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More "Morass" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... stopper with a crack like a gun-shot, flings the liquid "doughshifter" over the lake in a devastating shower, and commences to knead, swearing softly. Anon the exorcism changes to a noise like that affected by ostlers as they tend their charges, and the lake has become a parchment-coloured morass. For five pounds a month this man toils from four a.m. to eight p.m., and his wife can find nothing better to do ...
— An Ocean Tramp • William McFee
... swollen by the mountain rills, served as a defence to the grounds and residence. In building their strengths, all the Border chiefs had particular reference to the natural advantages of the situation: the middle of a morass, the edge of a precipice rising from a mountain torrent, or a small island in the midst of a lake or river, were held to be favoured localities; and Selkirkshire, in curious accordance with the habits of the people, ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, Volume III • Various
... much annoyed, and saw no way out of his morass of contradiction. Then I offered what looked like a plank, a stepping-stone to safety. "Surely," said I, "there is some room for judgment. The later and smaller laws and regulations give many directions for killing. All through ancient Hebraic history it ...
— The Forerunner, Volume 1 (1909-1910) • Charlotte Perkins Gilman
... country bounded by four rivers, and for a great part under water, Epworth was at that epoch dreariness itself. The Rev. Samuel's spirits must have sunk within him as the carts bearing his already large family and his few household belongings toiled through quagmire and morass; they must have fallen still farther when he gazed down the one straggling street at the rectory of mud and thatch that was to be his home; and they must have touched the zero mark, zealous High Churchman that he was, with ...
— Historic Ghosts and Ghost Hunters • H. Addington Bruce
... inaccessible, being on the summit of a perpendicular rock, on the top of which the natives had collected great quantities of stones for their defence. And a third quarter of the town was defended by an impassable morass. Yet after all these defensive preparations, we were astonished to find the town entirely abandoned, though every house was full of the different kinds of provisions which the country afforded, besides which it had a magazine stocked with arms of all sorts. While we were expressing our astonishment ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. IV. • Robert Kerr
... passage through his dominions to the Ostrogoths; if they would go by that road they must first fight with the unconquered Gepidae" Traustila then took up a strong position near the Hiulca Palus, whose broad waters, girdled by fen and treacherous morass, made the onward march of the invaders a task of almost desperate danger. But the Ostrogoths could not now retreat; famine and pestilence lay behind them on their road; they must go forward, and with a reluctant heart Theodoric gave the signal for ...
— Theodoric the Goth - Barbarian Champion of Civilisation • Thomas Hodgkin
... of such delicate taste laugh." He was not disappointed in his expectations, for the Romance had a great run. In the year 1638, he was attending the Carnival at Mons, of which he was a canon. Having put on the dress of a savage, he was followed by a troop of boys into a morass, where he was kept so long, that the cold penetrated his debilitated limbs, which became contracted in such a manner, that he used to compare his body to the shape of a Z. He died in 1660, at the age of fifty; he said to his friends who surrounded his dying bed, "I shall never make you weep so ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 13, - Issue 352, January 17, 1829 • Various
... the gay, glad light grow wooers bold, For there's brightness e'en in the dark morass, When the forest flames ...
— A Williams Anthology - A Collection of the Verse and Prose of Williams College, 1798-1910 • Compiled by Edwin Partridge Lehman and Julian Park
... was cheered by the knowledge that so long as the world recognizes the divine right of Kings, no monarch by descent could lay better claim to a throne than he. And he was young, and in love, and ready to believe that youth and love can level mountains, make firm the morass, bridge the ocean. ...
— A Son of the Immortals • Louis Tracy
... felt that she was floundering deeper and deeper into a morass of trouble. "You don't know what a scrape I got into at home for stopping behind that other time. Beatrice made me promise absolutely always to come home with Winnie and Lesbia. I should have to give ...
— The Youngest Girl in the Fifth - A School Story • Angela Brazil
... could produce. But it is this same Mr. Cooke who gives decisive testimony as to Goldsmith's increasing desire to "shine" by imitating the expenditure of the great; the natural consequence of which was that he only plunged himself into a morass of debt, advances, contracts for hack-work, and misery. "His debts rendered him at times so melancholy and dejected, that I am sure he felt himself a very unhappy man." Perhaps it was with some sudden resolve to flee from temptation, and grapple with the difficulties that beset him, that ...
— Goldsmith - English Men of Letters Series • William Black
... and morass, across hills and mountains. It wandered in a sort of haphazard fashion through a sun-bathed universe washed clean of sordidness and meanness. Always, as he pushed forward, the path grew more faint and uncertain. Elk runs crossed it here and there, ...
— The Yukon Trail - A Tale of the North • William MacLeod Raine
... the day that he had departed for the north to seek Evangeline. She and the good priest who had been her stay in a year of sorrow turned back in pursuit, and for weary months, over prairie and through forest, skirting mountain and morass, going freely among savages, they followed vain clues, and at last arrived in Philadelphia. Broken in spirit then, but not less sweet of nature for the suffering that she had known, she who had been named for the angels ...
— Myths And Legends Of Our Own Land, Complete • Charles M. Skinner
... dusk of another one of Berlin's rainy days, after slithering through the Tiergarten and past the endless concrete apartment-houses of Charlottenburg, that our taxicab swung to the right, lurched down the lane of mud, and stopped at the gate of Ruhleben. Inside was a sort of mild morass, overspread with Englishmen— professional-looking men with months-old beards, pink-cheeked young fellows as fresh as if they had just stepped off Piccadilly, men in faded knicker-bockers and puttees, men in sailor blue and brass buttons, men with flat caps and cockney accent, ...
— Antwerp to Gallipoli - A Year of the War on Many Fronts—and Behind Them • Arthur Ruhl
... every reason to trust you most fully. Have you any plan for extricating us from this dreadful morass of failure and difficulty into which we ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 152, January 10, 1917 • Various
... must be our eyes, Loskiel.... But neither the Cat-People nor the Andastes will venture out of that morass, save only by the trail. And we shall have two watchers ...
— The Hidden Children • Robert W. Chambers
... of Keppoch. This clan regiment advanced very slowly that they might keep their ranks until they had gained possession of the ground they wanted; they then turned their backs to the wind, and formed into the line of battle. The field which they intended to occupy was skirted by a deep morass as they came foot by foot, within pistol shot ...
— Memoirs of the Jacobites of 1715 and 1745 - Volume III. • Mrs. Thomson
... there was a sudden shout. At the moment that Osgod was making a long step from one tuft to another the boy stooped and caught his foot, and with a roar of surprise and fury Osgod fell head-foremost into the morass. At the same moment the lad darted away with a yell of defiance, leaping from tuft to tuft with the agility of a hare. Several of the men started after him, but unaccustomed to the treacherous bog four ...
— Wulf the Saxon - A Story of the Norman Conquest • G. A. Henty
... mile, ascended through the woods Till stunted were its growths; and still he clomb Printing with sandalled foot the dewy steep: But when above the mountain rose the moon Brightening each mist, while sank the prone morass In double night, he came upon a stone Tomb-shaped, that flecked that steep: a little stream Dropped by it from the summits to the woods: Thereon he knelt; and was ...
— The Legends of Saint Patrick • Aubrey de Vere
... of hurdles and fascines being made; which, as I hear, are to be employed in one of two different plans. The first plan is, To attack the French retrenchment generally; the ditch which is before it, and the morass which lies on our left wing, to be made passable with these fascines. The other plan is, To amuse the Enemy by a false attack, and throw succor into the Town.—One thing is certain, in a few days we shall have a stroke of work here. ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. IX. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... a fringe of willows and canes, among which were interspersed a few plants; and scattered about on the marsh was a species of uniola, closely allied to U. spicata of our sea- coast. The whole morass was animated with multitudes of water-fowl, which appeared to be very wild—rising for the space of a mile round about at the sound of a gun, with a noise like distant thunder. Several of the people waded ...
— The Exploring Expedition to the Rocky Mountains, Oregon and California • Brevet Col. J.C. Fremont
... of Stark's riflemen could be heard at the other end of the town. St. Clair's brigade held the bridge; the regiment Von Knyphausen lost a few precious moments endeavoring to extricate its guns, which had become mired in the morass near the bridge, and then charged upon St. Clair. But it was too late; Von Dechow was seriously wounded, and when the regiment saw itself taken in the flank by Sargeant's brigade, it retired in disorder, though some few men ...
— For Love of Country - A Story of Land and Sea in the Days of the Revolution • Cyrus Townsend Brady
... on march thither; and privately has his eye upon them, on Friedrich's part!—For the rest, this upland platform, insensibly sloping two ways, and as yet undrained, is of scraggy boggy nature in many places; much of it damp ground, or sheer morass; better parts of it covered, at this season, with rank June grass, or greener luxuriance of oats and barley. A humble peaceable scene; peaceable till this afternoon; dotted, too, with six or seven poor Hamlets, with scraggy woods, ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XV. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... Maurya dynasty,—that one seemingly firm patch to set your feet on in the whole morass of the Indian past,—occupy the thirteen decades from 320 to 190 B.C., (or we thought we did); now the question is, from that pied-a-terre whither shall we jump? If you could be sure that the ebb of the wave would be ...
— The Crest-Wave of Evolution • Kenneth Morris
... the table below the dock and turned over a sheaf of papers with a faint, cynical smile at the corners of his thin lips. This man, they said, had done the impossible. He had dragged the prisoner out of his morass by sheer titanic effort. Obviously Percival Field had believed firmly in the innocence of the man he had defended, or he had not thus triumphantly ...
— The Odds - And Other Stories • Ethel M. Dell
... permitted himself the pride of considering his mind somewhat as a computer that had been programmed through a magnificent gene inheritance to drive irresistibly toward the precise goals he had reached. But Fenwick—Fenwick was still fumbling around in a morass of uncertainty. After years of erratic starts and stops he was now confusedly trying to make something out of that miserable ...
— The Great Gray Plague • Raymond F. Jones
... and a machine-gun's ter-rut were audible from the direction of the jumping red glare, which stretched right and left as far as the eye could see. We broke off the road into a morass of mud, as one might cross fields when he had lost his way, and plunged on till the commanding officer said, "We go in here!" and we descended into a black chasm in the earth. The wonder was that any ditch could be cut in soil which the rains had turned ...
— My Year of the War • Frederick Palmer
... marches, passed the Alps and the Po; hastily pillaged the cities of Aquileia, Altinum, Concordia, and Cremona, which yielded to his arms; increased his forces by the accession of thirty thousand auxiliaries; and, without meeting a single enemy in the field, advanced as far as the edge of the morass which protected the impregnable residence of ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 4 • Various
... bush-veld and reached the place where the drive was to be. Here, bordered by steep banks covered with bush, was swampy ground not more than two hundred yards wide, down the centre of which ran a narrow channel of rather deep water, draining a vast expanse of morass above. It was up this channel that the sea-cows travelled to the feeding ground where they loved to collect at that ...
— She and Allan • H. Rider Haggard
... against the Scotch line. The movement was fatal, for as soon as they reached the treacherous ground their horses sunk to the saddle girths. The Scotch had dismounted on firmer ground behind, and now advanced to the attack, some working round the flanks of the morass, others crossing on tufts of grass, and so fell upon the struggling mass of English. The Earl of Westmoreland and many others of note were killed, and the Earl of Lancaster, with the remains of his force, at once retreated ...
— In Freedom's Cause • G. A. Henty
... walked straight on with a swift and even gait, treading the narrow path across the morass as securely as though she had been on the high road. Colwyn soon realised that the path they were following was taking them straight across the marshes to the sea. The surging of the waves against the breakwater sounded increasingly loud on his ears, and after a while he saw the breakwater ...
— The Shrieking Pit • Arthur J. Rees
... within ten miles of New Orleans. Next day it landed at the mouth of the creek and advanced along an overgrown footpath on the banks of a canal, its movements being concealed by the tall reeds of the swamp. After being delayed by several small streams, it finally emerged from the morass, and entering the cultivated portion of the district took up a position across the main road from Proctorsville to New Orleans, the Mississippi being on its left and ...
— The History of the First West India Regiment • A. B. Ellis
... insuperable. It is the track, which these others, these pioneers of godliness, have beaten in, that we cry to have shown us; not a mythic 'Pilgrim's Progress,' but a real path trodden in by real men. Here is a crag, and there is but one spot where it can be climbed; here is a morass or a river, and there is a bridge in one place, and a ford in another. There are robbers in this forest, and wild beasts in that; the tracks cross and recross, and, as in the old labyrinth, only one will bring us right. The age of the saints has passed; they are no longer any service ...
— Short Studies on Great Subjects • James Anthony Froude
... perchance seen the coming of Ella and Cissa, long ere the Norman set foot in Angleland; and with solemn glades where the wind made music in the tree tops, and the graceful deer bounded athwart the avenue, to seek refuge in tangled brake and inaccessible morass. ...
— The House of Walderne - A Tale of the Cloister and the Forest in the Days of the Barons' Wars • A. D. Crake
... and mounting to its top over went the wagon into the mud and water. The two young men took a flying leap into the swamp, and the young lady was thrown out. She was almost smothered before she was rescued by the young men. While they were in this predicament the preacher rode up to the edge of the morass. Raising himself in his stirrups he shouted at the top of his voice: "Glory to God! Glory to God! another sinner's down! Hallelujah! Glory! Glory!" Then he added: "Now you poor, miserable sinners, take this as a judgment from God upon you for your meanness, and repent of your wicked ways ...
— The Kentucky Ranger • Edward T. Curnick
... herons, as slowly you pass To your roosts in the haunts of the exiled thrushes, Sing him the song of the green morass, And the tides that water ...
— Voices for the Speechless • Abraham Firth
... side of the narrow channel, twelve miles south from Crown Point. It is a rocky angle of land, washed on three sides by the water and partly covered on the fourth side by a deep morass. On the space on the northwest quarter, between the morass and the channel, the French had formerly constructed lines of fortification, which still remained, and those lines the Americans had strengthened by ...
— Life And Times Of Washington, Volume 2 • John Frederick Schroeder and Benson John Lossing
... mountain. In remote times the pastoral Phocians had fortified the place against the incursions of the Thessalians, and the decayed remains of the wall and gates of their ancient garrison were still existent in the middle of the pass; while, by marsh and morass, to render the place yet more impassable, they had suffered the hot-springs to empty themselves along the plain, on the Thessalian side, and the quagmire was still sodden and unsteady. The country on either ...
— Athens: Its Rise and Fall, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... which things are held. Combs for wool. A rug. In high. A morass. A pile of sheaves. Parts of a sledge. Centrals read downward ...
— Harper's Young People, May 25, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... adjective, merisc, from mer, mere. The doublet Marris has usually become Morris. The compounds Tidmarsh and Titchmarsh contain the Anglo-Saxon names Tidda and Ticca. Moor also originally had the meaning morass (e.g. in Sedgemoor), as Ger. Moor still has, so that Fenimore is pleonastic. The northern form is Muir, as in Muirhead. Moss was similarly used in the north; cf. moss-trooper and Solway Moss, but the surname Moss is generally for Moses (Chapter IX). From slough ...
— The Romance of Names • Ernest Weekley
... long when the Spaniards returned in high glee from their pursuit. Reaching this open spot, well protected from assault as it appeared by the open morass on one side and the crescent-shaped hedge of palmettos and underwood on the other, they deemed themselves perfectly secure, stacking their arms and throwing themselves on the ground to ...
— Historical Tales, Vol. 2 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris
... lengths of hose. The fire had been beaten; its last gasp was out; and the main building stood, smoke-stained, water-stained, with gaping sockets for windows, but with its roof apparently intact. The trees were scorched to leeward, and the turf was a trampled morass. Charred benches and desks, broken bottles, retorts, and glass cases, bestrewed it. But of Jack's sanctum—of the room in which I had been allowed to sit while he worked, because, as he put it, "I made no noise with my pipe"—nothing ...
— Foe-Farrell • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... anything was a relief to Denis; it was like a piece of solid ground to a man laboring in a morass; his mind seized upon it with avidity; and he stood staring at it and trying to piece together some logical conception of his surroundings. Plainly there was a flight of steps ascending from his own ...
— The Short-story • William Patterson Atkinson
... was separated by only a few feet of level ground from the abrupt, wooded hill by which Tournebut was sheltered. A wall with several doors opening on the woods enclosed the chateau, the farm and the lower part of the park, and a wide morass, stretching from the foot of the terrace to the Seine, rendered access impossible from ...
— The House of the Combrays • G. le Notre
... and rising to his feet, went a step closer, gazing intently. This was real flesh and blood. It was in every way kin to the Limberlost, for no bird of its branches swung with easier grace than this dainty young thing rocked on the bit of morass on which she stood. A sapling beside her was not straighter or rounder than her slender form. Her soft, waving hair clung around her face from the heat, and curled over her shoulders. It was all of one piece with the gold of the sun that ...
— Freckles • Gene Stratton-Porter
... avoid a foe. There is, however, one species of aquatic hare, found only in the Southern United States. It is amphibious, like the musk-rat, is a most expert swimmer, and makes its nest, or "form," on the edge of the morass, where it sleeps all day, sallying forth morning and evening for a swim in search of the delicate water-plants upon which it feeds. The young ones enter the water at a very early age, and may be seen paddling about with the mother ...
— Harper's Young People, January 27, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... a terrestrial paradise, the capital of a kingdom and a great mart of trade, since burnt down and destroyed by the Dutch, exhibits nothing but ruins. There still remain numberless delicious fruit-trees, and a country still susceptible of general cultivation, being yet clear of jungle and morass. It is utterly abandoned: that it has not been rebuilt is owing to the Rajah of Pontiana, at whose suggestion it was destroyed, and whose interest it was to keep it down, having himself ...
— The Expedition to Borneo of H.M.S. Dido - For the Suppression of Piracy • Henry Keppel
... their way across it. He, therefore, assisting to support Jerry, moved on as fast as his weight and the nature of the ground would allow. Jerry's fall, however, had given an advantage to their pursuers, who were now making their way across the morass, sometimes stopped by a soft portion, and again moving faster where the ground was comparatively firmer. Still the Cossacks had somewhat gained upon them, and were scarcely fifty yards off, when Tom's welcome ...
— The Three Commanders • W.H.G. Kingston
... to The Observer complaining bitterly of the state of the morass leading to the Aerodrome at Hendon. This gentleman does not realise that there is a didactic purpose in the cause of his annoyance. Learn to fly and you will keep your ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, April 8, 1914 • Various
... novel a good deal of the windy moralizing of the pulpit. All of these German naturalists—and they are the only German novelists worth considering—share the weakness of Zola, their Stammvater. They, too, fall into the morass that engulfed ...
— A Book of Prefaces • H. L. Mencken
... the Moon is on the wave, And the glow-worm in the grass, And the meteor on the grave, And the wisp on the morass;[118] When the falling stars are shooting, And the answered owls are hooting, And the silent leaves are still In the shadow of the hill, Shall my soul be upon thine, 200 With a power and ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 4 • Lord Byron
... their way. Past the solitary lakes they went, past the long stretches of undulating morass, past the lonely sheilings perched far up on the hills; and the rough and blustering wind blew about them, and the gray clouds hurried by, and the old, strong-bearded man who shook the reins and gave the horses their heads ...
— Lippincott's Magazine. Vol. XII, No. 33. December, 1873. • Various
... foremost of all wielders of weapons, scorched all those great bowmen with showers of arrows like the sun scorching (everything below) with his burning rays. Thus struck, O king, by Drona, the Pandavas and the Srinjayas beheld no protector, like elephants sunk in a morass. The mighty arrows of Drona, as they coursed (through the welkin), looked like the rays of the sun blasting everything around. In that encounter, five and twenty warriors among the Panchalas were slain by Drona, who were all regarded as Maharathas and all approved ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 2 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... which they could retire on any emergency. James, however, was bent upon hazarding an engagement; and expressed uncommon confidence and alacrity. Besides the river which was deep, his front was secured by a morass and a rising ground, so that the English army could not ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.II. - From William and Mary to George II. • Tobias Smollett
... a part of the solid west coast if it wasn't for a half circle of the deadliest, double-damned, orchid-haunted black morass, with a solid wall of insects that bite, rising out of it. But the beach is good dry sand, and the wind keeps the bugs back in the swamp. Between the beach and the swamp is a strip of loam and jungle, where some ...
— IT and Other Stories • Gouverneur Morris
... the latter accidentally fell into a muddy rivulet, and tried in vain to disengage herself by the assistance of Mrs. Scott's hand. Mrs. Scott exerted her utmost power for many minutes, first to assist her friend, and next to prevent herself from being pulled into the morass, as her distressed companion would not disengage her hand. After other assistance was procured by their united screams, Mrs. Scott walked to a chair about twenty yards from the brook, and was seized with an apoplectic stroke: ...
— Zoonomia, Vol. I - Or, the Laws of Organic Life • Erasmus Darwin
... the southwest corner of Lake Michigan, which, seventy years ago, was half morass from the overflowing of the sluggish creek, whose waters, during flood, spread over the low-lying, level plain, or were supplemented in the dry season by the inflow from the lake, showed no sign of any future development and prosperity. The few streets of wooden houses that had been built ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 795, March 28, 1891 • Various
... once resumed, and, floundering in the mud, the artillery horses especially with great labour dragging the guns through the morass which extended nearly all the way, we arrived at about four o'clock on the banks of a canal in full view of ...
— A Narrative Of The Siege Of Delhi - With An Account Of The Mutiny At Ferozepore In 1857 • Charles John Griffiths
... pieces of artillery, he commenced this memorable campaign. On the fatal field of Mohacs the fate of Hungary was decided in an unequal fight. King Lewis, as he fled from the Turkish sabres, was drowned in a morass. The next day the sultan received in state the compliments of his officers. The heads of 2,000 of the slain, including those of seven bishops and many of the nobility, were piled up as a trophy before his tent. Seven days after the battle, a tumultuous cry arose in the camp to massacre ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 13, No. 374 • Various
... It is for this that Brahmanas who are always devoted to Yoga, who have transcended wrath and sorrow, and who always regard Religion as the causeway (along which every one must pass for avoiding the morass below), take refuge in Truth. I shall now speak of those Brahmanas who are restrained by one another and possessed of knowledge, of the orders, and of those who belong to the four modes of life. The wise say that Religion ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 4 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... had yet been before his blinded eyes how long! burst upon him. The shock of it snapped the filmy thread of being. As the escaping soul found its wings, spread them, and rose from that dun morass called Life, the Sieur de Mauprat, giving a long, deep sigh, fell back in his great arm-chair dead, and the silver snuff-box rattled ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... reverie, from which he started at my approach, and, putting his horse in motion, led the way at a leisurely pace through a broken and sandy road, which traversed a waste, level, and uncultivated tract of downs, intermixed with morass, much like that in the neighbourhood of my quarters at Shepherd's Bush. Indeed, the whole open ground of this district, where it approaches the sea, has, except in a few favoured spots, the same ...
— Redgauntlet • Sir Walter Scott
... swamp and bridge the river before the cold weather set in. Nor was his altered order of campaign due in any way to the storm which had raised the river and made of the alder-dotted stretch of flat bog-meadow an oozing, quaking morass. It no longer represented merely a positive not too alluring problem in engineering—that strip of swamp and open water. It had taken on a newer, strategic importance. And the change in Steve's plans, so far as the work at Thirty-Mile was concerned, was as much due to the news ...
— Then I'll Come Back to You • Larry Evans
... locomotive runs for a distance of 400 miles almost as "the crow" is supposed to fly, turning neither to the right hand nor to the left. For twelve weary hours the passenger in the express train looks out on forest and morass, and rarely catches sight of human habitation. Only once he perceives in the distance what may be called a town; it is Tver which has been thus favoured, not because it is a place of importance, but simply because it happened to be near the bee-line. And why ...
— Russia • Donald Mackenzie Wallace
... strongly entrenched at Muannis and elsewhere, and between them and the attacking troops, as an additional protection, they had the river, now swollen to many times its usual dimensions by the recent rains, which had also made the ground on either bank little better than a morass. Also, what fords there were had been rendered impassable by the floods, and it was only after prolonged and searching examination, which had always to be undertaken at night and by swimming the river many times, that ...
— With Our Army in Palestine • Antony Bluett
... certainly not a handsome one. It was a dark November evening, and the dingy lighting of the bar seemed but to emphasize the bleak exterior. Drifts of fog and damp from without mingled with the smoke of shag. The sanded floor was kicked into a muddy morass not unlike the surface of the pavement. An old lady down the street had died from pneumonia the previous evening, and the event supplied a fruitful topic of conversation. The things that one could get! Everywhere were germs eager to destroy one. At any minute the symptoms might break out. And ...
— The Best British Short Stories of 1922 • Various
... on a sofa covered with white marabou, her head sunk deep into a billowy morass of lace-coloured satin and lace-coloured lace. She could see her pointed toes emerging and her arm dangling over the edge as if she had forgotten it. On her finger was a huge emerald ring, a splotch of creme de menthe spilt on the whiteness ...
— Balloons • Elizabeth Bibesco
... two or three steps into the swamp itself, in order to gain the next acclivity, upon which I would then stand triumphantly, to determine my farther progress. So long as I could distinguish traces of horses' hoofs, I had no fear; but even these soon disappeared, and I stood there alone in the morass. I could not remain for ever on my tower of observation, and had no resource but to take to the swamp once more. I must confess that I experienced a very uncomfortable feeling of apprehension when my foot sank suddenly ...
— Visit to Iceland - and the Scandinavian North • Ida Pfeiffer
... never so turned away from man as when he ascends to them by disorderly methods." Our spirits may live in the Golden Age, but our bodily life moves on slow feet, and needs the lantern on the path and the staff struck carefully into the darkness before us to see that the path beyond is not a morass, and the light not ...
— National Being - Some Thoughts on an Irish Polity • (A.E.)George William Russell
... o'clock, the hour fixed on for the assault, the columns were in motion; but from delays made inevitable by the nature of the ground, it was twenty minutes after twelve before this commenced, when neither the morass, now overflowed by the tide, nor the formidable and double row of abattis, nor the high and strong works on the summit of the hill, could for a moment damp the ardor or stop the career of the assailants, who, in the face of an incessant fire of musketry and a shower of shells and ...
— Choice Specimens of American Literature, And Literary Reader - Being Selections from the Chief American Writers • Benj. N. Martin
... back a last time at the farm. It still lay deserted except for the figure of Dandie, who was now seen to be scribbling in his lap, the hour of expected inspiration having come to him at last. Thence she passed rapidly through the morass, and came to the farther end of it, where a sluggish burn discharges, and the path for Hermiston accompanies it on the beginning of its downward path. From this corner a wide view was opened to her of the whole stretch of braes upon the other side, still sallow and in places ...
— Weir of Hermiston • Robert Louis Stevenson
... also at the outlet of the bridge, on the other side, a morass, into which many horses and carriages had sunk, a circumstance which greatly embarrassed and retarded the entrance. Then it was that, in that infuriated column, crowded together, on a single plank of safety, there arose a ...
— The Two Great Retreats of History • George Grote
... when the great morass lay in white and sinister tangle under the wild spring moon, when the dark and dreadful swamps were rife with horrible croaks and snaps, the whirring of the wings of waterfowl or the noise of a disturbed puff adder, Philip stretched himself upon the seat ...
— Diane of the Green Van • Leona Dalrymple
... with her comic-opera coronets and her worm-eaten stage decorations, and her pomp and chivalry built on a morass ...
— The Melting-Pot • Israel Zangwill
... thousands of business houses closed their doors. The effect was cumulative; the fabric of credit, broken at one point, was weakened correspondingly in other places and the guilty and the innocent were alike plunged into the morass of bankruptcy. ...
— The American Empire • Scott Nearing
... battle-field Unchallenged still, but wary, did they pass, By many a broken spear or shatter'd shield That in Fate's hour appointed faithless was: Only the heron cried from the morass By Xanthus' side, and ravens, and the grey Wolves left their feasting in the tangled grass, Grudging; and loiter'd, nor ...
— Helen of Troy • Andrew Lang
... maligners, Calais is no better than a sort of Alsatia to England, a kind of extension of the rules of the King's Bench. The same persons would persuade you that America is something between a morass and a desert, and that its inhabitants are a cross between swindlers and barbarians; merely because its laws do not take upon them to punish those who have not offended against them! If America were to send ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, - Vol. 10, No. 283, 17 Nov 1827 • Various
... any work, even route marching, and, having nothing to do but lie around and think of himself, Tommy began to grouse. Each camp had become a morass with mud a foot deep, and Tommy looked out upon it and behold it was not good, and he cursed both loud and long whoever he thought might be responsible for the conditions, and particularly Emperor Bill the cause ...
— On the Fringe of the Great Fight • George G. Nasmith
... mind of man with difficulty endeavours to realise this immensity of wooded wilderness, covering a territory half as large again as the whole of France, where the rays of the sun never penetrate, where in the dark, dank air, filled with the steam of the heated morass, human beings dwarfed into pygmies and brutalised into cannibals lurk and live and die. Mr Stanley vainly endeavours to bring home to us the full horror of ...
— "In Darkest England and The Way Out" • General William Booth
... under command of General McClellan. It would be difficult to imagine an army better prepared for active operations; and the position which it held had been well selected. The left of the army was protected by the wellnigh impassable morass of the White-oak Swamp, and all the approaches from the direction of Richmond were obstructed by the natural difficulties of the ground, which had been rendered still more forbidding by an abattis of felled trees and earthworks of the best description. ...
— A Life of Gen. Robert E. Lee • John Esten Cooke
... and down dale; plunged through field after field of Indian corn; pursued his endless way through hemp grounds and fallow lands; scrambled on all fours through hedges and ditches, and finally forced his way through a vast morass in which he wallowed freely. In a sober condition he would have come to grief twenty times over, but Fate always protects ...
— The Day of Wrath • Maurus Jokai
... she paused, turned back, and said, 'This may be the last time we meet on earth; but whither flieth the flame when it leaves the ashes?—Wandering to and fro, up and down, as an exhalation on the morass, the flame may be seen in the marshes of the lake below; and the witch and the Magian, the pupil and the master, the great one and the accursed one, may meet ...
— The Last Days of Pompeii • Edward George Bulwer-Lytton
... I need hardly say that it was Edmund who first drew this inference, and when its full meaning burst upon my mind I shuddered at the hellish design which Ingra evidently entertained. Plainly, he meant to throw us into the morass, either to drown in the foul water, whose miasma now assailed our nostrils, or to starve amidst the fens! But his real intention, as you will perceive in a little ...
— A Columbus of Space • Garrett P. Serviss
... ordered her hot milk and, with a flutter, awaited it. This was life. And to-morrow she must telegraph to her step-father, and everything would end in the old round of parish duties; all her hopes and dreams would be submerged in the heavy morass of meeting mothers. The thought leapt up.—Betty hid her eyes and would not look at it. Instead, she looked at the other people seated at the tables—the women. They were laughing and talking among themselves. One or two looked at Betty and smiled with frank friendliness. Betty ...
— The Incomplete Amorist • E. Nesbit
... hours of morning sun before it was finally dissolved. Consequently when the advance-guard of the force which was formed by the New Cavalry Brigade topped the great sloping glacis, inclining for all the world like an under-feature of the Sussex Downs, into the stagnant morass which is Houwater's most prominent feature, the last Boers were disappearing into the labyrinth of Minie Kloof beyond. But there was just sufficient excitement to take the cold and stiffness, bred of a miserable march, out ...
— On the Heels of De Wet • The Intelligence Officer
... Calcutta, had built him a wooden hut in the jungles of the Delta, had become indigo planter in the swamps of Dinapoor that he might preach Christ without interference, had been forced to think of seeking the protection of a Buddhist in the Himalaya morass—was driven to begin anew in the very heart of the most densely peopled part of the British Empire, under the jealous care of the foreign European power which had a century before sent missionaries to Tranquebar and taught Zinzendorf and the Moravians the divine law of the kingdom; encouraged ...
— The Life of William Carey • George Smith
... of England, mark you, and there are those who serve and uphold it, who are the true men and the King's own lieges. Such a one am I. Then again, there are those who take such as me and transfer, carry or convey us into a bog or morass. Such a one is this graceless old man with the ax, whom I have seen already this day. There are also those who tear, destroy or scatter the papers of the law, of which this young man is the chief. Therefore, I would ...
— Sir Nigel • Arthur Conan Doyle
... written. And one might add that whatever is deeply observed is well said. The artist in design is by the very nature of his work compelled to observe deeply, precisely, beautifully. He is never able to revolve in a vacuum, or flounder in a morass, or run after a mirage. When there is nothing there he is still. He is held by his art to Nature. So, when he takes up his pen, by training, by acquired instinct, he still follows with the new ...
— Impressions And Comments • Havelock Ellis
... told that long ago a peasant living at Goetur in Myrdalur went out fishing round the island of Dyrholar. In returning from the sea, he had to cross a morass. It happened once that on his way home after nightfall, he came to a place where a man had lost his horse in the bog, and was unable to recover it without help. The fisherman, to whom this man was a stranger, aided him in freeing ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 2 • Charles Dudley Warner
... we must imagine Holland as it was when first inhabited by the first German tribes that wandered away in search of a country. It was almost uninhabitable. There were vast tempestuous lakes, like seas, touching one another; morass beside morass; one tract covered with brushwood after another; immense forests of pines, oaks, and alders, traversed by herds of wild horses; and so thick were these forests that tradition says one could travel leagues passing ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume 4 (of 10) • Various
... of it rushing at her, she saw the end of the patch of gravel. The road ahead was a wet black smear, criss-crossed with ruts. The car shot into a morass of prairie gumbo—which is mud mixed with tar, fly-paper, fish glue, and well-chewed, chocolate-covered caramels. When cattle get into gumbo, the farmers send for ...
— Free Air • Sinclair Lewis
... that his wife should lose a cent, and to satisfy his conscience, and impressed by his danger, he resolved that as soon as he was out of this quaking morass of speculation he would settle on his wife and each daughter enough to secure them in wealth through life, and arrange it in such a way that no ...
— What Can She Do? • Edward Payson Roe
... horseback: on that account his repulse was easier. When he was driven back, the Romans followed in pursuit: and the remainder of the Roman army, fired by the bravery of the king, routed the Sabines. Mettius, his horse taking fright at the noise of his pursuers, rode headlong into a morass: this circumstance drew off the attention of the Sabines also at the danger of so high a personage. He indeed, his own party beckoning and calling to him, gaining heart from the encouraging shouts of many ...
— Roman History, Books I-III • Titus Livius
... mountains called Oeta rose up and barred their way. Indeed, the woods, rocks, and precipices came down so near the seashore, that in two places there was only room for one single wheel track between the steeps and the impassable morass that formed the border of the gulf on its south side. These two very narrow places were called the gates of the pass, and were about a mile apart. There was a little more width left in the intervening ...
— The Junior Classics • Various
... unfortunately not in his immediate vicinity. He crept stealthily along in the direction of the possible anchorage, fighting his way through roots and undergrowth; it was all of no use—a barrier of morass and elephant grass proved absolutely impassable, so he turned back towards his camp, pausing now and then to listen. He could make out voices—one in an authoritative key summoning "Mung Li." Well, he had at least ...
— The Road to Mandalay - A Tale of Burma • B. M. Croker
... making sure that no guards lay hidden in the ditches. The trails left by the departing men were easily followed. They led, not to the river or toward Garman's as might have been expected, but scattered and lost themselves to the southward in the tangle morass of the cypress swamp. Here and there articles had been left behind in what savored of a flight; unopened canned goods, a deer carcass, a frying pan, a rifle and a pair of shoes. Roger studied the tracks leading into the swamp and saw that several of them had been made on the run. It was ...
— The Plunderer • Henry Oyen
... strong white arms, He bore me on his horse away O'er crag, morass, and hairbreadth pass, But never asked me ...
— Goblin Market, The Prince's Progress, and Other Poems • Christina Rossetti
... makes them conform to the line of beauty at last." It is this unintentional adaptation that makes a footpath so indestructible. Instead of striking across the natural lines, it conforms to them, nestles into the hollow, skirts the precipice, avoids the morass. An unconscious landscape-gardener, it seeks the most convenient course, never doubting that grace will follow. Mitchell, at his "Edgewood" farm, wishing to decide on the most picturesque avenue to his front door, ordered ...
— Oldport Days • Thomas Wentworth Higginson
... the turbid waves What is expected thou canst now discern, If reek of the morass conceal ...
— Divine Comedy, Longfellow's Translation, Hell • Dante Alighieri
... and have from the day we first met on board the Albatross. It may be a warning to you. No: I will not insult you by thinking you could ever grow up as I did. For to make up for my losings, I wildly plunged more deeply into the wretched morass, and then in my desperation went to my ...
— To The West • George Manville Fenn
... down in the jungle, where no bright sun could pierce the darkness, nor human voice be heard, far from any habitation of man or means of supporting life, on the edge of a dank, stagnant morass that was shunned by all but noisome reptiles and wandering beasts of prey, they set them down and left them, the dead husband and the living wife, alone to meet the horrors of the coming night—alone, ...
— Tales of Wonder Every Child Should Know • Various
... waterproof and I walked far upon the sodden moor, full of dark imaginings, the rain beating upon my face and the wind whistling about my ears. God help those who wander into the great mire now, for even the firm uplands are becoming a morass. I found the black tor upon which I had seen the solitary watcher, and from its craggy summit I looked out myself across the melancholy downs. Rain squalls drifted across their russet face, and the heavy, slate-coloured clouds hung low over the landscape, trailing ...
— The Hound of the Baskervilles • A. Conan Doyle
... black. The great inky stain of cloud spread and ran up the heavens, then down to the whole circumference. In five minutes it was night and rain-storm. It stung like a whip-lash; to meet it was like riding into a wall. Ladysmith streets were ankle deep in half an hour; the camps were morass and pond. And listening to the ever-fresh bursts hammering all the evening on to deepening pools, we learned that the Dundee men had not camped after all, had marched at six, and were coming on all night into Ladysmith. Thirty-two miles without rest, through stinging cataract and spongy ...
— From Capetown to Ladysmith - An Unfinished Record of the South African War • G. W. Steevens
... crossed the Burgut Mountains, we entered the Tola River valley, farther up which Urga is located. The road was strewn with the overcoats, shirts, boots, caps and kettles which the Chinese had thrown away in their flight; and marked by many of their dead. Further on the road crossed a morass, where on either side lay great mounds of the dead bodies of men, horses and camels with broken carts and military debris of every sort. Here the Tibetans of Baron Ungern had cut up the escaping Chinese baggage transport; and it was a strange ...
— Beasts, Men and Gods • Ferdinand Ossendowski
... uncovered notwithstanding the severity of the night, and the rain pouring in torrents upon him, when he found it necessary to cross a level of rough land, at all times damp and marshy, but in consequence of the rains of the season, now a perfect morass. Over this he had advanced about half a mile, and got beyond the frightful noises of the woods, when some large object rose into the air from a clump of plashy rushes before him, and shot along the blast, uttering a booming sound, so loud and stunning that he stood riveted ...
— The Black Prophet: A Tale Of Irish Famine • William Carleton
... immediately turned against the men who had just been using them. No (*33) assistance coming to him, he (Barlow) intrenched under fire and continued to hold his place. Gibbon was not so fortunate in his front. He found the ground over which he had to pass cut up with deep ravines, and a morass difficult to cross. But his men struggled on until some of them got up to the very parapet covering the enemy. Gibbon gained ground much nearer the enemy than that which he left, and here ...
— Memoirs of Three Civil War Generals, Complete • U. S. Grant, W. T. Sherman, P. H. Sheridan
... is located on a narrow piece of land, between the sea on one side and a river of considerable size, which flows through part of the city, on the other; while on another side is a swamp or morass. On the side fronting the sea is a handsome beach, extending two leagues to the port of Cavite, where lie the vessels of the Nueva Spana line. Where the river enters the sea, the land forms a point, upon which is built a very small and dilapidated wooden fort. Neither on the seacoast ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898 - Volume VI, 1583-1588 • Emma Helen Blair
... and training players, Schiller wrote poems, the products of a mind brooding over dark and mysterious things, and his "Philosophic Letters" unfold to us many a gloomy conflict of the soul, surveying the dark morass of infidelity yet showing no causeway through it. The first acts of "Don Carlos," printed in "Thalia," had attracted the attention of the Duke of Sachsen-Weimar, who conferred on their author the title of Counsellor. Schiller was loved and ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol IX. • Edited by Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton
... because you are looked upon as a man without spot or blemish; your home is regarded as a model home, and your conduct as a model of conduct. But all this grandeur, and you with it, is founded on a treacherous morass. A moment may come and a word may be spoken, when you and all your grandeur will be engulfed in the morass, if you do not save ...
— Pillars of Society • Henrik Ibsen
... However, we parted friends, and I slept sound, with a clear conscience. I got up early, to avoid complications, and made Tom Kettering drive me here in the dog-cart. It took an hour and a half because the road's bad. It's like a morass, all the way. I like the sound of the horse's hoofs when ...
— When Ghost Meets Ghost • William Frend De Morgan
... that it is, Babs, and I'll bless you. If the singing of these larks means nothing, if that blue up there is a morass of our invention, if we are pettily, creeping on furthering nothing, if there's no purpose in our lives, persuade me of ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... band, Through morass and wooded land, Over beach of yellow sand, Mountain, plain, and valley, A southern maid, in all her pride, Marched gayly at her lover's side, In such disguise That e'en his ...
— Poems • George P. Morris
... Road, surrounding levels, and creek-bed had somehow lost identity. One was like the other, and none had any bottom. Each gun had now a corps of pioneers, who, casting stone and brushwood into the morass, laboriously built a road for the piece. Whole companies of infantry were put at this work. The officers helped, the staff dismounted and helped, the commanding general was encountered, rain-dripping, mud-spattered, a log on his shoulder or a great ...
— The Long Roll • Mary Johnston
... route, through these channels; but night coming on, we lost ourselves. Our situation became the most disagreeable that can be imagined. Being unable to find a place where we could land, on account of the morass, we were obliged to continue rowing, or rather turning round, in this species of labyrinth, constantly kneeling in our little canoes, which any unlucky movement would infallibly have caused to upset. It rained in torrents and was dark as pitch. At last, after having wandered about during ...
— Narrative of a Voyage to the Northwest Coast of America in the years 1811, 1812, 1813, and 1814 or the First American Settlement on the Pacific • Gabriel Franchere
... youth, find the rest of life fall far short of their expectations. Her voice had acquired a perpetual wail, and the corners of what had once been a pretty mouth drooped in an eternal peevishness. She found herself in a morass of misery and shabby discomfort, but had her days continued in an even tenor she would still have lamented. "A dingy body," was Mrs. Morran's comment, but she laboured in kindness. Unhappily they had no common language, and it was only by signs that the hostess ...
— Huntingtower • John Buchan
... could for the sustenance and protection of his family, and to arrange with his neighbours the farther steps which should be adopted for the recovery of Grace Armstrong. The rest of the party dispersed in different directions, as soon as they had crossed the morass. The outlaw and his mother watched them from the ...
— The Black Dwarf • Sir Walter Scott
... the wind among the bushy grounds, Far in the distance rose the yell of hounds: The flame-wisps, starting from the sedge and grass, Hung, 'mid the vapours, over the morass. Up to him came a beldame, wildly drest, Bearing a closely-folded feather-vest: She smil'd upon him with her cheeks so wan, Gave him the robe, ...
— Romantic Ballads - translated from the Danish; and Miscellaneous Pieces • George Borrow
... in order to leave the place, each of them boasted and bragged of his bridal present. But when the uproar was at the highest, and they were all speaking together, a maiden dressed in green, and with a bulrush plaited over her head, came from a neighbouring morass, and going up to the fellow who was noisiest and bragged most of his bridal gift, she said, 'What will you give to Lady Boe?' The boor, who was half intoxicated from the brandy and ale he had swallowed, seized a whip, and answered, 'Three ...
— George Borrow - The Man and His Books • Edward Thomas
... dreaded more than another in those early days, it was a swamp. Steep hill sides, wide creeks, honey-combed flats, all came in, the day's ride,—but a swamp! Ugh! the horrible treacherous thing, so green and innocent looking, with here and there a quicksand or a peaty morass, in which, without a moment's warning, your horse sank up to his withers! It was dreadful, and when we came to such a place Helen used to stop dead short, prick her pretty ears well forward, and, trembling with fear and excitement, put her nose close to the ground, smelling every inch, before she ...
— Station Amusements • Lady Barker
... a waggon side-slips off the pave into the morass reserved for infantry, and overturns. The result is a block, which promptly extends forward and back for a couple of miles. A peculiarly British chorus of inquiry and remonstrance—a blend of biting sarcasm and blasphemous humour—surges up and down the line; ...
— All In It K(1) Carries On - A Continuation of the First Hundred Thousand • John Hay Beith (AKA: Ian Hay)
... atoll. Conceive one that has been partly plucked of its rush fringe; you have the atoll of Kauehi. And for either shore of it at closer quarters, conceive the line of some old Roman highway traversing a wet morass, and here sunk out of view and there re-arising, crowned with a green tuft of thicket; only instead of the stagnant waters of a marsh, the live ocean now boiled against, now buried the frail barrier. ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 18 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... towers projecting on the side of Nisaea, by engines from the sea, and clearing the entrance into the channel between the island and the shore, he next proceeded to cut off all communication by building a wall on the mainland at the point where a bridge across a morass enabled succours to be thrown into the island, which was not far off from the continent. A few days sufficing to accomplish this, he afterwards raised some works in the island also, and leaving a garrison there, ...
— The History of the Peloponnesian War • Thucydides
... Aberdeen, he used often to steal from home unperceived;—sometimes he would find his way to the sea-side; and once, after a long and anxious search, they found the adventurous little rover struggling in a sort of morass or marsh, from which he was unable ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. I. (of VI.) - With his Letters and Journals. • Thomas Moore
... deeper and deeper into this horrible bog, until I began to think that my first night in France was destined also to be my last, and that the heir of the de Lavals was destined to perish of cold and misery in the depths of this obscene morass. ...
— Uncle Bernac - A Memory of the Empire • Arthur Conan Doyle
... processes of the Puritan, therefore, were distinctly different from that of the Southerner. The Puritan mind was given to hours of grim repression which he called "Conviction of Sin." Resistance became the prime law of life. The world was a thing of evil. A morass of Sin to be attacked, to be reformed, to be "abolished." The Southerner perceived the evils of Slavery long before the Puritan, but he made a poor Abolitionist. The Puritan was born an Abolitionist. He should not only resist and attack the world; he should hate it. He early learned to ...
— The Man in Gray • Thomas Dixon
... shorn of its superrational sanctions, Saxon floundered into the morass of pessimism. There was no justification for right conduct in the universe, no square deal for her who had earned reward, for the millions who worked like animals, died like animals, and were a long time and forever dead. Like the hosts of more learned thinkers before her, she concluded that ...
— The Valley of the Moon • Jack London
... mountains ere discovering my mistake. Retracing my way, the right road is finally taken; but the gale increases in violence, the cold is numbing to unprotected hands and ears, and the wind and driving snow difficult to face. At one point the trail leads through a morass, in which are two dead horses, swamped in attempting to cross, and near by lies an abandoned camel, lying in the mud and wearily munching at a heap of kali (cut barley-straw) placed before him by his owners before leaving him to his kismet; perchance with a forlorn ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle Volume II. - From Teheran To Yokohama • Thomas Stevens
... consists in sheer revolt all along the line. The whole matter is in confusion. You have to accept Mrs. Walker's and Mrs. Gordon's view of the case, plainly and simply, or you get off into a sort of morass and blunder ...
— The Daughters of Danaus • Mona Caird
... with white centres animate the colour of the lower petals in our mountain kind—-mountain or morass;—it is vilely drawn in S. 997 under the name of Sylvatica, translated 'Procumbent'! As it is neither a wood flower nor a procumbent one,[33] and as its rosy colour is rare among morass flowers, I shall ...
— Proserpina, Volume 2 - Studies Of Wayside Flowers • John Ruskin
... 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 Sequel - What the Great War will mean to Australia • George A. Taylor
... There is very little probability that it was carved on the spot where it was recently exhumed; the stone for that purpose was not likely to have been found there or to have been taken there; and the situation where it was discovered, a morass or water-bed, favors the theory that it was deposited there. Setting aside the belief, honestly entertained by many people in the immediate vicinity, that the statue was surreptitiously placed in the slough where it was dug ...
— The American Goliah • Anon.
... the hour for surrender had come. For his unwelcome counsel the sachem forthwith lifted his tomahawk and struck him dead at his feet. Then the brother of the slain man crept away through the bushes to Church's little camp, and offered to guide the white men to the morass where Philip lay concealed. At daybreak of August 12 the English stealthily advancing beat up their prey. The savages in sudden panic rushed from under cover, and as the sachem showed himself running at the top of his speed, a ball from an Indian musket pierced ...
— The Beginnings of New England - Or the Puritan Theocracy in its Relations to Civil and Religious Liberty • John Fiske
... commerce to Venice precisely the same questions are in course of debate which again and again, ever since Venice was a city, have put her senate at pause—namely, how to hold in check the continually advancing morass formed by the silt brought down by the Alpine rivers. Is it not strange that for at least six hundred years the Venetians have been contending with those rivers at their mouths—that is to say, where their strength has become wholly irresistible—and never once thought of contending ...
— On the Old Road, Vol. 2 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... to her feet and led the way down into a spongy morass. The brush slapped her face. It caught in the meshes of her shoes and flung her down. The miry earth, oozing over the edges of the frames, clogged her feet and clung ...
— Man Size • William MacLeod Raine
... Through dense scrub and tangled brier, They passed with hearts undaunted, And with steps that would not tire; Through morass and flooding waters, Undismayed by toil and fears, At their chief's command, with salient hand, Fought ...
— Successful Exploration Through the Interior of Australia • William John Wills
... the north of Venice the banks of sand which nearer the city rise little above low-water mark attain by degrees a higher level, and knit themselves at last into fields of salt morass, raised here and there into shapeless mounds, and intercepted by ...
— Howards End • E. M. Forster
... noxious spirit of the neck, the neck-spirit of the desert, the neck-spirit of the mountains, the neck-spirit of the sea, the neck-spirit of the morass, the noxious cherub of the city, this noxious wind which seizes the body (and) the health of the body. Spirit of heaven remember, spirit ...
— Babylonian and Assyrian Literature • Anonymous
... still lingered in the South. So fretting, he tossed himself against the bars through the long snows of an unusually severe March, until April broke the frost, and the road to the Byrdsnest became a morass ...
— The Nest Builder • Beatrice Forbes-Robertson Hale
... tied. Speed, Malise, speed! such cause of haste Thine active sinews never braced. Bend 'gainst the steepy hill thy breast, Burst down like torrent from its crest; With short and springing footstep pass The trembling bog and false morass; Across the brook like roebuck bound, And thread the brake like questing hound; The crag is high, the scaur is deep, Yet shrink not from the desperate leap: Parched are thy burning lips and brow, Yet by the fountain pause not now; Herald of battle, fate, and fear, Stretch onward in thy fleet career! ...
— The Lady of the Lake • Sir Walter Scott
... holiness of his nature it is impossible he should not have given, man deprived himself of the ability to obey. And was the law of God therefore to be annulled? Must the sun cease to shine because the earth has become a morass, so that even that very glory of the sun hath become a new cause of its steaming up clouds and vapors that strangle the rays? God forbid! 'But for the law I had not sinned'. But had I not been sinful the law would not have occasioned me to sin, ...
— The Literary Remains Of Samuel Taylor Coleridge • Edited By Henry Nelson Coleridge
... See where the sun sets Ere he sets, ere old age Seizeth me in the morass, Ere my toothless jaws mumble, And my useless limbs totter; While drunk with his farewell beam Hurl me,—a fiery sea Foaming still in mine eye,— Hurl me, while dazzled and reeling, Down to the gloomy portal ...
— The Poems of Goethe • Goethe
... uncertainty of the sound her ladyship's trumpet gave, and began to be assured that the laws of society were no firm stepping-stones, and that society itself was a morass, where one must spend her life in jumping from hump to ...
— There & Back • George MacDonald
... make, and stone to quarry, and fifty other disagreeable things to do, and I can't be idle with you." Then I go into jagged up-hill and down-hill streets, where I am in the pastrycook's shop at one moment, and next moment in savage fastnesses of moor and morass, beyond the confines of civilisation, and I say to those murky and black-dusty streets, "Will YOU come and be idle with me?" To which they reply, "No, we can't, indeed, for we haven't the spirits, and we are startled by the echo of your ...
— The Lazy Tour of Two Idle Apprentices • Charles Dickens
... a relief to Denis; it was like a piece of solid ground to a man laboring in a morass; his mind seized upon it with avidity; and he stood staring at it and trying to piece together some logical conception of his surroundings. Plainly there was a flight of steps ascending from his own level to that of this illuminated doorway, and indeed he thought he ...
— The Short-story • William Patterson Atkinson
... line at the end of what she had written; below, that is, a great black morass of scratches that represented significantly the "Slough of Despond" she had got into over the ...
— Real Folks • Mrs. A. D. T. Whitney
... way, the right road is finally taken; but the gale increases in violence, the cold is numbing to unprotected hands and ears, and the wind and driving snow difficult to face. At one point the trail leads through a morass, in which are two dead horses, swamped in attempting to cross, and near by lies an abandoned camel, lying in the mud and wearily munching at a heap of kali (cut barley-straw) placed before him by his owners before leaving ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle Volume II. - From Teheran To Yokohama • Thomas Stevens
... ere that voice did pass, The night grew damp and dim, and, through a rent 2615 Of the ruin where we sate, from the morass A wandering Meteor by some wild wind sent, Hung high in the green dome, to which it lent A faint and pallid lustre; while the song Of blasts, in which its blue hair quivering bent, 2620 Strewed strangest sounds the moving leaves among; A wondrous light, the sound as ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley Volume I • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... Opened the great morass, shot every side With flashing water through and through; a-shine, Thick-steaming, all-alive. Whose shape divine Quivered i' the farthest rainbow-vapour, glanced Athwart the flying herons? He advanced, But warily; though Mincio leaped no more, Each ...
— The Poetry Of Robert Browning • Stopford A. Brooke
... outcome of the moment of illumination is belief in the possibility of a way of knowledge which may be called revelation or insight or intuition, as contrasted with sense, reason, and analysis, which are regarded as blind guides leading to the morass of illusion. Closely connected with this belief is the conception of a Reality behind the world of appearance and utterly different from it. This Reality is regarded with an admiration often amounting to worship; it is felt to be always and everywhere close at hand, thinly veiled ...
— Mysticism and Logic and Other Essays • Bertrand Russell
... could say what ugly, dwarfish things, what evil fairies, what dangerous dead men might climb up over the rim of the world? A man was not afraid of the grey wolf, or even the huge beast that trumpeted in the morass by the great water when the light was at his back, but when the world was darkened old men had seen strange shapes running by the wolf's muzzle, or groping with the big mastodon in the marsh land, and against these a stone axe was ...
— Dwellers in the Hills • Melville Davisson Post
... of southwest Afghanistan bordering on the Persian province of Yezd. It is intersected by the Helmund River (l. 751), which flows into the Hamoon Lake, now scarcely more than a morass. On an island in this lake are ruins of fortifications called Fort Rustum. This territory was long held by Rustum's family, feudatory to the Persian kings. Zal. Rustum's father, ruler of Seistan. See ...
— Matthew Arnold's Sohrab and Rustum and Other Poems • Matthew Arnold
... and ordered her hot milk and, with a flutter, awaited it. This was life. And to-morrow she must telegraph to her step-father, and everything would end in the old round of parish duties; all her hopes and dreams would be submerged in the heavy morass of meeting mothers. The thought leapt up.—Betty hid her eyes and would not look at it. Instead, she looked at the other people seated at the tables—the women. They were laughing and talking among themselves. One or two looked at Betty and smiled with frank ...
— The Incomplete Amorist • E. Nesbit
... on the edge of a morass, and spring back to firmer ground. Our Bible, as we have it, is a translation, made by forty-seven men and published in the year 1611. The original—and I am still on firm ground because I am quoting ...
— On The Art of Reading • Arthur Quiller-Couch
... not been there long when the Spaniards returned in high glee from their pursuit. Reaching this open spot, well protected from assault as it appeared by the open morass on one side and the crescent-shaped hedge of palmettos and underwood on the other, they deemed themselves perfectly secure, stacking their arms and throwing themselves on the ground to rest after their ...
— Historical Tales, Vol. 2 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris
... the Teche, and they reached the house of the herdsman Gabriel on the day that he had departed for the north to seek Evangeline. She and the good priest who had been her stay in a year of sorrow turned back in pursuit, and for weary months, over prairie and through forest, skirting mountain and morass, going freely among savages, they followed vain clues, and at last arrived in Philadelphia. Broken in spirit then, but not less sweet of nature for the suffering that she had known, she who had been named for the angels became a minister of mercy, and in ...
— Myths And Legends Of Our Own Land, Complete • Charles M. Skinner
... and two batteries engaged Buckland. The valley of Oak Creek is there wider, deeper, and boggy. The slope, crowned by Buckland's brigade, was steep and bushy. A bend in its course gave some companies of the Seventieth Ohio an enfilading fire. Cleburne's regiments, tangled in the morass, struggled with uneven front up the wooded ascent, only to be driven back by Buckland's steady fire. Reforming, they charged again, to meet another repulse. The regiments, broken, disordered, and commingled, ...
— From Fort Henry to Corinth • Manning Ferguson Force
... out of their ship, had starved in Calcutta, had built him a wooden hut in the jungles of the Delta, had become indigo planter in the swamps of Dinapoor that he might preach Christ without interference, had been forced to think of seeking the protection of a Buddhist in the Himalaya morass—was driven to begin anew in the very heart of the most densely peopled part of the British Empire, under the jealous care of the foreign European power which had a century before sent missionaries to Tranquebar and taught Zinzendorf and the Moravians ...
— The Life of William Carey • George Smith
... marsh, over which the foul vapours hung like smoke about a city. It was easy going for the bearers down the slopes, and by midday we had reached the borders of the dismal swamp. Here we halted to eat our midday meal, and then, following a winding and devious path, plunged into the morass. Presently the path, at any rate to our unaccustomed eyes, grew so faint as to be almost indistinguishable from those made by the aquatic beasts and birds, and it is to this day a mystery to me how our ...
— She • H. Rider Haggard
... an early breakfast, the whole party set off for the great pondlike morass that extended for miles. Numerous tracks of wild animals were seen, and Mustagan pointed out to the boys not only those of some wild cats, but also a number of those made by the great feet of the wolverines, as these latter animals are as fond of muskrats as are any other. ...
— Winter Adventures of Three Boys • Egerton R. Young
... provisions of the army were, I believe, carried up by water. The united river force was commanded by Brigadier Cotton, Captain Alexander, and Captain Chads; the land forces, of course, by Sir A Campbell, who had excellent officers with him, but whose tactics were of no use in this warfare of morass, mud, and jungle. ...
— Olla Podrida • Frederick Marryat (AKA Captain Marryat)
... your stepmother, or any of her sort. Try and realize this. Even the weakest of us is not dependent upon others for support. There is only one sure guide. Trust yourself. Be faithful to the best part of yourself. You know what is good and what is ugly. Don't be coerced, don't be led into the morass." ...
— Jeanne of the Marshes • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... furnished, in such rich abundance, the remains of other land animals. It is true that the remains of apes are also very rare, and we may well suppose that the superior intelligence of man led him to avoid that extensive destruction by flood or in morass which seems to have often overwhelmed other animals. Yet, when we consider that, even in our own day, men are not unfrequently overwhelmed by volcanic eruptions, as in Java and Japan, or carried away in vast numbers by floods, as ...
— Darwinism (1889) • Alfred Russel Wallace
... rushes. His horse waded in blood and bones to the belly; for the Kalevide slaughtered his enemies by tens of thousands, and would have utterly annihilated them, but, as he was pursuing the fugitives over hill and dale, his horse lost his footing in a bog, and was engulfed in the morass. ...
— The Hero of Esthonia and Other Studies in the Romantic Literature of That Country • William Forsell Kirby
... extricate ourselves? Who knows where the cutting may be found? Can staggering men again survive the treacherous morass? It is lighter now. We will pick our way better. But where is the cutting? Chantrill and the Captain despair. Have we missed it in, the dark? Then we are done for. Where is the "I" Co. detachment again? Lost? Here Corporal ...
— The History of the American Expedition Fighting the Bolsheviki - Campaigning in North Russia 1918-1919 • Joel R. Moore
... of the upward-life comes freedom from the dangers of water, morass, and thorny places, and the power ...
— The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali • Charles Johnston
... good deal of a democrat at heart, was cheered by the knowledge that so long as the world recognizes the divine right of Kings, no monarch by descent could lay better claim to a throne than he. And he was young, and in love, and ready to believe that youth and love can level mountains, make firm the morass, bridge ...
— A Son of the Immortals • Louis Tracy
... was a sudden shout. At the moment that Osgod was making a long step from one tuft to another the boy stooped and caught his foot, and with a roar of surprise and fury Osgod fell head-foremost into the morass. At the same moment the lad darted away with a yell of defiance, leaping from tuft to tuft with the agility of a hare. Several of the men started after him, but unaccustomed to the treacherous bog four or five ...
— Wulf the Saxon - A Story of the Norman Conquest • G. A. Henty
... under Hoogstraeten were easily defeated and scattered by Spanish detachments sent to meet them. Lewis of Nassau was at first more successful. Entering Groningen at the head of eight or nine thousand undisciplined troops he was attacked, May 23, in a strong position behind a morass by a Spanish force under the Count of Aremberg, Stadholder of Friesland, at Heiligerlee. He gained a complete victory. Aremberg himself was slain, as was also the younger brother of Lewis, Adolphus of Nassau. ...
— History of Holland • George Edmundson
... the beast probably made its way to the morass for water; but, by Mithras![3] the lad's arrow killed the brute; the barb passed through the eyeball into ...
— Our Boys - Entertaining Stories by Popular Authors • Various
... Mondega annually overflows its banks, changes its course and buries thousands of once fertile acres under sand and stones; the Vonga has converted the once productive land between Aveiro and Ovar into a vast morass; the Douro is periodically converted into a frightful and resistless torrent ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 17, - No. 97, January, 1876 • Various
... this time was but a mere village of frame buildings and unpaved streets. Viewed as facing its assailants, it was protected in its rear, or upon its north side, by the Savannah river; and on its west side by a thick swamp or morass, which communicated with the river above the city. The exposed sides were those of the east and south. These faced an open country which for several miles was entirely clear of woods. This exposed portion of the city was well protected ...
— The Colored Regulars in the United States Army • T. G. Steward
... the circumstances mighty inclement. From the round holes in the shutters of the parlour, shafts of candle-light streamed forth; elsewhere the darkness was complete. The trees, the thickets, were saturated; the lower parts of the garden turned into a morass. At intervals, when the wind broke forth again, there passed overhead a wild coil of clashing branches; and between whiles the whole enclosure continuously and stridently resounded with the rain. I advanced close to the window and contrived to read the face of my watch. It was half-past ...
— St Ives • Robert Louis Stevenson
... and circuitous, hugging the fringe of jungle. The gweels traveled it every day. But Latham had a better plan. By cutting directly through the morass, he might just arrive there ...
— One Purple Hope! • Henry Hasse
... after I had been at X—— a couple of months, we had a stem-winder of a storm. The rain came down in torrents unceasingly for twelve hours, and the country around X—— was almost a morass. The roadbed was good, however, and when the section men came in at six that night they reported the track firm and safe. But, my stars! how the rain was falling at seven-thirty as the flyer went smashing ...
— Danger Signals • John A. Hill and Jasper Ewing Brady
... track of our hypothetical child in the history of his character development, lost sight of him as he struggles in a morass of desires and purposes of power, fellowship and superiority. His situations become still more complex as we watch him seek to unify his life around permanent purposes, against a pestering, surging, recurring, temporary desire. He desires, let ...
— The Foundations of Personality • Abraham Myerson
... who kiss the rod; In haunts of fashion where each day All with urbanity betray, Where harsh frivolity proclaims Its cold unfeeling sentences; Amid the awful emptiness Of conversation, thought and aims— In that morass where you and I ...
— Eugene Oneguine [Onegin] - A Romance of Russian Life in Verse • Aleksandr Sergeevich Pushkin
... were further aided by the isthmus which connected this peninsula to the main land, as it was little more than three miles broad; by a projection of land on the west side, which was only half a stadium in breadth; and by a lake or morass which lay on the opposite side: this projection, which ran out considerably into the sea, was naturally strong by the rocks with which it was covered, and was rendered still stronger by art. In one point only had this projection ...
— Robert Kerr's General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 18 • William Stevenson
... obstruction our travellers had to encounter on their way across the great plain. There were tracts of moist ground, sometimes covered with tall forest-trees, at others opening out into a sedgy morass, with perhaps a small lake or water-patch in the centre. The first required them to make way through mud, or thick stagnant water covered with scum, often reaching above their knees. These places were especially disagreeable to cross; for ...
— The Castaways • Captain Mayne Reid
... it rushing at her, she saw the end of the patch of gravel. The road ahead was a wet black smear, criss-crossed with ruts. The car shot into a morass of prairie gumbo—which is mud mixed with tar, fly-paper, fish glue, and well-chewed, chocolate-covered caramels. When cattle get into gumbo, the farmers send for ...
— Free Air • Sinclair Lewis
... to be. Here, bordered by steep banks covered with bush, was swampy ground not more than two hundred yards wide, down the centre of which ran a narrow channel of rather deep water, draining a vast expanse of morass above. It was up this channel that the sea-cows travelled to the feeding ground where they loved to collect at that ...
— She and Allan • H. Rider Haggard
... visit with the heroes of the past, Grundtvig again turned his attention to their descendants in the present. And the contrast was almost startling. The war still was dragging on and the country sinking deeper and deeper into the morass of political, commercial and economic difficulties. But the majority of the people seemed completely indifferent to her plight. "They talked of nothing," Grundtvig says, "but of what they had eaten, worn and amused themselves with yesterday, or what they would eat, wear and amuse themselves ...
— Hymns and Hymnwriters of Denmark • Jens Christian Aaberg
... its top over went the wagon into the mud and water. The two young men took a flying leap into the swamp, and the young lady was thrown out. She was almost smothered before she was rescued by the young men. While they were in this predicament the preacher rode up to the edge of the morass. Raising himself in his stirrups he shouted at the top of his voice: "Glory to God! Glory to God! another sinner's down! Hallelujah! Glory! Glory!" Then he added: "Now you poor, miserable sinners, take this as a judgment from God upon you for your meanness, and repent of your ...
— The Kentucky Ranger • Edward T. Curnick
... a kind of bed over which our impedimenta might travel. Hour after hour went by amidst incessant labour. An ammunition waggon containing only half its proper load required the efforts of a dozen horses to pull it over that morass, whilst, as for the guns, each of the 12's required even more horses. It was three o'clock on the afternoon of the 18th when the last gun was got across. Three gun-carriages were broken during those efforts, but our men ...
— My Days of Adventure - The Fall of France, 1870-71 • Ernest Alfred Vizetelly
... coarse meal with him. Jerushe's heart was full of kindness; she would have given him more, but for the want thereof. Full two years did even-handed democracy drive the old man homeless to seek a shelter among the poisonous reptiles of the morass. Mr. Cordes Kemp must regain his property, and to that generous end he puts forth the following extremely southern proclamation, which may be found in all respectable morning journals, on posters hung at the "Rough and Ready," at "Your ...
— Our World, or, The Slaveholders Daughter • F. Colburn Adams
... 22, 1298, the armies met. The Scottish infantry were drawn up on a moor, with a morass in front. They were divided into four phalanxes or dense masses, with lances lowered obliquely over each other, and seeming, says an English historian, like a castle walled with steel. These spearmen were the flower of the army, in whom Wallace chiefly confided. ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume VI. • Various
... by staffs, they endeavoured to place their feet {on the top} of the high hill. They were {now} as far from the top, as an arrow discharged can go at once, {when} they turned their eyes, and beheld the other parts sinking in a morass, {and} their own abode alone remaining. While they were wondering at these things, {and} while they were bewailing the fate of their {fellow countrymen}, that old cottage of {theirs}, {too} little for even two owners, was changed into a temple. Columns took the place of forked stakes, ...
— The Metamorphoses of Ovid - Literally Translated into English Prose, with Copious Notes - and Explanations • Publius Ovidius Naso
... softer and the undergrowth had to be cut away by bayonet-wielding Narakans before the main body could move through. Terrence had thrown off his battle armor and lost his radiation helmet somewhere in the morass as had other of the Earthmen. Hannigan had prepared a thick mess of mud and grass which the Terrans applied to exposed ...
— Narakan Rifles, About Face! • Jan Smith
... difficulty about picking our way through the morass, for wherever the five could go we ...
— The Mystery of Cloomber • Arthur Conan Doyle
... was inaccessible, being on the summit of a perpendicular rock, on the top of which the natives had collected great quantities of stones for their defence. And a third quarter of the town was defended by an impassable morass. Yet after all these defensive preparations, we were astonished to find the town entirely abandoned, though every house was full of the different kinds of provisions which the country afforded, besides which it had a magazine stocked with arms of all sorts. While we were expressing ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. IV. • Robert Kerr
... earthquake; the great wave rises and swallows the cities and the villages, and goes back whence it came; the earth yawns, and devours the pretty towns and the sleeping children, the gardens where the lovers were sitting, and the churches where women prayed, and then the morass dries up and the gulf unites again. Men build afresh, and the grass grows, and the trees, and all the flowering seasons come back as of old. But the dead are dead: nothing ...
— Wisdom, Wit, and Pathos of Ouida - Selected from the Works of Ouida • Ouida
... which he wanted, I doubt not, on his present path, even as I shall on mine. "Se tu segui la tua stella" is my motto. . . . Let it be his too, wherever the star may guide him. If it be a will-o'-the- wisp, and lead to the morass, he will only learn how to avoid ...
— Yeast: A Problem • Charles Kingsley
... defended him, the man who sat at the table below the dock and turned over a sheaf of papers with a faint, cynical smile at the corners of his thin lips. This man, they said, had done the impossible. He had dragged the prisoner out of his morass by sheer titanic effort. Obviously Percival Field had believed firmly in the innocence of the man he had defended, or he had ...
— The Odds - And Other Stories • Ethel M. Dell
... suddenly changed. There had been a hint of spring in the air, but in an hour that was wiped out by a bitter north wind sweeping the bare fields with icy rain and snow. The transport, pitched in the filthy morass known as 'Scottish Lines,' saw its labour of three weeks thrown away in a couple of nights. For the human beings there were a few tents and huts, but in face of the searching wind canvas seemed quite porous, and the huts were badly built and had a hundred openings to the bitter air. ...
— On the King's Service - Inward Glimpses of Men at Arms • Innes Logan
... lands, so as to separate the Volscians: Fabius, without committing any devastation, proceeded to attack Auxur, which was a principal object in view. Auxur is the town now called Tarracinae; a city built on a declivity leading to a morass: Fabius made a feint of attacking it on that side. When four cohorts sent round under Caius Servilius Ahala took possession of a hill which commanded the city, they attacked the walls with a loud shout and tumult, from the higher ground where there was no ...
— The History of Rome, Books 01 to 08 • Titus Livius
... state of life a million years beyond their grasp. It fascinated and disturbed Lee: it had a definite interest, a meaning, for him. Was it to this that Savina had turned? Had the world only in the adherence to the duty typified by Fanny left such a morass as he saw about him? Was he, Lee Randon, instead of advancing, falling back into a past more remote than coherent speech? Nothing, he asserted, could be further from his intention and hope. Yet, without doubt, he was surrounded by the denial of order, of disciplined feeling; ...
— Cytherea • Joseph Hergesheimer
... windy moralizing of the pulpit. All of these German naturalists—and they are the only German novelists worth considering—share the weakness of Zola, their Stammvater. They, too, fall into the morass that engulfed "Fecondite," ...
— A Book of Prefaces • H. L. Mencken
... ago stooping down to look, which way the water oozed from a morass, as a labourer opened it with a spade, to detect the source of the spring, and inhaled a vapour, which occasioned an instant sense of suffocation. Immediately recoiling I believe I inhaled it but once; yet a few hours afterwards in the cool of the evening, when ...
— Zoonomia, Vol. II - Or, the Laws of Organic Life • Erasmus Darwin
... a reverie, from which he started at my approach, and, putting his horse in motion, led the way at a leisurely pace through a broken and sandy road, which traversed a waste, level, and uncultivated tract of downs, intermixed with morass, much like that in the neighbourhood of my quarters at Shepherd's Bush. Indeed, the whole open ground of this district, where it approaches the sea, has, except in a few favoured spots, the same uniform and ...
— Redgauntlet • Sir Walter Scott
... most wooden of all wearisome chronicles that ever cumbered the boards, had in it for sole principle of life its power of congenial appeal to the same blatant and vulgar spirit of Protestantism which inspired it. In all the flat interminable morass of its tedious and tuneless verse I can find no blade or leaf of living poetic growth, no touch but one of nature or of pathos, where Arthur dying would fain send a last thought in search of his ...
— A Study of Shakespeare • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... the country, because the ridge of mountains called Oeta rose up and barred their way. Indeed, the woods, rocks, and precipices came down so near the seashore, that in two places there was only room for one single wheel track between the steeps and the impassable morass that formed the border of the gulf on its south side. These two very narrow places were called the gates of the pass, and were about a mile apart. There was a little more width left in the intervening space; ...
— The Junior Classics • Various
... is the good greenwood, Our tent the cypress tree; We know the forest round us, As seamen know the sea. We know its walls of thorny vines, Its glades of reedy grass, Its safe and silent islands Within the dark morass. ...
— America First - Patriotic Readings • Various
... Our skirmishers began their desultory firing of the day before. The battle seemed to near us as it progressed, and the opening around Chancellor's House appeared to be alive with the enemy's artillery. About two o'clock our lines were ordered forward, and we made our way through the tangled morass, in direction of our skirmish line. Here one of the bravest men in our regiment was killed, private John Davis, of the "Quitman Rifles." He was reckless beyond all reason. He loved danger for danger's sake. Stepping ...
— History of Kershaw's Brigade • D. Augustus Dickert
... on with the tide which drifts inland up the estuary, and, farther than vision can really follow, track the march of its glancing ripples, as they swim on past shoal and sand-dune and morass up to the dewy gates of the Spring, in among green-clad river meadows and crisp close-skirted woodlands which the salt breath of sea-winds restrains from a richer luxuriance, on past springing knolls plumed with dark firs, and dimpling valleys mellow with the contrasted ...
— Uppingham by the Sea - a Narrative of the Year at Borth • John Henry Skrine
... assistance coming to him, he (Barlow) intrenched under fire and continued to hold his place. Gibbon was not so fortunate in his front. He found the ground over which he had to pass cut up with deep ravines, and a morass difficult to cross. But his men struggled on until some of them got up to the very parapet covering the enemy. Gibbon gained ground much nearer the enemy than that which he left, and here he intrenched and ...
— Memoirs of Three Civil War Generals, Complete • U. S. Grant, W. T. Sherman, P. H. Sheridan
... The victim was adorned for the sacrifice, and the garlands, according to the accustomed usage, were bound upon his temples. He contrived, however, he said, at the last moment, to make his escape. He broke the bands with which he had been bound, and fled into a morass near the shore, where he remained concealed in inaccessible thickets until the Greeks had sailed away. He then came forth and was at length seized and bound by the shepherds of the mountains, who found him wandering about, in extreme destitution and misery. Sinon ...
— Romulus, Makers of History • Jacob Abbott
... he sang,—"Who goes with me? Who is it wills King Richard free? He who bravely toils and dares, Pain and danger with me shares,— He whose heart is true and warm, Though the night perplex with storm Forest, plain, and dark morass, Hanging-rock and mountain-pass, And the thunder bursts ablaze,— Is ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 4, No. 24, Oct. 1859 • Various
... has become of us?" cried Miss Emma at length, when the shadows began to thicken, and out of the impenetrable forest and morass about them they ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 96, October 1865 • Various
... than done! The plausibility of the solution in Macaulay's mouth is due to the fundamental assumption that everything except morality is hopeless ground of inquiry. Once get beyond the Ten Commandments and you will sink in a bottomless morass of argument, counterargument, quibble, logomachy, ...
— Hours in a Library - New Edition, with Additions. Vol. II (of 3) • Leslie Stephen
... of Pericles. The revolution of 1848 called from the mud the sewermen. Flaubert, his face to the past, gazed sorrowfully at Carthage and wrote an epic of the French bourgeois. Zola and his crowd delved into a moral morass, and the world grew weary of them. And then the faint, fading flowers of romanticism were put into albums where their purple harmonies and subtle sayings are pressed into sweet twilight forgetfulness. Berlioz, mad ...
— Chopin: The Man and His Music • James Huneker
... ran for some distance along the edge of a swamp, and leaping in up to his knees in mud and water, doubled on his track, then turned again, and penetrating farther and farther into the depths of the morass, finally climbed a tree, groaning with the pain the effort cost him, and concealed himself among ...
— Elsie's Womanhood • Martha Finley
... splendor of bloom, and the live-oaks, mighty of girth and spread, draped in somber gray moss as if for the funeral of some god of the deep green wood. At the fringe of the swamp, tempting you until near to jumping into the morass after them, are the huge fleurs-de-lis, each gorgeous blossom fully seven inches across ...
— Southern Stories - Retold from St. Nicholas • Various
... A certain eminence at the back of the station became, by common consent, the meeting-place. There the missionary fathers of the hamlet would be found, each sitting on his accustomed stone. Before them lay the broad valley, once a reedy morass, now reclaimed and partitioned out into garden lands; its margin fringed with long water-courses, overhung with grey willows and the dark green syringa. On the low ground bordering the valley stood the church, with its attendant mission-houses and schools, and on the heights were ...
— Robert Moffat - The Missionary Hero of Kuruman • David J. Deane
... was almost thick here, the ground like a morass, with inches of clayey mud, which stuck to everything, whilst the sparse lanterns, hung to the prison walls and beneath the portico, threw practically no light ...
— I Will Repay • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... The hour of morn, before the sun is up, When all the branches in the lifeless light Hang dead and dull, is terrible. I feel As if I saw the whole world in a frightful And vacant glass, as dreary as my mind's eye. O would all flowers might wither! Would my garden Were poisonous morass, filled to the full With rotted corpses of these blooming trees, And my corpse ...
— The German Classics, v. 20 - Masterpieces of German Literature • Various
... fascinating trip can be taken in summer, after Berlin and Potsdam have been visited, than to the wild and beautiful Spreewald,—a combination of forest and morass not yet wholly redeemed to the civilization of Europe, but holding in its remoter depths a genuine relic of the old barbarism. The Goerlitz Railway skirts this forest for twenty-five miles before reaching Luebben, some two hours from Berlin in a southerly direction. ...
— In and Around Berlin • Minerva Brace Norton
... approaching night. My whole anxiety was centred on Jack. I thought that if I could prevail on him to rest he might recover, and proposed that we should encamp; but he would not hear of this. He kept plunging on, staggering through brake and swamp, reedy pond and quaking morass, until I felt myself utterly unable to follow him a ...
— Freaks on the Fells - Three Months' Rustication • R.M. Ballantyne
... camps were hardly better than the trenches. Only by duck-boards could one walk about the morass in which huts were built and tents were pitched. In the wagon lines gunners tried in vain to groom their horses, and floundered about in their gum boots, cursing the mud which clogged bits and chains and bridles, and could find no comfort anywhere between ...
— Now It Can Be Told • Philip Gibbs
... stopping a little while, leaving his companion to go on alone. He was very careful not again to overtake him. The boy had then, with four dollars in his pocket, a foot journey before him of between three and four hundred miles. And this was to be taken through desolate regions of morass and forest, where, not unfrequently, the lurking Indian had tomahawked, or gangs of half-famished wolves had devoured the passing traveller. He was also liable, at any time, to be caught by night and ...
— David Crockett: His Life and Adventures • John S. C. Abbott
... November evening, and the dingy lighting of the bar seemed but to emphasize the bleak exterior. Drifts of fog and damp from without mingled with the smoke of shag. The sanded floor was kicked into a muddy morass not unlike the surface of the pavement. An old lady down the street had died from pneumonia the previous evening, and the event supplied a fruitful topic of conversation. The things that one could get! Everywhere were germs ...
— The Best British Short Stories of 1922 • Various
... a hundred feet wide, but the city has its own ideas about the proper width of streets, and when in the course of time the municipality took over Regina it paved but two-thirds of Stonewall avenue, leaving a muddy morass at each side. The buildings that lined this thoroughfare were something between those of a city slum and those of a Western boom town. They had no difficulty in picking out Beechurst street; the big stone church in its muddy yard ...
— The Deaves Affair • Hulbert Footner
... retreat was prematurely began to be made by detached parties, he was some distance from camp, and having to equip himself for flight, was left a good way in the rear. It was not long however, before he came up with a party, whose horses were unable to extricate themselves from a deep morass, over which they had attempted to pass. Slover's was soon placed in the same unpleasant situation, and they all, alighting from them, proceeded on foot. In this manner they traveled on until they had nearly reached the Tuscarawa, when a ...
— Chronicles of Border Warfare • Alexander Scott Withers
... deal of shouting and whipping to get the poor brutes to take to this treacherous morass, but one after the other they were driven in, until at length the whole dozen of the pack-train were distributed, half-submerged, over the hundred yards of the mucky trail. Uncle Dick, not stopping to think of his clothes, followed Moise in; ...
— The Young Alaskans in the Rockies • Emerson Hough
... walk, run or otherwise ambulate—you proceed, or proceed at the double, which of course is much nicer for you)—yes, were proceeding, one at each end of an entanglement, along the top of a slope, when the leader missed his footing altogether and rolled down to the morass below. The second, after a brief struggle, followed with the entanglement. This movement involved not only the man behind, who was bearing a footboard, but also the remainder of the section. The entire avalanche was precipitated on to the leaders, and remained there struggling like the population ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 150, March 29, 1916 • Various
... author who damned it by calling it "more wholesome than toothsome", to Pasqua Rosee and his contemporaries, who urged its more fantastic claims, it was forced to make its way through a veritable morass of misunderstanding and intolerance. No harmless drink in history has suffered more at hands of ...
— All About Coffee • William H. Ukers
... the Puritan, therefore, were distinctly different from that of the Southerner. The Puritan mind was given to hours of grim repression which he called "Conviction of Sin." Resistance became the prime law of life. The world was a thing of evil. A morass of Sin to be attacked, to be reformed, to be "abolished." The Southerner perceived the evils of Slavery long before the Puritan, but he made a poor Abolitionist. The Puritan was born an Abolitionist. He should not only resist and attack the world; he should hate it. He early learned ...
— The Man in Gray • Thomas Dixon
... by mile, ascended through the woods Till stunted were its growths; and still he clomb Printing with sandalled foot the dewy steep: But when above the mountain rose the moon Brightening each mist, while sank the prone morass In double night, he came upon a stone Tomb-shaped, that flecked that steep: a little stream Dropped by it from the summits to the woods: Thereon he knelt; and was once more ...
— The Legends of Saint Patrick • Aubrey de Vere
... so secret Thrive terror and theft set free; Treason and shame shall come to pass While one weed flowers in a morass; And like the stillness of stiff grass The stillness ...
— The Ballad of the White Horse • G.K. Chesterton
... greet. In what hard mountain pass Striv'st thou? In what importunate morass Sink now thy ...
— New Poems • Robert Louis Stevenson
... he thought of beginning that old wandering life again he shrank back. He had hated it—Oh! how he'd hated it! And he didn't want to leave Maggie. He was in reality beginning to believe that with her he might pull himself right out of this morass of weakness and indecision in which he had been wallowing for years. And yet what sort of a life could he offer her? He did not believe that he would ever now be able to find this other woman whom he had married, and until he had ...
— The Captives • Hugh Walpole
... he stumbled along totally unknown paths up hill and down dale; plunged through field after field of Indian corn; pursued his endless way through hemp grounds and fallow lands; scrambled on all fours through hedges and ditches, and finally forced his way through a vast morass in which he wallowed freely. In a sober condition he would have come to grief twenty times over, but ...
— The Day of Wrath • Maurus Jokai
... crossed a bridge, of which, in order to delay the pursuer, they first cut the timbers down to the middle, thus making it not only unequal to a burden, but ready to come down; then they retreated into a dense morass. ...
— The Danish History, Books I-IX • Saxo Grammaticus ("Saxo the Learned")
... my life, and where am I now?" he says. Where, indeed, my friend? Looking about you, you begin to learn that you cannot describe your whereabouts. I do not marvel at that. No one finds himself planted at last in so terribly foul a morass, as he would fain stand still ...
— Framley Parsonage • Anthony Trollope
... in the East we noticed the beautiful process of raising rice. The rice is sown on a morass of mud and water, ploughed up by great buffaloes, and after a few weeks it springs up and appears above the water with its beautiful pale green shoots. The seed has been sown very thickly and the plants are clustered together in great numbers, so that you can pull up a score ...
— Days of Heaven Upon Earth • Rev. A. B. Simpson
... could answer "Whither are we drifting?" Or hope to wallow out of the morass— I might continue boosting and uplifting; But as it is, ...
— The So-called Human Race • Bert Leston Taylor
... neighbour Mrs. ——; the latter accidentally fell into a muddy rivulet, and tried in vain to disengage herself by the assistance of Mrs. Scott's hand. Mrs. Scott exerted her utmost power for many minutes, first to assist her friend, and next to prevent herself from being pulled into the morass, as her distressed companion would not disengage her hand. After other assistance was procured by their united screams, Mrs. Scott walked to a chair about twenty yards from the brook, and was seized with an apoplectic stroke: which continued many days, and ...
— Zoonomia, Vol. I - Or, the Laws of Organic Life • Erasmus Darwin
... from the name of his estate. This family has passed away, and its property merged in Banff. The laird was intensely disliked in the neighbourhood. Sir George Ramsay was, on the other hand, universally popular and respected. On one occasion, Sir George, in passing a morass in his own neighbourhood, had missed the road and fallen into a bog to an alarming depth. To his great relief, he saw a passenger coming along the path, which was at no great distance. He called ...
— Reminiscences of Scottish Life and Character • Edward Bannerman Ramsay
... knows what I mean," JOKIM said, piteously, looking round out of a morass a little deeper than he'd been in lately. But that is exactly what the Committee ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 100, May 2, 1891 • Various
... behind him the visible memorials of a noble work nobly done. He and his fellow-laborers had made for themselves, by the labors of their own hands, civilized dwellings amid the tangled forest and the dreary morass. At a time when clan-feuds and bloodshed were rife, and princes rose and fell, and all was stormy and changeful, they had covered the islands with monastic schools, where the Scriptures were studied, ancient books collected and read, and native missionaries ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 3 of 8 • Various
... stuffed into the broken glass; and their air is misery and desolation. It pains the eye to see the stumps of great trees thickly strewn in every field of wheat; and never to lose the eternal swamp and dull morass, with hundreds of rotten trunks, of elm and pine and sycamore and logwood, steeped in its unwholesome water; where the frogs so croak at night that after dark there is an incessant sound as if millions ...
— The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete • John Forster
... over the lake in a devastating shower, and commences to knead, swearing softly. Anon the exorcism changes to a noise like that affected by ostlers as they tend their charges, and the lake has become a parchment-coloured morass. For five pounds a month this man toils from four a.m. to eight p.m., and his wife can find nothing better to do than present ...
— An Ocean Tramp • William McFee
... and drawn his sword, when, without awaiting his order, all these ardent youths, preceded by Cinq-Mars and his friends, whose horses were urged on by the squadrons behind, had thrown themselves into the morass, wherein, to their great astonishment and to that of the Spaniards, who had counted too much upon its depth, the horses were in the water only up to their hams; and in spite of a discharge of grape-shot from the ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... attain. During all our time on Gallipoli I remember but one or two occasions when we were fortunate enough to secure timber or some corrugated iron to roof our dug-outs. Normally we had only our mackintosh sheets. Rain turned the thick dust to a brown morass, and the little mule carts struggling past the swampy curve of Geoghegan's Bluff could hardly clamber up the Gully Ravine. It ...
— With Manchesters in the East • Gerald B. Hurst
... extravagant expenditures of the court? Louis simply turned his back upon the whole problem of administration, and left his ministers, Fleury, and later de Choiseul, to deal with the misery and the discontent and to make their way through the financial morass ...
— A Short History of France • Mary Platt Parmele
... southwest corner of Lake Michigan, which, seventy years ago, was half morass from the overflowing of the sluggish creek, whose waters, during flood, spread over the low-lying, level plain, or were supplemented in the dry season by the inflow from the lake, showed no sign of any future development and prosperity. The few streets of wooden houses that had been built by ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 795, March 28, 1891 • Various
... economists is thereby often given a new meaning, radically different from that originally given to it and commonly understood. The student of Socialism who fails to appreciate this fact will most frequently land in a morass of confusion and difficulty, but the careful student who fully understands it will find it of great assistance. Take, as an illustration, the phrase "the abolition of capital" which frequently occurs in Socialist literature. The ...
— Socialism - A Summary and Interpretation of Socialist Principles • John Spargo
... than five and thirty thousand, men. The inferiority of number was, however, compensated by the advantage of the ground. Constantine had taken post in a defile about half a mile in breadth, between a steep hill and a deep morass, and in that situation he steadily expected and repulsed the first attack of the enemy. He pursued his success, and advanced into the plain. But the veteran legions of Illyricum rallied under the standard of a leader who had been trained to arms in the school of Probus and Diocletian. ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 1 • Edward Gibbon
... back gently and signed him to a seat. "I trust not," she said, answering his citation; "but I think the flame through which Beatrice walked must have been less contaminating than this morass in which ...
— The Valley of Decision • Edith Wharton
... slope both outwards (parallel to the sides) and inwards towards the bottom of the craters. Sometimes these craters have been converted into lakes, as in the case of those of the Eifel; but generally they are dry or have a floor of morass. Of the crater-lakes, those of Kohuora, five in number, are perhaps the most remarkable; and in the case of two of these the central cones of slag appear as islets rising from the surface of the waters. The fresh-water lake Pupuka has a depth of twenty-eight ...
— Volcanoes: Past and Present • Edward Hull
... mouth of the creek and advanced along an overgrown footpath on the banks of a canal, its movements being concealed by the tall reeds of the swamp. After being delayed by several small streams, it finally emerged from the morass, and entering the cultivated portion of the district took up a position across the main road from Proctorsville to New Orleans, the Mississippi being on its left and ...
— The History of the First West India Regiment • A. B. Ellis
... moon, and whispered to her something that made all nature tremble, so that for one moment all was silent, a death-like silence, more terrible than all the night voices speaking at once;—at such a time whose steps were those that sounded in the depths of the morass? ...
— Debts of Honor • Maurus Jokai
... life, shorn of its superrational sanctions, Saxon floundered into the morass of pessimism. There was no justification for right conduct in the universe, no square deal for her who had earned reward, for the millions who worked like animals, died like animals, and were a long time and forever dead. Like ...
— The Valley of the Moon • Jack London
... heaving wave, that the giant turbot might flap its snowy flakes on the emperor's table broader than its broad dish of gold. Many a swelling hill, clad in the dark oak coppice, had echoed to ringing shout of hunter and deep-mouthed bay of hound, ere the wild boar yielded his grim life by the morass, and the dark, grisly carcass was drawn off to provide a standing dish that was only meant to gratify the eye. Even the peacock roasted in its feathers was too gross a dainty for epicures who studied the art of gastronomy under ...
— Historic Tales, Volume 11 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris
... to pay Paul, and an hour later borrows from Paul to pay himself. His boyhood friend he simply plunders. This Ernest, in reality the Graf von Trautenau, is an idealist of the type that Wedekind is fond of delineating. He would save the world from itself, rescue it from the morass of materialism, but he relapses into a pathological mysticism which ends in a sanitarium for nervous troubles. The marquis is a Mephisto; he is not without a trace of idealism; altogether a baffling nature, Faust-like, ...
— Ivory Apes and Peacocks • James Huneker
... and uneven rocks with an occasional boulder, and here and there the walls had collapsed completely, blocking the track—or else over cultivated soil which was immediately converted into a muddy morass of uncertain depth. On such paths only single file was possible, and pack mules and donkeys had to be almost carried over some of the places. But the worst was yet to come, and though we were not intended to go down into the Wadi Kolah ...
— The Fife and Forfar Yeomanry - and 14th (F. & F. Yeo.) Battn. R.H. 1914-1919 • D. D. Ogilvie
... the journalist and the neophyte went to the Luxembourg, and sat down under the trees in that part of the gardens which lies between the broad Avenue de l'Observatoire and the Rue de l'Ouest. The Rue de l'Ouest at that time was a long morass, bounded by planks and market-gardens; the houses were all at the end nearest the Rue de Vaugirard; and the walk through the gardens was so little frequented, that at the hour when Paris dines, two lovers might fall out and exchange the earnest of reconciliation ...
— A Distinguished Provincial at Paris • Honore de Balzac
... They wore a strange contrast. The one bore all the signs of progress, the other of a stereotyped feudality. The estate, which in the days of the first Sir Roger de Rockville had been half morass and half wilderness, was now cultivated to the pitch of British agricultural science. The marshlands beyond the river were one splendid expanse of richest meadows, yielding a rental of four solid pounds per acre. Over hill and dale on this side ...
— International Miscellany of Literature, Art and Science, Vol. 1, - No. 3, Oct. 1, 1850 • Various
... ground as it came, now plunging to their arm-pits in foul sluices of gangrened water, now hopelessly submerged in slime, now attacked by Regions of wood ticks, now tempting some unfaithful log or greenishly solid morass, and plunging to the tip of the skull in poison stagnation; the tree boughs rent their uniforms; they came out upon dry land, many of them without a rag of garment scratched, and gashed, and spent, repugnant to themselves, ...
— The Life, Crime and Capture of John Wilkes Booth • George Alfred Townsend
... promised, to contain a chapter on Montreal, the starving and surrender of it- -but here are we on a sudden reading our book backwards. An account came two days ago that the French on their march to besiege Quebec, had been attacked by General Murray, who got into a mistake and a morass, attacked two bodies that were joined, when he hoped to come up with one of them before the junction, was enclosed, embogged,'and defeated. By the list of officers killed and wounded, I believe there has been a rueful slaughter- -the place, too, ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole Volume 3 • Horace Walpole
... easy as they had imagined it would be for, with only four to drive so many animals, several of the beasts were continually straying from the trail, and once a big steer, with part of the aeroplane on its back, wandered into a morass and they had to labor hard ...
— Tom Swift in Captivity • Victor Appleton
... Christendom—"Ride out amongst those quicksands! Ride out in the most opposite directions, and let him that first finds solid ground call out to us! It may perchance be the very ground in the midst of this quaking morass where we shall be able to stand firm and move ...
— Chips from a German Workshop - Volume IV - Essays chiefly on the Science of Language • Max Muller
... weaker circumvallation and joined to the original ring-wall of the Palatine, as in fen districts the outer dikes are joined on to the main dike. The "Seven Rings" were, the Palatine itself; the Cermalus, the slope of the Palatine in the direction of the morass that extended between it and the Capitol towards the river (-velabrum-); the Velia, the ridge which connected the Palatine with the Esquiline, but in subsequent times was almost wholly obliterated by the buildings of the empire; the Fagutal, the Oppius, ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... they are loud calls for more than a gush of sympathy or a song of thankfulness, but for downright help by practical work. Still greater was the change from bounding along in florid health on merry waves of the wholesome sea, to a walk through the east end of London,—that morass of vice, and sighs, and savagery,—what is forced on the senses in an hour being not a hundredth of what ...
— The Voyage Alone in the Yawl "Rob Roy" • John MacGregor
... into the forest, ready for friendship or war, since he knew not the temper of the natives of that region. Suddenly, as he came out upon an open space where a morass stretched from a hill to the river, two hundred shrieking savages rushed upon him, shooting their arrows wildly at ...
— The Princess Pocahontas • Virginia Watson
... of this road, Ma-zhee-gaw-gaw Swamp, was the next thing to be encountered. We reached it about nine o'clock. It spread before us, a vast expanse of morass, about half a mile in width, and of length interminable, partly covered with water, with black knobs rising here and there above the surface, affording a precarious foothold for the animals in crossing it. Where the water was not, there lay in place of it a bed of black ...
— Wau-bun - The Early Day in the Northwest • Juliette Augusta Magill Kinzie
... This clan regiment advanced very slowly that they might keep their ranks until they had gained possession of the ground they wanted; they then turned their backs to the wind, and formed into the line of battle. The field which they intended to occupy was skirted by a deep morass as they came foot by foot, within pistol ...
— Memoirs of the Jacobites of 1715 and 1745 - Volume III. • Mrs. Thomson
... ditch of a fortress. It was, in all respects, capable of a prolonged defence. In form it was an irregular parallelogram, about eight hundred yards in length and six hundred yards wide, and on the walls were eleven strong bastions. The morass which surrounded it was of from three ...
— With Clive in India - Or, The Beginnings of an Empire • G. A. Henty
... of the streets being obliterated, for the place had fallen like a house of dice, and had then been shaken up and jumbled. Finally we slept in a forest on the other side of the strait, beyond Gallipoli, taking our few provisions, and having to wade at some points through morass a foot deep before we ...
— The Purple Cloud • M.P. Shiel
... To the right was a deep black chasm, with a white foaming waterfall pouring into the darkness below. In front was the same wide chasm, only less wide, and beyond it, on the other side of the great yawning cleft in the earth, was a wild spread of morass country—a gloomy, terrible-looking place. To the left was a steep slope of small rocks and stones, leading downwards to the hollow of sedgy land that fringed the cliffs of the chasm. The only retreat possible was to pass down this ...
— Dot and the Kangaroo • Ethel C. Pedley
... miles the road from Cape Coast to Kumassi leads through heavy primeval forest. "The thick foliage of the trees, interlaced high overhead, causes a deep, dank gloom, through which the sun seldom penetrates. The path winds among the tree stems and bush, now through mud and morass, now over steep ascent or deep ravine." And, in addition to the difficulties of locomotion, there was the haunting menace of the heavy dews and mists which come at night laden ...
— The Story of Baden-Powell - 'The Wolf That Never Sleeps' • Harold Begbie
... Deep down in the jungle, where no bright sun could pierce the darkness, nor human voice be heard, far from any habitation of man or means of supporting life, on the edge of a dank, stagnant morass that was shunned by all but noisome reptiles and wandering beasts of prey, they set them down and left them, the dead husband and the living wife, alone to meet the horrors of the coming night—alone, without a chance ...
— Tales of Wonder Every Child Should Know • Various
... entertained him so well, that he did not think much more of his offended dignity.—When they set off on their journey again, the Baron and several of his followers came with them to show the only safe way across the morass, and a very slippery, treacherous, quaking road it was, where the horses' feet left pools of water wherever they trod. The King and the Baron rode together, and the other French Nobles closed round them; Richard was left quite in the background, and though ...
— The Little Duke - Richard the Fearless • Charlotte M. Yonge
... 655 We are beside thee in all thy ways, With our blame, with our praise, Our shame to feel, our pride to show, Glad, angry—but indifferent, no! Whether it be thy lot to go, 660 For the good of us all, where the haters meet In the crowded city's horrible street; Or thou step alone through the morass Where never sound yet was Save the dry quick clap of the stork's bill, 665 For the air is still, and the water still, When the blue breast of the dipping coot Dives under, and all is mute. So, at the ...
— Selections from the Poems and Plays of Robert Browning • Robert Browning
... between them and the attacking troops, as an additional protection, they had the river, now swollen to many times its usual dimensions by the recent rains, which had also made the ground on either bank little better than a morass. Also, what fords there were had been rendered impassable by the floods, and it was only after prolonged and searching examination, which had always to be undertaken at night and by swimming the river many times, that fairly suitable places were marked out as crossings. One ...
— With Our Army in Palestine • Antony Bluett
... Mr. Marrapit. "Beware how much deeper you enmire yourself in the morass of your evil. Put down that miserable creature you hold. I place Mrs. Major's Rose beside it. ...
— Once Aboard The Lugger • Arthur Stuart-Menteth Hutchinson
... flagg'd and falter'd our gallant steed, 'Neath the weight of his double burden, As we splash'd through water and crash'd through reed; Then the soil began to harden, And again we gain'd, or we seem'd to gain, With our foe in the deep morass; But those fleet hoofs thunder'd, and gain'd again, When they trampled the firmer grass, And I cried, and Harold again look'd back, And bade me fasten mine eyes on The forest, that loom'd like a patch of black Standing out from the ...
— Poems • Adam Lindsay Gordon
... It is thus that the work went on growing for a thousand years after it was first compiled and put together in the form of an Epic; until the crystal rill of the Epic itself was all but lost in an unending morass of religious and didactic episodes, legends, ...
— Maha-bharata - The Epic of Ancient India Condensed into English Verse • Anonymous
... the close vicinity of the swampy ground, upon pestiferous soil, and the usual tales of commissariat blunders were recounted. Close to the borders of this unhealthy spot, but about twenty feet above the level of the lowest morass, stands the convent belonging to the Sisters of Charity, which includes a school, in addition to a hospital. Great kindness was shown by these excellent ladies to many English sufferers, and their establishment deserves a liberal support ...
— Cyprus, as I Saw it in 1879 • Sir Samuel W. Baker
... unnoticed by the rider, Manuel's horse shied from off the narrow path of tussocks on which it was picking its way, and swerved directly into the morass. ...
— Plotting in Pirate Seas • Francis Rolt-Wheeler
... him, he saw another line of tracks, and, going to examine it, perceived that it was where the boar had chased the black man across the morass. Most of the negro's footprints were lost ...
— Golden Days for Boys and Girls - Volume VIII, No 25: May 21, 1887 • Various
... utilized the stones in rearing a fort at Ayr. Between 1660 and 1688 the sympathies of the county were almost wholly with the Covenanters, who suffered one of their heaviest reverses at Airds Moss—a morass between the Ayr and Lugar,—their leader, Richard Cameron, being killed (20th of July 1680). The county was dragooned and the Highland host ravaged wherever it went. The Hanoverian succession excited no active hostility if it evoked no enthusiasm. Antiquarian ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 1 - "Austria, Lower" to "Bacon" • Various
... immortal Brindley leads His long canals, and parts the velvet meads; Winding in lucid lines, the watery mass Mines the firm rock, or loads the deep morass;'[152] &c. &c. &c. ...
— Evolution, Old & New - Or, the Theories of Buffon, Dr. Erasmus Darwin and Lamarck, - as compared with that of Charles Darwin • Samuel Butler
... for the world had passed on November 5, 1918 beyond the region of idealism and aspiration, and had become part of a solemn contract to which all the Great Powers of the world had put their signature. But it was lost, nevertheless, in the morass of Paris;—the spirit of it altogether, the letter in parts ignored and ...
— The Economic Consequences of the Peace • John Maynard Keynes
... faded away, changing to a sickly pallor that grew to ashen gray, and then dissolved the low-hung, distorted shadows a quarter of a mile inland on either hand into a forbidding row of unbroken forest backed by plain, morass, and distant hills untipped by slanting rays. Overhead a bleak ruin of clouds drifted; underneath the river ran, a bilious yellow. The whole country so far as the eye could range was unmarred by the hand of man, untracked save by the feet of the ...
— The Barrier • Rex Beach
... however is the marvellous quickness with which the turf dries after rain. Those who have experienced the discomfort of walking the fells of Cumberland and Westmoreland, which at most seasons of the year resemble an enormous wet sponge, often combined with the real danger of bog and morass, will appreciate the better conditions met with in Sussex hill rambling. Where the chalk is uncovered it becomes exceedingly slippery after a shower, but there is rarely a necessity ...
— Seaward Sussex - The South Downs from End to End • Edric Holmes
... Ships, resolving to return with a strong Reinforcement, and make Descents at one and the same Time in different Parts of the Island. They ask'd the two Prisoners how the Country lay, and what the Soil was on the North Side the Island; and they answer'd it was morass, and the most dangerous Part to attempt, it being a Place where they shelter on any ...
— Of Captain Mission • Daniel Defoe
... assisting to support Jerry, moved on as fast as his weight and the nature of the ground would allow. Jerry's fall, however, had given an advantage to their pursuers, who were now making their way across the morass, sometimes stopped by a soft portion, and again moving faster where the ground was comparatively firmer. Still the Cossacks had somewhat gained upon them, and were scarcely fifty yards off, when Tom's welcome shout ...
— The Three Commanders • W.H.G. Kingston
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