most dangerous Part to attempt, it being a Place where they shelter on ...
— Of Captain Mission • Daniel Defoe
... through an emotional morass, you see. A firm smooth-bearing surface, that was what, for every-day use, he wanted her to provide him with; lightly given, casual caresses that could be accepted with a smile, pleasantness, a confident security that she wouldn't be "tragic." And on the assumption that she couldn't walk beside ...
— The Real Adventure • Henry Kitchell Webster
... he saw another line of tracks, and, going to examine it, perceived that it was where the boar had chased the black man across the morass. Most of the negro's footprints were lost in ...
— Golden Days for Boys and Girls - Volume VIII, No 25: May 21, 1887 • Various
... to play her old part, to regain her lost dominion, to reconvert the smiling land into the pestilential morass, where she could play again her old antics. From the period of the Reformation in England up to the present time, she has kept her emissaries here, individuals contemptible in intellect, it is true, but cat-like and gliding, who, at her bidding, ...
— Lavengro - The Scholar, The Gypsy, The Priest • George Borrow
... Corb, from the name of his estate. This family has passed away, and its property merged in Banff. The laird was intensely disliked in the neighbourhood. Sir George Ramsay was, on the other hand, universally popular and respected. On one occasion, Sir George, in passing a morass in his own neighbourhood, had missed the road and fallen into a bog to an alarming depth. To his great relief, he saw a passenger coming along the path, which was at no great distance. He called loudly for his help, but the man took no notice. Poor Sir George ...
— Reminiscences of Scottish Life and Character • Edward Bannerman Ramsay
... as slowly you pass To your roosts in the haunts of the exiled thrushes, Sing him the song of the green morass, And the tides that water the reeds ...
— Voices for the Speechless • Abraham Firth
... Our shame to feel, our pride to show, Glad, angry—but indifferent, no! Whether it be thy lot to go, {660} For the good of us all, where the haters meet In the crowded city's horrible street; Or thou step alone through the morass Where never sound yet was Save the dry quick clap of the stork's bill, For the air is still, and the water still, When the blue breast of the dipping coot Dives under, and all is mute. So at the last shall come old age, Decrepit as befits that stage; {670} How else wouldst thou retire apart With ...
— Introduction to Robert Browning • Hiram Corson
... day. Monasteries unnumbered lifted their towers above the forests of a land in which the streams still ran unstained and the air of which had not yet been dimmed by smoke, imparting a dignity to fen and flat morass. Round them ere long cities gathered, as at St. Albans, Malmesbury, Sherborne, and Wimborne; the most memorable of those monasteries being that at Canterbury, and that at Westminister, dedicated to St. Peter, ...
— Legends of the Saxon Saints • Aubrey de Vere
... of a kingdom and a great mart of trade, since burnt down and destroyed by the Dutch, exhibits nothing but ruins. There still remain numberless delicious fruit-trees, and a country still susceptible of general cultivation, being yet clear of jungle and morass. It is utterly abandoned: that it has not been rebuilt is owing to the Rajah of Pontiana, at whose suggestion it was destroyed, and whose interest it was to keep it down, having himself risen ...
— The Expedition to Borneo of H.M.S. Dido - For the Suppression of Piracy • Henry Keppel
... also, the interminable and inextricable dispute about the precise meaning and application of the terms "mobilization," "partial mobilization," "complete mobilization," "precautionary measures," "Kriegsgefahr," an so on. That is an unfathomable morass wherein many deceptions hide. In that controversy each opponent always charges the other with lying, and a wise neutral doubts both. It seems to be true—mark you, I only say it seems—that the first great European Power ...
— Fighting For Peace • Henry Van Dyke
... conclusion with a stick." But he made a good end; for when the Zulu soldiers attacked him, he killed no less than twenty of them with the Watcher, and the spears stuck in him "as thick as reeds in a morass." This man's strength was so great that he could kill a leopard "like a fly," with his hands only, much as Umslopogaas slew the ...
— Nada the Lily • H. Rider Haggard
... carpet spread in the heart of the woods. Here the vapour was more dense than ever, but I welcomed the sight of open ground after the reptile-infested thicket. Alas! it was a snare, a death-trap, a sort of morass, in which we sank up to our knees. Pah! it was filthy—vile! And I became aware of great—lassitude, do you say?— whilst Valera's panting breath told that he had almost reached the end ...
— Bat Wing • Sax Rohmer
... felt very nervous and excited. All sorts of odd fancies came into my head, and would not go away, but danced about like Will-o'-the-wisps on a morass. What did Prince Ivan mean? Was he mad? or had he drunk too much wine? What strange illusion had he in his mind about Zara and a demon? Suddenly a thought flashed upon me that made me tremble from head to foot. ...
— A Romance of Two Worlds • Marie Corelli
... my right flank, and as I reached the Nineteenth Corps the enemy was contesting the ground in its front with great obstinacy; but Emory's dogged persistence was at length rewarded with success, just as Crook's command emerged from the morass of Red Bud Run, and swept around Gordon, toward the right of Breckenridge, who, with two of Wharton's brigades, was holding a line at right angles with the Valley pike for the protection of the Confederate rear. Early had ordered ...
— The Memoirs of General P. H. Sheridan, Complete • General Philip Henry Sheridan
... bow while he listened,—and while the thunder shook the earth he slipped through the crevices of the rock and lay hidden at the edge of a mountain morass where the reeds grew tall, and wild things fed—ahead of the storm small animals might cross the open there to reach the shelter of the rock walls—and K[a]-ye-povi ...
— The Flute of the Gods • Marah Ellis Ryan
... That dreary morass, that Serbonian bog, the Bacon-Shakespeare controversy, has been lately lit up as by the flickering light of a will-o'-the-wisp, by the almost simultaneous publication of an imaginary charge delivered to an equally ...
— In the Name of the Bodleian and Other Essays • Augustine Birrell
... which they manage with great dexterity. They sit astride the stern, with their legs hanging down in the water, and if they cannot find any branches capable of being used as oars, they paddle with their hands. The Nouers, who inhabit this region of marsh and morass, seem to offer an illustration of the Darwinian theory of the "survival of the fittest." By a process of natural selection, they have become thoroughly adapted to the conditions of the soil and climate, the weaker of the ...
— Celebrated Women Travellers of the Nineteenth Century • W. H. Davenport Adams
... Woodburn, for bravery and good conduct, had been made a subaltern officer, marched with that division of the army which Arnold, with almost unequalled energy and fortitude, and amidst privation and suffering untold, led through the snow-clad wilderness of morass and mountain, to the distant Quebec. And there, in the onset, in which the high-souled Montgomery fell, they were together cut off from their company and made prisoners; when, after having, for nearly a year and a half, endured ...
— The Rangers - [Subtitle: The Tory's Daughter] • D. P. Thompson
... was at once resumed, and, floundering in the mud, the artillery horses especially with great labour dragging the guns through the morass which extended nearly all the way, we arrived at about four o'clock on the banks of a canal in full view ...
— A Narrative Of The Siege Of Delhi - With An Account Of The Mutiny At Ferozepore In 1857 • Charles John Griffiths
... their way across it. He, therefore, assisting to support Jerry, moved on as fast as his weight and the nature of the ground would allow. Jerry's fall, however, had given an advantage to their pursuers, who were now making their way across the morass, sometimes stopped by a soft portion, and again moving faster where the ground was comparatively firmer. Still the Cossacks had somewhat gained upon them, and were scarcely fifty yards off, when Tom's welcome shout reached ...
— The Three Commanders • W.H.G. Kingston
... intent on their own business. The market-place was bordered to the east and west by an extensive swamp, covered with weeds and water and frequented by wild ducks, cranes, and vultures. The house which had been provided for him was close to a morass, the pestilential exhalations of which were increased by the sewers of the houses ...
— Great African Travellers - From Mungo Park to Livingstone and Stanley • W.H.G. Kingston
... its right from off the ground on which they had rested, soon entered the path through the morass, conducting their march with astonishing silence and great rapidity. The mist had not risen to the higher grounds, so that for some time they had the advantage of starlight. But this was lost as the stars faded before approaching day, and the head of the marching column, ...
— English Literature For Boys And Girls • H.E. Marshall
... was cheered by the knowledge that so long as the world recognizes the divine right of Kings, no monarch by descent could lay better claim to a throne than he. And he was young, and in love, and ready to believe that youth and love can level mountains, make firm the morass, ...
— A Son of the Immortals • Louis Tracy
... and the earth itself shook and trembled as if about to swallow up those whom the waters or their falling habitations had spared. The smaller vessels at anchor in the bay were driven on shore and dashed to pieces, and the largest were torn from their anchors and carried up far into the morass, whence they could never be removed. One ship, the Princess Royal, was hove on her beam-ends, but again righted by the earthquake or by the force of the wind, and was left ...
— Hurricane Hurry • W.H.G. Kingston
... too much to say they were enchanted to see Mary looking not a day over thirty, but they were able to endure it. Isabel Lawrence thought it downright immoral, and Polly Vane looked as if she had fallen into a stinking morass and only refrained from holding her nose out of consideration for her hostess. I think she feels that Mary's return is an insult to New York. Lily Tracy was painfully excited. No doubt she'll begin collecting for the Vienna poor at once and finding it necessary ...
— Black Oxen • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... undefined, stretched along the borders of the bay, presenting a vast and uncultivated tract, varying through every shade of sterility and verdure; from the bare and beetling promontory, which defied the encroaching tide, the desert plain, and dark morass, to the impervious forest, the sloping upland, and the green valley, watered by its countless streams. A transient sun-beam, at times, gilded this variegated prospect, and again the flitting clouds chequered it with ...
— The Rivals of Acadia - An Old Story of the New World • Harriet Vaughan Cheney
... engage without some superiority of circumstances, and both watchful to prevent that superiority. At length the Sultan observing a weakness in the left wing of Hobaddan's army, caused by sickness, as they were encamped near a morass, gave orders for a furious attack upon the front, but directed the main effort to be made against ...
— Eastern Tales by Many Story Tellers • Various
... he never meant that his wife should lose a cent, and to satisfy his conscience, and impressed by his danger, he resolved that as soon as he was out of this quaking morass of speculation he would settle on his wife and each daughter enough to secure them in wealth through life, and arrange it in such a way that no ...
— What Can She Do? • Edward Payson Roe
... a day of disaster. I intended to go as far as Orthez, and had already made half the journey when I was overtaken by one of these terrible storms which one has in the Midi. Rain mixed with hail fell in torrents, beating on my face; the road, already bad, became a morass in which I had the greatest difficulty in walking in boots with spurs; a chestnut tree near to me was struck by lighting.... No matter, I walked on with stoic resignation. But, behold....! In the midst of the storm I saw coming toward me two mounted gendarmes. You ...
— The Memoirs of General the Baron de Marbot, Translated by - Oliver C. Colt • Baron de Marbot
... erected. Here we surveyed its rock-hewn seats, capable of accommodating an audience larger than that of all the theaters of New York; but there was no longer a voice to cry, "Great is Diana of the Ephesians!" The sea has forsaken the harbor, which is now a pestilential morass. We passed through the ruins of the custom-house, now miles inland, and found a single Turkish soldier on guard. The peasants who cultivate some parts of the plain come from distant villages, and fever, filth, and beggary reign ...
— Fables of Infidelity and Facts of Faith - Being an Examination of the Evidences of Infidelity • Robert Patterson
... into the rear of the army of James? About four miles south of the Boyne was a place called Duleek, where the road to Dublin was so narrow, that two cars could not pass each other, and where on both sides of the road lay a morass which afforded no firm footing. If Meinhart Schomberg should occupy this spot, it would be impossible for the Irish to retreat. They must either conquer, or be cut off to a man. Disturbed by this apprehension, the French general marched with his countrymen and with Sarsfield's horse in the direction ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 3 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... house - a vertical thread of light, widening towards the bottom, such as might escape between two wings of arras over a doorway. To see anything was a relief to Denis; it was like a piece of solid ground to a man labouring in a morass; his mind seized upon it with avidity; and he stood staring at it and trying to piece together some logical conception of his surroundings. Plainly there was a flight of steps ascending from his own level to that ...
— New Arabian Nights • Robert Louis Stevenson
... by its having been for some time the place of his retreat. It was called Athelney.[1] Athelney was, however, scarcely deserving of a name, for it was nothing but a small spot of dry land in the midst of a morass, which, as grass would grow upon it in the openings among the trees, a simple cow-herd had taken possession of, ...
— King Alfred of England - Makers of History • Jacob Abbott
... tempers and vicious habits yielded a regular comedy of fun; and, in order to improve it, he would sometimes bribe Lord Westport's treacherous groom into misleading us, when floundering amongst bogs, into the interior labyrinths of these morasses. Deep, however, as the morass, was this man's remorse when, on leaving Westport, I gave him the heavy golden perquisite, which my mother (unaware of the tricks he had practised upon me) had by letter instructed me to give. He was a mere savage boy from the central bogs of Connaught, and, to ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey
... obeyed; and, supported by staffs, they endeavoured to place their feet {on the top} of the high hill. They were {now} as far from the top, as an arrow discharged can go at once, {when} they turned their eyes, and beheld the other parts sinking in a morass, {and} their own abode alone remaining. While they were wondering at these things, {and} while they were bewailing the fate of their {fellow countrymen}, that old cottage of {theirs}, {too} little for even two owners, was changed into a temple. Columns took the place of forked stakes, ...
— The Metamorphoses of Ovid - Literally Translated into English Prose, with Copious Notes - and Explanations • Publius Ovidius Naso
... the rivers Parana and Uruguay, the latter forming the boundary on the south-east. The rolling plains and woods alternate with great marshes called 'esteros', which in some districts, as of that of Neembucu, cover large tracts of land, forming in winter an almost impenetrable morass, and in the spring and early summer excellent feeding-ground for sheep. Throughout the territory the climate is healthy, except towards the woody northern hills. With this rich territory and the false reports of mines, which even unsuccessful exploration could not dispel, it is but natural ...
— A Vanished Arcadia, • R. B. Cunninghame Graham
... often afford them shelter; some solitary farm-house on the borders of a lake, or near a deep morass, took the name of their monastery; some cranogue in the lake, or dry spot in the thick of the morass, which they could reach by paths known to themselves only, was their asylum in times of extraordinary ...
— Irish Race in the Past and the Present • Aug. J. Thebaud
... through one or two small rivers, to a saw-mill, situated on the edge of an extensive forest, through which we proceeded for some miles. The road was a difficult one, and our progress was but slow, being often impeded by a morass or by the trunk of a tree which had fallen right across the path, and was now rapidly rotting into touchwood under the influence of the damp atmosphere and incessant rain. Lichens of every colour and shape abounded, and ...
— A Voyage in the 'Sunbeam' • Annie Allnut Brassey
... the bushy grounds, Far in the distance rose the yell of hounds: The flame-wisps, starting from the sedge and grass, Hung, 'mid the vapours, over the morass. Up to him came a beldame, wildly drest, Bearing a closely-folded feather-vest: She smil'd upon him with her cheeks so wan, Gave him the robe, ...
— Romantic Ballads - translated from the Danish; and Miscellaneous Pieces • George Borrow
... so secret Thrive terror and theft set free; Treason and shame shall come to pass While one weed flowers in a morass; And like the stillness of stiff grass The ...
— The Ballad of the White Horse • G.K. Chesterton
... said. 'It turns out for nothing. It crosses a morass to avoid going around. When you reach the high ground you are covered with mud and slime. You need to be washed and disinfected, and perhaps you've caught a fever that will last as long as you live. Many a boy and girl have got mired in this ...
— 'Charge It' - Keeping Up With Harry • Irving Bacheller
... edge of a morass, and spring back to firmer ground. Our Bible, as we have it, is a translation, made by forty-seven men and published in the year 1611. The original—and I am still on firm ground because I am quoting now from "The Cambridge History ...
— On The Art of Reading • Arthur Quiller-Couch
... Arden. There are some gigantic oak trees and even some very papier-mache-looking stumps, all ready for the duke, "and other Lords, like Foresters," to do their moralizing upon; and in place of the poor sequestered stag there is a very fine plushy cow, grazing, hard by a very agreeable morass. At the back (L.U.E.) is discovered a pleasing ruin, the carcass of an ancient farmstead, whose stony ribs are thickset with brambles; and the pleasant melancholy of an abandoned orchard rounds off the scene in the wings, giving a fine place for Rosalind ...
— Plum Pudding - Of Divers Ingredients, Discreetly Blended & Seasoned • Christopher Morley
... 1864), follows Knox picturesquely.], the Warden of the Marches, show that, acting on some days' information, he had ready a force of from 2,000 to 3,000 men, with whom, having watched his opportunity, he fell upon the very badly organised Scottish levies and entangled them in the morass called Solway Moss. The completeness of the disaster has not been over-rated; but it was an intelligible operation of war, not a miracle. James was prostrated by the blow. In three weeks time (December 14th, 1542) he was dead, and his week-old ...
— England Under the Tudors • Arthur D. Innes
... theology,—what is there of the divine in their characters? What supernatural in their deeds? What wisdom poured forth from their lips which did not come from other philosophers? What immense structures have been founded on these shifting sands, on this morass of ignorance and childish fable? How long can these structures endure, aided by the bolstering up of the theologists, and how long must it be before the light of reason will pierce these foundations of blindness and force them ...
— The Necessity of Atheism • Dr. D.M. Brooks
... notwithstanding the severity of the night, and the rain pouring in torrents upon him, when he found it necessary to cross a level of rough land, at all times damp and marshy, but in consequence of the rains of the season, now a perfect morass. Over this he had advanced about half a mile, and got beyond the frightful noises of the woods, when some large object rose into the air from a clump of plashy rushes before him, and shot along the blast, uttering a booming sound, so loud and ...
— The Black Prophet: A Tale Of Irish Famine • William Carleton
... fuller and fairer symbol of taxation, both in its possible good and evil effects, is to be found in the evaporation of waters from the surface of the earth. The sun may draw up the moisture from the river, the morass, and the ocean, to be given back in genial showers to the garden, to the pasture, and the corn field; but it may, likewise, force away the moisture from the fields of tillage, to drop it on the stagnant pool, the saturated swamp, or the unprofitable sand-waste. The gardens in the south ...
— Specimens of the Table Talk of S.T.Coleridge • Coleridge
... spots with white centres animate the colour of the lower petals in our mountain kind—-mountain or morass;—it is vilely drawn in S. 997 under the name of Sylvatica, translated 'Procumbent'! As it is neither a wood flower nor a procumbent one,[33] and as its rosy colour is rare among morass flowers, I shall call ...
— Proserpina, Volume 2 - Studies Of Wayside Flowers • John Ruskin
... hour of five to go with him on inspection I might watch his methods, and it means something to men to have their corps commander thus early among them when a drizzly rain is softening the morass under foot. He stopped and asked the privates how they were in a friendly way and they answered with straight-away candor. Then he gave some directions about improvements with a we-are-all-working-together suggestiveness, but all the time he was the general. ...
— My Second Year of the War • Frederick Palmer
... down, and ordered her hot milk and, with a flutter, awaited it. This was life. And to-morrow she must telegraph to her step-father, and everything would end in the old round of parish duties; all her hopes and dreams would be submerged in the heavy morass of meeting mothers. The thought leapt up.—Betty hid her eyes and would not look at it. Instead, she looked at the other people seated at the tables—the women. They were laughing and talking among themselves. One or two looked at Betty and smiled with frank friendliness. Betty smiled back, but with ...
— The Incomplete Amorist • E. Nesbit
... the Moon is on the wave, And the glow-worm in the grass, And the meteor on the grave, And the wisp on the morass;[118] When the falling stars are shooting, And the answered owls are hooting, And the silent leaves are still In the shadow of the hill, Shall my soul be upon thine, 200 With a power and ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 4 • Lord Byron
... belonging to his wife's family, lying seventy feet above the sea, sixteen miles from Dumfries, among desolate moors and bogs, and fully six miles from the nearest village. 'The house is gaunt and hungry-looking. It stands with the scanty fields attached as an island in a sea of morass. The landscape is unredeemed either by grace or grandeur, mere undulating hills of grass and heather with peat bogs in the hollows between them.' So Froude describes the home where the Carlyles were to spend six years, the wife in domestic labours, in solitude, ...
— Victorian Worthies - Sixteen Biographies • George Henry Blore
... N. marsh, swamp, morass, marish^, moss, fen, bog, quagmire, slough, sump, wash; mud, squash, slush; baygall [U.S.], cienaga^, jhil^, vlei^. Adj. marsh, marshy; swampy, boggy, plashy^, poachy^, quaggy^, soft; muddy, sloppy, squashy; ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... her child was born. He longed for even the superficial thrill of Felicity's presence, but she still lingered in the South. So fretting, he tossed himself against the bars through the long snows of an unusually severe March, until April broke the frost, and the road to the Byrdsnest became a morass of running mud. ...
— The Nest Builder • Beatrice Forbes-Robertson Hale
... on. Several of his hearers were really interested in the then unusual subject, and listened intelligently as he pointed across the low plain at hundreds of acres of land that were nothing but a morass, partly filled in with the foulest refuse of a semi-tropical city, and beyond it where still lay the swamp, half cleared of its forest and festering in the sun—"every drop of its waters, and every inch of its mire," said the Doctor, "saturated ...
— Dr. Sevier • George W. Cable
... sepia rolled over the lake, vomited a host of liquid ramrods and, after short intervals of brilliant glare, were succeeded by others. The gutters of the station were turned into burbling brooks and the grass plot into a morass. ...
— Witch-Doctors • Charles Beadle
... a precipitous morass to the river's brink. A slender pine-tree spanned the screaming foam and bent midway to touch the water. The surge beat upon the taper trunk and gave it a rhythmical swaying motion, while the feet of the packers had worn smooth its wave-washed surface. Eighty feet it stretched in ticklish insecurity. ...
— A Daughter of the Snows • Jack London
... mounted another horse, which one of his men brought him, and drawn his sword, when, without awaiting his order, all these ardent youths, preceded by Cinq-Mars and his friends, whose horses were urged on by the squadrons behind, had thrown themselves into the morass, wherein, to their great astonishment and to that of the Spaniards, who had counted too much upon its depth, the horses were in the water only up to their hams; and in spite of a discharge of grape-shot from the two largest pieces, all reached ...
— Cinq Mars, Complete • Alfred de Vigny
... and attempt a surprise. But while the army of Sisera, warned by Heber, were awaiting them on the plains of Esdraelon, a sudden thunder storm with rain (commemorated in the Song) converted the whole plain into a morass. The army of Barak fell on the foe while their horses were struggling in the mud, and extirpated ...
— Select Masterpieces of Biblical Literature • Various
... who can pick out of the desolate morass of growing imbecility the scanty grains of higher intelligence! There will always be people who will be impressed, not by the sound part of his thought, but by ...
— The Silesian Horseherd - Questions of the Hour • Friedrich Max Mueller
... abundant and near at hand, and the water, which is in a morass at the back of the beach, although shallow, and covered with a species of azolla, was both good ...
— Narrative of a Survey of the Intertropical and Western Coasts of Australia - Performed between the years 1818 and 1822 • Phillip Parker King
... breaking his way through tangles of vegetation, the company living for several days on a few pounds of raw roots, moldy cassava, and cheese, and at last breaking down in despair. In thirty days they had crossed ninety miles of morass, and were too feeble to go farther. Ojeda set up his picture for the last time and besought the thirty-five cut-throats who survived to pray to it also, assuring the Virgin that if she would only guide them through their peril this time ...
— Myths & Legends of our New Possessions & Protectorate • Charles M. Skinner
... took me in his strong white arms, He bore me on his horse away O'er crag, morass, and hair-breadth pass, But never asked ...
— Poems • Christina G. Rossetti
... man could see this exquisite creature without feeling it possible to fall in love with her; but all the fervor of his nature was engaged on the side of precaution. There are personages who feel themselves tragic because they march into a palpable morass, dragging another with them, and then cry out against all the gods. Deronda's mind was strongly set ...
— Daniel Deronda • George Eliot
... godliness, have beaten in, that we cry to have shown us; not a mythic 'Pilgrim's Progress,' but a real path trodden in by real men. Here is a crag, and there is but one spot where it can be climbed; here is a morass or a river, and there is a bridge in one place, and a ford in another. There are robbers in this forest, and wild beasts in that; the tracks cross and recross, and, as in the old labyrinth, only one will bring us right. The age of the saints has passed; they are no longer any ...
— Short Studies on Great Subjects • James Anthony Froude
... which she bestowed upon Edward's accommodation. She seemed eager to place him by the meal which she had so sedulously arranged, and to which she now added a few bunches of cranberries, gathered in an adjacent morass. Having had the satisfaction of seeing him seated at his breakfast, she placed herself demurely upon a stone at a few yards' distance, and appeared to watch with great complacency for ...
— Waverley • Sir Walter Scott
... womb of the true tropical forest." The mind of man with difficulty endeavours to realise this immensity of wooded wilderness, covering a territory half as large again as the whole of France, where the rays of the sun never penetrate, where in the dark, dank air, filled with the steam of the heated morass, human beings dwarfed into pygmies and brutalised into cannibals lurk and live and die. Mr Stanley vainly endeavours to bring home to us the full horror of ...
— "In Darkest England and The Way Out" • General William Booth
... of artillery on each flank. His right was covered by a park wall and by the village of Preston. On his left stood Seaton House, and in his rear lay the sea, with the villages of Prestonpans and Cockenzie. Their front was covered by a deep and difficult morass. ...
— Bonnie Prince Charlie - A Tale of Fontenoy and Culloden • G. A. Henty
... the rock, we commenced the descent of the Echemamis. This small stream has its course through a morass, and in dry seasons its channel contains, instead of water, merely a foot or two of thin mud. On these occasions it is customary to build dams that it may be rendered navigable by the accumulation of its waters. As the beavers perform this operation very effectually, endeavours have ...
— Narrative of a Journey to the Shores of the Polar Sea, in the Years 1819-20-21-22, Volume 1 • John Franklin
... quantities of hurdles and fascines being made; which, as I hear, are to be employed in one of two different plans. The first plan is, To attack the French retrenchment generally; the ditch which is before it, and the morass which lies on our left wing, to be made passable with these fascines. The other plan is, To amuse the Enemy by a false attack, and throw succor into the Town.—One thing is certain, in a few days we shall have a stroke ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. IX. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... two cavaliers of courage and address, one of whom had his entries everywhere, while the other possessed the supreme skill of sea, shore, morass, hill, and heather, which comes only after generations of practice. But against them they had a man infinitely subtle and wholly without scruple. Eben McClure was of that breed of Galloway Scot, which, having been kicked and humiliated in youth for lack of strength and courage, ...
— Patsy • S. R. Crockett
... proceeded the lady, 'he will be running about to all the preachings on every bleak moor and wet morass he can find, catching his death with rheums, like his ...
— The Chaplet of Pearls • Charlotte M. Yonge
... thought that if I could prevail on him to rest he might recover, and proposed that we should encamp; but he would not hear of this. He kept plunging on, staggering through brake and swamp, reedy pond and quaking morass, until I felt myself utterly unable to follow him ...
— Freaks on the Fells - Three Months' Rustication • R.M. Ballantyne
... Rhine, the Meuse, and the Scheld—had deposited their slime for ages among the dunes and sand banks heaved up by the ocean around their mouths. A delta was thus formed, habitable at last for man. It was by nature a wide morass, in which oozy islands and savage forests were interspersed among lagoons and shallows; a district lying partly below the level of the ocean at its higher tides, subject to constant overflow from the rivers, and to frequent and terrible inundations ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... haste if you mean to go with me,' said the West Wind; and away it went over hill and dale, and moor and morass, and Halvor had enough to do ...
— The Red Fairy Book • Various
... 1685. I forget how many times he was overturned within one particular stretch of five miles; but I remember that it was a subject of gratitude (and, upon meditating a return by the same route a subject of pleasing hope) to dwell upon the softlying which was to be found in that good-natured morass. Yet this was, doubtless, a pet road, (sinful punister! dream not that I glance at Petworth,) and an improved road. Such as this, I have good reason to think, were most of the roads in England, unless upon the ...
— Autobiographic Sketches • Thomas de Quincey
... one. It was a dark November evening, and the dingy lighting of the bar seemed but to emphasize the bleak exterior. Drifts of fog and damp from without mingled with the smoke of shag. The sanded floor was kicked into a muddy morass not unlike the surface of the pavement. An old lady down the street had died from pneumonia the previous evening, and the event supplied a fruitful topic of conversation. The things that one could get! Everywhere were germs eager to destroy one. At any minute the symptoms might break ...
— The Best British Short Stories of 1922 • Edward J. O'Brien and John Cournos, editors
... they stormed the intrenchments of Cassivellaunus, and that no native fort has ever withstood their assault. I should say that it ought to be a war of small fights. We should attack them constantly, enticing them into the deepest parts of the morass, and falling upon them at spots where our activity will avail against their heavily weighted men. We should pour volleys of arrows into their boats as they pass along through the narrow creeks, show ourselves at points where the ground is firm enough for them to land, and then falling back to ...
— Beric the Briton - A Story of the Roman Invasion • G. A. Henty
... Coast to Kumassi leads through heavy primeval forest. "The thick foliage of the trees, interlaced high overhead, causes a deep, dank gloom, through which the sun seldom penetrates. The path winds among the tree stems and bush, now through mud and morass, now over steep ascent or deep ravine." And, in addition to the difficulties of locomotion, there was the haunting menace of the heavy dews and mists which come at night laden with the poison ...
— The Story of Baden-Powell - 'The Wolf That Never Sleeps' • Harold Begbie
... the beast probably made its way to the morass for water; but, by Mithras![3] the lad's arrow killed the brute; the barb passed through the eyeball ...
— Our Boys - Entertaining Stories by Popular Authors • Various
... of the highway, somewhat more than a hundred yards north of the toll-gate, was the abode of a farmer named Mark Stolliver. Half a mile further up was John Calder's house, which was the only one until you came to Squire Harrington's. To the rear of the Squire's farm was a huge morass about fifty acres in extent, where cranberries grew in great abundance, from which circumstance it was ...
— The Gerrard Street Mystery and Other Weird Tales • John Charles Dent
... to one of the eddies, its limbs feebly quivering; a fish arises, and it is gone. Lower down the stream, I can see over a knoll the green and damp turf roofs of four or five hovels, built at the edge of a morass, which is trodden by the cattle into a black Slough of Despond at their doors, and traversed by a few ill-set stepping stones, with here and there a flat slab on the tops, where they have sunk out of sight;—and at the turn of the brook I see a man fishing, with a boy and a dog—a picturesque ...
— Frondes Agrestes - Readings in 'Modern Painters' • John Ruskin
... Drona, that foremost of all wielders of weapons, scorched all those great bowmen with showers of arrows like the sun scorching (everything below) with his burning rays. Thus struck, O king, by Drona, the Pandavas and the Srinjayas beheld no protector, like elephants sunk in a morass. The mighty arrows of Drona, as they coursed (through the welkin), looked like the rays of the sun blasting everything around. In that encounter, five and twenty warriors among the Panchalas were slain by Drona, who were all regarded as Maharathas and all approved (as such) by Dhrishtadyumna. ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 2 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... be taken in summer, after Berlin and Potsdam have been visited, than to the wild and beautiful Spreewald,—a combination of forest and morass not yet wholly redeemed to the civilization of Europe, but holding in its remoter depths a genuine relic of the old barbarism. The Goerlitz Railway skirts this forest for twenty-five miles before reaching Luebben, some two hours from ...
— In and Around Berlin • Minerva Brace Norton
... preceding day, charged impetuously against the Scotch line. The movement was fatal, for as soon as they reached the treacherous ground their horses sunk to the saddle girths. The Scotch had dismounted on firmer ground behind, and now advanced to the attack, some working round the flanks of the morass, others crossing on tufts of grass, and so fell upon the struggling mass of English. The Earl of Westmoreland and many others of note were killed, and the Earl of Lancaster, with the remains of his force, at once retreated south and recrossed ...
— In Freedom's Cause • G. A. Henty
... Goth the Christian religion and philosophy are baneful, baleful. As the result of their feeble policy was not Christ followed—the Germans claim—by the Dark Ages when mankind was obsessed by His superstitious worship? Lifting men out of this morass, the proper practical, scientific and warlike forces came at length into play and we have the magnificent modern regime whose ...
— Villa Elsa - A Story of German Family Life • Stuart Henry
... her comic-opera coronets and her worm-eaten stage decorations, and her pomp and chivalry built on a morass ...
— The Melting-Pot • Israel Zangwill
... for Mr 0 Frizzle assures me, he values not her portion a brass varthing — And, indeed, what's poor ten thousand pounds to a Baron Knight of his fortune? and, truly, I told Mr 0 Frizzle that was all she had trust to — As for John Thomas, he's a morass fellor — I vow, I thought he would a fit with Mr 0 Frizzle, because he axed me to dance with him at Spring Garden — But God he knows I have no thoughts eyther ...
— The Expedition of Humphry Clinker • Tobias Smollett
... ashore together in the row-boat. Landing at the fort, the party were received by the garrison with military honours. The two British officers were shown every courtesy, and escorted over the works, which had been considerably strengthened. A morass or small lagoon cut the fortification off in rear from the mainland. It was a position which could not easily have been carried by assault, but was indefensible against cannon. The Senegalese Tirailleurs forming the garrison were paraded for their inspection. There ...
— Khartoum Campaign, 1898 - or the Re-Conquest of the Soudan • Bennet Burleigh
... Laon lies through a great morass, covered in different places with low brushwood, and intersected only by the narrow chaussee on which the road is laid. The appearance of the town is very striking; standing on a hill in the centre of ...
— Travels in France during the years 1814-1815 • Archibald Alison
... inspection he went forward a little way, when suddenly he was once more plunged into the morass, and commenced crying— ...
— Folk-lore and Legends: German • Anonymous |
