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Whirlpool   Listen
noun
Whirlpool  n.  
1.
An eddy or vortex of water; a place in a body of water where the water moves round in a circle so as to produce a depression or cavity in the center, into which floating objects may be drawn; any body of water having a more or less circular motion caused by its flowing in an irregular channel, by the coming together of opposing currents, or the like.
2.
A sea monster of the whale kind. (Obs.) "The Indian Sea breedeth the most and the biggest fishes that are; among which the whales and whirlpools, called "balaenae," take up in length as much as four... arpents of land."






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Whirlpool" Quotes from Famous Books



... strange thing is man? and what a stranger Is woman! What a whirlwind is her head, And what a whirlpool full of depth and danger Is all the rest about her! Whether wed Or widow, maid or mother, she can change her Mind like the wind: whatever she has said Or done, is light to what she 'll say or do;— The oldest thing on record, ...
— Don Juan • Lord Byron

... came upon a crowd massed about the steps of a great granite building in Pine Street; a whirlpool of men, it seemed, with crosscurrents and eddies, and from the whole rose the ...
— Blindfolded • Earle Ashley Walcott

... surface of the water; so that, with no other external symptoms than a great bubbling and foaming, and gush of smoke, and belch of smothered thunder out of the yeasty waves, there shall be a deadly fight going on below,—and, by and by, a sucking whirlpool, as one of the ...
— Sketches and Studies • Nathaniel Hawthorne

... of the night, the whirlpool of my sighs bears the firmament from its place; The dragons of the inundations of my tears bear down the four quarters of the ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 3 • Various

... with very correct judgment, the urchins had selected as their bathing-place. A little slope, or watering-ground in the bank, brought them to the edge of the stream, where the bottom fell away into the fearful depths of the whirlpool, under the hanging oak on the other bank. Well do I remember the first time I ventured to swim across it, and even yet do I see, in imagination, the two bunches of water flaggons on which the inexperienced swimmers trusted themselves in ...
— The Hedge School; The Midnight Mass; The Donagh • William Carleton

... "country customers" from forty-five states; ranchers from Texas, and lumber kings from Maine, and mining men from Nevada. At home they had reputations, and perhaps families to consider; but once plunged into the whirlpool of the Tenderloin, they were hidden from all the world. They came with their pockets full of money; and hotels and restaurants, gambling-places and pool-rooms and brothels—all were lying in wait for them! So eager had the competition become that there was a tailoring ...
— The Metropolis • Upton Sinclair

... population, and the work of destroying human souls goes on. It is an awful thing to contemplate. Thousands of men and women, boys and girls, once innocent as the babes upon whom Christ laid his hand in blessing, are drawn into this whirlpool of evil every year, and few come out except by the ...
— Cast Adrift • T. S. Arthur

... river. There was only one right place to do this. Deceivingly near to the shallow rock-based ford before the Corral, so near that only the wise ones knew how to miss it, Nature placed the cruelest whirlpool that ever swung an even surface up stream, its gentle motion telling nothing of the fatal suction underneath that level stretch of steady, ...
— A Master's Degree • Margaret Hill McCarter

... a thousand men! And refluent through the pass of fear The battle's tide was poured; Vanished the Saxon's struggling spear, Vanished the mountain sword. As Bracklinn's chasm, so black and steep, Receives her roaring linn, As the dark caverns of the deep Suck the wild whirlpool in, So did the deep and darksome pass Devour the battle's mingled mass; None linger now upon the plain, Save those who ...
— The World's Best Poetry, Volume 8 • Various

... a score of officious voices cry out "A ring!" and the surging waves fall back, as when a whirlpool ...
— Follow My leader - The Boys of Templeton • Talbot Baines Reed

... honey laden: Days, like ghostly shadows, flitted By; and weeks and months rolled onward With a never-ceasing rolling, Like the blue bright waves a-rolling, Never quiet—never ending! Still the girlish, grief-worn figure, Might be seen, with vacant glances, Threading through life's rushing whirlpool— Gliding, like a sunbeam, o'er it— To that small corpse-crowded graveyard; Where for hours she'd sit and murmur, With a wild and plaintive wailing; "Come back, darling! Come back, darling; Come, for I am broken-hearted." ...
— The Death of Saul and other Eisteddfod Prize Poems and Miscellaneous Verses • J. C. Manning

... merchant was now very much frightened. What was to be done? The mill would not stop grinding; and at last the ship was overloaded, and down it went, making a great whirlpool where it sank. The ship soon went to pieces; but the mill stands on the bottom of the sea, and keeps grinding out "salt, salt, nothing but salt!" That is the reason, say the peasants of Denmark and Norway, why ...
— McGuffey's Fourth Eclectic Reader • William Holmes McGuffey

... known it, the Old Lady had forgotten the existence of all and any egg pedlars. He had blotted himself and his insignificance out of her consciousness by his last sentence. All her thoughts, feelings, and wishes were submerged in a very whirlpool of desire to hear Sylvia sing that solo. She went into the house in a tumult and tried to conquer that desire. She could not do it, even thought she summoned all her pride to ...
— Chronicles of Avonlea • Lucy Maud Montgomery

... indeed to transact the business of the Society for Anthropological Research, I might perhaps be induced to yield to the temptation you so generously put in my way. But seeing that possibly my principal object is to give my endowments a fair chance away from this whirlpool of confusion, which makes social reform a morbid idee fixe, I cannot persuade myself that it would ...
— Too Old for Dolls - A Novel • Anthony Mario Ludovici

... hammering with it just at the moment when a crocodile saw "Crinkle." A blow landed on my head, cut my forehead, and sent the blood down into my eyes at the same moment that I heard the dog's yelp of agony; and next time I looked at the pond there was a tiny whirlpool on the surface, slightly tinged ...
— The Ivory Trail • Talbot Mundy

... the farm of La Haye Sainte where desperate men were butchering others that were more desperate than they—in among that seething crowd of black coats and fur bonnets, of silver tassels and of brass eagles, into a whirlpool of swords and bayonets and gun-fire from the tirailleurs—for there he had seen the man whom Crystal loved—for whose sake she would eat out her ...
— The Bronze Eagle - A Story of the Hundred Days • Emmuska Orczy, Baroness Orczy

... tone. This one sung in a veiled voice, a contralto muffled in the hollows of overhanging banks, with a low, deep, musical gurgle in some of the stony eddies, in which a straw would float for days and nights till a flood came, borne round and round in a funnel-hearted whirlpool. The brook was deep for its size, and had a good deal to say in a solemn tone for such a small stream. We lay on the side of the hillock, I say, and Turkey's Jews' harp mingled its sounds with those of the brook. After a while he laid it aside, and we were both silent ...
— Ranald Bannerman's Boyhood • George MacDonald

... the only man of whom these particulars have been true. Change the name and you have an exact description of too many. Many a fair craft has come within the reach of the circling eddies of the same boiling whirlpool, and, after a struggle, has succumbed. The young man hails from his native village home, earnest and ingenuous. At first he stands firm against the worldly influences around; but gradually he becomes careless ...
— Love to the Uttermost - Expositions of John XIII.-XXI. • F. B. Meyer

... volume of the river. Choked by the stubborn granite at this point, its width is probably between two hundred and fifty and three hundred feet, its velocity fifteen miles an hour, and its volume and turmoil equal to the Whirlpool Rapids of Niagara. Its rise in time of heavy rain is rapid and appalling, for the walls shed almost instantly all the water that falls upon them. Drift is lodged in ...
— The Life Radiant • Lilian Whiting

... remember about Scylla and Charybdis, the two fabled monsters that used to alarm the old chaps hundreds and hundreds of years ago; but which turned out to be a dangerous rock and a big sucker hole, called a whirlpool? That's what ails this old inlet, I guess. The currents suck hard; and these crackers along the coast think unseen hands are trying to drag ...
— Motor Boat Boys Down the Coast - or Through Storm and Stress to Florida • Louis Arundel

... Union. The citizens of Bridgeport should be proud to claim as one of their citizens P. T. Barnum. His name was written upon every charity in their city, and the temples of God bore its impress. By a few fell strokes of an ugly pen, he has been drawn into that whirlpool of destruction to himself and almost destruction to many in the city. In the midst of his prosperity, while he was building up a city on the east side of their little harbor, he had fallen by the hand of traitors. He hoped that he might survive his misfortunes ...
— A Unique Story of a Marvellous Career. Life of Hon. Phineas T. • Joel Benton

... the Wild Island, Pantagruel spied afar off a huge monstrous physeter (a sort of whale, which some call a whirlpool), that came right upon us, neighing, snorting, raised above the waves higher than our main-tops, and spouting water all the way into the air before itself, like a large river falling from a mountain. Pantagruel showed it to the ...
— Gargantua and Pantagruel, Complete. • Francois Rabelais

... tranquillity enjoyed by the youthful Republic. His powerful figure was followed by many others, the majority of whom were tyrannical, some incapable, and a few whose aims were really progressive. Progress, indeed, in the vortex of the whirlpool of events which ensued was practically an impossibility. It is said that from 1825 to 1898 more than sixty revolutions burst out in Bolivia, to say nothing of intermittent foreign wars! In the course of these various struggles no less than six ...
— South America • W. H. Koebel

... condition they were as helpless as children. The lead was cast, and sixty fathoms called. It was now evident that there was land close by. But the trail of the line only showed the more clearly that the ship was at the mercy of some rapid and dangerous current, perhaps being drawn into some whirlpool. Now the fog seemed to lift, and long lines of light were seen ahead, but it was only to be succeeded by greater darkness. Then the sounds began to change and vary; and while what seemed voices were heard singing and sighing overhead, ...
— The Von Toodleburgs - Or, The History of a Very Distinguished Family • F. Colburn Adams

... current growing always stronger. In this centre the water boiled, but it was for the most part because of a lashing of surface currents. There seemed to be no heavy twist of the deep water into anything like a dangerous whirlpool. Still there was a pull, a tugging of the current to a centre. Again I was unable to estimate the power of this drag, as it was impossible to estimate how much resistance was being offered ...
— Dwellers in the Hills • Melville Davisson Post

... most women smile aloud. And the fact that in so doing we unveil all our artifice, all the whirlpool of our inmost being to each other, proves the ...
— The Dangerous Age • Karin Michaelis

... my feris (companions) and deir freyndis, quod he, Of bywent perillis not ignorant ben we, Ze have sustenit gretir dangeris unkend, Like as hereof God sall make sone ane end: The rage of Silla, that huge sweste (whirlpool) in the se Ze have eschapit and passit eik (each) have ze: The euer (pot) routand (roaring) Caribdis rokkis fell The craggis quhare monstruous Cyclopes dwell: Ze are expert: pluk up zour harts, I zou pray, This dolorous drede ...
— The Revolution in Tanner's Lane • Mark Rutherford

... man has no spiritual interpretation of life, if he does not believe in God, he may well give up hope and conclude that the human river is flowing all awry or has altogether ceased to move. A Christian, however, has a spiritual interpretation of life. He knows that human history is a river—not a whirlpool, nor a pond, but a river flowing to its end. Just as, far inland, we can tell that the Hudson is flowing to the sea, because the waters, when the tide comes in, are tinctured with the ocean's quality, so now, we believe that we can tell that the river of human ...
— Christianity and Progress • Harry Emerson Fosdick

... better have been tost Into a whirlpool. Vanish into air, Warm mountaineer! for canst thou only bear A woman's sigh alone and in distress? See not her charms! Is Phoebe passionless? Phoebe is fairer far—O gaze no more:— Yet if thou wilt behold all beauty's store, Behold her panting in the forest grass! Do not those ...
— Endymion - A Poetic Romance • John Keats

... ranks on the other; and the moment approaches which is prophesied to be 'as the lightning that lighteneth out of the one part under heaven, and shineth even to the other part.' In other words, the fiery whirlpool of the Ring is nearly ready to absorb our planet in its vortex; and out of all who dwell upon its surface, how many shall reach the glorious Central World of God? Of two men working in the same field, shall it not be as Christ foretold—'the one shall ...
— A Romance of Two Worlds • Marie Corelli

... excepting the Savior himself, since the day Adam was made of the dust, to this present time, but what Satan has endeavored, by lies and machinations to turn him away from God. Thousands of millions have gone down the rapids of negligence and carelessness, and been lost in the whirlpool of a cold, ...
— The Gospel Day • Charles Ebert Orr

... outside, of the dim wild whirlpool of London, I was much afraid, but I was now ready to be willing to leave the narrow Devonshire circle, to see the last of the red mud, of the dreary village street, of the plethoric elders, to hear the last of ...
— Father and Son • Edmund Gosse

... knightly Don John! One spark of love and devotion to the wretched Mary, and all is over with them! Give me back that paper, child, and warn Babington against ever dreaming of aid to a wretch like me. I will perish alone! It is enough! I will drag down no more generous spirits in the whirlpool ...
— Unknown to History - A Story of the Captivity of Mary of Scotland • Charlotte M. Yonge

... live in union with Him, to have His thoughts for my thoughts, and His love wrapping my heart, and His will enshrined in my will; to carry Him about with me into all the pettinesses of daily life, and, amidst the whirlpool of duties and changing circumstances, to sit in the centre, as it were the eye of the whirlpool where there is a dead calm, that lifts a man on high. Communion with God secures elevation of spirit, raising us clean above the flat that lies beneath. There are many ways by ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Isaiah and Jeremiah • Alexander Maclaren

... and the blandishments, entirely aside. He seemed as superior to the dragging and wearing of life as a figure carved in stone, a Buddha, any Eastern presentment of the aloof contempt of a serene wisdom at the mountain of its own flesh. Lee, beside his brother, resembled a whirlpool of dust temporarily formed by ...
— Cytherea • Joseph Hergesheimer

... by this torrent of beauty poured unexpected through eyes to brain. It surged the centres to violent commotion, one jostling another in a whirlpool of conflict. Out of the tumult alarm flashed down the wires to his heart—set it banging; flashed in wild message to ...
— Once Aboard The Lugger • Arthur Stuart-Menteth Hutchinson

... tell you than my aunt," she said, "or than my cousins, or my uncle. They would all make such a bustle, and it is that very bustle I dread—the alarm, the flurry, the eclat. In short, I never liked to be the centre of a small domestic whirlpool. You can bear ...
— Shirley • Charlotte Bronte

... emotions had held him lately; Lone was beginning to feel the need of a long, quiet pondering over his problems. He did not feel sure of anything except the fact that the Quirt was like a drowning man struggling vainly against the whirlpool that is sucking him ...
— Sawtooth Ranch • B. M. Bower

... In vain did the sleet beat round thy temples; it lighted only on thy impenetrable, felted or woven, case of wool. In vain did the winds howl,—forests sounding and creaking, deep calling unto deep,—and the storms heap themselves together into one huge Arctic whirlpool: thou flewest through the middle thereof, striking fire from the highway; wild music hummed in thy ears, thou too wert as a 'sailor of the air'; the wreck of matter and the crash of worlds was thy element and propitiously wafting tide. ...
— Sartor Resartus, and On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History • Thomas Carlyle

... gradually rising and growing into his plan. The doctor although much more at the mercy of mysterious agencies and chances than the architect, still knows enough of the forms and effects of his means. In War, on the other hand, the Commander of an immense whole finds himself in a constant whirlpool of false and true information, of mistakes committed through fear, through negligence, through precipitation, of contraventions of his authority, either from mistaken or correct motives, from ill ...
— On War • Carl von Clausewitz

... putting for the cape, by reason of bad weather and south-west winds, perceived signals of distress made by a schooner to the leeward. This schooner, deprived of its mizzen-mast, was running towards the whirlpool, under bare poles. Captain Louis Cornbutte, seeing that this vessel was hastening into imminent danger, resolved to go on board her. Despite the remonstrances of his crew, he had the long-boat lowered into the sea, and got into it, with the sailor ...
— A Winter Amid the Ice - and Other Thrilling Stories • Jules Verne

... wide and is surrounded by mountains. The river enters through a small canyon at the northwest and passes out through another canyon at the south end. Sometimes the wind will rush down the canyon at the northwest and in a few moments the waters of the lake are like a great whirlpool. These sudden storms often imperil any small boats which may be out on the sea as was the case in Bible times when the Master was sleeping and his disciples awakened him, saying: "Lord, ...
— Birdseye Views of Far Lands • James T. Nichols

... over my shoulder and the whistle was dashed from my grasp. Then came a whirl of maelstrom fighting with Smith and myself ever sinking lower amid a whirlpool, as it seemed, of blood-lustful eyes, yellow ...
— The Return of Dr. Fu-Manchu • Sax Rohmer

... past the zigzag of the broken rock the water glanced from one side, and shot almost at right angles across to the other, to whirl round and round, ever enlarging a great well-like hole, the centre of which looked like a funnel-like whirlpool, with the water screwing its way apparently into the bowels of the earth, and down whose watery throat great balls of ...
— The Crystal Hunters - A Boy's Adventures in the Higher Alps • George Manville Fenn

... to circle about in the outer edge of the whirlpool that sucks in its victims so relentlessly and remorselessly, always, ...
— The Evolution of Dodd • William Hawley Smith

... silent Wild, with pain and bloody sweat, he toiled for them. Sooner or later must he come within reach of their talons to be fleeced, flouted and despoiled. It was an organised system of sharpers, thugs, harpies, and birds of prey of every kind. It was a blot on the map. It was a great whirlpool, and the eddy of it encircled the furthest outpost of the golden valley. It was a vortex of destruction, of ruin and shame. And here was I, hovering on its brink, likely to be soon sucked down into ...
— The Trail of '98 - A Northland Romance • Robert W. Service

... revolt, the Anabaptists to madness. Under other circumstances the noble enthusiasm, with other surroundings the strong will, of Jan of Leyden might have left a different mark on the page of history. Dragged down in this whirlpool of fanaticism, sensuality, and despair, we can only look upon him as a factor of the historic judgment, a necessary actor in that tragedy of Muenster, which forms one of the most solemn chapters of the ...
— A Wanderer in Holland • E. V. Lucas

... the thundering cataract's roar once worshipped the roaming sons of the forest in all their primitive freedom. They recognized in its thunder the voice, in its mad waves the wrath, and in its crashing whirlpool the Omnipotence of the Great Spirit—the Manitou ...
— Birch Bark Legends of Niagara • Owahyah

... next to nothing, after the Malay or Chinaman has stabbed you for nothing at all: so you can hardly hope to make a cheaper end. Down by the Docks, anybody drunk will quarrel with anybody drunk or sober, and everybody else will have a hand in it, and on the shortest notice you may revolve in a whirlpool of red shirts, shaggy beards, wild heads of hair, bare tattooed arms, Britannia's daughters, malice, mud, maundering, and madness. Down by the Docks, scraping fiddles go in the public-houses all day long, and, shrill above their din and all the din, rises the screeching of innumerable parrots ...
— The Uncommercial Traveller • Charles Dickens

... blown high into the air and came down in splinters, scattered to the four winds of heaven. The deck was rent and open up with a great, yawning scam, through which the ocean rushed, driving the craft below the waves as though it had been drawn down by some mighty whirlpool. A minute later, where had been one of Germany's most terrible fighters, there was only a seething flood of water covered ...
— The Boy Allies Under Two Flags • Ensign Robert L. Drake

... enchantments turned into a rock, with dogs around her. Charybdis is a very ravenous woman, who stole Hercules's oxen, for which crime Jupiter struck her dead with a thunder-bolt, and then turned her into a gulf or whirlpool in the Sicilian Sea. The Sea Nymphs are the Nereides already referred to. The Naides or Naiades preside over fountains and springs; the Potameides preside over rivers, ...
— The Mysteries of All Nations • James Grant

... this attitude was not grasped in England, and the resultant misunderstanding led to criticisms and recriminations which everyone now regrets. The fact is that the Americans had very good reason for disliking the idea of being drawn into the awful whirlpool in which Europe seemed to be perishing. It was not cowardice that held her back: her sons had done enough during the four terrible years of civil conflict in which her whole manhood was involved to repel that charge for ever. Rather was it a realistic ...
— A History of the United States • Cecil Chesterton

... meditation. Then we observe that the plain man's world is in a muddle, just because he has tried to arrange its major interests round himself as round a centre; and he is neither strong enough nor clever enough for the job. He has made a wretched little whirlpool in the mighty River of Becoming, interrupting—as he imagines, in his own interest—its even flow: and within that whirlpool are numerous petty complexes and counter-currents, amongst which his will and attention fly to and fro in a continual state of unrest. The man who ...
— Practical Mysticism - A Little Book for Normal People • Evelyn Underhill

... door-step when she said good-by, Eunice stepped out of my life as completely as if the earth had opened and swallowed her up. Is she dead or alive? Did the unhappy girl seek self-destruction that June night, or was she swept into that great, black whirlpool, the name of which even a girl of the workaday world mentions always with bated breath? I do not know. I never expect to know the fate of Eunice. It is only in stories that such things are made clear, usually, and this was only an ...
— The Long Day - The Story of a New York Working Girl As Told by Herself • Dorothy Richardson

... racing current, were seized, and spun around and around. Above the drone of the waters he heard the roar of a whirlpool, coming rapidly nearer. The firm clutch of Miss Vost's hand on his collar was not loosened. Occasionally he heard her gasp and sputter as a wave ...
— Peter the Brazen - A Mystery Story of Modern China • George F. Worts

... said Myra, earnestly, "nor for you, weighted by me. We should never get round that eddying whirlpool. It would merely mean that we should both be drowned. But you can easily do it alone. Oh, go at once! Go quickly! And—don't look back. I shall be all right. I shall just sit down against the cliff, and wait. I have always been ...
— The Mistress of Shenstone • Florence L. Barclay

... at the straw like a drowning swimmer in a whirlpool. "Now? I said not now but when you please, Angelique! You are worth a man's waiting ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby

... back to London, and though all Hyacinth's fine people protested that the town stank of burnt wood, smoked oil, and resin, and was altogether odious, they rejoiced not the less to be back again. Lady Fareham plunged with renewed eagerness into the whirlpool of pleasure, and tried to drag Angela with her; but it was a surprise to both, and to one a cause for uneasiness, when his lordship began to show himself in scenes which he had for the most part avoided as well ...
— London Pride - Or When the World Was Younger • M. E. Braddon

... at Walden to exasperate you? And what became of your philosophy then?" But he never notices my plaints, and I know that inside his covers he is discoursing away like anything on the folly of allowing oneself to be overwhelmed in that terrible rapid and whirlpool called a dinner, which is situated in the meridian shallows, and of the necessity, if one would keep happy, of sailing by it looking another way, tied to the mast like Ulysses. But he gets grimly carried back for all that, and is taken into ...
— The Solitary Summer • Elizabeth von Arnim

... manner of engagements. No one was surprised at it and every one was pleased. The little whirlpool of talk that it created prevented Milly's ignorance of the events of the past six or seven months from coming to the surface. She lay awake at night, devising means of telling Ian about this strange blank in her life. ...
— The Invader - A Novel • Margaret L. Woods

... fortunately, of short duration. During the terrific contest of nation against nation which succeeded the French Revolution we were enabled by the wisdom and firmness of President Washington to maintain our neutrality. While other nations were drawn into this wide-sweeping whirlpool, we sat quiet and unmoved upon our own shores. While the flower of their numerous armies was wasted by disease or perished by hundreds of thousands upon the battlefield, the youth of this favored land were permitted to enjoy the blessings ...
— State of the Union Addresses of Millard Fillmore • Millard Fillmore

... disease and immorality. Concerning immoral living in general, young people should know only enough for necessary warning. Curiosity derived from extensive knowledge of immorality has drawn many a young man into the whirlpool of sexual depravity. It is beyond question that in sexual lines there is the danger that Pope saw when he declared that vice is a monster that seen too oft, we first endure, then pity, then embrace. Sex-education should guard against ...
— Sex-education - A series of lectures concerning knowledge of sex in its - relation to human life • Maurice Alpheus Bigelow

... this was not altogether safe; it might even prove disastrous, but it might become a plank of rescue from that African whirlpool. Stas in the end began to wonder why the possibility of meeting with Smain should have frightened him at first and, as he was anxious for quick relief for Nell, he determined to go, even ...
— In Desert and Wilderness • Henryk Sienkiewicz

... not, Julia, I do not,' said Mr W. 'The society in which you move—necessarily move, from your station, connection, and endowments—is one vortex and whirlpool of the most frightful excitement. Bless my heart and body, can I ever forget the night you danced with the baronet's nephew at the election ball, ...
— The Life And Adventures Of Nicholas Nickleby • Charles Dickens

... second cycle, and therefore a third, and so on for ever and ever, with no more chance of escape than a circulating decimal has, if the circumstances have been reproduced with perfect accuracy as to draw it into such a whirlpool. ...
— Selections from Previous Works - and Remarks on Romanes' Mental Evolution in Animals • Samuel Butler

... pressure has at this point been overcome. Young [Footnote: Young: Indiana State Med. Assn. Jour., March, 1914.] believes that the murmurs of the second phase, which in all normal conditions are heard during the 20 mm. drop below the point at which the systolic pressure had been read, is "due to whirlpool eddies produced at the point of constriction of the blood vessel by the cuff of the instrument." The third phase is when these murmurs cease and the sound resembles the first, lasting he thinks for only 5 mm. The ...
— DISTURBANCES OF THE HEART • OLIVER T. OSBORNE, A.M., M.D.

... body of veterans under his orders as myself. The whereabouts of the Oldest Inhabitant was at once settled when I looked at them. For upwards of twenty years before this epoch, the independent position of the Collector had kept the Salem Custom-House out of the whirlpool of political vicissitude, which makes the tenure of office generally so fragile. A soldier—New England's most distinguished soldier—he stood firmly on the pedestal of his gallant services; and, himself secure in the wise liberality of the successive administrations ...
— The Scarlet Letter • Nathaniel Hawthorne

... me, to wipe out all thought of doubt or difficulty. I suppose it must be what men suffered—suffering need not mean pain—under enchantments in old times. I am but as a straw whirled in the resistless eddies of a whirlpool. I feel that I must see her again, even if it be but in her tomb in the crypt. I must, I suppose, prepare myself for the venture, for many things have to be thought of. The visit must not be at night, for ...
— The Lady of the Shroud • Bram Stoker

... to act for Arnold, to play to his special consciousness, he was fastened to his chair, held down, so to speak, by a whirlpool of conflicting impulses. She did so much more than "lift" the inventive vulgarisation of the Bible story in the common sense; she inspired and transfused it so that whenever she appeared people irresistibly forgot the ...
— The Path of a Star • Mrs. Everard Cotes (AKA Sara Jeannette Duncan)

... the winds shifting hither and thither or dying away altogether, the ships, getting no direction from their helms, are carried back and forth or are caught in some eddy where two currents meet and whirled round and round to the dismay of the sailors, like a chip in a river whirlpool. ...
— Steep Trails • John Muir

... familiar with. You know of his birth at East Dereham, of his life in Ireland and in Scotland, of his school days at Norwich, of his departure from Norwich to London on his father's death, of his dire struggles in the literary whirlpool, and of his wanderings in gipsy land. You know, thanks to Dr. Knapp, more than you could otherwise have learned of his life at St. Petersburg, whither he had been sent by the Bible Society, on the recommendation of Mr. Joseph John Gurney and another patron. Then he has ...
— Immortal Memories • Clement Shorter

... either side of it; her heavy, black brows almost met across her forehead, her teeth were large and square, and set far apart—teeth that could tear. She filled the room; the men were obliterated, seemed tossed about like twigs in an angry water, and even Steavens felt himself being drawn into the whirlpool. ...
— Youth and the Bright Medusa • Willa Cather

... shame of being repulsed, for she could not possibly know whether you would feel as well disposed for her as she felt for you. She is very handsome, and it all turned out well, but the adventure has thrown me into a whirlpool of agitation which I cannot ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt

... is very fatiguing, but has been accomplished, is beautiful and extensive. On the largest lake travellers have embarked in a canoe, but I believe it has never been crossed, on account of the vulgar prejudice that it is unfathomable, and has a whirlpool in the centre. The volcano is about fifteen thousand feet above the level of the sea, and nine thousand above Toluca. It is not so grand as Popocatepetl, but a respectable volcano for a country town—muy decente(very decent), as a man said in talking ...
— Life in Mexico • Frances Calderon De La Barca

... Ordinarily, the whirlpool of property localizes itself. On the one hand, farm-rent stops at a certain point; on the other, in consequence of competition and over-production, the price of manufactured goods does not rise,—so that the condition of the peasant varies but little, and depends mainly ...
— What is Property? - An Inquiry into the Principle of Right and of Government • P. J. Proudhon

... motionless, and then fell—a hundred tons of solid flesh—back into the sea. On either side of that mountainous mass the waters rose in shining towers of snowy foam, which fell in their turn, whirling and eddying around us as we tossed and fell like a chip in a whirlpool. Blinded by the flying spray, baling for very life to free the boat from the water, with which she was nearly full, it was some minutes before I was able to decide whether we were still uninjured or not. Then I saw, at a little distance, the ...
— American Merchant Ships and Sailors • Willis J. Abbot

... a great mental disorderliness. He recognized that his brain remained a mere whirlpool from which Phyllis Abingdon, the deceased Sir Charles, Nicol Brinn, and another, alternately arose to claim supremacy. He clenched his teeth upon ...
— Fire-Tongue • Sax Rohmer

... remembered the newspaper girl's words to her on the night of their first meeting: "If ever I have a chance to get even with Harriet Hamlin, won't I take my revenge?" Did Marjorie Moore also suspect that an effort would be made to draw Barbara into this whirlpool of disgrace? ...
— The Automobile Girls At Washington • Laura Dent Crane

... Moelk, which is the next important place, we passed the town of Ens and beyond that the famous Strudel or Whirlpool which is dangerous at times for boats. Our raft was completely whirled round. This whirlpool is caused by rocks rising abruptly out of the water. The popular tradition is that this whirlpool is the abode of a very malicious and spiteful Wassernixe, ...
— After Waterloo: Reminiscences of European Travel 1815-1819 • Major W. E Frye

... or another Jack's absence was prolonged. He wrote often, he made bright comments on the characters and peculiarities of the capital, and he said that he was tired to death of the everlasting whirl and scuffle. People plunged in the social whirlpool always say they are weary of it, and they complain bitterly of its exactions and its tax on their time and strength. Edith judged, especially from the complaints, that her husband was enjoying himself. She felt also ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner

... things now began to happen, and the river played its own part in some of these, for there were disastrous freshets, the sudden breaking-up of great jams of logs, and the drowning of men who were engulfed in the dark whirlpool below the rapids. ...
— The Story Of Waitstill Baxter • By Kate Douglas Wiggin

... next eight or nine hours Philip's mind was in a whirlpool. While a student at Princeton, the lectures of Cardinal Wiseman had chanced to fall in his way. He read them with avidity, particularly those "On the Practical Success of the Protestant Rule of Faith in Converting Heathen Nations," and "On the Practical Success of the Catholic ...
— Hubert's Wife - A Story for You • Minnie Mary Lee

... which in the main they had displayed up to then, the Emperor and his Ministers misjudged the situation. They did not foresee the crisis to which their policy was conducting, and when that crisis arrived they lost their heads and blundered in trying to deal with it. They did not perceive the whirlpool toward which they were heading. They thought that they could safely expose what was precarious to a strain, and secure the substance of a real victory without having to overcome actual resistance. Had they ...
— Before the War • Viscount Richard Burton Haldane

... questioned herself, "Am I, or is this traveller, Mlle. Moriaz?" She closed her eyes, and saw a blank abyss open before her, in which her life was ingulfed, whirled about, like the leaf of a tree in a whirlpool. ...
— Samuel Brohl & Company • Victor Cherbuliez

... Blaine, Cameron, Conkling, Sherman. Greatness in a man is sometimes a hindrance to the Presidency. Such was the case with Daniel Webster, Henry Clay, Thomas H. Benton, and William C. Preston. We were only on the edge of the whirlpool of a presidential election. In England the election storm was just beginning. The first thunderbolt was the sudden dissolution of Parliament by Lord Beaconsfield. The two mightiest men in England then were antagonists, ...
— T. De Witt Talmage - As I Knew Him • T. De Witt Talmage

... to resist the pounding of those seas. The weight of the mighty ocean along whose breast they raced was in them, and though the wind was no more than a brisk gale, each billow by its stature showed itself the child of a giantess. The ice-bed was like a whirlpool with the leap and flash and play of the froth upon it. The black air of the night was whitened by the storms of foam-flakes which flew over the vessel. The roaring of the broken waters increased the horrors of the scene. I firmly believed my time was come. God had been merciful, but I was ...
— The Frozen Pirate • W. Clark Russell

... it. From her rather narrow shoulders depended a black cape, whose silk foundation was suffocated with bugles. A shrill scent of cherry-blossom ran with her like a crowd, and in her hand she carried an umbrella and a plush bag with a steel snap. Her face, in the midst of this whirlpool of finery, peeped out anxiously, covered as it was with a smear of paint and powder, and when she saw Valentine standing alone to receive her, her nervous eyes ranged uncomfortably about in obvious quest of an acquaintance ...
— Flames • Robert Smythe Hichens

... Charybdis. The former was a rock, in which dwelt Scylla, a hideous monster, encompassed with dogs and wolves. The latter was a whirlpool, into which Charybdis ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook, Vol. 3 • E. Cobham Brewer

... we begin with the inward world of thought and feeling, the whirlpool is still more rapid, the flame more eager and devouring. There it is no longer the gradual darkening of the eye, the gradual fading of colour from the wall—movements of the shore-side, where the water flows down indeed, though in apparent rest—but ...
— The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry • Walter Horatio Pater

... in slow, cutting tones, as if each word was hammered out of a seething whirlpool of ...
— Winding Paths • Gertrude Page

... or the walls of the purse they climb to the opening. Do they wish to take flight and escape? By no means. On the threshold of the cavity, while already almost at liberty, they allow themselves to fall into the whirlpool, retaken by their madness. The lure is irresistible. None will break free from the swarm until the evening, or perhaps the next day, when the heady fumes will have evaporated. Then the units of the swarm disengage ...
— Social Life in the Insect World • J. H. Fabre

... hours the bison streamed by our island, dividing before and closing behind the insensate peak that alone had power to break their close-packed ranks. Then came an opening, a falling apart; slight as it was, we plunged into it with joy. Thereafter we were buffeted like chips in the swirling maw of a whirlpool; we fought our way rod by rod. Here an opening, and we shot through; there a solid wall of flesh for whose passing we halted, lashing out with quirts and spurring desperately to hold our own—a war for the open road against an enemy whose ...
— Raw Gold - A Novel • Bertrand W. Sinclair

... behold! another was set over him and probably reported that he neglected the business to pay court to a married woman. He felt that he was lost and that his only chance to secure the beloved one was to step outside the circle which he knew would be the vortex of a whirlpool once ...
— The Son of Clemenceau • Alexandre (fils) Dumas

... was to be drawn into the whirlpool itself. I was still travelling back over the different stages of the adventure which had brought me to this point, when I was rudely awakened by M. de Rosny calling my name in a raised voice. Seeing, somewhat late, that ...
— A Gentleman of France • Stanley Weyman

... darkness are the patrol boats, manned by the Englishmen who are seeking my life. Seeking it, not to gratify their private emotions, but because we are all in the whirlpool of War and ...
— The Diary of a U-boat Commander • Anon

... inherent activities by which they are distinguished from not living matter. Each individual living organism is formed by their temporary combination. They stand to it in the relation of the particles of water to a cascade, or a whirlpool; or to a mould, into which the water is poured. The form of the organism is thus determined by the reaction between external conditions and the inherent activities of the organic molecules of which it is composed; and, as the stoppage of a whirlpool ...
— Discourses - Biological and Geological Essays • Thomas H. Huxley

... off the cliff into the force; the priest saw the soles of his feet, and knew not afterwards what was become of him. But Grettir dived under the force, and hard work it was, because the whirlpool was strong, and he had to dive down to the bottom, before he might come up under the force. But thereby was a rock jutting out, and thereon he gat; a great cave was under the force, and the river fell over it from the sheer rocks. He went up ...
— The Story of Grettir The Strong • Translated by Eirikr Magnusson and William Morris

... intelligence. He has power over nature and men and He uses all with the motive and purpose of a holy love. We know that He controlled nature, when on earth, and not nature Him. He taught the great love of God for man. He made it plain that men were not in a relation as atoms of matter in a whirlpool of action, but as sons to a ...
— Studies in the Life of the Christian • Henry T. Sell

... whirled and swayed the broad cloud-plain. Once a great eddy formed in it, a whirlpool of vapour, and through it, as down a funnel, I caught sight of the distant world. A large white biplane was passing at a vast depth beneath me. I fancy it was the morning mail service betwixt Bristol and London. Then the drift swirled ...
— Danger! and Other Stories • Arthur Conan Doyle

... sunk in the quicksand, nor has a single spar or board been displaced. Maritime legend says, that two ships of Denmark having had permission, for a time, to work deeds of darkness and dolor on the deep, were at last condemned to the whirlpool and the sunken rock, and were wrecked in this bonnie bay, as a sign to seamen to be gentle and devout. The night when they were lost was a harvest evening of uncommon mildness and beauty: the sun had newly set; the moon came brighter and brighter out; and the reapers, ...
— Little Classics, Volume 8 (of 18) - Mystery • Various

... her mind seemed lost in a whirlpool of emotion, as she reviewed the hour of their arrival. The road up to the big gates—every tree and hillock, every stock and stone, loved and familiar, recalling childish joys and sorrows, adventure and ...
— The White Ladies of Worcester - A Romance of the Twelfth Century • Florence L. Barclay

... thereinne ony maner metalle, it turnethe anon to glasse. And the glasse, that is made of that grevelle, zif it be don azen in to the gravelle, it turnethe anon in to gravelle as it was first. And therefore somme men seyn, that it was a sweloghe [Footnote: Whirlpool.] of the gravely see. ...
— The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques and Discoveries - of the English Nation. v. 8 - Asia, Part I. • Richard Hakluyt

... the French fear hadn't been so much a monomania as a foreknowledge. The thing stunned him. He wished to protest, to cry out against the monstrousness of what was happening. But his voice was a reed in a hurricane; he was a straw in a gigantic whirlpool. ...
— The Purple Heights • Marie Conway Oemler

... way on and on through the regions of his thought. All were united, all drove him, all put him on the trail of catastrophe. They foreshadowed the future, they inclosed events, they lured him with his endless illusions. He was in the vortex of a vast whirlpool, not of water or of wind, but of life. Alas! he seemed indeed the very current of that whirlpool, a monstrous force, around which evil circled and lurked and conquered. Wade—who had the ill-omened croak of the raven—Wade—who bent his driven ...
— The Mysterious Rider • Zane Grey

... brink of the Golden River, and its waves were as clear as crystal, and as brilliant as the sun. And, when he cast the three drops of dew into the stream, there opened where they fell a small circular whirlpool, into which the waters descended ...
— Types of Children's Literature • Edited by Walter Barnes

... the courtyard below. For the story seemed to have laid hold of my inmost soul, and touched the spring of a long-hidden desire. Why I was so moved, I could not tell. What issue would open to this whirlpool of vague excitement in which I had fallen, I had no idea. But I was profoundly conscious both of the excitement and the emotion, and, with that refined epicureanism of which intellectual people alone are capable, I abandoned ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 2 • Various

... have got than we have?" answered, "How many do you make me equal to then?" This Homer also seems to have noticed. For he has represented Odysseus, when his comrades were dreadfully afraid of the noise and whirlpool of Charybdis, reminding them of ...
— Plutarch's Morals • Plutarch

... between Italy and Sicily, where, in avoiding one mariners were often wrecked by the other; but the dangers in the Firth were from the "Merry Men of Mey," a dangerous expanse of sea, where the water was always boiling like a witch's cauldron at one end, and the dreaded "Swalchie Whirlpool" at the other. This was very dangerous for small boats, as they could sail over it safely in one state of the tide, but when it began to move it carried the boat round so slowly that the occupants did not realise their danger ...
— From John O'Groats to Land's End • Robert Naylor and John Naylor

... that of the United States. Strictly universal suffrage is a Utopian dream wherever a majority of the people are wicked and degraded. Sooner or later it threatens to plunge any nation, as nations now are, into a whirlpool of dangers, even if Divine Providence may not permit a nation to be stranded and wrecked altogether. In the politics of Savonarola we see great wisdom, and yet great sympathy for freedom. He would give the people all that they ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume VI • John Lord

... He shouted to his comrades in the rear to come on with their boats, and that he was all right. A moment later, his friends were astonished to see the boat gone, and their leader swimming around and around in a whirlpool, trying hard to ...
— My Native Land • James Cox

... whirlpool of boiling waters has a centre point, so, all this raging circled round Defarge's wine-shop, and every human drop in the caldron had a tendency to be sucked towards the vortex where Defarge himself, already begrimed with gunpowder ...
— A Tale of Two Cities - A Story of the French Revolution • Charles Dickens

... over the Falls in a barrel—not satisfactory to her. Went over in a tub—still not satisfactory. Swam the Whirlpool and the Rapids in a fig-leaf suit. It got much damaged. Hence, tedious complaints about my extravagance. I am too much hampered here. What I need ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain

... situation. We are upon the brink of a whirlpool which, if once it get hold of us, will render all further deliberation impotent. An unfortunate jealousy seems to have insinuated itself between us, which I would willingly remove; and I come to ask your assistance. We are ...
— Caleb Williams - Things As They Are • William Godwin

... Farrington was in a whirlpool of presents that she was both sending and receiving. Maids and footmen were running hither and thither, bringing messages or carrying out orders, and as the whole house was full of warmth and light, and the spicy fragrance of Christmas ...
— Patty's Success • Carolyn Wells

... apple spun in the saucer, faster and faster, till you couldn't see the apple at all, nothing but a mist like a little whirlpool in the silver saucer. And the little good one looked at it, and ...
— Old Peter's Russian Tales • Arthur Ransome

... than I can help, but it will take time. The house is well stocked; make yourself comfortable. There are days when no one knows whether I am here or elsewhere. Protect yourself until I return. And when"—Farwell paused and moistened his lips—"when you are over the border, in the whirlpool, the past, this life, must be forgotten. Raise up a high wall, Priscilla, that no one can scale. Begin your new life from the hour you reach the States. The one who will befriend you need know no more ...
— The Place Beyond the Winds • Harriet T. Comstock

... of the passenger train so as to get out of the way of the flood. A young man who was on the rear end of the train grabbed a young lady who was floating by and thus saved her life. The house of an old man, eighty-two years of age, was caught in the whirlpool, and he and his aged wife climbed on the roof for safety. They were floating down the railroad track to certain death, when their son-in-law, from the roof of the Pennsylvania Railroad station-house, pulled them off and saved their lives as ...
— The Johnstown Horror • James Herbert Walker

... harmonious and holy all nature appeared; and yet a few miles distant, into what a fierce seething whirlpool of conflicting passions, of hatred and bloodthirsty vengeance, had human crime plunged an entire community. We plume ourselves upon nineteenth century civilization, upon ethical advancement, upon Christian ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson

... easy to overstate the efflorescence of distinctively feminine emotion, dressiness, mysticism, and vanity upon the suffrage movement. Those things showed for anyone to see. This was the froth of the whirlpool. What did not show was the tremendous development of the sense of solidarity among women. Everybody knew that women had been hitting policemen at Westminster; it was not nearly so showy a fact that women of title, working women, domestic servants, tradesmen's wives, professional ...
— What is Coming? • H. G. Wells

... liked, was to sit drinking Up in the Elector's Castle, By our age's greatest marvel Which the German mind has wrought out, By the tun of Heidelberg. A most worthy hermit dwelt there, Who was the Elector's court fool, Was my dear old friend Perkeo; Who had out of life's wild whirlpool Peacefully withdrawn himself where He could meditate while drinking, And the cellar was his refuge. Here he lived, his care dividing 'Twixt himself and the big wine-tun; And he loved it—truer friendship Never has the world yet witnessed; ...
— The Trumpeter of Saekkingen - A Song from the Upper Rhine. • Joseph Victor von Scheffel

... with it the two Barents Islands.[135] At the west end of these two running waters, that is, where they come together to the east of these islands, they make, with the rocks and reefs, such a frightful eddy and whirlpool that it is exceedingly dangerous to pass through them, especially with small boats, of which there are some lost every now and then, and the persons in them drowned; but experience has taught men the way of passing through them with less danger. Large vessels have always less danger because ...
— Journal of Jasper Danckaerts, 1679-1680 • Jasper Danckaerts

... the struggle for the military posts on the river, during the wars of France and England; the awful scene in the conspiracy of Pontiac, where a detachment of English troops was driven by the Indians over the precipice near the great Whirlpool; the sorrow and havoc visited upon the American settlements in the Revolution by the savages who prepared their attacks in the shadow of Fort Niagara; the battles of Chippewa and of Lundy's Lane, that mixed the roar of their cannon with that of the fall; the savage forays with ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells

... d'Espard, and my sister-in-law Emilie count for something in all this. Those women, against whom I ought to have put you more thoroughly on your guard, have cultivated your curiosity more to trouble me and cause me unhappiness, than to fling you into a whirlpool which, as I believe, you ...
— A Daughter of Eve • Honore de Balzac

... hamlets of brown houses and red temples half concealed in groves of golden bamboo and the glossy green of orange trees; moments when the boatmen lounged on the deck or hung exhausted over their oars were followed by grief, fierce struggles against the dreadful force of a whirlpool ...
— A Wayfarer in China - Impressions of a trip across West China and Mongolia • Elizabeth Kendall

... fear death, she disliked Catherine's way of killing her. Catherine paid no attention to such ribaldry, and drove on like Phaeton. Wharton was carried away by the girl's dash and coolness. He wanted to paint her as the charioteer of the cataract. They drove by the whirlpool, and so far and fast that, when Esther found herself that night tossing and feverish in her bed, she could only dream that she was still skurrying over a snow-bound country, aching with jolts and jerks, but unable ever to stop. The ...
— Esther • Henry Adams

... of that gray whirlpool below. He had every reason to believe that by no possible effort of his could he save the girl; he would only throw away his own life too. The waters were icy cold: swiftly would they draw the life-giving heat ...
— The Snowshoe Trail • Edison Marshall

... cone of AEtna, above the chestnut woods. And there Charybdis caught them in its fearful coils of wave, and rolled mast-high about them, and spun them round and round; and they could go neither back nor forward, while the whirlpool sucked ...
— The Heroes • Charles Kingsley

... uneventful course of things, and the lean fare proscribed by Mother Church, it was a very dispirited Boccadoro that wandered aimlessly whither his dulling fancy took him. But in Holy Week, at last, we received an abrupt stir which set a whirlpool of excitement in the Dead Sea of our lives. It was the sudden reappearance of the ...
— The Shame of Motley • Raphael Sabatini

... plunging from wave to wave, flinging torrents of blood and spray into the air. At one moment he reared his blunt gigantic head high above the sea; the next he buried his vast and quivering carcase deep in the gory brine, carrying down with him a perfect whirlpool of red foam. Then he rose again and made straight for the boat. Had he known his own power, he might have soon terminated the battle, and come off the victor, but fortunately he did not. Tim Rokens received his blunt nose on the point of his lance, and drove him back with mingled fury and terror. ...
— The Red Eric • R.M. Ballantyne

... five minutes together, Grace had caught a glimpse of the troubled, angry current over which the upper waters rippled so smoothly that none save an accurate observer would have suspected the fierce whirlpool which lay just below the surface. Because, he thought, they would like it better, Richard left the two ladies alone at last and then turning ...
— Darkness and Daylight • Mary J. Holmes

... work, for other trees and obstructions were upon every hand, and more than once both were torn and scratched as they sped by in what was little short of a whirlpool. ...
— The Boy Land Boomer - Dick Arbuckle's Adventures in Oklahoma • Ralph Bonehill

... soul of it. Innocent, frank and brave, simple and constant among a group of false and worldly courtiers, among whom she moves like the white Truth, untouched as yet by love or by the fates of her position, she is suddenly thrown into a whirlpool of affairs and of love; and her simplicity, clearness of intelligence, unconscious rightness of momentary feeling, which comes of her not thinking about her feelings—that rare and precious element in character—above all, her belief in love as the one worthy thing ...
— The Poetry Of Robert Browning • Stopford A. Brooke

... afternoon, the Hammerfest steamer called in from the southward, and by her came two fair sisters of our hostess from their father's home in one of the Loffodens which overlook the famous Maelstrom. The stories about the violence of the whirlpool Mr. T— assures me are ridiculously exaggerated. On ordinary occasions the site of the supposed vortex is perfectly unruffled, and it is only when a strong weather tide is running that any unusual movements in the water can be ...
— Letters From High Latitudes • The Marquess of Dufferin (Lord Dufferin)

... who steered the ship of our state through the hurricane of the Restoration and the whirlpool of national rejuvenation, were men who knew no other moral teaching than the Precepts of Knighthood. Some writers[30] have lately tried to prove that the Christian missionaries contributed an appreciable ...
— Bushido, the Soul of Japan • Inazo Nitobe

... Were worth a thousand men. And refluent through the pass of fear The battle's tide was poured; Vanished the Saxon's struggling spear, 485 Vanished the mountain-sword. As Bracklinn's chasm, so black and steep, Receives her roaring linn, As the dark caverns of the deep Suck the wild whirlpool in, 490 So did the deep and darksome pass Devour the battle's mingled mass; None linger now upon the plain, Save those who ne'er ...
— Lady of the Lake • Sir Walter Scott

... a legend of Niagara, is published for piano accompaniment. Now, Niagara is a dangerous subject for the frail skiffs of rhyme, prose, or music to launch out upon. Barrel staves may carry one through the whirlpool, but music staves cannot stand the stress. Of all the comments upon the Falls of Niagara that I have ever read, or heard of, there has been only one that seemed anything but ridiculously inappropriate; that one ...
— Contemporary American Composers • Rupert Hughes

... turning away with a sigh, he rested his elbows on the sill of the window and looked out at the moving wheel under the gauzy shadows. The sound of the water as it rushed through the mill-race into the buckets and then fell from the buckets into the whirlpool beneath, was loud in his ears while his quick glance, passing over the drifting yellow leaves of the sycamore, discerned a spot of vivid red in the cornlands beyond. The throbbing of his pulses rather than the assurance of his eyes ...
— The Miller Of Old Church • Ellen Glasgow

... conceived the idea of going to the Northland to win back the Sampo. On the way they allied to themselves the wizard Lemminkainen. As they approached the whirlpool near Pohyola, their vessel stuck on the shoulders of a great pike. When neither Lemminkainen nor Ilmarinen could slay it, Wainamoinen impaled it on his fire-sword, and the three banqueted on the great fish. From its bones, Wainamoinen framed the first harp. No one could win music ...
— National Epics • Kate Milner Rabb

... biassed the other way) pretty certainly not Welsh in origin, and there is no reason to think that it originally had anything to do with Arthur. Even after it obeyed the strange "suck" of legends towards this centre whirlpool, or Loadstone Rock, of romance, it yielded nothing intimately connected with the Arthurian Legend itself at first, and such connection as succeeded seems pretty certainly[31] to be that of which Percevale is the hero, ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 1 - From the Beginning to 1800 • George Saintsbury

... in the cup, no matter what beverage is served. Most of us have seen some absent-minded individual (we will charitably suppose him absent-minded instead of ignorant), stir his coffee round and round and round, creating a miniature whirlpool and very likely slopping it over into the saucer; then, prisoning the spoon with a finger, drink half the cup's contents at a gulp. To do this is positively vulgar. Stir the coffee or tea very slightly, just enough to ...
— Mother's Remedies - Over One Thousand Tried and Tested Remedies from Mothers - of the United States and Canada • T. J. Ritter

... survey, of any description, had ever been made anywhere in the neighboring region. It was generally supposed that it had no visible outlet; but among the trappers, including those in my own camp, were many who believed that somewhere on its surface was a terrible whirlpool, through which its waters found their way to the ocean by some subterranean communication. All these things had made a frequent subject of discussion in our desultory conversations around the fires at night; and my own mind had become tolerably well ...
— The Exploring Expedition to the Rocky Mountains, Oregon and California • Brevet Col. J.C. Fremont

... meditated against the continent of Africa. The Straits of Rhegium and Messina [128] are twelve miles in length, and, in the narrowest passage, about one mile and a half broad; and the fabulous monsters of the deep, the rocks of Scylla, and the whirlpool of Charybdis, could terrify none but the most timid and unskilful mariners. Yet as soon as the first division of the Goths had embarked, a sudden tempest arose, which sunk, or scattered, many of the transports; their courage was daunted by the terrors of a new element; and the whole ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 3 • Edward Gibbon



Words linked to "Whirlpool" :   course, vortex, maelstrom, run, feed, purl, current, whirl, swirl



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