"Miry" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... of holm-oak, holly and beech for the most part, rises and dips twice before it climbs the final ascent to the crown above Altopascio. A cart-track runs through it, deeply rutted and always miry, on either hand of which glades are revealed of great beauty. Here, if the trees are remote, the grass grows lush and green. Hereabouts are the flowers, tall and plenty—foxgloves and mullein, such as we have at home, and loosestrife ...
— The Fool Errant • Maurice Hewlett
... and rattled away into the darkness, while somewhat to my surprise 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. ...
— Lorimer of the Northwest • Harold Bindloss
... 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 ...
— An Inland Voyage • Robert Louis Stevenson
... and is probably now best known as the savage puma of more southern zones. But a hundred years ago it abounded throughout the Western wilderness, making its deeper dens in the caverns of mountain rocks, its lair in the impenetrable thickets of bramble and brakes of cane, or close to miry swamps and watery everglades; and no other region was so loved by it as the vast game park of the Indians, where reined a semi-tropical splendour and luxuriance of vegetation and where, protected from time immemorial by the Indian hunters themselves, ...
— The Choir Invisible • James Lane Allen
... wi' angry sugh;[1] The short'ning winter-day is near a close; The miry beasts retreating frae the pleugh; The black'ning 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[2] in ease and ...
— The Ontario Readers: The High School Reader, 1886 • Ministry of Education
... State's-prison convict breaking the heads of Ratcliffe and other well-known political leaders with a very feeble hammer, or as "Old Granny" in pauper's rags, hopelessly repairing with the same heads the impossible roads which typified the ill-conditioned and miry ways of his party. But these violations of decency and good sense were universally reproved by the virtuous; and it was remarked with satisfaction that the purest and most highly cultivated newspaper editors on his side, without excepting those of Boston itself; agreed with one voice that ...
— Democracy An American Novel • Henry Adams
... at the soft, miry road. The one wheel seemed to be sinking deeper and deeper into the clay, and the others showed a ...
— The Outdoor Girls in a Motor Car - The Haunted Mansion of Shadow Valley • Laura Lee Hope
... she thinks she's a gret lady nowadays, I s'pose; but I 'member when she was Miry Brown over here 'n Oldtown, and I used to be waitin' on her ...
— Oldtown Fireside Stories • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... in the habit of walking to a farm which was about half a league distant by the road, but the distance could be reduced by half by going over a deep and miry ditch across which a narrow plank was thrown, and I always insisted upon going that way, in spite of the fright of the ladies who always trembled on the narrow bridge, although I never failed to cross the first, and to offer my hand to help them over. One fine day, I crossed first so as to give ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... and heavy with mud and moisture, and the two young men were pained to perceive that, in spite of her efforts and their watchful care, she stumbled frequently with exhaustion, and leaned heavily on their arms as she labored through the miry soil. ...
— Fort Lafayette or, Love and Secession • Benjamin Wood
... uncle's opinion, 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
... resolved to fly from Maria's companionship. The Dennetts were mortally offended, but what did that matter? She wanted to go back to her old haunts and be helped by the presence of those who could lift her out of miry ways; and Mrs. Beaton and her son took compassion upon the repentant woman, and let her come to live with them. Sometimes they made little excursions into the suburbs, which did them all good. Mrs. Penn became a really useful member ...
— A Vanished Hand • Sarah Doudney
... end, on the "Flyer," and then rest in some palatial hotel at last. Each mounted his horse, taking with them by way of baggage all that was necessary for the trip,—tent, provisions, clothing and Bibles. They plodded through miry swamps, they climbed up and down almost perpendicular ledges, and cut their way through canebrakes with a hatchet. When they had creeks to cross they swam their horses. At night they camped, often in ...
— A Story of One Short Life, 1783 to 1818 - [Samuel John Mills] • Elisabeth G. Stryker
... 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 vanquished ...
— Memoirs of the Private Life, Return, and Reign of Napoleon in 1815, Vol. II • Pierre Antoine Edouard Fleury de Chaboulon
... The mill at Evelyn was filled with fugitives from the battle: the miller, espying Charles and his guide, and afraid of a discovery, called out "rogues;" and they, supposing him an enemy, turned up a miry lane, running at their utmost speed,—Boscobel, 47. Account from ...
— The History of England from the First Invasion by the Romans - to the Accession of King George the Fifth - Volume 8 • John Lingard and Hilaire Belloc
... 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 adieu. Thou mightest say that the apple ...
— Persian Literature, Volume 2, Comprising The Shah Nameh, The - Rubaiyat, The Divan, and The Gulistan • Anonymous
... Cupples had more than 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 ...
— Alec Forbes of Howglen • George MacDonald
... Like stepping-stones, to save a stride, In streets where kennels are too wide; Or like a heel-piece, to support A cripple with one foot too short; Or like a bridge, that joins a marish To moorlands of a different parish. So have I seen ill-coupled hounds Drag different ways in miry grounds. So geographers, in Afric maps, With savage pictures fill their gaps, And o'er unhabitable downs Place elephants for want of towns. But, though you miss your third essay, You need not throw your pen away. Lay now aside all thoughts of fame, To spring more ...
— The Poems of Jonathan Swift, D.D., Volume I (of 2) • Jonathan Swift
... 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 cavalier spurred his horse into the slimy depths, ...
— History Of The Conquest Of Peru • William Hickling Prescott
... with a long and miry lane, lying along the valley, and leading to the cottages of a little clan, the chief of whom seemed to be a large-boned lively-eyed old dame, who, after minute inquiries after "the Lady Poynsett," went on, "And be it true, Master Julius, as that young gentleman of Squire Bowater's ...
— The Three Brides • Charlotte M. Yonge
... 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) ...
— The Red Horizon • Patrick MacGill
... the Boer, and although he may often have been the object of derision, it is to his credit that the predominant qualities mentioned have enabled him to pull through the miry clay. Without these qualities, it is patent that the little band which landed at the Cape long years ago would have succumbed before the conflicting forces which then existed. And as succeeding years passed on, and the sun still shone ...
— The Boer in Peace and War • Arthur M. Mann
... communication the two shores bordered with vast constructions and high chimneys, naval shops, warehouses, arsenals, and dry-docks for cleaning up the boats. Tug-boats were continually stirring up its green and miry waters. Steamers undergoing repairs were lined up the length of the break-waters undergoing a continual pounding that made their plates resound. Lighters topped with hills of pit coal were going slowly to take their position along the flanks of the ships. Under the drawbridge ...
— Mare Nostrum (Our Sea) - A Novel • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... 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 sad ...
— The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (1753),Vol. V. • Theophilus Cibber
... from the spot, stretched out their gaunt arms, and implored charity in the name of the Merciful Mother! Glyndon hastily threw them some small coins, and, turning away his face, clapped spurs to his horse, and relaxed not his speed till he entered the village. On either side the narrow and miry street, fierce and haggard forms—some leaning against the ruined walls of blackened huts, some seated at the threshold, some lying at full length in the mud—presented groups that at once invoked pity and aroused alarm: pity for their squalor, alarm for the ferocity imprinted ...
— Zanoni • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... my feats this single week Wad mak a daft-like diary, O! I drave my cart out ow'r a dike, My horses in a miry, O! I wear my stockings white an' blue, My love's sae fierce an' fiery, O! I drill the land that I should pleugh, An' pleugh the drills entirely, O! O, love, love, ...
— The Book of Humorous Verse • Various
... by nature a very light and cheerful heart; her spirit was as bright and cheery as her appearance. She picked up her courage very soon, stepped neatly through the miry, slippery streets, and presently reached her home. Mrs. Reed and the six grandchildren lived in a model lodging-house in a place called Sparrow Street, off Whitechapel Road. The house possessed all the new sanitary improvements, a good supply of water ...
— Good Luck • L. T. Meade
... 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 ...
— The Dog's Book of Verse • Various
... calling, he 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 ...
— A Desperate Character and Other Stories • Ivan Turgenev
... taunt, he seized Hsueeh P'an by the left leg, and dragging him several steps into a miry spot among the reeds, he rolled him about till he was covered with one mass of mud. "Do you now know what stuff I'm made of?" he ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book II • Cao Xueqin
... fallen; and the water stood about in what it is easier to call large 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 away like an enormous nightmare; ...
— The New Jerusalem • G. K. Chesterton
... held her vagrant big brother 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
... 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 Katharine's stumbled he would storm and swear at the poor jaded beast, who could scarce crawl under his burthen, as if he had been ...
— Tales from Shakespeare • Charles and Mary Lamb
... journeying by their side, Enter'd, though by 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 ...
— Literary Remains (1) • Coleridge
... the action commenced. Napoleon, in his Memoirs, gives as the reason for this delay, the miry state of the ground through the heavy rain of the preceding night and day, which rendered it impossible for cavalry or artillery to manoeuvre on it till a few hours of dry weather had given it its natural consistency. It has been ...
— The Fifteen Decisive Battles of The World From Marathon to Waterloo • Sir Edward Creasy, M.A.
... the tale of sin is written on these countenances. "But ye are washed, but ye are sanctified, but ye are justified in the name of the Lord Jesus and by the Spirit of our God." Listen, they are singing; it is the fortieth Psalm: "He took me from the fearful pit and from the miry clay." What pathos they throw into the words, what joy overspreads their faces! They know themselves to be monuments of free grace and ...
— The Life of St. Paul • James Stalker
... a low ground on the south, covered with groves of cottonwood timber. At the distance of six miles, we reached on the north a hunting camp of Minnetarees consisting of thirty lodges, and built in the usual form of earth and timber. Two miles and a quarter farther, comes in on the same side Miry creek, a small stream about ten yards wide, which, rising in some lakes near the Mouse river, passes through beautiful level fertile plains without timber in a direction nearly southwest; the banks near its entrance being steep, and rugged on both sides of the Missouri. Three miles above this ...
— History of the Expedition under the Command of Captains Lewis and Clark, Vol. I. • Meriwether Lewis and William Clark
... 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 ...
— The Uncommercial Traveller • Charles Dickens
... two forests are only parted by a narrow range of enclosures, yet no two soils can be more different; for the Holt consists of a strong loam, of a miry nature, carrying a good turf, and abounding with oaks that grow to be large timber; while Wolmer is nothing but a hungry, sandy, barren waste. The former being all in the parish of Binsted, is about two miles in extent from north to south, and near as ...
— The Natural History of Selborne, Vol. 1 • Gilbert White
... can reach the wicket-gate, they fall into a 'miry slough.' Who does not know the miry slough too? When a man begins for the first time to think seriously about himself, the first thing that rises before him is a consciousness of his miserable past life. Amendment seems to be desperate. He thinks it is too late to change for any ...
— Bunyan • James Anthony Froude
... 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 ...
— The Memoirs of Louis XIV., His Court and The Regency, Complete • Duc de Saint-Simon
... Raleigh. That bold and talented adventurer, whose name will live forever in American annals, and whose monument is North Carolina's beautiful State capital, is said in the familiar story to have attracted the notice of Queen Elizabeth by spreading his scarlet cloak over a miry place for the queen to walk upon. He made rapid progress in the good graces of his sovereign, who was quick to discern the men who could be useful to her and to her kingdom. Sir Humphrey Gilbert, half brother to Sir Walter, had ...
— The Land We Live In - The Story of Our Country • Henry Mann
... 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
... moment,—there lingered in Richmond a memorial of those days, most peculiar and most instructive. Before the days of Secession, when the Northern traveller in Virginia, after traversing for weary leagues its miry ways, its desolate fields, and its flowery forests, rode at last into its metropolis,—now slowly expanded into a city of twenty-eight thousand inhabitants,—he was sure to be guided erelong to visit its stately Capitol, modelled by Jefferson, when French minister, from the ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 10, Number 59, September, 1862 • Various
... that he has been an American soldier, and is an American citizen, they had cheerfully marched through heavy mire. So much had they given to so small a demand on their natural sentiment, he could not doubt they would with equal alacrity, and with the same firm step, march over a field miry with the blood of comrade and of foe, where opposing causes make to ...
— Speeches of the Honorable Jefferson Davis 1858 • Hon. Jefferson Davis
... finde 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 ...
— Kemps Nine Daies Wonder - Performed in a Daunce from London to Norwich • William Kemp
... London would take, and that a large part of the Londoners favoured his cause. Marching therefore up the Thames he seized a bridge at Kingston, threw his force across the river, and turned rapidly back on the capital. But a night march along miry roads wearied and disorganized his men; the bulk of them were cut off from their leader by a royal force which had gathered in the fields at what is now Hyde Park Corner, and only Wyatt himself with a handful of followers pushed desperately on past the palace of St. James, whence ...
— History of the English People - Volume 4 (of 8) • John Richard Green
... Loskiel. 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; and then, still northward for ...
— The Hidden Children • Robert W. Chambers
... 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
... proved, however, too light to enable us to stem the stream, and we were obliged to resume the fatiguing operation of tracking; sometimes under cliffs so steep that the men could scarcely find a footing, and not unfrequently over spots rendered so miry by the small streams that trickled from above, as to be almost impassable. In the course of the day we passed the scene of a very melancholy accident. Some years ago, two families of Indians, induced by the flatness of a small beach, which lay betwixt the cliff and the river, chose ...
— Narrative of a Journey to the Shores of the Polar Sea, in the Years 1819-20-21-22, Volume 1 • John Franklin
... dungeon in the prison, the only access to which was from above. Prisoners were let down into it with ropes, and left there to die of hunger. The bottom of it was wet and miry, and the prophet, when let down into its gloomy depths, sank into the deep mire. Here he would soon have died of hunger and misery; but the king, feeling some misgivings in regard to what he had done, lest ...
— Cyrus the Great - Makers of History • Jacob Abbott
... Heine's magnificent powers have often served only to give electric force to the expression of debased feeling, so that his works are no Phidian statue of gold, and ivory, and gems, but have not a little brass, and iron, and miry clay mingled with the precious metal. The audacity of his occasional coarseness and personality is unparalleled in contemporary literature, and has hardly been exceeded by the license of former days. Yet, when all coarseness, all scurrility, all Mephistophelean contempt for the reverent ...
— George Eliot; A Critical Study of Her Life, Writings & Philosophy • George Willis Cooke
... black horse is this which, despite Carnaby's flailing whip and cruel, rowelling spur, is slowly, surely creeping up with the laboring gray? Who is this, a wild, bare-headed figure, grim and bloody, stained with mud, rent and torn, upon whose miry coat yet hangs a crushed and ...
— The Amateur Gentleman • Jeffery Farnol et al
... through it all, till at last the sun sank in sullen splendour just as we reached a spot of rising ground about two acres in extent—a little oasis of dry in the midst of the miry wilderness—where Billali announced that we were to camp. The camping, however, turned out to be a very simple process, and consisted, in fact, in sitting down on the ground round a scanty fire made ...
— She • H. Rider Haggard
... Mr. Wang; his proud, overbearing 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 some other way ...
— How I Know God Answers Prayer - The Personal Testimony of One Life-Time • Rosalind Goforth
... north for the gold which is the price thereof, I have, I thank Heaven, no disguises to keep with any man, and wear my own name of Thomas Trumbull, without any chance that the same may be polluted. Whereas, thou, who art to journey in miry ways, and amongst a strange people, mayst do well to have two names, as thou hast two shirts, the one to ...
— Redgauntlet • Sir Walter Scott
... seeing the age which succeeded those ancient ones, 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, is meant the truth of the Word ...
— The Delights of Wisdom Pertaining to Conjugial Love • Emanuel Swedenborg
... 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 cudgeling. It was plain that these feet had kicked off sportive children oftener than they had plodded with freight through miry lanes. He was altogether a fine-weather, holiday sort of a donkey; and though he was just then somewhat solemnized 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 solemnized just then; for with ...
— English: Composition and Literature • W. F. (William Franklin) Webster
... the corporal and I—all well muffled up and swathed about the throat against the northwest wind; and we carried but one inside passenger, though he snored enough for six. You could hear him above the chink of the swingle-bars and the drumming of our horses' hoofs on the miry road. What this inside fare was like I had no means of telling; for when the corporal and I overtook the coach at Torpoint Ferry he was already seated, and being served through the door with hot kidney pasty and hot brandy-and-water. ...
— Two Sides of the Face - Midwinter Tales • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... insecurity from violence and oppression, its barbarous discomfort; the life of nobles in unplumbed stone castles; the life of burghers in walled towns, without lighting, drainage, or police; the life of countrymen who took their goods to market over miry roads impassable half the year for any wheeled vehicle. As to the English poets whom we have passed in review, from Coleridge to Swinburne, not one of them joined the Catholic Church; and most of them found romantic literary tastes quite consistent with varying shades of political ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Nineteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... remarks that passed between two agricultural women who from behind the hedge were watching the approach of the curate along a deep miry lane. Where they stood the meadow was high above the level of the lane, which was enclosed by steep banks thickly overgrown with bramble, briar, and thorn. The meadows each side naturally drained into the hollow, which during a storm was filled with a rushing torrent, ...
— Hodge and His Masters • Richard Jefferies
... visit a great deal, in order to make new acquaintances, or to revive the old ones. That is, however, impossible. The distance is too great, and the ways too miry to go on foot; the muddy state of Paris being indescribable; and to take a coach, one may soon drive away four or five livres, and all in vain, for the people merely pay you compliments, and then it is over. They ask me to come on this or that day—I play, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, Number 361, November, 1845. • Various
... surprise him, because it is of the kind that has always met him in every benevolent movement. When in the Parliament of England he was pleading for women in the collieries who were harnessed like beasts of burden, and made to draw heavy loads through miry and dark passages, and for children who were taken at three years old to labor where the sun never shines, he was met with determined and furious opposition and obloquy—accused of being a disorganizer, and of wishing to restore the dark ages. Very similar accusations have attended all ...
— Sunny Memories Of Foreign Lands, Volume 1 (of 2) • Harriet Elizabeth (Beecher) Stowe
... house, but such a trouvaille would be 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
... on shore, they feed on the grass and other plants which grow near the banks of fresh-water streams; and, when not employed in feeding, sleep in herds in the most miry places they can find. As they seem of a very lethargic disposition, and are not easily awakened, each herd was observed to place some of their males at a distance, in the nature of centinels, who never failed to alarm them when any one attempted to molest, or even to approach them. The ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 11 • Robert Kerr
... agitation was beginning to be felt in backward provincial regions, and the Tractarian satire on the Low-Church party was beginning to tell even on those who disavowed or resisted Tractarian doctrines. The vibration of an intellectual movement was felt from the golden head to the miry toes of the Establishment; and so it came to pass that, in the district round Milby, the market-town close to Shepperton, the clergy had agreed to have a clerical meeting every month, wherein they would exercise their intellects by discussing theological and ecclesiastical questions, ...
— Scenes of Clerical Life • George Eliot
... obstructed by fallen trees, old logs, miry places, pointed rocks and entangled roots, which were not to be avoided. We were alternately on the ridge of a lofty mountain and in the depths of a valley. At best, our path was obscure and we needed guides to go before ...
— A Sketch of the History of Oneonta • Dudley M. Campbell
... arc of day The burning wheels have urged their way; And eve along the western skies Sheds her intermingling dyes. Down the deep, the miry lane, Creaking comes the empty wain, And driver on the shaft-horse sits, Whistling now and then by fits: And oft, with his accustom'd call, Urging on the sluggish Ball. The barn is still, the master's gone, And thresher puts his jacket ...
— The Poetical Works of Henry Kirke White - With a Memoir by Sir Harris Nicolas • Henry Kirke White
... the dazzling of the fireworks, the glittering of the flowers, the crash of the rockets, to the serenity of a lovely night—starlit, clear, and still. Alas! yes, this good girl preferred the black mud of the streets of the capital to the verdure of its flowery meadows; its pavements miry or tortuous, to the fresh and velvet moss of the paths in the woods, perfumed by violets; the suffocating dust at the City gates, or the Boulevards, to the waving of the golden ears of corn, enameled by the scarlet of the wild poppy and the ...
— The Mysteries of Paris V2 • Eugene Sue
... Him. Jesus, Jesus! Why is Your face so pure, so blissful? You have passed only over the brink of human sufferings, as over the brink of an abyss, and only the foam of the bloody and miry waves have touched You. Do You command me, a human being, to sink into the dark depth? Great is Your Golgotha, Jesus, but too reverent and joyous, and one small but interesting stroke is ...
— The Crushed Flower and Other Stories • Leonid Andreyev
... highest: there the gods govern. Your soul is large enough to embrace your country: all other affection is for less objects, and less men are capable of it. Abandon, O Caesar! such thoughts and wishes as now agitate and propel you: leave them to mere men of the marsh, to fat hearts and miry intellects. Fortunate may we call ourselves to have been born in an age so productive of eloquence, so rich in erudition. Neither of us would be excluded, or hooted at, on canvassing for these honours. He who can think dispassionately and deeply as I do, is great as I am; none other. ...
— Imaginary Conversations and Poems - A Selection • Walter Savage Landor
... and no home, remembered in passing that on that very site when he first came out from England there had stood a fishing village, a few mat huts erected on piles between a muddy tidal creek and a miry pathway that went writhing into a tangled wilderness without any ...
— End of the Tether • Joseph Conrad
... into the ditch of Schwiednitz, and fill it up with their dead bodies, that the rear may pass over them dry-shod, and gain the honour? 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 ...
— The Covenants And The Covenanters - Covenants, Sermons, and Documents of the Covenanted Reformation • Various
... miry ground and a matted, marish 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 ...
— Treasure Island • Robert Louis Stevenson
... with admiration, I attempted, as our caick approached the landing-place, to be the first to leap upon the quay, when, just as I was in the act of springing, my foot slipped, and I fell headlong into a miry stream. Such was my entrance ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 380, June, 1847 • Various
... It was a muddy, miry place in which Tom Mason now found himself, for it had been raining some there and Fort Hamilton was not blessed with a system of drainage. There were no sidewalks except in front of the various saloons ...
— Elam Storm, The Wolfer - The Lost Nugget • Harry Castlemon
... 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 it ...
— The Hound of the Baskervilles • A. Conan Doyle
... they came to 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 Year of Jubilee • George Gissing
... will, He worketh still, In ways most wonderful. He drew me from the miry clay, He filled my cup quite full. And while my heart can speak I'll ...
— Bees in Amber - A Little Book Of Thoughtful Verse • John Oxenham
... imprudently left his companions, and, while alone, was seen and pursued by a party of savages. He retreated fighting, killed three Indians with his own hand, and probably would have regained his boat in safety, had he not accidentally plunged into a miry hole, from which he ...
— Parker's Second Reader • Richard G. Parker
... I stood before a cage, Where, guarded by a loftier screen, Were artificial rocks, and pools, And strips of vegetation green; There, perched upon some rocky mound, Or crouching on the miry ground, A flock of waterfowl ...
— Poems • John L. Stoddard
... 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 scenery is indicated ...
— Dante: His Times and His Work • Arthur John Butler
... improved. But in spite of disorder and squalor, shaded with clouds, washed and wiped by rain and sea winds, it was triumphantly salubrious through all the seasons. And though the houses seemed to rest uneasily among the miry rocks and stumps, squirming at all angles as if they had been tossed and twisted by earthquake shocks, and showing but little more relation to one another than may be observed among moraine boulders, Wrangell was a tranquil place. I never ...
— Travels in Alaska • John Muir
... 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, ...
— A Practical Directory for Young Christian Females - Being a Series of Letters from a Brother to a Younger Sister • Harvey Newcomb
... it," says a recent and ingenious critic, "that in all the miry paths of life which he had trod, no speck ever sullied the robe of his modest and graceful muse. How amid all that love of inferior company, which never to the last forsook him, did he keep his genius so free ...
— Oliver Goldsmith • Washington Irving
... wanted, for he had a plan for revenging himself on his upstart nephew. He drove on till he got to a place where there was a muddy and miry puddle beside the road. Then by a dexterous manoeuver, for he understood driving thoroughly, he managed to overturn the wagon, and Nicholas was thrown headlong into the puddle. Dick leaped out just at the right time, retaining his ...
— Frank and Fearless - or The Fortunes of Jasper Kent • Horatio Alger Jr.
... 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 doctor ...
— A Country Doctor and Selected Stories and Sketches • Sarah Orne Jewett
... it is late, and I have been several hours on horseback in a country so miry after the rains, that every hundred yards brings you to a ditch, of whose depth, width, colour, and contents, both my horses and their riders have brought ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. 6 (of 6) - With his Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... 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 ye might ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Matthew Chaps. IX to XXVIII • Alexander Maclaren
... the same meaning in the following words. They are, however, too simple to need defining; in fact, there are no simpler words on which to base definitions: airy, balky, bony, briny, chunky, downy, dusty, healthy, hearty, miry, musty, rusty, scaly, showy, ...
— Orthography - As Outlined in the State Course of Study for Illinois • Elmer W. Cavins
... chill blaws loud wi' angry sugh: The shortening winter-day is at its close; The miry beasts retreating frae the pleugh, The black'ning ...
— Nancy Stair - A Novel • Elinor Macartney Lane
... for disembarkation, were thrown high and 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 from Tientsin, were doubtfully reliable, many of the ...
— World's War Events, Vol. I • Various
... life, the gentle charities, that, like the face of Una, make sunshine in the shady place, are often found not far from rugged rage and black despair. Press on through glad and sombre scenery. Press upward in steep ways, miry and craggy, narrow and ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. 5, Issue 2, February, 1864 • Various
... blood of Christ 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 to ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 1 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... 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 their successors, ...
— Some Cities and San Francisco and Resurgam • Hubert Howe Bancroft
... of living waves that roll On golden sands, Or break on tragic reef and shoal 'Mid fatal lands; O forest wrought of living leaves, Some filled with Spring, Where joy life's festal raiment weaves And all birds sing,— Some trampled in the miry ways, Or whirled along By fury of tempestuous days,— Take ...
— The Poems of William Watson • William Watson
... finds security; such security that "dug in" he can defy at a hundred yards' distance rifles that carry death three thousand yards. She it is that has made the deadlock in the trenches and plastered their occupants with her miry hands. ...
— My Year of the War • Frederick Palmer
... mistaken Job for another? I let many drops of rain descend from the heavens, and for each drop there is a mould in the clouds, for were two drops to issue from the same mould, the ground would be made so miry that it could not bring forth any growth. It hath never happened that a mould hath been misplaced. Should I, then, have mistaken Job for another? Many thunderbolts I hurl from the skies, but each one comes from its own path, for were two to proceed from the same path, they would destroy ...
— The Legends of the Jews Volume 1 • Louis Ginzberg
... we descended to a deep miry watercourse, full of bulrushes, then over another hill, from the heights of which we saw Suwarora's palace, lying down in the Uthungu valley, behind which again rose another hill of sandstone, faced on the top with a ...
— The Discovery of the Source of the Nile • John Hanning Speke
... bony and utterly freckled. They drove off, Patricia not far but straight, and Merle, after impressive preliminaries that should have intimidated any golf ball, far but not straight. After his shot he lectured instructively upon its faults. When he had done they knew why he had sliced into the miry fen on the right. Then with an expert eye he studied his brother's stance and swing. The ball of Wilbur went low and straight and far, but the shot was prefaced, apparently, by no nice adjustment of the feet or by any preliminary ...
— The Wrong Twin • Harry Leon Wilson |
