"Slough" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... out haying. It was noon, and his dinner hour. He and his old collie dog, General, were taking their leisure on the slope of Red Willow slough, while the horses, relieved of their bits and traces, were nibbling at the succulent roots of the grass over which the ...
— The Watchers of the Plains - A Tale of the Western Prairies • Ridgewell Cullum
... gazing on the divine lineaments of the risen Christ. And this 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, silver mail. The whole ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet
... but were embodied in the knowledge of agriculture and the arts which, adopted by the people, made possible later the German civilization. The old rescue mission sought to yank the sinner out of the slough of despond, the social settlement seeks to help him who has fallen in the contest of life or him to whom the opportunity has not been offered, to climb, recognizing that morality and religion attend, not recede progress. The old charity gave alms and the country was ...
— The Negro Farmer • Carl Kelsey
... had slipped away, washed from the stone core with which it was faced at this point, by a slow and neglected percolation of water. Had he walked on therefore, he would have fallen his own height or more into a slough of mud, whence he might, or might not have been able to extricate himself. As it was, however, by such light as remained he could crawl upon the coping of the stonework which was still held in place with old struts ...
— Lysbeth - A Tale Of The Dutch • H. Rider Haggard
... "When shall this slough of sense be cast, This dust of thoughts be laid at last, The man of flesh and soul be slain And the ...
— A Shropshire Lad • A. E. Housman
... and wisdom herself are the purgation of them. The founders of the mysteries would appear to have had a real meaning, and were not talking nonsense when they intimated in a figure long ago that he who passes unsanctified and uninitiated into the world below will lie in a slough, but that he who arrives there after initiation and purification will dwell with the gods. For 'many,' as they say in the mysteries, 'are the thyrsus-bearers, but few are the mystics,'—meaning, as I interpret the words, 'the true philosophers.' In the number ...
— Phaedo - The Last Hours Of Socrates • Plato
... lowest social strata a hell upon earth; sacrificing his last chances of health and life to put down with a strong hand the robbers who infested the streets of London; and clinging with affection to his wife and children. He never got fairly clear of that lamentable slough of despond into which his follies had plunged him. His moral tone lost what delicacy it had once possessed; he had not the strength which enabled Johnson to gain elevation even from the temptations which then beset the unlucky 'author by profession.' Some literary hacks of ...
— Hours in a Library - New Edition, with Additions. Vol. II (of 3) • Leslie Stephen
... classes and masses. The masses is muck; that's my motter, as who should have learnt it more betterer? BUMBLE could hopen the heyes of them BOOTHSES, JOHN BURNSES, ancetterer. Snow? Is it me brings the snow, and the hice, and the peasoupy slushiness, Making the subbubs one slough? No! The Age is give over to gushiness. Parties as writes to the Papers is snivellers, yus, every one of 'em, Barring the few as cracks jokes, though I own as I can't see the fun of 'em. Look at "UCALEGON," now, him as writes ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 100., Jan. 10, 1891 • Various
... Jerry Juniper; not, however, the Jerry of the gipsies, but a much more showy-looking personage. Jerry was no longer a gentleman of "three outs"—the difficulty would now have been to say what he was "without." Snakelike he had cast his slough, and rejoiced in new and brilliant investiture. His were "speaking garments, speaking pockets too." His linen was of the finest, his hose of the smartest. Gay rings glittered on his fingers; a crystal snuff-box underwent graceful manipulation; a handsome gold repeater ...
— Rookwood • William Harrison Ainsworth
... cream of the insurgents and revolutionaries of genius; and here the shy and reticent schoolgirl with the mark of the churchly checkrein fresh upon her, was free to browse, for her cousin had no slightest notion of playing censor. Mrs. Baker thought that the sooner one was allowed to slough off the gaucheries of the Young Person, the better. She did not gauge the real and tumultuous depths of feeling concealed under the young ...
— Slippy McGee, Sometimes Known as the Butterfly Man • Marie Conway Oemler
... It's just like exercising your muscles in a gymnasium. You can lift twice or three times as much after you've been in training a month as you could before. And I can see that it's going to be just so with your son. His going through college won't hurt him,—he'll soon slough all that off,—and his bringing up won't; don't be anxious about it. I noticed in the army that some of the fellows that had the most go-ahead were fellows that hadn't ever had much more to do than girls before the war broke out. Your son ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... from any other work ever written on Will Power. The culmination of over twenty years of research and study, it deals in simple language with the possibilities of every man—how you and everyone else may rise from the slough of mediocrity to the pinnacle of ...
— The Silence • David V. Bush
... on his bed that night, listening to the snoring of the half-breeds on the floor, to the faint murmur of a wind that stirred the drooping boughs of the spruce, he reviewed his enthusiasms and his tenuous plans—and slipped so far into the slough of despond as to call himself a misguided fool for rearing so fine a structure of dreams upon so slender a foundation as this appointment to a mission in the outlying places. He blamed the Board of Missions. Obviously that august circle of middle-aged and worthy ...
— Burned Bridges • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... day and 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
... a degree 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 ...
— Manual of Surgery - Volume First: General Surgery. Sixth Edition. • Alexis Thomson and Alexander Miles
... from the sea, and a couple of miles (22) perhaps from Lechaeum. Their friends in Lechaeum, perceiving them, embarked in boats and sailed round until they were immediately under the hillock. And now, in the very slough of despair, being so sorely troubled as man after man dropped dead, and unable to strike a blow, to crown their distress they saw the enemy's heavy infantry advancing. Then they took to flight; some of them threw themselves into the sea; others—a mere handful—escaped with ...
— Hellenica • Xenophon
... specially deep water-hole, and with ducked heads and bodies bent double (the Germans were only two hundred yards on the other side of the parapet) walked on dry earth for at least ten paces. The officer's laughter was loud at the corner of the next traverse, when there was an abrupt descent into a slough of despond. ...
— Now It Can Be Told • Philip Gibbs
... 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, ...
— Appreciations of Richard Harding Davis • Various
... by the intelligence that Sir George had advanced that morning to attack the Nek. To return was almost impossible, since both horses and travellers were pretty nearly knocked up. Also, anybody who has travelled with his family in summer-time over the awful track of alternate slough and boulders between Maritzburg and Newcastle, known in the Colony as a road, will understand, that at the time, the adventurous voyagers would far rather risk being shot than face a ...
— Cetywayo and his White Neighbours - Remarks on Recent Events in Zululand, Natal, and the Transvaal • H. Rider Haggard
... a little: going to Portsmouth first, and to Slough on our return; we were to have gone by Slough, but the Prince of Denmark and the King going to Ascot took up all horses and beds, so we were obliged to go ...
— The Life and Letters of Maria Edgeworth, Vol. 2 • Maria Edgeworth
... River and the dead hour of night, and those slowly moving boats of hushed heroes creeping across the waters to where the mighty Quebec hills gloomed hugely out. The other is of that quiet church-yard in England, at Stoke Pogis, near Slough, where pilgrims from many parts of the world still wander through the pleasant Buckinghamshire fields to stand where ...
— A History of the Four Georges, Volume II (of 4) • Justin McCarthy
... wishes to assimilate to its parent, and to reflect with a true filial resemblance the beauteous countenance of British liberty, are we to turn to them the shameful parts of our constitution? are we to give them our weakness for their strength, our opprobrium for their glory, and the slough of slavery, which we are not able to work off, to ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. II. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... ill-boding wings of a screech owl,[36] together with its flesh; and the entrails of an ambiguous wolf, that was wont to change its appearance of a wild beast into {that of} a man. Nor is there wanting there the thin scaly slough of the Cinyphian water-snake,[37] and the liver of the long-lived stag;[38] to which, besides, she adds the bill and head of a crow that had sustained {an existence of} nine ages. When, with these and a thousand other things without a name, the barbarian {princess} has completed ...
— The Metamorphoses of Ovid - Vol. I, Books I-VII • Publius Ovidius Naso
... fables. It was woman, charming woman, that led unpolished man forth from the forests and the dens, and taught him to bend before thy shrine, humanity! See how the face of nature changes! Where late the slough mantled, or the serpent hissed among the briars and the reeds, all is pasture and fertility. The cottages arise. The shepherds assume the guise of gentleness and simplicity. They attire themselves with care, they braid the garland, and they tune the pipe. Wherefore do they ...
— Imogen - A Pastoral Romance • William Godwin
... despair, as bound with them. Hence his power as a preacher; hence the wonderful adaptation of his great allegory to all the variety of spiritual conditions. Like Fearing, he had lain a month in the Slough of Despond, and had played, like him, the long melancholy bass of spiritual heaviness. With Feeble-mind, he had fallen into the hands of Slay-good, of the nature of Man-eaters: and had limped along his difficult way upon ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... of this action and recognized that his country could not emerge from the slough of revolution without American assistance, he was depressed at the condition of affairs, and in view of his physical feebleness felt himself unequal to the task of guiding the country through impending difficulties. He therefore on May 6, 1916, resigned the presidency of the Republic, ...
— Santo Domingo - A Country With A Future • Otto Schoenrich
... was stamped as authoritative.[13] On Whit-Sunday 1782, William and Caroline Herschel played and sang in public for the last time in St. Margaret's Chapel, Bath; in August of the same year the household was moved to Datchet, near Windsor, and on April 3, 1786, to Slough. Here happiness and honours crowded on the fortunate discoverer. In 1788 he married Mary, only child of James Baldwin, a merchant of the city of London, and widow of Mr. John Pitt—a lady whose domestic virtues were enhanced by the possession of a large jointure. The ...
— A Popular History of Astronomy During the Nineteenth Century - Fourth Edition • Agnes M. (Agnes Mary) Clerke
... a pleasant drive. May in Ireland! What does it mean? It means coming out of a dark tunnel into blinding sunshine; it means casting off the slough of winter, and gliding with crest erect and fresh habiliments under leafy trees and by the borders of shining seas, the crab-apple blossoms, pink and white, scenting the air over your head, and primroses and violets dappling the turf beneath your feet; it means lambs frisking around ...
— My New Curate • P.A. Sheehan
... over his paper, watching the languid breath that showed how deep the hurt had been, the maimed body, the face outwardly cool, watchful, reticent as before. He fancied the slough of disappointment into which God had crushed the soul of this man: would he struggle out? Would he take Miss Herne as the first step in his stairway, or be content to be flung down in vigorous manhood to the depth of impotent poverty? He could not tell if the quiet on Holmes's face were ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 52, February, 1862 • Various
... rang true. The fellow rolled to earth mortally wounded; but Lewis felt the whiz of a bullet past his own head. Having captured more horses than they had lost, the white men at once mounted and rode for their lives through river and slough, sixty miles without halt; for the Minnetarees would assuredly rally a larger band of warriors to their aid. A pause of an hour to refresh the horses and a wilder ride by moonlight put forty more ...
— Pathfinders of the West • A. C. Laut
... (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 ...
— A Short Biographical Dictionary of English Literature • John W. Cousin
... have no aspiration even to be free," "they are content to wallow in the slough of despond." The {adikoi} (unjust) correspond to the {dikaioi} (just), {akrateis} (incontinent) to the {sophoi} (wise) (Breit. cf. "Mem." III. ix. 4, {sophian de kai sophrosunen ou diorizen}), {andrapododeis} (servile) to the {kasmioi}, ...
— Hiero • Xenophon
... "he would say you were Christian floundering in the Slough of Despond, and deeming yourself one of its ...
— A Reputed Changeling • Charlotte M. Yonge
... nation must have its seers and prophets, lest it forget its high calling to press forward, and so sink in the slough of contented ease. The preacher of ideals is the architect of a nation's hopes and desires, and the fulfilment of these hopes and desires will depend on the wisdom of its political builders—the practical ...
— The Rise of the Democracy • Joseph Clayton
... spare The moderate means I owe to his wise care, 'Twas, "See the life that son of Albius leads! Observe that Barrus, vilest of ill weeds! Plain beacons these for heedless youth, whose taste Might lead them else a fair estate to waste:" If lawless love were what he bade me shun, "Avoid Scetanius' slough," his words would run: "Wise men," he'd add, "the reasons will explain Why you should follow this, from that refrain: For me, if I can train you in the ways Trod by the worthy folks of earlier ...
— The Satires, Epistles, and Art of Poetry • Horace
... our souls are strong enough To plunge into the crater of the Scheme — Triumphant in the flash there to redeem Love's handsel and forevermore to slough, Like cerements at a played-out masque, the rough And reptile skins of us whereon we set The stigma of scared years — are we to get Where atoms and ...
— The Children of the Night • Edwin Arlington Robinson
... To Scotland 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 all my wrongs, My blood is liquid flame! And ne'er the ...
— Marmion: A Tale of Flodden Field • Walter Scott
... that I believe we shall triumph. But whether we triumph or no, our life itself is a victory, for it is a life lived in the spirit. To shatter material bonds that we may bind closer the bonds of the soul, to slough dead husks that we may liberate living forms, to abolish institutions that we may evoke energies, to put off the material and put on the spiritual body, that, whether we fight with the tongue or the sword, is the inspiration of our movement, ...
— A Modern Symposium • G. Lowes Dickinson
... all so huge and strange, The solitary felt a hurried change Working within him into something dreary,— Vex'd like a morning eagle, lost, and weary, And purblind amid foggy, midnight wolds. But he revives at once: for who beholds New sudden things, nor casts his mental slough? Forth from a rugged arch, in the dusk below, 640 Came mother Cybele! alone—alone— In sombre chariot; dark foldings thrown About her majesty, and front death-pale, With turrets crown'd. Four maned lions ...
— Endymion - A Poetic Romance • John Keats
... Yellow Handkerchief took the tiller, issuing his orders in whispers; and from our position at the time, and from the alteration of the sail, which I could dimly make out above me as a blot against the stars, I knew the junk was being headed into the mouth of a small slough which emptied at that point into San ...
— Brown Wolf and Other Jack London Stories - Chosen and Edited By Franklin K. Mathiews • Jack London
... Smooth-it-away, "is the famous Slough of Despond—a disgrace to all the neighborhood; and the greater that it might so easily be converted ...
— Mosses from an Old Manse and Other Stories • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... to wheat, was the first crop which the Partridge brothers put in. The total yield was seven bushels, obtained from around the edges of a slough! ...
— Deep Furrows • Hopkins Moorhouse
... of the nation was again directed to Egypt the scene was transformed. It was as though at the touch of an angel the dark morasses of the Slough of Despond had been changed to the breezy slopes of the Delectable Mountains. The Khedive and his Ministers lay quiet and docile in the firm grasp of the Consul-General. The bankrupt State was spending surpluses upon internal improvement. The disturbed Irrigation ...
— The River War • Winston S. Churchill
... art—every one writes and reads and no one understands. Religion! Ah! Yes, religion; the world will be a blackened cinder or cometary gas before the love of God is stamped from its heart. But religion and art must go hand in hand. Divorced, art has fallen into the Slough of Despond; else has been transformed into an acrid poison wherewith men's souls are destroyed as if by a virulent absinthe. United with religion, art is purified. All art sprang from religion. All great ...
— Visionaries • James Huneker
... too, the case of an old woman murdered at Slough. Chief Detective-Inspector Bower, now head of the Port of London Authority police, ultimately arrested a man against whom there was nothing but suspicion, as apart from legal proof. And on the suspect was found a slip of crumpled paper ...
— Scotland Yard - The methods and organisation of the Metropolitan Police • George Dilnot
... drift away out of his acquaintance. He wanted especially to be with them in public places, and to see for himself, if possible, whether Cuckoo's accusation against Valentine were true. That a frightful change had taken place in Julian's life, and that he was rapidly sinking in a slough of wholly inordinate dissipation was clear enough. But did Valentine, this new, strange Valentine, lead him, or merely go with him, or stand aloof smiling at him and letting him take his own way like a foolish boy? ...
— Flames • Robert Smythe Hichens
... the handle of the Great Dipper reached the point agreed, the line of the Sioux clansmen crawled away from the fringe of trees and out into the cover of a little slough that made toward the village of tepees on wheels, a quarter of a mile in front of the village men arose out of the ground and shot into them. Five of their warriors fell. Tall men in the dark came out and counted coup on them, took off their war bonnets; took off ...
— The Covered Wagon • Emerson Hough
... and a bit of a smile continually bitten in as she regarded me. She seemed indeed like the very spirit of mischief, and, walking briskly in the room, had soon involved me in a kind of quarrel over nothing and (at the least) with nothing intended on my side. I was like Christian in the slough—the more I tried to clamber out upon the side, the deeper I became involved; until at last I heard her declare, with a great deal of passion, that she would take that answer at the hands of none, and I must down upon my knees ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 11 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... firm, who is unmoved, who never laughs, or apologizes, or deprecates, or makes concessions, or assents through good-nature, or goes abroad; who is not afraid of giving offense; "who answers you without supplication in his eye,"—in fact, who stands like a granite pillar amid the slough of life. You may wrestle with this man, he says, or swim with him, or lodge in the same chamber with him, or eat at the same table, and yet he is a thousand miles off, and can at any moment finish with you. He is a sheer precipice, is ...
— Birds and Poets • John Burroughs
... manner we call today for more faith in a way out of the slough of despond, more resolute endeavor to improve social and economic conditions. We beg the leaders of public opinion to pause before they condemn the efforts making to teach those means of social control which may build yet ...
— Euthenics, the science of controllable environment • Ellen H. Richards
... nation to private enterprise. However great the economies your contemporaries might have devised in the consumption of products, and however marvelous the progress of mechanical invention, they could never have raised themselves out of the slough of poverty so long as ...
— Looking Backward - 2000-1887 • Edward Bellamy
... without a deal of labour. This proverb is very true, as I know by my own experience, for I never took a short cut in my life, and I have taken many in my wanderings, without falling down, getting into a slough, or losing my way. On the present occasion I lost my way, and wandered about for nearly two hours amidst rocks, thickets, and precipices, without being able to find it. The temperance woman, however, spoke nothing but the truth when she said I should see some ...
— Wild Wales - Its People, Language and Scenery • George Borrow
... to be born from me and from her." As time went on, the finding of a serpent skin around Nero's neck when he was but a boy caused the seers to say: "He shall acquire great power from the aged man." Serpents are thought to slough off their old age with their old skin, and ...
— Dio's Rome, Volume V., Books 61-76 (A.D. 54-211) • Cassius Dio
... saving grace lay in her sense of humor. It had saved her from many dangers, from none more insidious than that lurking in five years' experience as a successful author. It had rescued her from the slough of despond when unappreciative publishers rejected her most ambitious attempts; it had come to her aid also when a southern admirer whose intentions were better than his rhetoric, sent her a manuscript ode constructed in her honor. She had won success in her profession; but she ...
— Phebe, Her Profession - A Sequel to Teddy: Her Book • Anna Chapin Ray
... settler would fence off the hunter's game preserve into farms and cities. A rare glamour lay over the plains {58} that June, not the less rare because hope beckoned the travellers. The unfenced prairie billowed to the horizon a sea of green, diversified by the sky-blue waters of slough and lake, and decked with the hues of gorgeous flowers—the prairie rose, fragrant, tender, elusive, and fragile as the English primrose; the blood-red tiger-lily; the brown windflower with its corn-tassel; the heavy wax cups of the sedgy water-lily, growing ...
— The Cariboo Trail - A Chronicle of the Gold-fields of British Columbia • Agnes C. Laut
... Napel[TR: Possibly Kapel] Slough on Dr. West's place. I wanted to rent but Dr. West wouldn't advance me anything unless he took a mortgage on my place; so I wouldn't stay there. I chartered a car and took my things back to Brinkley at a cost of ten dollars. I stayed around Brinkley ...
— Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States - Volume II. Arkansas Narratives. Part I • Work Projects Administration
... deeper and deeper in the Slough of Despond, the firing of a musket, and the shriek of the man who was struck, attracted my attention. Looking towards the opposite end of the pen I saw a guard bringing his still smoking musket to a "recover arms," ...
— Andersonville, complete • John McElroy
... well-disciplined mind. He resolved, that, let it cost what it might in the shape of loss of time and trial of temper, he would leave no stone unturned, and spare no pains, to deliver his friend of yesterday from the slough into which he was plunging. How he might best work for this end occupied his thoughts as ...
— Tom Brown at Oxford • Thomas Hughes
... did not come, think of the living space and the vast new opportunities—not the least of which would be the opportunity to achieve peaceful living in a virgin world, where the old hatreds would slough off and new concepts have a chance ...
— Project Mastodon • Clifford Donald Simak
... 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. ...
— The Alaskan • James Oliver Curwood
... absurd,—and all things, both in nature and art, took on a sombre colouring, and the majestic pageant of the world's progress appeared no more than a shadow too vain and futile to be worth while watching as it passed. Into a Slough of Despond, such as Solomon experienced when he wrote his famous "Ecclesiastes," Aubrey sank unconsciously, and,—to do him justice,—most unwillingly. His was naturally a bright, vivacious, healthy nature—but he was over- sensitively organised,—his nerves did not resemble iron ...
— The Master-Christian • Marie Corelli
... of some of the many streams which ran from the hills down to the bay, and which were filled in as the town grew—for instance, the Grand Opera House was built over the bed of St. Anne's Creek. A bog, slough and marsh, known as the Pipeville Slough, was the ground on which the City Hall was built, and which was originally a burying ground. Sand from the western shore had blown over and drifted into the marsh and hardened ...
— The San Francisco Calamity • Various
... side, as I had seen her not long ago, with her white, drawn face, and staring eyes, dumb with an agony of fear. Her life was bidding fair to be knit with his,— what Upas tree of horror was rooted in his very bones? The thought that her sweet purity was likely to be engulfed in a devil's slough in which he was swallowing was not to be endured. As I realised that the man was more than my match at the game which I was playing—in which such vital interests were at stake!—my hands itched to clutch him by the throat, and try ...
— The Beetle - A Mystery • Richard Marsh
... mercy!" Dick buries his face in his hands, as he clings desperately to the smooth white-oak trunk. A strange, wild strain, like a detached chord of a vesper melody, sounds above him! It is the whippoorwill—steadily, continuously, entrancingly the dulcet measure is taken up and echoed, until the slough of despond seems transformed into a varying diapason of melancholy minstrelsy. He dares not raise his head. It will vanish if he moves. He crouches, panting, almost exultant, in the sense of recovered ...
— The Iron Game - A Tale of the War • Henry Francis Keenan
... their composure; in order to appreciate the humour of the sally it was necessary to know that Miss Vincent had "come a cropper" at the last meet of the Long Island Hunt Club, and been extricated from a slough ...
— The Metropolis • Upton Sinclair
... the eyes stood out in the form of naked globes on the forehead. When born, the corneas of both heads were transparent, but then became opaque from exposure. The brain of the supernumerary head was quite visible from without, and was covered by a membrane beginning to slough. On the right side of the head was a rudimentary external ear. The nurse said that when the child sucked some milk regurgitated through the supernumerary mouth. The great physiologic interest in this case lies in the fact that every movement and every act of the natural face was simultaneously ...
— Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine • George M. Gould
... 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
... to regard the present works in progress as my own. I think I saw two things:—(1) That he is desirous to return into the management of his own affairs without Cadell, if he can. (2) That he relies on my connection as the way of helping us out of the slough. Indeed he said he was ruined utterly without my countenance. I certainly will befriend him if I can, but Constable without Cadell is like getting the clock without the pendulum—the one having the ingenuity, the other the caution of the business. ...
— The Journal of Sir Walter Scott - From the Original Manuscript at Abbotsford • Walter Scott
... most blessed and beneficent spirit that lifteth the fallen from the slough, that bindeth up the broken heart, that cheereth the sad and downcast and maketh the oft-defeated bold and courageous to attempt ...
— Black Bartlemy's Treasure • Jeffrey Farnol
... rode home beside Happy Jack and tried to lift him out of the slough of despond. But Happy refused to budge, mentally, an inch. He rode humped in the saddle like a calf in its first blizzard, and he was discouragingly unresponsive; except once, when Weary reminded him that the tableau would need no rehearsing and that it would only last a ...
— The Lonesome Trail and Other Stories • B. M. Bower
... should have apparently condemned myself by showing how anxious I was to get it. And you know I could not have explained all this before him and you. You would have thrown up the stall in disgust." Would that he had! That was Mark's wish now,—his futile wish. In what a slough of despond had he come to wallow in consequence of his folly on that night at Gatherum Castle! He had then done a silly thing, and was he now to rue it by almost total ruin? He was sickened also with all these lies. His very soul was dismayed by the dirt through which he ...
— Framley Parsonage • Anthony Trollope
... I consented to go to San Jose and get some for them. I engaged Mr. Watts, who had a little schooner that would carry about six tons. He was captain and I was super-cargo, and we made the trip down in about one day. I found what I wanted on the banks of a slough, loaded the schooner and returned to San Francisco. While in San Jose I came across two young ladies. I had a very pleasant chat with them. I learned later on that they were the daughters of Mr. Burnett, who became the first Governor of California. I heard no more of them until 1910, when ...
— California 1849-1913 - or the Rambling Sketches and Experiences of Sixty-four - Years' Residence in that State. • L. H. Woolley
... him stronger in order that he might go away without delay. She only knew that every moment of the next few weeks was going to be full of a greater happiness than she had ever tasted. As we get deeper into the slough of life most of us learn to be thankful that the future is hidden—some of us recognise the wisdom and the mercy which decree that even the ...
— With Edged Tools • Henry Seton Merriman
... only seek to overwhelm the accused with their votes.(2) Nor have I forgotten how Cleon treated me because of my comedy last year;(3) he dragged me before the Senate and there he uttered endless slanders against me; 'twas a tempest of abuse, a deluge of lies. Through what a slough of mud he dragged me! I almost perished. Permit me, therefore, before I speak, to dress in the manner ...
— The Acharnians • Aristophanes
... "It matters a lot. The point is that it isn't you at all. Some day you'll slough it the way a butterfly ...
— The Sheriff's Son • William MacLeod Raine
... and the marts of commerce. Save us from such a war! Let not the mad anger of such a people be aroused. And, gentlemen, if war comes it must be long and terrible. You will see both parties rise in their majesty at both ends of the line. They will slough off every other consideration and devote themselves, with terrible energy, to the work of death. Oh ye! who bring such a calamity as this upon this once happy country! Pause, gentlemen, before you do it, and think of the fearful accountability ...
— A Report of the Debates and Proceedings in the Secret Sessions of the Conference Convention • Lucius Eugene Chittenden
... the soil and cultivate it to the best advantage, without paying rent, agriculture, even though it should enjoy—which can by no means be taken for granted—a momentary prosperity, would soon fall back into the slough in which it finds itself to-day. The whole thing would have to be begun over ...
— The Conquest of Bread • Peter Kropotkin
... more and more unfit for the needs of the family, and in June, 1785, a move was made to Clay Hall, in Old Windsor. The residence here was but short, and finally a last change was made to Slough ...
— Sir William Herschel: His Life and Works • Edward Singleton Holden
... timid companions, He prayed to the Virgin on high, and she led him forth from the forest; For angels she sent him as men— in the forms of the tawny Dakotas, And they led his feet from the fen, from the slough of despond and the desert, Half dead in a dismal morass, as they followed the red-deer they found him, In the midst of the mire and the grass, and mumbling "Te Deum laudamus." "Unktomee[72]—Ho!" ...
— The Feast of the Virgins and Other Poems • H. L. Gordon
... piece of flying iron, silent under the shock of news that his sight was gone for ever; the feeling that these men were suffering on our account, and the realisation that every one of us has had his share in the responsibility for the whole, makes a load that one cannot, or should not, slough away ...
— The Relief of Mafeking • Filson Young
... 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
... made everything beautiful in his time," murmured Grande, partly because, gazing at the distant prospect, she thought so, and partly as a praiseworthy attempt, in her turn, to pluck us out of the slough into ...
— Gala-days • Gail Hamilton
... nightingale with feathers new she sings; The turtle to her make hath told her tale. Summer is come, for every spray now springs: The hart hath hung his old head on the pale; The buck in brake his winter coat he flings; The fishes flete with new repaired scale. The adder all her slough away she slings; The swift swallow pursueth the flies smale; The busy bee her honey now she mings; Winter is worn that was the flowers' bale. And thus I see among these pleasant things Each care decays, and yet my sorrow springs. HENRY HOWARD, EARL ...
— The Principles of English Versification • Paull Franklin Baum
... series of paintings for their cloister. To this refuge, therefore, I repaired, completing, in two years, thirty-one great frescoes for little more than my sustenance. Yea; and for my belly's sake I might have accepted the life of a cowled monk, had not Chigi in the nick of time drawn me from that slough with the announcement that Peruzzi had completed the building of his villa, and that it was now ...
— Romance of Roman Villas - (The Renaissance) • Elizabeth W. (Elizbeth Williams) Champney
... steeling the heart. Such grace as was visible in it, made it the uglier, showing how warped and perverted all things good by nature were become. The maidenly bosom bared to this, the pretty almost-child's head thus distracted, the delicate foot mincing in this slough of blood and dirt, were types of ...
— A Tale of Two Cities - A Story of the French Revolution • Charles Dickens
... problem of the victuals is solved. When I compare the larval slough sticking to the Scolia's cocoons with the Cetonia-larvae or, better, with the skin cast by these larvae, under cover of the cocoon, at the moment of the nymphal transformation, I establish an absolute identity. The ...
— More Hunting Wasps • J. Henri Fabre
... human beings sink to the depths in which John B. Gough found himself at the age of twenty-five years. By sheer force of will he raised himself from the slough in which he wallowed, till he attained a position honored among men, and performed a service ...
— Stories of Achievement, Volume III (of 6) - Orators and Reformers • Various
... directly; whom I propose to meet in person at Slough; either to proceed onward to London with a joyful heart, or to return back to M. ...
— Clarissa, Volume 6 (of 9) - The History Of A Young Lady • Samuel Richardson
... been impressed with the very different difficulties the soul of man has to encounter nowadays from those so triumphantly overcome by Christian in the great work of John Bunyan in the first part of "The Pilgrim's Progress." He cannot now get out of the Slough of Despond by planting his foot on the stepping stones of the Promises. He cannot, like Hopeful, pluck from his bosom the Key of Promise which opens every lock in Doubting Castle when the two pilgrims are shut in it by Giant Despair, when they are caught ...
— An Autobiography • Catherine Helen Spence
... the reward, Ben kept the runaway over there in the marshes all summer. The negro would fish and Ben would carry him scraps of other food. Then, by and by, it leaked out. Some wood-choppers went on a hunt for the fugitive, and chased him to what was called "Bird Slough." There trying to cross a drift ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... able to have their loads of grain carried over this dreadful place for three or four cents a bushel was to the farmers of the Rock River and Fox River valleys—who, having hauled their wheat from forty to eighty miles to this Slough of Despond, frequently could get it no farther—a privilege which they soon began to appreciate. The road had all it could do, at once. It was a success. There was now no difficulty in getting the stock taken up, and before long it was finished to Fox River. It paid from fifteen ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 7, No. 43, May, 1861 • Various
... covered with a thick slough of oil and varnish (the perishable vehicle of the English school), like an envelope of goldbeaters' skin, so as to ...
— Table-Talk - Essays on Men and Manners • William Hazlitt
... one as the many dull would meanly scorn and the few wise nobly envy. For him love comes like a mighty wind of fire and burns his heart clean. He may have been stained and spotted in the slough of life, but when the ...
— The Proud Prince • Justin Huntly McCarthy
... your pants leg. We going to stand here all day! I move we get a hike on down to the boat. Maybe we can hitch on behind Steve Porter's launch—he's going up past Dead Tree Point—and that'll save us the long pull through the slough." ...
— The Boy Scouts of the Air on Lost Island • Gordon Stuart
... newspaper. Even then, a vague forewarning of what Mannion's inexplicable reserve boded towards me, crossed my mind. There was yet more difficulty, danger, and horror to be faced, than I had hitherto confronted. The slough of degradation and misery into which I had fallen, had its worst perils yet in ...
— Basil • Wilkie Collins
... Manse, Vol. II.] where Hawthorne has preserved Shelley's skylark and the steed Rosinante, with Hebe's cup and many another impalpable marvel, in the warden-ship of the Wandering Jew. So, too, when we read Great-Heart's analysis of Mr. Fearing, this expression, "He had, I think, a Slough of Despond in his mind, a slough that he carried everywhere with him," we can detect the root of symbolical conceptions like that of "The Bosom Serpent." [Footnote: Mosses from an Old Manse, Vol. II.] I cannot ...
— A Study Of Hawthorne • George Parsons Lathrop
... correspondence, and, simple though it sounds to hear it, it cannot be learned by attendance at a few clinics. It is delicate in this sense, that if it is not rightly performed in the individual case the glands will slough. That means loss of time, loss of temper, and the waste of a perfectly good pair of young goat-glands. Another very important thing which his experiments have taught Dr. Brinkley is this: the glands on being removed from ...
— The Goat-gland Transplantation • Sydney B. Flower
... carry the Cross to the heathen. In his old age abandoned to die, in the swamps, by his timid companions, He prayed to the Virgin on high, and she led him forth from the forest; For angels she sent him as men —in the forms of the tawny Dakotas, And they led his feet from the fen, —from the slough of despond and the desert. Half-dead in a dismal morass, as they followed the red-deer they found him, In the midst of the mire and the grass, and mumbling "Te Deum laudamus." "Unktomee [72]—Ho!" muttered the braves, for they deemed ...
— Legends of the Northwest • Hanford Lennox Gordon
... little one, thou whose business it is to make the house merry, again hast thou been wallowing, in spite of a thousand prohibitions, in that slough of melancholy, whence thou hast already fished out Bertha, and come back with thy tresses dishevelled, like a girl who has been ill-treated by a regiment of soldiers! Where are thy golden aiglets and bells, ...
— Droll Stories, Volume 3 • Honore de Balzac
... half an hour we had left the tall matama and fields of water-melons, cucumbers, and manioc; and, crossing a reedy slough, were in an open forest of ebony and calabash. In its depths are deer in plentiful numbers, and at night it is visited by the hippopotami of the Kingani for the sake of its grass. In another hour we had emerged from the woods, and were looking down upon the broad valley ...
— How I Found Livingstone • Sir Henry M. Stanley
... or more; yet if there's roast 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 ...
— The Farringdons • Ellen Thorneycroft Fowler
... territory 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 ...
— The Poetry Of Robert Browning • Stopford A. Brooke
... got into this slough? When was it that I came down from the Mount where I had seen the Lord, and came back to make these miserable, petty things as much my business as ever? Oh, these fluctuations in my religious life amaze me! I cannot, ...
— Stepping Heavenward • Mrs. E. Prentiss
... You wonder why such a seeming waste of power is allowed, till you see one of the carts stick fast in a mud-hole, and discover that even in the West Indies there is a good reason for everything, and that the Creoles know their own business best. For the wheelers, being in the slough with the cart, are powerless; but the leaders, who have scrambled through, are safe on dry land at the end of their long traces, and haul out their brethren, cart and all, amid the yells, and I am sorry to say blows, of the black gentlemen in attendance. But cane cutting is altogether a busy, ...
— At Last • Charles Kingsley
... the triennial Eton ceremony, the chief part of which took place at Salt Hill (ad montem), near Slough, was abolished in 1847.] ...
— The Letters of Queen Victoria, Vol 2 (of 3), 1844-1853 • Queen Victoria
... unerring judge, seems best, and be careless about 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 ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb (Vol. 6) - Letters 1821-1842 • Charles and Mary Lamb
... in an Iowa slough! Yes, but more than that. This is the first sign of the resurrection which we call spring. When the pilgrims to the Eleusinian mysteries were ridiculed because of the commonplace nature of their symbols, they rightly replied that more than that which met the eye existed in the sacred things; ...
— Some Winter Days in Iowa • Frederick John Lazell |
