"Slough" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... this as I see it, sweetheart. I'm a man—primitive, if you like. I've done wild and evil things—plenty of them. What of that? I slough them off and trample them down. The heart of me ...
— The Highgrader • William MacLeod Raine
... rear of the army. Of this incident Glazier writes: "I had been told by the negroes that fifteen of our sick, who fell into the hands of the rebels but a few days before our recapture, were taken to a swamp, where their throats were cut, and their bodies thrown into a slough hole. I cannot vouch for the truth of this statement, but it came to me from many whose veracity I have no reason ...
— Sword and Pen - Ventures and Adventures of Willard Glazier • John Algernon Owens
... dwelt in this painfully ponderous body was as mellow with affection and kindliness as a ripe pear, and the voice that proceeded from her ever-smiling lips was a hoarse and dove-like coo of love. Ellen at first started a little aghast at this gigantic fleshliness, this general slough and slump of outline, this insistency of repellent curves, and then the old woman spoke and thrust out a great, soft hand, and the heart of the child overleaped her artistic sense and her reason, and she thought old Mrs. ...
— The Portion of Labor • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... produced more repulsion than attraction. Maurice earnestly protested that we were to believe in God, not in a theory about God, though the distinction, as Mr. Stephen says, is vague; he appealed to the inner light, to the conscience of mankind; he went back into the slough of Intuitionism. Carlyle cried aloud against materialistic views and logical machinery; he denounced 'the great steam-engine, Utilitarianism'; he was for the able despot and hero-worship against grinding competition ...
— Studies in Literature and History • Sir Alfred Comyn Lyall
... the advantage your quotation has given me, by overwhelming you with the refutation with which the victim Cassio replies to the tempter Iago. I only wish you to know, that there is one person at least sorry to see a youth of talents and expectations sink into the slough in which the inhabitants of this ...
— Rob Roy, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... "The dinner hour summons us; I think that, little by little, we have allowed this conversation to drift toward the miry slough of backbiting." ...
— The Lesser Bourgeoisie • Honore de Balzac
... in every direction near the army had become almost impassable—mud knee deep in the middle and ruts cut to the hubs on either side. The roads leading to Manassas were literally strewn with the carcasses of horses, some even sunk out of sight in the slough and mud. It would remind one of the passage of Napoleon across the Arabian desert, so graphically described by historians. The firewood had become scarce, and had to be carried on the men's shoulders the distance of a mile, the wagons being engaged in hauling supplies and the enormous ...
— History of Kershaw's Brigade • D. Augustus Dickert
... forgotten files. A tunneled, revetted, embrasured and battlemented citadel filled with rusty armor and broken lances. A hock shop, a junkyard, a hall of distorting mirrors. A cemetery by the sea, a peak of glory, a slough of despond. A radiant light, an encroaching dark, the sweetest of melody, the sourest of discord. A library of trivia, museum of curiosa, sideshow of freaks, and shrine of greatness. It was the lowering pendulum, the waiting pit, the closing walls. It was the vaulting spirit, the gallant ...
— The Short Life • Francis Donovan
... except by use of opium. He was already impatient to go to sea again, and chafed under the delay of healing, concerning the duration of which the surgeons could give him no assurance. The ligature must be left to slough away, for it was two inches up the wound, and if, in attempting to cut it, the artery should be cut, another amputation would be necessary higher up, which would not be easy, for the stump was already very short. There was consequently nothing for it but endurance. To his suffering ...
— The Life of Nelson, Vol. I (of 2) - The Embodiment of the Sea Power of Great Britain • A. T. (Alfred Thayer) Mahan
... 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
... till the grave was filled and the turf laid down, a trying quarter of an hour. Ah me! the thud of the spade on your mother's grave! None gave any sign of what he felt save Drumsheugh, whose sordid slough had slipped off from a tender heart, and Chalmers, who went behind a tombstone and sobbed aloud. Not even Posty asked the reason so much as by a look, and Drumtochty, as it passed, made as though it did not see. But I marked that the Dominie took Chalmers ...
— Beside the Bonnie Brier Bush • Ian Maclaren
... Tautuk and Amuk Toolik at the edge of a slough where willows grew deep and green and the crested billows of sedge-cotton stood knee-high. The faces of the herdsmen were sweating. Thereafter Alan walked with them, until in that hour when the sun had sunk to its lowest plane they came to the first of the Endicott foothills. Here they rested ...
— The Alaskan • James Oliver Curwood
... ditch of a scavenger, like Escoubleau, is 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 ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... fast enough at battles of spurs and other encounters. Sudden riches beget insolence, tumults, civic broils. Internecine quarrels, horrible tumults stain the streets with blood, but education lifts the citizens more and more out of the original slough. They learn to tremble as little at priestcraft as at swordcraft, having acquired something of each. Gold in the end, unsanctioned by right divine, weighs up the other forces, supernatural as they are. And so, struggling along their appointed path, making cloth, making money, making treaties ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... the long, stout cane, plunged into the slough. He was more anxious than he was willing to say, but at the same time he was hopeful. As the swamp was due, at least in large part, to the great rains, it must have firm ground somewhere, and he had noticed also in the thickening twilight that the bushes ...
— The Eyes of the Woods - A story of the Ancient Wilderness • Joseph A. Altsheler
... on the banks of a small stream. The sky had lightened somewhat, and we could perceive the way fairly well when we again advanced, now traveling through a more open country, a prairie, interspersed with groves of trees. Daylight overtook us at the edge of a slough, which bordered a little lake, where in the gray dawn, Tim, by a lucky shot, managed to kill a crippled duck, which later furnished us with a meager breakfast. In the security of a near-by cluster of trees, we ventured to build a fire, and, sitting about it, discussed whether to remain ...
— The Devil's Own - A Romance of the Black Hawk War • Randall Parrish
... animosity. Old men with one foot in the grave, in this year 1895, are still accusing each other of embezzling acres of it; the devil of Discord, and Mercury the god of thieves, encamped upon it; the Port Albert Company fell into its Slough of Despond, which in the Court of Equity was known as "Kemmis v. Orr," and there all the ...
— The Book of the Bush • George Dunderdale
... his holy name be us amang, What is this? for Saint 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 of young tharmes,[142] The devil knock ...
— Everyman and Other Old Religious Plays, with an Introduction • Anonymous
... 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 • William Shakespeare [Craig, Oxford edition]
... nothing of the fashion in which the British Navy lived up to its best traditions in that Battle of Jutland, it seems nothing short of criminal that the English censor should have permitted the world to hold Great Britain in contempt for twenty-four hours and sink poor France in the slough of despond. However, he is used to abuse, and ...
— The Living Present • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... the caterpillar, up or down to the lion and to man, ye all of you, fostering a brief momentary spark in you, like the glance from the flint and steel ... gone is the red bubbling up of the spark ... and again a mere slough is lying before us, after its short dream of life and love, dust upon dust, rottenness upon decay ... the great-grandfather beside his mouldering great-grandchild ... and neither knows the other, neither has ever heard ...
— The Old Man of the Mountain, The Lovecharm and Pietro of Abano - Tales from the German of Tieck • Ludwig Tieck
... so much as "Thank you." She put the shawl round her mistress, and then went slowly back. She sat down on the stone steps, and glared stupidly at the scene, and felt very miserable and leaden. She seemed to be stuck in a sort of slough of despond, and could not move in any direction to get ...
— A Terrible Temptation - A Story of To-Day • Charles Reade
... queer slough, too," replied Vautrin. "The mud splashes you as you drive through it in your carriage—you are a respectable person; you go afoot and are splashed—you are a scoundrel. You are so unlucky as to walk off with something ...
— Father Goriot • Honore de Balzac
... the 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 Onlooker, Volume 1, Part 2 • Various
... generalization. We say Tragedy with the dagger and bowl, and it means something very different to the aesthetic sense from Tragedy with the case-knife and the phial of laudanum, though these would be as effectual for murder. It was a misconception of this that led poetry into that slough of poetic diction where everything was supposed to be made poetical by being called something else, and something longer. A boot became "the shining leather that the leg encased"; coffee, "the fragrant juice ...
— The Function Of The Poet And Other Essays • James Russell Lowell
... ask for a tub full of lye," (that is, washing water prepared with wood-ashes) "and a tub full of fresh milk, and as many whips as a boy can carry in his arms,—and have all these brought into your bed-chamber. Then, when the Lindworm tells you to shed a shift, do you bid him slough a skin. And when all his skins are off, you must dip the whips in the lye and whip him; next, you must wash him in the fresh milk; and, lastly, you must take him and hold him in your arms, if it's ...
— East of the Sun and West of the Moon - Old Tales from the North • Peter Christen Asbjornsen
... almost every day; tents were water-logged and one moved about in a slough of sticky mud. We ate mud, we drank it in our tea, we slept in it, for our wardrobes had been left behind in Cairo. Harness-cleaning was another bugbear, but even that succumbed to the mud after a time; and as the weeks ...
— With Our Army in Palestine • Antony Bluett
... word don't exist. When we animals never drink only just enough to satisfy thirst, never eat except when we have genuine appetites, never indulge in any sort of debauch, and never strain excess till we sink into the slough of satiety, shall "animalism" be a word to designate all that men and women dare to do? "Animalism!" You ought to blush for such a libel on our innocent and reasonable lives when you regard your own! You men who scorch your throats with alcohols, and kill your lives with absinthe; ...
— Wisdom, Wit, and Pathos of Ouida - Selected from the Works of Ouida • Ouida
... regards the revolt of her passions and her involuntary faults as terrible crimes, which draw upon her the hatred of her Beloved. She seeks to cleanse and to purify herself, but she is no sooner washed than she seems to fall into a slough yet more filthy and polluted than that from which she has just escaped. She does not see that it is because she runs that she contracts defilement, and falls so frequently, yet she is so ashamed to run in this condition, that she does not know where to ...
— Spiritual Torrents • Jeanne Marie Bouvires de la Mot Guyon
... brought to him a sense of almost awed repose. It released him from the vicious circle of self, of sharp-toothed disappointment and leaden-heavy discouragement, in which he had so long fruitlessly turned. He seemed consciously to slough off the foul and ragged garment of the past and all its base, unprofitable memories, as the snake sloughs off her old skin in the warm May weather and glides forth, glittering, in a coat of untarnished, ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet
... and escort, had led us out of our way, and that we were in very truth then travelling towards the town. We therefore hove-about and returned to Palanquillo, a village that we had passed through that very morning, leaving the hussar and his horse sticking fast in a slough. We arrived about nightfall, and as the village was almost entirely deserted, we were driven to take up our quarters in an old house, that seemed formerly to have been used as a distillery. Here we found a ...
— Tom Cringle's Log • Michael Scott
... destroyed, That I eternal thought. Destroyed! I feel all hope and all desire depart, For life and its deceitful joys. Forever rest! Enough! Thy throbbings cease! Naught can requite thy miseries; Nor is earth worthy of thy sighs. Life is a bitter, weary load, The world a slough. And now, repose! Despair no more, but find in Death The only boon Fate on our race bestows! Still, Nature, art thou doomed to fall, The victim scorned of that blind, brutal power That rules and ...
— The Poems of Giacomo Leopardi • Giacomo Leopardi
... only enough space for the whitewashed frame buildings of Fort Brannon. But to the east, the paralleling bluffs lay at a distance, and broke their ridge-back far up the scarlet coulee; from where, southward, stretched a wide gap—ten broad and gently undulating miles—that ended at the slough-studded base of Medicine Mountain. Evan Lancaster, as he stood bareheaded under the unclouded sky, looked about him upon acres heavy with tangled grass and weeds; and pleased with the evident richness of the untouched ground, and with ...
— The Plow-Woman • Eleanor Gates
... silently, had the labor been carried on, that by morning a strong redoubt was thrown up as a main work, flanked on the left by a breastwork, partly cannon-proof, extending down the crest of Breed's Hill to a piece of marshy ground called the Slough. To support the right of the redoubt, some troops were thrown into the village of Charlestown, at the southern foot of the hill. The great object of Prescott's solicitude was now attained, a sufficient ...
— The Life of George Washington, Volume I • Washington Irving
... always to be thus with Israel? Are we to struggle out of one slough only to sink into another? But these doubts dishonor the Master. Let me be humbler in judging others, cheerfuller in looking out upon the future, more enkindling towards the young men who are growing up around me, and who may yet pass on the torch of the Master. For them let me recall the ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... failure rather to my own 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. ...
— Frankenstein - or The Modern Prometheus • Mary Wollstonecraft (Godwin) Shelley
... on his journey Mr. Worldly Wiseman meets him and urges him to return; but he hastens on, only to plunge into the Slough of Despond. His companion Pliable is here discouraged and turns back. Christian struggles on through the mud and reaches the Wicket Gate, where Interpreter shows him the way to the Celestial City. As he passes a cross beside the path, the heavy burden which he carries (his load of ...
— Outlines of English and American Literature • William J. Long
... other copious secretions; as after drunkenness, cathartics, or fever fits, the mucus of the mouth becomes viscid, and in small quantity, from the increased absorption, adhering to the tongue like a white slough. In the diabaetes, where the thirst is very great, this slough adheres more pertinaciously, and becomes black or brown, being coloured after a few days by our aliment or drink. The inspissated mucus on the tongue of those, who sleep with their mouths ...
— Zoonomia, Vol. II - Or, the Laws of Organic Life • Erasmus Darwin
... soldiers laughed at seeing the sergeant on horseback. Mr Swinton, however, calmly advised us to make no obstacle: "Good," said he, "will come of this, and though for a season we are ordained to tribulation, and to toil through the slough of despond, yet a firm footing and a fair and green path lies in a ...
— Ringan Gilhaize - or The Covenanters • John Galt
... the dead form of the woman on Osiris' knee there issued forth another form and stood before us, as a snake issues from its slough. And as was the dead Hataska so was this form, feature for feature, look for look, and limb for limb. But still the corpse rested upon Osiris' knee, for this was but the Ka ...
— The World's Desire • H. Rider Haggard and Andrew Lang
... 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 ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No 3, September 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... said the Queen, amused. "What of that? Thy name is not Cis, is it? 'Tis only the slough that serves thee for the nonce. The good youth will find himself linked to some homely, housewifely Cis in due time, when the Princess Bride is queening it in France or Austria, and will own that the well was wiser ...
— Unknown to History - A Story of the Captivity of Mary of Scotland • Charlotte M. Yonge
... of despair he realised it!—that Mary—his bonnie Mary—his betrothed wife—had been chosen to inherit those very millions which had formerly stood between him and what he had then imagined to be his happiness. And listening to the strange story, he had sunk deeper and deeper into the Slough of Despond, and now sat rigidly silent, with all the light gone out of his features, and all the ardour quenched in his eyes. Mary looking at him, and reading every expression in that dark beloved face, felt the tears rising thickly in her throat, but bravely suppressed ...
— The Treasure of Heaven - A Romance of Riches • Marie Corelli
... happily, to drag you out of this wretched slough into which you are sinking. Whatever the cost, that shall ...
— In the Year of Jubilee • George Gissing
... porch they also stopped, distributing alms. One of the beggars, with a red, cicatrized slough instead of a nose, approached Katiousha. She produced some coins from her handkerchief, gave them to him, and without the slightest expression of disgust, but, on the contrary, her eyes beaming with delight, kissed him ...
— The Awakening - The Resurrection • Leo Nikoleyevich Tolstoy
... season of drought and scarcity ask not the distressed dervish, saying: "How are you?" Unless on the condition that you apply a balm to his wound, and supply him with the means of subsistence:—The ass which thou seest stuck in the slough with his rider, compassionate from thy heart, otherwise do not go near him. Now that thou went and asked him how he fell, like a sturdy fellow bind up thy loins, and take his ass by ...
— Persian Literature, Volume 2, Comprising The Shah Nameh, The - Rubaiyat, The Divan, and The Gulistan • Anonymous
... There was 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 ...
— Out of Doors—California and Oregon • J. A. Graves
... the portal, bright With steel, his head and bust secured in mail, Like to a serpent, issued into light, Having cast off his slough, diseased and stale: Who more than ever joying in his might, Renewed in youth, and proud of polished scale, Darts his three tongues, fire flashing from his eyes; While every frighted ...
— Orlando Furioso • Lodovico Ariosto
... chicken! We didn't have anything for supper but coffee and rolls and eggs. He's certainly bringing good things in his wake. How delicious that chicken does smell! Let's take it as a good omen, Alec, a forerunner of better days. He'll surely get you out of your slough ...
— Flip's "Islands of Providence" • Annie Fellows Johnston
... some over, when the rest soon jumped off. However, F—- and myself declared we would go right into the quadrangle of the Castle, so we went into the middle of the road and formed a line. Soon a rocket (the signal that the Queen was at Slough) was let off, and then some Life Guards came galloping along, and one of them ran almost over me, and actually trod on F—-'s toe, which put him into dreadful pain for some time. Then came the Queen's carriage, and I thought college would have tumbled down with the ...
— Life of John Coleridge Patteson • Charlotte M. Yonge
... WILLIAM (1792-1871).—S. of Sir William H., the eminent astronomer and discoverer of the planet Uranus, was b. at Slough, and ed. at Camb., where he was Senior Wrangler and first Smith's prizeman. He became one of the greatest of English astronomers. Among his writings are treatises on Sound and Light, and his Astronomy (1831) was for long the leading manual on the subject. He also pub. ...
— A Short Biographical Dictionary of English Literature • John W. Cousin
... it is important to avoid having bruised, torn, or separated tissues in the flaps, as these are liable to slough or to become the seat of infection. In this connection it should be borne in mind that the damage to soft tissues is always wider in extent than ...
— Manual of Surgery Volume Second: Extremities—Head—Neck. Sixth Edition. • Alexander Miles
... Hertfordshire, by a route, 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
... 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 he packed into ...
— The Big-Town Round-Up • William MacLeod Raine
... pork on the table, and I say a word to put him off it, he's that hurt as never was. Why, I'm only too glad to see him enjoying his food if no harm comes of it; but it's dreary work seeing your husband in the Slough of Despond, especially when it's your business to drag him out again, and most especially when you particularly warned ...
— The Farringdons • Ellen Thorneycroft Fowler
... for some foolish fly, imprisoned on a window pane, to find its way to freedom through it. There is no escape for the fly until its restless activities discover the right direction, and, to change the figure, there is none for the Negro out of his slough of despond until he can lay hold of the ballot. Wanting the ballot no amount of education and wealth in the South and of agitation in the North will of themselves be able to make Southern Governments responsive to the needs and the rights of the Negro as laborer and citizen. But until they are made ...
— The Ballotless Victim of One-Party Governments - The American Negro Academy, Occasional Papers No. 16 • Archibald H. Grimke
... of uncertainty about the graft retaining its vitality long enough to permit of its deriving the necessary nourishment from its new surroundings; in a certain number of cases the flap dies and is thrown off as a slough—moist or dry according to the presence or ...
— Manual of Surgery - Volume First: General Surgery. Sixth Edition. • Alexis Thomson and Alexander Miles
... 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 to elevate it and to introduce ...
— Public Speaking • Irvah Lester Winter
... seemed, read in that light. And how every word drove the unhappy heir of Maxfield deeper and deeper into the slough of perplexity. ...
— Roger Ingleton, Minor • Talbot Baines Reed
... not help calling to mind Miss Edgeworth's admirable tale of Murad the Unlucky, and his friend the lucky Saladin. Like the former, Wheelwright seemed destined but to fall from one calamity into another, and effort to retrieve his affairs, did but plunge him deeper into the slough of misery. I could not but perceive, however, that as in the case of the persecuted Mussulman, the misfortunes of my poor friend had their origin in his own bad management, and to speak the honest truth, of common sense. The wound in his hand, indeed, might perhaps be accounted an unavoidable ...
— Ups and Downs in the Life of a Distressed Gentleman • William L. Stone
... Barrens all his life. David described a typical case of sniffles, with running at eyes and nose, and Bouvais laughed. "The only cold we have up here is when the lungs get touched by frost," he said, "and then you die—the following spring. Always then. The lungs slough away." And then he asked: "Why are ...
— The Courage of Marge O'Doone • James Oliver Curwood
... 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 he ...
— Essays in English Literature, 1780-1860 • George Saintsbury
... a long, gradual slope. At the bottom of it was a broad, almost dried-out slough. A wooden culvert spanned the reed-grown watercourse. Then the trail made a sharpish ascent beyond, and lost itself behind a distant bush, beyond which again stretched out ...
— The Law-Breakers • Ridgwell Cullum
... Englishwoman enough to admire except at its latest stage (just the past few years), when lace-making, as almost every other art work in this country, is emerging from what, from an artistic point of view, has been one long Slough of Despond. ...
— Chats on Old Lace and Needlework • Emily Leigh Lowes
... falls into the error (venial when he wrote) of assuming an etymological connexion between certain words which have a specious air of kinship—such as 'care' and 'cura,' 'bloom' and 'blossom,' 'ghastly' and 'ghostly,' 'brat' and 'brood,' 'slow' and 'slough'—he makes just the mistakes which we would be tempted to make ourselves had not Professor Skeat and Dr. Murray and the great German School of philologists taught us to know better. Our plan, therefore, ...
— English Past and Present • Richard Chenevix Trench
... individual and social lives of 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 and fatuity? ...
— The Pivot of Civilization • Margaret Sanger
... that I ought to wait, say a week at least having killed all your mules for you, before I shot down your dogs—but not being exactly Phoibos Apollon, you are to know further that when I did think I might go modestly on, ... [Greek: omoi], let me get out of this slough of a simile, never mind with what dislocation of ancles! Plainly, from waiting and turning my eyes away (not from you, but from you in your special capacity of being written-to, not spoken-to) when I turned again ...
— The Letters of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett, Vol. 1 (of 2) 1845-1846 • Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett
... fight the devil himself in a good cause. Upon his friends R. H. D. had the same effect. And it was not only in proximity that he could distribute energy, but from afar, by letter and cable. He had some intuitive way of knowing just when you were slipping into a slough of laziness and discouragement. And at such times he either appeared suddenly upon the scene, or there came a boy on a bicycle, with a yellow envelope and a book to sign, or the postman in his buggy, or the telephone rang and from ...
— The Red Cross Girl • Richard Harding Davis
... incoherency of the same sort is displayed in the logical department of Huxley's Physical Basis of Life; where, after trying to persuade us to put our feet on the ladder which leads in the reverse direction from Jacob's, and to descend with him into the slough of materialism, and affirming that "our thoughts are the expression of molecular changes in that matter of life which is the source of our other vital phenomena;" he goes on to say, that he does not believe in materialism. And he tries ...
— Fables of Infidelity and Facts of Faith - Being an Examination of the Evidences of Infidelity • Robert Patterson
... came to a place where, in order to cut off a long sweeping curve of the river with open water and bad shore ice, we went through a dry slough and had to drag those iron runners over gravel and stones, where sometimes it was all the three of us could do to move the sled a few feet at a time. Yet all along the banks were willows, and if we had only known then what we know now we would have cut down and split some ...
— Ten Thousand Miles with a Dog Sled - A Narrative of Winter Travel in Interior Alaska • Hudson Stuck
... certain it is that about noon I had ventured out; and equally so that some two hours after I had good reasons to regret my presumption, for at three, having already wandered far from home, I found myself tramping on the road I have named, wearily plodding my way through a slough of thawing snow, teeth chattering, eyes watering and fingers numbed, whilst a wind fit to dethrone all the weather-cocks in Christendom was ploughing up the earth in showers of mud around me, blowing my hat off my head and ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 15, - No. 90, June, 1875 • Various
... voice. Reader, our anxious inquiry should be, Have we entered in by Christ the gate? Are our fruits meet for repentance? Let no one vaunt of his experience, because he go well bedaubed with the dirt of the slough. Every soul that enters the gate is ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... he trots off in the darkness. After waiting about two hours I hear the tramp of horses in the distance. Now the team is made ready, the two extra horses are attached in front, the coachman takes his place on the box, and with united strength our animals drag the heavy vehicle up out of the slough. We roll and jolt on again with lumps of wet clay dropping and splashing ...
— From Pole to Pole - A Book for Young People • Sven Anders Hedin
... for if I know anything at all about you it is that you are not the sort of character to make such a horrible mess of your life as that poor wretch has done. But now, the question is: What can I do to help you and your respected mother out of this slough into which another man's weakness and sin have plunged you both? Not very much, I am afraid; for I cannot restore to you the property of which you are robbed. That appears to be gone beyond recall. But I can do this for you—and ...
— The Adventures of Dick Maitland - A Tale of Unknown Africa • Harry Collingwood
... 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 have to return to Beerjand. As I remonstrate with him ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle Volume II. - From Teheran To Yokohama • Thomas Stevens
... that's it, mon. I have led them astray. By jingo, there's not a pond or a slough within five miles of the place but they ...
— She Stoops to Conquer - or, The Mistakes of a Night. A Comedy. • Oliver Goldsmith
... 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 her once more, busy this time with the entrance into ...
— The Life of the Fly - With Which are Interspersed Some Chapters of Autobiography • J. Henri Fabre
... also called "Slough dogs," in consequence of their exploring the sloughs, mosses, and bogs, in pursuit of offenders, called Moss-troopers. They were used for this purpose as late as the reign of James the First. In Scotland they are called the Sleuth-hound. It is the largest ...
— Anecdotes of Dogs • Edward Jesse
... together, without looking whither they were going, and in the midst of the plain they fell into a very miry slough, which was called the Slough of Despond. Here they wallowed for a time, and Christian, because of the burden that was on his back, began to sink in ...
— The Worlds Greatest Books - Vol. II: Fiction • Arthur Mee, J. A. Hammerton, Eds.
... larger males until they are strong 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 ...
— Four Months in a Sneak-Box • Nathaniel H. Bishop
... was very high at the time, and the water had backed up into the slough about the foot of the Lower Cascades to such a degree that it left me only a narrow neck of firm ground to advance over toward the point occupied by the Indians. On this neck of land the hostiles had ...
— The Memoirs of General Philip H. Sheridan, Vol. I., Part 1 • Philip H. Sheridan
... benighted, lost in the darkness. Radically, 'to founder' is to go to the bottom (Fr. fondrer; Lat. fundus, the bottom), hence applied to ships; it is also applied to horses sinking in a slough. The compound is Miltonic (see Par. Lost, i. 204), and is sometimes stigmatised as meaningless; on the contrary, it is very expressive, implying that the brothers are swallowed up in night and have lost their way. 'Founder' is here used ...
— Milton's Comus • John Milton
... when the forms are removed. When stiff pastes or mortars are used the contractor often places the facing by plastering the lagging just ahead of the concreting; this process requires constant watching to see that the plaster coat does not slough or peel off before it is backed ...
— Concrete Construction - Methods and Costs • Halbert P. Gillette
... Goldsmith was now thinking of another method of replenishing his purse. The Vicar of Wakefield had brought him little but reputation; the Good-natured Man had brought him L500. It was to the stage that he now looked for assistance out of the financial slough in which he was plunged. He was engaged in writing a comedy; and that comedy was She Stoops ...
— Goldsmith - English Men of Letters Series • William Black
... snake-slough and an eight-ribbed turtle were found. The short, sandy neck of the eastern knob is a playground for 'parson-crows' and scavengers (turkey-buzzards); hawks, kites, and fish-eagles, white and black, while the adjacent reefs are frequented by gulls, ...
— To The Gold Coast for Gold, Vol. II - A Personal Narrative • Richard Francis Burton and Verney Lovett Cameron
... Commodore Foote's fleet steamed into position and the first shell from his guns shrieked its message of death across the island. The gunboats concentrated their fire on the main battery which was located on low ground, almost submerged by the high water and separated from the others by a wide slough. Their gun platforms were covered with water—the men in gray must work their pieces standing half-leg deep in mud and slush. Five iron-clad gunboats led the attack. Three of them were lashed together in midstream ...
— The Victim - A romance of the Real Jefferson Davis • Thomas Dixon
... in confessing that the Science of Morals can never be as exact as that of Mathematics, because we have no terminology for Ethics so exact as for Geometry, she, in effect, yields the whole question, and leaves us in the old slough of doubt where Pyrrho and Pascal delighted to thrust us, and where the Church threatens to keep us, unless we will pay her tolls and pick our way along her turnpike. But though her major and minor premises may ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 22, Aug., 1859 • Various
... 'The vices of the world's nobler half in this day are feminine.' We have to guard against 'half-conceptions of wisdom, hysterical goodness, an impatient charity'—against the elementary state of the altruistic virtues, distinguishable as the sickness and writhings of our egoism to cast its first slough. Idea is there. The funny part of it is our finding it in books of fiction composed for payment. Manifestly this lady did not 'chameleon' her pen from the colour of her audience: she was not of the uniformed ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... imperfect ideals, failed more or less, or changed its character from time to time. The first and third projects were at one time guided by the same hand; but the first project gradually cast off its colonizing slough, and resolved itself once more into discovery for discovery's sake; and the third project ceased to be a plan of campaign, and resolved itself into sober and peaceful schemes for settling in the land. Even the second project, which was ...
— The Story of Newfoundland • Frederick Edwin Smith, Earl of Birkenhead
... a marcy we're gut folks to tell us The rights an' the wrongs o' these matters, I vow— God sends country lawyers an' other wise fellers To drive the world's team wen it gits in a slough; For John P. Robinson, he Sez the world'll go right, ef he ...
— The Book of Humorous Verse • Various
... be not affraid of greatnesse: Some are become great, some atcheeues greatnesse, and some haue greatnesse thrust vppon em. Thy fates open theyr hands, let thy blood and spirit embrace them, and to invre thy selfe to what thou art like to be: cast thy humble slough, and appeare fresh. Be opposite with a kinsman, surly with seruants: Let thy tongue tang arguments of state; put thy selfe into the tricke of singularitie. Shee thus aduises thee, that sighes for thee. Remember who commended thy yellow stockings, and wish'd to see thee ...
— The First Folio [35 Plays] • William Shakespeare
... horror, but the minister saw nothing. He was tired, and absorbed in his new possessions. It was good to sit down in his study, and spread his treasures out on the broad table, and gloat over them. A clump of damp moss rested quietly on his new sermon, "The Slough of Despond," but he took no note. He was looking for a place to put this curious little lizard in, and after anxious thought selected the gilt celluloid box, lined with pink satin, which the Mission Circle had ...
— "Some Say" - Neighbours in Cyrus • Laura Elizabeth Howe Richards
... only did their two guests think so, but the whole country, far and wide around, entertained precisely the same opinion. It is not, therefore, surprising that two young men like Frank and Vernon should be well pleased with their quarters, or that, having so early gotten into the slough of love, they should daily continue to sink deeper into the mire. The young poet's lame leg, though not a very serious affair, was still sufficient to keep him for several days a close prisoner to the house; ...
— Blackwoods Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 365, March, 1846 • Various
... and for 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, until he followed her and rescued her beloved. Not less was the change in myself. ...
— Autobiographic Sketches • Thomas de Quincey
... suddenly in Holland, and facing bravely the fact that his own vitality had been fatally impaired. "What exceeding folly," he wrote to a friend, "was it that tempted me to cross the sea in search of what I do not seem able to find here—a righteous stomach? I have been wallowing in the slough of despond for a week and my digestive apparatus has gone wrong again. I have suffered tortures that would have done credit to the inventive genius of a Dante, and the natural consequence is that I am as blue ...
— Eugene Field, A Study In Heredity And Contradictions - Vol. I • Slason Thompson
... aft your moss-traversing spunkies Decoy the wight that late and drunk is; The bleezin', curst, mischievous monkeys Delude his eyes, Till in some miry slough he sunk ...
— The Mysteries of All Nations • James Grant
... 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 dower of pity ...
— Daisy's Aunt • E. F. (Edward Frederic) Benson
... alone," he said. "You had to go through it, your slough of despond. It lies across every path—that leads to anywhere. Clear ...
— Paul Kelver • Jerome Klapka, AKA Jerome K. Jerome
... mine. Then and there I made a covenant with my soul; and no other man's arms shall ever enfold you. Ah, my Rosa Alba! I could dig your grave with my own hands, sooner than see that thief claim you. I am a proud man, and you have dragged me through the slough of humiliation, but to-day, as I bid you good-bye, I realize how one felt, who looking at the bust of him she loved supremely, said with her last breath: 'Voila mon univers, mon espoir, et mes dieux!' How soon we meet again depends solely on your future course. You know ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... 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
... all her thoughts. Had he allowed it, she would have devoted herself exclusively to him, but this he would not have. Very slowly, very painfully, he had struggled out of his Slough of Despond, and what that struggle had meant to him none but himself would ever know. And now that he had made it, and in a measure succeeded, he suffered scarcely less than before. His strength was undoubtedly ...
— The Knave of Diamonds • Ethel May Dell
... say a word about Slough, which is still the favourite cry of Lord Inverforth's critics, who have held their peace about the "dumps" since the publication of the White Paper ...
— The Mirrors of Downing Street - Some Political Reflections by a Gentleman with a Duster • Harold Begbie
... month after month, in practical success, and in height of humor in a still higher ratio. And in the course of the next Two Years rises to a great height indeed. Here—snatched, who knows with what difficulty, from that shoreless bottomless slough of an Austrian-Succession War, deservedly forgotten, and avoided by extant mankind—are some of the more essential phenomena, which Friedrich had to witness in those months. To witness, to scan with such intense interest,—rightly, ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XIV. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... but I never heard about the bear and bull episode before. I seem to have sort of a dim notion that you were packing a deer home on your back and fell into a barranca with it and lost it in a mud slough, but perhaps I'm mistaken. You forgot to tell ...
— Bears I Have Met—and Others • Allen Kelly
... Sept. 21, just two weeks after the robbery, Oscar saw us, and fled into town with the alarm. A party of forty was soon out in search for us, headed by Capt. W. W. Murphy, Col. Vought and Sheriff Glispin. They came up with us as we were fording a small slough, and unable to ford it with their horses, they were delayed somewhat by having to go around it. But they soon after got close enough so that one of them broke my walking stick with a shot. We were in ...
— The Story of Cole Younger, by Himself • Cole Younger
... marvellous power of mere money, of the lucre which philosophers pretend to despise and men sell their souls for. His heart almost burst in its admiration for that extraordinary Nella, who by mere personal force had raised two men out of the deepest slough of despair to the blissful heights of hope and happiness. 'These Anglo-Saxons,' he said ...
— The Grand Babylon Hotel • Arnold Bennett
... middle of the day; with every one declaring that it had been a great treat. Larry kept the two drumsticks as well as the wings of the gobbler. Possibly he might many a time feel a queer little sensation creeping up and down his spinal column as memory carried him back again to that slough, where the treacherous black mud was slowly ...
— Chums in Dixie - or The Strange Cruise of a Motorboat • St. George Rathborne
... try to be "careful and not captious," as you suggest, but more than all, I shall try not to run myself or my cause into the slough of political schemes or schemers. And I pray you, be prudent and conscientious, and do not surrender one iota of true principle or of our philosophy of reform to aid ...
— The Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony (Volume 1 of 2) • Ida Husted Harper
... almost unbearable. The pure unspoilt passion of it—the careless, confident joy—seemed to make an outcast of her, as she sat there in the dark, dragged back by the shock and horror of Delane's appearance into the slime and slough of old memories, and struggling with them in vain. Yes, she was "damaged goods"—she was unfit to marry George Ellesborough. But she would marry him! She set her teeth—clinging to him with all the energy of a woman's deepening and maturing consciousness. She had been a weak and self-willed ...
— Harvest • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... shaken, was jerked out of the saddle, and must have fallen, ignominiously, face downward in her Slough of Despond, but that Lenox,—reaching her in the nick of time—caught and crushed her in ...
— The Great Amulet • Maud Diver
... successful close. He wedded the Dowager Warwick, went to reside at Holland-house, and became miserable for life. She was a proud, imperious woman, who, instead of seeking to wean Addison from his convivial habits, (if such habits in any excessive measure were his,) drove him deeper into the slough by her bitter words and haughty carriage. The tavern, which had formerly been his occasional resort, became now his nightly refuge. In 1717 he received his highest civil honour, being made Secretary of State under Lord Sunderland; but, as usual, the slave soon appeared in the ...
— The Poetical Works of Addison; Gay's Fables; and Somerville's Chase • Joseph Addison, John Gay, William Sommerville
... and the duke lost more. His mind was jaded. He floundered—he made desperate efforts, but plunged deeper in the slough. Feeling that, to regain his ground, each card must tell, he acted on each as if it must win, and the consequences of this insanity (for a gamester at such a crisis is really insane) were, that his losses ...
— The Gaming Table: Its Votaries and Victims - Volume II (of II) • Andrew Steinmetz
... of a dress-coat at dinner, which I continued to don daily out of respect to Josephine's feelings. (This has been one of the few points in my behavior upon which she has ever laid particular stress, and I thank her here publicly for her pertinacity. It has saved me from the slough of utter carelessness.) Barring the single blue necktie and the pajamas, I drifted into and have stuck to blacks and browns and the least ostentatious cuts until my own wife and children have felt called ...
— The Opinions of a Philosopher • Robert Grant
... old as the first man who threw away his shield in battle, and yet, when it was over, gathered with the victors to share the spoils, as old as cowardice and lust in the human and animal world; only to cease from being when, perhaps, an enlarged and expanded humanity shall have cast the last slough of ...
— Woman and Labour • Olive Schreiner
... "is there any chance of my discarding this and getting out to-morrow?" He touched the handkerchief round his eyes. "It doesn't matter about the head bandages, but the eyes—can't I slough the wraps to-morrow? I feel scarcely any ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... yelping for Hardy's aid. He sprang down and unyoked them and over they scrambled and were gone, ringing like fire-bells. Outside the fence, both right and left, the ground was miry, yet for us it was best to struggle round through the bushy slough; which we had barely done when with sudden curses Hardy spurred forward. The younger dogs were off on a separate chase of their own. For at the river-bank the four negroes had divided by couples ...
— The Flower of the Chapdelaines • George W. Cable
... a theory, how they torture facts into their service! The lying whimsies of a few sick children, encouraged by foolish parents, and drawn out by superstitious neighbours, were sufficient to set a country in a flame. If, instead of commissioners as deeply sunk in the slough of ignorance as the people they were sent amongst, there had been deputed a few men firm in courage and clear in understanding, how different would have been the result! Some of the poor children who were burned would ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds • Charles Mackay
... away and blow up the hard rock. But what can be done against an amorphous mass which gives like a jelly, collapses under the least pressure, and retains no imprint of it? All thought and energy and everything disappeared in the slough. When a stone fell there were hardly more than a few ripples quivering on the surface of the gulf: the monster opened and shut its maw, and there was left no ...
— Jean-Christophe, Vol. I • Romain Rolland
... off, he commanded three of his men to follow hard after him, giving them marks whereby they should know him. Immediately they came up with the captain, before whom was a great slough or stank in the way, out of which three Galloway men had just drawn their horses. They cried to the captain, What would they do now! He answered them, What was the fray—he saw but three men coming upon ...
— Biographia Scoticana (Scots Worthies) • John Howie
... not been poor myself I should not have had sympathy with other men who were in the slough and couldn't get out," he said, speaking as much to himself ...
— A Countess from Canada - A Story of Life in the Backwoods • Bessie Marchant
... across a sea of mud worse than the Slough of Despond, of methodically advanced barrage fire, of quick work in trench fight, sufficed for the Canadians to take Regina trench—one of the smoothest bits of trench-taking that has been witnessed in the Somme drive. I saw the Canadians, ...
— America's War for Humanity • Thomas Herbert Russell
... from the great steamer Tennessee to the little stern-wheel boat as it slowly puffed across the bay through Carquinez straits and up the slough, turning and winding along, sometimes being caught by a sharp turn in the stream and one or two stops on the sand bars if the water was too low. We did not sleep much because everything was so strange and small. We were always in fear of some accident. The hours dragged slowly until morning, ...
— Sixty Years of California Song • Margaret Blake-Alverson
... lift that convention from the slough of sordidness to which the wiles and bribes of Dumont and his clique had lured it; to set it in the highroad of what he believed with all his intensity to be the high-road of right. Usually he spoke with feeling strongly repressed; but he knew ...
— The Cost • David Graham Phillips
... in her sorrow. But Elfride possessed special facilities for getting rid of trouble after a decent interval. Whilst a slow nature was imbibing a misfortune little by little, she had swallowed the whole agony of it at a draught and was brightening again. She could slough off a sadness and replace it by a hope as easily as a lizard renews ...
— A Pair of Blue Eyes • Thomas Hardy
... 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, ...
— The Little Lady of the Big House • Jack London
... fore-finger press the bowel into its proper place. Remember, if the above methods be observed, you cannot do the slightest injury to the bowel; and the sooner it be returned, the better it will be for the child; for if the bowel be allowed to remain long down, it may slough or mortify, and death may ensue. The nurse, every time he has a motion, must see that the bowel does not come down, and if it does, she ought instantly to return it. Moreover, the nurse should be careful not to allow the child to remain on his chair more ...
— Advice to a Mother on the Management of her Children • Pye Henry Chavasse
... the whimsies of such a half-baked notionist as I am. We are here in a most pleasant country, full of walks, and idle to our hearts desire. Taylor has dropt the London. It was indeed a dead weight. It has got in the Slough of Despond. I shuffle off my part of the pack, and stand like Xtian with light and merry shoulders. It had got silly, indecorous, pert, and every thing that is bad. Both our kind remembrances to Mrs. K. and yourself, and stranger's-greeting to Lucy—is ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb (Vol. 6) - Letters 1821-1842 • Charles and Mary Lamb
... (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 obscure portion of Georgia near Clayton Court-house, which is ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, October 1887 - Volume 1, Number 9 • Various
... lamp, and if beneath that gleam appears 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 ...
— Ferragus • Honore de Balzac
... cramp landed property were struck off. The Greek philosopher declared that if he had a standing-place he could move the earth. Give to capital the ground of perpetuity of tenure, whereon to plant its machinery, and it will soon lift this island from the slough of despond. Then may it be said more truly than Grattan said it in 1782, that Ireland had ...
— The Land-War In Ireland (1870) - A History For The Times • James Godkin
... half is slough, Half pine-tree forest: maples, scarlet oaks Breed o'er the river-beds; even Mincio chokes With sand the summer through: but 'tis morass In winter up to Mantua's walls. There was, Some thirty years before this evening's coil, One spot reclaimed from the surrounding spoil, Goito; just ...
— The Poetry Of Robert Browning • Stopford A. Brooke
... that? One vision of unseen things, rushing in, made small all the things that are seen. The poor old cripple, deformed and diseased, whose days must have been long a burden to her, was going even now to drop the slough of her mortality and to take on her the robes of light and the life that is all glory. What if my own life were barren for a while; then comes the end! What if I must be alone in my journey; I may ...
— Daisy in the Field • Elizabeth Wetherell
... law;—to know that license is the foe of freedom; and, though the sophistry of Passion in these books disgusted me, flowers of purest hue seemed to grow upon the dark and dirty ground. I thought she had cast aside the slough of her past life, and begun a new existence beneath the ...
— Woman in the Ninteenth Century - and Kindred Papers Relating to the Sphere, Condition - and Duties, of Woman. • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... 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 herself that ...
— Hidden Gold • Wilder Anthony
... 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 was something in our silence as dismal and more hopeless ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland Volume 17 • Alexander Leighton
... thus lives, in secret bless'd, Above him in the clouds doth rest An oak-wreath, verdant and sublime, Placed on his brow in after-time; While they are banish'd to the slough, Who their great ...
— The Poems of Goethe • Goethe
... 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 picture still ...
— My Days and Nights on the Battle-Field • Charles Carleton Coffin
... error that even the little children, the sucking babes, were hardened and desperate heretics. He affirmed that no man without Heaven's especial warrant should attempt their conversion lest while he lent his hand to draw them from the slough he should himself be precipitated ...
— Twice Told Tales • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... 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 ...
— First Across the Continent • Noah Brooks
... 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
... coy to Alfred's evident devotion—almost repellent at seasons. Had these rebuffs not alternated with attacks of remorse, during which the exceeding gentleness of her demeanor gradually pried the crushed hopes of her adorer out of the slough, and cleansed their drooping plumes of mud, the courtship would have fallen through, ere Mrs. Sutton could bring her skill to bear upon it. Guided, and yet soothed by her velvet rein, Rosa really seemed to become more steady. ...
— At Last • Marion Harland
... had passed through both and had emerged half cynical, half indifferent from the slough of an ...
— The Velvet Glove • Henry Seton Merriman
... next my route was ta'en, 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 ...
— Marmion: A Tale of Flodden Field • Walter Scott
... his shoulders like a top falling. His sense of beauty is all that is left of him, and that seems over ripe, like a fruit left too long in the sun. Materialism is the artist's curse. Their heads are in the clouds and their feet are in the slough.—Pah!" ...
— The Black Cross • Olive M. Briggs
... pass briefly over the next few years. I continued to sink deeper and deeper into the slough. I knew all the drugstore clerks in New York by their first names, and they called me by mine. I no longer even had to specify the abomination I desired. I simply handed the man my ten cent check and said: "The ...
— A Wodehouse Miscellany - Articles & Stories • P. G. Wodehouse
... only a better start. James Edward Oglethorpe conceived another settlement in America, and for colonists he would have all these down-trodden and oppressed. He would gather, if he might, only those who when helped would help themselves—who when given opportunity would rise out of old slough and briar. He was personally open to the appeal of still another class of unfortunate men. He had seen upon the Continent the distress of the poor and humble Protestants in Catholic countries. Folk of this kind—from France, from Germany—had been going in a thin stream for ...
— Pioneers of the Old South - A Chronicle of English Colonial Beginnings, Volume 5 In - The Chronicles Of America Series • Mary Johnston
... David Slac Benjamin Slade Thomas Slager John Slane Jean Louis Slarick Measer Slater Matthew Slaughter John Slee Thomas Slewman Samuel Slide Joseph Slight Josiah Slikes Christopher Sloakum Edward Sloan Timothy Sloan Andrew Sloeman Thomas Slough Ebenezer Slow Isaac Slowell William Slown Henry Sluddard Samuel Slyde Richard Slykes William Smack Joseph Small Robert Smallpiece John Smallwood (2) Peter Smart John Smight William Smiley Abraham Smith Alexander Smith Allan ...
— American Prisoners of the Revolution • Danske Dandridge
... rawhide, which were drawn by a single horse or ox, and carried a load of from 800 to 1,000 pounds. These vehicles were admirably adapted to the country, which was in a perfectly natural state, without roads of any kind, except the trail worn by the carts. They could easily pass over a slough that would obstruct any other forms of wheeled carriage, and one man could drive four or five of them, each being hitched behind the other. They were readily constructed on the border, by the unskilled half-breeds, where iron was unobtainable. This trade, with an occasional arrival of dog ...
— The History of Minnesota and Tales of the Frontier • Charles E. Flandrau
... I got on the Northern Belle, a fine boat, one of my children was taken with croup. Dr. N——, a Universalist minister, got off at Dubuque and bought medicine for me. This saved the child, but he was sick all the way. We were stuck in Beef Slough for several days. I never left the cabin as my child needed me, but some time during the first day a boat from St. Paul was stuck there too, so near us that passengers passed from one boat to the other all day. ...
— Old Rail Fence Corners - The A. B. C's. of Minnesota History • Various
... at Slough; and Lady Betty herself, and one of the Miss Montagues, with proper equipages, will be at Reading to receive you; and carry you directly to the seat of the former: for I have expressly stipulated, that the wretch himself shall not come into your ...
— Clarissa, Volume 7 • Samuel Richardson
... lose, as February was nearly over. I took a steerage passage to San Francisco, resolving that I would mend my fortunes. It is so easy to drift. I was already in the social slough, a hobo and an outcast. I saw that as long as I remained friendless and unknown nothing but degraded toil was open to me. Surely I could climb up, but was it worth while? A snug farm in the Northwest awaited me. I would work my way back there, and arrive decently clad. Then none ...
— The Trail of '98 - A Northland Romance • Robert W. Service
... have thought it faint-hearted to shrink at every little molehill of difficulty; she had plenty of what the boys call pluck (no word is more eloquent than that), and a fund of quiet humor that tided her safely over many a slough of despond. If any one could have read Bessie's thoughts a few minutes after the laboring engine had ceased to work, they would have been as follows, with little staccato movements ...
— Our Bessie • Rosa Nouchette Carey |
