"Miry" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Treenail-to Morillo's headquarters. We got an order to the officer commanding the nearest post on shore, to provide us with horses; but before reaching it, we had to walk, under a roasting sun, about two miles through miry roads, until we arrived at the barrier, where we found a detachment of artillery, but the commanding officer could only give us one poor broken-winded horse, and a jackass, on which we were to proceed ...
— Tom Cringle's Log • Michael Scott
... but before into the miry mead, And keep the path that doth to Farnsfield lead; I'll into Southwell and buy all the knacks, That shall fit both ...
— A Select Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. VIII (4th edition) • Various
... journey: these pathways are flanked by wide and deep ditches, and almost rendered completely dark by lofty hedges on each side of them, the trees of which meet at top, and thus form an arch: hence they are rough and uneven in summer, besides being intolerably hot, and deep and miry in winter. To add to these inconveniences, the bed of a rivulet flowing along them frequently constitutes the only passage. Even when the traveller, after toiling along these dreadful pathways, comes near a town or village, ...
— A Visit to the Monastery of La Trappe in 1817 • W.D. Fellowes
... wi' angry sugh;* The short'ning winter-day is near a close; The miry bests retreating frae the pleugh; The black'ning trains o' craws to their repose; The toil-worn Cotter ...
— English Literature For Boys And Girls • H.E. Marshall
... the pole slipped from its insecure support into the miry mud, and Frank, instead of landing on the hummock for which he had aimed, lost his direction, and soused flat on his side with a loud "spa-lash," in the water and mud three feet to ...
— Two Little Confederates • Thomas Nelson Page
... me for wishing to make a third? Is a mere modern murderer beneath my vengeance, by comparison with two classical tyrants who did their murders by deputy? The man who killed Arthur Mountjoy is (next to Cain alone) the most atrocious homicide that ever trod the miry ways of this earth. There is my reply! I call ...
— Blind Love • Wilkie Collins
... impossible now as Kidd's treasure. And yet the mere taming of the neighborhood does not quite satisfy me as an explanation. Twenty years ago, on my way to bathe in the river, I saw every day a brace of woodcock, on the miry edge of a spring within a few rods of a house, and constantly visited by thirsty cows. There was no growth of any kind to conceal them, and yet these ordinarily shy birds were almost as indifferent to my ...
— My Garden Acquaintance • James Russell Lowell
... spunkies Decoy the wight that late an' drunk is, The bleezin, curst, mischievous monkeys Delude his eyes, Till in some miry slough he sunk is, Ne'er ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham
... get him at least a footing on firm ground, and to give him room to live. Then you may have a chance. At present you have none. And you will have all the better opportunity to find a way to his heart, if he comes to know that it was you who pulled him out of the horrible pit and the miry clay in which he ...
— "In Darkest England and The Way Out" • General William Booth
... forts, differing in size, but on the same model, a plan of which he gave, of his own drawing. The largest was on Lake Erie, the other on French Creek, fifteen miles apart, with a waggon road between them. The nearest and levellest way to them was now impassable, lying through large and miry savannas; they would have, therefore, to go by Venango, and it would take five or six sleeps (or days) of good travelling to reach the ...
— The Life of George Washington, Volume I • Washington Irving
... seemed to view, as one appraises the pattern of an unrolled carpet, every action of Jurgen's life: and she seemed, too, to wonder, without reproach or trouble, how men could be so foolish, and of their own accord become so miry. ...
— Jurgen - A Comedy of Justice • James Branch Cabell
... to the outlying husbandry and homesteads. And 'Clay Pits!' It is out of the pit and the miry clay that we want to bring them. The suggestion of that is too much like Mary Moxall's 'heap that everybody ...
— The Other Girls • Mrs. A. D. T. Whitney
... a voice from without confirming the voice within; it was the love and forgiveness of man sealing and making sure the love and forgiveness of God. Wherefore, let us take heed lest, by our sullen refusal to forgive, we be thrusting some penitent soul back into the miry depths, whence, slowly and painfully, it is winning its way into the ...
— The Teaching of Jesus • George Jackson
... had become a layman, and in consequence had experienced all sorts of hardships; and, finally, had become a vagrant. 'And had I not met with my benefactor, Paramon Semyonitch,' Punin commonly added (he never spoke of Baburin except in this way), 'I should have sunk into the miry abysses of poverty and vice.' Punin was fond of high-sounding expressions, and had a great propensity, if not for lying, for romancing and exaggeration; he admired everything, fell into ecstasies over everything.... ...
— A Desperate Character and Other Stories • Ivan Turgenev
... the way to Toby's place, the main trail through the swamp going right by the hummock on which the old man's farm was situated. She knew there was a corduroy road most of the way—that is, a road built of logs laid side by side directly over the miry ground. Save in very wet weather this road was ...
— Nan Sherwood at Pine Camp - or, The Old Lumberman's Secret • Annie Roe Carr
... below Both good and evil in mysterious love, And she was silenced. What a sacred power Hath hallow'd Friendship o'er the nameless ills That throng our pilgrimage. Its sympathy, Doth undergird the drooping, and uphold The foot that falters in its miry path. It grows more precious, as the hair grows grey. Time's alchymy that rendereth so much dross Back for our gay entrustments, shows more pure The perfect essence of its sanctity, Gold unalloyed. How doth the cordial grasp, ...
— Man of Uz, and Other Poems • Lydia Howard Sigourney
... insinuating cluck to the horses, while several passengers, who had alighted to gather blackberries from the ditch, scrambled hurriedly into their places. With a single clanking wrench the stage toiled on, plodding clumsily over the miry road. ...
— The Deliverance; A Romance of the Virginia Tobacco Fields • Ellen Glasgow
... being relieved, had ended in utter gloom, gave Diva a headache, and she adopted her usual strenuous methods of getting rid of it. So, instead of lying down and taking aspirin and dozing, she set out after lunch to walk it off. She sprinted and splashed along the miry roads, indifferent as to whether she stepped in puddles or not, and careless how wet she got. She bit on the bullet of her omission from the dinner-party this evening, determining not to mind one atom about it, but to look ...
— Miss Mapp • Edward Frederic Benson
... laying himself down on the ground, he cried, 'I am dead,' and remained motionless. Forthwith the Ulemas hastened to him, and bringing with them a coffin, placed him in it, saying, 'Let us carry him home.' On their way, coming to a miry place, they said, 'We will rest,' and began to talk together. The Cogia, forthwith raising his head from the coffin, said, 'If I were alive I would get out of this place as ...
— The Turkish Jester - or, The Pleasantries of Cogia Nasr Eddin Effendi • Nasreddin Hoca
... an ill-fitting, clumsy pair of shoes she must pay at least $2; and no sooner has she bought them than she must begin to skimp because in a month or six weeks she will need another pair. The hour or two hours' walk each day through streets thickly spread, oftener than not, with a slimy, miry dampness literally dissolves these shoes. Long after up-town streets are dry and clean, those of the congested quarters display the muddy travesty of snow in the city. The stockings inside these cheap shoes, with their worn linings, wear out even more quickly than the shoes. It is practically impossible ...
— Making Both Ends Meet • Sue Ainslie Clark and Edith Wyatt
... manner had changed, and he became a humble, devout follower of the lowly Nazarene. God used a dream to awaken this man's conscience—as is not uncommon in China. One night he dreamed he was struggling in a deep, miry pit; but try as he would he could find no way of escape. When about to give up in despair, he looked up and saw Mr. Goforth and another missionary on the bank above him, with their hands stretched out to save him. Again he sought for ...
— How I Know God Answers Prayer - The Personal Testimony of One Life-Time • Rosalind Goforth
... retired from the world in a cavern. I said: 'Why dost thou not come into the city, that thy heart might be relieved from a load of servitude?' He replied: 'In it there dwell some wonderful and angel-faced charmers, and where the path is miry, elephants may find it slippery.'—Having delivered this speech, we kissed each other's head and face, and took our leaves:—What profits it to kiss our mistress's cheek, and with the same breath to bid her ...
— Persian Literature, Volume 2, Comprising The Shah Nameh, The - Rubaiyat, The Divan, and The Gulistan • Anonymous
... the light of day, run their swift and fiery career of sin, and then disappear. Dante, in that wonderful Vision which embodies so much of true ethics and theology, represents the wrathful and gloomy class as sinking down under the miry waters and continuing to breathe in a convulsive, suffocating manner, sending up bubbles to the surface, that mark the place where they are drawing out their lingering existence.[4] Something like this, is the wretched life of a vicious population. As we look in upon the fermenting ...
— Sermons to the Natural Man • William G.T. Shedd
... the carriage as she saw Pinck Johnson coming out of the saloon with Buck Gowdy; and had then clambered out again and gone into the little hotel where they seemed to have decided to stay all night; while I went on over roads which were getting more and more miry as I went west. I had only been able to tell her of the Fewkes family—Old Man Fewkes, with his bird's claws and a beard where a chin should have been, Surajah Dowlah Fewkes with no thought except for silly inventions, Celebrate Fourth Fewkes ...
— Vandemark's Folly • Herbert Quick
... that in his absence some rich and valuable thing might be turned up, and perhaps concealed or conveyed away secretly by the finder. But the weeks passed and nothing was found; and it was now a bare and ugly place with miry pools of dirt, great holes where the trees had been; there were cart tracks all over the field in which it lay, the great trunks lay outside the mound, and the undergrowth was piled in stacks. The mound and ditch had ...
— Paul the Minstrel and Other Stories - Reprinted from The Hill of Trouble and The Isles of Sunset • Arthur Christopher Benson
... town, we came to what should have been a harmless little drift, about two or three miles out. The recent rains had, however, transformed it into a formidable obstacle, and waggon after waggon stuck hopelessly in its miry embrace. The General, therefore, determined to halt on a rising slope on the far side, and as many waggons as possible were man-handled over the bog. Tents were pitched, but scarcely were they up when a furious storm ...
— The Second Battalion Royal Dublin Fusiliers in the South African War - With a Description of the Operations in the Aden Hinterland • Cecil Francis Romer and Arthur Edward Mainwaring
... giving their own names, with a sprinkling of the names of bear-flag heroes, not forgetting the usual Washington and Jackson, leaving in the centre a plaza, the cove in front to be filled in later. The streets were narrow, dusty in summer and miry in winter. Spanish-American streets are usually thirty-six feet wide. Winding trails led from the Presidio to the Mission, and from Mission and Presidio to the cove. This was the beginning of San Francisco, which a merciful providence has five times burned, the original shacks and ...
— Some Cities and San Francisco and Resurgam • Hubert Howe Bancroft
... But, having found it, take a course oblique, Where glittering rainbows rise from far, to cheat Their wondering eyes, and tempt their eager feet; And lead them forward o'er forbidden ground, } Where pleasures still decrease, and pains abound, } Till in a miry lake, or whelming torrent, drown'd. } Thus form'd by art, a fancied meteor flies On glowing wings, and sails along the skies, Shoots to the stars with imitative blaze Of feeble splendor, rivalling their rays; With many a glittering track indents its way, ...
— Gustavus Vasa - and other poems • W. S. Walker
... arrested by swamps or marshes; hence the forests, if this region was ever generally wooded, have been gradually swept away and devoured, until none remain. In fact, from the river bottoms of the lower Kansas to those of the San Joaquin and Sacramento, there is no swamp, though two or three miry meadows of inconsiderable size, near the South Pass, known as 'Ice Springs' and 'Pacific Springs,' are of a somewhat swampy character. Beside these, there is nothing approximating the natural meadows of New England, the fenny, oozy flats of nearly all inhabited ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I. February, 1862, No. II. - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... which he had shed upon the cross; and attested to be genuine by the seals of the patriarch of Jerusalem and others! He commanded a procession the following day; and the historian adds, that though the road between St. Paul's and Westminster Abbey was very deep and miry, the king kept his eyes constantly fixed on the phial. Two monks received it, and deposited the phial in the abbey, "which made all England shine with glory, dedicating it ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 1 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... but considerable depth, which had been laid open by the bursting of a waterspout on the uplands, and in which the dark peaty chasm remained unclosed, though the event had happened ere my birth, until I had become old and curious enough thoroughly to explore it. It was a black miry ravine, some ten or twelve feet in depth. The bogs around waved thick with silvery willows of small size; but sticking out from the black sides of the ravine itself, and in some instances stretched across it from side ...
— My Schools and Schoolmasters - or The Story of my Education. • Hugh Miller
... the Lord troubled him.' The divine influence which came on the towering head of the son of Kish, through the anointing oil that Samuel poured upon his raven hair, left him, and he stood God-forsaken because he stood God-forsaking. And so David looks back from the 'horrible pit and miry clay' into which he had fallen, where, stained with blood and lust, he lies, to that sad gigantic figure, remembered so well and loved by him so truly—the great king who sinned away his soul, and bled out his life on the heights of ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... the way, and put up gates there, which they strongly fortified. In order still further to increase the difficulty of forcing a passage, they conducted the water of the warm springs over the ground without the wall, in such a way as to make the surface continually wet and miry. The old wall had now fallen to ruins, but the miry ground remained. The place was solitary and desolate, and overgrown with a confused and wild vegetation. On one side the view extended far and wide over the sea, with the highlands of Euboea in the distance, and on the other ...
— Xerxes - Makers of History • Jacob Abbott
... once, after the first tumbler of toddy and before the second, betaken himself to his prayers for his poor Alec Forbes, and entreated God Almighty to do for him what he could not do, though he would die for him—to rescue him from the fearful pit and the miry clay of moral pollution—if he had heard this, he would have said that it was a sad pity, but such prayers could not be answered, seeing he that prayed was himself in the gall of bitterness and the bond ...
— Alec Forbes of Howglen • George MacDonald
... they sprang upon their ponies and dashed away. Had it not been for the creek, which lay between us and them, we would have got them before they could have mounted their horses; but as it was rather miry, we were unexpectedly delayed. The Indians fired some shots at us while we were crossing, but as soon as we got over we went for them in hot pursuit. A few of the redskins, not having time to mount, had started on foot toward the brush. One of these ...
— The Great Salt Lake Trail • Colonel Henry Inman
... the party as far as Chester. At that point the task of travel became arduous. Over miry roads, in places blocked by boulders, there was the painful, laborious ascent of the steep grade leading to the summit of what we now call Schooley's Mountain. There the party camped for the night, ...
— Fifth Avenue • Arthur Bartlett Maurice
... look at him to see he had never worked. There was something too roguish and wanton in his face, a look too like that of a schoolboy or a street Arab, to have survived much cudgelling. It was plain that these feet had kicked off sportive children oftener than they had plodded with a freight through miry lanes. He was altogether a fine-weather, holiday sort of donkey; and though he was just then somewhat solemnised and rueful, he still gave proof of the levity of his disposition by impudently wagging his ears at me as I drew near. I say he was somewhat ...
— Essays of Travel • Robert Louis Stevenson
... a stream is driving, To the skies 'tis quickly sped, Now the wounded monster diving, Roaring seeks his miry bed. Fridthjof's giant strength then casteth Lances at the goblins bold, One in Ice-bear's bosom fasteneth, One Storm-eagle's breast ...
— Fridthjof's Saga • Esaias Tegner
... great black pond on which marsh fowl were swimming, but Henry led around its miry edges, and they pressed on into the deeper depths of the vast swamp. He judged that they had now penetrated it a full two miles, but he had no intention of stopping. The four behind him knew without his telling for what he was looking. The swamp, partly a product of an extremely rainy season, ...
— The Eyes of the Woods - A story of the Ancient Wilderness • Joseph A. Altsheler
... So Boyd shall march by compass, slowly, seeking over the level way, and open woods, with the artillery and wagons ever in his thoughts. Six miles due north shall he march; then, where the hills end a swamp begins—thick, miry, set with maple, brier, and tamarack. But through this he must blaze his trail, and the pioneers who are to follow shall lay their wagon-path across felled trees, northward still, across the forests that border the flats of Catharines-town; ...
— The Hidden Children • Robert W. Chambers
... to English winters, and the huge house looked down on them like a London terrace that had lost its way, with a dreary uninhabited air about it. Even by this private way they had two miles and a half of park to traverse, before they reached a heavy miry lane, where the beds of mud, alternated with rugged masses of stone, intended to choke them. It led up between high hedges to the brow of one of the many hills of the county, whence they could look down into the hollow, a perfect cup, scooped out as it ...
— Magnum Bonum • Charlotte M. Yonge
... dare to trust the man I know of, even in defiance of that man's own voice. I dare protest the man no thief, but in all things a madly honourable gentleman. My poor bruised, puzzled boy," said Melicent, with an odd mirthful tenderness, "how came you to be blundering about this miry world of ours! Only be very good for my sake and forget the bitterness; what does it matter ...
— Domnei • James Branch Cabell et al
... puddles than anything so poetic as small pools. A motor car sent by friends had halted beside the platform; I got into it with a not unusual vagueness about where I was going; and it wound its way up miry paths to a more rolling stretch of country with patches of cactus here and there. And then with a curious abruptness I became conscious that the whole huge desert had vanished, and I was in a new land. The dark red plains had rolled ...
— The New Jerusalem • G. K. Chesterton
... was begun shortly before dawn in a dark and heavy mist. As the first glimmer of morning light appeared the snow began to fall, hiding with a white mantle the miry battle field, in which the British troops sank ankle deep as they struggled forward floundering here and there in old shell holes. The Germans had not recovered from the nerve-shattering bombardment that had preceded the attack when the ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume VI (of VIII) - History of the European War from Official Sources • Various
... His love, His work upon the Cross. The condition is for us; the power comes from Him. My faith is the hand that grasps His; it is His hand, not mine, that holds me up. My faith lays hold of the rope; it is the rope and the Person above who holds it, that lift me out of the 'horrible pit and the miry clay.' My faith flees for refuge to the city; it is the city that keeps me safe from the avenger of blood. Brother! exercise that faith, and you will receive a better sight than was poured ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Mark • Alexander Maclaren
... is well— And let him shun the spot, The damp and dismal brake, That skirts the shallow lake, The brown and stagnant pool[A], The dark and miry fen, And let him never at nightfall spread His blanket among the isles that dot The surface of that lake; And let my brother tell The men of his race that the wolf hath fed Ere now on warriors brave and true, In the fearful Lake of ...
— Traditions of the North American Indians, Vol. 3 (of 3) • James Athearn Jones
... pine-sticks flared up as though saturated with oil, their flickering blaze lighting up a weird scene; the gaunt, bare, white trees, ghosts of a departed forest, the miry ground strewn with eggs of all sizes, shapes and colors, and dead birds of many kinds, in amongst which writhed and twisted dirty-looking, repulsive water moccasins and brilliant yellow and black swamp snakes, while ...
— The Boy Chums in the Forest - or Hunting for Plume Birds in the Florida Everglades • Wilmer M. Ely
... this part of the cave has been used by the citizens of the county as a place for holding camp-meeting. I estimated its length at not far short of one mile and a half. The main passage is in general quite spacious, the roof elevated, and the floor tolerably level, but often wet and miry. For some distance beyond the entrance there is not much to attract attention; but as we proceed, at the far extremity the chambers are quite as picturesque as the most noted of the well-known Mammoth Cave. The ...
— Cave Regions of the Ozarks and Black Hills • Luella Agnes Owen
... are partly strong and partly broken. Compare the Protestant United States with Catholic Mexico, or compare Protestant Great Britain with Catholic Spain, and compared with these nations we have the strength of iron, but judged by our sectarianism we have the weakness of miry clay. ...
— Personal Recollections of Pardee Butler • Pardee Butler
... than most," snarled Kemp, "but mostly lies! And why does he forget the miry lanes By Brainford with thick woods on either side, And the deep holes, where I could find no ease But skipped up to my waist?" A crackling laugh Broke from his lips which, if he had not worn The cap and bells, would scarce have roused the mirth Of good Sir John, who roundly ...
— Collected Poems - Volume Two (of 2) • Alfred Noyes
... and fill it up with their dead bodies, that the rear may pass over them dry-shod, and gain the honor? How many earnest, rugged Cromwells, Knoxes, poor Peasant Covenanters, wrestling, battling for very life, in rough miry places, have to struggle, and suffer, and fall, greatly censured, bemired—before a beautiful Revolution of Eighty-eight can step over them in official pumps and silk ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 1-20 • Various
... could make out a longish clump of men who stood four abreast, scuffling their feet upon the miry wet stones of the square. These were the prisoners—one hundred and fifty Frenchmen and Turcos, eighty Englishmen and eight Belgians. From them, as we drew near, an odor of wet, unwashed animals arose. It was as rank and raw as fumes from crude ammonia. Then, in the town ...
— Paths of Glory - Impressions of War Written At and Near the Front • Irvin S. Cobb
... and recognizing its clear-sightedness, Cesar tumbled from the heights of hope into the miry marshes of doubt and uncertainty. In such horrible commercial straits a man, unless his soul is tempered like that of Pillerault, becomes the plaything of events; he follows the ideas of others, or his own, as a traveller pursues a will-o'-the-wisp. He lets the gust ...
— Rise and Fall of Cesar Birotteau • Honore de Balzac
... Pierre," exclaimed Amelie, sparkling at the reminiscence; "I recollect how I wept and wrung my hands, tired out, hungry, and forlorn, with my dress in tatters, and one shoe left in a miry place! I recollect, moreover, that my protectors were in almost as bad a plight as myself, yet they chivalrously carried the little maiden by turns, or together made a queen's chair for me with their locked hands, until we all broke down together and sat ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby
... have enjoyed the communion of his friendship, and I would not have lived my whole existence in vain! Though more honourable than he, it is indeed evident that silk and satins only serve to swathe this rotten trunk of mine, and choice wines and rich meats only to gorge the filthy drain and miry sewer of this body of mine! Wealth! and splendour! ye are no more than contaminated with ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book I • Cao Xueqin
... paying the cost of experiencing a mistake, they willingly returned to their respective duties. Thus when the rabble of Athens murmured at the exaction of the magistrates, Themistocles satisfied them with such another tale of the fox and the hedge-hog; the first whereof being stuck fast in a miry bog, the flies came swarming about him, and almost sucked out all his blood, the latter officiously offers his service to drive them away; no, says the fox, if these which are almost glutted be frighted off, there will come a ...
— In Praise of Folly - Illustrated with Many Curious Cuts • Desiderius Erasmus
... sand-grains are by Zephyr tossed On Libya's plain, or wot, when Eurus falls With fury on the ships, how many waves Come rolling shoreward from the Ionian sea. Not that all soils can all things bear alike. Willows by water-courses have their birth, Alders in miry fens; on rocky heights The barren mountain-ashes; on the shore Myrtles throng gayest; Bacchus, lastly, loves The bare hillside, and yews the north wind's chill. Mark too the earth by outland tillers tamed, And Eastern homes of Arabs, and tattooed Geloni; to all trees ...
— The Georgics • Virgil
... has sunk into some mossy or miry place," said Michael, to a man near him, into whose face he could not look, "a cruel, cruel death to one like her! The earth on which my child walked has closed over her, and we shall never ...
— McGuffey's Fifth Eclectic Reader • William Holmes McGuffey
... become miry and foul because it has not been properly cared for; but my text says the unclean shall not walk on this one. Room on either side to throw away your sins. Indeed, if you want to carry them along, you ...
— New Tabernacle Sermons • Thomas De Witt Talmage
... she saw me resume my race through the bushes, blowing, panting, desperate, absurd. I ran thus during a space of time of which I am unable to form any estimate, accomplishing unprecedented feats of gymnastics, tearing through the thorny brambles, sinking into the miry spots, leaping over the ditches, bounding upon my feet with the elasticity of a panther, galloping to the devil, without reason, without object, and without any other hope but that of seeing the earth ...
— Led Astray and The Sphinx - Two Novellas In One Volume • Octave Feuillet
... third chapter of Genesis, and ability was given us to preach the Gospel of life and salvation. All hearts seemed touched, and our own overflowed with gratitude. We may in truth say, Our Heavenly Father has plucked our feet out of a horrible pit and out of the miry clay, and set them upon a rock, and put a new song into our mouth, even praise to his glorious name. On considering afterwards our situation, we could not but behold the hand of a gracious Providence which had led us to this spot; had we attempted to go by Corinth to Athens, we should [as they ...
— Memoir and Diary of John Yeardley, Minister of the Gospel • John Yeardley
... wore his festival dress; but his best stockings and buckled shoes were stained and splashed, as from much walking in miry ways. Also he came unsteadily, and his face was white as ashes. The parson stared ...
— I Saw Three Ships and Other Winter Tales • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... into miry pulpy water, where her course tended downwards, and where the earth-vault above darkened as it sank ...
— Weird Tales from Northern Seas • Jonas Lie
... out, climbed a miry glacis of five or six feet, reached hard wet sand, and strode away with the sluggish ripple of the Balje on my left hand. A curtain dropped between me and Davies, and I was alone—alone, but how ...
— Riddle of the Sands • Erskine Childers
... and to know what its quality formerly was, and still is? Follow me, and you shall see. They are those concerning whom Daniel thus prophesied: 'A kingdom shall arise after those four in which iron shall be mixed with miry clay: they shall mingle themselves together by the seed of man: but they shall not cohere one with the other, as iron is not mixed with clay, Dan. ii. 41-43:'" and he said, "By the seed of man, whereby iron shall be mixed with clay, and still they shall not cohere, ...
— The Delights of Wisdom Pertaining to Conjugial Love • Emanuel Swedenborg
... I call indeed a Brahmana who has traversed this miry road, the impassable world and its vanity, who has gone through, and reached the other shore, is thoughtful, guileless, free from doubts, free ...
— The Dhammapada • Unknown
... A miry lane led us up from Quartes with its church and bickering windmill. The hinds were trudging homewards from the fields. A brisk little woman passed us by. She was seated across a donkey between a pair of glittering milk-cans; and, as she went, she kicked jauntily with her heels upon the donkey's ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 1 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... from one into another, as into basins, and there are immense bulks of ever-flowing rivers under the earth, both of hot and cold water, and a great quantity of fire, and mighty rivers of fire, and many of liquid mire, some purer and some more miry, as in Sicily there are rivers of mud that flow before the lava, and the lava itself, and from these the several places are filled, according as the overflow from time to time happens to come to each of them. But all these move up and down as it were by a certain oscillation existing ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 2 • Various
... home was not the place for him to rest in, and after bidding a hasty adieu to his father, he crossed the country northward on foot and reached Liverpool, in the hope of finding work there. Failing in that, he set out for Manchester and reached it at dusk, very weary and very miry in consequence of the road being in such a wretched state of mud and ruts. He relates that, not knowing a person in the town, he went up to an apple-stall ostensibly to buy a pennyworth of apples, but really to ask the stall-keeper if he knew of any person in want of a ...
— Industrial Biography - Iron Workers and Tool Makers • Samuel Smiles
... at my bewildered expression. "There is a delightful freshness about you, Watson, which makes it a pleasure to exercise any small powers which I possess at your expense. A gentleman goes forth on a showery and miry day. He returns immaculate in the evening with the gloss still on his hat and his boots. He has been a fixture therefore all day. He is not a man with intimate friends. Where, then, could he have been? Is ...
— The Hound of the Baskervilles • A. Conan Doyle
... by the hand, not to let go till she had seen him in the bosom of his class-mates. There a sullen wild-eyed mite in petticoats was being dragged along, screaming, towards distasteful durance. It was a drab picture—the bleak, leaden sky above, the sloppy, miry stones below, the frowsy mothers and fathers, ...
— Children of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... herself that they could not have broken out of that pasture, and that the river bank was impassable, because of high, thick bushes and miry mud in the open spaces. She had a fight with Blue over these latter places and demonstrated beyond doubt that they were miry, by getting him in to the knees in spite of his violent objections. They left deep tracks behind ...
— The Ranch at the Wolverine • B. M. Bower
... what I had done on that day long ago. I had half slid on a miry descent; it was still there; a little lower I had knocked off the top of a thistle; the thistles had not been discouraged, but were still growing. I recalled it because I had wondered why one knocks off the tops of thistles; ...
— A Miscellany of Men • G. K. Chesterton
... dry upon the beach. Sixteen Japanese were drowned in trying to save other boats that broke loose. The Sikhs got safely ashore, but next morning again the winds blew and the rains descended, and the camping-ground was soon a miry pool. Circumstances other than the weather, however, helped to put the British officers out of humour. Trouble ahead threatened in connexion with transport arrangements. While the Chinese carts and drivers, brought hurriedly ...
— World's War Events, Vol. I • Various
... balsas containing Pizarro's wardrobe; but, as the men who defended it raised loud cries for help, they reached the ears of Hernando Pizarro, who, with a small body of horse, had effected a landing some way farther down the shore. A broad tract of miry ground, overflowed at high water, lay between him and the party thus rudely assailed by the natives. The tide was out, and the bottom was soft and dangerous. With little regard to the danger, however, the bold ...
— History Of The Conquest Of Peru • William Hickling Prescott
... 'twas the ——," he said, rubbing a miry hand across the jaw, dripping with blood, "I think the two poor devils are done in. Oh, this isn't much," he continued, taking out a spare handkerchief and wiping his face, "'twon't bring me back to England, worse (p. 065) luck! ...
— The Red Horizon • Patrick MacGill
... they were obliged to halt, and the lively "gee-up—gee-up" as they moved on again—frighted any game long before we could come up with it. Of course we were compelled to keep by the waggon until we had made the passage of the miry flat. ...
— The Hunters' Feast - Conversations Around the Camp Fire • Mayne Reid
... halt was called, but the rest was of short duration, for at ten the column was again plodding along through the miry roads in hourly dread lest the whole scheme should be spoilt, and the Boers suddenly arrest the course of the ...
— South Africa and the Transvaal War, Vol. 2 (of 6) - From the Commencement of the War to the Battle of Colenso, - 15th Dec. 1899 • Louis Creswicke
... huddled figure slowly climbed upon a low fence running about the house-yard of the little farm where the boy lived who got thrashed for losing a milkpail. On the wet top rail, precariously perching, the figure slipped and sprawled forward in the miry yard. It got up, painfully swaying on its feet. It was Mr. Trimm, looking for food. He moved slowly toward the house, tottering with weakness and because of the slick mud underfoot; peering near-sightedly this way and that through the murk; starting at every ...
— The Escape of Mr. Trimm - His Plight and other Plights • Irvin S. Cobb
... his way through the intricacies of the wood, he had been seriously incommoded by the thick undergrowth, and he had accidentally encountered several miry pools, with which he had involuntarily made a closer acquaintance than was at all conducive either to his personal appearance or comfort. The doctor's temper, though, generally speaking, one of the most even, was at last affected by his mishaps, and he could not restrain from an execration ...
— Varney the Vampire - Or the Feast of Blood • Thomas Preskett Prest
... on the river bank without shelter in a heavy storm of rain. There was no sign of abatement; therefore Nagendra, thinking it necessary to seek for shelter, set out to walk to the village, which was at some distance from the river, through miry paths. Presently the rain ceased, the wind abated slightly, but the sky was still thickly covered with clouds; therefore both wind and rain might be expected at night. Nagendra ...
— The Poison Tree - A Tale of Hindu Life in Bengal • Bankim Chandra Chatterjee
... with the English were coming to meet them. Our generals had, however, all the day before them to choose their ground, and to make their dispositions. It would have been difficult to succeed worse, both with the one and the other. A brook, by no means of a miry kind, ran parallel to our army; and in front of it a spring, which formed a long and large quagmire, nearly separated the two lines of Marshal Tallard. It was a strange situation for a general to take up, who is master of a vast plain; and it became, as will ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... a thorn in our sides. In half an hour he was accidentally remembered, and was found to be nowhere within view; so we pursued our way, well pleased. He had dropped quietly off, at the first canter, into a miry slough, and had returned sobbingly, covered with mortification and mud, to the arms of his parent. Keen questioning at dinner was ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 26, December, 1859 • Various
... denote. Henceforth we find sins which are only possible to the higher intelligence of humanity. It will be observed, too, that at this point what may be called pictorial description begins. Hitherto we have had merely a general impression of murky air and miry soil, sloping perhaps a little toward the centre, and intersected now and again by a stream. Now the City of Dis with minarets and towers rises in front of us, and, as we shall see in future cantos, from this time onwards the character of the ...
— Dante: His Times and His Work • Arthur John Butler
... appearance of a large black dog, with long shaggy hair, and, as the natives express it, "eyes as big as saucers." The first name is given to it form the peculiar noise made by its feet when passing along, resembling that of a heavy shoe in a miry road. The second appellation is in allusion to the sound of its voice when heard by those parties who are unable to see the appearance itself. According to the statements of parties who have seen the trash frequently, it makes its ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 34, June 22, 1850 • Various
... gust of wind arise, The brittle forest into atoms flies: The crackling wood beneath the tempest bends, And in a spangled show'r the prospect ends. Or, if a southern gale the region warm, And by degrees unbind the wintry charm, The traveller, a miry country sees, And journeys ...
— The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (1753),Vol. V. • Theophilus Cibber
... wife upon a miserable horse, lean and lank, which he had picked out for the purpose, and himself and his servant no better mounted, they journeyed on through rough and miry ways, and ever when this horse of Katherine's stumbled, he would storm and swear at the poor jaded beast, who could scarce crawl under his burthen, as if he had been ...
— Books for Children - The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Vol. 3 • Charles and Mary Lamb
... the sudden tightening of the reins, or by the tearing of some frightened thing through the canes that beset the low, miry bank, the horse sprang aside; then stood trembling with pricked ears. The white man stared at the stream; turned in his saddle and stared at the tree trunks, the patches of moonlight, and the impenetrable shadow that closed each vista. "The blazed ...
— Audrey • Mary Johnston
... for nearly an hour over a rough and miry river-bottom when the setter showed sudden excitement and began sniffing to ...
— Captured by the Navajos • Charles A. Curtis
... that the nearest priest in our part of the country lived a long distance away, and to get to him and his little thatched chapel one had to cross a swamp two miles wide in which one's horse would sink belly-deep in miry holes at least a dozen times before one could get through. In these circumstances the Gandara family could not go to the priest, but managed to persuade him to come to them, and as La Tapera was not considered a ...
— Far Away and Long Ago • W. H. Hudson
... easy, I say, to see, that with such an additional number of passengers, the domestic plaustrum would sink deeper and deeper in the miry ways of the world. And consultations many and long did my excellent wife and I hold over the darkening prospect of our future life. At last she bethought her of going to take counsel of her near friend ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 55, No. 344, June, 1844 • Various
... turn at the crack noo," he said, coming forward to a part of the foul miry dungeon where a crowd of male and female prisoners were endeavouring to inhale a little fresh air through a crevice in the wall. "I'm fit to choke for want o' a breath o' ...
— Hunted and Harried • R.M. Ballantyne
... even beyond the grave. Out of silence and nothingness we arise; we have our short space of sight and hearing; and then into the silence we depart. But in that interval we are surrounded by much joy. Sometimes the path is hard and lonely, and we stumble in miry ways; but sometimes our way is through fields and thickets, and the valley is full of sunset light. If we could be more calm and quiet, less anxious about the impression we produce, more quick to ...
— The Thread of Gold • Arthur Christopher Benson
... he, "is true; but remember that, taking the compositions of Young in general, they are but like bright stepping-stones over a miry road. Young froths and foams, and bubbles sometimes very vigorously; but we must not compare the noise made by your tea-kettle here with the ...
— Anecdotes of the late Samuel Johnson, LL.D. - during the last twenty years of his life • Hester Lynch Piozzi
... winter's morning just before nine o'clock, where you can overlook a circle of some two or three miles' radius, the center being the Old Red School-house. You will see little figures picking their way along the miry roads, or ploughing through the deep drifts, cutting across the fields, all drawing to the school-house, Bub in his wammus and his cowhide boots, his cap with ear-laps, a knitted comforter about his neck, and his hands glowing ...
— Back Home • Eugene Wood
... ne'er barked and Spot ne'er whined But quickly caught the thief behind; He dragged him down in the mire and dirt, And tore his coat and tore his shirt, Then held him fast on the miry ground; The robber uttered not a sound, While his hands and feet the farmer bound, And tumbled him into ...
— The Dog's Book of Verse • Various
... from the bar who, he said, could supply my needs. This man, the very type of a Western pioneer, bowed, threw himself into a rocking-chair, drew a spittoon beside him, cut a fresh quid of tobacco, began to chew energetically, and put his feet, cased in miry high boots, into which his trousers were tucked, on the top of the stove. He said he had horses which would both "lope" and trot, that some ladies preferred the Mexican saddle, that I could ride alone in perfect safety; and after a route had been devised, I hired a horse for two ...
— A Lady's Life in the Rocky Mountains • Isabella L. Bird
... sky, his enemy. But all this does not affect the first great lines of the quarrel, which had begun before horsemen in Germanic uniform had waited vainly upon the road to Varennes or had failed upon the miry slope up to the windmill of Valmy. And that duel, on which depended all that our Europe has since become, had great Russia and gallant Spain and our own glorious island only as subordinates or seconds. That duel, first, last, and for ever, was a duel between the Frenchman and the German; that ...
— The Crimes of England • G.K. Chesterton
... more favoured than the lower order of females in Scotland. Upon a brisk sprightly chamber-maid entering my room one day at an inn in Glasgow, I heard a sound which resembled the pattering of some web-footed bird, when in the act of climbing up the miry side of a pond. I looked down upon the feet of this bonny lassie, and found that their only covering was procured from the mud of the high street—adieu! to the tender eulogies of the pastoral reed! I have never thought of ...
— The Stranger in France • John Carr
... consequently incapable of looking beyond immediate results. The sad truth was, however, that they had done something more than discipline the lad. They had fairly worried his native virtues of frankness and fair-dealing out of his heart; they had beaten him back, inch by inch, into the miry refuge of sheer duplicity. Zack was deceiving ...
— Hide and Seek • Wilkie Collins
... in order that he might have more respect for her—for there will always be found in the midst of the most intimate confidences restrictions, false shame, delicacy, and pity. You divine either in the other or in yourself precipices or miry paths which prevent you from penetrating any farther; moreover, you feel that you will not be understood. It is hard to express accurately the thing you mean, whatever it may be; and this is the reason ...
— Sentimental Education, Volume II - The History of a Young Man • Gustave Flaubert
... in my dream, that just as they had ended this talk, they drew nigh to a very miry slough that was in the midst of the plain: and they, being heedless, did both fall suddenly into the bog. The name of the slough was Despond. Here, therefore, they wallowed for a time, being grievously bedaubed with dirt; and Christian, because of the burden that was ...
— Bible Stories and Religious Classics • Philip P. Wells
... Indian buffalo that is found in Italy—where it has been introduced, and is used for draught; its great strength giving it the advantage over horses, especially on the deep miry roads that exist in some parts ...
— Quadrupeds, What They Are and Where Found - A Book of Zoology for Boys • Mayne Reid
... Robert the Devil, or Devilish Bob, as those who had the care of him called the bay horse, played no antics on the outward journey, which was safely accomplished. So leaving him at the venerable "Swan," I hurried through the miry streets toward the church. They were thronged with pale-faced men and women who had sweated out their vigor in the glare of red furnace, dye-shop, and humming mill, but there was no lack of enthusiasm. I do not think there ...
— Lorimer of the Northwest • Harold Bindloss
... a man who does this, his memory is not like a land where he loves to linger upon the sunlit ridges of happy recollection, but a land where in reflection he threads in backward thought the dark vale, the miry road, the craggy rift up which he painfully climbed; the optimism that hurries with averted glance past the shadow is as false as the pessimism that hurries timidly across the bright and flowery meadow. The more we realise the immutability of our lot, the more grateful we become ...
— The Silent Isle • Arthur Christopher Benson
... station in the very foremost rank of English poets. And if the evil star which seems generally to have presided over the literary fortunes of John Marston should misguide the student, on first opening a volume of his works, into some such arid or miry tract of wilderness as too frequently deforms the face of his uneven and irregular demesne, the inevitable sense of disappointment and repulsion which must immediately ensue will too probably discourage a casual explorer from any renewal ...
— The Age of Shakespeare • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... no ease in, thicke woods being on eyther side the lane; the lane likewise being full of deep holes, sometimes I skipt vp to the waste; but it is an old Prouerb, that it is a little comfort to the miserable to haue companions, and amidst this miry way I had some mirth by an vnlookt ...
— Kemps Nine Daies Wonder - Performed in a Daunce from London to Norwich • William Kemp
... the afternoon he came to a hamlet, by the roadside, where he found himself so exhausted by the unaccustomed toil of walking, and by exposure to the rain and the miry roads, that he felt it necessary to remain until the next morning. The aspect he presented was shabby and dilapidated in the extreme; for he was in his working dress, which by the wear and tear of travel had become greatly soiled and tattered. ...
— Benjamin Franklin, A Picture of the Struggles of Our Infant Nation One Hundred Years Ago - American Pioneers and Patriots Series • John S. C. Abbott
... a frame of steel. Passing on from tribe to tribe, he strode through darkling woods, through tangled thickets, through miry sloughs, through swarms of mosquitoes; and anon, plying his swift canoe, he sped through primeval forests, by flowers of the tulip tree, through roaring rapids, round beetling bluffs, past groups of mottled rattlesnakes that lay basking in the sun. ...
— History of the Moravian Church • J. E. Hutton
... re-crossed with great difficulty by a cow-path."* (* "Jackson himself," writes Dr. McGuire, "accompanied by three or four members of his staff, of whom I was one, followed the cavalry across the Swamp. The ford was miry and deep, and impracticable for either ...
— Stonewall Jackson And The American Civil War • G. F. R. Henderson
... One evening this swain, after securing at the post-office his treasured mail budget, was escorting his lady-love home through the muddy, ill-lighted streets of little Christchurch. A light of some sort was needed at an especially miry crossing. The devoted squire did not spread out his cloak, as did Sir Walter Raleigh. He had no cloak to spread. But he deftly made a torch of his unread English letters, and, bending down, lighted the way across the mud. ...
— The Long White Cloud • William Pember Reeves
... a different track, beneath. Into a lake, the Stygian nam'd, expands The dismal stream, when it hath reach'd the foot Of the grey wither'd cliffs. Intent I stood To gaze, and in the marish sunk descried A miry tribe, all naked, and with looks Betok'ning rage. They with their hands alone Struck not, but with the head, the breast, the feet, Cutting each other piecemeal with their fangs. The good instructor spake; "Now seest ...
— The Divine Comedy • Dante
... the Bible. There was one picture of a shepherd very like that, Rosalie; it came back to my mind the other day, when that old man gave it to you, only in mine the shepherd was just drawing the lamb out of a deep miry pit, into which it had fallen, and the text underneath it was this: "The Son of Man is come to seek and to save that which is lost." We used to learn these texts, and repeat them to our nurse when we looked at the pictures; and then, if we had said ...
— A Peep Behind the Scenes • Mrs. O. F. Walton
... an unusually severe winter in Louisiana, in a season of almost daily rainfalls, when the Kentucky and part of the Tennessee troops reached their destination. They went into camp without tents or blankets or bedding of straw even, on the open and miry alluvial ground, with the temperature at times at freezing point. This destitution and consequent suffering at once enlisted the attention and sympathies of the public. The Legislature of Louisiana, in session, ...
— The Battle of New Orleans • Zachary F. Smith
... Chase, the road grew worse. No one in these days, who has not seen the byroads of fifty years ago, can imagine what they were. We had to quarter, as Randal called it, nearly all the way along the deep- rutted, miry lanes; and the tremendous jolts I occasionally met with made my seat in the gig so unsteady that I could not look about me at all, I was so much occupied in holding on. The road was too muddy for me to walk without dirtying myself more than I ...
— My Lady Ludlow • Elizabeth Gaskell
... blaws loud wi' angry sugh[1]; The shortening winter day is near a close; The miry beasts retreating frae the pleugh; The blackening trains o' craws to their repose The toil-worn Cotter frae his labor goes; This night his weekly moil is at an end; Collects his spades, his mattocks, and his hoes, Hoping the morn in ease and rest to spend, And weary, o'er ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 7 • Various
... clothes formed almost the sum total of his worldly wealth, that as he was accompanying the queen in one of her daily walks,—during which she was fond of giving audience, because she imagined that the open air produced a favorable effect on her complexion,—she arrived at a miry spot, and stood in perplexity how to pass. With an adroit presence of mind, the courtier pulled off his rich plush cloak and threw it on the ground to serve her for a footcloth. She accepted with pleasure an attention which flattered ...
— Memoirs of the Court of Queen Elizabeth • Lucy Aikin
... spite of miry ways And weather dark and dreary, Trudged every day to Edward's house, And made them all ...
— Poems of Coleridge • Coleridge, ed Arthur Symons
... men with thighs, thighs of men with knees, knees of men with calves, calves of men with feet, feet of men with toes, toes of men with nails,[2] so that [3]heads of men over shields[3] would be as numerous [4]with me[4] as bits of ice [5]on the miry stamping-ground[5] [6]between two dry fields[6] that a king's horses would course on. Every limb of the Ulstermen [7]would I send flying through the air[7] before and behind me this day [8]like ...
— The Ancient Irish Epic Tale Tain Bo Cualnge • Unknown
... shriek, and saw no ghastly figure, sitting or standing; saw nothing but a heap of torn and miry clothes upon ...
— The Mystery of Edwin Drood • Charles Dickens
... When we look towards winter from the last borders of autumn, it seems as if we could not encounter it, and as if it never would go over. So does threatened trouble of any kind seem to us as we look forward upon its miry ways from the last borders of the pleasant greensward on which we have hitherto been walking. But not only do both run their course, but each has its own alleviations, its own pleasures; and very marvellously does the healthy mind fit itself to the new ...
— Annals of a Quiet Neighbourhood • George MacDonald
... be imagined that Carl worked feverishly when it came time to get Dock Phillips out. He was deeper than either of the others had been, and it required some very rough usage before finally they loosened him from his miry bed. ...
— The Boy Scouts of Lenox - Or The Hike Over Big Bear Mountain • Frank V. Webster
... outpost of civilisation in a region of barbarians. Though the buildings covered but a small part of the space over which they now extend; though the arrival of a brig in the port was a rare event; though the Exchange was the middle of a miry street, in which stood a market cross much resembling a broken milestone; though the sittings of the municipal council were held in a filthy den with a roughcast wall; though the best houses were such as would now be called hovels; though the best roofs were of thatch; though the best ceilings ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 3 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... hoped for a longer interview. "Stop as you come back, won't you?" she asked. "I'm goin' to pick you some of the handsomest poppies I ever raised. I got the seed from my sister-in-law's cousin, she that was 'Miry Gregg, and they do beat everything. They wilt so that it ain't no use to pick 'em now, unless you was calc'latin' to come home by the other road. There's nobody sick about here, is there?" to which the ...
— A Country Doctor and Selected Stories and Sketches • Sarah Orne Jewett
... west, and Embarras and Raccoon through it. An equal proportion of timber and prairie, some excellent, other parts inferior,—and some bad, miry swamps, called "purgatories." ...
— A New Guide for Emigrants to the West • J. M. Peck
... new trail led to the right we held a council of war to determine whether to keep to the old trail, and so save several days' travel, or to turn to the right and avoid the difficult crossing. The new trail was reported to be exceedingly miry, and that determined the matter—we concluded to ...
— The Trail of the Goldseekers - A Record of Travel in Prose and Verse • Hamlin Garland
... waited patiently for the Lord; and He inclined unto me, and heard my calling. He brought me also out of the horrible pit, out of the miry clay, and set my feet upon the rock. And He hath put a new song into my mouth, even a thanksgiving unto our God.—Ps. ...
— Out of the Deep - Words for the Sorrowful • Charles Kingsley
... they are subject). Man, for the sake of his wife (and others), commits numerous evil acts, but suffers singly diverse kinds of misery both in this and the next world. All men, attached to children and wives and kinsmen and relatives, sink in the miry sea of grief like wild elephants, when destitute of strength, sinking in a miry slough. Indeed, O lord, upon loss of wealth or son or kinsmen or relatives, man suffers great distress, which resembles as ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 3 - Books 8, 9, 10, 11 and 12 • Unknown
... lie where it fell, and to die where it lay? We talk about 'silly sheep.' Are there any of them so foolish as men and women listening to me now, who will not answer the Shepherd's voice when they hear it, with, 'Lord, here am I, come and help me out of this miry clay, and bring me back.' He is saying to each of you, 'Turn ye, turn ye, why will ye die?' May He not have to say at last of any of us, 'Ye would not come to Me, that ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Matthew Chaps. IX to XXVIII • Alexander Maclaren
... abstains from fleshly lusts, and not because he fears loss or disgrace, which is the motive of other men. He too has been a captive, and the willing agent of his own captivity. But philosophy has spoken to him, and he has heard her voice; she has gently entreated him, and brought him out of the 'miry clay,' and purged away the mists of passion and the illusions of sense which envelope him; his soul has escaped from the influence of pleasures and pains, which are like nails fastening her to the body. To that prison-house she will not return; and therefore she abstains from bodily pleasures—not ...
— Phaedo - The Last Hours Of Socrates • Plato
... hamlet a few miles from the town—so lonely that what are called lonely villages were teeming by comparison—there lived a man of curious repute as a forecaster or weather-prophet. The way to his house was crooked and miry—even difficult in the present unpropitious season. One evening when it was raining so heavily that ivy and laurel resounded like distant musketry, and an out-door man could be excused for shrouding himself to his ears and eyes, such a shrouded ...
— The Mayor of Casterbridge • Thomas Hardy
... heavy, miry ground and a matted, marsh vegetation greatly delayed our progress; but by little and little the hill began to steepen and become stony under foot, and the wood to change its character and to grow in a more open order. It was, indeed, a most pleasant ...
— Treasure Island • Robert Louis Stevenson
... night in the forest, and reach an Indian settlement about three o'clock the next evening, after walking one-third of the way through wet and miry ground. ...
— Wanderings In South America • Charles Waterton
... they wad let me win to, for I was amaist famished wi' vexation. Aweel, they had me up in the grey o' the morning, and I behoved to whig awa wi' them, reason or nane, to a great gathering o' their folk at the Miry-sikes; and there this chield, Gabriel Kettledrummle, was blasting awa to them on the hill-side, about lifting up their testimony, nae doubt, and ganging down to the battle of Roman Gilead, or some sic ...
— Old Mortality, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... out the way, and Harold trudged off to accomplish, as best he might, five Irish miles over miry highways and byways through the ...
— Stories by English Authors: Ireland • Various
... reappearing, oozing between the pavements, splashing carriage panels, horses' breasts, the clothing of the passers-by, soiling windows, thresholds, shop-fronts, until one would think that all Paris was about to plunge in and disappear beneath that depressing expanse of miry earth in which all things are jumbled together and lose their identity. And it is a pitiable thing to see how that filth invades the spotless precincts of new houses, the copings of the quays, the colonnades of stone balconies. There is some ...
— The Nabob, Vol. 2 (of 2) • Alphonse Daudet
... the inn seemed incapable of showing sympathy, I went out to look at the town under a borrowed umbrella. It was certainly not much to look at, especially under circumstances of such acute depression. I walked or waded through a number of miry little streets where all manner of refuse was in a saturated or deliquescent state—cabbage-stumps and dead rats floating in the gutters, potato-peelings and bean-pods sticking to the mediaeval pitching—everything ...
— Wanderings by southern waters, eastern Aquitaine • Edward Harrison Barker
... was uttered as they followed their guide. Mrs Franklin lifted up her heart in silent praise for their preservation, and in prayer for present direction. Backward and forward swayed the lantern, just revealing snatches of hedge and miry path. At last the deep barking of a dog told that they were not far off from a dwelling: the next minute Mr Tankardew exclaimed, "Here we are;" and the light showed them that they were come to a little gate in a ...
— Nearly Lost but Dearly Won • Theodore P. Wilson
... that radiant plain? I stumble now in miry ways; Dark clouds drift landward, big with rain, And lonely moors their summits raise. On, on with hurrying feet I range, And left and right in the dumb hillside Grey gorges open, drear and strange, And so I come ...
— A Cluster of Grapes - A Book of Twentieth Century Poetry • Various
... long before the Countess succeeded in bringing the two men together. The way had indeed been paved. If Lassalle's idealism had survived the experience of the Hatzfeldt law-suits, if he had yet to learn that the Fighter cannot pick his steps as cleanly and logically as the Thinker, those miry law-suits, waged unscrupulously on both sides, had prepared him to learn the lesson readily and to apply it unflinchingly. Without Force behind one, victory must be sought more circuitously. But to a man who represents ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... driving his cart along a deep miry lane, the wheels stuck so fast in the clay, that the horses could not draw them out. Upon this he fell a-bawling and praying to Hercules ...
— Favourite Fables in Prose and Verse • Various
... which they can be surmounted. Suppose a traveller just entering a dreary wilderness. The path which leads through it is exceedingly narrow and difficult to be kept. On each side, it is beset with thorns, and briers, and miry pits. Would he not rejoice to find a book containing the experience of former travellers who had passed that way; in which every difficult spot is marked; all their contests with wild beasts and serpents, and all their falls described; and a beacon, ...
— A Practical Directory for Young Christian Females - Being a Series of Letters from a Brother to a Younger Sister • Harvey Newcomb
... such a hopefulness of belief in human nature that he shrinks from no man, however clothed and cloaked in evil, however miry with stumblings and fallings. I am a man, he might say with the noblest utterance of antiquity, and I deem nothing alien that is human. His investigations of evil are profoundly consistent with an indomitable optimism. Any one can say ...
— An Introduction to the Study of Browning • Arthur Symons
... other children make their way up the hill!" said Learning, who stood watching Lubin and Nelly. "Why, the boy has twice sat down to rest on his bundle; and now, surely my spectacles must be at fault, can he be rolling his carpet up the hill, instead of carrying it on his shoulder! In a fine miry state it will be by the time that he ...
— The Crown of Success • Charlotte Maria Tucker
... take part with their comrades, on whom we laid such load that they took to their heels, some being knocked down, and many having their pates pitifully broken, while others had to run through a miry ditch to escape us. The master of their admiral had occasioned this tumult, as he had gone from ship to ship, desiring the men to go armed on shore and kill all the English they could meet: and when some of our ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. VIII. • Robert Kerr
... upper window by means of a Fire Ladder, and carried off to the Holborn Union; when the last clerk shall have engrossed the last parchment behind the last splash on the last of the mud-stained windows, which, all through the miry year, are pilloried out of recognition in Gray's Inn-lane. Then, shall a squalid little trench, with rank grass and a pump in it, lying between the coffee-house and South- square, be wholly given up to cats and rats, and not, as now, have its empire divided ...
— The Uncommercial Traveller • Charles Dickens
... shanties and along the miry, uneven ways, men stand in groups, their conversation all of the luck of "the toffs." But around the Office of the Gold League the crowd is greatest, and the cheers of the members are echoed ...
— The Tale of Timber Town • Alfred Grace
... an old broken gate, half open; it was the entrance to a narrow cartway, now unused, which descended windingly between high thick hedges. Ruts of a foot in depth, baked hard by summer, showed how miry the track must be in the season ...
— In the Year of Jubilee • George Gissing
... Panchalas and the Pandavas boldly approached Drona, who, armed with his bow of great force, resembled a fire having weapons for its flames. Then with their elephants and foot-soldiers and steeds he began to despatch them unto the abode of Yama. And Drona made the earth miry with blood. Scattering his mighty weapons and shooting his shafts thick on every side, Drona soon so covered all the points of the compass, that nothing could be seen except his showers of arrows. And among foot-soldiers and cars and steeds and elephants nothing could be seen ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 2 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... along the clayey bottom of the trench. Some faces were laughing, though their mustaches dripped. Others grimaced at the spongy bread and flabby meat, or at the missiles which attacked their skin from all sides at every defect in their heavy and miry armor-plate. ...
— Under Fire - The Story of a Squad • Henri Barbusse
... the proud giant fell because of the bloody and miry state of the ground it was as though a mountain had fallen so that the country shook as with an earthquake, and terror fell on Pluto in hell. From the violence of the shock he lay as stunned on the level ground. Suddenly the people, seeing him as one ...
— The Notebooks of Leonardo Da Vinci, Complete • Leonardo Da Vinci
... true, if that be any little compensation, that Hector and Andromache fare here hardly better than he: while of the momentary presentation of Helen on the dirtier boards of a stage more miry than the tub of Diogenes I would not if I could and I must not though I would say so much as one single proper word. The hysterics of the eponymous hero and the harlotries of the eponymous heroine remove ...
— A Study of Shakespeare • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... call upon him with a dreary insistence—to call him far away, to address him personally, and to have a meaning that he failed to seize. It was thus, at least, in this nodding castle, in a cold, miry woodland, and so far from men and society, that the traffic on the Great North Road spoke to him in the intervals ...
— Lay Morals • Robert Louis Stevenson
... seek, attack, and pursue them in their inaccessible intrenchments. Thirty thousand English or Prussians[53] were sacrificed by their hands on that fatal day; and when it is considered, that this horrible carnage was the work of fifty thousand men[54], dying with fatigue and hunger, and striving in miry ground against an impregnable position and a hundred and thirty thousand fighting men, we cannot but be seized with sorrowful admiration, and decree to the ...
— Memoirs of the Private Life, Return, and Reign of Napoleon in 1815, Vol. II • Pierre Antoine Edouard Fleury de Chaboulon
... dinner to-day. Among other discourses one Mr. Oudant, secretary to the late Princesse of Orange, did discourse of the convenience as to keeping the highways from being deep, by their horses, in Holland (and Flanders where the ground is as miry as ours is), going in their carts and, waggons as ours in coaches, wishing the same here as an expedient to make the ways better, and I think there is something in it, where there is breadth enough. Thence to my office, sent for to meet Mr. Leigh again; from Sir ...
— Diary of Samuel Pepys, Complete • Samuel Pepys |
