Diccionario ingles.comDiccionario ingles.com
Synonyms, antonyms, pronunciation

  Home
English Dictionary      examples: 'day', 'get rid of', 'New York Bay'




More "Mire" Quotes from Famous Books



... The all-powerful and terrible mystery will not be defied. It produces result. You are here. Do I dare to lose caste? Yes. Do I dare to be your mistress—your concubine—your slave—your chattel? Joyfully. Gwynplaine, I am woman. Woman is clay longing to become mire. I want to despise myself. That lends a zest to pride. The alloy of greatness is baseness. They combine in perfection. Despise me, you who are despised. Nothing can be better. Degradation on degradation. What joy! I pluck the double blossom of ignominy. Trample ...
— The Man Who Laughs • Victor Hugo

... sudden discovery that his friends at Rome were almost powerless to help him. They could not parade a question of principle when it came to persons; a kingdom in Numidia was more easily defended than its king; every act of assistance which they rendered plunged them deeper in the mire of suspicion; it was a time to walk warily, for those who had no judge in their own conscience found one in the keen scrutiny of a hostile world. But the danger was too great to permit Jugurtha to relax his efforts through the failure of his friends. He appealed to his own ...
— A History of Rome, Vol 1 - During the late Republic and early Principate • A H.J. Greenidge

... home to Fremont, wet with rain and splashed with mire, for it was thawing fast and he had ridden far. He sloughed off his outer garments, and turned to Breckenridge, who had been waiting him, ...
— The Cattle-Baron's Daughter • Harold Bindloss

... "clothed in soft raiment"! They shrink from the rough fustian, the labourer's cotton smock, the leather suit of George Fox. They are ultra-"finicky." They are afraid of the mire. They touch the sorrows of the world with a timid finger, not with the kindly, healing grasp of ...
— My Daily Meditation for the Circling Year • John Henry Jowett

... about the question; he would keep his hands clean anyhow, retrench his social work, abandon the types of cocoa involved, and pass by on the other side. But indeed I do not believe we came into the mire of life simply to hold our hands up out of it. Messrs. Cadbury follow a better line; they keep their business going, and exert themselves in every way to let light into the secrets of Portuguese East Africa and ...
— First and Last Things • H. G. Wells

... anything more about it," Sommers answered, closing his lips firmly. "It is part of the mire; we must avert ...
— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick

... the very ditch and dust of degradation and take her in his arms. I never saw a man stand at the shore where she had been morally wrecked, waiting for the waves to bring back even her corpse to his arms but I have seen woman do it. I have seen woman with her white arms lift man from the mire of degradation, and hold him to her bosom as though ...
— Lectures of Col. R. G. Ingersoll, Volume I • Robert Green Ingersoll

... persuading himself that she would not dare refuse when the deeds were recorded in court, and he held them in his hand;—and very few women would have been brave enough, too; he did not know My Miriam! I can fancy the poor horse lashed through the heavy mire, tired, foaming, panting, while his strong arm urged it on, with whip and spur; I can hear the exulting beating of his heart, that wild refrain that was raging as his death-knell—"Mine! Mine at last!" ...
— A Confederate Girl's Diary • Sarah Morgan Dawson

... jealous lest he be thought better than other men,—lest he seem to stand apart from even criminals and offenders. When the passion for human brotherhood is upon him, he is balked by nothing; he goes down into the social mire to find his lovers and equals. In the pride of our morality and civic well-being, this phase of his work shocks us; but there are moods when the soul says it is good, and we rejoice in the strong ...
— Whitman - A Study • John Burroughs

... the mirage will depart when real water comes, dust and sand-pillars will be no longer to be seen, and all the nine horses and mules of the diligence-team, floundering, splashing, and kicking, will hardly keep the heavy coach from settling down inextricably in the mire. And so on until October, and then the season of water, "la estacion de las aguas," will cease, and things will be ...
— Anahuac • Edward Burnett Tylor

... doubted his word and the village burst into joy. Women, for they were the worst sufferers gave thanks, both silently and aloud. Henry took Ross, Sol and others to the valley in the forest, where the savages had kept their war camp. Here they had soaked in the mire during the storm, and all about were signs of their hasty flight, the ground being littered with bones of deer, ...
— The Young Trailers - A Story of Early Kentucky • Joseph A. Altsheler

... who dined without forks, and thought pewter dishes too great a luxury to be used in common by the highest nobility; who transported their ladies on pillions for want of coaches, and themselves struggled through mire for want of pavements; who, with a knowledge of the manufacture of glass, and possessed beyond ourselves of an exquisite skill in coloring it, were yet too frugal or careless to use it freely in ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, April 1844 - Volume 23, Number 4 • Various

... of the bosky grove and the clouded sky without. The glass was now blankly white, opaque, sheeted with ice, and only the wind gave token how the storm raged. It was indeed a wild night for a drive of fifty miles through a mountain wilderness, over roads sodden with the late rains, the deep mire corrugated into ruts by the wheels of travel ...
— The Ordeal - A Mountain Romance of Tennessee • Charles Egbert Craddock

... as ardently devoted and valiantly true to Emmy as ever. I felt a desire to shield her with my life against the baseness of this world and let my body serve her as a bridge across the earthly pool of mire. And higher than ever, I held her image above every profaning thought. I considered it a sacrilege to think of her as one of the thousand females about me and to confound my love with the wooing and wedding of the rest ...
— The Bride of Dreams • Frederik van Eeden

... Taunt me with my mortality? "Weak things, Brought forth from earth,"—"Poor simple child of clay,"— These are thy words, when well thou knows't that I, Though bound to earth by bonds made of its mire, Am mightier than thou. Were it not so, Thou would'st not now be face to face with one Of mortal birth. Thou, too, canst feel revenge, And knowest how to wreak it; but, take heed,— The power which brought thee hither, can, and may Deal harshly with thee. If thou knowest aught ...
— Mazelli, and Other Poems • George W. Sands

... from the simplest to the sublimest! He turned back to the biography; he read on; he saw the proud, daring, mournful spirit alone in the Great City, like himself. He followed its dismal career, he saw it falling with bruised and soiled wings into the mire. He turned again to the later works, wrung forth as tasks for bread,—the satires without moral grandeur, the politics without honest faith. He shuddered and sickened as he read. True, even here his ...
— My Novel, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton

... hunting man now, and I sit by the fire, And whenever the wind keens around by the byre, I shiver and rock like a reed that has root in the mire. ...
— Sprays of Shamrock • Clinton Scollard

... and Rose were pulling off fence-rails and dragging them to the edge of the swamp. Then, while Rose brought more, Russ began to lay the rails on the quivering mire, side by side but about a foot apart, the ends of the first row of rails being only a few inches from the side of ...
— Six Little Bunkers at Cowboy Jack's • Laura Lee Hope

... are now following, that they may take and slay him?—'Why should your rider turn his bridle our way?' say you in your hearts; 'we will none of him; if we may help ourselves, we will rather turn us to wallow in the mire of monarchy, with the sow that was washed but newly.' Come, men of Woodstock, I will ask, and do you answer me. Hunger ye still after the flesh-pots of the monks of Godstow? and ye will say, Nay;—but wherefore, except that the pots are cracked ...
— Woodstock; or, The Cavalier • Sir Walter Scott

... quick up flew, and kicked the beam, Which Gabriel spying, thus bespake the Fiend. Satan, I know thy strength, and thou knowest mine; Neither our own, but given: What folly then To boast what arms can do? since thine no more Than Heaven permits, nor mine, though doubled now To trample thee as mire: For proof look up, And read thy lot in yon celestial sign; Where thou art weighed, and shown how light, how weak, If thou resist. The Fiend looked up, and knew His mounted scale aloft: Nor more; but fled Murmuring, and with him ...
— Paradise Lost • John Milton

... analysis as in everything these days, personal sense of achievement had been too unsubtly annihilated. Recalling his just completed task—the Citizen Files and persona-tapes and the endless annotating—Beardsley felt himself sinking still further into that mire of futility that encompassed neither excitement ...
— We're Friends, Now • Henry Hasse

... seat. "Lady!" he cried, "Lady! whom I serve and whom I have loved from a child, thy brain is sick, and not thy heart. Thou canst not love him. Dost thou not remember that thou art Queen of Khem and Pharaoh's wife? Wilt thou throw thy honour in the mire to be trampled by a ...
— The World's Desire • H. Rider Haggard and Andrew Lang

... themselves to tread these tortuous ways, to stoop, to cringe, and creep through the mire of these cloacas, where the presence of a fine mind only alarmed the other denizens. The ambitious man of genius grows old in obtaining his triple crown; he does not follow in the steps of Sixtus the Fifth merely to become head of a bureau. No one comes or stays in the government offices but ...
— Bureaucracy • Honore de Balzac

... should not have lost our North American Colonies, or have got plunged over head and ears in debt as we are, alack! already; and now, with war raging and all the world in arms against us, getting deeper and deeper into the mire." Without holding my worthy principal in such deep admiration as our head clerk evidently did, I had a most sincere regard and ...
— James Braithwaite, the Supercargo - The Story of his Adventures Ashore and Afloat • W.H.G. Kingston

... Buey, an old name given to the head of a large marsh, which extends from Bahia Blanca. Here we changed horses, and passed through some leagues of swamps and saline marshes. Changing horses for the last time, we again began wading through the mud. My animal fell and I was well soused in black mire — a very disagreeable accident when one does not possess a change of clothes. Some miles from the fort we met a man, who told us that a great gun had been fired, which is a signal that Indians are near. ...
— The Voyage of the Beagle • Charles Darwin

... said than done. Comparative strangers as yet to the country surrounding Bellwood, even when they had got on solid ground out of the muck and mire of the boggy waste, they knew not which way ...
— The Boys of Bellwood School • Frank V. Webster

... you come, dear Dean, Your humble friend to entertain, Through dirt and mire along the street, You find no scraper for your feet; At which you stamp and storm and swell, Which serves to clean your feet as well. By steps ascending to the hall, All torn to rags by boys and ball, With scatter'd fragments on the floor; A sad, uneasy parlour door, Besmear'd with chalk, ...
— Poems (Volume II.) • Jonathan Swift

... salt meadow or marsh to the kill, which was full half an hour's distance; but when we came to the canoe, the ebb tide was still running strong, and we required the flood. The canoe lay in a bend of a small creek, and it was impossible to get it out of this bight and over the mire, except at high water, which would not take place until evening. We were, therefore, brought to a stand, whether to proceed in the evening, to which we were not much inclined, or await until the next morning, which was too much of a delay ...
— Journal of Jasper Danckaerts, 1679-1680 • Jasper Danckaerts

... from very different motives, had fought the marriage bill of 1753. The thought that stirred him was indicated in a phrase or two to his wife at Hawarden: 'July 31.—Parliamentary affairs are very black; the poor church gets deeper and deeper into the mire. I am to speak to-night; it will do no good; and the fear grows upon me from year to year that when I finally leave parliament, I shall not leave the great question of state and church better, but perhaps even worse, than I ...
— The Life of William Ewart Gladstone, Vol. 1 (of 3) - 1809-1859 • John Morley

... Who could be the wife of demons, and know the seed whose fruit is monstrous? Or who would fain share her couch with a barbarous giant? Who caresses thorns with her fingers? Who would mingle honest kisses with mire? Who would unite shaggy limbs to smooth ones which correspond not? Full ease of love cannot be taken when nature cries out against it: nor doth the love customary in the use of women ...
— The Danish History, Books I-IX • Saxo Grammaticus ("Saxo the Learned")

... never preened her wings, and thought all the world lay before her, and she could fly as straight as any lark of them all, and catch as many flies as any swallow? Ay, nor she never tumbled off into the mire, and found she could not fly a bit, and all the insects went darting past her as safe as if she were a dead leaf? Eh, my lassies, this would be a poor world, if it were all. I have seen something of it, though you thought not, likely enough. But flowers are flowers, and dirt is ...
— Out in the Forty-Five - Duncan Keith's Vow • Emily Sarah Holt

... width, and sixteen inches deep. I started off with two 2nd Corps motor-cyclists. There was an almost continuous line of transport on the road—motor-lorries that did not dare deviate an inch from the centre of the road for fear of slipping into the mire, motor ambulances, every kind of transport, and some infantry battalions. After following a column of motor-lorries a couple of miles—we stuck twice in trying to get past the rearmost lorry—we tried the road by Dranoutre ...
— Adventures of a Despatch Rider • W. H. L. Watson

... exiled from heaven!" thought the tall stranger. "Which of us all has a right to undeceive him? Not I—I, who am so often lifted by some magic spell so far above the earth; I who am dedicate to God; I who am a mystery to myself. Have I not already seen the fairest of the angels dwelling in this mire? Is this child more or less crazed than I am? Has he taken a bolder step in the way of faith? He believes, and his belief no doubt will lead him into some path of light like that in which I walk. But though he is as beautiful as an angel, is he not too feeble to stand ...
— The Exiles • Honore de Balzac

... Lee's right flank. June 8, the battle of Cold Harbor followed this movement. The Union forces were shot down in the mire and brush by Lee's troops, now snugly in out of the wet, behind the Cold Harbor defences. One historian says that in twenty minutes ten thousand Yankee troops were killed; though Badeau, whose accuracy in counting dead has always been perfectly marvellous, admits ...
— Comic History of the United States • Bill Nye

... too, where there is no sense of education, think of the children dragging weary feet from the filthy hovels that still house peasants the whole world over, to work in the mire and the pitiless winds, scaring birds, bending down to plant and weed. Even in London again, think just a little of the real significance of some facts I have happened upon in the Report of the Education Committee of the London County Council for ...
— New Worlds For Old - A Plain Account of Modern Socialism • Herbert George Wells

... seemes but a dreaming dolt, Still walking like a ragged Colt, 290 And oft out of a Bush doth bolt, Of purpose to deceiue vs. And leading vs makes vs to stray, Long Winters nights out of the way, And when we stick in mire and clay, Hob doth with laughter ...
— Minor Poems of Michael Drayton • Michael Drayton

... yet paved, so if the sun shone two days continuously, they turned to powder which covered everything. But let it rain a day, you had a mire, reflecting at night the shifting lamps of the carriages and bespattering the foot-passengers on the narrow walks. How many women had lost their embroidered slippers in ...
— An Eagle Flight - A Filipino Novel Adapted from Noli Me Tangere • Jose Rizal

... pumped Jack made him laugh; but he assured them he was just about as "deep in the mud as they were in the mire." ...
— Air Service Boys Over The Enemy's Lines - The German Spy's Secret • Charles Amory Beach

... loved to dwell; and it was in reference to these that he collected. If the book were the one desired by him, no anxiety and toil, no payable price, was to be grudged for its acquisition. If the book were an inch out of his own line, it might be trampled in the mire for aught he cared, be it as rare or costly ...
— The Book-Hunter - A New Edition, with a Memoir of the Author • John Hill Burton

... hunde dschinawe duge gole dui trin Lawinser mire zelle gowe, har geas mange an demaro foro de demare Birengerenser. Har weum me stildo gage lean demare Birengere mr lowe dele, de har weum biro gage lean jon man dran o stilibin bri, de mangum me mr lowe lender, gai deum dele. Jon pendin len wellen geg mander. Gai me deum miro lowe lende, naste ...
— The English Gipsies and Their Language • Charles G. Leland

... whom nevermore we wrestle down, Thou Fury of this home, how oft and oft Thou dost descry what far aloof is laid, Yea, from afar dost bend th' unerring bow And rendest from my wretchedness its friends; As now Orestes—who, a brief while since, Safe from the mire of death stood warily,— Was the home's hope to cure th' exulting wrong; Now thou ordainest, ...
— The House of Atreus • AEschylus

... that the heat of day is best, Flat on his belly in the pit's much mire, With elbows wide, fists clenched to prop his chin, And, while he kicks both feet in the cool slush, And feels about his spine small eft-things course, Run in and out each arm, and make him laugh: And while above ...
— Browning's Shorter Poems • Robert Browning

... can think up," Dolly answered. "Warren Wilks reads all the philosophical and scientific magazines, and he fairly floors us—there I go again; when I talk I either grab the stars or stick my nose in the mire. I mean that Warren's subjects are generally abstruse ...
— The Desired Woman • Will N. Harben

... chastity, but chaste thou wilt not be; Abstraction is thy faith, but void thou may'st not see; Thy precious, gemlike self will, pitiful to say, Into the mundane mire collapse at length ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book I • Cao Xueqin

... own grounds. At Castelnau de Montmirail, near Cahors, the head of one of two brothers, De Ballud, was cut off and the blood left to drip upon the face of the surviving brother; the Comtesse de la Mire was seized in her own house by the peasants and her arms cut to pieces; M. Guillin was slain, roasted, and eaten before the eyes of his wife. At Bordeaux the Abbes de Longovian and Dupuy were beheaded and their heads carried about on ...
— France and the Republic - A Record of Things Seen and Learned in the French Provinces - During the 'Centennial' Year 1889 • William Henry Hurlbert

... brutal passion. It is needless for me to speak plainer ladies. There is a passage of Scripture which reads as follows: 'The dog has returned to his vomit, and the sow that was washed is wallowing in the mire.' The young mother brought the child to Wilmington, gave her to me, and disappeared. Molly was then about four years old. Those who knew of me and my affairs know how carefully I raised the girl. She graduated from Hampton with honors, has a fair musical education, ...
— Hanover; Or The Persecution of the Lowly - A Story of the Wilmington Massacre. • David Bryant Fulton

... know, don't know anything these days except that I'm down—down; down in the mire, deep!" It was the end, the last crumb of confidence, and Armstrong leaped to his feet. "But what's the use of dissecting any more, what possible use?" His hat was in his hand and he was heading for the ...
— The Dominant Dollar • Will Lillibridge

... I though deluges down pour Beating earth to mire, Though heaven shattering with the thunder's roar Scorcheth now in fire, Though every planet molten from its place Should ...
— My Beautiful Lady. Nelly Dale • Thomas Woolner

... day the legions, posted on the wings, whether from perverseness or fear, deserted their post and took sudden possession of a field beyond the bogs; neither did Arminius fall straight upon them, though they lay open to assault; but when the baggage was set fast in the mire and ditches, the soldiers about it in disorder, the order of the standards confounded, and—as usual at such a time—each man acting hastily for himself, when the ears are slow to catch the word of command, he then commanded his Germans to charge, exclaiming vehemently, ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 03 • Various

... persistent for over three years in trying to hunt down the tricky woman, who had imposed upon Justin Cutler, and it was a bitter pill for him to swallow, to discover, just as he believed himself to be on the verge of success, that he was only getting deeper into the mire. ...
— True Love's Reward • Mrs. Georgie Sheldon

... and we pushed on once more until we came to a little village called Braine something, and there we stopped; and time too, for a sudden thunderstorm broke over us, and a plump of rain that turned all the roads and the fields into bog and mire. We got into the barns at this village for shelter, and there we found two stragglers—one from a kilted regiment, and the other a man of the German Legion, who had a tale to tell that was as dreary as ...
— The Great Shadow and Other Napoleonic Tales • Arthur Conan Doyle

... Tropics, doesn't entirely approve of work. What he did at Ahloon on the morning of my visit he did with infinite deliberation, and he stopped much to rest between tugs. Also when some enormous log, thirty or forty feet long and two or three feet thick, was given him to pull through the mire, he would roar mightily at each hard place, getting down on his knees sometimes to use his strength to better advantage, and one could hardly escape the conclusion that at times he "cussed" in violent Elephantese. The king of ...
— Where Half The World Is Waking Up • Clarence Poe

... brute force, was guilty of mixing himself up in this vulgar squabble which had led to such an ignominious end. The disgrace of it, too, was hard to bear; keenly sensitive as he was, and with an abhorrence of anything like brawls of any sort, he felt as though he was dragged through mire. Of course the unions took up their case and promised to defend them. They had a large amount of money at their disposal in the union funds, and they promised that the best legal advice obtainable should be employed in their behalf. As I have said, feeling ran very ...
— The Day of Judgment • Joseph Hocking

... we paused, sandwich in hand, to consider what would come of that resolution of Wickedness in boots, to sever Innocence in flowered chintz from Honest Industry in striped stockings. When the curtain fell for the night, we still fell back upon sandwich, to help us through the rain and mire, and home ...
— The Uncommercial Traveller • Charles Dickens

... dreaming I seem to be an entirely different person—a low, vulgar creature proud of the brutal strength and coarseness of her man. I seem to be a part of this human beast! When I wake up I feel as if my soul had been stained, dragged in the mire, almost lost. It seems as if I could never again feel any self-respect. Oh, doctor," Penelope's voice broke and the tears filled her eyes, "you must help me! I cannot bear this torture any longer! What can I do to escape from such ...
— Possessed • Cleveland Moffett

... hovers about to catch a peep of me now and then; I suppose the little sharper is angling for a few more sixpences. But this would have been, in Joshua's eyes, a return of the washed sow to wallowing in the mire, and I resolved, while I remained his guest, to spare him so violent a shock to his prejudices. The next point was, to shorten the time of my proposed stay; but, alas! that I felt to be equally impossible. I had named a week; and however rashly my promise had been pledged, it must be held ...
— Redgauntlet • Sir Walter Scott

... Popolo and through its open gates the via Flaminia stretching straight to the north across the free Campagna was discernible. With that sight I comprehended Caterina's intention and at the same instant the boy-girl Giovanni let fall the Borgia emblem, which was instantly trampled in the mire by the mob, and snatching the banner bearing the Medici balls from his sister's hand he waved it triumphantly in its proper position, crying "Palle, ...
— Romance of Roman Villas - (The Renaissance) • Elizabeth W. (Elizbeth Williams) Champney

... emitted smoke or steam all the day, and the volcano was unusually furious, insomuch that the air was loaded with its ashes. The rain which fell at this time was a compound of water, sand, and earth; so that it properly might be called showers of mire. Whichever way the wind was, we were plagued with the ashes; unless it blew very strong indeed from the opposite direction. Notwithstanding the natives seemed well enough satisfied with the few expeditions we had made in the neighbourhood, they were ...
— A Voyage Towards the South Pole and Round the World Volume 2 • James Cook

... was sure the order had not passed through his office, and that the humanity of his late majesty would not have permitted him to sanction so satanic a measure. But Chatham was now floundering in the mire, and the more he endeavoured to extricate himself, the deeper he got into it. The fallacy of this pretence was exposed by Lord Suffolk, who said, that all instructions to governors and commanders-in-chief necessarily ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan

... meditation, the colossal pillars of the audience chamber of the Deity! The Mount of Contemplation rises far above the mists of partial opinion and the mire of conflict, the discords of jangling interests and the refractions of divided policies, girt by a serene and sublime horizon, and within hearing ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. 5, Issue 2, February, 1864 • Various

... Would to God a man like the great-hearted, pure-bodied Milton, a man whom young men are compelled to respect, would in this our age, utter such a word as, making "mad the guilty," if such grace might be accorded them, would "appal the free," lest they too should fall into such a mire of ...
— Annals of a Quiet Neighbourhood • George MacDonald

... going minutely over a path so long since trodden to mire as the life of Swift, let us expend a page or two in seeking to form some estimate of his character and genius. It is refreshing to come upon a new thing in the world, even though it be a strange or ...
— Specimens with Memoirs of the Less-known British Poets, Complete • George Gilfillan

... renders a man (homo) blessed, but the emulation of wives contending for the honor of the first place in the husband's favor?" As he said this, a man entered into the women's apartment and opened the two doors; whence there issued a libidinous effluvium, which had a stench like mire; this arose from polygamical love, which is connubial, and at the same time adulterous; so I rose and shut the doors. Afterwards I said, "How can you subsist upon this earth, when you are void of any love truly conjugial, ...
— The Delights of Wisdom Pertaining to Conjugial Love • Emanuel Swedenborg

... reading slowly, Noting every trace around, Of the travel gone before him, Every mark upon the ground, Down the winding, deep-cut roadway Furrowed out by grinding tire, Where the ruts lead to the water, In the half-dried plastic mire, He beholds the telltale marking Of an odd-shaped band of steel, Welded to secure the fellies Of old ...
— Nancy MacIntyre • Lester Shepard Parker

... rooms and dressed, sad, thoughtful, and dispirited. The world of Paris was like an ocean of mud for him just then; and it seemed that whoever set foot in that black mire must needs sink into it up to ...
— Father Goriot • Honore de Balzac

... army within the lines of the place. In furtherance of this plan, Porter himself, with a large body of his ships, ran the batteries at Vicksburg on the night of April 16. The fleet then kept pace with the necessarily slow progress of the army, encumbered with trains, through the roads heavy with the mire of the recent overflow. On the 29th of April the Mississippi squadron fought a sharp engagement with the Confederate batteries at Grand Gulf, which they could not reduce; and the following day Grant's ...
— Admiral Farragut • A. T. Mahan

... angel. Had he only died to her, still the angel smile would have survived and warned. But the man had not died; the angel itself had deceived; the wings could uphold her no more,—they had touched the mire, and were sullied with the soil; with the stain, was forfeited the strength. All was deceit and hollowness and treachery. Lone again in the universe rose the eternal I. So down into the abyss she looked, depth upon depth, and the ...
— Lucretia, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton

... emerged on the topmost rung, having become one Ruth, pure, and fair, and divine, and with power to make him know love, and to aspire toward purity, and to desire to taste divinity—him, Martin Eden, who, too, had come up in some amazing fashion from out of the ruck and the mire and the countless mistakes and abortions of unending creation. There was the romance, and the wonder, and the glory. There was the stuff to write, if he could only find speech. Saints in heaven!—They were only ...
— Martin Eden • Jack London

... we must either have spoiled our trick, or else have let ourselves be mauled by the rude yokel, from whose conduct one can learn how haughty and overbearing such people become when they suddenly rise from the mire to a station of worth and honor. If I had, in an unlucky moment, impersonated a secretary myself, I might have got a thrashing, and the whole affair would have been a failure, for people would have laughed more at me than at the peasant. We had better let him sleep ...
— Comedies • Ludvig Holberg

... kindly ale-houses to rest his legs in. But that day it rained as if the floodgates of heaven had opened. When I crossed Clyde by the bridge at Hyndford the water was swirling up to the key-stone. The ways were a foot deep in mire, and about Carnwath the bog had overflowed and the whole neighbourhood swam in a loch. It was pitiful to see the hay afloat like water-weeds, and the green oats scarcely showing above the black floods. In two minutes after starting I was wet to the skin, and I thanked Providence ...
— Salute to Adventurers • John Buchan

... barefoot to lighten it, she even helped to coax a wheel up the further bank. At last we were saved from relapse. But that night our travelers' joy flickered and faded. We stuck grimly at a crossing; stuck at a mean little stream; there we found odds against us, both rocks and also deep mire. So we camped, leaving our wagon jammed ...
— Cinderella in the South - Twenty-Five South African Tales • Arthur Shearly Cripps

... just see the blaze of bonfires at Annapolis," groaned Douglass. "Say, the middies just fairly tore our scalps off. I always had an ambition to captain the Army eleven, but I never thought I'd be dragged down so deep under the mire!" ...
— Dick Prescotts's Fourth Year at West Point - Ready to Drop the Gray for Shoulder Straps • H. Irving Hancock

... wrong, there it is for ever, and all its horrible things with it—deceit, concealment, falsehood, subterfuge, pretence: vile and beastly things like that. I couldn't endure them; and I much less could endure thinking I had caused you to suffer them. And then on through that mire to dishonour.—It's easy, it sounds rather fine, to say the world well lost for love; but honour, honour's not well lost for anything. You ...
— If Winter Comes • A.S.M. Hutchinson

... ankle-deep in slush from the melted snow. This was his daily walk, he explained. An hour and a half down, in the chill twilight of dawn; two hours' trudge home, always up hill, dead tired, through mud and mire, in pitch darkness, often with snow and ...
— Alone • Norman Douglas

... that we could not pursue him, by which means he made his escape to the Shore badly wounded. I have observed buffalow floating down which I suppose must have been drounded in Crossing above. more or less of those animals drown or mire in passing this river. I observed Several floating buffalow on the R. Rochejhone imediately below where large gangues had Crossed. The wind blew hard all the after part of the day. I derected the men to dress their ...
— The Journals of Lewis and Clark • Meriwether Lewis et al

... And into every hayfield And through the swamp and mire Still Barney ran and ran and ran As ...
— Boys and Girls Bookshelf; a Practical Plan of Character Building, Volume I (of 17) - Fun and Thought for Little Folk • Various

... law; our pledge that, having no law, we have been eager to act lawfully as we might. The reign of lawlessness and terror must end in this country. We must contrive some machinery of the law which shall command respect. We must not continually drag the name of the South—the name of America— in the mire of lawlessness. To do that is to smirch the flag—the one flag of America. But we denounce and will always denounce that false decree which says that black is white; that inequality is equality; that lack of manhood is manhood itself; ...
— The Law of the Land • Emerson Hough

... undertaken many years after his entrance into Parliament, as the following curious political memorandum will prove:—"I like it no better for being from France—whence all ills come—altar of liberty, begrimed at once with blood and mire." ...
— Memoirs of the Life of the Rt. Hon. Richard Brinsley Sheridan V1 • Thomas Moore

... ensample to his shepe he yaf, [11] That first he wrought, and afterward he taught, Out of the gospel he the wordes caught, And this figure he added yet thereto, That if gold ruste, what should iren do. He sette not his benefice to hire, And lette [12] his shepe accombred [13] in the mire, And ran unto London unto Seint Poules, To seken him a chanterie for soules, Or with a brotherhede to be withold, But dwelt at home, and kepte wel his fold, So that the wolf ne made it not miscarie: He was a shepherd and no mercenarie; And though he holy were and vertuous, He was to sinful ...
— Literary Remains (1) • Coleridge

... she paid them no great attention, the surroundings had a depressing effect on her. There was, however, very little to see; the mass of the great elevators that cut against a lowering sky, the little cluster of houses, and the sea of churned-up mire between them and the track. There also appeared to be no station except a big water tank and a rather unsightly shed, about which stood a group of blurred and shapeless figures. It seemed very cold, and Agatha shivered as she felt the ...
— Hawtrey's Deputy • Harold Bindloss

... sensuality. Those who walk in it take appetite as their guide. Their main object in life is to gratify their physical desires. Some of them are delicate, and some of them are coarse. That is a matter of temperament. But all of them are hungry. That is a matter of principle. Whether they grub in the mire for their food like swine, or browse daintily upon the tree-tops like the giraffe, the question of life for those who follow this way is the same. "How much can we hold? How can we obtain the most pleasure for these five senses of ours before they wear out?" And the watchword of their journey is, ...
— Joy & Power • Henry van Dyke

... with the view of throwing more dust into the eyes of the police. Patience Crabstick had, of course, been one of the gang throughout, and she had now been allowed to go off with her mistress's money and lesser trinkets,—so that the world of Scotland Yard might be thrown more and more into the mire of ignorance and darkness of doubt. To this view Gager was altogether opposed. He was inclined to think that Lord George had taken the diamonds at Carlisle with Lizzie's connivance;—that he had restored them in London to her keeping, finding the suspicion against him too heavy to admit of his dealing ...
— The Eustace Diamonds • Anthony Trollope

... and soon in the slimy bottom, yards below, huge fat salamanders, long-lost and forgotten tadpoles as large as rats, gigantic toads, enormous flat beetles, all kinds of hairy, scaly, spiny, blear-eyed, bulbous, shapeless monsters without name, mud-colored offspring of the mire that had been sleeping there for hundreds of years, woke up, and crawled in and out, and wallowed and interwriggled, and devoured each other, like the great saurians and batrachians in my Manuel de Geologie Elementaire. Edition illustree a l'usage des enfants. Par Jules ...
— Peter Ibbetson • George du Marier et al

... o'er field and fell, Through muir and moss, and mony a mire; His spurs o' steel were sair to bide, And fra her fore-feet flew ...
— A Collection of Ballads • Andrew Lang

... no man's land. Their food the cattle's scorn, Their rest is mire and their desire ...
— Songs from Books • Rudyard Kipling

... which they rule, provoke, and move at the pleasure of their influences.] ... Of all creatures man is the most miserable and frail, and therewithal the proudest and disdainfullest. Who perceiveth himself placed here, amidst the filth and mire of the world ... and yet dareth imaginarily place himself above the circle of the Moon, and reduce heaven under his feet. It is through the vanity of the same imagination that he ...
— Montaigne and Shakspere • John M. Robertson

... laughed as the gay banners danced in air, where was it? Burned to the ground; only a sorry heap of ruin marked where once it stood. No more cotton bales came from the Sea Islands. First one army, then the other, had swept over the Beaufort plantation, trampling its fields into mire. It had been seized, confiscated, retaken, re-confiscated, sold to this person and that. Nobody knew exactly to whom it belonged nowadays; but it was not to little Annie, rightful heiress of all. Stripped of every thing, reduced to utter want, Mrs. Pickens and her daughter ...
— Nine Little Goslings • Susan Coolidge

... von Singer, an Austrian citizen and a man of great wealth, who lifted midgets out of the mental mire of being regarded as children and gave them their rightful place. The story is told that the baron became interested in little people through the pleadings of an invalid daughter. He invited several midgets to his home. Finding them agreeable and companionable, he founded a ...
— David Lannarck, Midget - An Adventure Story • George S. Harney

... mean? keep faith with her, with his wife? how else should he do it but by saving her from the wrath to come, by plucking her as a flower out of the mire? ...
— Marie • Laura E. Richards

... their highway to a rookery. After a search, an almost dry gulley bed was found to yield water when a pit was dug in its bed. This spot was some eighty yards from the beach and to reach it one traversed an area of tussocks between which sea elephants wallowed in soft mire. ...
— The Home of the Blizzard • Douglas Mawson

... compass all worlds! the same, endowed with this sentiment of pride, which drives me on to active exertion. My fate wavered whether I should become one such as these or whether I should rise into that circle which the world calls the higher. The mist-form did not sink down into the mire, but rose above into the high refreshing air. And am I become happy through this?" His eye stared upon the bright disk of the moon. Two large tears rolled over his pale cheeks. "Infinite Omnipotence! I acknowledge ...
— O. T. - A Danish Romance • Hans Christian Andersen

... bog, did he? said Berry, drawing his left leg out of some mire with a noise that made me shudder. Jill slid a warm arm into mine, ...
— The Brother of Daphne • Dornford Yates

... something disarranged. Some clamoured loud for armour lost; Some brawled and wrangled with the host; "By Becket's bones," cried one, "I fear That some false Scot has stol'n my spear!" Young Blount, Lord Marmion's second squire, Found his steed wet with sweat and mire; Although the rated horse-boy sware, Last night he dressed him sleek and fair. While chafed the impatient squire like thunder, Old Hubert shouts, in fear and wonder, "Help, gentle Blount! help, comrades all! Bevis lies dying in his stall: To Marmion ...
— Marmion: A Tale of Flodden Field • Walter Scott

... great In straps and buttons—haughtily silenced Paul, Hand-bound and sent him guarded to the camp, And the poor comrade shivering stood the watch Till dawn of day and I was made aware. Among the true were some vainglorious fools Called by the fife and drum from native mire To lord and strut in shoulder-straps and buttons. Scrubs, born to brush the boots of gentlemen, By sudden freak of fortune found themselves Masters of better men, and lorded it As only base and brutish natures can— Braves on parade and cowards ...
— The Feast of the Virgins and Other Poems • H. L. Gordon

... for the pacifying of a dying man, to the murmur and shuffle, which was a lie; and the lie burnt him, contributed to the brand on his race. He and his father upheld a solitary bare staff, where the Cambrian flag had flown, before their people had been trampled in mire, to do as the worms. His loathing of any shadow of the lie was a protest on behalf of Welsh blood against an English charge, besides the passion for spiritual cleanliness: without which was no comprehension, ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith

... of the Gridiron one thought alone occupied him. Murray McTavish had lied. He had lied deliberately to Bill Brudenell. He had made no attempt to save the boy from the mire into which he had helped to fling him. On the contrary, he had thrust him deeper and deeper into it. Why? What—what was the meaning of it all? Where were things heading? What purpose lay ...
— The Triumph of John Kars - A Story of the Yukon • Ridgwell Cullum

... and waves, yea all the billows and waves of the judgment of the holy God passed over Him. In another Psalm the Holy Spirit describes His agony. (Ps. lxix). There we read His cry "Save me, O God; for the waters are come in unto my soul. I sink in deep mire, where there is no standing; I am come into deep waters, where the floods overflow me. I am weary of my crying, my throat is dried; mine eyes fail while I wait for my God." And deeper He went for our sakes. The miry clay has a special ...
— The Lord of Glory - Meditations on the person, the work and glory of our Lord Jesus Christ • Arno Gaebelein

... island a peculiar ghostly appearance. The canoes soon grounded in the marsh grass, and, fastening them to paddles, stuck down in the mud, our hunters shouldered their fowling-pieces and trudged ahead through the mire. They had prepared themselves well for the trip and each wore a pair of rubber boots reaching to the hip drawn on over their rawhide boots ...
— The Boy Chums in the Forest - or Hunting for Plume Birds in the Florida Everglades • Wilmer M. Ely

... mule-team plodding through the Gallic mire for Catullus' graceful yacht speeding home from Asia, follows the original ...
— Vergil - A Biography • Tenney Frank

... our way, passing through every mire, running along the verge of every abyss; and we are the most ...
— The Temptation of St. Antony - or A Revelation of the Soul • Gustave Flaubert

... year innumerable earless blades of wheat rose from the bottom of the sea like a forest, catching up mud, mire, weed, and remains of animals, so that by and by a dune rose under water which stopped the ships from ...
— Legends of the Rhine • Wilhelm Ruland

... in the cities. There was nothing of the dandy about this fellow. From head to heel he was a man's son, full of the vim of living, strong with the lust of life. The sweat ran down his face, dirty with the dust kicked up by the cattle in the stockyard. His clothes were not guiltless of mire, for he had been knocked over more than once that morning, and there was an edge upon his voice as he rapped out his orders to the stockmen who were working with him. He did not look in the least ...
— Campaign Pictures of the War in South Africa (1899-1900) - Letters from the Front • A. G. Hales

... of female conquest, which began as soon as he had emancipated himself from his mother's apron strings, he left behind him a wake of ruined lives; not the least tragic of which was that of the lovely and foolish Henrietta Vernon, Countess Grosvenor, whom he dragged through the mire of the Divorce Court, only to fling her aside, a soiled and crushed flower of too ...
— Love Romances of the Aristocracy • Thornton Hall

... The Dialogue (Mire Festivus), which in the edition of 1710 occurs between the first and second parts of the Epistolae, bears especial marks of Hutten's manner, and is doubtless by him. The interlocutors are three ...
— Notes & Queries, No. 38, Saturday, July 20, 1850 • Various

... I did?" answered Fanny, who was disposed to have her associate as deep in the mud as she herself was in the mire; and she knew that it would be impossible to deny the fact when she exhibited the great roll of bills in ...
— Hope and Have - or, Fanny Grant Among the Indians, A Story for Young People • Oliver Optic

... upon the eastern. The plain, slowly heaving upwards, as smoothly as the beach of a watering-place, for the distance of a mile, until it culminated in a gentle and rounded ridge, presented none of those difficulties which troubled us on the other side. There were none of those cataclysms of mire and sloughs of black mud and over-tall grasses, none of that miasmatic jungle with its noxious emissions; it was just such a scene as one may find before an English mansion—a noble expanse of lawn and sward, with boscage sufficient to agreeably diversify it. After traversing the ...
— How I Found Livingstone • Sir Henry M. Stanley

... on every side of them the howling of wolves coming to eat them up. They scarce dared to speak or turn their heads. After this, it rained very hard, which wetted them to the skin; their feet slipped at every step they took, and they fell into the mire, whence they got up in a very dirty pickle; their ...
— The Blue Fairy Book • Various

... innumerable who will never have any home at all. Capitalists of America, build plain homes for the people. Let this tenement-house system, in which hundreds of thousands of the people of our cities are wallowing in the mire, be broken up by small homes, where people can have their own firesides and their own altar. In this great continent there is room enough for every man and woman to have a home. Morals and ...
— The Wedding Ring - A Series of Discourses for Husbands and Wives and Those - Contemplating Matrimony • T. De Witt Talmage

... con rapido vuelo; Goce la tierra durable consuelo; Mire a los hombres piadoso el Senor... page lxxv The 11-syllable line of ternary movement has had less vogue in artistic verse than those of ...
— Modern Spanish Lyrics • Various

... fool. Shall I sue for a legal divorce? "Si fuerit dolus?" Had I not had enough of notoriety? Enough of laughter, calumny, and ridicule? Must I drag my honest and hitherto respected name through the mire, and become the laughing-stock of every fop throughout the country? No, anything but that! Help me, thou worser self, thou Devil in my own breast, help me to find some revenge worthy of a Devil's ...
— Dr. Dumany's Wife • Mr Jkai

... And twice he pulled his sister's hair, and thrice he smote her side; "Ha' done, ha' done with your impudent fun—ha' done with your games!" she cried; "You have made mud-pies of a marvellous size—finger and face are black, You have trodden the Way of the Mire and Clay—now up and wash you, Jack! Or else, or ever we reach our home, there waiteth an angry dame— Well you know the weight of her blow—the supperless open shame! Wash, if you will, on yonder hill—wash, if ...
— The Book of Humorous Verse • Various

... Comte—following out his hypothesis—shows us his capitalist acquiring one after another the products of his employees' labor, he sinks deeper and deeper into the mire; and, as his argument does not change, our reply of course remains ...
— What is Property? - An Inquiry into the Principle of Right and of Government • P. J. Proudhon

... almost into a swamp. He was obliged to walk upon bog tufts and watch his feet to keep from the oily mire. Pausing at one time to look about him he saw, out at some black water, a small animal pounce in and emerge directly with a ...
— The Red Badge of Courage - An Episode of the American Civil War • Stephen Crane

... wrongly. Standing near her with clenched hands, he said, in the same hard tones which seemed to have passed beyond the expression of feeling, "I'm a brute and worse. I have been wounding you as with blows by my vile story. I have been dragging your pure thoughts through the mire of my ...
— Opening a Chestnut Burr • Edward Payson Roe

... run!" sounded the loud cries, from the English within the fort. Their comrades on the outside hastened—scrambling, wading, straddling the log or knee-deep in the half frozen mire. ...
— Boys' Book of Indian Warriors - and Heroic Indian Women • Edwin L. Sabin

... and although the widespread notion that the shock of the war would automatically make a new heaven and a new earth, and that the dog would never go back to his vomit nor the sow to her wallowing in the mire, is already seen to be a delusion, yet we are far more conscious of our condition than we were, and far less disposed to submit to it. Revolution, lately only a sensational chapter in history or a demagogic claptrap, is now a possibility so imminent that hardly by trying to suppress it ...
— Heartbreak House • George Bernard Shaw

... right here and watch, and I'll get some wood." Nuck had brought a tomahawk which, with his skinning knife, was thrust into his belt. With the hatchet he obtained dry branches from the lower limbs of some spruce-trees which grew near, and packed a big fagot through the mire to the hillock where Bryce stood guard. This wood he flung into the mouth of the lair, started the fire with his flint and steel, and when the flames began to wreathe the branches hungrily, he flung on leaves ...
— With Ethan Allen at Ticonderoga • W. Bert Foster

... affairs, and the earl spoke despondingly about ten thousands and twenty thousands, and the viscount somewhat flippantly of fifty thousands and sixty thousands; and this was continued till the earl felt that his son was too deep in the mire to be pulled out, and the son thought that, deep as he was there, it would be better to remain and wallow in it than undergo so disagreeable a process as that to which his father subjected him in extricating him from it. It was settled, however, that Mr. Jervis, Lord Cashel's agent, should ...
— The Kellys and the O'Kellys • Anthony Trollope

... we did not go to church because the weather was bad, or there was no preaching within twenty miles of us, or my mother was not well, or the roads were impassable with mire or frost, Mary 'Liza and I learned two questions in the Shorter Catechism, and she learned the references as well. We also committed a hymn to memory, and five verses of a psalm. Beyond this, no religious exercise was binding upon us, and there was a ...
— When Grandmamma Was New - The Story of a Virginia Childhood • Marion Harland

... just done twenty miles in slush and mire, and their hearts were heavier than their heels. No, they would go to bed while the others did the jumpin', and next day they would fill ...
— The Magnetic North • Elizabeth Robins (C. E. Raimond)

... curious to learn whether the truth will ever be generally known concerning the seizure of the Anglo-rebel steamer Peterhoff. Then the people would learn how old Welles bravely defended what turpe Seward had decided to drag in the mire. The people would learn what an utterly ignorant impudence presided over the restoring to England of the Peterhoff's mail bag of a vessel a contrabandist, a blockade runner, and a forger. The people would know ...
— Diary from November 12, 1862, to October 18, 1863 • Adam Gurowski

... was lazy and neglected his work, Ariel (who was invisible to all eyes but Prospero's) would come slily and pinch him, and sometimes tumble him down in the mire; and then Ariel, in the likeness of an ape, would make mouths at him. Then swiftly changing his shape, in the likeness of a hedgehog, he would lie tumbling in Caliban's way, who feared the hedgehog's sharp quills would prick ...
— Tales from Shakespeare • Charles and Mary Lamb

... young girl who crossed with me on the Ivernia is in the mire too," thought Edestone; for it seemed to him that the King's order of exile against the Duchess and herself could mean nothing else. Yet somehow his feeling of disdain and aversion for the traitor did not extend to the feminine members of the family. ...
— L. P. M. - The End of the Great War • J. Stewart Barney

... herds are their food and their clothes and their housing. It is the Way Things Are that the Buffalo People should make the trails and men should ride in them. They go up along the watersheds where the floods cannot mire, where the snow is lightest, and there are the ...
— The Trail Book • Mary Austin et al

... chill'd or clouded at this awful task, To learn the lore of undeceitful Good, 390 And Truth eternal. Though the poisonous charms Of baleful Superstition guide the feet Of servile numbers, through a dreary way To their abode, through deserts, thorns, and mire; And leave the wretched pilgrim all forlorn To muse at last, amid the ghostly gloom Of graves, and hoary vaults, and cloister'd cells; To walk with spectres through the midnight shade, And to the screaming owl's accursed song Attune ...
— Poetical Works of Akenside - [Edited by George Gilfillan] • Mark Akenside

... into the work of governing themselves and each other with a great deal of vim. They had no well drawn out formulae to work upon as we have, but they went at things in a sort of rule-of-thumb, rough-and-ready style, and when one party had dragged the country into the mire, the other dragged it out again. It was customary for the party that was out of office to say that the party that was in was corrupt and venal—that every man of it was a liar, was a thief, was taking bribes, would soon be kicked out, etc. Then the party that ...
— The Dominion in 1983 • Ralph Centennius

... steadily gathering menace; the "starved ignoble" Nature, "peevish and dejected" among her scrub of thistle and dock, grows malignant; to the barren waste succeed the spiteful little river with its drenched despairing willows, the blood-trampled mire and wrecked torture-engine, the poisonous herbage and palsied oak, and finally the mountains, ignoble as the plain—"mere ugly heights and heaps," ranged round the deadly den of the Dark Tower. But Browning's horror-world differs ...
— Robert Browning • C. H. Herford

... give over going to the resort of every sort of vice in the metropolis. I asked you none of these things, because it would be hard and ungenerous to require a man to do what his nature and habits render perfectly impossible. I turn to his vomit again, or the sow to refrain from wallowing in the mire." ...
— The King's Highway • G. P. R. James

... dale to where the water was bridged by a great fallen stone, and so over it and up a steep bent on the further side, on to a marvellously rough mountain-neck, whiles mere black sand cumbered with scattered rocks and stones, whiles beset with mires grown over with the cottony mire-grass; here and there a little scanty grass growing; otherwhere nought but dwarf willow ever dying ever growing, mingled with moss or red-blossomed sengreen; and all blending ...
— The Roots of the Mountains • William Morris

... dark nights our engineers had to build new roads across spongy, shell-torn areas, repair broken roads beyond No Man's Land, and build bridges. Our gunners, with no thought of sleep, put their shoulders to wheels and dragropes to bring their guns through the mire in support of the infantry, now under the increasing fire of the enemy's artillery. Our attack had taken the enemy by surprise, but, quickly recovering himself, he began to fire counter-attacks in strong force, supported by heavy bombardments, ...
— History of the World War - An Authentic Narrative of the World's Greatest War • Francis A. March and Richard J. Beamish

... street; Mrs. Ludworth had publicly defied gossip and smiled with favor on young Driscoll; the new director of the Metropolitan Museum had announced himself an enemy to tradition and a friend of progress; and Desiree Le Mire had consented to a two weeks' ...
— Under the Andes • Rex Stout

... near the Barna, his countrymen, he will be hidden. He told his plan to our guide, and asked to accompany him back to Tanganyika, but he is eager to deliver him up for a reward: all are eager to press each other down in the mire into which ...
— The Last Journals of David Livingstone, in Central Africa, from 1865 to His Death, Volume II (of 2), 1869-1873 • David Livingstone

... wild-swine, which keep chiefly in the mountains, as do likewise the wild-goats. These swine are very fat, but so excessively wild that they are never to be got at by a man, unless when asleep, or rolling themselves in the mire. ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume X • Robert Kerr

... rumbling of a ponderous coach and six, with four outriders and two equerries kicking up the dust; whilst a small body of heavy dragoons rode solemnly after the huge vehicle. It waded, with inglorious struggles, through a deep mire of mud, between the Palace and Hyde Park, until the cortege entered Kensington Park, as the gardens were then called, and began to track the old road that led to the red-brick structure to which William III. had added a higher story, built by Wren. There are two ...
— The Wits and Beaux of Society - Volume 1 • Grace Wharton and Philip Wharton

... heart. On a wet and dismal afternoon they sailed into Greenock. A heavy smoke hung about the black building-yards and the dirty quays; the narrow and squalid streets were filled with mud, and only the poorer sections of the population waded through the mire or hung disconsolately about the corners of the thorough-fares. A gloomier picture could not well be conceived; and Sheila, chilled with the long and wet sail and bewildered by the noise and bustle of the ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 5 • Various

... filled his glass, the others followed his example— the toast was given and drunk—more toasts were given and drunk—the three men returned to their drink and their old ways, and haunts and comrades, as the sow returns to her wallowing in the mire. ...
— The Floating Light of the Goodwin Sands • R.M. Ballantyne

... devilish, caring not a straw for peace rhetoric or Quaker gravity, for persuasion or interest. It strikes straight down at right or justice. It tries to hammer them to atoms, and trample them with swinish hoofs into the mire. Now what am I to do? To stand peaceably by and see this thing done, while I study new tropes and invent new metaphors to persuade? Is that my business, to waste the godlike gift of human speech on this mad brute ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No 4, October, 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various

... pile, but no more light was there: all had disappeared, even the executioner. They tore up and threw aside the beams; one of them was still burning, and its light showed under a mass of ashes and ensanguined mire a blackened hand, preserved from the fire by a large iron bracelet and chain. A woman had the courage to open it; the fingers clasped a small ivory cross and an image ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet

... should not be overlooked in this connexion is that it must be a great comfort to the sinner and an encouragement of the most practical sort to find, as he sometimes will, that the hands which are dragging him and his kind from the mire, had once been as filthy as his own. When the worker can say to him, 'Look at me; in bygone days I was as bad as or worse than you'; when he can point to many others whose vices were formerly notorious, but who now fill positions ...
— Regeneration • H. Rider Haggard

... particular when he knew they were going to the christening of an infant. It was then plainly Toby's opinion that, while they might not take quite so much time to christen as to marry, there was still no need to rush off with the priest's vestments out of order and his own fetlocks weighted with mire. The two had many friendly contests on these occasions, but Toby's will was the stronger, and his temper was not quite so mild; and as it is always the less amiable who wins, it was commonly he who won, in ...
— Round Anvil Rock - A Romance • Nancy Huston Banks

... sang the kettle, "and the rotten leaves are lying by the way, and above all is mist and darkness, and below all is mire and clay, and there's only one relief in all the sad and murky air; and I don't know that it is one, for its nothing but a glare of deep and angry crimson, where the sun and wind together set a brand upon the clouds, ...
— The Evolution of Expression Vol. I • Charles Wesley Emerson

... new-comer seats himself in solemn silence, and for five minutes the conversation is only kept up by monosyllables, in spite of the incredible efforts of all parties to appear unconcerned. The young man in his confusion plunges deeper into the mire;—he twists and writhes in secret agony—remarks on the sultriness of the weather, though the thermometer is below the freezing point; and commits a thousand gaucheries—too happy if he can escape from a situation ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 1, Complete • Various

... Percies, Algies, 'n' Claudes I've met Who could take it 'n' come agen, While the bullets flew in a screamin' jet. What in pain, 'n' death, and in mire 'n' sweat I 'ave learned from them that I won't forget Is a ...
— 'Hello, Soldier!' - Khaki Verse • Edward Dyson

... which dreams high above all storms, unsoiled by all burdens; but, perhaps, the strongest love is that which, whilst it adores, drags its feet through mire, and burns its brow in heat ...
— Wisdom, Wit, and Pathos of Ouida - Selected from the Works of Ouida • Ouida

... crumpled pieces of a heart? Let him take mine! Who'll give his whole of passion for a part, And call't divine? Who'll have the soiled remainder of desire? Who'll warm his fingers at a burnt-out fire? Who'll drink the lees of love, and cast i' the mire The ...
— Songs from Vagabondia • Bliss Carman and Richard Hovey

... service which these recommendations display, are all the more remarkable when we reflect that there was as yet no sign of a public conscience upon the subject. The patronage of the Government was scrambled for, as a matter of course, in the mire into which Jackson ...
— Abraham Lincoln: A History V1 • John G. Nicolay and John Hay

... many hours would have made any steep ascent difficult, but unfortunately a new road had been recently marked out, which beguiled us into its almost bottomless mud, from the firmer footing of the unbroken cliff. Shoes and gloves were lost in the mire, for we were glad to avail ourselves of all our limbs, and we reached the grand hotel ...
— Domestic Manners of the Americans • Fanny Trollope

... to satisfy itself; and although its prime malice is to oppose God it has every quality to make it as hideous as Satan himself. It goeth before a fall, but it does not cease to exist after the fall; and no matter how deep down in the mire of iniquity you search, you will find pride nethermost. Other vices excite one's pity; pride makes ...
— Explanation of Catholic Morals - A Concise, Reasoned, and Popular Exposition of Catholic Morals • John H. Stapleton

... unknown to his listener. She did not know of what woman it was that he had dared to speak with such contempt; probably of some one she had never seen. It was not at the stranger alone; it was through her at all women that the mire ...
— The Bay State Monthly, Volume 3, No. 2 • Various

... tunic and his cothurni, covered from head to foot with blood and mire, his left arm hanging useless, and his face like the face of a dead man, neither his miserable plight nor his story brought softness to the stern lips ...
— The Lion's Brood • Duffield Osborne

... spring forth before all the nations.' 'Peace, peace, to him that is far off, and to him that is near, saith the Lord, and I will heal him: but the wicked are like the troubled sea when it cannot rest, whose waters cast up mire and dirt. There is no peace, saith my God, for the wicked.' 'Out of Zion shall go forth the Law and the word of the Lord from Jerusalem. And he shall judge between the nations and shall reprove many peoples; ...
— Progress and History • Various

... motives, had fought the marriage bill of 1753. The thought that stirred him was indicated in a phrase or two to his wife at Hawarden: 'July 31.—Parliamentary affairs are very black; the poor church gets deeper and deeper into the mire. I am to speak to-night; it will do no good; and the fear grows upon me from year to year that when I finally leave parliament, I shall not leave the great question of state and church better, but perhaps even worse, than ...
— The Life of William Ewart Gladstone, Vol. 1 (of 3) - 1809-1859 • John Morley

... sights of woe and squalor,—she looks down, and sees the weary toilers below, the hopeless, the wretched; she sees the steep hills they have to climb, carry in' their crosses; she sees 'em go down into the mire, dragged there by the love ...
— Sweet Cicely - Or Josiah Allen as a Politician • Josiah Allen's Wife (Marietta Holley)

... consider what would come of that resolution of Wickedness in boots, to sever Innocence in flowered chintz from Honest Industry in striped stockings. When the curtain fell for the night, we still fell back upon sandwich, to help us through the rain and mire, ...
— The Uncommercial Traveller • Charles Dickens

... meete for a litle ffootpage, That has run through mosse and mire, To take his supper vpon his knee & sitt downe by the kitchin fyer, Then to go into the chamber with any ladye That ...
— Ballads of Romance and Chivalry - Popular Ballads of the Olden Times - First Series • Frank Sidgwick

... groaning, under his burden. Macgregor, racked as he was, shed tears for his friend's sake. Time had no significance except as a measure of suspense and torture. But Willie held on, directed by some instinct, it seemed, over that awful shell-fragment-studded mire, round the verges of shell-formed craters, past dead and wounded waiting for succour—on, on, till the very guns seemed to have grown weary, and the rain ceased, and the air grew chillier as with dread of what the dawn should ...
— Wee Macgreegor Enlists • J. J. Bell

... had room for no other thought. I cared not to conjecture by what devious ways God had brought her to my side. I cared not what mire her feet had trodden. She had carried her face pure as a lily through all the foul and sooty air. There was a pure heart in her voice. Sin is of the soul, and this soul had not sinned! Let him that is without sin amongst you cast ...
— The Quest of the Golden Girl • Richard le Gallienne

... Assyria, rod of mine anger, The staff in whose hand is mine indignation. Against an impious nation am I wont to send him. And against the people of my wrath I give him charge, To take spoil and gather booty, And to tread them down like the mire in the streets. But he—not so doth he plan; And his heart—not so doth it purpose. For destruction is in his heart, And to cut off nations not a few. For he saith, By the strength of my hand have I done it, And by my wisdom, for I ...
— Stories of the Prophets - (Before the Exile) • Isaac Landman

... it would assuredly be a terrible blow for the nobility in general, and for the Count de Toumeville in particular, and the freethinkers would be triumphant. The evilly disposed newspapers would sing songs of victory for six months; my mother's name would be dragged through the mire and brought into the prose of Socialistic journals, and my father's would be bespattered. It was impossible that such a thing ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Vol. 1 (of 8) - Boule de Suif and Other Stories • Guy de Maupassant

... as it may, you shall have lifted your soul out of the mire. You must do it, Arthur; don't you see ...
— Bylow Hill • George Washington Cable

... thrust forward; that is where a man puts forward the right foot the left arm must be advanced. And if you make any one fallen, you must show the place where he has slipped and been dragged along the dust into blood stained mire; and in the half-liquid earth arround show the print of the tramping of men and horses who have passed that way. Make also a horse dragging the dead body of his master, and leaving behind him, in the dust and mud, the ...
— The Notebooks of Leonardo Da Vinci, Complete • Leonardo Da Vinci

... Presently they arrived at the back entrance of Cronane, the Murphys' decidedly dilapidated residence. They had to cross a courtyard covered with rough cobbles and in a sad state of neglect and mess. Some pigs were wallowing in the mire in one corner, and a rough pony was tethered to a post not far off; he was endeavoring, with painful insistence, to reach a clump of hay which was sticking out of a hayrick a foot or two away. Nora, seeing ...
— Light O' The Morning • L. T. Meade

... and hard for our spirit to rise upwards, if God does not raise it, seeing that it is burdened with earth, and hindered in a thousand ways. Its willingness to rise is of no service to it; for, though an aptness for flying be more natural to it than to a toad, yet is it so sunk in the mire as to have lost it by ...
— The Life of St. Teresa of Jesus • Teresa of Avila

... how deep Herzog had led him in the mire. His moral sense had disappeared, but he had a vague instinct of the danger he had incurred. The financier's last words came to his mind: "Confess all to your wife; she can get you out of this difficulty!" He ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet

... females, though still, I am resolved to think, compatible with a generous breadth of natural propriety. It shocked me, at first, to see them (of all ages, even elderly, as well as infants that could just toddle across the street alone) going about in the mud and mire, or through the dusky snow and slosh of a severe week in winter, with petticoats high uplifted above bare, red feet and legs; but I was comforted by observing that both shoes and stockings generally ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XII. July, 1863, No. LXIX. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various

... resolved upon, by the general ruler and governor of all; or all by necessary consequence. So that the dreadful hiatus of a gaping lion, and all poison, and all hurtful things, are but (as the thorn and the mire) the necessary consequences of goodly fair things. Think not of these therefore, as things contrary to those which thou dost much honour, and respect; but consider in thy mind ...
— Meditations • Marcus Aurelius

... on in her bare feet through the mire of the towpath, while the thunder storm passed over and the sun came out again. As she urged on the mules she was planning for a delight that had never yet entered into ...
— The Corner House Girls Growing Up - What Happened First, What Came Next. And How It Ended • Grace Brooks Hill

... under the flooring, lodged against the eastern wall. Both negro rowers came up from their plunge and climbed like cats upon this platform, smearing a mire of sodden plastering over their homespun trousers as they crawled. One of them reached down and caught the half-breed by the hair, as she rose at the edge of the flooring. Between them they were able to ...
— Old Kaskaskia • Mary Hartwell Catherwood

... suppose that I enjoy this sort of thing, you're quite mistaken." Hadn't supposed any such thing; hadn't, indeed, referred to the matter. Only looked at him inquiringly, as ATTORNEY-GENERAL for IRELAND, trudging stolidly through the mire, attempted to answer CHARLES RUSSELL. "If I am Irish Secretary, as TREVELYAN once said, I'm an English gentleman, and if you suppose I have any sympathy with the sort of thing that goes on at Clongorey, ...
— Punch, or, the London Charivari, Volume 98, March 8, 1890. • Various

... where the earth was soft and black, and gave forth a dank odor. We passed ponds and swamps, and little lakes. We saw where beavers had gnawed down aspens, and we just escaped miring our horses in marshes, where the grass grew, rich and golden, hiding the treacherous mire. The sun set, and still we did not seem to get anywhere. I was afraid darkness would overtake us, and we would get lost in the woods. Presently we struck an old elk trail, and following that for a while, came to a point where ...
— Tales of lonely trails • Zane Grey

... beggar; expel &c. (punish) 972. impute shame to, brand, post, stigmatize, vilify, defame, slur, cast a slur upon, hold up to shame, send to Coventry; tread under foot, trample under foot; show up, drag through the mire, heap dirt upon; reprehend &c. 932. bring low, put down, snub; take down a peg, take down a peg lower, take down a peg or two. obscure. eclipse, outshine, take the shine out of; throw into the shade, cast into the shade; overshadow; ...
— Roget's Thesaurus • Peter Mark Roget

... not a straight game to fit me out with a pair of hip rubber boots miles too large for me and then sit and howl when you see me losing my life in them. Well, you needn't come into the mire if you don't want to, but you can at least be gentleman enough to pass me the end of that pole that is lying beside you," ...
— The Story of Sugar • Sara Ware Bassett

... Church, which is not wont to expose her malefactors, preserved a timid and an innocent silence. The Abbe disappeared with a commendable constancy, and with that just sense of secrecy which should compel even an archiepiscopal admiration. He was not of those who would drag his cloth through the mire. Not until the darkness he loved so fervently covered the earth would he escape from the dull respectability of Entrammes, nor did he ever thus escape unaccompanied by his famous valise. The grey suit was an effectual disguise to his calling, and so jealous was he of the Church's ...
— A Book of Scoundrels • Charles Whibley

... have done no little harm, and should not have learned that clean, unsensational, vigorous books that are loved by children in the homes of the well-to-do are welcome to children in the homes of the poor. The way to good taste in reading is not, as some curiously declare, through the mire of the dime novel and the sensational story, but straight along the clean, bright path of ...
— Library Work with Children • Alice I. Hazeltine

... the mire they say, 'We sullen were In the sweet air, which by the sun is gladdened, Bearing ...
— Divine Comedy, Longfellow's Translation, Hell • Dante Alighieri

... Now o'er the violet's azure flush He skips along in lightsome mood; And now he thrids the bramble bush, Till its points are dyed in fairy blood. He has leapt the bog, he has pierced the briar, He has swum the brook, and waded the mire, Till his spirits sank, and his limbs grew weak, And the red waxed fainter in his cheek. He had fallen to the ground outright, For rugged and dim was his onward track, But there came a spotted toad in sight, And he laughed as he jumped upon her back; He bridled her mouth with a silk-weed twist; ...
— The Culprit Fay - and Other Poems • Joseph Rodman Drake

... frequently looked for and found than books and manuscripts, in an exceedingly dirty and dark dungeon at the bottom of a tower and one of these books, Quintilian, though described as "sound and safe," is also described as being "saturated with moisture and begrimed with mire," as if it had been made dirty expressly for the occasion of the recovery: "Quintilianum comperimus, adhuc salvum et incolumem, plenum tamen situ et pulvere squalentem. Erant non in bibliotheca libri illi, ut eorum dignitas postulabat, sed in teterrimo quodam et obscuro carcere, ...
— Tacitus and Bracciolini - The Annals Forged in the XVth Century • John Wilson Ross

... kept exclaiming, "to act as he has done! and what stuff and nonsense he has written! and what a bother he makes about his policy and his measures, when there are no measures but rolling himself and his country in the mire."[25] ...
— British Supremacy & Canadian Self-Government - 1839-1854 • J. L. Morison

... bar upon bar,— The vibrating lyre Of the spirit responds with melodious fire, As thy fluttering fingers now grasp it and ardently shake, With laughter and ache, The chords of existence, the instrument star-sprung, Whose frame is of clay, so wonderfully molded of mire. ...
— Poems • Madison Cawein

... beams 'Twixt quiet mirth and wise employ; Of tranquil nights that give in dreams The moonlight of the morning's joy!— All this my heart could dwell on here, But for those gross mementoes near; Those sullying truths that cross the track Of each sweet thought and drive them back Full into all the mire and strife And vanities of that man's life, Who more than all that e'er have glowed With fancy's flame (and it was his, In fullest warmth and radiance) showed What an impostor Genius is; How with that strong, mimetic art Which forms its life and soul, it takes All shapes of thought, all hues ...
— The Complete Poems of Sir Thomas Moore • Thomas Moore et al

... wisdom of these monitions, Light o' Leap broke out, 'Good Slow-toes! thou art a wise protector of those that come to thee; thy learning comforts my enlightened friend, as elephants drag elephants from the mire,' And thus, on the best of terms, wandering where they pleased for food, ...
— Hindu Literature • Epiphanius Wilson

... Disbrough so in time they not agreeing sd Henry carried ye cetle to them againe & then sd Dibroughs wife was very angry and many hard words pased & yt som time since about two months he lost a cow which was mired in a swampe and was hanged by one leg in mire op to ye gambrill and her nose in the water and sd cow was in good case & saith he had as he judged about 8 pound of tallow out of sd cow & allso yt he had a thre yr old heifer came home about three weeks since & seemed to ale somthing she lay downe & would haue cast herself but he ...
— The Witchcraft Delusion In Colonial Connecticut (1647-1697) • John M. Taylor

... what the pleasures of sin are. Do you think that an Angel could be made to understand what are the pleasures of sin? I trow not. You might as well attempt to persuade him that there was pleasure in feasting on dust and ashes. There are brute animals who wallow in the mire and eat corruption. This seems strange to us: much stranger to an Angel is it how any one can take pleasure in any thing so filthy, so odious, so loathsome as sin. Many men, as I have been saying, wonder what possible pleasure there can be in any thing so melancholy as religion. Well: be sure of ...
— Parochial and Plain Sermons, Vol. VII (of 8) • John Henry Newman

... his chief charm. Everybody who knew him felt that he was a man, a large-hearted, generous friend, always ready to help everybody and everything out of their troubles, whether it was a pig stuck in the mire, a poor widow in trouble, or a farmer who needed advice. He had a helpful mind, open, frank, transparent. He never covered up anything, never had secrets. The door of his heart was always open so that anyone could ...
— Pushing to the Front • Orison Swett Marden

... Empty, in vain I poked and shoved, No hidden penny lurking there Greeted my search. "Sir, I declare I have no money, pray forgive, But let me take you where you live." And so we plodded through the mire Where street lamps cast a wavering fire. I took no note of where we went, His talk became the element Wherein my being swam, content. It flashed like rapiers in the night Lit by uncertain candle-light, When on some moon-forsaken sward A quarrel dies upon a sword. It hacked and ...
— Sword Blades and Poppy Seed • Amy Lowell

... some places the Gospel was attended with little benefit. "All were seeking their own, not the things of Jesus Christ."[52] Others returned "like dogs to their vomit, and like swine to their wallowing in the mire."[53] Many perverted the liberty of the spirit into the licentiousness of the flesh. Many insinuated themselves as brethren, who afterwards brought the pious into dangers. Various contentions were excited among the brethren themselves. What was to be done by ...
— Prefaces and Prologues to Famous Books - with Introductions, Notes and Illustrations • Charles W. Eliot

... its root and ground and cause in and from hell [the dark kingdom], and is as surely in its degree the working and manifestation of hell in this world, as the most diabolical malice and wickedness is; the stink of weeds, of mire, of all poisonous, corrupted things; shrieks, horrible sounds; wrathful fire, rage of tempests and thick darkness, are all of them things that had no possibility of existence, till the fallen angels disordered their kingdom ...
— Spiritual Reformers in the 16th & 17th Centuries • Rufus M. Jones

... spoken since his fall, so furious was he at having been outwitted by a boy, and having not only allowed him to escape, but being himself rolled in the mire—raised his voice in a tremendous shout. All listened intently, but ...
— Wulf the Saxon - A Story of the Norman Conquest • G. A. Henty

... being heedless, did both fall suddenly into the bog. The name of the slough was Despond. Here, therefore, they wallowed for a time, being grievously bedaubed with the dirt; and Christian, because of the burden that was on his back, began to sink in the mire. Then said Pliable, "Ah! neighbor Christian, where are ...
— Journeys Through Bookland - Volume Four • Charles H. Sylvester

... (alone, shaking his head). A good affectionate girl. To think that so many like her perish! Get but once into trouble and she'll go from hand to hand until she sinks into the mire, and can never be found again! There was that dear little Nataly. She, too, was a good girl, reared and cared for by a mother. (Takes up paper.) Well, let's see what tricks Ferdinand is up to ...
— Redemption and Two Other Plays • Leo Tolstoy et al

... understanding being reached, and of subsequent illegal dealings in which one man who is shrewder, wiser, more versed in the subtle ways of Third Street leads the other along over seemingly charming paths of fortunate investment into an accidental but none the less criminal mire of failure and exposure and public calumny and what not. And then they get to the place where the more vulnerable individual of the two—the man in the most dangerous position, the city treasurer of Philadelphia, no less—can no longer reasonably or, let us say, courageously, follow the other ...
— The Financier • Theodore Dreiser

... no more with the unravelling of this tissue of imposition; we will wander no longer in this labyrinth of fraud, of low and vile intrigue, of dark crime of which the clue disappears in the night, and of which the trace is lost in a doubtful mixture of blood and mire; we will listen no longer to the cry of the widow and her four children reduced to beggary, to the groans of obscure victims, to the cries of terror and the death-groan which echoed one night through the vaults ...
— Celebrated Crimes, Complete • Alexandre Dumas, Pere

... movement of the population had finally compelled them, however, to give some attention to the means of land transportation and many rude earth roads were built to replace the old Indian trails. These roads were unspeakably poor, sloughs of mire during the thaws of winter and spring and thick with dust in the summer, but bad as they were they carried considerable traffic and their use was constantly growing. Inland towns were beginning to grow up at the focusing ...
— Outline of the development of the internal commerce of the United States - 1789-1900 • T.W. van Mettre

... water, it was at first suggested and then strongly advised, that we should not undertake to make the trip to Blondy's Throne: and yearning to see what is considered the cave's chief beauty was not easy to overcome, but after careful attention to the deep mire of the approach the advice seemed good, especially as Mr. Powell kindly promised to write a description of its trials and treasures; which he promptly did, thereby making it possible for us to continue the journey now without a disappointing interruption, so we will proceed ...
— Cave Regions of the Ozarks and Black Hills • Luella Agnes Owen

... came to see, and it was fun to see them pluming and preening themselves at the back, each for the eyes of her own particular lord in the stalls. Thus she flung out unfamiliar notes, hardly knowing their purport, but to John they were as slimy creatures out of the social mire she had struggled through. O London! London! Its shadow was over them even there, and go where they would, they could never escape ...
— The Christian - A Story • Hall Caine

... attendance on a spoilt child, the poor Nurse was kept, as she said, "on the continual go" by Amelia's reckless destruction of her clothes. It was not fair wear and tear, it was not an occasional fall in the mire, or an accidental rent or two during a game at "Hunt the Hare," but it was constant wilful destruction, which Nurse had to repair as best she might. No entreaties would induce Amelia to "take care" of anything. She walked obstinately on ...
— The Brownies and Other Tales • Juliana Horatia Ewing

... money-lending proved a hopeless trade; it only plunged Derues deeper and deeper into the mire of financial disaster. The noblemen either forgot to pay while they were alive, or on their death were found to be insolvent. Derues was driven to ordering goods and merchandise on credit, and selling ...
— A Book of Remarkable Criminals • H. B. Irving

... wrestle down, Thou Fury of this home, how oft and oft Thou dost descry what far aloof is laid, Yea, from afar dost bend th' unerring bow And rendest from my wretchedness its friends; As now Orestes—who, a brief while since, Safe from the mire of death stood warily,— Was the home's hope to cure th' exulting wrong; Now thou ...
— The House of Atreus • AEschylus

... hooks and shears to scare Hence the hag that rides the mare, Till they be all over wet With the mire and the sweat: This observ'd, the manes shall be Of your horses ...
— The Hesperides & Noble Numbers: Vol. 1 and 2 • Robert Herrick

... the sticky mire when he, by accident, let them fall at his sides. If this sort of thing kept on, in less than twenty minutes it would ...
— Chums in Dixie - or The Strange Cruise of a Motorboat • St. George Rathborne

... the season, it had thawed in the streets of Westham, and as a matter of course the doctor, who always appeared to choose the very muddiest of places to tramp in, had managed to collect as much of the mire as he could on his ...
— Afloat at Last - A Sailor Boy's Log of his Life at Sea • John Conroy Hutcheson

... opportunity of intellectual and physical improvement, and he will carefully search out the nearest mudhole—unhappy until he finds it—will thrust not only his nose but his body into it, and will find supreme enjoyment in wallowing in the mire; and no blame to him for this; he is grumpish by nature. Yes, a low tavern is beneath the ...
— The Lifeboat • R.M. Ballantyne

... hundreds of men to-day penniless, who were, during the war, hurled from their affluent positions by incorrect accounts of battles that shook the money-market, and the gold gamblers, with their hoofs, trampled these honest men into the mire. And many a window was hoisted at the hour of midnight as the boy shouted: "Extra! Extra!" And the father and mother who had an only son at the front, with trembling hand, and blanched cheek, and sinking heart, read of battles that had never occurred. God pity the father and mother who ...
— The Abominations of Modern Society • Rev. T. De Witt Talmage

... in want of fine jewels. Although he was a Touranian, and had plenty of spirit and animation, he kept himself virtuous as a true saint, in spite of the blandishments of the city, and had passed the days of his green season without once dragging his good name through the mire. Many will say this passes the bounds of that faculty of belief which God has placed in us to aid that faith due to the mysteries of our holy religion; so it is needful to demonstrate abundantly the secret cause of this silversmith's chastity. And, first remember ...
— Droll Stories, Complete - Collected From The Abbeys Of Touraine • Honore de Balzac

... grass and play in the dirt, and which it will trouble no one to see torn or soiled. Do this, if you have a prince's revenue,—unless you would be vulgar. For, although you may be able to afford to cast jewels into the mire or break the Portland vase for your amusement, if you do so, you are a Goth. Jewels were not made for the mire, vases to be broken, or handsome clothes ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 4, No. 24, Oct. 1859 • Various

... the letter came, Eve was obliged to find a wet-nurse; her milk had dried up. She had made a god of her brother; now, in her eyes, he was depraved through the exercise of his noblest faculties; he was wallowing in the mire. She, noble creature that she was, was incapable of swerving from honesty and scrupulous delicacy, from all the pious traditions of the hearth, which still burns so clearly and sheds its light abroad in quiet country homes. Then David had been right in his ...
— Eve and David • Honore de Balzac

... 1788 from Fredericksburg, Bay Quinte, to a friend in Lachine, Lower Canada, says of his journey: 'After a most tedious and fatiguing journey I arrived here, nineteen days on the way, sometimes for whole days up to the waist in water or mire.' But the average time required to ascend the rapids was from ten to twelve days, and three ...
— The Loyalists of America and Their Times, Vol. 2 of 2 - From 1620-1816 • Edgerton Ryerson

... be glad to hear it. We'll ride together. Look out for your horse! He may go knee deep into mire at any time. Harry, the Wilderness looks even more somber to me than it did a year ago when ...
— The Shades of the Wilderness • Joseph A. Altsheler

... all his blood was on fire With the rush of the wind and the gleam of the mire, And the leap of his heart to the skylarks in quire, And the feel of his horse going onward, on, on, Under sky with white banners and ...
— Right Royal • John Masefield

... fearing to soil her slippers. This was the young courtier's chance. Raleigh had been in the background, but seeing the Queen hesitate he sprang forward, and sweeping his new plush cloak from his shoulders, spread it in the mire, so that she might cross. The Queen's face lighted up with pleasure at the graceful act, and she thanked the youthful gallant. Later she saw that he was given many court suits for the cloak he had so ...
— Historic Boyhoods • Rupert Sargent Holland

... came home to Fremont, wet with rain and splashed with mire, for it was thawing fast and he had ridden far. He sloughed off his outer garments, and turned to Breckenridge, who had been waiting him, with a little, ...
— The Cattle-Baron's Daughter • Harold Bindloss

... in perplexity and dismay, and I think I never beheld more pale faces assembled. By my father's direction, we looked about to find anything which might indicate or account for the noise which we had heard; but no such thing was to be seen—even the mire which lay upon the avenue was undisturbed. We returned to the house, more ...
— The Purcell Papers - Volume III. (of III.) • Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu

... friend then—'Time is money to a man on the road. If I was going to do any business with yo' I ought to have done it yesterday. I have spoiled a day fo' you an' I don't believe the Lord will hold anything against me if I do business with you today. You know he makes allo'ances when the ox gets in the mire, so get out yo' book, if you will, suh,—an' I will give ...
— Tales of the Road • Charles N. Crewdson

... he did with infinite deliberation, and he stopped much to rest between tugs. Also when some enormous log, thirty or forty feet long and two or three feet thick, was given him to pull through the mire, he would roar mightily at each hard place, getting down on his knees sometimes to use his strength to better advantage, and one could hardly escape the conclusion that at times he "cussed" in violent Elephantese. The king of the group, a magnificent tusker, pushed the logs with his snout and ...
— Where Half The World Is Waking Up • Clarence Poe

... con passa la lance Par devant le lit trespasserent Et d'une chambre a l'autre alerent. Et li vaslet les vit passer, Ni n'osa mire demander Del graal cui l'an ...
— Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres • Henry Adams

... re-acted in these vast western solitudes, and the fate of the unfortunate traders would be unknown until some day, perchance, a living skeleton, a famished being covered with blood, dust, and mire, would arrive at one of the military posts on the borders, and relate an awful and bloody tragedy, from which he ...
— Travels and Adventures of Monsieur Violet • Captain Marryat

... father, used to boast that he never got drunk—I used to boast that I never got sober. Finally, I bumped my last bump and found myself at the bottom. And there I stayed, until Captain Dabney, and the dear girl, pulled me out of the mire." ...
— Fire Mountain - A Thrilling Sea Story • Norman Springer

... his noble mind her mystery was only some misfortune, not of her making, and his was to be the part of leading her away from it into the happiness of the open life. He did not doubt her, for he loved, and to doubt is to dip love in the mire. She had been given to him by God, and he was so rich in her possession that the responsibility attached to the gift was not grievous. She was his, and no mortal man could part them. Those who looked askance at her were looking askance ...
— The Little Minister • J.M. Barrie

... females are born in considerable excess with Bombyx mori, and in greater excess of late years than formerly! Quatrefages writes to me that he believes they are equal in France. So that the farther I go the deeper I sink into the mire. With cordial thanks for ...
— More Letters of Charles Darwin Volume II - Volume II (of II) • Charles Darwin

... last it seemed to tire Of pavements and pursuing feet. It soared, then settled in the mire, Full in the middle of the street, A mud-stained, shattered relic—not The bright new hat I ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 103, August 6, 1892 • Various

... and all its horrible things with it—deceit, concealment, falsehood, subterfuge, pretence: vile and beastly things like that. I couldn't endure them; and I much less could endure thinking I had caused you to suffer them. And then on through that mire to dishonour.—It's easy, it sounds rather fine, to say the world well lost for love; but honour, honour's not well lost for anything. You ...
— If Winter Comes • A.S.M. Hutchinson

... other parts of the hill emitted smoke or steam all the day, and the volcano was unusually furious, insomuch that the air was loaded with its ashes. The rain which fell at this time was a compound of water, sand, and earth; so that it properly might be called showers of mire. Whichever way the wind was, we were plagued with the ashes; unless it blew very strong indeed from the opposite direction. Notwithstanding the natives seemed well enough satisfied with the few expeditions we had made in the ...
— A Voyage Towards the South Pole and Round the World Volume 2 • James Cook

... not turn back. The four went boldly on to make war. The Grasshopper with his cousin, the Dragon Fly, went foremost. They reached a marshy place, and the mire was very deep. As they waded through the mud, the Grasshopper's legs stuck, and he pulled them off! He crawled upon a log and wept, "You see me, brothers, ...
— Old Indian Legends • Zitkala-Sa

... murder by making or singing psalms; not that 'righteousness' as a standard of conduct is lower than 'morality'; but that, having fallen, he learned to abhor his sin, and with deepened trust in God's mercy, and many tears, struggled out of the mire, and with unconquered resolve and strength drawn from a divine source, sought still to press towards the mark. It is not the attainment of purity, not the absence of sin, but the presence and operation, though it be partial, ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren

... in a cloud of gold, Unseen amid the vapour of the fire, Did Aphrodite veil her, fold on fold; And through the darkness, thronged with faces dire, And o'er men's bodies fallen in a mire Of new spilt blood and wine, the twain did go Where Lust and Hate were mingled in desire, And dreams and death were blended in ...
— Helen of Troy • Andrew Lang

... Albertus, Prince of Transylvania, who, having been driven out by the Germans, came to Charles II. for succour. He is said to have been kindly received and given a sufficient maintenance. This prince was approaching Rochester on the 15th of October, 1661, when his chariot stuck fast in the mire within a mile of Strood, probably at Gad's Hill ("that woody and high old robbing hill," as our Norwich officer called it). He resolved to sleep in his coach, and was there killed, with his own hanger, and plundered by his coachman, Isaac Jacob, ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: The Cathedral Church of Rochester - A Description of its Fabric and a Brief History of the Episcopal See • G. H. Palmer

... you have a standard that is immutable. What shall a man give in exchange for his own soul? Will he sell that? Will he consent to see another man sell his soul? Will he consent to see the conditions of his community such that men's souls are debauched and trodden underfoot in the mire? What shall he give in exchange for his own soul, or any other man's soul? And since the world, the world of affairs, the world of society, is nothing less and nothing more than all of us put together, it is a great enterprise for the salvation of the soul in this ...
— President Wilson's Addresses • Woodrow Wilson

... instead of diamonds* and emeralds, a mine (four) of rock-crystal. (* These legends of diamonds are very ancient on the coast of Paria. Petrus Martyr relates that, at the beginning of the sixteenth century, a Spaniard named Andres Morales bought of a young Indian of the coast of Paria admantem mire pretiosum, duos infantis digiti articulos longum, magni autem pollicis articulum aequantem crassitudine, acutum utrobique et costis octo pulchre formatis constantem. [A diamond of marvellous value, as long as two joints of an infant's finger, ...
— Equinoctial Regions of America V3 • Alexander von Humboldt

... your god. You crush your wife and servants at home; you crush the spirit and manhood of your clerks here by your cast-iron system and rules. If you had shown a little consideration for me you would have lost nothing, and I might have had a chance for a better life. But you tread me down into the mire of the streets; you make it impossible for me to appear among decent men again; you strike my mother and sisters as with a dagger. Curse you! if I go to jail, it will require you and all your clerks to take me there!" and he whirled ...
— A Knight Of The Nineteenth Century • E. P. Roe

... Parliament had been, as a whole, from the taint of Republicanism or of revolutionary violence, it had nevertheless had its birth in revolution: the crown which it offered would, in the King's expression, have been picked up from blood and mire. Had the princes of Germany by any arrangement with the Assembly tendered the crown to Frederick William the case would have been different; a new Divine right would have emanated from the old, and conditions fixed by ...
— History of Modern Europe 1792-1878 • C. A. Fyffe

... lips. The holy place is the renewed mind, and the windows therein may denote divine illumination from above, cautioning a saint lest they be darkened with the smoke of anger, the mist of grief, the dust of vain-glory, or the filthy mire of worldly cares. The golden candlesticks, the infused habits of divine knowledge resting within the soul. The shew-bread, the word of grace exhibited in the promises for the preservation of a Christian's life and glory. The golden altar of odors, ...
— The Symbolism of Freemasonry • Albert G. Mackey

... that he was unable to fulfil his very excellent intentions with regard to Prince Alfred. The latter fell into bad hands, squandered large sums of money at cards, became involved in pecuniary difficulties, and in his endeavors to retrieve them, sunk deeper and deeper into the mire, until finally Emperor William, suddenly alive to the results of his wholly-unintentional neglect of the royal lad, sent him back to his heart-broken parents, discredited, implicated in all sorts of unpleasant gambling transactions, and shattered alike in health and ...
— The Secret Memoirs of the Courts of Europe: William II, Germany; Francis Joseph, Austria-Hungary, Volume I. (of 2) • Mme. La Marquise de Fontenoy

... one arm, and with one eye, and the leprous with their sores, some emerging from little streets adjacent, some from the air-holes of cellars, howling, bellowing, yelping, all limping and halting, all flinging themselves towards the light, and humped up in the mire, like ...
— Notre-Dame de Paris - The Hunchback of Notre Dame • Victor Hugo

... been betwixt them no approach to union. When what sir Wilton called love had evaporated, he returned to his mire, with a resentful feeling that the handsome woman—his superior in everything that belongs to humanity—had bewitched him to his undoing. The truth was, she had ceased to charm him. The fault was not in her; it lay in the dulled eye ...
— There & Back • George MacDonald

... either 'being saved' or you are 'perishing.' No man becomes a devil all at once, and no man becomes an angel all at once. Trust yourself to Christ, and He will lift you to Himself; turn your back upon Him, as some of you are doing, and you will settle down, down, down in the muck and the mire of your own sensuality and selfishness, until at last the foul ooze spreads over your head, and you are lost in the ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: The Acts • Alexander Maclaren

... can pounce upon a "fortune" and ensnare an heiress into matrimony: and so having dragged their gifts, their horses of the sun, into a service which shames out of them all their native pride and power, they sink in the mire, and their peers and emulators exclaim that they have "made a good thing ...
— The Potiphar Papers • George William Curtis

... went into money affairs, and the earl spoke despondingly about ten thousands and twenty thousands, and the viscount somewhat flippantly of fifty thousands and sixty thousands; and this was continued till the earl felt that his son was too deep in the mire to be pulled out, and the son thought that, deep as he was there, it would be better to remain and wallow in it than undergo so disagreeable a process as that to which his father subjected him in extricating ...
— The Kellys and the O'Kellys • Anthony Trollope

... that paw to the enemy again, tear the other loose, and feel about for a foothold in another direction. At the same time she drew out her body to its full length, and lay flat, so that she might gain as much support as possible by distributing her weight. Because of this sagacity, and because the mire at this point had more substance than in most of the other "honey-pots," she made a good fight, and almost, but not quite, held her own. By the time the tide had once more overtaken her she had sunk but a little way, and was still far from giving ...
— The House in the Water - A Book of Animal Stories • Charles G. D. Roberts

... exactly at the moment Mr. Brown was stooping with such wistful anxiety over the pavement, that gentleman, to his inexpressible dismay, was absolutely lifted, as it were, from his present footing, and immersed in a running rivulet of liquid mire, which flowed immediately below the pavement. Nor was this all: for the wind, finding itself somewhat imprisoned in the narrow receptacle it had thus abruptly entered, made so strenuous an exertion to extricate itself, that it turned Lady Waddilove's memorable relic ...
— The Disowned, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton

... world. How could I persist in refusing to drink with a young gentleman of such wealth, and (as a necessary consequence) such distinction? Besides, I suddenly felt quite a curiosity to drink some liquor, just to see how it tasted. After all, it was only very low people who got drunk and wallowed in the mire. Gentlemen (I thought) never get drunk, and they always seem so happy and joyous after they have been drinking! How they shake hands, and swear eternal friendship, and seem generously willing to lend or give away all they have in the world! So thought I, as my mind was made up to accept ...
— My Life: or the Adventures of Geo. Thompson - Being the Auto-Biography of an Author. Written by Himself. • George Thompson

... been engaged, even though he had wearied of the engagement. It seemed to her that he had built between them a barrier which she determined he should be the first to cross. So she studiously avoided him, and thus unconsciously plunged him deeper and deeper into the mire, where he was already foundering. Her apparent indifference only increased the ardor of his affection, and though he struggled against it as against a deadly sin, he could not overcome it, and at last urged on by Nina, who begged so hard for Miggie, he resolved upon going to Collingwood and taking ...
— Darkness and Daylight • Mary J. Holmes

... employed as continually to renew the temper of culture in those who possess it. The richest results of past toil, genius, and life are without significance in the hands of the ignorant; and it has happened more than once that the pearls of past civilisation have been trampled into the mire by the feet ...
— Essays On Work And Culture • Hamilton Wright Mabie

... Miss Jennie! how can you say so, when she took you, poor little beggar as you was, all from the mire and dirt to be ...
— The Elm Tree Tales • F. Irene Burge Smith

... the weary leaped up ready, fresh, and true! No weak blood curdled white i' the face, no valour turned to dew. Majestic as a God defied, arose our little host— All for the peak of peril pushed—each for the fieriest post! Thorough mist, and thorough mire, and o'er the hill brow scowling grim, As is the frown of Slaughter when he dreams his dreadful dream. No sun! but none is needed,—men can feel their way to fight, The lust of battle in their face—eyes filled with fiery light; And long ere dawn was red in heaven, upon the dark earth lay The prophesying ...
— Successful Recitations • Various

... self-denying efforts to rescue the perishing; to delight in the rest of faith while forgetful to fight the good fight of faith; to dwell upon the cleansing and the purity effected by faith, but to have little thought for the poor souls struggling in the mire of sin. If we can put off our coat when He would have us keep it on; if we can wash our feet while He is wandering alone upon the mountains, is there not sad want of fellowship ...
— Union And Communion - or Thoughts on the Song of Solomon • J. Hudson Taylor

... life as he now had to lead under a woman who loved him not, and did not understand his unusual cast of character, his love of nature, his wanderings by the sea, his coming home with his pockets full of wet shells and his trousers damaged by the mire. She snubbed him; she whipped him. He bore her ill treatment with wonderful patience; but it impaired the social side of him forever. Nearly fifty years after he said to one of his ...
— Captains of Industry - or, Men of Business Who Did Something Besides Making Money • James Parton

... raised the barrier that has stayed them. They have stumbled in their running, and are lying hurt upon the ground; while they who have heard their boastings turn upon them with ridicule, and laugh at them in their discomforture. They are rolling in the mire, and cannot take the hand of any man to help them. Though the hand of the by-stander may be stretched to them, his face is scornful and his voice full of reproaches. Who has not known that hour of misery when in the sullenness of the heart all help has been refused, and misfortune ...
— Volume 2 • Anthony Trollope

... a table with a crash, and a young man had bounded upon one of the chairs. He had the face of one inspired—pale, eager, with wild hawk eyes, and tangled hair. His sword hung straight from his side, and his riding-boots were brown with mire. ...
— The Exploits Of Brigadier Gerard • Arthur Conan Doyle

... as usual floundered into her favourite blue mire, whose stale scraps of learning ...
— Infelice • Augusta Jane Evans Wilson

... oddly assorted pair along—the maiden whose soul was as pure and fresh as the breeze that blew upon them from the sea, and the man whose life years ago had been marred by a sorrow, the quest of whose forgetfulness had led him through the mire of untold sin; the girl upon the threshold of womanhood, her life all before her and seeming to her untainted mind a joyous, wholesome business; the man midway on his ill-starred career, his every hope blighted save the one odious hope of vengeance, which made him cling to a life he ...
— The Tavern Knight • Rafael Sabatini

... in missions with enthusiasm but there was something in the present case which staggered her imagination. How could a boy of sixteen, brought up with all the advantages of a home and good influences, have sunk so deeply into the mire of evil? How could one be so depraved and yet look at you with such an open, winning smile? Was he inherently bad or just weak, just reaching out blindly for some good ...
— Skippy Bedelle - His Sentimental Progress From the Urchin to the Complete - Man of the World • Owen Johnson

... embrace it, please measure the probable pillage and let me know. I will then give you the amount. In that way you will have the profits of every act of villainy you might commit, while missing the mud and mire of its accomplishment. Remember, Mr. Gwynn; I will not ...
— The President - A novel • Alfred Henry Lewis

... haunted the Greek Olympus, or the half-bestial shapes of Egyptian mythology. The reasons for the prohibition may be considered as two,—the impossibility of setting forth the glory of the Infinite Spirit in any form, and the certainty that the attempt will sink the worshipper deeper in the mire of sense. An image degrades God and damages men. By it religion reverses its nature, and becomes another clog to keep the soul among the things seen, and an ally of all fleshly inclinations. We know how idolatry seemed to cast a spell over the Israelites from Egypt to Babylon, and how their ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus and Numbers • Alexander Maclaren

... I'll never speak to her again. She dragged me into the mire once, but I'll not pollute myself with such filth as that—" And the archdeacon gave a shudder which shook the whole room, so violently was he convulsed with the thought which then agitated ...
— Barchester Towers • Anthony Trollope

... foot at a time, and Alfred saw at a glance he had won the race. The great weight of the roan handicapped him here. When Alfred reached the other side of the bog, where the bottle was swinging from a branch of a tree, his rival's horse was floundering hopelessly in the middle of the treacherous mire. The remaining three horsemen, who had come up by this time, seeing that it would be useless to attempt further efforts, had drawn up on the bank. With friendly shouts to Clarke, they acknowledged themselves beaten. There were no judges required ...
— Betty Zane • Zane Grey

... centers generally. I have tried to avoid the two extremes which Guizot says are always to be shunned, viz.: that of the "visionary theorist" and that of the "libertine practician." The former is analogous to a blank cartridge, and the latter to the mire of a swamp or the entangled underbrush of a thicket. The legs of one's theories (as Lincoln said of those of a man) should be long enough to reach the earth; and yet they must be free to move upon ...
— Rural Life and the Rural School • Joseph Kennedy

... Gortschakoff's precipitate act was governed by circumstances never revealed to mankind. He learned, too, that it caused the Chancellor to be deconsidere in high Russian circles; he was called "un Narcisse qui se mire dans son encrier." Kinglake used to say that in conceding the right of the Sultan to exclude any war-flag from the Bosphorus and the Dardanelles, Russia was treating Turkey as a bag-fox, to be gently hunted occasionally, ...
— Biographical Study of A. W. Kinglake • Rev. W. Tuckwell

... now-a-days, along the high parts of Selkirkshire, and hear the mire-snipe whistle in the morass, proclaiming itself, in the silence around, the unmolested occupant of the waste, or descend into the green valley, and see the lazy shepherd lying folded up in his plaid, while his ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, Volume 2 - Historical, Traditional, and Imaginative • Alexander Leighton

... walking in a swamp, in danger of sinking at each step in the mire and slime, while his godfather, like a river loach, wriggled himself on a dry, firm little spot, vigilantly watching the life ...
— Foma Gordyeff - (The Man Who Was Afraid) • Maxim Gorky

... your lonely ride, Nor deign from the mire to save me; I will paddle it stoutly at your side With the tandem that nature ...
— The Poetical Works of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Complete • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.

... circumference of love's circle drawn in, but to hate an enemy was elevated almost into a duty. It is the worst form of retaliation. 'An eye for an eye' is bad enough, but hate for hate plunges men far deeper in the devil's mire. To flash back from the mirror of the heart the hostile looks which are flung at us, is our natural impulse; but why should we always leave it to the other man to pitch the keynote of our relations with him? Why should we echo only his tones? Cannot we leave his discord ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ezekiel, Daniel, and the Minor Prophets. St Matthew Chapters I to VIII • Alexander Maclaren

... men and women innumerable who will never have any home at all. Capitalists of America, build plain homes for the people. Let this tenement-house system, in which hundreds of thousands of the people of our cities are wallowing in the mire, be broken up by small homes, where people can have their own firesides and their own altar. In this great continent there is room enough for every man and woman to have a home. Morals and ...
— The Wedding Ring - A Series of Discourses for Husbands and Wives and Those - Contemplating Matrimony • T. De Witt Talmage

... and the pasty's made hot, They broach the brown ale, and they fill the black pot, And the goodwife would wish the goodman in the mire, Ere he lack'd a soft pillow, ...
— Ivanhoe - A Romance • Walter Scott

... as the recollection of the velvet-gown and mob-cap episode recurs to me, I repent me, and, crossing the road, pick up again my harmless catkins and snow-drops, and rearrange them. I have hardly finished wiping the mire from the tender, lilac-veined snow-drop petals, before I hear his voice in the distance, in conversation with some one. Clearly, Delilah is coming to see the last of him! I expect that she mostly escorts them ...
— Nancy - A Novel • Rhoda Broughton

... shepherd's house. "We had miserable up-putting," the diary continues, "and on both sides of the ferry much anxiety of mind. Our beds were clean straw, and but for the circumstance of the boat, I should have slept as soundly as ever I did after a walk through moss and mire of sixteen hours." ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 16 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson

... I been in her place I should either have sunk into the mire, so to speak, or thrown myself, ...
— The Cavalier • George Washington Cable

... brutes when weighed against the peril of those human souls? It was not the most promising party to travel with and hope to gain a higher veneration for religion through the example of its devotees. We said the Saviour who pitied dumb beasts and taught that the ox must be rescued from the mire even on the Sabbath day, would not have counseled a forced march like this. We said the "long trip" was exhausting and therefore dangerous in the blistering heats of summer, even when the ordinary days' stages were traversed, ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain

... led Fatima off the ferry, she sank over her fetlocks in mud, and I had to lead her some distance before I found ground firm enough to warrant my mounting her, lest my weight should make the poor creature flounder hopelessly in the mire. ...
— The Rose of Old St. Louis • Mary Dillon

... The psychology of the looks, and leers, and grins, and hot, hectic desires on the faces of his women is a puzzle that we can not lay aside—we want to solve the riddle of this paradox of existence—the woman whose soul is mire and whose heart is hell. Many men have tried to fathom it at close range, but we devise a safer plan and follow the trail in books, art and imagination. Art shows you the thing you might have done or been. Burke says the ugly attracts ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 6 - Subtitle: Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Artists • Elbert Hubbard

... Protestant straightness often lauds spirituality and faith, and neglects homely truth, candor, and generosity; and ultra-liberal Rationalistic refinement sometimes soars to heaven in its dreams, and wallows in the mire of ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike

... came," broke out MacIan, "and my soul said to me: 'Give up fighting, and you will become like That. Give up vows and dogmas, and fixed things, and you may grow like That. You may learn, also, that fog of false philosophy. You may grow fond of that mire of crawling, cowardly morals, and you may come to think a blow bad, because it hurts, and not because it humiliates. You may come to think murder wrong, because it is violent, and not because it is unjust. ...
— The Ball and The Cross • G.K. Chesterton

... into his brain, Mislikes the place, and fled into his feet; And there it wanders up and down the street,[474] Dabbled in the dirt, and soaked in the rain. Doubtless his wit intends not to aspire, Which leaves his head, to travel in the mire. ...
— The Works of Christopher Marlowe, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Christopher Marlowe

... all the sources of her life and hopes, she was not earthy. If her spirit could not soar and sing in the sky, it also could not grovel in the mire of gross materiality. Some little time, therefore, before the company broke up, on the plea of not feeling well she lured her father away from his wine and cigars and a knot of gentlemen who were beginning to talk a little ...
— Barriers Burned Away • E. P. Roe

... my then mood, under the influence of a kind of morbid seizure, inquisitiveness took me by the throat. I could not whistle my mind from the chase of a certain graveyard will-o'-the-wisp; and on it went stumbling and floundering through bog and mire, until it fell into a state of collapse, and was useful for ...
— At a Winter's Fire • Bernard Edward J. Capes

... probably got it are carefully labelled "Fiction." Lamb says somewhere that we think of the "Dark Ages" as literally without sunlight, and so I fancy people like you, dear, think of the "East-end" as a mixture of mire, misery, and murder. How's that for alliteration? Why, within five minutes' walk of me there are the loveliest houses, with gardens back and front, inhabited by very fine people and furniture. Many of my university friends' ...
— The Grey Wig: Stories and Novelettes • Israel Zangwill

... followed. "If we explored," he proposed, "perhaps we could get you a cup of coffee." She elected, however, to stay by the river, and Elim went inward alone. Beyond the willows was an empty marshland. The old man had disappeared, with no trace of his objective kin. A road, deep in yellow mire, mounted a rise beyond and vanished a hundred yards distant. Elim, unwilling to get too far away from the sloop, had turned and moved toward the wharf, when he was halted by the sound of ...
— The Happy End • Joseph Hergesheimer

... he found it difficult to understand what he himself had been. But one never can wholly escape from one's self, and what had been surely still was there. And now this innocent child had been given him to guard and protect. He had managed to get himself into the mire till over his head, and doubtless he would easily succeed in drawing her down into it too. No, no, it shall not be thus—no, she is to go on living her clear, bright girl's life in spite of him. And the carriage rattled and rattled. ...
— Mogens and Other Stories - Mogens; The Plague At Bergamo; There Should Have Been Roses; Mrs. Fonss • Jens Peter Jacobsen

... to extricate himself from the mire into which he sank, was advised to make use of a Political Pull. When the Political Pull had arrived, the Ox said: "My good friend, please make fast to me, and let nature take ...
— Fantastic Fables • Ambrose Bierce

... where he rambled from one chalet to another, sleeping on beds of fodder, with its keen night air piercing through the apertures of the roof and walls, yet bringing with it those intolerable stenches which exhale from the manure and mire lying ankle-deep round each picturesque little hut. The yelping of the watch-dogs; the snoring of the tired herdsmen lying within arm's length of him; the shrill tinkling of cow-bells, musical enough by day and in the distance, but driving sleep away too harshly; ...
— Cobwebs and Cables • Hesba Stretton

... Verse, as Croaking comforts Frogs,[46] And Mire and Ordure are the Heav'n of Hogs. As well might Nothing bind Immensity, Or passive Matter Immaterials see, As these shou'd write by reason, rhime, and rule, Or we turn Wit, whom nature doom'd a Fool. If Dryden ...
— An Essay on Satire, Particularly on the Dunciad • Walter Harte

... keep his service pure; but, having one day let his acid temperament out of hand to revel in an orgy of personal retaliation, he had since never known when she would slip her chain and come home smothered in mire. Moreover, he no longer chastised her when she came. His ideals had left him, one by one; he now lived alone, immune from dignity and shame, soothing himself with whisky. A man of rancour, meet for pity, and, in his cups, contented. He had lunched ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy

... with a few bruises, and after an hour's exercise with rails and saplings, we succeeded in prying the wheels out of the mire. Then the driver discovered that one of the horses had lost his shoes, and insisted on having them replaced before he proceeded. We were midway between two 'relay-houses,' each being six miles distant, and the Jehu decided on taking the shoeless horse back to the one we had passed. ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 2 No 4, October, 1862 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various

... is to educate men of base passions to deeds of dark dishonor and unmeasured infamy; men who receiving such instruction will concoct schemes for the burning of cities, for the liberation of their prisoners; and, lastly, they have sunk so low in the mire of dishonor, impelled by savage ferocity and hate, that it would appear folly, if not downright criminality to longer deal with them on the principles of liberality and gentleness, which has marked our conduct hitherto. It was our generosity, ...
— The Great North-Western Conspiracy In All Its Startling Details • I. Windslow Ayer

... were approaching whilst still speaking beyond the swingchains a horse, dragging a sweeper, paced on the paven ground, brushing a long swathe of mire up so that with the noise Bloom was not perfectly certain whether he had caught aright the allusion to sixtyfive guineas and John Bull. He inquired if it was John Bull the political celebrity of that ilk, as it struck him, ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce

... Spirits, and then, of our affairs." "I am sure, we shall be worse than brutes, if we fly upon one another, at a time when the floods of Belial are upon us." "The Devil has made us like a troubled sea, and the mire and mud begins now also to heave up apace. Even good and wise men suffer themselves to fall into their paroxysms, and the shake which the Devil is now giving us, fetches up the dirt which before lay still at the bottom of our sinful hearts. If we allow the mad dogs of Hell to poison us by ...
— Salem Witchcraft and Cotton Mather - A Reply • Charles W. Upham

... with a crash, and a young man had bounded upon one of the chairs. He had the face of one inspired—pale, eager, with wild hawk eyes, and tangled hair. His sword hung straight from his side, and his riding-boots were brown with mire. ...
— The Exploits Of Brigadier Gerard • Arthur Conan Doyle

... acknowledgement does not discharge him from the burden of Hutten's reproaches which he flung at him in fiery language in 1523. In this quarrel Erasmus's own fame pays the penalty of his fault. For nowhere does he show himself so undignified and puny as in that 'Sponge against Hutten's mire', which the latter did not live to read. Hutten, disillusioned and forsaken, died at an early age in 1523, and Erasmus did not scruple to publish the venomous pamphlet against his ...
— Erasmus and the Age of Reformation • Johan Huizinga

... have among civilised nations. Your greatest enemy is not the Russian, nor the French, nor the British Government. They might defeat you in war, but they never could take away your honour. Your greatest enemy is the Government which has dragged the fair name of Germany in the mire of dishonour, shocking the moral instincts of the whole world by acts no other civilised country would think of committing. Your greatest enemy is the Government which stifles your individual development by ...
— Plain Words From America • Douglas W. Johnson

... then, if the offer is made, I will accept it. In short, when your man is out of the bog I will lend my aid to cleanse him of the stains incurred in the transit. But he must pull himself out of the mire. I am safe upon the bank, I will not be drawn with him into a bottomless ruin. ...
— Prisoners of Hope - A Tale of Colonial Virginia • Mary Johnston

... my house you come, dear Dean, Your humble friend to entertain, Through dirt and mire along the street, You find no scraper for your feet; At which you stamp and storm and swell, Which serves to clean your feet as well. By steps ascending to the hall, All torn to rags by boys and ball, With scatter'd ...
— Poems (Volume II.) • Jonathan Swift

... a man can not strike a woman! He may tread her in the mire; he may clasp her and then scorn her; he may kiss her close, and then dash her from him into a dung-heap, but he must not strike her—that would be unmanly! Oh! grace itself is the rage of the pitiful Othello to the forbearance ...
— Paul Faber, Surgeon • George MacDonald

... More silence than itself, each stalk Of flower just swayed by it, we'll walk, Mary and I, when every fowl Hides beak and eyes in breast, the owl Only awake to hoot."—But clover Is beaten down now, and birds hover, Peering for shelter round; no blade Of grass stands sharp and tall; men wade Thro' mire with frequent plashing sting Of rain upon their faces. Sing, Then, Mary, to me thro' the dark: But kiss me first: my hand shall mark Time, pressing yours the ...
— The Germ - Thoughts towards Nature in Poetry, Literature and Art • Various

... [Footnote: That is to say, the influence of Gottsched on German literature, of which more is said in the next book.—TRANS.] had inundated the German world with a true deluge, which threatened to rise up, even over the highest mountains. It takes a long time for such a flood to subside again, for the mire to dry away; and as in any epoch there are numberless aping poets, so the imitation of the flat and watery produced a chaos, of which now scarcely a notion remains. To find out that trash was trash was hence the greatest sport, yea, the triumph, of the critics of those ...
— Autobiography • Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

... viper, thou unhanged rascal, thou mire under my feet, thou blot on the house! Darest thou beard me—me?" screamed my Lady. "Darest ...
— Unknown to History - A Story of the Captivity of Mary of Scotland • Charlotte M. Yonge

... the depth of winter, the roads were often wrought into rivers of mire, and at many points almost impassable even for well-appointed conveyances. In connection therewith, I had one very perilous experience. I had to go from Clunes to a farm in the Learmouth district. The dear old Minister there, Mr. Downes, went ...
— The Story of John G. Paton - Or Thirty Years Among South Sea Cannibals • James Paton

... deprecation with his maimed hand, and even smiled faintly. "I knew you'd say that. I knew what you'd think about it, but it's all the same now. I did it for you and Safie! I knew I was in the way; I knew you was the man she orter had; I knew you was the man who had dragged her outer the mire and clay where I was leavin' her, as you did when she fell in the water. I knew that every day I lived I was makin' YOU suffer and breakin' HER heart—for all she tried to ...
— The Bell-Ringer of Angel's and Other Stories • Bret Harte

... grounds thereof were so firm and solid, that nothing more sublime had been built thereon. As on the contrary, I compar'd the writings of the Ancient heathen which treated of Manner, to most proud and stately Palaces which were built only on sand and mire, they raise the vertues very high, and make them appear estimable above all the things in the world; but they doe not sufficiently instruct us in the knowledg of them, and often what they call by that fair Name, is but ...
— A Discourse of a Method for the Well Guiding of Reason - and the Discovery of Truth in the Sciences • Rene Descartes

... head of affairs we should not have lost our North American Colonies, or have got plunged over head and ears in debt as we are, alack! already; and now, with war raging and all the world in arms against us, getting deeper and deeper into the mire." Without holding my worthy principal in such deep admiration as our head clerk evidently did, I had a most sincere ...
— James Braithwaite, the Supercargo - The Story of his Adventures Ashore and Afloat • W.H.G. Kingston

... fight between the rival Highland clans, described by Scott in "The Fair Maid of Perth." I used to wonder at their folly, when I was stumbling over the rough hassocks, and sinking knee-deep in the black mire, raking the sharp sickle-edged grass which we used to feed out to the young cattle in midwinter when the bitter cold gave them appetite for even such fodder. I had an almost Irish hatred of snakes, and these meadows were full of them,—striped, green, dingy water- snakes, and ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier

... subsided as they entered upon its difficulties. They found the prairies saturated with the heavy cold rains, prevalent in certain seasons of the year in this part of the country, the wagon wheels sank deep in the mire, the horses were often to the fetlock, and both steed and rider were completely jaded by the evening of the 12th, when they reached the Kansas River; a fine stream about three hundred yards wide, entering the Missouri from the ...
— The Adventures of Captain Bonneville - Digested From His Journal • Washington Irving

... turn understand what the pleasures of sin are. Do you think that an Angel could be made to understand what are the pleasures of sin? I trow not. You might as well attempt to persuade him that there was pleasure in feasting on dust and ashes. There are brute animals who wallow in the mire and eat corruption. This seems strange to us: much stranger to an Angel is it how any one can take pleasure in any thing so filthy, so odious, so loathsome as sin. Many men, as I have been saying, wonder what possible pleasure there can be in any thing so melancholy as religion. ...
— Parochial and Plain Sermons, Vol. VII (of 8) • John Henry Newman

... strong enough to compel the perusal of those little pieces, if he had not known that the people of England were ignorant of the treasures contained in them: and if he had not, moreover, shared the too common propensity of human nature to exult over a supposed fall into the mire of a genius whom he had been compelled to regard with admiration, as an inmate of the celestial regions—'there sitting where he durst ...
— The Prose Works of William Wordsworth • William Wordsworth

... which the first swallow appears is muddy enough, and surrounded with poached mud, for a herd of cattle drink from and stand in it. An elm overhangs it, and on the lower branches, which are dead, the swallows perch and sing just over the muddy water. A sow lies in the mire. But the sweet swallows sing on softly; they do not see the wallowing animal, the mud, the brown water; they see only the sunshine, the golden buttercups, and the blue sky of summer. This is the true way to look at this ...
— Nature Near London • Richard Jefferies

... the law," his son retorted. "No speculating, now, while I am away; whatever comes in must go towards getting us out of this scrape, not to plunging us deeper in the mire." ...
— The Firm of Girdlestone • Arthur Conan Doyle

... left to pull The few scared, ragged flowers— All that was ours, and, God, how beautiful! All, all that was once ours, Lies faceless, mouthless, mire to mire, So lost to all sweet semblance of desire That we, in those fields seeking desperately One face long-lost to love, one face that lies Only upon the breast of Memory, Would never find it—even the very blood Is stamped into the horror of the mud— Something that mad men ...
— Out To Win - The Story of America in France • Coningsby Dawson

... as any squire would have, as these travelled about without drawing the attention that a London coach would. They rattled and slid along at their own convenience on the muddy road, and the postilion were soon reeking with mire thrown ...
— Mistress Penwick • Dutton Payne

... of character and countenance. He had once been young and daring; beginning as a mere clerk, he had risen to be a notary; but at this period his face showed, to the eyes of an observer, certain haggard lines, and an expression of weariness in the pursuit of pleasure. When a man plunges into the mire of excesses it is seldom that his face shows no trace of it. In the present instance the lines of the wrinkles and the heat of the complexion were markedly ignoble. Instead of the pure glow which suffuses ...
— Rise and Fall of Cesar Birotteau • Honore de Balzac

... field and fell, Through muir and moss, and mony a mire; His spurs o' steel were sair to bide, And fra her fore-feet flew ...
— A Collection of Ballads • Andrew Lang

... the traveller reached there, for the apartments preparing for him were far from ready, and he had to wait throughout the winter in the vicinity, in a castle of the Count of Oropesa, and in the midst of an almost continual downpour of rain, which turned the roads to mire, the country almost to a swamp, and the mountains to vapor-heaps. The threshold of his new home was far from ...
— Historical Tales - The Romance of Reality - Volume VII • Charles Morris

... ambitious boys, who advance, head erect, and the heart that Princess Tourandocte of the Mille et un Jours—each one of them fain to be her Prince Calaf. But never a one of them reads the riddle. One by one they drop, some into the trench where failures lie, some into the mire of journalism, some again into the ...
— A Distinguished Provincial at Paris • Honore de Balzac

... quickly taken off and only known, Is in a minute shut as soone as showne. Why should weake Nature tire her selfe in vaine In such a peice, to dash it straight againe? Why should she take such worke beyond her skill, Which when she cannot perfect, she must kill? Alas, what is't to temper slime or mire? But Nature's puzled when she workes in fire: Great Braines (like brightest glasse) crack straight, while those Of Stone or Wood hold out, and feare not blowes. And wee their Ancient hoary heads can see Whose Wit was never their mortality: Beaumont dies young, so Sidney ...
— The Works of Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher in Ten Volumes - Volume I. • Beaumont and Fletcher

... display, are all the more remarkable when we reflect that there was as yet no sign of a public conscience upon the subject. The patronage of the Government was scrambled for, as a matter of course, in the mire into ...
— Abraham Lincoln: A History V1 • John G. Nicolay and John Hay

... a wise man in his own generation, yet was he, notwithstanding, a great fool. He was one of that class who can sometimes overreach a neighbour, yet, in doing so, inevitably loses his own balance, and tumbles into the mire. A sagacious ninny, who had an "I told you so," for every possible ...
— Rattlin the Reefer • Edward Howard

... respectable, Rowley had the air of a great English statesman of the mid-nineteenth century. He halted on the outskirts of the group, and for a moment they all looked at the pigs in a silence that was only broken by the sound of grunting or the squelch of a sharp hoof in the mire. Rowley turned at last, slowly and ponderously and nobly, as he did everything, and addressed ...
— Crome Yellow • Aldous Huxley

... With pats and fond caresses, The young Herminia washed and combed, And twined in even tresses, And decked with colored ribbons From her own gay attire, Hung sadly o'er her father's corpse In carnage and in mire. Forth with a shout sprang Titus, And seized black Auster's rein. Then Aulus sware a fearful oath, And ran at him amain. "The furies of thy brother With me and mine abide, If one of your accursed house Upon black Auster ride!" As on a Alpine watch-tower From ...
— Lays of Ancient Rome • Thomas Babington Macaulay

... well satisfied with his own system ever to consider the effect of what is unknown on the element which is known. To the Hegelian all things are plain and clear, while he who is outside the charmed circle is in the mire of ignorance and 'logical impurity': he who is within is omniscient, or at least has all the elements ...
— Sophist • Plato

... the illimitable open, and it is as though the whole houseless, outside earth were racing through it. Towards evening, under a gray sky, flies by an unframed picture of desolation. In the foreground a farm wagon almost axle deep in mud, the mire dripping from the slow-turning wheels as the man flogs the horses. Behind him on a knoll of sodden soggy grass, fenced off by raw rails from the landscape at large, are a knot of utterly uninterested citizens who have flogged horses and raised wheat in their time, but to-day lie ...
— Letters of Travel (1892-1913) • Rudyard Kipling

... my cart, my heart that wanders one way, my eyes they leer another, my feet they lead me, I know not whither, but now and then into a slough over head and ears; so that poor Grim, that before was over shoes in love, is now over head and ears in dirt and mire. ...
— A Select Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. VIII (4th edition) • Various

... snows Hide the huge eastern woes. But thou, twin-born with morning, nursed of noon, And blessed of star and moon! What shall avail to assail thee any more, From sacred shore to shore? Have Time and Love not knelt down at thy feet, Thy sore, thy soiled, thy sweet, Fresh from the flints and mire of murderous ways And dust of travelling days? Hath Time not kissed them, Love not washed them fair, And wiped with tears and hair? Though God forget thee, I will not forget; Though heaven and earth be set Against thee, O unconquerable child, Abused, abased, reviled, Lift thou not less from ...
— Two Nations • Algernon Charles Swinburne

... fate; and this was the answer? The vague distrust, the subtle sombre presentiment, the haunting shadow of an inexplicable ill, had all meant this; this bloody horror, dragging her fair name down to the loathsome mire of the slums of crime. Had some merciful angel leaned from the parapets of heaven and warned her; or did her father's spirit, in mysterious communion of deathless love and prescient guardianship, stir her soul to oppose her mother's ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson

... plastered their clothing and mingled generously with their diet. Their grandfathers, who had been at Sebastopol, could have told them something about mud; but even after India and South Africa, the mire of the Aisne seemed a grievous affliction." The fighting was constant, the nervous strain exhausting, and the cold and wet were even harder to bear. There had as yet been no time to build trenches with all conveniences, ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume III (of 12) - The War Begins, Invasion of Belgium, Battle of the Marne • Francis J. Reynolds, Allen L. Churchill, and Francis Trevelyan

... rejoined her husband at Santon in the duchy of Cleves. From this town, however, they were soon chased by the imminent apprehension of molestation from the bishop of Arras. It was on an October evening that, followed only by two maid-servants, on foot, through rain and mire and darkness, Bertie carrying a bundle and the duchess her child, the forlorn wanderers began their march for Wesel one of the Hanse-towns, about four miles distant. On their arrival, their wild and wretched appearance, with the sword which Bertie carried, gave ...
— Memoirs of the Court of Queen Elizabeth • Lucy Aikin

... that composed it was worthy of illustration by Cruikshank. The procession was singularly varied, and supremely bizarre. There were the army-wagons, with sick and wounded soldiers, lumbering heavily along; the paroled prisoners wading through the mire; cotton-buyers, on foot and on horseback; members of the twelve tribes of Israel, with all possible modes of conveyance—in broken buggies, in dilapidated coaches, on bare-boned Rosinantes, on superannuated oxen, with fragmentary reins, rope reins, and no ...
— Incidents of the War: Humorous, Pathetic, and Descriptive • Alf Burnett

... been expected quietly to endure, for "at once the two men fell fast to wrestling, then to blowes and theirin grew to that feircnes that the master of the pinnace thought the boatswain would have puled out his eies; and they toumbled on the ground down the hill into the creeke and mire shamefully wallowing theirin." In his pain and terror the master called out, "Hoe, the Watch! Hoe, the Watch!" "The Watch made hast and for the present stopped the disorder, but in his rage and distemper the boatswaine fell a-swearinge ...
— Sabbath in Puritan New England • Alice Morse Earle

... her house were tormented for eight hours and then drowned in the lake in her own grounds. At Castelnau de Montmirail, near Cahors, the head of one of two brothers, De Ballud, was cut off and the blood left to drip upon the face of the surviving brother; the Comtesse de la Mire was seized in her own house by the peasants and her arms cut to pieces; M. Guillin was slain, roasted, and eaten before the eyes of his wife. At Bordeaux the Abbes de Longovian and Dupuy were beheaded and their heads carried about on pikes. M. de Bar was ...
— France and the Republic - A Record of Things Seen and Learned in the French Provinces - During the 'Centennial' Year 1889 • William Henry Hurlbert

... is unfathomable. This one now pitched weakly once or twice, then gave up in unconditional surrender. Bob's surprise was complete. He had expected, after being shaken violently, to be flung into the mire again. The reaction was instantaneous and exhilarating. He forgot that he was covered with mud and bruises, that every inch of him cried aloud with aches. He had won, had mastered a wild outlaw horse ...
— The Fighting Edge • William MacLeod Raine

... wretchedness is an eternal law, that sufferers must give up hope of relief, that it is a crime to sigh for welfare in this world, since the crown of glory on high is the only reward for misery here), then the stupefied people will resignedly wallow in the mire, all their impatient aspirations for better days smothered, and the volcano-blasts blown aside, which made the future of rulers so horrid and so dark? They see not, in truth, that this blind and passive faith which we demand from the mass, furnishes ...
— The Wandering Jew, Complete • Eugene Sue

... this most excellent general description by some examples. Chopin said that Beethoven raised him one moment up to the heavens and the next moment precipitated him to the earth, nay, into the very mire. Such a fall Chopin experienced always at the commencement of the last movement of the C minor Symphony. Gutmann, who informed me of this, added that pieces such as the first movement of the Moonlight Sonata (C sharp minor) were most highly appreciated by his master. One day when ...
— Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician - Volume 1-2, Complete • Frederick Niecks

... water fairies. Moored in one locality, they are a well-known resort of the vicious. In the fields are [Page 10] the tillers of the soil wading barefoot and bareheaded in mud and water, holding plough or harrow drawn by an amphibious creature called a carabao or water-buffalo, burying by hand in the mire the roots of young rice plants, or applying as a fertiliser the ordure and garbage of the city. Such unpoetic toils never could have inspired the georgic muse ...
— The Awakening of China • W.A.P. Martin

... emotions, with speculations upon the Infinite, with addresses to flowers, with the worship of waterfalls and flying clouds, and with the incessant portraiture of a thousand moods and variations of love, while their neighbours lie grovelling in the mire, and never know anything more of life or its duties than is afforded them by a police report in a bit of newspaper picked out of the kennel. We went one evening to hear a great violin-player, who played ...
— Mark Rutherford's Deliverance • Mark Rutherford

... from Mourne and Bann, Blood he'll draw o'er shafts of spears; He will cast to mire and sand These ...
— The Ancient Irish Epic Tale Tain Bo Cualnge • Unknown

... little like that speech of a man in Indianapolis who nominated James Whitcomb Riley for the Presidency of the United States. The mob diluted the thought of Henry George and trod his proud and honest heart into the mire. ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 9 - Subtitle: Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Reformers • Elbert Hubbard

... ascertained the truth he left her, and, looking up at the hill, saw that it was high time. The rider had vanished, but his jaded horse was standing half-way up the hillside in the mire of loose sand. It was either too frightened or too weary to move, and stood there ...
— The Night Riders - A Romance of Early Montana • Ridgwell Cullum

... "I remember that day at Windsor, lady!" he cried. "The man of whom I afterward asked your name was a most libertine courtier, and he raised his hat when he spoke of you, calling you a lily which the mire of the court could not besmirch. I will believe all good, but no harm of ...
— To Have and To Hold • Mary Johnston

... memory of Alix, who was chicken-farming at that age, and generally unpleasantly redolent of incubators, chopped feed, and mire. He seemed to remember Alix shouting that if Peter Joyce was going to LIVE in their house, she would move somewhere else! ...
— Sisters • Kathleen Norris

... own, and walked out into the East Street. Through the magic power of the goloshes, he was at once carried back three hundred years, to the times of King Hans, for which he had been longing when he put them on. Therefore he immediately set his foot into the mud and mire of the street, which in those days ...
— Fairy Tales of Hans Christian Andersen • Hans Christian Andersen

... I'll get some wood." Nuck had brought a tomahawk which, with his skinning knife, was thrust into his belt. With the hatchet he obtained dry branches from the lower limbs of some spruce-trees which grew near, and packed a big fagot through the mire to the hillock where Bryce stood guard. This wood he flung into the mouth of the lair, started the fire with his flint and steel, and when the flames began to wreathe the branches hungrily, he flung on leaves and grass to make a "smudge." His suspicions regarding ...
— With Ethan Allen at Ticonderoga • W. Bert Foster

... defiled the sanctuaries of God, and shed the blood of the saints round about the altar. They have laid waste the dwelling-place of our hope; they have trodden down the bodies of the saints in the temple of God like mire in the street. What can I say? I can only lament in my heart with you before the altar of Christ, and say: Spare, Lord, spare Thy people, and give not Thy heritage to the heathen, lest the pagans say, ...
— Anglo-Saxon Literature • John Earle

... unprecedented extent. We have all had a tremendous jolt; and although the widespread notion that the shock of the war would automatically make a new heaven and a new earth, and that the dog would never go back to his vomit nor the sow to her wallowing in the mire, is already seen to be a delusion, yet we are far more conscious of our condition than we were, and far less disposed to submit to it. Revolution, lately only a sensational chapter in history or a demagogic claptrap, is now a possibility so imminent that hardly by trying to ...
— Heartbreak House • George Bernard Shaw

... all, it's a farce: you won't fire at him, and he can't hit you—so leave ill alone. Beside, for Scoutbush's sake, her sake, every one's sake, the thing must be hushed up. If the fellow chooses to duck under into the London mire, let him ...
— Two Years Ago, Volume II. • Charles Kingsley

... gentry of the neighbourhood hunted the fox, and the dogs found on the bank of the Shannon a body covered with a large blue mantle that was drenched with wet and mire. A pair of small feet in Spanish leather shoes appearing from below the end of the garment showed that the body was that of a female, whilst a mass of long, fair hair which escaped from the hood proved that death had found the victim ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Volume V. • Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton, Eds.

... now decidedly at the head of the English Drama; moreover, he had found it a low, foul, disreputable thing, chiefly in the hands of profligate adventurers, and he had lifted it out of the mire, breathed strength and sweetness into it, and made it clean, fair, and honourable, a structure all alive with beauty and honest delectation. Such being the case, his standing was naturally firm and secure; he had little cause to fear rivalry, he could well afford to be generous; ...
— Shakespeare: His Life, Art, And Characters, Volume I. • H. N. Hudson

... no law of man or God. To-day their self-satisfaction has made them indifferent to anything that elevates. I had led them into a morass, and deeper in the mire have ...
— The Sequel - What the Great War will mean to Australia • George A. Taylor

... Those black angularities which his face had used to put on when his wishes were thwarted now did duty in picturing the incorrigible backslider who would insist upon turning again to his wallowing in the mire. ...
— Tess of the d'Urbervilles - A Pure Woman • Thomas Hardy

... that stain the spokes with mire; Thick folds of ebon night on loch and law; The moan of breezes wailing through the shaw Like the weird plaints of an AEolian lyre: And intermittently through the clouds, the fire Of lightning streaks the night with glitter and awe, And lapses swiftly ...
— Literary Tours in The Highlands and Islands of Scotland • Daniel Turner Holmes

... seeing between Haddon Wood and Countisbury Cliff, with good Mr. Palk Collyns to show you the way, and mend your bones as fast as you smash them. Only when that jolly day comes, please don't break your neck; stogged in a mire you never will be, I trust; for you are ...
— The Water-Babies - A Fairy Tale for a Land-Baby • Charles Kingsley

... see me safe through my journey, or leave me bogged in the mire? Since a puff of tobacco can cloud it, shall I ...
— Pipe and Pouch - The Smoker's Own Book of Poetry • Various

... such scornful kindness as you might accord your lapdog. I have but dared to peep at heaven while I might, and only as lost Dives peeped. Ignoble as I am, I never dreamed to squire an angel down toward the mire and filth which is henceforward ...
— Domnei • James Branch Cabell et al

... at first, though a rustic and a fugitive, and not knowing how to provide for the future; but this I know for certain: that before I was humbled, I was like a stone lying in deep mire, until He who is powerful came, and in his mercy raised me up, and indeed again succored and placed me in His part; and therefore I ought to cry out loudly, and thank the Lord in some degree for all his benefits, here and after, which ...
— The Most Ancient Lives of Saint Patrick - Including the Life by Jocelin, Hitherto Unpublished in America, and His Extant Writings • Various

... you, Miss Jennie! how can you say so, when she took you, poor little beggar as you was, all from the mire and dirt to be her ...
— The Elm Tree Tales • F. Irene Burge Smith

... another, sleeping on beds of fodder, with its keen night air piercing through the apertures of the roof and walls, yet bringing with it those intolerable stenches which exhale from the manure and mire lying ankle-deep round each picturesque little hut. The yelping of the watch-dogs; the snoring of the tired herdsmen lying within arm's length of him; the shrill tinkling of cow-bells, musical enough by day and in the distance, but driving sleep away ...
— Cobwebs and Cables • Hesba Stretton

... indeed, we cannot speak, but even that little we can reach locks up our lips at once, ties our hands, leads us to 'the No.' Then one way is left a man to keep his feet, not to fall to pieces, not to sink into the mire of self-forgetfulness... of self-contempt,—calmly to turn away from all, to say 'enough!' and folding impotent arms upon the empty breast, to save the last, the sole honour he can attain to, the dignity of knowing his own nothingness; that ...
— The Jew And Other Stories • Ivan Turgenev

... best affections, it was not to be expected that its imitator should have been visited with deeper glimpses of the divine. The indignant passions of his unrequited lover are, indeed, passions of the most ignoble clay—not one touch of elevated feeling lifts him for a moment out of the mire. The whole train of circumstances which engender his emotions, prove the lover, in this case, to have been the silliest of mortal men, and his mistress, from the very beginning of his intercourse with her, to have been one of the most abandoned of her sex. "Lilian" is a burlesque on ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 347, September, 1844 • Various

... the highways throughout Manzi, so that you ride and travel in every direction without inconvenience. Were it not for this pavement you could not do so, for the country is very low and flat, and after rain 'tis deep in mire and water. [But as the Great Kaan's couriers could not gallop their horses over the pavement, the side of the road is left unpaved for their convenience. The pavement of the main street of the city also is laid out in two parallel ways of ten paces in width on either side, leaving ...
— The Travels of Marco Polo, Volume 2 • Marco Polo and Rustichello of Pisa

... standing, straight and sturdy, right before his sister. Elizabeth did not dare raise her head, but she peeped at her little brother from under her tangle of hair. She did hope Archie would lift the name of Gordon from the mire in ...
— 'Lizbeth of the Dale • Marian Keith

... the pure seafoam, wallows in the mire.... When Aphrodite Urania, the heaven-born, degrades herself to Pandemos, ...
— The Road to Damascus - A Trilogy • August Strindberg

... obliged to go from one city to another, he often rode on horseback. Instead of a trunk for his clothing, he carried a pair of saddlebags. Instead of sitting at his ease in a parlor car, he went jolting along through mud and mire, ...
— Fifty Famous People • James Baldwin

... massed up, as "Albert's Line," and with a History ever more condensing itself almost to the form of LABEL, can they pretend to memorability with us. What can Dryasdust himself do with them? That wholesome Dutch cabbages continued to be more and more planted, and peat-mire, blending itself with waste sand, became available for Christian mankind,—intrusive Chaos, and especially Divine TRIGLAPH and his ferocities being well held aloof:—this, after all, is the real History of our Markgraves; and of this, by the nature ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol, II. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—Of Brandenburg And The Hohenzollerns—928-1417 • Thomas Carlyle

... Considering, remember, And from remembering, do, And doing, so continue. Whoso abides in Virtue's paths, And ever strives until the end From sinful bondage to be free, Ne'er shall possess wherewith to feed The direful flame, nor weight of sin To sink him in th' infernal mire; Nor will he come to that dread realm Where Wrong and Retribution meet. But, woe to that poor, worthless wight Who lives a bitter, stagnant life, Who follows after every ill And knows not either Faith or Love, (For Faith in deeds alone doth live). Eternal ...
— The Visions of the Sleeping Bard • Ellis Wynne

... our sight, our author only lets us taste a morsel—a couple of lines taken apparently from a lost ballad on the fate of the Chevalier de la Beaute, rubbed down by the rough Scottish tongue to 'Bawty,' at Billie Mire in 1517. ...
— The Balladists - Famous Scots Series • John Geddie

... expectation, re-established and girt in his official dress, complained in a violent manner of this circumstance; and the emperor replied, "Proceed, O woman, if you think that you have been injured in any respect; he is girt as you see in order to go more quickly through the mire; your cause will not ...
— The Roman History of Ammianus Marcellinus • Ammianus Marcellinus

... night of frosty wreck, Enrobed in morning's mounted fire, When lowly, with a broken neck, The crocus lays her cheek to mire." ...
— Highways and Byways in Surrey • Eric Parker

... close together in the Dyea Canyon, and the feet of men churned the wet sunless earth into mire and bog-hole. And when they had done this they sought new paths, till there were many paths. And on such a path Frona came upon a man spread carelessly in the mud. He lay on his side, legs apart and one arm buried beneath him, pinned down by a bulky pack. His cheek was pillowed restfully in ...
— A Daughter of the Snows • Jack London

... sovereign authority it represented had given way. The countenances and deportment of the men harmonized with the weather; they moved about gloomily and despondently, their bright accoutrements sullied with the wet, and their buskins clogged with mire. A forlorn sight it was to watch the shivering sentinels on the walls; and yet more forlorn to see the groups of the abbot's old retainers gathering without, wrapped in their blue woollen cloaks, patiently enduring the drenching showers, and awaiting the last awful scene. But ...
— The Lancashire Witches - A Romance of Pendle Forest • William Harrison Ainsworth

... upstairs, and shut the door of her attic. Apparently she meant to improve the bonnet by some touch. After waiting nervously a few moments, the aged Hilda slipped silently downstairs, and through the kitchen, and so by the garden, where with their feet in mire the hare trees were giving signs of hope under the soft blue sky, into the street. Florrie would never know ...
— Hilda Lessways • Arnold Bennett

... of righteous indignation throughout the parish; nor without reason. Tell me that doctors and graduates must have the dead; but tell it not to Mansie Wauch, that our hearts must be trampled in the mire of scorn, and our best feelings laughed at, in order that a bruise may be properly plaistered up, or a sore head cured. Verily, the remedy is worse than ...
— The Life of Mansie Wauch - Tailor in Dalkeith, written by himself • David Macbeth Moir

... the stunning hammer, still the plumber plumbs and the bellhanger rattles, still the cisterns overflow and the unfinished drains send forth odorous fumes, still the rains descend and all around the house is a muddle of muck and mire, and still there is so much to do that we look forward to some far distant futurity, when all that we are now suffering will be over, and we may look back upon it as upon some strange yet not ...
— Alfred Russel Wallace: Letters and Reminiscences Vol 2 (of 2) • James Marchant

... the tickets and stood with the ticket-box in his hand, trying to calm the crowd, but he was as a straw in the wind. The maddened people ran over him. When the excitement cleared away he was found almost buried in mud, mire, and oil outside, his clothes torn to shreds, but he still grasped the precious ...
— Charles Frohman: Manager and Man • Isaac Frederick Marcosson and Daniel Frohman

... all done in a hurry: Mr. Neville had no horse now to ride home with; he did me the justice to think I should be very ill pleased, were he to trudge home afoot and suffer for his courtesy; so he borrowed my gray to keep him out of the mire; and, indeed, the ways were fouler than usual, with the rains. Was there any ill in all this? HONI SOIT QUI ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 100, February, 1866 • Various

... contains also vast herds of wild-swine, which keep chiefly in the mountains, as do likewise the wild-goats. These swine are very fat, but so excessively wild that they are never to be got at by a man, unless when asleep, or rolling themselves in the mire. ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume X • Robert Kerr

... his accustomed cunning, managed thus to lift her out of the mire and array her in his golden dress to idealize her, as we say. Reconciled for the hour were the contesting instincts in the nature of this youth the adoration of feminine refinement and the susceptibility to sensuous impressions. But Emilia walked ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith

... that part of the building which had once been the church, having previously to pass through a farmyard, in which was abundance of dirt and mire. ...
— Wild Wales - Its People, Language and Scenery • George Borrow

... debts to the extent of several thousand more. He was pressed for these debts; his interest was in arrears, and he could raise no money for lack of another indorser. Ruin stared him in the face, unless I again put my shoulder to the wheel, and pried him out of the mire. The turpentine business was not paying as well as formerly, but the new plantation was encumbered with only the original mortgage—less than six thousand dollars—and was then worth, owing to an advance in the value of land, fully twenty thousand. He would secure me by a mortgage on that ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. III, No IV, April 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various

... feel about for a foothold in another direction. At the same time she drew out her body to its full length, and lay flat, so that she might gain as much support as possible by distributing her weight. Because of this sagacity, and because the mire at this point had more substance than in most of the other "honey-pots," she made a good fight, and almost, but not quite, held her own. By the time the tide had once more overtaken her she had sunk but a little way, and was still far from ...
— The House in the Water - A Book of Animal Stories • Charles G. D. Roberts

... necessary record. The long, low foreshore of Seal Bay was dotted with a large number of mud huts, thatched with reeds from adjacent marshes, and a fair sprinkling of frame houses of varying shapes and sizes. There were no streets in the modern sense, only stretches of mire which were more or less bottomless for about seven months in the year, and lost in the grip of an Arctic winter for the rest of the time. Foot traffic was only made possible in the softer portion of the year by means of disjointed ...
— The Heart of Unaga • Ridgwell Cullum

... came to a place where they saw Barbekin having a hard time getting his carabao out of the mire. Suan offered to help. He seized the carabao by the tail, and pulled with great force. The carabao was rescued, but its tail was broken off short by a sudden pull of Suan. Barbekin was filled with rage because of the ...
— Filipino Popular Tales • Dean S. Fansler

... very words,—a new light broke upon me, struggling and dim, but light still. The ambition with which I had sought the truckling Frenchman revived, and took worthier and more definite form. I would lift myself above the mire, make a name, rise ...
— The Caxtons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton

... a year. John Ferguson, writing in 1788 from Fredericksburg, Bay Quinte, to a friend in Lachine, Lower Canada, says of his journey: 'After a most tedious and fatiguing journey I arrived here, nineteen days on the way, sometimes for whole days up to the waist in water or mire.' But the average time required to ascend the rapids was from ten to twelve days, and three ...
— The Loyalists of America and Their Times, Vol. 2 of 2 - From 1620-1816 • Edgerton Ryerson

... little island a peculiar ghostly appearance. The canoes soon grounded in the marsh grass, and, fastening them to paddles, stuck down in the mud, our hunters shouldered their fowling-pieces and trudged ahead through the mire. They had prepared themselves well for the trip and each wore a pair of rubber boots reaching to the hip drawn on over ...
— The Boy Chums in the Forest - or Hunting for Plume Birds in the Florida Everglades • Wilmer M. Ely

... MacLean, "This quarrel's mine by virtue of my making it so. Mistress Truelove, you shall have no further annoyance. Now, you Lowland cowards that cannot see a flower bloom but you wish to trample it in the mire, come taste the ground yourself, and be taught that the flower ...
— Audrey • Mary Johnston

... clean. In the eye of nature and before the presence of nature's innumerable creatures she stood as innocent as they. She had entered into noisome places, but so had the marsh-hawk poising grandly on motionless wing there above. She had scrambled in the mire, and she was ruffled and draggled and besmirched; so likewise had been the silent flame-bird in the thicket, but he had washed clean his plumes and was now singing the universal hymn from the nearest bush-top. ...
— Blazed Trail Stories - and Stories of the Wild Life • Stewart Edward White

... father virtuous son, Now that the fields are dank, and ways are mire, Where shall we sometimes meet, and by the fire Help waste a sullen day, what may be won From the hard season gaining? Time will run On smoother, till Favonius re-inspire The frozen earth, and clothe in fresh attire The lily and rose, that neither sowed nor spun. What neat repast ...
— Life of John Milton • Richard Garnett

... the "Bush Inn," but pursued our way over a marshy flat, crossed a dangerous creek, and having ascended a steep and thickly wooded hill on the skirts of the Black Forest, we halted and pitched our tents. It was little more than mid-day, but the road had been fearful—as bad as wading through a mire; men and beasts were worn out, and it was thought advisable to recruit well before entering the dreaded precincts of the Black Forest. Fires were lit, supper was cooked, spirits and pipes made their appearance, ...
— A Lady's Visit to the Gold Diggings of Australia in 1852-53. • Mrs. Charles (Ellen) Clacey

... will fill his heart with enthusiasm and energy, and give him a host of jewels washed from the mire and shining like meteors. The same experience coming to a mechanic will fire him with a love for Jesus and a solicitude for souls that will make him pray and fast and weep and work for his fellow-laborers, for his neighbors, and for his friends. The ...
— The Heart-Cry of Jesus • Byron J. Rees

... he is dead, I am in your debt and bound to you for life. He is! I see it in your faces. Who triumphs now? Is this your dreadful news; this your terrible intelligence? You see how it moves me. You did well to send. I would have travelled a hundred miles afoot, through mud, mire, and darkness, to hear this news just ...
— The Life And Adventures Of Nicholas Nickleby • Charles Dickens

... way by which, out of the mire and clay of earth, there can be formed a fair image of holiness, and that is, that Jacob's experience, in deeper, more inward, more wonderful form, should be repeated in each one of us; and that thus, penitent and yet hopeful, we ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Isaiah and Jeremiah • Alexander Maclaren

... have any divorce trial," said Ishmael firmly. "We will not have your daughter's pure name dragged through the mire of a divorce court; we will have Lord Vincent and his accomplices arrested and tried; the valet for murder, and the viscount and the opera singer for conspiracy and kidnaping. We have proof enough ...
— Self-Raised • Emma Dorothy Eliza Nevitte Southworth

... was he looked forward with little pleasure to a tramp out in the rain at the head of a procession, trying to keep dry under an umbrella, with his soutane rolled up to his knees, and his shoes coming off at every step in the mire. Besides, some day, in the very face of San Bernardo, the river might carry half the city off, and then what a fix, what a fix, religion would be in, all on account of ...
— The Torrent - Entre Naranjos • Vicente Blasco Ibanez

... circumstances—hung on in the great city as best they could, in the hope of a better fortune soon, living expectantly from day to day. Each month the city life seemed to demand more money, and each month Bragdon sank deeper into the mire of journalistic art. Worst of all they got into the habit of regarding their life as a temporary makeshift, which they expected to change when they could, tolerating it for the present as best they could,—like most of the ...
— One Woman's Life • Robert Herrick

... who use the power their money gives them to keep their less fortunate fellow men in servile subjection. I want to be rich, very rich, but I will use my wealth for good. With it I will help my fellow man rise from the mire. I will help him throw off the shackles with which conscienceless capitalism has fettered him. I want to be such a power for good. ...
— The Mask - A Story of Love and Adventure • Arthur Hornblow

... more worldly fury with which Henry Fox, from very different motives, had fought the marriage bill of 1753. The thought that stirred him was indicated in a phrase or two to his wife at Hawarden: 'July 31.—Parliamentary affairs are very black; the poor church gets deeper and deeper into the mire. I am to speak to-night; it will do no good; and the fear grows upon me from year to year that when I finally leave parliament, I shall not leave the great question of state and church better, but perhaps even ...
— The Life of William Ewart Gladstone, Vol. 1 (of 3) - 1809-1859 • John Morley

... here sold by ragamuffins to ragamuffins for greasy coppers; and not only these fruits, but quinces and peaches, the large yellow Caucasian khurma, the little blood-red kizil, and many unnamed rarities. They all surged up out of the waste of over-trodden mire, as if the pageantry of some fairy world had been arrested as it was disappearing into ...
— A Tramp's Sketches • Stephen Graham

... that it conveyed but the impression of light. The candour of boyhood, the simplicity of the villager, were still there,—refined by intelligence, but intelligence that seemed to have traversed through knowledge, not with the 'footstep, but the wing, unsullied by the mire, tending towards the star, seeking through the various grades of Being but the lovelier forms of truth and goodness; at home, as should be the Art that ...
— My Novel, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton

... "the armies have kept a respectful distance; they were like nothing I can think of," said the figurative Frenchman, "except two hideous serpents wallowing in mire, and vomiting at each other whole rivers of ...
— Charles O'Malley, The Irish Dragoon, Volume 2 (of 2) • Charles Lever

... no reply. He turned to one of the negroes: "Where's that 'Cajun?" Nobody knew. Down where his canoe had lain, tiny rillets of muddy water were still running into its imprint left in the mire; but canoe, dog, and man had vanished into the rank undergrowth of ...
— Bonaventure - A Prose Pastoral of Acadian Louisiana • George Washington Cable

... proved a hopeless trade; it only plunged Derues deeper and deeper into the mire of financial disaster. The noblemen either forgot to pay while they were alive, or on their death were found to be insolvent. Derues was driven to ordering goods and merchandise on credit, and selling them at a lower price for ready money. Victims of this ...
— A Book of Remarkable Criminals • H. B. Irving

... him, either in the Cabinet or out of it, of suggestion or information on matters even of vital interest. The Treasury as an active influence ceased to exist. Mr. Boutwell waited with confidence for society to drag his department out of the mire, as it was sure to do if he waited ...
— The Education of Henry Adams • Henry Adams

... half a dozen such cases in my memory now, and I do not know what to make of them. When I see a character standing to-day above all reproach, compacted through many years of manly, honest, Christian living, overthrown to-morrow, and trodden in the mire, I am shocked. If such men fall, where are we to look for those who will not? If such men, with worthy natures, and long practice of virtue, and myriad motives for the maintenance of an unspotted character, yield to temptation, and are ...
— Lessons in Life - A Series of Familiar Essays • Timothy Titcomb

... misunderstood...of being, as it were, in advance of my time... like poor Flaubert....I know you'll think me ridiculous... and if only my own reputation were at stake, I should never give it a thought...but the idea of dragging John's name through the mire..." ...
— The Descent of Man and Other Stories • Edith Wharton

... He was afflicted with what the Western people called the 'swaleys,' and could not go downhill. I frequently had to dismount and back him down, as the only way of getting along. The road often lay through forests and clearings, in mire, and among the roots of the beeches, with which my poor beast was constantly struggling. I would sometimes emerge from a dark wood, five miles through, perhaps, and find myself near a clearing where the farmer's house I was seeking lay, half a mile off the road. Picking ...
— Great Fortunes, and How They Were Made • James D. McCabe, Jr.

... torrents, as from the mouths of water skins, and the folk forbore to come and go about the ways for that which was therein of rain and slough. Now I was straitened in breast because none of my brethren came to me nor could I go to them, by reason of the mud and mire; so I said to my servant, "Bring me wherewithal I may divert myself." Accordingly he brought me meat and drink, but I had no heart to eat, without some one to keep me company, and I ceased not to look out of window and watch ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 7 • Richard F. Burton

... solace; quhen suddenlie apperit to his sicht the fairist hart that evir wes sene afore with levand creature. The noyis and din of this hart rinnand, as apperit, with awful and braid tindis, maid the kingis hors so effrayit, that na renzeis micht hald him, bot ran, perforce, ouir mire and mossis, away with the king. Nochtheles, the hart followit so fast, that he dang baith the king and his hors to the ground. Than the king kest abak his handis betwix the tindis of this hart, to haif savit him fra the ...
— Chronicles of the Canongate • Sir Walter Scott

... Colonel Douglas writes: "I received orders to call in my guard all, and march immediately with the utmost silence." Hitchcock's Rhode Islanders carried their baggage and camp equipage to the boats on their shoulders "through mud and mire and not a ray of light visible." The embarkation was made from the ferry—the present Fulton Ferry—where General McDougall superintended the movements. Between seven and eight o'clock the boats were manned by Glover's and Hutchinson's ...
— The Campaign of 1776 around New York and Brooklyn • Henry P. Johnston

... trampling his memory in the mire, the Baron von Blitzenberg, deserted and dejected, his face still buried in his hands, endured the slow passage of the doleful afternoon. Unlike the prisoner at The Lash, who, by a coincidence that happily illustrates the dispensations of Providence, was undergoing at the ...
— Count Bunker • J. Storer Clouston

... a-coming down. We made a shard[16] that let the rest of 'em through. It was the only wall that came in the way of the chase to-day. The second downfall was at the brook by Bourton-Windrush, I think they call it. Dobbin being a bit short of wind, and quilting sadly, stuck fast in the mire, and tumbled on to his nose in scrambling out. Marry, sir, but 'twas a famous chase; the like of it I never saw before. 'Twas grand at first to see the hart unharboured—a stag with all his rights, ...
— A Cotswold Village • J. Arthur Gibbs

... But in each case the situation is further complicated. The woman over whose loss of virtue her forsaken husband mourns with passionate anguish and unavailing bitterness of regret, has been to him, whom she now leaves for another, an image of purity: her love and influence have lifted him from the mire, and "the Worst of it," the last pang which he cannot nerve himself to endure, is the knowledge that she had saved him, and, partly at least through him, ruined herself. The poem is one of the most passionate and direct of Browning's dramatic lyrics: it is ...
— An Introduction to the Study of Browning • Arthur Symons

... unconscious; his head and face were covered with blood, and his left ankle was apparently broken. A small open motor stood at the bottom of the hill, and an angry dispute was going on between an old man in mire-stained working-clothes, and the young doctor from Pengarth to whom the ...
— The Mating of Lydia • Mrs. Humphry Ward

... determined to visit other parts and places before locating. I visited Toledo; it was then muddy, ragged, unhealthful, and unpromising. Chicago was then next looked over. It was likewise apparently without promise. The streets were almost impassable with mire. The sidewalks were seldom continuously level for a square. The first floors of some buildings were six to ten feet above those of others beside them. So walking on the sidewalks was an almost constant going up and down steps. ...
— Slavery and Four Years of War, Vol. 1-2 • Joseph Warren Keifer

... since his fall, so furious was he at having been outwitted by a boy, and having not only allowed him to escape, but being himself rolled in the mire—raised his voice in a tremendous shout. All listened intently, but no ...
— Wulf the Saxon - A Story of the Norman Conquest • G. A. Henty

... gallant bearing, as handsome as the knave of hearts in the noble game of cards. He had first encountered Madame Violante one evening at a ball, and after dancing with her far into the night, had carried her home on his crupper, while the Advocate splashed his way through the mud and mire of the kennels by the dancing light of the torches his four tipsy lackeys bore. In the course of these merry doings, a-foot and on horseback, Messire Philippe de Coetquis had formed a shrewd notion that Madame Violante had ...
— The Merrie Tales Of Jacques Tournebroche - 1909 • Anatole France

... clay," the sinner plead, Who fed each vain desire. "Not only clay," another said, "But worse, for thou art mire." ...
— The Complete Poems of Paul Laurence Dunbar • Paul Laurence Dunbar

... the dust,' Katharine said. 'I would kiss the mire from the shoon of the vilest man there is if in that way I might win ...
— The Fifth Queen Crowned • Ford Madox Ford

... Egyptian mythology. The reasons for the prohibition may be considered as two,—the impossibility of setting forth the glory of the Infinite Spirit in any form, and the certainty that the attempt will sink the worshipper deeper in the mire of sense. An image degrades God and damages men. By it religion reverses its nature, and becomes another clog to keep the soul among the things seen, and an ally of all fleshly inclinations. We know how idolatry seemed to cast a spell ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus and Numbers • Alexander Maclaren

... severe the world may be upon a woman after she is down in the mire, there is no denying that it is reluctant to tumble her from her eminence and throw her there. A woman will find more champions than detractors in the face of the most serious charge; especially a young and pretty one, or one whose ...
— The Bondboy • George W. (George Washington) Ogden

... still pending. As administrator of the estate of Professor Kelton—you remember him—Madison College—I filed a petition to be let into the case. It's been sleeping along for a couple of years—stockholders too poor to put up a fight. I've undertaken to probe clear into the mire. I've got lots of time ...
— A Hoosier Chronicle • Meredith Nicholson

... while a separation would accomplish nothing. When once a man has given his name to a woman, he told me, he cannot take it back; it belongs to her for the rest of her days, and she has a right to dispose of it. She may sully it, cover it with mire, drag it from wine shop to wine shop, and her husband can do nothing. That being the case, my course was soon taken. That same day, I sold the fatal meadow, and sent the proceeds of it to Claudine, wishing to keep nothing of the price of shame. I then had a document ...
— The Widow Lerouge - The Lerouge Case • Emile Gaboriau

... loves and one made white Thy singing lips, and golden hair; Born of the city's mire and light, The shame and splendour of the night, She trapped and fled thee unaware; Not through the lamplight and the rain Shalt thou behold this ...
— Ballads and Lyrics of Old France: with other Poems • Andrew Lang

... subjection; and if I mistake not, 'breaking away' will prove to be no joke. If any of the students feel like giving up, now is the best time to take the back track, for the farther we go the deeper in the mire we shall be. If there are any who are sick of their bargain, they had better say ...
— Breaking Away - or The Fortunes of a Student • Oliver Optic

... says the black-coat gent to the female; 'he's a-flounderin' in the mire of sin. Don't you know,' he goes on to Texas, 'my perishin' friend, you are bein' swept downward in the river of your own sinful life till your soul will ...
— Wolfville • Alfred Henry Lewis

... inherent and fatal defects in private capitalism as a machine for producing wealth which, quite apart from its ethical character, made its abolition necessary if the race was ever to get out of the mire ...
— Equality • Edward Bellamy

... conductor can easily lift a recalcitrant passenger, and project him through one of the windows of the car, (provided said window is large enough to admit of such exit,) into any selected pool, or pond, or quagmire, or any other sort of mire, of the miasmatic salt meadows, with the produce of which Morris and Essex stock is so satisfactorily ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 16, July 16, 1870 • Various

... impossible to believe that any human being is incapable of understanding that, in allowing herself merely to smile at the expense of a fellow-creature who has loyally held out his hand to her, she is casting herself into a mire from which it will be impossible, with the best will in the world, ever to rescue her. I dwell so many miles above the puddles in which these filthy little vermin sprawl and crawl and bawl their cheap obscenities, that I cannot possibly be spattered by the ...
— Swann's Way - (vol. 1 of Remembrance of Things Past) • Marcel Proust

... the material side of the Universe and the carnal side of Man's being,—we shall realise how easy it is for the secular life, once it has lost, through its divorce from religion, the tonic stimulus of a central aim, to sink, without directly intending to do so, into the mire of materialism,—a materialism of conduct as well as ...
— What Is and What Might Be - A Study of Education in General and Elementary Education in Particular • Edmond Holmes

... night-shrouded town, and called the peasants from their well-earned rest to toil onwards in their march. The wind howled fiercely over the moorland; a close, thick, wetting rain descended. Chilled to the bone, worn out with long fatigue, sinking to the knees in mire, onward they marched to destruction. One by one the weary peasants fell off from their ranks to sleep, and die in the rain-soaked moor, or to seek some house by the wayside wherein to hide till daybreak. One by one at first, then in gradually increasing numbers, at every shelter that was seen, ...
— Lay Morals • Robert Louis Stevenson

... the blaze of bonfires at Annapolis," groaned Douglass. "Say, the middies just fairly tore our scalps off. I always had an ambition to captain the Army eleven, but I never thought I'd be dragged down so deep under the mire!" ...
— Dick Prescotts's Fourth Year at West Point - Ready to Drop the Gray for Shoulder Straps • H. Irving Hancock

... twig her legs." The irate dame turns round to reprove them by words, or wither them with a glance; but alas! in her indignation she raises a threatening hand, forgetful of the important duties it was fulfilling, and down go gown, petticoats, and auxiliaries in the filthy mire; the boys of course roar with delight—it's the jolliest fun they have had for many a day; the old lady gathers up her bundle in haste, and reaches the opposite side with a filthy dress and a furious temper. Let any mind, unwarped ...
— Lands of the Slave and the Free - Cuba, The United States, and Canada • Henry A. Murray

... following her, though all the time they fancied themselves doing it of their own accord. The cow was by no means very nice in choosing her path; so that sometimes they had to scramble over rocks, or wade through mud and mire, and all in a terribly bedraggled condition, and tired to death, and very hungry, into the bargain. What a weary ...
— Tanglewood Tales • Nathaniel Hawthorne

... ponderous coach and six, with four outriders and two equerries kicking up the dust; whilst a small body of heavy dragoons rode solemnly after the huge vehicle. It waded, with inglorious struggles, through a deep mire of mud, between the Palace and Hyde Park, until the cortege entered Kensington Park, as the gardens were then called, and began to track the old road that led to the red-brick structure to which William III. had added a higher story, built ...
— The Wits and Beaux of Society - Volume 1 • Grace Wharton and Philip Wharton

... was greeted with renewed glee by her assailants. They were now roused to the highest point of frenzy: the crowd of brutes would in the nex moment have torn the helpless girl from her place of refuge and dragged her into the mire, an outraged prey, for the satisfaction ...
— I Will Repay • Baroness Emmuska Orczy

... tillers of the soil cursed the traveller who brought them potatoes in place of bread, the daily food of the poor man.... They snatched the precious gift from the hands outstretched to them, flung it in the mire, trod ...
— A Reckless Character - And Other Stories • Ivan Turgenev

... Goblin, Wood-god, Fairy, Elfe, or Fiend, Satyr or other power that haunts the Groves, Shall hurt my body, or by vain illusion Draw me to wander after idle fires; Or voyces calling me in dead of night, To make me follow, and so tole me on Through mire and standing pools, to find my ruine: Else why should this rough thing, who never knew Manners, nor smooth humanity, whose heats Are rougher than himself, and more mishapen, Thus mildly kneel to me? sure there ...
— The Faithful Shepherdess - The Works of Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher (Vol. 2 of 10). • Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher

... himself from the mire into which he sank, was advised to make use of a Political Pull. When the Political Pull had arrived, the Ox said: "My good friend, please make fast to me, and let nature ...
— Fantastic Fables • Ambrose Bierce

... that was washed returned to her wallowing in the mire;" and in like manner Cuff left off steering the souls of sinners through the temptations and sorrows of this wicked world, or the infant mind through the intricacies of a—b ab, and once more betook ...
— An Old Sailor's Yarns • Nathaniel Ames

... pursue them as a star may guide those who wish to reach the place over which it happens to shine. But an eternal possibility has no material power. It is only one of an infinity of other things equally possible intrinsically, yet most of them quite unrealisable in this world of blood and mire. The realm of eternal essences rains down no Jovian thunderbolts, but only a ghostly Uranian calm. There is no frown there; rather, a passive and universal welcome to any who may have in them the will and the power to climb. ...
— Winds Of Doctrine - Studies in Contemporary Opinion • George Santayana

... not clinging, it was not like real mire. There was no suction to hold the wheel down. Merely the crust had broken in and the wheel had encountered an impediment of a sound tree root in front of it so that, when the horses tugged, the tire had come against the root and ...
— Nan Sherwood at Pine Camp - or, The Old Lumberman's Secret • Annie Roe Carr

... its walls, turned into a scene thus swept clean for it, a wave of olive drab, impeccable row after impeccable row of scissors-like legs advancing. Recruits, raw if you will, but already caparisoned, sniffing and scenting, as it were, for the great primordial mire of war. ...
— Americans All - Stories of American Life of To-Day • Various

... further north the mire grew deeper. About eight o'clock it began to fall heavily, and, as we crossed the wild heaths hereabout, there was no vestige of a track. The mail kept on well, however, and at eleven we reached a bare place with a house standing alone in the midst of a dreary moor, which ...
— The Letters of Charles Dickens - Vol. 1 (of 3), 1833-1856 • Charles Dickens

... Silliness, animal passion, which intertwines itself with our seemingly tender feelings, which tricks itself out with blossoms, and then eats canker-like into them, to make them too shed their leaves, to trample that, which it called heavenly, in the mire, and—far worse than the comparatively innocent beasts of the field, that are driven by a blind instinct without anything of volition—to deface and spoil everything which but now it worshipt as holy. From this conflagration then shoot forth ever and anon those disasterous ...
— The Old Man of the Mountain, The Lovecharm and Pietro of Abano - Tales from the German of Tieck • Ludwig Tieck

... ancle deep slush and mire, that 'tis hard to get to the post office, and cruel to send the maid out. 'Tis a slough of despair, or I should sooner have thankd you for your offer of the Life, which we shall very much like to have, and will return duly. I do ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb (Vol. 6) - Letters 1821-1842 • Charles and Mary Lamb

... time, the man who had fallen into the ditch had succeeded in making his appearance in the visible world again, and as he crawled up the bank, looking a thing of mire and mud, Jack walked up to him with all the carelessness in the ...
— Varney the Vampire - Or the Feast of Blood • Thomas Preskett Prest

... had a little pony, his name was Dapple Grey; I lent him to a lady, to ride a mile away. She whipped him and she lashed him, She rode him through the mire; I would not lend my pony now For ...
— A History of Nursery Rhymes • Percy B. Green

... "When our feet were in slippery places, and we leaned on Him, did he not support us firmly? and when the mire and clay were deep in our path, did He not ...
— True Riches - Or, Wealth Without Wings • T.S. Arthur

... this child, And grass, and white and red morning-glories,[1] and white and red clover, and the song of the phoebe-bird,[2] And the Third-month lambs, and the sow's pink-faint litter, and the mare's foal, and the cow's calf, And the noisy brood of the barn-yard, or by the mire of the pond-side, And the fish suspending themselves so curiously below there—and the beautiful, curious liquid, And the water-plants with their graceful fiat heads—all became part of him. The field-sprouts of Fourth-month and Fifth-month ...
— Poems By Walt Whitman • Walt Whitman

... monophysitism made this result inevitable. Extremes meet. Extreme spirituality readily passes into its opposite. It cuts the ground from under its own feet. It soars beyond its powers, and falls into the mire of materialism. Illustrations of this fact can be found in the history of philosophy. The Stoics, for instance, contrived to be both pantheists and materialists. Coming nearer to our own time, we find ...
— Monophysitism Past and Present - A Study in Christology • A. A. Luce

... midst of this uproar, the Rector entered the village, and was coming full upon Scourhill and his retinue when the ass made a sudden halt before the door of a tinker, its master, and threw its rider upon a large heap of mire. The youth instantly started up, and, without ever looking behind him to thank his attendants for the procession, he ran home ...
— Forgotten Tales of Long Ago • E. V. Lucas

... have done," he said. "You can have nothing to say. Be silent and listen to me. You have destroyed the greatest happiness the world ever knew. You have dishonoured me and mine. You have dragged my faith in you—God knows how great—into the mire of your infamous life. And worse than that—I could almost have forgiven that, I am ...
— Sant' Ilario • F. Marion Crawford

... locality, they are a well-known resort of the vicious. In the fields are [Page 10] the tillers of the soil wading barefoot and bareheaded in mud and water, holding plough or harrow drawn by an amphibious creature called a carabao or water-buffalo, burying by hand in the mire the roots of young rice plants, or applying as a fertiliser the ordure and garbage of the city. Such unpoetic toils never could have inspired the georgic ...
— The Awakening of China • W.A.P. Martin

... about for a foothold in another direction. At the same time she drew out her body to its full length, and lay flat, so that she might gain as much support as possible by distributing her weight. Because of this sagacity, and because the mire at this point had more substance than in most of the other "honey-pots," she made a good fight, and almost, but not quite, held her own. By the time the tide had once more overtaken her she had sunk but a little ...
— The House in the Water - A Book of Animal Stories • Charles G. D. Roberts

... now to carry out her scheme in coming to Washington, for she was already deep in the mire of politics and could see with every advantage how the great machine floundered about, bespattering with mud even her own pure garments. Ratcliffe himself, since entering the Treasury, had begun to talk with a sneer of the way in which laws were made, and openly said that he wondered how ...
— Democracy An American Novel • Henry Adams

... He's no a sheep, nor in some ways as guid's a sheep, A grant ye that, but such as he is was it no ma duty to pull him oot o' the mire o' Sawbath ...
— To Him That Hath - A Novel Of The West Of Today • Ralph Connor

... constantly doing, or to a particularly steep hill. At such times, the desperate straining of the team, their agonized leaping and plunging under the pitiless lashing of hunger, the many who fainted at the rope and were trampled in the mire, made a very distressing spectacle, which often called forth highly creditable displays of feeling on the top of the coach. At such times the passengers would call down encouragingly to the toilers of the rope, exhorting them to patience, and holding out hopes of possible compensation in another ...
— Looking Backward - 2000-1887 • Edward Bellamy

... cold, wet, dirty night. Grisell's little sister, a girl not well able to walk, soon lost her shoes in the dirt. Whereupon the Lady Polwarth took her upon her back, the gentlemen carrying all their baggage, and Grisell going through the mire ...
— The Red True Story Book • Various

... a long night as I pushed onward through the mire. For presently it had come on to rain—a thick, dank rain, which wetted through all covering, yet fell soft as caressing ...
— Red Axe • Samuel Rutherford Crockett

... threatened, Otherwise events had happened, For they wanted to o'erthrow me, Threatened they would sink me deeply 160 In the swamp when I was walking, That in mire I might be sunken, In the mud my chin pushed downward, And my beard in filthy places. But indeed a man they found me, And they did not greatly fright me, I myself put forth my magic, And began my spells to mutter, Sang the wizards with their arrows, And ...
— Kalevala, Volume I (of 2) - The Land of the Heroes • Anonymous

... the christening of an infant. It was then plainly Toby's opinion that, while they might not take quite so much time to christen as to marry, there was still no need to rush off with the priest's vestments out of order and his own fetlocks weighted with mire. The two had many friendly contests on these occasions, but Toby's will was the stronger, and his temper was not quite so mild; and as it is always the less amiable who wins, it was commonly he who ...
— Round Anvil Rock - A Romance • Nancy Huston Banks

... not abject yet; there was one that loved them—their chief and their friend! Below their level was a deeper depth, in which, alas, lie many of like heart and, passions with them, trodden into the mire ...
— What's Mine's Mine • George MacDonald

... Caliph in Bagdad; they founded dynasties in India. The fanaticism of Christianity and the fanaticism of Mohammedanism were alike powerless against them. The valor of the bravest fighting men in Europe was impotent to check them. They trampled Russia into bloody mire beneath the hoofs of their horses; they drew red furrows of destruction across Poland and Hungary; they overthrew with ease any force from western Europe that dared encounter them. Yet they had no ...
— African and European Addresses • Theodore Roosevelt

... chief charm. Everybody who knew him felt that he was a man, a large-hearted, generous friend, always ready to help everybody and everything out of their troubles, whether it was a pig stuck in the mire, a poor widow in trouble, or a farmer who needed advice. He had a helpful mind, open, frank, transparent. He never covered up anything, never had secrets. The door of his heart was always open so that anyone could ...
— Pushing to the Front • Orison Swett Marden

... dipped, and she felt the deepening slush of swamp-mire under her feet. She sank in it to her shoe-tops, and stumbled into pools knee-deep, and Peter wallowed in it to his belly. A quarter of an hour they fought through it to the rising ground beyond. And by that time the last of the black storm clouds had passed ...
— The Country Beyond - A Romance of the Wilderness • James Oliver Curwood

... were not yet over, when a tired Cinderella, trudging through the mire, was suddenly provided with a comfortable carriage, springing as it were out of the earth to carry her to her destination. It was extraordinary how often Dr Maclure's brougham "happened" to be travelling in the same ...
— The Fortunes of the Farrells • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey

... convenient bashluk (a sort of woollen hood) over their heads and ears. The Arab, in his long camel-skin coat, looks impervious to the weather, and women with veiled faces and long black cloaks pick their way through the mire. Throngs of donkeys, melancholy and overladen, their small feet sinking in the slush, may be with the foot-passengers. Some pariah dogs make a dirty patch in the snow, and a troop of Cossacks, their long cloaks spotted with ...
— My War Experiences in Two Continents • Sarah Macnaughtan

... although there was a little sprinkling of snow on the ground, as befitted the season, it had thawed in the streets of Westham, and as a matter of course the doctor, who always appeared to choose the very muddiest of places to tramp in, had managed to collect as much of the mire as he could on ...
— Afloat at Last - A Sailor Boy's Log of his Life at Sea • John Conroy Hutcheson

... Golgotha, and this despite that the books out of which you probably got it are carefully labelled "Fiction." Lamb says somewhere that we think of the "Dark Ages" as literally without sunlight, and so I fancy people like you, dear, think of the "East-end" as a mixture of mire, misery, and murder. How's that for alliteration? Why, within five minutes' walk of me there are the loveliest houses, with gardens back and front, inhabited by very fine people and furniture. Many of my university ...
— The Grey Wig: Stories and Novelettes • Israel Zangwill

... such an ignominious end. The disgrace of it, too, was hard to bear; keenly sensitive as he was, and with an abhorrence of anything like brawls of any sort, he felt as though he was dragged through mire. Of course the unions took up their case and promised to defend them. They had a large amount of money at their disposal in the union funds, and they promised that the best legal advice obtainable ...
— The Day of Judgment • Joseph Hocking

... suspicion in her frank acceptance of the stranger. There had been open amusement in her tone at his suggestion of danger to her from any in Limasito, and genuine love and pride when she spoke of her father and his calling. How was it possible that the mire of her surroundings had left ...
— The Fifth Ace • Douglas Grant

... finished mi wark, An' wor tooastin mi shins anent th' fire, A chap rushes in aat 'o'th' dark Throo heead to fooit plaistered wi' mire. ...
— Yorkshire Ditties, Second Series - To which is added The Cream of Wit and Humour - from his Popular Writings • John Hartley

... exchange for his own soul? Will he sell that? Will he consent to see another man sell his soul? Will he consent to see the conditions of his community such that men's souls are debauched and trodden underfoot in the mire? What shall he give in exchange for his own soul, or any other man's soul? And since the world, the world of affairs, the world of society, is nothing less and nothing more than all of us put together, it is a great enterprise for the salvation of the soul in ...
— President Wilson's Addresses • Woodrow Wilson

... of mine anger, The staff in whose hand is mine indignation. Against an impious nation am I wont to send him. And against the people of my wrath I give him charge, To take spoil and gather booty, And to tread them down like the mire in the streets. But he—not so doth he plan; And his heart—not so doth it purpose. For destruction is in his heart, And to cut off nations not a few. For he saith, By the strength of my hand have I done it, And by my wisdom, ...
— Stories of the Prophets - (Before the Exile) • Isaac Landman

... said than done. Our unfortunate Normans struggled vainly in the darkness and in the mire, uttering piteous exclamations—cold and frozen, and mocked ever and anon by some blazing light. Many a vow did they make to our Lady of Sorrows, and to St. Erroutt, St. Gervaise, St. Denys, and every ...
— The Rival Heirs being the Third and Last Chronicle of Aescendune • A. D. Crake

... setting out on foot. We went about two kilometres as bravely as possible, and then I stopped, quite exhausted. The mud which clung to our shoes made these very heavy. The effort we had to make at every step to get our feet out of the mire tired us out. I sat down on a milestone, and declared that I ...
— My Double Life - The Memoirs of Sarah Bernhardt • Sarah Bernhardt

... hast lighted the sun, Oh, Thou who hast darkened the tare, Judge Thou The sin of the Stone that was hurled By the Goat from the light of the sun As she sinks in 'the mire of ...
— The Second Chance • Nellie L. McClung

... the toils of the journey and the nature of their tasks, promptly mutinied on arrival. Others dispatched after them failed to turn up, and Lisle never discovered what became of them. The camp-site was a sea of puddled mire with big stones in it; tents and shacks were almost continuously dripping; and every hollow was filled with a raging torrent. Nobody had dry clothes, even to sleep in; the work was mostly carried on knee-deep in water, and at first things got little ...
— The Long Portage • Harold Bindloss

... virtuous father virtuous son, Now that the fields are dank, and ways are mire, Where shall we sometimes meet, and by the fire Help waste a sullen day, what may be won From the hard season gaining? Time will run On smoother, till Favonius reinspire The frozen earth, and clothe in fresh attire The lily and rose, that ...
— The Life of John Milton, Volume 5 (of 7), 1654-1660 • David Masson

... the beginning. Having beguiled her into an extravagant mode of expenditure, from motives of self-protection I have been forced to plunge deeper into the mire of deception. I have informed her that she is to refer all tradespeople to Nevin. Quite innocently she may let us in for any amount ...
— The Orchard of Tears • Sax Rohmer

... that counts in the formation of character. All fall short, all fail, but in the end those who seek to climb out of the pit, those who strive, however vainly, to fashion failure to success, are, by comparison, the righteous, while those who are content to wallow in our native mire and to glut themselves with the daily bread of vice, are the unrighteous. To turn our backs thereon wilfully and without cause, is the real unforgiveable sin against the Spirit. At least that is the best definition ...
— Finished • H. Rider Haggard

... men of all ranks, peers and yokels, prize-fighters and Jews, and the last came to plunder, and are now plundering amidst that wild confusion of hail and rain, men and horses, carts and carriages. But all hurry in one direction, through mud and mire; there's a town only three miles distant which is soon reached, and soon filled, it will not contain one-third of that mighty rabble; but there's another town farther on—the good old city is farther on, only twelve miles; what's that! who'll ...
— George Borrow - The Man and His Books • Edward Thomas

... hopeless trade; it only plunged Derues deeper and deeper into the mire of financial disaster. The noblemen either forgot to pay while they were alive, or on their death were found to be insolvent. Derues was driven to ordering goods and merchandise on credit, and selling ...
— A Book of Remarkable Criminals • H. B. Irving

... and (as a necessary consequence) such distinction? Besides, I suddenly felt quite a curiosity to drink some liquor, just to see how it tasted. After all, it was only very low people who got drunk and wallowed in the mire. Gentlemen (I thought) never get drunk, and they always seem so happy and joyous after they have been drinking! How they shake hands, and swear eternal friendship, and seem generously willing to ...
— My Life: or the Adventures of Geo. Thompson - Being the Auto-Biography of an Author. Written by Himself. • George Thompson

... crossed a black and fetid mire, and struck inland to a higher and drier level. The vegetation was that of the Calumbo road, but not so utterly sunburnt: there were dwarf fields of Manioc and Thur (Cajanus indicus), and the large wild ...
— Two Trips to Gorilla Land and the Cataracts of the Congo Volume 2 • Richard F. Burton

... these Reports "more faith-strengthening and soul-refreshing than many a sermon," particularly so after just wading through the mire of a speech of a French infidel who boldly affirmed that of all of the millions of prayers uttered every day, not one is answered. We should like to have any candid skeptic confronted with Mr. Muller's unvarnished story of a life of faith, and see how he would on any principle ...
— George Muller of Bristol - His Witness to a Prayer-Hearing God • Arthur T. Pierson

... 'Go thou from me to fate, And to my father my foul deeds relate. Now die!' With that he dragg'd the trembling sire, Slidd'ring thro' clotter'd blood and holy mire, (The mingled paste his murder'd son had made,) Haul'd from beneath the violated shade, And on the sacred pile the royal victim laid. His right hand held his bloody falchion bare, His left he twisted in his hoary hair; Then, with a speeding thrust, ...
— The Aeneid • Virgil

... you thy true love's grace," (Fly away, my heart, fly away) And now there is joy in the traveller's face: (Fly away, my heart, fly away) Oh, wild does he ride through the rain and mire, To greet his love by the smithy fire— (Fly ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker

... about it," Sommers answered, closing his lips firmly. "It is part of the mire; we ...
— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick

... is so awful hard. Better almost to die an' be done with it, he sometimes thinks. Then comes a day when his temptation is ten times more than he is able to bear. He throws up the sponge; he has done his best an' failed, so away he goes like the sow that was washed to his wallowing in the mire. But he has not done his best. He has not gone to his Maker; an' surely the maker of a machine is the best judge o' how to mend it. Now, when a believer in Jesus comes to the same point o' temptation he falls on his knees an' cries for help; an' he gets ...
— The Young Trawler • R.M. Ballantyne

... fatal as the fight between the rival Highland clans, described by Scott in "The Fair Maid of Perth." I used to wonder at their folly, when I was stumbling over the rough hassocks, and sinking knee-deep in the black mire, raking the sharp sickle-edged grass which we used to feed out to the young cattle in midwinter when the bitter cold gave them appetite for even such fodder. I had an almost Irish hatred of snakes, and these meadows were full of them,—striped, green, dingy water- snakes, ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier

... imagine. Women are neither as good as their admirers and defenders maintain, nor as bad as their enemies make them out to be. Woman's character is characterlessness. The best woman will momentarily go down into the mire, and the worst unexpectedly rises to deeds of greatness and goodness and puts to shame those that despise her. No woman is so good or so bad, but that at any moment she is capable of the most diabolical as well as of the ...
— Venus in Furs • Leopold von Sacher-Masoch

... transfigured sunshine; as clear and mellow, only showing everything in a new wonderful significance. The shadows of the leaves on the road were so strangely black that Dowson and I had difficulty in believing that they were not solid, or at least pools of dark mire. And the hills and the trees, and the white Italian houses with lit windows! O! nothing could bring home to you the keenness and the reality and the wonderful Unheimlichkeit of all these. When the moon rises every night over the Italian ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 23 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson

... hastened through the thin, reflecting mire, amid beams of light and illuminated numbers that advanced upon him in both directions thundering or purring, and crossed Piccadilly, and hurried ahead of her, to watch her in safety from the other side of the thoroughfare. He could hardly see her; she was only a moving shadow; but still he ...
— The Pretty Lady • Arnold E. Bennett

... very large yard, surrounded on three sides by buildings, stables, and store-houses, and cattle-sheds and stalls. In the midst of it was a quantity of manure, all wet and sloppy, and upon the very top of this heap stood that charming boy, Master Tom, with his shoes and stockings all covered with mire. ...
— The Fairchild Family • Mary Martha Sherwood

... fell Upon us, with design To root us out, then had not God Appeared to take our part, And them chastized with His rod, And made them feel the smart, We then had overwhelmed been And trodden in the mire; Our enemies on us had seen Their cruel hearts' desire. When stoned, when stocked, when rudely stripped, Some to the waist have been (Without regard of sex), and whipped, Until the blood did spin; Yea, when their skins with stripes looked black, Their flesh to jelly beat, Enough to make ...
— The History of Thomas Ellwood Written by Himself • Thomas Ellwood

... were left dead upon the field. The victorious army marched to York. As King Harold sat there at the feast, in the midst of all his company, a stir was heard at the doors; and messengers all covered with mire from riding far and fast through broken ground came hurrying in, to report that the ...
— A Child's History of England • Charles Dickens

... happier things as remembering that the happy state came to an end by one's own wrongdoing. Still, most modern readers will think that Goethe, in elaborating the Brocken scene as an interesting study of the uncanny and the vile, let his hero sink needlessly far into the mire. ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke

... children raised to the full enjoyment of their privileges as social and rational beings, and he seems to have established society for this very end, among others, that there may be an agency and a machinery adequate and fitted to drag even the unwilling out of the mire into which they have fallen. Without such an interposition on the part of society as a whole, the work will not be done. The mass of the people will remain in ignorance in every community, in which the community as such does not provide the means ...
— In the School-Room - Chapters in the Philosophy of Education • John S. Hart

... enemy, the Parisians have succeeded in emptying the cup of disgrace to the dregs by dragging down the monument of their military glory, amid hoots and hisses, and toppling over the effigy of their greatest soldier-hero on to a bed of mire, at the same time publicly tearing the tricoloured national flag which has for so many years led their armies to victory. Upon the official announcement some days back that the Vendome Column was to be sacrificed as an insult to the principles ...
— The Insurrection in Paris • An Englishman: Davy

... free. Would to God a man like the great-hearted, pure-bodied Milton, a man whom young men are compelled to respect, would in this our age, utter such a word as, making "mad the guilty," if such grace might be accorded them, would "appal the free," lest they too should fall into such a mire of selfish dishonour! ...
— Annals of a Quiet Neighbourhood • George MacDonald

... miles of their journey, and this was undertaken on foot, but soon a storm brought five inches of snow. Mr. Wright says: "My wife was very lame, and what woman would not be after walking twenty long miles through mire and water, over high hills and through gullies, in snow from four to ...
— The American Missionary, Volume 49, No. 3, March, 1895 • Various

... person). Why, she set to work and made a rochet in little, and set it on the dog's back. Heardst thou ever the like? And there was he, a-running about the house with his rochet on him, and all trailing in the mire. I know not whether Annis were wholly free of some knowledge thereof—nor Bertie neither. He said he knew not; I marvel whether he ...
— Robin Tremain - A Story of the Marian Persecution • Emily Sarah Holt

... throwing more dust into the eyes of the police. Patience Crabstick had, of course, been one of the gang throughout, and she had now been allowed to go off with her mistress's money and lesser trinkets,—so that the world of Scotland Yard might be thrown more and more into the mire of ignorance and darkness of doubt. To this view Gager was altogether opposed. He was inclined to think that Lord George had taken the diamonds at Carlisle with Lizzie's connivance;—that he had restored them in London to her keeping, finding the suspicion ...
— The Eustace Diamonds • Anthony Trollope

... they extend this merriment with the largest, to the preiudice of ouer-credulous people, perswading them to fight with a Dragon lurking in Halgauer, or to see some strange matter there: which concludeth at least, with a trayning them into the mire. ...
— The Survey of Cornwall • Richard Carew

... person—a low, vulgar creature proud of the brutal strength and coarseness of her man. I seem to be a part of this human beast! When I wake up I feel as if my soul had been stained, dragged in the mire, almost lost. It seems as if I could never again feel any self-respect. Oh, doctor," Penelope's voice broke and the tears filled her eyes, "you must help me! I cannot bear this torture any longer! What can I do to ...
— Possessed • Cleveland Moffett

... reflected, "maybe likened to the Sibyl, who in the pantheon of the false gods, proclaimed the coming Redeemer to the Nations. The mire of old-world falsehoods yet clings about the hoofs of his feet, but his forehead is uplifted to the light, and ...
— The Well of Saint Clare • Anatole France

... take her in his arms. I never saw a man stand at the shore where she had been morally wrecked, waiting for the waves to bring back even her corpse to his arms but I have seen woman do it. I have seen woman with her white arms lift man from the mire of degradation, and hold him to her bosom as though he ...
— Lectures of Col. R. G. Ingersoll, Volume I • Robert Green Ingersoll

... same year innumerable earless blades of wheat rose from the bottom of the sea like a forest, catching up mud, mire, weed, and remains of animals, so that by and by a dune rose under water which stopped the ships from entering the ...
— Legends of the Rhine • Wilhelm Ruland

... again. She begged him to kill her rather than exact this ultimate love- payment. She told him of the penalty of breaking the taboo of the Red One—a week of torture, living, the details of which she yammered out from her face in the mire until he realized that he was yet a tyro in knowledge of the frightfulness the human was capable of ...
— The Red One • Jack London

... not have any divorce trial," said Ishmael firmly. "We will not have your daughter's pure name dragged through the mire of a divorce court; we will have Lord Vincent and his accomplices arrested and tried; the valet for murder, and the viscount and the opera singer for conspiracy and kidnaping. We have proof enough to convict them all; the valet will be hanged; and the viscount ...
— Self-Raised • Emma Dorothy Eliza Nevitte Southworth

... happier in all his life. The past?—he wiped that off his recollection as with a sponge; now he was a new man with his feet out of the mire and a clean road all the rest of the way, with a clean sweet soul for his companion. He loved her to his very heart of hearts; he had, honestly, for her but the rendered passion of passion—why! what ...
— Doom Castle • Neil Munro

... the long silence that followed and the distant voices that flashed across it now and then—the call of the mire drum in the marshes and the songs of the winter wren and the swamp robin. It was a ...
— The Light in the Clearing • Irving Bacheller

... rapture. Damn it, couldn't he be freed from one without falling into the other? Lee told himself that it must be possible to leave permanently the fenced roads of Eastlake for the high hills; it wasn't necessary to go down into the bottoms, the mire. ...
— Cytherea • Joseph Hergesheimer

... before the wall they fought, While Death exulted o'er them; deadly Strife Shrieked out a long wild cry from host to host. With blood of slain men dust became red mire: Here, there, fast fell the ...
— The Fall of Troy • Smyrnaeus Quintus

... evening, tell pleasant tales of ancient days, while the wind powdered the glass with drift, and roared in the chimney. Then a man thanked God that he was not confined to a place where the pure snow was trodden into mire, and the thick fog made it ...
— Kate Carnegie and Those Ministers • Ian Maclaren

... rain ceased, but the fog continued. Their path led through marshy ground thoroughly soaked with rain, so that they often sank to their knees in the mire. Their feet were shod with moccasins made of the hide of buffaloes. These being alternately wet and dried, became stiff, and blistered their feet cruelly. Fortunately, they struck upon one of the "streets" made by the ...
— The Adventures of the Chevalier De La Salle and His Companions, in Their Explorations of the Prairies, Forests, Lakes, and Rivers, of the New World, and Their Interviews with the Savage Tribes, Two Hu • John S. C. Abbott

... the characteristic of those who are yearning to rise above their low environment. It is not from external filth alone that a man seeks to cleanse himself, but from inward corruption also. And so he strives, and strives again, for purity—and falls the deeper in the mire. ...
— Maxim Gorki • Hans Ostwald

... crucial trials. It condemned him, for the pacifying of a dying man, to the murmur and shuffle, which was a lie; and the lie burnt him, contributed to the brand on his race. He and his father upheld a solitary bare staff, where the Cambrian flag had flown, before their people had been trampled in mire, to do as the worms. His loathing of any shadow of the lie was a protest on behalf of Welsh blood against an English charge, besides the passion for spiritual cleanliness: without which was no comprehension, ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith

... these last had ever been as "the morning cloud and the early dew," and like all good resolutions repeatedly broken, had only added fresh rivets to the chains of his evil habits. And so he had plunged deeper and deeper into the mire of intemperance and ungodliness, till scarce the faintest trace of the divine image could be discerned ...
— True to his Colours - The Life that Wears Best • Theodore P. Wilson

... martyr detrahatur, Petrus Martyr Vermilius, omnesque cum eo foederati, peiores adulteris et sacrilegis habeantur. Ac ne singulis insistam diutius, Patres huius saeculi damnantur omnes, "quippe qui doctrinam de poenitentia mire depravarint."[49] Quo pacto? Nam austeritas canonum, quae viguit ea tempestate, maiorem in modum displicet huic sectae plausibili, quae tricliniis aptior, quam templis, voluptarias aures titillare et pulvillos omni cubito[50] ...
— Ten Reasons Proposed to His Adversaries for Disputation in the Name • Edmund Campion

... prodigality of genius has wasted upon so poor a theme. Not even that libretto could degrade the pure, serious, and essentially innocent character of Mozart's conceptions; but, in turn, his refined musical conception has been unable to lift the subject from the mire of Da Ponte's delineation. We know that page after page has been written to unfold the mystic meanings and profound philosophy contained in the story, but our observation has been, that the effect of the whole upon pure minds is simply—disgust. The musical grandeur of the finale rarely saves its ...
— Continental Monthly, Volume 5, Issue 4 • Various

... gentleman's shoulder. He took him in the instant in which, with one foot off the ground and the other on the step of the carriage, the foreigner was easily thrown' off his balance; he dragged him violently backward, span him round and dropped him floundering in the mire of the street-kennel. ...
— St. Martin's Summer • Rafael Sabatini

... without adding to thine iniquity, by allowing that man to know what should never have been revealed to him? Do you not feel that you make that man your own accomplice the very moment that you throw into his heart and soul the mire of your iniquities? He is as weak as you are; he is not less a sinner than yourself; what has tempted you will tempt him; what has made you weak will make him weak? what has polluted you will pollute him; what has thrown you down into the dust ...
— The Priest, The Woman And The Confessional • Father Chiniquy

... for refusing the oath of supremacy, were arrested at their firesides: herded together like cattle; driven at the point of the bayonet, amid the gibes, jeers, and scoffs of soldiers, up to this dreary place, and thrust promiscuously into a dark vault in this castle; almost smothered in filth and mire; a prey to pestilent disease, and to every malignity which brutality could inflict, they died here unpitied. A few escaping down the rocks were recaptured, ...
— Sunny Memories Of Foreign Lands, Volume 1 (of 2) • Harriet Elizabeth (Beecher) Stowe

... fell asleep, it was in the thick of marveling over the processes of evolution that could produce from primeval mire and dust the glowing, glorious flesh and ...
— The Little Lady of the Big House • Jack London

... for help as I was sticking in the mire, and, more propitious than Hercules, he put his own shoulder to the wheel. Through his favourable representations Murray was quickly induced to undertake the future publication of the work which he had previously declined. A further edition of the first volume was put to press, and from ...
— A Publisher and His Friends • Samuel Smiles

... just above the end of the stock, poise the piece on the hammer on either shoulder, stock uppermost, and roll up our breeches to the knees. Then like Tam O'Shanter, we "skelpit on through dub and mire, despising wind, and rain, and fire," and singing "John Brown's Body," or whatever else came handy. But rainy days in camp, especially such as we had at Benton Barracks, engender feelings of gloom and dejection that have to be experienced ...
— The Story of a Common Soldier of Army Life in the Civil War, 1861-1865 • Leander Stillwell

... come, dear Dean, Your humble friend to entertain, Through dirt and mire along the street, You find no scraper for your feet; At which you stamp and storm and swell, Which serves to clean your feet as well. By steps ascending to the hall, All torn to rags by boys and ball, With scatter'd fragments on the floor; A sad, uneasy parlour ...
— Poems (Volume II.) • Jonathan Swift

... learn whether the truth will ever be generally known concerning the seizure of the Anglo-rebel steamer Peterhoff. Then the people would learn how old Welles bravely defended what turpe Seward had decided to drag in the mire. The people would learn what an utterly ignorant impudence presided over the restoring to England of the Peterhoff's mail bag of a vessel a contrabandist, a blockade runner, and a forger. The people would know how Mr. Seward, aided by Mr. Lincoln, has done all in his ...
— Diary from November 12, 1862, to October 18, 1863 • Adam Gurowski

... quench the God-born fire, Pulsing at the soul's deep root? Tyrants! grind it in the mire, ...
— Old Spookses' Pass • Isabella Valancy Crawford

... me, and have good courage." They followed their guide, who, believing he led them well, brought them to the way which the governor had barricaded. Not being able to pass that way, they went to the other newly made in the wood among the mire, which the Spaniards could shoot into at pleasure; but the pirates, full of courage, cut down the branches of trees and threw them on the way, that they might not stick in the dirt. Meanwhile, those of Gibraltar fired with ...
— Great Pirate Stories • Various

... if she were there, which I know is not the case. I was there myself yesterday, and they had never heard anything about her. I wish to heaven you would leave us alone, and let us sink into the mire we are made for! We don't want such fine ladies as you coming patronising us, and trying to make pious examples of us. We are quite happy—oh, quite happy—as ...
— The Guinea Stamp - A Tale of Modern Glasgow • Annie S. Swan

... results! He saw how, whenever failure and dishonor had filtered in, it was where weakness, self-indulgence, or untruthfulness, had left an opening. He saw how one wrong had been a sure and easy path to another, until in the end he had groveled face downward in the mire. ...
— Bressant • Julian Hawthorne

... his torn tunic and his cothurni, covered from head to foot with blood and mire, his left arm hanging useless, and his face like the face of a dead man, neither his miserable plight nor his story brought softness to the stern lips ...
— The Lion's Brood • Duffield Osborne

... loneliness. How could she ever drop it all—all this wild freedom, this boundless health, this great outdoors, this life, life, how could she drop it all and go back into the little circle where convention fenced out the tiniest alien streamlet, although the circle itself might lie deep in mire? And how would she give up this boy who had grown so imperceptibly but so intimately into the very soul of her being; give him up with all his strength, and virility, and—yes, and coarseness, if you will—but sincerity too; an essential man, as ...
— The Cow Puncher • Robert J. C. Stead

... same hard tones which seemed to have passed beyond the expression of feeling, "I'm a brute and worse. I have been wounding you as with blows by my vile story. I have been dragging your pure thoughts through the mire of my wretched life." ...
— Opening a Chestnut Burr • Edward Payson Roe

... answered Fanny, who was disposed to have her associate as deep in the mud as she herself was in the mire; and she knew that it would be impossible to deny the fact when she exhibited the great roll of ...
— Hope and Have - or, Fanny Grant Among the Indians, A Story for Young People • Oliver Optic

... I say, of the flesh; even of that flesh, who, or which also committeth the greatest enormities; for the flesh is but one, though its workings are divers: sometimes in a way most notoriously sensual and devilish, causing the soul to wallow in the mire. ...
— The Pharisee And The Publican • John Bunyan

... married. But with Jeff it would be for one of the least of these. There flashed into her mind an old Indian proverb she had read. "I met a hundred men on the road to Delhi, and they were all my brothers." Yes! None were too deep sunk in the mire to be brothers and sisters to ...
— The Vision Spendid • William MacLeod Raine

... controversy. It is possible to set the standard too high as well as too low—to plant it on an elevation so distant that its symbol can no longer be deciphered, as well as to fix it so low that its folds draggle in mire and dust. If genius systematically appeal only to the initiated few, it must learn to do without the homage of the outer multitude. For its slender income of fame, it has mainly itself to thank. These remarks apply with primary force to that class of contemporary poets who delight in ...
— Chambers' Edinburgh Journal - Volume XVII., No 422, New Series, January 31, 1852 • Various

... hog or wild boar, enemy of Adonis; because in that country the functions of the Northern Bear were performed by the animal whose inclination for mire and dirt was emblematic of winter. And this is the reason, followers of Moses and Mahomet! that you hold him in horror, in imitation of the priests of Memphis and Balbec, who detested him as the murderer of their God, the sun. This likewise, O Indians! is the type of your Chib-en; and ...
— The Ruins • C. F. [Constantin Francois de] Volney

... a story that the king of gods, 'Indra,' once became a pig, wallowing in mire. He had a she pig and a lot of baby pigs and was very happy. Then some other angels saw his plight, came to him and told him, 'You are the king of the gods, you have all the gods to command. Why are you here?' But Indra said, 'Let me be. I am all right here, I don't ...
— A California Girl • Edward Eldridge

... their lips, and it has not been permitted to pass, as His was not permitted to pass. In the souls of men and of women is something of the divine, something high and marvelous—a gift from Heaven to hold the human race above the mire which threatens to engulf it.... Every day it asserts itself somewhere; in sacrifice, in devotion, in simple courage, in lofty renunciation. It is common; wonderfully, beautifully common... yet there are men who do not see it, or, seeing, do not comprehend, and so despair of humanity.... ...
— Youth Challenges • Clarence B Kelland

... bushes and scrub willows. I mounted a fallen tree and tried to get cautiously down to some tempting lily-pads. Evidently some one else on the other side of the brush was after those same bulbs; for I heard the sucking sound of steps plunging through the mire ...
— Lords of the North • A. C. Laut

... MARKEE? For is not all the BROKAH'S wealth, even his wife and children, pledged on that bond? Shall I ruin him to save myself? Allah forbid! Rather let me eat the salt fish of honest penury, than the kibobs of dishonorable affluence; rather let me wallow in the mire of virtuous oblivion, than repose on ...
— Legends and Tales • Bret Harte

... Minority malplimulto. Minstrel bardo, kantisto. Mint mento. Minute menueto. Minuet (time) minuto. Minute (note) noto. Minute malgrandega. Minuti detaleto. Miracle miraklo. Miraculous mirakla. Mire sxlimo, koto. Mirror spegulo. Mirth gajeco, kun—. Miry sxlimhava. Misapply eraralmeti. Misapprehend malkompreni. Misapprehension malkompreno. Misanthrope homevitulo. Misbehave malbonkonduti. Miscalculation ...
— English-Esperanto Dictionary • John Charles O'Connor and Charles Frederic Hayes

... had given him a beating, and he foresaw his trade ruined, his name dragged through the mire and dishonored, his friends outraged and taking no more notice of him. In the end he excited my pity, and I sent for my colleague Rivet, a bantering, but very sensible little man, to give us ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume II (of 8) • Guy de Maupassant

... Rome, Mixing two governments that ill assort, Hath missed her footing, fall'n into the mire, And there ...
— On the Firing Line in Education • Adoniram Judson Ladd

... all the billows and waves of the judgment of the holy God passed over Him. In another Psalm the Holy Spirit describes His agony. (Ps. lxix). There we read His cry "Save me, O God; for the waters are come in unto my soul. I sink in deep mire, where there is no standing; I am come into deep waters, where the floods overflow me. I am weary of my crying, my throat is dried; mine eyes fail while I wait for my God." And deeper He went for our sakes. ...
— The Lord of Glory - Meditations on the person, the work and glory of our Lord Jesus Christ • Arno Gaebelein

... lone cabin, where the cane Hid the black mire before the lowly door, De Soto died—although they sought to feign By some pretended magic mirror's lore That still he lived, a gentleman of Spain,— And the dread flood ...
— Days of the Discoverers • L. Lamprey

... before her, Angel dragged out the weary years, almost hopeless; and the one object of her toil and solicitude, was only a pitiful wreck of the former stalwart William Way. Only a miserable, wretched creature, that grovelled in the mire of its own degradation, and from whose bosom the last spark of manhood seemed to have forever fled. To look upon him, you would ask, 'Can this being ...
— Clemence - The Schoolmistress of Waveland • Retta Babcock

... Phoocah, or Poocah, a mischievous being, who was particularly dreaded on the night of All Hallow E'en, when it was thought he had especial power; he delighted to assume the form of a black horse, and should any luckless wight bestride the fiendish steed, he was carried through brake and mire, over water and land at a bewildering pace. Woe-betide the timid rider, for the Poocah made short work of such an one, and soon made him kiss the ground. But to the bold fearless rider the Poocah submitted willingly, and became his obedient ...
— Welsh Folk-Lore - a Collection of the Folk-Tales and Legends of North Wales • Elias Owen

... safely," replied Edith. "When our feet were in slippery places, and we leaned on Him, did he not support us firmly? and when the mire and clay were deep in our path, did He not ...
— True Riches - Or, Wealth Without Wings • T.S. Arthur

... of meditation, the colossal pillars of the audience chamber of the Deity! The Mount of Contemplation rises far above the mists of partial opinion and the mire of conflict, the discords of jangling interests and the refractions of divided policies, girt by a serene and sublime horizon, and within ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. 5, Issue 2, February, 1864 • Various

... which was full of mud and water; there poor Tommy tumbled about for some time, endeavouring to get out; but it was to no purpose, for his feet stuck in the mud, or slipped off from the bank; his fine waistcoat was dirtied all over, his white stockings covered with mire, his breeches filled with puddle water; and, to add to his distress, he first lost one shoe and then the other—his laced hat tumbled off from his head and was completely spoiled. In this distress he must probably have remained a considerable time, had not the little ragged boy ...
— The History of Sandford and Merton • Thomas Day

... agree with one of the most active benefactors of the Jewish nation, who while he acknowledges these facts, changes the blame of them to the Christians." Very true, and truly I do not know, what right one man has to trample another into the mire, and then abuse him for being dirty. Mr. Everett remarks upon the same subject, p. 210, "Bowed down with universal scorn, they have been called secret and sullen; cut off from pity and charity, they have been thought selfish and unfeeling, and ...
— Five Pebbles from the Brook • George Bethune English

... and storied column, Palace, and obelisk, and temple solemn, 345 My imperial mountains crowned with cloud, and snow, and fire, My sea-like forests, every blade and blossom Which finds a grave or cradle in my bosom, Were stamped by thy strong hate into a lifeless mire: ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley Volume I • Percy Bysshe Shelley

... redeeming feature of the society which can tolerate their existence. Although writers are able to find a sale for the most disgusting productions; although the critic is continually obliged, in reviewing current literature, to wade through the nastiest mire, it yet remains certain that public taste is not pleased with the vile. A limited circulation will be found for immoral novels among a depraved class, but it is to be said, for the credit of the nineteenth century, that talents ...
— A History of English Prose Fiction • Bayard Tuckerman

... mechanic-democratic ideals and brought about the Revolution of 1848. Heine, by nature an aristocratic poet, who instinctively dreaded the competition of "noble bears," saw all his loftiest principles trodden into the mire by these Utopian hot-heads and the crew of politicians that came storming after them. This doctrinaire and numerical interpretation of the rights of man—for which rights in their proper application the poet himself had fought so valiantly—caused him great unhappiness. He now ...
— Atta Troll • Heinrich Heine

... sorrow, with hands outstretched did worship; and answering the prince, he spoke, "The orders that you give me will, I fear, add grief to grief, and sorrow thus increased will deepen, as the elephant who struggles into deeper mire. When the ties of love are rudely snapped, who, that has any heart, would not grieve! The golden ore may still by stamping be broken up, how much more the feelings choked with sorrow! the prince has grown up in a palace, with every care bestowed upon his ...
— Sacred Books of the East • Various

... hoc loco pauca quadam retulisse haud abs re fuerit. Terra ipsa Agyptus expers imbrium mire tamen fertilis, et hominum aliorumque perfoecunda generatrix. Nilus id efficit, amnium in internum mare permeantium maximus. Hic in Africa desertis, montibus Luna ortus, haud statim Nilus est, et primum ingentem lacum Nilidem, qui nunc Zaire et Zembre dicitur, CXX. milliar. German. ...
— The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques, and Discoveries - Vol. II • Richard Hakluyt

... Jedburgh to Hermitage castle; the one by the Note of the Gate, the other over the mountain, called Winburgh. Either of these, but especially the latter, is several miles shorter than that by Hawick, and the Queen's Mire. But, by the circuitous way of Hawick, the queen could traverse the districts of more friendly clans, than by going directly into the disorderly province ...
— Minstrelsy of the Scottish border (3rd ed) (1 of 3) • Walter Scott

... first and the foremost is the Khilafat question. On this the heart of the Mussalmans of India has become lascerated. British pledges given after the greatest deliberation by the Prime Minister of England in the name of the English nation, have been dragged into the mire. The promises given to Moslem India on the strength of which, the consideration that was expected by the British nation was exacted, have been broken, and the great religion of Islam has been placed ...
— Freedom's Battle - Being a Comprehensive Collection of Writings and Speeches on the Present Situation • Mahatma Gandhi

... et resolvenda ambiguitate, et distinguendo, dividendo, illiciendo, implicando; ita si totum sibi vindicaverit in foro certamen, obstabit melioribus, et sectas ad tenuitatem vires ipsa subtilitate consumet. Itaque reperias quosdam in disputando mire callidos; cum ab illa vero cavillatione discesserint, non magis sufficere in aliquo graviori actu, quam parva quaedam animalia, quae in angustiis mobilia, campo deprehenduntur. Quint. lib. xii. ...
— A Dialogue Concerning Oratory, Or The Causes Of Corrupt Eloquence • Cornelius Tacitus

... contracted are ignored. With us there is a feeling that it is pitiful, mean almost beyond expression, to wrong a laborer of his hire. We have men who go in debt to tradesmen perhaps without a thought of paying them; but when we speak of such a one who has descended into the lowest mire of insolvency, we say that he has not paid his washerwoman. Out there in the West the washerwoman is as fair game as the tailor, the domestic servant as the wine merchant. If a man be honest he will not willingly ...
— Volume 1 • Anthony Trollope

... of shorter days Are dark and all the "ways are mire," How bright upon your books the blaze Gleams from ...
— Highways & Byways in Sussex • E.V. Lucas

... them—they mocked at it. What do they take me for?... A bundle of rags, which to-day they may trample in the mud, and to-morrow stick up for a scarecrow in their gardens! Or a puppet—to bow down to it to-day, and to-morrow to cast it into the mire, with Vuiduibai, father vuiduibai![3] No! they have chosen the wrong man. They may spin their traitorous intrigues with the King of Poland, and hail him their lord; but I will go myself and tell Tver who is her real master. Tease me ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 55, No. 340, February, 1844 • Various

... thousand humiliations his proud spirit had suffered at their hands when he noted the disdain with which they addressed him, speaking to him—because he was compelled to carve his living with a quill—as though he were less than mire. It was not so much against her scorn of him that he voiced his bitter grievance, but against the entire noblesse of France, which denied him the right to carry a high head because he had not been born of Madame la Duchesse, Madame la Marquise, or Madame la Comtesse. All the ...
— The Trampling of the Lilies • Rafael Sabatini

... wretched plaintiffs in the Ferrers case, and that the belief was in the mother being implicated, although not from the beginning. It was believed too that the miserable girl had herself taken step after step into the mire, involved herself gradually, the first guilt being an extravagance in personal expenses, which she lied and lied to account for in the face of her family. 'Such a respectable family,' said George, 'the grandfather in court ...
— The Letters of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett, Vol. 1 (of 2) 1845-1846 • Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett

... there? It seemed hopeless. Indeed, at first it was scarcely dreamt of; but, the stone once set rolling, none knew where it would stop. Marvellous to say, some of the prisoners themselves asked for ministrations of this sort. Feeling that they were as low down in the mire as they could be, they craved a helping hand; indeed, entreated not to be left out from the benevolent operations which Mrs. Fry now commenced. The officers of Newgate despaired of any good result; the people who associated with Mrs. Fry, charitable as they ...
— Elizabeth Fry • Mrs. E. R. Pitman

... to advise, to plead, to pray; the right to make her desk a Delphi, if God so permitted; the right to be all that the phrase "noble, Christian woman" means. But not the right to vote; to harangue from the hustings; to trail her heaven-born purity through the dust and mire of political strife; to ascend the rosta of statesmen, whither she may send a worthy husband, son, or brother, but whither she can never go, ...
— St. Elmo • Augusta J. Evans

... righteous indignation throughout the parish; nor without reason. Tell me that doctors and graduates must have the dead; but tell it not to Mansie Wauch, that our hearts must be trampled in the mire of scorn, and our best feelings laughed at, in order that a bruise may be properly plastered up, or a sore head cured. Verily, the remedy is ...
— The Life of Mansie Wauch - tailor in Dalkeith • D. M. Moir

... from them to self-denying efforts to rescue the perishing; to delight in the rest of faith while forgetful to fight the good fight of faith; to dwell upon the cleansing and the purity effected by faith, but to have little thought for the poor souls struggling in the mire of sin. If we can put off our coat when He would have us keep it on; if we can wash our feet while He is wandering alone upon the mountains, is there not sad want ...
— Union And Communion - or Thoughts on the Song of Solomon • J. Hudson Taylor

... be of all religions, therefore truly of none. Thus by naturalising himself some would think him a very dangerous fellow to the State; but he is not greatly to be feared, for this dejection of his is only like a rogue that goes on his knees and elbows in the mire to further ...
— Character Writings of the 17th Century • Various

... Holden, in his wild way, "hath sent His angel and shut the lions' mouths that they have not hurt me. He raiseth the poor out of the dust, and lifteth the needy out of the mire." ...
— The Lost Hunter - A Tale of Early Times • John Turvill Adams

... substitutes the mule-team plodding through the Gallic mire for Catullus' graceful yacht speeding home from Asia, follows the original phraseology ...
— Vergil - A Biography • Tenney Frank

... former is "wax, gum, or copal gum," and also, according to Henderson, "root." According to Brinton the Tzental radical chab means "honey, was, bee, a late meal." He refers, however, to the Cakchiquel, where he finds that ch'ab means "mud, clay, mire," and suggests that "as red and black clays were the primitive pigments this may connect the Tzental day name with the Maya." Seler, however, derives the Maya name from ci or cii, "to taste good," "to smell good;" and as ci is also the name of the maguey ...
— Day Symbols of the Maya Year • Cyrus Thomas

... him, little chance of those lads making back this way in a hurry, since they got the scare of their lives tonight. "Let's look around some more and possibly a suggestion will pop up to give us the glad hand and see us out of the mire." ...
— Eagles of the Sky - With Jack Ralston Along the Air Lanes • Ambrose Newcomb

... the ultra-national party became the object of satire and parody. When the political danger was past, and people resumed their ordinary occupations, those who loved foreign literature returned to their old favourites—or, as the ultra-patriots called it, to their "wallowing in the mire"—simply because the native literature did not supply them with what they desired. "We are quite ready," they said to their upbraiders, "to admire your great works as soon as they appear, but in the meantime please allow us to enjoy what ...
— Russia • Donald Mackenzie Wallace

... sprawl, now that the heat of day is best, Flat on his belly in the pit's much mire, With elbows wide, fists clenched to prop his chin; And, while he kicks both feet in the cool slush, And feels about his spine small eft-things course, Run in and out each arm, and make him laugh; And while above his ...
— English Critical Essays - Nineteenth Century • Various

... and slip on the shell-hole's lip, and fall in the clinging mire— Steady in front, go steady! Close up there! Mind the wire! Double behind where the pathways wind! Jump clear of the ditch, jump clear! Lost touch at the back? Oh, halt in front! And duck when the shells come near! Carrying parties all night long, all day in a muddy trench, With your ...
— Mr. Punch's History of the Great War • Punch

... two leagues before me of a road mostly uphill, and now deep in mire. So soon as I was clear of the last street lamp, darkness received me—a darkness only pointed by the lights of occasional rustic farms, where the dogs howled with uplifted heads as I went by. The wind continued to decline: it had been but ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 20 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson

... away, that she was surrounded by us and we could mock her as much as we pleased. I don't know why, but we did not beat her. She stood among us, turning her head one way and another, listening to our abuses. And we kept on throwing at her more of the mire and poison of ...
— Twenty-six and One and Other Stories • Maksim Gorky

... over Faversham's prostrate form. He was unconscious; his head and face were covered with blood, and his left ankle was apparently broken. A small open motor stood at the bottom of the hill, and an angry dispute was going on between an old man in mire-stained working-clothes, and the young doctor from Pengarth to whom the ...
— The Mating of Lydia • Mrs. Humphry Ward

... to imagine a more discomforting atmosphere in which to be abroad: yet Sir Marmaduke de Chavasse was trudging through the mire, and getting wet to the skin, even when he might just as well be sitting beside the fire in ...
— The Nest of the Sparrowhawk • Baroness Orczy

... face down in the mire, And prayed that darkness might become my pall; The rabble rout roared round me like some quire Of filthy animals primordial; My heart seemed like a toad eternally Prisoned in stone, ugly and sad as he; Sweet sunlight seemed a dream, a mythic thing, And life ...
— English Poems • Richard Le Gallienne

... him with stones, calling out, "The poisoner! the poisoner! Down with the wizard! down with him!" A mob very soon collected, and the doctor took to his heels and ran for his life. He was pursued and seized in Wood Street, and from thence dragged by the hair through the mire to St. Paul's Cross; the mob beating him with sticks and stones, and calling out, "Kill ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds • Charles Mackay

... demigravit in hanc eremum, addito grege septemplici, propter septiformem gratiam spiritus sancti. Ibi enim eius prudentia construxit mA"nia quadrata, turrita mole surgentia; claustra excipiendis adventantibus mire opportuna. In his domus alma fulget; habitatoribus digna. Ab Euro surgit Ecclesia, crucis effigie, cujus verticem obtinet Beatissima Virgo Maria; Altare est ante faciem lectuli, cum Dente sanctiss, patris Philiberti, pictum gemmarum luminibus, auro argentoque comptum: ab ...
— Account of a Tour in Normandy, Vol. II. (of 2) • Dawson Turner

... And in the mire to leave him, till the stars are all burnt out, While, in strange-looking shapes, they frisk about the ground, And, afar in the woods, they raise a dismal shout, Till I shrink into my cell again for terror of ...
— The Mysteries of Udolpho • Ann Radcliffe

... that von Hindenburg knew so well. The Russians resisted desperately, but their position could not be held. Disaster awaited them. They found their guns sinking to the axle-trees in mire. Whole regiments were driven into the lakes and drowned. On the last day of battle, August 31st, Samsonov himself was killed, and his army completely destroyed. Fifty thousand prisoners were taken with ...
— History of the World War - An Authentic Narrative of the World's Greatest War • Francis A. March and Richard J. Beamish

... was Este's prince, Who, more than right could warrant, with his wrath Pursued me. Had I towards Mira fled, When overta'en at Oriaco, still Might I have breath'd. But to the marsh I sped, And in the mire and rushes tangled there Fell, and beheld ...
— The Divine Comedy, Complete - The Vision of Paradise, Purgatory and Hell • Dante Alighieri

... dwell; and it was in reference to these that he collected. If the book were the one desired by him, no anxiety and toil, no payable price, was to be grudged for its acquisition. If the book were an inch out of his own line, it might be trampled in the mire for aught he cared, be it as rare or costly as it ...
— The Book-Hunter - A New Edition, with a Memoir of the Author • John Hill Burton

... agree now about a property; let us shake hands, and the bargain's made, the property and the price of purchase remain in the same hands.'—Madame Balnokhazy too was jesting when she said to her daughter: 'My dear Melanie, we have fallen up to our necks in the mire, we cannot be very particular about the hand that is to drag us out. Lorand will never come back again, Gyali has deceived us; but only tit for tat,—for we deceived him with that tale of the regained property in ...
— Debts of Honor • Maurus Jokai

... a fire and warmed his feet. Still he wouldn't talk, so you warmed them some more. Fine! But you didn't suppose you'd ever get your feet warmed. I'm not asking much of you, and you'll be no deeper in the mire when you answer. If you don't—well, there's plenty of wood here. Will you tell me what I want to know, or shall ...
— Raw Gold - A Novel • Bertrand W. Sinclair

... yet of our Brave Adventurers, notwithstanding we despacht men to the likeliest Stations to enquire after them. They were still Scuffleing in the Mire, and could not Possibly forward the Line this whole day more than one Mile and 64 Chains. Every Step of this Day's Work was thro' a cedar Bog, where the Trees were somewhat Smaller and grew more into a Thicket. It was now a great Misfortune ...
— Southern Literature From 1579-1895 • Louise Manly

... to achieve the necessary record. The long, low foreshore of Seal Bay was dotted with a large number of mud huts, thatched with reeds from adjacent marshes, and a fair sprinkling of frame houses of varying shapes and sizes. There were no streets in the modern sense, only stretches of mire which were more or less bottomless for about seven months in the year, and lost in the grip of an Arctic winter for the rest of the time. Foot traffic was only made possible in the softer portion of the year by means of disjointed sections of wooden sidewalks laid down by those who preferred ...
— The Heart of Unaga • Ridgwell Cullum

... hast been guilty once, when alone, in My presence, without adding to thine iniquity, by allowing that man to know what should never have been revealed to him? Do you not feel that you make that man your own accomplice the very moment that you throw into his heart and soul the mire of your iniquities? He is as weak as you are; he is not less a sinner than yourself; what has tempted you will tempt him; what has made you weak will make him weak? what has polluted you will pollute him; what has thrown you down into the dust will throw him down into ...
— The Priest, The Woman And The Confessional • Father Chiniquy

... watched those of his neighbours who were not Roman Catholics making for church and chapel, to which half a dozen tinkly bells invited them. The weather had finally cleared up, and a goodly number of people waded past him through the mire. Among them, in seemly Sabbath dress, went Ocock, with his two black sheep at heel. The old man was a rigid Methodist, and at a recent prayer-meeting had been moved to bear public witness to his salvation. This was no doubt one reason ...
— Australia Felix • Henry Handel Richardson

... despite himself. "Well, then, if the offer is made, I will accept it. In short, when your man is out of the bog I will lend my aid to cleanse him of the stains incurred in the transit. But he must pull himself out of the mire. I am safe upon the bank, I will not be drawn with him into a bottomless ruin. ...
— Prisoners of Hope - A Tale of Colonial Virginia • Mary Johnston

... almost savagely, and with a feeling combined of ambition and despair, he had begun, very slowly indeed, to create a public. These ten years, however, had loaded him with debts; and his struggle to keep himself afloat only plunged him deeper in the mire. His thirty unsigned novels began to pay him a few hundred francs, not in cash, but in promissory notes; so that he had to go ...
— Famous Affinities of History, Vol 1-4, Complete - The Romance of Devotion • Lyndon Orr

... returning to the post a hog was sacrificed to ... the village deity ... the blood from the carcass being allowed to flow into a pit prepared to receive it. The victim, made senseless by intoxication, was now thrown into the pit, and his face pressed down till he died from suffocation in the blood and mire, a deafening noise with instruments being kept up all the time. The priest then cut a piece of flesh from the body and buried it with ceremony near the village idol, all the rest of the people going through the same form ...
— Primitive Love and Love-Stories • Henry Theophilus Finck

... the world may be upon a woman after she is down in the mire, there is no denying that it is reluctant to tumble her from her eminence and throw her there. A woman will find more champions than detractors in the face of the most serious charge; especially a young and pretty one, ...
— The Bondboy • George W. (George Washington) Ogden

... for nothing ... our own, our only daughter, the light of our eyes, our priceless jewel—you've trodden her into the mire, that's what you've done! You've ...
— The Live Corpse • Leo Tolstoy

... need not be transcribed further. It pursues its way through mire and filth to its most lame and impotent conclusion. The abbot was not deposed; he was invited merely to reconsider his conduct, ...
— History of England from the Fall of Wolsey to the Death of Elizabeth. Vol. II. • James Anthony Froude

... and bare, with puddles where the steam-engines had stood, and in the puddles bedabbled relics of paper brushes, confetti bags, scraps torn from feminine flounces, twisted leaden tubes of "ladies' tormentors" cast away and half-trodden into the mire; the whole an unscavenged desolation. Her folk—the show-folk—had deserted her and vanished, and she had not a penny in her pocket. It cost Tilda all her pluck to keep what she called a tight upper lip. She ...
— True Tilda • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch

... fire, In the summer time, Of branch and briar On the hill to the sea I slowly climb Through winter mire, And scan and trace The ...
— Satires of Circumstance, Lyrics and Reveries, with - Miscellaneous Pieces • Thomas Hardy

... his peculiarities of manner and diction—as in the famous cartoon of Lord Brougham as Mrs. Caudle, of the original sketch for which a reproduction is given opposite—but he steadily carried into execution his threat of earlier days, to drag Lord Brougham "in the mire." He has been as good as his word ever since the day when Dicky Doyle drew the famous cover which is familiar to us all—that is to say, in 1849—for, as you will see if you will refer to last week's Punch, a young faun in the grand procession that ...
— The History of "Punch" • M. H. Spielmann

... a good while, yet still the flames would be reaching towards him; also, he heard doleful voices, and rushings to and fro, so that sometimes he thought he should be torn in pieces, or trodden down like mire in the streets. This frightful sight was seen, and these direful noises were heard by him for a long while together; and coming to a place where he thought he heard a great company of fierce opponents (as it were a numerous and influential ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 104, April 15, 1893 • Various

... herself to be deceived again? and through what deplorable madness had she thus ruined her life by continual sacrifices? She recalled all her instincts of luxury, all the privations of her soul, the sordidness of marriage, of the household, her dream sinking into the mire like wounded swallows; all that she had longed for, all that she had denied herself, all that she might have had! And ...
— Madame Bovary • Gustave Flaubert

... interesting to find Dennie writing in his introduction, "Literary industry, usefully employed, has a sort of draught upon the bank of opulence, and has the right of entry into the mansion of every Maecenas.... Authors far elevated above the mire of low avarice have thought it debasement to make ...
— The Philadelphia Magazines and their Contributors 1741-1850 • Albert Smyth

... saturated with mud, a gray-white mud that clung moistly to their overcoats, or, fully dry, colored every part of the uniform with its powder. One saw men that appeared to have rolled over and over in a puddle bath of this whitish mud, and sometimes there was seen a sinister mixture of blood and mire. There is nothing romantic about a wounded soldier, for his condition brings a special emphasis on our human relation to ordinary meat. Dirty, exhausted, unshaven, smelling of the trenches, of his wounds, and of the antiseptics on his wounds, the soldier comes from the ...
— A Volunteer Poilu • Henry Sheahan

... scare and affright me with fearful dreams, and did terrify me with dreadful visions.'[19] 'I often wished that there had been no hell, or that I had been a devil to torment others.' A common childish but demoniac idea. His mind was as 'the troubled sea, when it cannot rest, whose waters cast up mire and dirt.' 'A while after, these terrible dreams did leave me; and with more greediness, according to the strength of nature, I did let loose the reins of my lusts, and delighted in all transgression ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan

... the procession of penitents in which Monsieur accompanied the King through the streets, after the hollow reconciliation. I could scarcely convince myself that the sanctimonious-looking person, in coarse penitential robe, heading the procession through the mire and over the stones of Paris, from shrine to shrine, was the dainty King whom I had beheld in sumptuous raiment in the gallery of the Louvre. The Duke of Anjou, who wore ordinary attire, seemed to take to this mummery like a bear, ...
— An Enemy To The King • Robert Neilson Stephens

... friends, Sidonie felt that they lived in a different world, a thousand miles from her own; and a deathly sadness seized her, especially when, on her return home, her mother spoke of sending her as an apprentice to Mademoiselle Le Mire, a friend of the Delobelles, who conducted a large false-pearl establishment on the ...
— Fromont and Risler, Complete • Alphonse Daudet

... dismal afternoon in early spring when I lounged disconsolately about the streets of Winnipeg. The prairie metropolis had not then attained its present magnitude, but it was busy and muddy enough; for when the thaw comes the mire of a Western town is indescribable. Also odd showers of wet snow came down, and I shivered under my new skin coat, envying the busy citizens who, with fur caps drawn low down, hurried to and fro. One and ...
— Lorimer of the Northwest • Harold Bindloss

... is still a chance for you here. England is to blame as well as you that you have been sucked by the eddies of life into criminal streams. England also rescues you. It is but dragging out indeed, but you are out of the mire. Take heart, you may carry the British flag proudly yet; the career of the sailor is open to you also, and who shall say that some gallant three-master may not yet be commanded by a sailor bred in the 'Cornwall' Reformatory school-ship ...
— The Voyage Alone in the Yawl "Rob Roy" • John MacGregor

... among themselves, some yet doubting whether the thing were true, cried one of them, "Now shall we know the certainty of this matter, for here cometh a herald with leaves of olive on his head, and he hath dust on his garments and mire on his feet, as one who cometh ...
— Stories from the Greek Tragedians • Alfred Church

... have sounded forth in triumph above the foundering wrecks of Time! O Poet unworthy of thy calling! ... How thou hast wantoned with the sacred Muse! ... how thou hast led her stainless feet into the mire of sensual hypocrisies, and decked her with the trumpery gew-gaws of a meaningless fair speech!—How thou hast caught her by the virginal hair and made her chastity the screen for all thine own licentiousness! ... Thou shouldst have humbly sought her benediction,—thou shouldst have handled ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli

... fiction there is probably no more graphic and poignant study of the way in which man loses his grip on life, lets his pride, his courage, his self-respect slip from him, and, finally, even ceases to struggle in the mire that has engulfed him. * * * There is more tonic value in Sister Carrie than in ...
— At the Time Appointed • A. Maynard Barbour

... oh no! He was my rival for a time, it is true, but he was also my friend, and the very soul of honour. Oh no! the loss of your mother's love was merely one of many results of a piece of as consummate villainy as ever dragged the honour of a British naval officer in the mire. But, pshaw! let us speak of other things. I suppose you have wondered what are my ultimate intentions toward you, have you not? Well, I will tell you. You once reproached me with having ruined your professional career. My dear boy, have no ...
— A Middy in Command - A Tale of the Slave Squadron • Harry Collingwood

... dashing courage which now and then seemed to have in it an element of grandeur. But it is time that I told you about myself, and gave you some idea of the development of my character in the thick of this filthy mire into which it had pleased God to plunge me, on ...
— Mauprat • George Sand

... mud, through mire, they came to our cottage. The poor princess was forced to change shoes and stockings. M. de Lally is more accustomed to such expeditions. Nothing could be more sweet than they both were, nor indeed, more grateful than I felt for my share in their kind exertion. The house was re-viewed all ...
— The Diary and Letters of Madame D'Arblay Volume 3 • Madame D'Arblay

... love is that which dreams high above all storms, unsoiled by all burdens; but perhaps the strongest love is that which, whilst it adores, drags its feet through mire, and burns its brow in ...
— Bebee • Ouida

... thought of all this medley of personal material and secret matters of Church polity falling into the hands of those who might make capital of it, and thereby drag the Rincon honor through the mire, cast the man ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking

... discordant, that he made himself almost exclusively the poet of the gentler side of human nature. On the fringe of his pictures or in their background, just for the sake of contrast, he will show us the vices, the cruelties, even the mire of life. But he cannot stay in these gloomy regions, and he hastens back to the realms of the sun and flowers, or to the poetical moonlight of melancholy, which he loves best because in it he can find expression for his ...
— Rudin • Ivan Turgenev

... of the weight of guilt, and the lashes of hell upon their conscience for their evil deeds; who have, so soon as their present torments and fears were gone, returned again with the 'dog to his vomit; and as the sow that was washed, to her wallowing in the mire' ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan

... courage." They followed their guide, who, believing he led them well, brought them to the way which the governor had barricaded. Not being able to pass that way, they went to the other newly made in the wood among the mire, which the Spaniards could shoot into at pleasure; but the pirates, full of courage, cut down the branches of trees and threw them on the way, that they might not stick in the dirt. Meanwhile, those of Gibraltar fired with their great guns so furiously, ...
— Great Pirate Stories • Various

... form of Prince Augustus of Prussia. Duroc was right; the prince was not in very courtly trim to appear before the emperor. His uniform was torn and bespattered; he had but one boot, and that covered with mire; the other had stuck in the marshy ground near Schonermark, and he had replaced it by a heavy wooden shoe, such as those worn by German peasants; his right arm was in a linen bandage, flecked with blood, and an ...
— Napoleon and the Queen of Prussia • L. Muhlbach

... when awd finished mi wark, An' wor tooastin mi shins anent th' fire, A chap rushes in aat 'o'th' dark Throo heead to fooit plaistered wi' mire. ...
— Yorkshire Ditties, Second Series - To which is added The Cream of Wit and Humour - from his Popular Writings • John Hartley

... violent manner of this circumstance; and the emperor replied, "Proceed, O woman, if you think that you have been injured in any respect; he is girt as you see in order to go more quickly through the mire; your cause will ...
— The Roman History of Ammianus Marcellinus • Ammianus Marcellinus

... been in her place I should either have sunk into the mire, so to speak, or thrown myself, literally, into ...
— The Cavalier • George Washington Cable

... Saint," he reflected, "maybe likened to the Sibyl, who in the pantheon of the false gods, proclaimed the coming Redeemer to the Nations. The mire of old-world falsehoods yet clings about the hoofs of his feet, but his forehead is uplifted to the light, and his lips ...
— The Well of Saint Clare • Anatole France

... by Bonaparte and Talleyrand as our representative in America; because we then intended to strike, and not to negotiate. But during the present embroiled state of Europe, an intriguer was more necessary there than either a warrior or a politician. A man who has passed through all the mire of our own Revolution, who has been in the secrets, and an accomplice of all our factions, is, undoubtedly, a useful instrument where factions are to be created and directed, where wealth is designed for pillage, and a State for overthrow. General Turreaux is, therefore, in his ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton

... their pretty suits!" "Too pretty by far to take under fire!" A pretty boy in a pretty suit Lay once in Bethel's bloody mire. The first to fall in the war's first fight— Raise him tenderly. Wash away The blood and mire from the pretty suit; For Winthrop died ...
— Point Lace and Diamonds • George A. Baker, Jr.

... young sir," said Fairthorn, "be his most bitter open enemy, and fall down in the mire, the first hand to help you would be Guy Darrell's; but be his professed friend, and betray him to the worth of a straw, and never try to see his face again if you are wise,—the most forgiving and the least ...
— What Will He Do With It, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton

... dogs before mentioned. Sometimes, indeed, you may see his small eye twinkling on a slaughtered friend, whose carcase garnishes a butcher's door-post, but he grunts out 'Such is life: all flesh is pork!' buries his nose in the mire again, and waddles down the gutter: comforting himself with the reflection that there is one snout the less to anticipate ...
— American Notes for General Circulation • Charles Dickens

... reply. He turned to one of the negroes: "Where's that 'Cajun?" Nobody knew. Down where his canoe had lain, tiny rillets of muddy water were still running into its imprint left in the mire; but canoe, dog, and man had vanished into the ...
— Bonaventure - A Prose Pastoral of Acadian Louisiana • George Washington Cable

... integrity! That is exactly the same that Germany had promised her. For this Belgium had to be dragged through the horrors of war, and the good name of Germany as that of an honest nation had to be dragged through the mire, and hatred and murder had to be started, that Belgium might get on the battlefield, from the insufficient support of Russia and France and England, what Germany had freely ...
— The New York Times Current History of the European War, Vol. 1, January 9, 1915 - What Americans Say to Europe • Various

... happened upon two other travelers and together we floundered for many weary miles through black mud varying from the consistency of soup to that of pudding. The road was indescribably bad, and riders and horses were covered with mire and thoroughly fatigued. That evening at the inn, through the open door between our rooms, I heard my traveling companions discussing me. One of them asked: "What is his object in coming here?" The other answered: ...
— Santo Domingo - A Country With A Future • Otto Schoenrich

... his soul was bowed within him, three times he cried out: "Why art thou cast down, O my soul? and why art thou disquieted in me? Hope thou in God: for I shall yet praise Him for the help of His countenance" (Psalm xlii. 5). And Jeremiah, remembering the wormwood and the gall, and the deep mire of the dungeon into which they had plunged him, and from which he had scarcely been delivered, said: "It is good that a man should both hope and quietly wait for the salvation of ...
— When the Holy Ghost is Come • Col. S. L. Brengle

... beneath the hoofs of horses; the cry of the maddened onset, the shrieks of the wounded, and the groans of the dying; the despair of the widow and the orphan; smouldering ruins of once happy homes; the fruits of the husbandman's toils trodden into the mire; starvation, misery, and death—these are ever ...
— Henry IV, Makers of History • John S. C. Abbott

... to publish abroad one's own dishonour, while a separation would accomplish nothing. When once a man has given his name to a woman, he told me, he cannot take it back; it belongs to her for the rest of her days, and she has a right to dispose of it. She may sully it, cover it with mire, drag it from wine shop to wine shop, and her husband can do nothing. That being the case, my course was soon taken. That same day, I sold the fatal meadow, and sent the proceeds of it to Claudine, wishing to keep nothing of the price of shame. I then ...
— The Widow Lerouge - The Lerouge Case • Emile Gaboriau

... for and against each one of these amendments were published in a little pamphlet which was sent to every voter. One man—and he was a good man, too—who argued against woman suffrage said that women should not descend into the dirty mire of politics, that the vote would be of no value to them. In the same speech he said that the women should teach their sons the sacred duties of citizens and to hold the ballot as the most precious inheritance of every American boy. Can we really bring up our sons with a clear sense of ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume V • Ida Husted Harper

... absent from you. How have the heathen defiled the sanctuaries of God, and shed the blood of the saints round about the altar. They have laid waste the dwelling-place of our hope; they have trodden down the bodies of the saints in the temple of God like mire in the street. What can I say? I can only lament in my heart with you before the altar of Christ, and say: Spare, Lord, spare Thy people, and give not Thy heritage to the heathen, lest the pagans say, Where is the God of the Christians? What confidence is there for the churches of Britain ...
— Anglo-Saxon Literature • John Earle

... now April, and the snow had given place to cold rains, and the unpaved street in front of Aniele's house was turned into a canal. Jurgis would have to wade through it to get home, and if it was late he might easily get stuck to his waist in the mire. But he did not mind this much—it was a promise that summer was coming. Marija had now gotten a place as beef-trimmer in one of the smaller packing plants; and he told himself that he had learned his lesson now, and would meet with no more accidents—so that ...
— The Jungle • Upton Sinclair

... power, the Mysteries fell into the mire and became corrupt, as all things human are apt to do: even the Church itself being no exception. But that at their highest and best they were not only lofty and noble, but elevating and refining, there can be no ...
— The Builders - A Story and Study of Masonry • Joseph Fort Newton

... the desperate effort to escape their doom; of hundreds of houses crashing down the surging river, carrying men, women and children beyond the hope of rescue; of a night of horrors, multitudes dying amid the awful terrors of flood and fire, plunged under the wild torrent, buried in mire, or consumed in devouring flames; of helpless creatures rending the air with pitiful screams crying aloud in their agony, imploring help with outstretched hands, and finally sinking with no ...
— The Johnstown Horror • James Herbert Walker

... shapes of Egyptian mythology. The reasons for the prohibition may be considered as two,—the impossibility of setting forth the glory of the Infinite Spirit in any form, and the certainty that the attempt will sink the worshipper deeper in the mire of sense. An image degrades God and damages men. By it religion reverses its nature, and becomes another clog to keep the soul among the things seen, and an ally of all fleshly inclinations. We know how idolatry seemed to cast a spell over the ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus and Numbers • Alexander Maclaren

... inalienable right to roll upon the grass and play in the dirt, and which it will trouble no one to see torn or soiled. Do this, if you have a prince's revenue,—unless you would be vulgar. For, although you may be able to afford to cast jewels into the mire or break the Portland vase for your amusement, if you do so, you are a Goth. Jewels were not made for the mire, vases to be broken, or handsome clothes to be ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 4, No. 24, Oct. 1859 • Various

... blaze of bonfires at Annapolis," groaned Douglass. "Say, the middies just fairly tore our scalps off. I always had an ambition to captain the Army eleven, but I never thought I'd be dragged down so deep under the mire!" ...
— Dick Prescotts's Fourth Year at West Point - Ready to Drop the Gray for Shoulder Straps • H. Irving Hancock

... and passed forth: Nevertheless one ran between my feet And made me totter, using speech and signs I smart with shame to think of: then my blood Kindled, and I was moved to smite the knave, And the knave howled; whereat the lewd whole herd Brake forth upon me and cast mire and stones So that I ran sore risk of bruise or gash If they had touched; likewise I heard men say, (Their foul speech missed not mine ear) they cried, "This devil's mass-priest hankers for new flesh Like a dry hound; let him seek such ...
— Chastelard, a Tragedy • Algernon Charles Swinburne

... scarcely dreamt of; but, the stone once set rolling, none knew where it would stop. Marvellous to say, some of the prisoners themselves asked for ministrations of this sort. Feeling that they were as low down in the mire as they could be, they craved a helping hand; indeed, entreated not to be left out from the benevolent operations which Mrs. Fry now commenced. The officers of Newgate despaired of any good result; the people who associated with Mrs. Fry, charitable as they were, viewed her plans as Utopian ...
— Elizabeth Fry • Mrs. E. R. Pitman

... and make his exit through the keyhole. Meantime the new-comer seats himself in solemn silence, and for five minutes the conversation is only kept up by monosyllables, in spite of the incredible efforts of all parties to appear unconcerned. The young man in his confusion plunges deeper into the mire;—he twists and writhes in secret agony—remarks on the sultriness of the weather, though the thermometer is below the freezing point; and commits a thousand gaucheries—too happy if he can escape from a situation than ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 1, December 18, 1841 • Various

... angel guardian smiled upon you; and if it was not, I cannot say you have nothing to answer for, and yet I think God may have said 'She is a quadroone; all the rights of her womanhood trampled in the mire, sin made easy to her—almost compulsory,—charge it to account of ...
— Old Creole Days • George Washington Cable

... fairist hart that evir wes sene afore with levand creature. The noyis and din of this hart rinnand, as apperit, with awful and braid tindis, maid the kingis hors so effrayit, that na renzeis micht hald him, bot ran, perforce, ouir mire and mossis, away with the king. Nochtheles, the hart followit so fast, that he dang baith the king and his hors to the ground. Than the king kest abak his handis betwix the tindis of this hart, to haif savit him fra the strak thairof; and the haly croce slaid, incontinent, ...
— Chronicles of the Canongate • Sir Walter Scott

... whole multitude of the disinherited and the poor, who agonised and asked for justice whilst the Chamber, sitting in all pomp, grew furiously impassioned over the question as to whom the nation should belong to, as to who should devour it. Mire was flowing on in a broad stream, the hideous, bleeding, devouring sore displayed itself in all impudence, like some cancer which preys upon an organ and spreads to the heart. And what disgust, what nausea must such a spectacle inspire; ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola

... destroy and outlive the New Italy, as it had destroyed and outlived the Old Rome,—offering the daily sacrifice amid the murmur and solitude of the woods,—confident, peaceful, unstained; while the new men in the valleys below peculated and bribed, swarmed and sweated, in the mire of a profitless ...
— Eleanor • Mrs. Humphry Ward

... over beating the vizier Saouy, left him in the mire, and taking the fair Persian, marched home with her, attended by the people, with shouts and acclamations for ...
— The Arabian Nights Entertainments Complete • Anonymous

... the love of self and the love of the world is crucified. I am not afraid to repeat in your ears the words of Jesus. He has left them on record, that all who will heed them in the meek and teachable spirit of a little child may be lifted out of the mire and filth and darkness of a sinful life into the glorious liberty of the ...
— Life and Labors of Elder John Kline, the Martyr Missionary - Collated from his Diary by Benjamin Funk • John Kline

... the slave is very happy, and bids us leave him as he is. If laughter is a sign of happiness, the Irishman, tumbling in the same mire as his pigs, is happy. The merely sensual man is no doubt merry and heedless; but who would call him happy? Is it not a fearful thing to keep immortal beings in a state like beasts? The more the senses are subjected to the moral and intellectual powers, the happier man is,—the more we learn ...
— An Appeal in Favor of that Class of Americans Called Africans • Lydia Maria Child

... believe that any human being is incapable of understanding that, in allowing herself merely to smile at the expense of a fellow-creature who has loyally held out his hand to her, she is casting herself into a mire from which it will be impossible, with the best will in the world, ever to rescue her. I dwell so many miles above the puddles in which these filthy little vermin sprawl and crawl and bawl their cheap obscenities, that I cannot possibly be spattered by the witticisms of a ...
— Swann's Way - (vol. 1 of Remembrance of Things Past) • Marcel Proust

... sound of Milling's respectful voice. What a lop-sided thing a civilised sense of values seemed to be! Even when you had dragged the white robes of your spirit deep in the mire, you must still be scrupulously careful not to soil the hem of the white satin that clothed ...
— The Splendid Folly • Margaret Pedler

... rose to his knees, put his eye to the slit at the bottom of the door, and remained perfectly motionless while he watched and waited. Some time passed thus, and then he suddenly leapt to his feet, covered with mire from head to foot. Furiously he fastened the bolt, which secured the shelter on the outside, and seizing the shafts, he shook the hut as if he would have broken it to atoms. After a moment he began to drag it along—exerting the strength of a bull, and bending nearly double in his tremendous ...
— The works of Guy de Maupassant, Vol. 5 (of 8) - Une Vie and Other Stories • Guy de Maupassant 1850-1893

... falls within the mire will still a gem remain; Men's eyes turn downward to the earth and search for it with pain. But dust, though whirled aloft to heaven, continues dust alway, More base and noxious in the air than when on earth ...
— Poems with Power to Strengthen the Soul • Various

... looked down and scanned the red moccasins. They showed not a grain of dust, not a speck of mire, not a stain of grass, or weed, or water, although he had walked in them—or, if you please, they had walked with him—through many a mile of grassy wood and reedy swamp, where path was none, that had ever been trodden ...
— The Red Moccasins - A Story • Morrison Heady

... take. Few, few, indeed, Ever grow to pearls. No doubt Thou hadst fallen in the mire And become a clod ...
— Atta Troll • Heinrich Heine

... precipitate act was governed by circumstances never revealed to mankind. He learned, too, that it caused the Chancellor to be deconsidere in high Russian circles; he was called "un Narcisse qui se mire dans son encrier." Kinglake used to say that in conceding the right of the Sultan to exclude any war-flag from the Bosphorus and the Dardanelles, Russia was treating Turkey as a bag-fox, to be gently hunted occasionally, but not mangled ...
— Biographical Study of A. W. Kinglake • Rev. W. Tuckwell

... at the shore where she had been morally wrecked, waiting for the waves to bring back even her corpse to his arms but I have seen woman do it. I have seen woman with her white arms lift man from the mire of degradation, and hold him to her bosom as though he ...
— Lectures of Col. R. G. Ingersoll, Volume I • Robert Green Ingersoll

... been persistent. But by some kind fate he always emerged, and more and more, as years went on, owing to Dora. He drank, but not hopelessly; he gambled, but not past salvation; and there was generally, as we have said, some friend at hand to pick the poor besmirched featherbrain out of the mire. ...
— The History of David Grieve • Mrs. Humphry Ward

... plagued, impatient things, All dream and unaccountable desire; Crawling, but pestered with the thought of wings; Spreading through every inch of earth's old mire Mystical hanker after ...
— Gloucester Moors and Other Poems • William Vaughn Moody

... prostrate, and the debauch goes on. What a mute confession of degradation there is in the very appearance of a confirmed sot. Behold a man no longer in possession of himself; the flesh is master; the spiritual nature is sunk in the mire of sensuality, and the mental faculties are a mere mob of enfeebled powers under bondage to a bestial or ...
— Architects of Fate - or, Steps to Success and Power • Orison Swett Marden

... in the mire", sang Drayton, "he doth with laughter leave us." These fires were also "fallen stars", "death fires", and ...
— Myths of Babylonia and Assyria • Donald A. Mackenzie

... voices, there were many others speaking for truth and purity. The obscure mass meant to be just and honest. They were good fathers and brothers, and yet they were forced to bear the odium that fell on the whole legislature whenever the miscreant minority rolled in the mire and walked ...
— A Spoil of Office - A Story of the Modern West • Hamlin Garland

... have referred to the old days if I hadn't. It was I, who, when at last a lull occurred, said something about that time when he had found me struggling in a mire that threatened to drown, and I had grasped his ...
— The Fifth Wheel - A Novel • Olive Higgins Prouty

... powerful to persuade us of the reality of God's invitations and promises to us than this. We are still seeking signs and tokens of God's love, something to warrant us to come to God in Christ, and to persuade us that we shall be welcome, and many Christians puddle themselves in the mire of their own darkness and discouragement, because they cannot find any thing in themselves that can give but the least probable conjecture, that he will admit and welcome them to come to him, or that such precious ...
— The Works of the Rev. Hugh Binning • Hugh Binning

... "And mire my beak," he answered, immediately plunging it deep in the sod, and drawing out a great wriggling red worm. He threw back his head, and tossed it in the air. It spread great wings, gorgeous in red and black, and ...
— Lilith • George MacDonald

... said MacLean, "This quarrel's mine by virtue of my making it so. Mistress Truelove, you shall have no further annoyance. Now, you Lowland cowards that cannot see a flower bloom but you wish to trample it in the mire, come taste the ground yourself, and be taught that the ...
— Audrey • Mary Johnston

... Mr. Perkins, who was eating Mrs. Smithers's crisp, hot rolls with a very unpoetic appetite. "To me, the world grows worse every day. It is only a few noble souls devoted to the Ideal and holding their heads steadfastly above the mire of commercialism that keep our so-called civilisation from becoming an absolute hotbed of greed—yes, a hotbed of greed," he repeated, the words ...
— At the Sign of the Jack O'Lantern • Myrtle Reed

... Shakespeare, what luminous vapours are to the traveller; he follows it at all adventures it is sure to lead him out of his way, and sure to ingulf him in the mire. It has some malignant power over his mind, and its fascinations are irresistible. Whatever be the dignity or profundity of his disquisitions, whether he be enlarging knowledge or exalting affection, whether ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson in Nine Volumes - Volume V: Miscellaneous Pieces • Samuel Johnson

... terror was greeted with renewed glee by her assailants. They were now roused to the highest point of frenzy: the crowd of brutes would in the nex moment have torn the helpless girl from her place of refuge and dragged her into the mire, an outraged prey, for the ...
— I Will Repay • Baroness Emmuska Orczy

... superior to the prejudices of Grotius, Puffendorff, and Vatel, which he calls "l'aristocratie diplomatique."—Such sublime spirits think, because they differ from the rest of mankind, that they surpass them. Like Icarus, they attempt to fly, and are perpetually struggling in the mire.—Plain common sense has long pointed out a rule of action, from which all deviation is fatal, both to nations and individuals. England, as well as France, has furnished its examples; and the annals of genius in all countries are replete with the miseries ...
— A Residence in France During the Years 1792, 1793, 1794 and 1795, • An English Lady

... wishes to reduce himself to the degraded condition of an habitual drunkard, all the temperance pledges and sanctimonious tea-parties in the world will not eventually prevent him from wallowing in the mire. Father Matthew deserves canonizing for his bringing the Irish peasantry into the condition of a temperate people, but there religion is the vehicle; with Protestants such a vehicle should never be attempted, unless the clergy once more are the directors ...
— Canada and the Canadians, Vol. 2 • Richard Henry Bonnycastle

... a shepherd staggered into the place, pale, bleeding, bruised, covered with mire. The Prussians, he told them, had forced him to be their guide, had knotted him tight to a trooper's saddle, and had dragged him with them until he was half dead with fatigue and pain. At night he had broken from them and had fled. They were close at hand, he said, ...
— Stories By English Authors: France • Various

... than sorrow for sin. Many a man has that, and yet rushes again into the old mire. To change the mind and will is not enough, unless the change is certified to be real by deeds corresponding. So John preached the true nature of repentance when he called for its fruits. And he preached the greatest motive for it ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren

... mine (four) of rock-crystal. (* These legends of diamonds are very ancient on the coast of Paria. Petrus Martyr relates that, at the beginning of the sixteenth century, a Spaniard named Andres Morales bought of a young Indian of the coast of Paria admantem mire pretiosum, duos infantis digiti articulos longum, magni autem pollicis articulum aequantem crassitudine, acutum utrobique et costis octo pulchre formatis constantem. [A diamond of marvellous value, as long as ...
— Equinoctial Regions of America V3 • Alexander von Humboldt

... against humanity has become a matter of interest, of sordid speculation. Alas! what sadder spectacle could be seen than the ministers of Christ using their talents to lead their people into wrong, mocking religion, trailing its snowy wings in the mire of the most corrupt political dogmas, doing their utmost to upheave that grand corner stone set by Christ himself in the primal temple of Christianity and humanity: 'All things whatsoever you would that men should do to you, do ye even so ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No 3, September 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various

... a woman who loved him not, and did not understand his unusual cast of character, his love of nature, his wanderings by the sea, his coming home with his pockets full of wet shells and his trousers damaged by the mire. She snubbed him; she whipped him. He bore her ill treatment with wonderful patience; but it impaired the social side of him forever. Nearly fifty years after he said to one ...
— Captains of Industry - or, Men of Business Who Did Something Besides Making Money • James Parton

... I once took a young girl—lifted her up from the mire of the streets and carried her in my arms. Next my heart I carried her. So I would have borne her all through life—lest haply she should dash her foot against a stone. For her shoes were worn very thin ...
— When We Dead Awaken • Henrik Ibsen

... her puzzling was no good, Though staring up the bank she stood, Which, as she sunk, grew higher; Until, invaded with dismay, Lest baby's patience should give way, She frees her from the mire. ...
— A Hidden Life and Other Poems • George MacDonald

... could not understand that the statesman and potent courtier, whose fortunes at no time were visibly clouded, should be unable, or honestly think himself unable, to lift a persecuted comrade out of the mire. If Cecil did not come effectually to the rescue, he believed, at any rate at last, that it was because he would not. Cecil read his mind, had no faith in his gratitude, and accounted the duties of a dead friendship ...
— Sir Walter Ralegh - A Biography • William Stebbing

... Hand-bound and sent him guarded to the camp, And the poor comrade shivering stood the watch Till dawn of day and I was made aware. Among the true were some vainglorious fools Called by the fife and drum from native mire To lord and strut in shoulder-straps and buttons. Scrubs, born to brush the boots of gentlemen, By sudden freak of fortune found themselves Masters of better men, and lorded it As only base and brutish natures can— Braves on parade and ...
— The Feast of the Virgins and Other Poems • H. L. Gordon

... sapp'd with underground fire, Soak'd with snow, torn with shot, mash'd to one gory mire! There Fate's iron scale hangs in horrid suspense, While those two famished ogres—the Siege, the Defence, Face to face, through a vapor frore, dismal, and dun, Glare, scenting the breath of each other. The one Double-bodied, two-headed—by separate ways Winding, serpent-wise, ...
— Lucile • Owen Meredith

... which was so soft and slimy that it would not support my weight when I attempted to step upon it for the purpose of pushing my little craft into the water, which had receded only a few feet from my camp. I tried pushing With my oak oar; but it sunk into the mire almost out of sight. Then a small watch-tackle was rigged, one block fastened to the boat, the other to the limb of a willow which projected over the water. The result of this was a successful downward movement of the willow, but the boat remained in ...
— Four Months in a Sneak-Box • Nathaniel H. Bishop

... crept along the back to his neck, and biting and striking at the vertebrae, quickly extinguished the strong life in the great frame and the huge head gradually sank in the mire. For several days Black Bruin came and gorged himself upon the carcass and did not desist until it had ...
— Black Bruin - The Biography of a Bear • Clarence Hawkes

... were chased by bulls, but they stepped lightly to one side, and, as the animals passed, drove their arrows deep into their sides. Thus the tumultuous war went on, amid thundering tread, and yell, and bellow, till the green plain was transformed into a sea of blood and mire, and every buffalo of the herd ...
— The Dog Crusoe and his Master • R.M. Ballantyne

... men, swarmed about him, and men with one arm, and with one eye, and the leprous with their sores, some emerging from little streets adjacent, some from the air-holes of cellars, howling, bellowing, yelping, all limping and halting, all flinging themselves towards the light, and humped up in the mire, like ...
— Notre-Dame de Paris - The Hunchback of Notre Dame • Victor Hugo

... gambler and saloon-keeper, now that he was rich, he resolved not only to let his father know of his good-fortune and his change of life, but also (and this was due to Bertie's influence) he earnestly desired to help his family out of their mire. ...
— Money Magic - A Novel • Hamlin Garland

... I've met him maybe a dozen times in the past three years. He is known as 'Black Bart'; is a gambler by profession, a desperado by reputation, and a cur by nature. Just now I suspect him of being even deeper in the mire than this." ...
— Keith of the Border • Randall Parrish

... journey feeling as though it were a challenge to fate; and this was the answer? The vague distrust, the subtle sombre presentiment, the haunting shadow of an inexplicable ill, had all meant this; this bloody horror, dragging her fair name down to the loathsome mire of the slums of crime. Had some merciful angel leaned from the parapets of heaven and warned her; or did her father's spirit, in mysterious communion of deathless love and prescient guardianship, stir her ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson

... knowing how deep Herzog had led him in the mire. His moral sense had disappeared, but he had a vague instinct of the danger he had incurred. The financier's last words came to his mind: "Confess all to your wife; she can get you out of this difficulty!" He understood the ...
— Serge Panine, Complete • Georges Ohnet

... that man. He was born at hazard, by misfortune, in a hovel, in a cellar, in a cave, no one knows where, no one knows of whom. He came out of the dust to fall into the mire. He had only so much father and mother as was necessary for his birth, after which all shrank from him. He has crawled on as best he could. He grew up bare-footed, bare-headed, in rags, with no idea ...
— Napoleon the Little • Victor Hugo

... narrowness. They would not go so far as to deny that the devil might afflict mankind, but they declared themselves unqualified to prove it. There began in them, in short, the dawn of human sympathies, and the growth of spiritual humility. Cotton Mather, with all that he represented, sinks into the mire; but the true Puritan arises, and goes forward with lightened heart to the ...
— The History of the United States from 1492 to 1910, Volume 1 • Julian Hawthorne

... Never trample on any soul, though it may be lying in the veriest mire; for that last spark of self-respect is as its only hope, its only chance; the last seed of a new and better life; the voice of God which still whispers to it, "You are not what you ought to be, and you are not what you can be. You are still God's child, ...
— Daily Thoughts - selected from the writings of Charles Kingsley by his wife • Charles Kingsley

... the verse under review is formed by vii. 10: "And mine enemy shall see it, and shame shall come upon her who said. Where is the Lord thy God? Mine eyes shall behold her, now shall she be trodden down as the mire of the streets." The words, "Where is the Lord thy God?" entirely agree in substance with, "Let her be profaned!" But the desire of profaning Jerusalem must be conceived of as the human motive only. According to the view of Scripture generally, and of Micah particularly, ...
— Christology of the Old Testament: And a Commentary on the Messianic Predictions, v. 1 • Ernst Wilhelm Hengstenberg

... lie in the mud of the trenches, I may reek with blood and mire, But I will control, by the God in my soul, The might of my man's desire. I will fight my foe in the open, But my sword shall be sharp and keen For the foe within who would lure me to sin, And I will ...
— Hello, Boys! • Ella Wheeler Wilcox

... the lofty brazen mass, nine stories high, which contained and engaged more than three thousand soldiers, began to rock gently like a ship. In fact, the water, which had penetrated the terrace, had broken up the path before it; its wheels stuck in the mire; the head of Spendius, with distended cheeks blowing an ivory cornet, appeared between leathern curtains on the first story. The great machine, as though convulsively upheaved, advanced perhaps ten paces; but the ground softened more and more, the mire reached to the axles, ...
— Salammbo • Gustave Flaubert

... vigils, from love of right and truth, from the simple hope of seeing their ideas given to the public, and reaping from them a little consideration richly earned, which your injustice and thanklessness have now stolen from them for ever.... You and your book will be dragged through the mire; you will henceforth be cited as a man who has been guilty of an act of treachery, an act of vile hardihood, to which nothing that has ever happened in this world can be compared. Then you will be able to judge ...
— Diderot and the Encyclopaedists (Vol 1 of 2) • John Morley

... however, who turned from idols to serve the true and living God, received Christ into their hearts, and found the power of salvation in the gospel. They found power in the blood of Christ to cleanse them from their impurities, and not only so, but also to raise them so far from the mire of sin and wickedness abounding around them as to keep them faithful in Christ Jesus while still ...
— Heart Talks • Charles Wesley Naylor

... into a hole. It flounced him into the seat from which he had half started and faced him to the horses. With a smothered imprecation he rose and laid on the whip. They plunged, the carriage sprang from the hole and ploughed the mire, and Garnet sat down and drove into the town's main avenue, bespattered with mud from ...
— John March, Southerner • George W. Cable

... absorbed in ruin,—and yet thy clear-convincing voice, rendered imperishable by its faithfulness should have sounded forth in triumph above the foundering wrecks of Time! O Poet unworthy of thy calling! ... How thou hast wantoned with the sacred Muse! ... how thou hast led her stainless feet into the mire of sensual hypocrisies, and decked her with the trumpery gew-gaws of a meaningless fair speech!—How thou hast caught her by the virginal hair and made her chastity the screen for all thine own licentiousness! ... ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli

... could not for mercy call, Because though great my grief, my faith was small; Yet, as the sick on skilful men rely, The soul diseased may to a doctor fly. "A famous one there was, whose skill had wrought Cures past belief, and him the sinners sought; Numbers there were defiled by mire and filth, Whom he recovered by his goodly tilth: 'Come then,' I said, 'let me the man behold, And tell my case:'—I saw him and I told. "With trembling voice, 'Oh! reverend sir,' I said, 'I once believed, and I was then misled; And now such doubts my sinful soul beset, I dare ...
— The Borough • George Crabbe

... no use here," said the experienced Macko, recollecting his former service under Witold, "because large horses would at once stick in the mire, but the native nag goes everywhere, ...
— The Knights of the Cross • Henryk Sienkiewicz

... vulgar squabble which had led to such an ignominious end. The disgrace of it, too, was hard to bear; keenly sensitive as he was, and with an abhorrence of anything like brawls of any sort, he felt as though he was dragged through mire. Of course the unions took up their case and promised to defend them. They had a large amount of money at their disposal in the union funds, and they promised that the best legal advice obtainable should be employed in their behalf. ...
— The Day of Judgment • Joseph Hocking

... themselves, are instructive in this respect. In that country, where the government was less able than in other provinces to confine itself to the part of a mere onlooker, the law of nations was directly trampled under foot by the Roman governors; and the honour of Rome was permanently dragged in the mire by a faithlessness and treachery without parallel, by the most wanton trifling with capitulations and treaties, by massacring people who had submitted and instigating the assassination of the generals of the enemy. Nor was this all; war was even waged and peace concluded against the expressed will ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen

... "Lady! whom I serve and whom I have loved from a child, thy brain is sick, and not thy heart. Thou canst not love him. Dost thou not remember that thou art Queen of Khem and Pharaoh's wife? Wilt thou throw thy honour in the mire to be trampled by a ...
— The World's Desire • H. Rider Haggard and Andrew Lang

... said in the next book.—TRANS.] had inundated the German world with a true deluge, which threatened to rise up, even over the highest mountains. It takes a long time for such a flood to subside again, for the mire to dry away; and as in any epoch there are numberless aping poets, so the imitation of the flat and watery produced a chaos, of which now scarcely a notion remains. To find out that trash was trash was hence the greatest sport, yea, the triumph, of the critics of those days. Whoever ...
— Autobiography • Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

... and particularly deliberated and resolved upon, by the general ruler and governor of all; or all by necessary consequence. So that the dreadful hiatus of a gaping lion, and all poison, and all hurtful things, are but (as the thorn and the mire) the necessary consequences of goodly fair things. Think not of these therefore, as things contrary to those which thou dost much honour, and respect; but consider in thy mind the true fountain ...
— Meditations • Marcus Aurelius

... man can not strike a woman! He may tread her in the mire; he may clasp her and then scorn her; he may kiss her close, and then dash her from him into a dung-heap, but he must not strike her—that would be unmanly! Oh! grace itself is the rage of the pitiful Othello to the forbearance of many a self-contained, cold-blooded, self-careful slave, that ...
— Paul Faber, Surgeon • George MacDonald

... within the lines of the place. In furtherance of this plan, Porter himself, with a large body of his ships, ran the batteries at Vicksburg on the night of April 16. The fleet then kept pace with the necessarily slow progress of the army, encumbered with trains, through the roads heavy with the mire of the recent overflow. On the 29th of April the Mississippi squadron fought a sharp engagement with the Confederate batteries at Grand Gulf, which they could not reduce; and the following day ...
— Admiral Farragut • A. T. Mahan

... a blank of misery through which her reviving soul— like the shoot of a plant trodden into mire—pushed feebly towards the sunlight that coaxed her eyes to open. Something it sought there . . . a face . . . yes, a face. ...
— Lady Good-for-Nothing • A. T. Quiller-Couch

... dust—nor did Lawrie Logan always stand against the blows of one whose provincial fame was high in England, as the head of the Rough-and-Ready School. Even now—as in an ugly dream—we see the combatants alternately prostrate, and returning to the encounter, covered with mire and blood. All the women left the Green, and the old men shook their heads at such unchristian work; but Lawrie Logan did not want backers in the shepherds and the ploughmen, to see fair play against all the attempts of the Showmen and the Newcastle horse-cowpers, who laid ...
— Recreations of Christopher North, Volume 2 • John Wilson

... so much remembering happier things as remembering that the happy state came to an end by one's own wrongdoing. Still, most modern readers will think that Goethe, in elaborating the Brocken scene as an interesting study of the uncanny and the vile, let his hero sink needlessly far into the mire. ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke

... hast builded the world! Oh, Thou who hast lighted the Sun! Oh, Thou who hast darkened the Tarn! Judge Thou The sin of the Stone that was hurled By the Goat from the light of the Sun, As She sinks in the mire of the Tarn, Even now—even now—even now! —From the Unpublished Papers of ...
— Indian Tales • Rudyard Kipling

... points and tassels of gold, silver, and silk. The hilts of daggers, rapiers, and swords are gilt thrice over, and have scabbards of velvet. And all this while the poor lie in London streets upon pallets of straw, or else in the mire and dirt, and ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner

... groans, heavy blows, and the plashing of water, ran to the spot, where the last incident of battle was revealed to them in a spectacle as novel as it was shocking. The Indian lay on his back suffocating in mire and water; while astride his body sat the late prisoner, covered from head to foot with mud and gore, furiously plying his fists, for he had no other weapons, about the head and face of his foe, his blows falling like sledge-hammers or battering-rams, with such strength ...
— Nick of the Woods • Robert M. Bird

... direction of this guide, I traversed hedges and ditches; for I would not venture to travel in the highway, lest I should fall into the hands of my pursuer, and after I had actually tumbled into the mire, and walked six or seven long miles by the help of a good spirit, which never failed me on such occasions, I arrived at the place, and rung the bell at the garden gate for admittance. Seeing my figure, which was very uncouth, together with my draggled condition, they denied me entrance; ...
— The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle, Volume I • Tobias Smollett

... lore of undeceitful Good, 390 And Truth eternal. Though the poisonous charms Of baleful Superstition guide the feet Of servile numbers, through a dreary way To their abode, through deserts, thorns, and mire; And leave the wretched pilgrim all forlorn To muse at last, amid the ghostly gloom Of graves, and hoary vaults, and cloister'd cells; To walk with spectres through the midnight shade, And to the screaming owl's accursed song Attune the dreadful workings of his heart; 400 Yet be not ye ...
— Poetical Works of Akenside - [Edited by George Gilfillan] • Mark Akenside

... Stalking through the shadows of the Thames Embankment to find his clear place in the milky way, is hardly the easiest road for so exceptional a celebrity. It is but another instance of the odd tradition perpetuating itself, that some geniuses must creep hand and knee through mire, heart pierced with the bramble of experience, up over the jagged pathways to that still place where skies are clear at last. Thompson is the last among the great ones to have known the dire vicissitude, direst, if legends are ...
— Adventures in the Arts - Informal Chapters on Painters, Vaudeville, and Poets • Marsden Hartley

... singular equipage before them—a small horse, nearly dead and lathered all over with foam; a cariole bespattered with mud; a dashing fine girl behind, with flaunting hair, a short petticoat, and a flaming pair of red stockings; myself in the body of the cariole, covered from head to foot with mire, my beard flying out in every direction, and my hair still standing on end from the effects of recent fright—a very singular spectacle to meet in the middle of a public highway, even in Norway. The road was very narrow at the point of meeting. It became necessary for one of the vehicles ...
— The Land of Thor • J. Ross Browne

... there is no one like him in the world; in the next stage, he is like an ape, and dances, jests, and talks nonsense, knowing not what he is doing and saying; when thoroughly drunken, he wallows in the mire like a sow.[63] To this legend Chaucer evidently alludes in the ...
— Flowers from a Persian Garden and Other Papers • W. A. Clouston

... brooks, the town and country houses, he saw about him." The Slough of Despond, with its treacherous quagmire in the midst of the plain, into which a wayfarer might heedlessly fall, with its stepping-stones half drowned in mire; Byepathmeadow, promising so fair, with its stile and footpath on the other side of the fence; the pleasant river fringed with meadows, green all the year long and overshadowed with trees; the thicket all overgrown with briars and thorns, ...
— The Life of John Bunyan • Edmund Venables

... long night as I pushed onward through the mire. For presently it had come on to rain—a thick, dank rain, which wetted through all covering, yet fell soft ...
— Red Axe • Samuel Rutherford Crockett

... is he whom the legends represent as being the most prompt of all the heavenly host to assist the unfortunate among mankind. Thus in one of the stories a peasant is driving along a heavy road one autumn day, when his cart sticks fast in the mire. Just then St. ...
— Russian Fairy Tales - A Choice Collection of Muscovite Folk-lore • W. R. S. Ralston

... and there is no shame in hoping. Truth, not the full truth, of that, indeed, we cannot speak, but even that little we can reach locks up our lips at once, ties our hands, leads us to 'the No.' Then one way is left a man to keep his feet, not to fall to pieces, not to sink into the mire of self-forgetfulness... of self-contempt,—calmly to turn away from all, to say 'enough!' and folding impotent arms upon the empty breast, to save the last, the sole honour he can attain to, the dignity of knowing his own nothingness; that dignity at which Pascal hints when calling man a thinking ...
— The Jew And Other Stories • Ivan Turgenev

... rather disreputable-looking hat. He sat with a ridiculously contented look on his face, smoking a small briar pipe, and he laughed outright as I circled his mud-hole and came to a stop opposite the car with its nose poked deep down in the mire, for all the world like a ...
— The Prairie Mother • Arthur Stringer

... should I guess he'd grovel in the mire So deep, this parson perch'd on fortune's top, A man with snug appointments, children, wife, And money to defy the ills of life? If such a man prove such a Philistine, What shall of us poor copyists be said? Of me, who drive the quill and rule the line, A man engaged and shortly to be wed, ...
— Love's Comedy • Henrik Ibsen

... been more alien to Dolores's taste than going out to a meet on foot through mud and mire—she who hated the being driven out to take a constitutional walk on the gravel road or the paved path! But she had some hope that while all the others ran off madly, as was their wont, she might secure a little rational conversation with Uncle Reginald. So she came down in ...
— The Two Sides of the Shield • Charlotte M. Yonge

... shifting the ground from one field of observation to another to make this statement, and when the assertions go so far as to exclude from the domain of science those who will not be dragged into this mire of mere assertion, then it is ...
— Fables of Infidelity and Facts of Faith - Being an Examination of the Evidences of Infidelity • Robert Patterson

... and for a second she seemed not to understand. But the next second she burst out crying and hurriedly took out her handkerchief and hid her face as she passed. One of the boys lying on the blood-wet mire in Flanders, was Donal's bitter thought, but he had had his kind hours to recall at the last moment—and even now she had ...
— Robin • Frances Hodgson Burnett

... on my life, I'll be no farmer's dowdy wife, To toil and drudge thro' mud and mire: I hope you'll hold your head ...
— Think Before You Speak - The Three Wishes • Catherine Dorset

... whereinto the Witchcraft, now raging, has enchanted us. The embroiling, first, of our Spirits, and then, of our affairs." "I am sure, we shall be worse than brutes, if we fly upon one another, at a time when the floods of Belial are upon us." "The Devil has made us like a troubled sea, and the mire and mud begins now also to heave up apace. Even good and wise men suffer themselves to fall into their paroxysms, and the shake which the Devil is now giving us, fetches up the dirt which before lay still at ...
— Salem Witchcraft and Cotton Mather - A Reply • Charles W. Upham

... crept into the Muckley certain devils in the color of the night who spoke thickly and rolled braw lads in the mire, and egged on friends to fight and cast lewd thoughts into the minds of the women. At first the men had been bashful swains. To the women's "Gie me my faring, Jock," they had replied, "Wait, Jean, till I'm fee'd," but by night most had got their arles, with a dram above it, ...
— Sentimental Tommy - The Story of His Boyhood • J. M. Barrie

... not help thinking that these deserted women were indeed human sparrows, who needed no small share of their heavenly Father's loving kindness to prevent them from falling and being utterly lost in the mire of London. Once or twice during Mavis's stay, the house was so full that three would sleep in one room, each of whom would go downstairs to the parlour, which was the front room on the ground floor, for the dreaded ordeal, to be taken upstairs as soon as possible ...
— Sparrows - The Story of an Unprotected Girl • Horace W. C. Newte

... man who is shrewder, wiser, more versed in the subtle ways of Third Street leads the other along over seemingly charming paths of fortunate investment into an accidental but none the less criminal mire of failure and exposure and public calumny and what not. And then they get to the place where the more vulnerable individual of the two—the man in the most dangerous position, the city treasurer ...
— The Financier • Theodore Dreiser

... in the prison, the only access to which was from above. Prisoners were let down into it with ropes, and left there to die of hunger. The bottom of it was wet and miry, and the prophet, when let down into its gloomy depths, sank into the deep mire. Here he would soon have died of hunger and misery; but the king, feeling some misgivings in regard to what he had done, lest it might really be a true prophet of God that he had thus delivered into the hands of his enemies, inquired ...
— Cyrus the Great - Makers of History • Jacob Abbott

... part of the building which had once been the church, having previously to pass through a farmyard, in which was abundance of dirt and mire. ...
— Wild Wales - Its People, Language and Scenery • George Borrow

... Hunting of Cheviot and The Red Harlaw.' But of all this feast which he spreads in our sight, our author only lets us taste a morsel—a couple of lines taken apparently from a lost ballad on the fate of the Chevalier de la Beaute, rubbed down by the rough Scottish tongue to 'Bawty,' at Billie Mire in 1517. ...
— The Balladists - Famous Scots Series • John Geddie

... bound him and mounted him on horseback behind one of his companions. They were advanced a good way into the fields, when the duke, making efforts for his liberty, threw himself to the ground, and brought down with him the assassin to whom he was fastened. They were struggling together in the mire, when Ormond's servants, whom the alarm had reached, came and saved him. Blood and his companions, firing their pistols in a hurry at the duke, rode off, and saved themselves by means of ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part F. - From Charles II. to James II. • David Hume

... Court for theft and sent to Sing Sing? It's a good name in New York, yours, you know. The Van Teyls have held up their heads high for more than one generation. Your sister will not fancy seeing it dragged down into the mire." ...
— The Pawns Count • E. Phillips Oppenheim

... was a confused scrambling, and spattering, and splashing, through the soft mire—a growling on the part of the bear, and the wildest screeching from the throat of the affrighted negro—all of which came to an end by Bruin—whose body was now bedaubed all over with black mud—once more regaining his ...
— Bruin - The Grand Bear Hunt • Mayne Reid

... leaping with agility over the peaks, by means of the hooks on its claws, its weapons of war and nutrition. Its nearest relative, the cricket of the sea, a dull and heavy animal, was sulking in the corners covered with mire and with sea weed, in an immovability that made it easily confounded with the stones. Around these giants, like a democracy accustomed to endure from time to time the attack of the strong, crayfish and shrimps were swimming in shoals. Their movements were free and graceful, ...
— Mare Nostrum (Our Sea) - A Novel • Vicente Blasco Ibanez

... hand, and even smiled faintly. "I knew you'd say that. I knew what you'd think about it, but it's all the same now. I did it for you and Safie! I knew I was in the way; I knew you was the man she orter had; I knew you was the man who had dragged her outer the mire and clay where I was leavin' her, as you did when she fell in the water. I knew that every day I lived I was makin' YOU suffer and breakin' HER heart—for all she tried to be gentle ...
— The Bell-Ringer of Angel's and Other Stories • Bret Harte

... be Thou his sentry. Guard him from the tempests wintry, Sheep and shepherd ever tending—such my prayer to heaven ascending, O hear my cry and guard my love. Loving Saviour, stay beside us; let Thy Holy Spirit guide us, Keep our feet from rock and mire, till within Thy heavenly choir, We ...
— Welsh Lyrics of the Nineteenth Century • Edmund O. Jones

... aspect,—stern enough place of exile for a Crown-Prince fallen into such disfavor with Papa! A rugged, compact, by no means handsome little Town, at the meeting of the Warta and the Oder; stands naturally among sedges, willows and drained mire, except that human industry is pleasantly busy upon it, and has long been. So that the neighborhood is populous beyond expectation; studded with rough cottages in white-wash; hamlets in a paved condition; and comfortable signs of labor victoriously ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XVIII. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—Seven-Years War Rises to a Height.—1757-1759. • Thomas Carlyle

... I've been tortured even here by these wretched hags, and I've envied even them, so near to death, yet not ashamed like me. I know, and you should know, that my heart is broken, crushed, trampled into the mire. I had felt that for me even the thought of marriage again would be a mockery, a wicked thing, which I would never have a right to entertain.—I never dreamt that anyone would think of such a thing, knowing what you know. Oh, oh! Why have you tempted me so if it is not right? ...
— He Fell in Love with His Wife • Edward P. Roe

... plunged their hands deep in the mire to obtain the Union, quite honestly believed in the policy of the Union. They were wrong. They merely reestablished the old ascendancy in a form, morally perhaps more defensible, but just as damaging to the interests ...
— The Framework of Home Rule • Erskine Childers

... recall the names of some of the notable citizens of Quebec at that time, other than the high officials. There were Michel Filion and Pierre Duquet, notaries; Jean Madry, surgeon to the king's majesty; Jean Le Mire, the future syndic des habitants; Madame d'Ailleboust, widow of a former governor; Madame Couillard, widow of Guillaume Couillard and daughter of Louis Hebert, the first tiller of the soil; Madame de Repentigny, ...
— The Great Intendant - A Chronicle of Jean Talon in Canada 1665-1672 • Thomas Chapais

... all the clear and lucid spaces of his brain in a moment; and then, after the dissipations which he could not resist, he sank, utterly exhausted in body, heart, and mind, into a collapsed condition bordering upon imbecility. Such a character will drag a man down into the mire if he is left to himself, or bring him to the highest heights of political power if he has some stern friend to keep him in hand. Neither Chesnel, nor the lad's father, nor Aunt Armande had fathomed the depths of a nature so nearly ...
— The Collection of Antiquities • Honore de Balzac

... Duke had his bust carried about Paris, after his unworthy schemes against the King had been discovered, it was thrown into the mire. Necker passing, perhaps by mere accident, stopped his carriage, and expressing himself with some resentment for such treatment to a Prince of the blood and a friend of the people, ordered the bust to be taken to the Palais Royal, ...
— The Memoirs of Louis XV. and XVI., Volume 5 • Madame du Hausset, and of an Unknown English Girl and the Princess Lamballe

... like an Assumption to the young peasant girl. The beautiful Adeline was translated at once from the mire of her village to the paradise of the Imperial Court; for the contractor, one of the most conscientious and hard-working of the Commissariat staff, was made a Baron, obtained a place near the Emperor, and was attached to the Imperial Guard. The handsome rustic bravely ...
— Cousin Betty • Honore de Balzac

... of the men of Company F marched far out of their places to avoid a mudhole in the road. He marched and countermarched them over the same ground to compel the men to keep their rank and file regardless of the mud. Captain Conwell saw his object, and himself plunged into the mire, his men followed, and were thus saved the ...
— Russell H. Conwell • Agnes Rush Burr

... places where it might be death itself to any one who got off the trail, and became bewildered. The mud is deceptive, and once one gets fast in it an hour or two is apt to see him swallowed up; nor will his fate ever be known, for the bottomless mire of the bog never ...
— The Boy Scouts of Lenox - Or The Hike Over Big Bear Mountain • Frank V. Webster

... observer and the oldest Parisian. He often went wandering about at night, vaguely and irresistibly led on by one of those creatures who are neither all vice nor all virtue, and who walk so gracefully along in the mire. Sometimes he was dazzled by one of those fine-looking girls, so often seen in Paris, who seem to brighten everything as they pass along, and he would turn round to look at her and stand there even after she had suddenly disappeared in the darkness of some passage. His vocation ...
— Rene Mauperin • Edmond de Goncourt and Jules de Goncourt

... a bridge, in a sort of a swamp, that we had fired on for some time, and we now moved down to it, just to see what we had done. We found a good many dead, and several horses in the mire, but no wounded. We kept emptying canteens, as we went along, until our own would hold no more. On our return from the bridge, we went to a brook in order to mix some grog, and then we got a full view of the offing. Not a craft was to be seen! Everything had weighed and ...
— Ned Myers • James Fenimore Cooper

... "Mire Chatta," or battle-dance, denotes the frenzy, supposed to animate the combatants, during the ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volumes I-VI. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various

... the gay banners danced in air, where was it? Burned to the ground; only a sorry heap of ruin marked where once it stood. No more cotton bales came from the Sea Islands. First one army, then the other, had swept over the Beaufort plantation, trampling its fields into mire. It had been seized, confiscated, retaken, re-confiscated, sold to this person and that. Nobody knew exactly to whom it belonged nowadays; but it was not to little Annie, rightful heiress of all. Stripped of every thing, reduced to utter want, Mrs. ...
— Nine Little Goslings • Susan Coolidge

... the reconsideration of Gibson's news did not improve. We save Bonaparte however, and that is a great thing. I will not be downcast about it, let the worst come that can; but I wish I saw that worst. It is the devil to be struggling forward, like a man in the mire, and making not an inch by your exertions, and such seems to be my fate. Well! I have much to comfort me, and I will take comfort. If there be further wrath to come, I shall be glad that I bear it alone. Poor Charlotte was too much ...
— The Journal of Sir Walter Scott - From the Original Manuscript at Abbotsford • Walter Scott

... the river Dee, where the ship was to be launched. Here the train stopped, and absolutely deposited our whole party of excursionists, under a heavy shower, in the midst of a muddy potato-field, whence we were to wade through mud and mire to the ship-yard, almost half a mile off. Some kind Christian, I know not whom, gave me half of his umbrella, and half of his cloak, and thereby I got to a shed near the ship, without being ...
— Passages From the English Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne

... him not for lying there; First what he is inquire: An orient pearl is often found In depth of dirty mire. ...
— England's Antiphon • George MacDonald

... mountains drew close together in the Dyea Canyon, and the feet of men churned the wet sunless earth into mire and bog-hole. And when they had done this they sought new paths, till there were many paths. And on such a path Frona came upon a man spread carelessly in the mud. He lay on his side, legs apart and one arm buried beneath him, pinned down by a bulky pack. His cheek was pillowed restfully ...
— A Daughter of the Snows • Jack London









Copyright © 2025 Diccionario ingles.com




Advanced search
     Find words:
Starting with
Ending with
Containing
Matching a pattern  

Synonyms
Antonyms
Quotes
Words linked to  

only single words



Share |