"Slough" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... take The old women and their shadows! (thus the King Roared) make yourself a man to fight with men. Go: Cyril told us all.' As boys that slink From ferule and the trespass-chiding eye, Away we stole, and transient in a trice From what was left of faded woman-slough To sheathing splendours and the golden scale Of harness, issued in the sun, that now Leapt from the dewy shoulders of the Earth, And hit the Northern hills. Here Cyril met us. A little shy at first, but by and by We twain, with mutual pardon asked and given For stroke and song, resoldered ...
— The Princess • Alfred Lord Tennyson
... eke the vale: The nightingale with feathers new she sings; The turtle to her make hath told her tale. Summer is come, for every spray now springs: The hart hath hung his old head on the pale; The buck in brake his winter coat he flings; The fishes flete with new repaired scale. The adder all her slough away she slings; The swift swallow pursueth the flies smale; The busy bee her honey now she mings; Winter is worn that was ...
— Book of English Verse • Bulchevy
... to a bad piece of road where a Slough of thick mud forced the wagon-way over the stumps of a turnout in the woods. "You had better let me have the reins, Clementina," he said. He drove home over the yellow leaves of the hickories and the crimson leaves of the maples, that heavy with the ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... sink to the depths in which John B. Gough found himself at the age of twenty-five years. By sheer force of will he raised himself from the slough in which he wallowed, till he attained a position honored among men, and performed a service ...
— Stories of Achievement, Volume III (of 6) - Orators and Reformers • Various
... Smooth-it-away, "is the famous Slough of Despond—a disgrace to all the neighborhood; and the greater that it might so easily be converted into ...
— Mosses from an Old Manse and Other Stories • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... this Slough of Despond, he was called to Washington by his patent lawyer. Not having enough money to pay the cost of such a journey, he borrowed the price of a return ticket from Sanders and arranged to stay with a friend in Washington, to save ...
— The History of the Telephone • Herbert N. Casson
... must be given up. She forgot to think about where the water came from, in the more pressing question, "What will Aunt Fortune say?" and the quick wish came that she had her mother to go to. However, she got out of the slough, and wiping her shoes as well as she could on the grass, she hastened back to ...
— The Wide, Wide World • Elizabeth Wetherell
... upon which the ravages of the Normans are clearly indicated in Domesday Book,[5] to a position on the north of London, thus gradually severing its communications with the rest of England, so that neither men nor convoys of provisions could enter its walls. Placing camps at Slough, Edmonton, and Tottenham, William himself remained some distance to the rear of these last with the main body of the army, and it seems probable that the actual surrender of London took place at or near Little Berkhampstead, ...
— Memorials of Old London - Volume I • Various
... river then taking the name of Yazoo; so that the works erected across the neck were said to be between the Tallahatchie and Yazoo, though the stream is one. The fort, which was called Pemberton, was built of cotton and earth; in front of it was a deep slough, and on its right flank the river was barricaded by a raft and the hull of the ocean steamer Star of the West, which, after drawing the first shots fired in the war, when the batteries in Charleston stopped her from reinforcing ...
— The Gulf and Inland Waters - The Navy in the Civil War. Volume 3. • A. T. Mahan
... from meeting the friends who had so confidently expected her to win it, and her own thoughts were too painful to be left alone with. If Hinpoha had been wandering in the Desert of Waiting for the past few months, Migwan was sunk deep in the Slough of Despond. She was at the age when death seemed preferable to defeat, and she wished miserably that she would fall ill of some mortal disease, and never have to face the world again with failure written on her forehead. "Oh, why," ...
— The Camp Fire Girls at School • Hildegard G. Frey
... enough to protect themselves, feeding in the mean time upon fish and flesh of every description. In the water they move with agility, but on land their long bodies and short legs prevent rapid motion. They migrate during droughts from one slough or bayou to another, crossing the intervening upland. When discovered on these journeys by man, the alligator feigns death, or at least appears to be in an unconscious state; but if an antagonist approach within reach of that terrible tail, a blow, a sweep, and a snapping together of the jaws ...
— Four Months in a Sneak-Box • Nathaniel H. Bishop
... especially when they are old and picturesque, and smell of the Middle Ages; but to be kept a prisoner in one of them by rainy weather is apt to plunge a restless wanderer into the Slough of Despond. The chances are that the inn itself becomes at such times a slough, so that Bunyan's expression is then applicable in a real as well as in a figurative sense. There is a constant coming in and going out of peasants with dripping sabots, ...
— Wanderings by southern waters, eastern Aquitaine • Edward Harrison Barker
... their composure; in order to appreciate the humour of the sally it was necessary to know that Miss Vincent had "come a cropper" at the last meet of the Long Island Hunt Club, and been extricated from a slough several ...
— The Metropolis • Upton Sinclair
... as complete a labyrinth as ever historian was perplexed withal; therefore, I advise them to take fast hold of my skirts, and keep close at my heels, venturing neither to the right hand nor to the left, lest they get bemired in a slough of unintelligible learning, or have their brains knocked out by some of those hard Greek names which will be flying about in all directions. But should any of them be too indolent or chicken-hearted to accompany me in this perilous undertaking, ...
— Knickerbocker's History of New York, Complete • Washington Irving
... historical romance are happily ended. Such milk and water diet is food not fit for men. The new dramatist must provide us with strong meat, properly served by players of intelligence and insight, if dramatic art is to be rescued from the slough into which it has so miserably sunk. The question is: Can America produce a writer of sufficient originality, a manager of sufficient courage, an actor of sufficient understanding to give the public what ...
— The Onlooker, Volume 1, Part 2 • Various
... poor fellow with many a hopeful message from the gospel of mercy and soon drew him out of the Slough of Despond; but he drew him out with so eager an arm that up went this impressionable personage from despond to the fifth heaven. He was penitent, forgiven, justified, sanctified, all in three weeks. Moreover, he now fell into a certain foul habit. Of course Scripture formed a portion of his daily ...
— It Is Never Too Late to Mend • Charles Reade
... long festoons of grape-vines,—where the air is sweet with woodland odors, and vocal with the song of birds. Then the deep cypress-swamp, where dark trunks rise like the columns of some vast sepulchre. Above, the impervious canopy of leaves; beneath, a black and root-encumbered slough. Perpetual moisture trickles down the clammy bark, while trunk and limb, distorted with strange shapes of vegetable disease, wear in the gloom a semblance grotesque and startling. Lifeless forms lean propped in wild disorder ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, August, 1863, No. 70 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various
... with the cozeners: for so soon as I came beyond Eton, they threw me off, from behind one of them, in a slough of mire; and set spurs and away, like three German ...
— The Merry Wives of Windsor - The Works of William Shakespeare [Cambridge Edition] [9 vols.] • William Shakespeare
... pause to think that it was to be her daily task to tend him and help to make him stronger in order that he might go away without delay. She only knew that every moment of the next few weeks was going to be full of a greater happiness than she had ever tasted. As we get deeper into the slough of life most of us learn to be thankful that the future is hidden—some of us recognise the wisdom and the mercy which decree that even the present ...
— With Edged Tools • Henry Seton Merriman
... the horrid face of a withered old woman with fleshless fingers, ah, then! and we say it in the interests of young and pretty women, that woman is lost. She is at the mercy of the first man of her acquaintance who sees her in that Parisian slough. There is more than one street in Paris where such a meeting may lead to a frightful drama, a bloody drama of death and love, a drama ...
— The Thirteen • Honore de Balzac
... as we rode down into the great basin. Before us, the horse and boot tracks showed plain in the soft slough where melted snow ...
— The Virginian - A Horseman Of The Plains • Owen Wister
... shooting away down the river to the dredging work—Carlson insists I must advise him—and then up in to Sacramento, running over the Teal Slough land on the way, to ...
— The Little Lady of the Big House • Jack London
... my story. When we fell to playing, after breakfast, on the second day away from the caves, Lop-Ear led me a chase through the trees and down to the river. We came out upon it where a large slough entered from the blueberry swamp. The mouth of this slough was wide, while the slough itself was practically without a current. In the dead water, just inside its mouth, lay a tangled mass of tree trunks. Some of these, what ...
— Before Adam • Jack London
... to Bunyan to question why the Lord of the way had ever allowed this unhallowed crew to gather in the valley at all. If he could restrain them, and if Mr. Greatheart could hew the giants in pieces, why could not the whole nest of hornets have been smoked out once and for all? Even the Slough of Despond could not be mended with all the cartloads of promises and texts that were shot there. And yet for all that, when one came to reflect upon it, this Calvinistic scheme of election and reprobation did seem to correspond in a terrible manner with the ...
— Beside Still Waters • Arthur Christopher Benson
... these are successfully forded, though not without some difficulty; but we finally arrive at the parent slough, of which the others are but tributaries. This proves too deep for the sowars' horses to ford, and after surveying the yellow flood some minutes and searching up and down, the khan declares ruefully that we shall ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle Volume II. - From Teheran To Yokohama • Thomas Stevens
... standards, for in a fourteen-hour working day John Cardigan and his men could not cut more than twenty thousand feet of lumber. Nevertheless, when Cardigan looked at his mill, his great heart would swell with pride. Built on tidewater and at the mouth of a large slough in the waters of which he stored the logs his woods-crew cut and peeled for the bull- whackers to haul with ox-teams down a mile-long skid-road, vessels could come to Cardigan's mill dock to load and lie safely in twenty feet of water at low tide. Also ...
— The Valley of the Giants • Peter B. Kyne
... point in this region of the Columbia was named Wappatoo Island by the explorers. This is a large extent of country lying between the Willamette and an arm of the Columbia which they called Wappatoo Inlet, but which is now known as Willamette Slough. It is twenty miles long and from five to ten miles wide. Here is an interesting description of the manner of gathering the roots of the wappatoo, of which we have heard so much in ...
— First Across the Continent • Noah Brooks
... must have its seers and prophets, lest it forget its high calling to press forward, and so sink in the slough of contented ease. The preacher of ideals is the architect of a nation's hopes and desires, and the fulfilment of these hopes and desires will depend on the wisdom of its political builders—the practical politicians. Often enough the structural ...
— The Rise of the Democracy • Joseph Clayton
... is no meaner than a fay, Redeem'd from sleepy death, for beauty's sake, By old ordainment:—silent as she lay, Touched by a moonlight wand I saw her wake, And cut her leafy slough, and so forsake The verdant prison of her lily peers, That slept amidst the stars upon the lake— A breathing shape—restored to human fears, And new-born love and grief—self-conscious ...
— The Poetical Works of Thomas Hood • Thomas Hood
... Chuzzlewit is defective, character and description constituting the chief part of its strength. But what it lost as a story by the American episode it gained in the other direction; young Martin, by happy use of a bitter experience, casting off his slough of selfishness in the poisonous swamp of Eden. Dickens often confessed, however, the difficulty it had been to him to have to deal with this gap in the main course of his narrative; and I will give an instance from a letter he wrote to ...
— The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete • John Forster
... the fluid which exudes from an ulcerating surface and the debris of broken-down tissue is known as pus, and the process by which this is formed is known as suppuration. A mass of dead tissue in a soft part is termed a slough, while the same in bone is called a sequestrum. Such changes are especially liable to occur when the part becomes infected with microorganisms that have the property of destroying tissue and thus causing the production of pus. These are ...
— Special Report on Diseases of the Horse • United States Department of Agriculture
... old person of Slough, Who danced at the end of a bough; But they said, "If you sneeze, you might damage the trees, You imprudent old ...
— Nonsense Books • Edward Lear
... I have led them astray. By jingo, there's not a pond or a slough within five miles of the place but they can tell ...
— She Stoops to Conquer - or, The Mistakes of a Night. A Comedy. • Oliver Goldsmith
... saw one the other morning as he was going from Root River settlement to Slough Creek. He was passing the Norwegian's cabin, near the grove, when suddenly a Sioux galloped by on his pony, giving a loud whoop as he rode out of sight. And Mrs. Pingry had a great scare. Her husband was away after supplies, and she was alone about her work, when the door opened and an Indian ...
— The Cabin on the Prairie • C. H. (Charles Henry) Pearson
... those trees. It's steep down these paths. They sort of zigzag their way, but it's a path any horse can make without danger. It just needs care. Once in the valley it's a stretch of sweet-grass without a bluff or a break of any sort. There's no slough either. It's just grass. One big ...
— The Forfeit • Ridgwell Cullum
... the other day, who, two years ago, was running a small paper at Larrabie's Slough. He was then in his meridian as a journalist, and his paper was frequently quoted by such widely-read publications as the Knight of Labor at Work, a humorous semi-monthly journal. He boldly assailed the silver dollar, and with his trenchant pen he wrote such burning words of denunciation ...
— Remarks • Bill Nye
... extends down the thorax. Through this cross-shaped opening, the Anthrax suddenly appears, all moist with the humors of life's laboratory. She steadies herself upon her trembling legs, dries her wings and takes to flight, leaving at the window of the cell her nymphal slough, which keeps intact for a very long period. The sand-colored fly has five or six weeks before her, wherein to explore the clay nests amid the thyme and to take her small share of the joys of life. In July, we shall see ...
— The Life of the Fly - With Which are Interspersed Some Chapters of Autobiography • J. Henri Fabre
... any thing which regarded my sister's memory, in one hour I received a new heart. Once in Westmoreland I saw a case resembling it. I saw a ewe suddenly put off and abjure her own nature, in a service of love—yes, slough it as completely as ever serpent sloughed his skin. Her lamb had fallen into a deep trench, from which all escape was hopeless without the aid of man. And to a man she advanced, bleating clamorously, ...
— Autobiographic Sketches • Thomas de Quincey
... the situation. De Foe painting mere everyday pots and pans is as dull as a modern blue-book; but when his pots and pans are the resource by which a human being struggles out of the most appalling conceivable 'slough of despond,' they become more poetical than the vessels from which the gods drink nectar in epic poems. Since he wrote, novelists have made many voyages of discovery, with varying success, though they have seldom had the fortune ...
— Hours in a Library, Volume I. (of III.) • Leslie Stephen
... 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 regards its power of burning, a forest conflagration. All this, viz., joy and grief, existence and non-existence, is dependent upon destiny. One having friends as one destitute ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 3 - Books 8, 9, 10, 11 and 12 • Unknown
... already far misled, and of further fanning passion already kindling into flame. Doubtless it served in its day, and in greater or less degree, the end designed by it. Having done that, it has sunk into the general mass of stale and loathed calumnies. It is the very cast-off slough of a polluted and shameless press. Incapable of further mischief, it lies in the sewer, lifeless and despised. It is not now, sir, in the power of the honorable member to give it dignity or decency by attempting ...
— Public Speaking • Irvah Lester Winter
... I should take any other course. Turn from this folly and all will be serene and happy soon. I can obtain a position elsewhere. Surely, Ella, you are too true a Southern girl to have given your heart unsought, unasked to your knowledge till last night. Your very pride should rescue you from such a slough as this." ...
— The Earth Trembled • E.P. Roe
... last device of self-seeking,—were but attempts to find consolation for life's hardships and to secure happiness hereafter. Fortunately such selfish motives are transmuted in the search for larger ethical and spiritual conceptions. An enlarged insight into the possibilities of living tends to slough off selfishness and to make more habitual the occasional, and often involuntary, response to Christlike deeds and ideals. But so ingrained is our earthly nature that, in communities as in nations, periods ...
— The Development of Religious Liberty in Connecticut • M. Louise Greene, Ph. D.
... by the light of the moon, and the ill-boding wings of a screech owl,[36] together with its flesh; and the entrails of an ambiguous wolf, that was wont to change its appearance of a wild beast into {that of} a man. Nor is there wanting there the thin scaly slough of the Cinyphian water-snake,[37] and the liver of the long-lived stag;[38] to which, besides, she adds the bill and head of a crow that had sustained {an existence of} nine ages. When, with these and a thousand ...
— The Metamorphoses of Ovid - Vol. I, Books I-VII • Publius Ovidius Naso
... eighties was in 1887, when it ended in third place, being led by St. Louis and Cincinnati. During all that period William Barnie was the club's manager. In 1892 he was superseded by Manager Hanlon; and from that date to the close of the past season, the club began to get out of its previous "slough of despond," induced by its repeated failures to ...
— Spalding's Baseball Guide and Official League Book for 1895 • Edited by Henry Chadwick
... to wheat, was the first crop which the Partridge brothers put in. The total yield was seven bushels, obtained from around the edges of a slough! ...
— Deep Furrows • Hopkins Moorhouse
... the gloomy background of the river, in those dull and mean surroundings of dank stone and rusted iron. She was like (he thought extravagantly) a whiff of flower-fragrance lost in the miasmatic vapors of a slough. ...
— The Black Bag • Louis Joseph Vance
... the estate could not very well carry it, and a sledge was substituted. Several times, during the journey through the forest, the sledge had to be halted while the underwood was cut away to permit of its passing; and once a slough had to be filled up with branches hewn from fir trees, and bundles of fern. These delays made it evening before the shore of the creek ...
— After London - Wild England • Richard Jefferies
... poor, young or old, ugly or handsome, the girl is right; she has sense and judgment, she has tripped you over into the slough of self-interest and lets you know it," cried Honor. "She deserves an answer, a sincere and loyal and frank answer, and, above all, the honest expression of your thought. Examine yourself! sound your heart and purge it of its meannesses. ...
— Modeste Mignon • Honore de Balzac
... for the rest of our existence, wandering farther and farther from the beauty and freshness and from the kindly gushing springs of clear gladness that made all around us green in our youth! One wanders and gropes in a slough of stock-jobbing, one sinks or rises in a storm of politics, and in either case it is as good to fall as to rise—to mount a bubble on the crest of the wave, as to sink ...
— George Cruikshank • William Makepeace Thackeray
... relent. Before the gate stood Pyrrhus, threat'ning loud, With glitt'ring arms conspicuous in the crowd. So shines, renew'd in youth, the crested snake, Who slept the winter in a thorny brake, And, casting off his slough when spring returns, Now looks aloft, and with new glory burns; Restor'd with poisonous herbs, his ardent sides Reflect the sun; and rais'd on spires he rides; High o'er the grass, hissing he rolls ...
— The Aeneid • Virgil
... horrible. To struggle therein is hideous; at the same time that one is going through the death agony, one is floundering about. There are shadows enough for hell, and mire enough to render it nothing but a slough, and the dying man knows not whether he is on the point of becoming a spectre ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... manhood which was thrust upon the soul (or was it voluntarily assumed?)? This part of deity called individual soul certainly cannot be improved by its human conditions; and the question is not—"How soon can I pass through this slough of despond," but, "why was I thrust into it at all? Was it a mere sacred whim ...
— India's Problem Krishna or Christ • John P. Jones
... over his paper, watching the languid breath that showed how deep the hurt had been, the maimed body, the face outwardly cool, watchful, reticent as before. He fancied the slough of disappointment into which God had crushed the soul of this man: would he struggle out? Would he take Miss Herne as the first step in his stairway, or be content to be flung down in vigorous manhood to the depth of impotent poverty? He could not tell if the quiet on Holmes's face were ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 52, February, 1862 • Various
... from all distractions; his pupils and concerts, his whole connection at Bath, were immediately renounced; he accepted the King's offer with alacrity, and after one or two changes settled permanently at Slough, near Windsor. ...
— The Story of the Heavens • Robert Stawell Ball
... always concerned with the contemplation of his own likeness, he contemplates also the causes which produce that likeness. Is Epicurus right when he asserts that images proceed forth from us, as it were a kind of slough that continually streams from our bodies? These images when they strike anything smooth and solid are reflected by the shock and reversed in such wise as to give back an image turned to face its original. Or should we accept the view maintained by other ...
— The Apologia and Florida of Apuleius of Madaura • Lucius Apuleius
... you call it—of being arrant asses," retorted the doctor, "and not having sense enough to know honest air from poison, and the dry land from a vile, pestiferous slough. I think it most probable—though of course it's only an opinion—that you'll all have the deuce to pay before you get that malaria out of your systems. Camp in a bog, would you? Silver, I'm surprised at you. You're less of a fool than ...
— Treasure Island • Robert Louis Stevenson
... William Herschel, the greatest modern astronomer, died at Slough in England. Herschel was born in 1738 at Hanover. He was a musician of rare skill and a self-taught mathematician of great ability. In 1757, he deserted the band of Hanoverian Guards in which he played the oboe, although a mere boy, and fled ...
— A History of the Nineteenth Century, Year by Year - Volume Two (of Three) • Edwin Emerson
... muddy, and it is muddy now. There is fine, thin, sticky, slimy, splashy, thick, heavy, dirty mud. Thousands of men and thousands of mules and horses are treading it to mortar. It is mixed with slops from the houses and straw from the stables. You are reminded of the Slough of Despond described by Bunyan in the Pilgrim's Progress,—a place for all the filth, sin, and slime of this world. Christian was mired there, and Pliable nearly lost his life. If Bunyan had seen Cairo, he might have made the ...
— My Days and Nights on the Battle-Field • Charles Carleton Coffin
... heart, but a great deal of something sweeter, joy—joy that thrilled and vibrated through every nerve within him. Leaning against the portal, in an absurd delirium of delight—for it takes but a trifle to jerk those lovers from the slimiest depths of the Slough of Despond to the topmost peak of the mountain of ecstasy—he uncovered his head that the night-air might cool its feverish throbbings. But the night-air was as hot as his heart; and, almost suffocated ...
— The Midnight Queen • May Agnes Fleming
... him; and it was even longer before she was sufficiently calm to comprehend me. Never did unhappy parents before experience greater bitterness of soul. I strove to comfort her, but she would not listen to my words; for oh, they were as the blind leading the blind; we both were struggling in the slough of despair—both were in the pit of dark, bewildering misery. We sometimes sat looking at each other, like criminals whose last hour is come; and even when our grief wore itself into a "calm sough," there ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland Volume 17 • Alexander Leighton
... necessity and practicability of social reform, but it must be through individual effort. Years ago he decided that society was in a low state, now he calls on all men to put their shoulders to the wheel and lift it out of the Slough of Despond, where it has been floundering to no purpose for so long. His investigations are aided by a keen shrewdness, that bespeaks the practical man, who knows where to find the vulnerable heel of circumstance, and aims at it his swiftest ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol I, Issue I, January 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... my father was a young man, somewhere up north of Sacramento, in a creek called Cache Slough, the tules was full of grizzliest He used to go in an' shoot 'em. An' when they caught 'em in the open, he an' the Mexicans used to ride up an' rope them—catch them with lariats, you know. He said a horse that wasn't afraid of grizzlies ...
— The Valley of the Moon • Jack London
... in a wretched slough of helplessness, Dorothy found her conviction wavering. Could it really be possible that he was speaking the truth; that he did not know? But with the dreadful thought came also the realization that she must not let him fathom her mind. She told ...
— Hidden Gold • Wilder Anthony
... transformed, so that from being things difficult to bear, she had built up with them her own character. Sorrow had increased her own power of sympathy; out of trials she had learnt patience; and failure and the gradual sinking of one she had loved into the bottomless slough of evil habit had but left her with an added ...
— Daisy's Aunt • E. F. (Edward Frederic) Benson
... with oil extracted from the shrawana and priyangn plants, its wick being made of cloth and the slough of the skins of snakes, is lighted, and long pieces of wood placed near it, those pieces of wood ...
— The Kama Sutra of Vatsyayana - Translated From The Sanscrit In Seven Parts With Preface, - Introduction and Concluding Remarks • Vatsyayana
... Full well the paths I knew. Fame of my fate made various sound, That death in pilgrimage I found, That I had perished of my wound - None cared which tale was true: And living eye could never guess De Wilton in his palmer's dress; For now that sable slough is shed, And trimmed my shaggy beard and head, I scarcely know me in the glass. A chance most wondrous did provide That I should be that baron's guide - I will not name his name! - Vengeance to God alone belongs; But when I think on all my wrongs, My blood is liquid flame! And ne'er the time shall ...
— Marmion: A Tale of Flodden Field • Walter Scott
... built a frame house. During all this time the wild deer were numerous, and often I have counted from the door from five to twenty deer feeding in a slough not a quarter of a ...
— Fifty Years of Public Service • Shelby M. Cullom
... out, we found, to our great astonishment, that it contained a printed pamphlet. We were all curious to see what sort of a pamphlet such a person would read; what it could contain that he seemed to have had such a care about. For the slough in which it was rolled was fine chamois leather; what colour it had been could not be known. But the pamphlet was wrapped so close together, and so damp, rotten, and yellow that it seemed one solid piece. We all concluded from some words that we could make out that it was a religious tract, ...
— The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner • James Hogg
... to Beaconsfield to view a house, and had a fly from Slough, a drive of several miles. The house was in the middle of the town, large and convenient, with good garden and paddock; the whole was offered us for $200 yearly; and we should have taken it, had it not been in such a dismantled ...
— Our Farm of Four Acres and the Money we Made by it • Miss Coulton
... slough, quagmire, hot water, hornet's nest; sea-, peck of troubles: pretty kettle of fish; pickle, stew, imbroglio mess, ado; false position; set fast, stand; dead,-lock,-set; fix, horns of a dilemma, cul de sac; hitch; stumbling block, &c. ...
— Journalism for Women - A Practical Guide • E.A. Bennett
... moon has set." [Footnote: LETTRES D'UN VOYAGEUR] Such scenes she had prayed never to be forced to desert—never desiring to bring her heart and imagination back to this dreary world, too like the gloomy coasts of Finland, where the slime and miry slough can only be escaped by scaling the naked granite of the solitary rocks. Fatigued with the massive statue she had sculptured, the Amazonian Lelia; wearied with the grandeur of an Ideal which it is impossible to mould from the gross materials of this earth; she was ...
— Life of Chopin • Franz Liszt
... sole policy necessary for France to adopt in order to preserve her magnificent dominion in North America. His counsels were neither liked nor followed by the Court of Versailles, then sinking fast into the slough of corruption that marked the closing years of ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby
... alarm of "Liberal Christianity" for those who have passed the age of childhood. Many of his Unitarian brethren will hardly agree with his radical Rationalism. Belonging to the extreme Left Wing, he holds that it is the province of liberal Christians to slough off the absurd doctrines now prevalent,—"not to remould the age,—to recast it, to regenerate it, to cross it or struggle with it, but to penetrate its meaning, enter into its temper, sympathize with its hopes, blend with its endeavors. The life of the time appoints ...
— History of Rationalism Embracing a Survey of the Present State of Protestant Theology • John F. Hurst
... inexperience and mistake than to a want of skill or fidelity in my instructors. And thus for a time I was occupied by exploded systems, mingling, like an unadept, a thousand contradictory theories and floundering desperately in a very slough of multifarious knowledge, guided by an ardent imagination and childish reasoning, till an accident again changed the current of my ideas. When I was about fifteen years old we had retired to our house near Belrive, when we witnessed a most violent and terrible thunderstorm. It advanced ...
— Frankenstein - or The Modern Prometheus • Mary Wollstonecraft (Godwin) Shelley
... happened that, at the very time of this chat between Madame Roussillon and Rene Alice was bandaging Long-Hair's wounded leg with strips of her apron. It was under some willows which overhung the bank of a narrow and shallow lagoon or slough, which in those days extended a mile or two back into the country on the farther side of the river. Alice and Jean went over in a pirogue to see if the water lilies, haunting a pond there, were yet beginning to bloom. They landed at a convenient spot some distance ...
— Alice of Old Vincennes • Maurice Thompson
... the time," said the old man drily; "and it has long been a commonplace that that slough awaits State Socialism in the end, if it gets to the end, which as you know it did not with us. However it went further than this minimum and maximum business, which by the by we can now see was necessary. The government now found it imperative on them to meet the outcry of the master class ...
— News from Nowhere - or An Epoch of Rest, being some chapters from A Utopian Romance • William Morris
... let him go. The colloquy had not only done me no service, but had positively emboldened him—or so I seemed to perceive as the weeks went on—in his efforts to cast off his old slough and become a travesty of me, as he had been a travesty of my uncle. I am willing to believe that they caused him pain. A crust of habit so inveterate as his cannot be rent without throes, to the severity of which his facial contortions bore witness whenever ...
— Two Sides of the Face - Midwinter Tales • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... and south, the early American road was a veritable Slough of Despond. Watery pits were to be encountered wherein horses were drowned and loads sank from sight. Frequently traffic was stopped for hours by wagons which had broken down and blocked the way. Thirteen ...
— The Paths of Inland Commerce - A Chronicle of Trail, Road, and Waterway, Volume 21 in The - Chronicles of America Series • Archer B. Hulbert
... read, it was objected to by the audience. Mr. —— objected to the word slough, as an ill sounding, disagreeable word, and which conveyed at first to the eye the idea of a wet boggy place; such as the slough of Despond. At last S——, who had been pondering over the affair in silence, exclaimed, "But I think there's ...
— Practical Education, Volume II • Maria Edgeworth
... when he saw it. From that morning a feeling of self-respect dawned upon me, I was not so altogether ignorant as I had thought myself, I had some available knowledge; and with that feeling came the determination to raise myself out of that slough of despond into which I ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 76, February, 1864 • Various
... in my dream that just as they had come to an end of this talk, they drew near to a slough that was in the midst of the plain, and as they took no heed, they both fell in. The name of the slough was Despond. Here they lay for a time in the mud; and the load that Christian had on his back made him sink all the more ...
— The Pilgrim's Progress in Words of One Syllable • Mary Godolphin
... represses every effort on the part of seafaring men to cultivate a self-respect, and elevate themselves in the scale of society; a line of conduct which is calculated to thrust them contemptuously back, and plunge them deeper in the slough from which, perhaps, they are ...
— Jack in the Forecastle • John Sherburne Sleeper
... be that long before we have any good news," said Betty, trying to speak lightly. This would never do, she thought. They simply had to find some way out of this terrible slough of despondency before ...
— The Outdoor Girls at Bluff Point - Or a Wreck and a Rescue • Laura Lee Hope
... the presence of this woman, who slept tranquilly beyond these panels of oak. He felt a glow on his cheeks, a quickening of his pulse. To what lengths would he not go for her sake? Sure of winning her love, yes, he would become great, rise purified from the slough of loose living. He had never killed a man dishonorably; he had won his duels by strength and dexterity alone. He had never taken an advantage of a weakling; for many a man had insulted him and still walked the earth, suffering ...
— The Grey Cloak • Harold MacGrath
... should do it. I wrestled with my own resolution: I wanted to be weak that I might avoid the awful passage of further suffering I saw laid out for me; and Conscience, turned tyrant, held Passion by the throat, told her tauntingly, she had yet but dipped her dainty foot in the slough, and swore that with that arm of iron he would thrust her down to unsounded ...
— Jane Eyre - an Autobiography • Charlotte Bronte
... prating of holy writ; For that except that the preacher himself live well, His predication will help never a dell, And I know well that thy living is nought: Thou art an apostate, if it were well sought. An homicide thou art, I know well enough, For myself knew where that thou slough A wench with thy dagger in a couch: And yet, as thou say'st in thy sermon, that ...
— A Select Collection of Old English Plays, Volume I. • R. Dodsley
... Fed upon serpents; and the sucking fish Which holds the vessel back (38) though eastern winds Make bend the canvas; dragon's eyes; and stones That sound beneath the brooding eagle's wings. Nor Araby's viper, nor the ocean snake Who in the Red Sea waters guards the shell, Are wanting; nor the slough on Libyan sands By horned reptile cast; nor ashes fail Snatched from an altar where the Phoenix died. And viler poisons many, which herself Has made, she adds, whereto no name is given: Pestiferous leaves pregnant with magic chants ...
— Pharsalia; Dramatic Episodes of the Civil Wars • Lucan
... a long, low line of green, indicating a ditch, or slough, edged with saw-palmettoes and bay bushes, that began at some indefinite northwestward point and diagonally crossed the prairie until it passed around our Oasis scarcely more than a hundred feet away. Heretofore, completely hidden by the tall grass, I had ...
— Wings of the Wind • Credo Harris
... and clamor of forest warfare, had never for an instant abated. Looking down upon the open space of the gully's bottom, we could see more than two-score corpses piled upon the logs of the road, or upon little mounds of black soil which showed above the level of the slough, half-hidden by the willows and tall, rank tufts of swamp-grass. Save for the dead, this natural clearing was well-nigh deserted. Captain Jacob Seeber was in sight, upon a hillock below us to the north, with a score of his Canajoharie company in a circle, firing outward ...
— In the Valley • Harold Frederic
... no impure love. I repeat: There is no impure love. The impurity is in the mortal mind of man, obstructing his vision until he fails to see the purity of that which fain would lift him from the Slough of Despond to ...
— Sex=The Unknown Quantity - The Spiritual Function of Sex • Ali Nomad
... traveled east Clay began to slough the outward marks of his calling. He gave his spurs to Johnnie before he left the ranch. At Tucson he shed his chaps and left them in care of a friend at the Longhorn Corral. The six-gun with which he had shot rattlesnakes ...
— The Big-Town Round-Up • William MacLeod Raine
... fairs on the Way, he may have had other scenes in his mind which suggested other names. The Delectable Mountains may have been the blue line of the Sussex Downs, or the hills by Black Down and Hindhead. The Slough of Despond may have been the marshy pools of Shalford Common, or the ponds under the hill by Chilworth; and Doubting Castle, spelt Dowding Castle, is actually a name to be found on the Surrey map, south of Epsom Downs on Banstead Heath. But ...
— Highways and Byways in Surrey • Eric Parker
... without having in my thoughts any occurrence of special good fortune, I have enjoyed a perfect exhilaration. I am glad to the brink of fear. In the woods, too, a man casts off his years as the snake his slough, and at what period soever of life is always a child. Within these plantations of God a decorum and sanctity reign, a perennial festival is dressed, and the guest sees not how he should tire of them in a thousand years. Standing on the bare ground, my head bathed in the blithe air, and uplifted ...
— The Worlds Greatest Books, Volume XIII. - Religion and Philosophy • Various
... a slough on the place which was full of beaver and beaver dams. How I tried to get one of them, always without success! They were very crafty, very alert, and at the slightest indication of danger dived under water to the doors of their houses, long before one was in gunshot of them. Full many a weary ...
— Out of Doors—California and Oregon • J. A. Graves
... the great numerical majority of the inhabitants bear this character, he spoke truly, inasmuch as the great numerical majority of the inhabitants are negroes, among the most depraved in the island. Kingston is like the slough of Despond, a place whither all the scum and filth of the negro population in the east end of the island do continually run, and make it a very sink of wickedness. But are the white families and the large number of thoroughly respectable colored families to be confounded ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No 3, September 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... aren't many quicksands, or the like, hereabout. Never heard tell of 'em, if there are. Old Tobe lost a cow once in some slough." ...
— Nan Sherwood at Pine Camp - or, The Old Lumberman's Secret • Annie Roe Carr
... juncture my attention was directed to several hatchet-marks on the deck, and I instantly inquired the meaning. The answer was, 'The snake, sir! the snake is loose!' And so it proved. The reptile had cast his slough, and assumed with renewed beauty all its natural energy. It had forced itself out of the cage, and after doing some damage below, found its way to the deck, spreading consternation among the men; by whom, as it appeared, it had been slightly wounded, hatchets having been ...
— Twilight And Dawn • Caroline Pridham
... along his range "atmosphere." To the Happy Family it seemed a waste of horseflesh to comb a twenty-mile radius of mesa to get a cow and calf which might have been duplicated within a mile of the ranch. The Happy Family knew that Luck was wading chin deep in the slough of despond, and they decided that he kept them riding all day just for ...
— The Phantom Herd • B. M. Bower
... in the matter, and have done my best to gain them news of him. I did not believe in the reformation of one who had shown himself to be of such evil spirit; but God is all-powerful, and might have led him out from the slough ...
— When London Burned • G. A. Henty
... The deep-toned sentence sang in Evan's heart. Rose and her mother were of one stamp. And Rose might speak for her mother. To take the hands of such a pair and be lifted out of the slough, he thought no shame: and all through the hours of the morning the image of two angels stooping to touch a leper, pressed on his brain like a reality, and went divinely through ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... Wilson had cast his slough, and had become the autocratic, freespoken, self-constituted dictator, Christopher North. He was confronted with the very difficult problem of Mr. Tennyson's poems. He knew they were poetry; that ...
— Essays in English Literature, 1780-1860 • George Saintsbury
... sufficient to entirely arrest the circulation in any part, the structures soon die. The disorder manifests itself as lameness in one or more limbs; swelling about the ankle which may result in only a small slough or the loss of a toe, but it may circumscribe the limb at any point below the knee or hock by an indented ring below which the tissues become dead. The indentation soon changes to a crack, which extends completely around the limb, forming the line ...
— Special Report on Diseases of Cattle • U.S. Department of Agriculture
... James!—I may not well gang. I trust I be the same. Ah! my neck has lain wrang Enough Mickle thank, since yester-even Now, by Saint Stephen! I was flayed with a sweven,—[140] My heart out of slough.[141] I thought Gill began to croak, and travail full sad, Well nigh at the first cock,—of a young lad, For to mend our flock: then be I never glad. To have two on my rock,—more than ever I had. Ah, my head! A house full ...
— Everyman and Other Old Religious Plays, with an Introduction • Anonymous
... Gazette (California) describes the fall of a meteor in that vicinity, witnessed by Dr. Goodspeed, which fell in a slough and so heated the water as to kill the catfish that inhabited it. It lies in the pond, and looks as if a hundred feet wide. A much more marvellous story has been published of an engraved meteoric stone falling in an ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, October 1887 - Volume 1, Number 9 • Various
... greatest, making the knowledge of the wise due to the ignorant, and the strength of the strong due to the weak. The costs of freedom would have been paid in the patient lifting up of a degraded race from the slough of servitude; and the nation would at the same time have avoided that slough of lava and fire wherein it is ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XI., February, 1863, No. LXIV. • Various
... throw over the refuse of the body, it is thus we arrive at the majesty of man. That sublimity of conception which renders the poet, and the man of great literary and original endowments "in apprehension like a God," we could not have, if we were not privileged occasionally to cast away the slough and exuviae of the body from incumbering and dishonouring us, even as Ulysses passed over his threshold, stripped of the rags that had obscured him, while Minerva enlarged his frame, and gave loftiness to ...
— Thoughts on Man - His Nature, Productions and Discoveries, Interspersed with - Some Particulars Respecting the Author • William Godwin
... deeds, and searcheth, with inscrutable knowledge, into, the hearts of both. This earth is his footstool; yonder heaven his throne! I pretend not to enter into his sacred mysteries, or to proclaim the reason why one-half of his fair work hath been so long left in that slough of ignorance and heathenish abomination in which my fathers found it; why these hills never before echoed the songs of praise or why the valleys have been so long mute. These are truths hid in the secret designs of his sacred purpose, and they may not be known, until ...
— The Wept of Wish-Ton-Wish • James Fenimore Cooper
... of marauders. Nullus perturbet, aut impediat canem trassantem, aut homines trassantes cum ipso, ad sequendum latrones.—Regiam Majestatem, Lib. 4tus, Cap. 32. And, so late as 1616, there was an order from the king's commissioners of the northern counties, that a certain number of slough-hounds should be maintained in every district of Cumberland, bordering upon Scotland. They were of great value, being sometimes sold for a hundred crowns. Exposition of Bleau's Atlas, voce Nithsdale. The breed of this sagacious animal, which could trace the human ...
— Minstrelsy of the Scottish border (3rd ed) (1 of 3) • Walter Scott
... entered the city he found it situated in a slough. It was generally supposed that the ground upon which the city was built was a natural swamp, and when Palmer, among others, advocated the idea of raising the streets they were ridiculed. But subsequent tests proved that beneath the surface ...
— Hidden Treasures - Why Some Succeed While Others Fail • Harry A. Lewis
... we see the man who struggles to conform to a standard of conduct so high, exacting, and minute, that it touches every particular of life, and who yet is beset by a constant sense of failure and disappointment. From this slough of despond he is lifted—how? By the sense of a love which extends to him from the unseen world. It takes form to him as the personal love of one who has lived, has died, and in some inexpressible way still lives. This friendship in the unseen world is the sufficient, the absolute pledge ...
— The Chief End of Man • George S. Merriam
... all I saw was from a curtained auto as we swayed and bumped over broken roads, with an occasional interlude when Jeremy and I got out to lend our shoulders and help the Arab driver heave the car out of a slough. ...
— Affair in Araby • Talbot Mundy
... the most contented and healthy sort. Would such men and women, liberated from our endless, unceasing struggle against mass prejudice and inertia, be deprived in any way of the stimulating zest of life? Would they sink into a slough of complacency ...
— The Pivot of Civilization • Margaret Sanger |
